THURSDAY: Once the witticisms end...

THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2026

...they turn to the evasions: We employ the moment to offer a gripe about the weekly Bruni/Stephens colloquy at the New York Times. 

This week's colloquy starts as shown. Our gripe concerns the rollicking, tongue-in-cheek, humorous back-and-forth style: 

Trump Is at His Wit’s End

Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. We seem to be sliding back into war with Iran. Do you see any good outcome? Or, at least, a least-bad outcome?

Frank Bruni: Yeesh, Bret, you really know how to perk up a guy’s day, don’t you?

Bret: Would you rather discuss interest-rate policy?

Frank: In honor of “The Odyssey”—Christopher Nolan’s new movie adaptation opens this weekend—I’m going to describe that as a Scylla-and-Charybdis choice.

Bret: Listen, Penelope, your suitor is waiting for his answer.

Frank: Fine. I’ll abandon my loom long enough to give you a response. No, I don’t see any good outcome, because whatever happens over the next weeks or months can’t erase or rewrite the, um, odyssey that brought us to this wretched juncture. 

Witty opinion scribes, please! 

Do Times readers really need to be humored this way before they'll read an analysis of the claim that the sitting president is somehow "at his wit's end?"

In fairness, no one can blame Bruni for this feature's rollicking style. It came into being during the earlier weekly "Conversations" between Stephens and Gail Collins. The rollicking style was simply held over when Bruni was subbed in.

At any rate, is the president at his wit's end? And what might that whimsical claim even mean? 

Once the early joshing (largely) ends, it sounds like things are substantially worse than that! Stephens soon unloads in this straightforward manner:   

Bret: ...What isn’t solvable is an erratic president who issues threats he withdraws, signs cease-fire agreements he doesn’t appear to have read, claims he’s indifferent to political and economic considerations until he caves to both, and lacks not only a coherent strategic concept but an elementary understanding of what strategy is.   

Oof! Bruni is no less unimpressed with the sitting president—but an intriguing refusal lurks in this presentation:  

Frank: ...Never in the past 50 years have we seen anything from an American president like Trump’s determination to undermine voters’ faith in democracy itself, which is fine with him if it’s the only way to hold on to power and get what he wants. It’s a degree of ruthlessness and a magnitude of narcissism that add up to a kind of political sociopathy. I’ve written this before and stand by it: He’ll burn the whole thing down if that’s best for him. He’ll gladly rule over ashes, just as long as he’s the one ruling. 

Bruni is deeply unflattering too. Our comment would go like this:   

"Narcissism" is a clinical term. So is "sociopathy." 

Like Stephens, Bruni's an excellent writer. That said, has it ever occurred to him that this isn't a kind of political sociopathy—that it's straight-up clinical sociopathy, a dangerous "personality disorder" the president's niece attributes to him in her best-selling 2020 book?   

These high-end scribes today! They've agreed that they'll never speak directly about any such possibility. 

They've agreed that they'll never speak directly. Promises made, promises wittily kept!