"Trump and his team exuberantly violate just about every precept of character that I was ever taught"

 

There I was, recording my students’ end-of-semester grades and worrying about how many A-minuses I was handing out, when President Trump came to the rescue and showed me, I was being not soft but stern. I was denying those students one of the many, many marks higher than that.

Like an A. Or an A-plus. Or an A-plus-plus. Or an A-plus-plus-plus, which is still inferior to the plus-a-palooza that Trump pulled off. I refer of course to the evaluation that he gave himself in an interview last week with Dasha Burns of Politico. She asked him to grade the economy under his stewardship.

“A-plus,” he said.

“A-plus?” she said back to him, as if maybe she hadn’t heard him right, as if such flamboyant boasting were still a shock, as if she were clinging idealistically to the idea that a president of the United States could not travel quite this many light-years away from reality, as if the past decade of American history hadn’t happened.

“Yeah,” Trump responded.

But then, upon further consideration, he realized that he’d been unduly self-effacing. So, he rewrote his report card, just like the Alicia Silverstone character got her teachers to do for her in “Clueless.”

“A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” Trump said. That’s five pluses, for those of you too nonplused to pause and count. I assume he stopped there only because he was winded. He’s not the cyclone of energy he used to be. He’s more an erratic breeze.

And he has decided that the answer to one kind of inflation is another. You think 4.0 grade point averages are too common at the elite universities that he supposedly deplores? They wouldn’t even land you on the dean’s list in the Trump administration, where the windbags in the West Wing, the showboats in the cabinet and the blowhard in chief are constantly gilding their self-determined A’s with self-indulgent pluses atop pluses.

Trump and his team exuberantly violate just about every precept of character that I was ever taught, and so it goes with moderation and humility. They’ve normalized bragging. Scratch that: They’ve fetishized it. It’s a naughtiness they allow themselves, a perk they accord themselves, a rite by which they identify themselves to one another as birds of a feather — peacocks, in this case. It’s a competition: My superlatives are bigger than yours.

When Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, gave a status report on his agency’s work in mid-October in the Oval Office, he effused: “These are the best numbers for fighting crime in U.S. history.” He used “historic” less than a minute later, and another “historic” less than a minute after that. As Shakespeare might have written, methinks he doth “historic” too much.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, giving a status report of his own at a cabinet meeting two weeks ago, pronounced: “It has been a historic year at the Department of War.” He added that “the spirit in our ranks” was “unprecedented” and that recruitment and retention were “at the most historic levels our country has ever seen.” Not just historic — most historic. Take note, Director Patel. That’s how the game is properly played.

Hardly a day goes by without Trump’s telling us that no president has amassed a political movement like his or accomplished as much in such a short time or built such a rich economy or worked harder. Me, me, me. Best, best, best. He can’t find enough hours in the conventional workday to proclaim his glory adequately, so he has been known to spend the wee hours strutting on Truth Social, as he did from 9 p.m. to midnight on the first day of December, in a narcissistic meltdown of more than 150 posts.

About six hours later, as he reflected on what terrific fun that was, he awarded a superlative to the platform designed to accommodate his superlatives. “TRUTH SOCIAL IS THE BEST!” he wrote. “There is nothing even close!!!” Exclamation points are like pluses. You can’t have just one.

Alas, reality has a way of catching up with even the most fervent hucksters and audacious confidence men. Remember when Trump, eager to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, huddled with Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August and, upon the conclusion of their talks, said that he’d rate the meeting a 10 out of a possible 10? Well, it’s four months later and the war rages on. Perhaps there was a crucial tell in Trump’s remarks that everyone missed. He didn’t rate the meeting an 11 — or at least a 10-plus.

As for the economy, all the pluses in the world may not persuade voters of their good fortune. An AP-NORC poll released on Thursday showed that just 31 percent of Americans — a new low in that survey — approve of how Trump is handling economic issues.

That’s an F with minus upon minus in tow.

-Frank Bruni, NY Times