Opinion | Ronna McDaniel Gets the Trump Treatment – The New York Times
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Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
Donald Trump claims to be the best, most or first in countless laughable ways, but there’s one endeavor at which he really is peerless: Nobody dishes out humiliation in such heaping, merciless measures.
Just ask Ronna McDaniel. She’s the one feasting miserably on it now.
The chair of the Republican National Committee, McDaniel is responsible for its presidential primary debates, including the one next week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Trump is skipping it. Dismissing her wishes, ignoring her entreaties, he has made other arrangements, just as he did in August, when he jilted McDaniel and pointedly took a pass on the first Republican primary debate, in Milwaukee.
But that’s just the half of it. When Trump snubs you, he snubs you in neon.
He’s actively competing with her debate by counterprogramming it — again, a repeat of his antics last month, when he did an interview with Tucker Carlson that was shown just as Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley and the gang stood behind their lecterns, unfurling their talking points.
Only this time, he’s staging his rival event, a prime-time speech to striking United Auto Workers members that he could have scheduled for any other night, in McDaniel’s own backyard. She lives just outside Detroit, where Trump reportedly plans to make his remarks, and Michigan is where her grandfather George Romney was governor; where one of her uncles, Mitt Romney, grew up; and where the Romney clan has long been royalty. That’s why she went by Ronna Romney McDaniel until Trump came along and his contempt for Uncle Mitt complicated the luster of that middle name.
Michigan, in other words, is Romney territory. And Trump will be trampling all over it.
What a priceless turn of events. What a perfect spectacle — in the sense that it so vividly captures the mess of the Republican Party and the mortification of Republican “leaders” in the Trump era, when courtesy is obsolete, traditions are damned, loyalty flows to Mar-a-Lago but never from it, and all prosper or perish in accordance with their orange overlord’s whims.
Once upon a time, being the chair of the Republican Party was a prize and McDaniel’s duration in the job (she’s in her fourth term) would have been a triumphant validation of her political acumen and power. Now it just pegs her as a toady. It’s her ticket to disrepute.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Uncle Mitt. He didn’t mention his niece in his withering remarks about Republican officials to the journalist McKay Coppins, at least to go by the excerpt from Coppins’s forthcoming book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” that The Atlantic published last week. But Romney’s lament about those Republicans’ disregard for the Constitution and his insistence that the party’s current caretakers must go indisputably applied to McDaniel.
She has richly earned that censure. Right after the 2020 presidential election, she was alternately squishy about and indulgent of Trump’s bogus claims that it had been stolen. As Tim Alberta recounted in a November 2020 article in Politico titled “The Inside Story of Michigan’s Fake Voter Fraud Scandal,” McDaniel “sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods.” Alberta also noted that the R.N.C., “on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump ‘won in a landslide’ (when he lost by more than six million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.”
That was just a continuation of McDaniel’s fealty to Trump, who handpicked her to ascend to the chair of the R.N.C. after the 2016 election. She thanked him by dutifully playing the sycophant, as two headlines in Politico two years in a row neatly illustrated.
From January 2019: “R.N.C. Chair McDaniel Sides With Trump Over Uncle Mitt Romney.” That was when Romney, freshly elected to the Senate from Utah, wrote an opinion essay for The Washington Post that disparaged Trump’s performance as president. McDaniel in turn tweeted that Romney’s critique was “disappointing and unproductive.”
From February 2020: “Ronna McDaniel Stands With Trump After Uncle Mitt Says He’ll Vote to Convict.” That was when Romney, alone among Senate Republicans, deemed Trump culpable in the “perfect phone call” with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, which prompted the first of Trump’s two impeachments. McDaniel countered Romney’s vote by tweeting that “Trump did nothing wrong, and the Republican Party is more united than ever behind him.”
How faithful she has been. How little it has netted her. She is being reduced to a laughingstock and is learning what Rudy Giuliani did when he had to trek to Mar-a-Lago with a tin cup in his hand and beg for financial help with legal bills that he’d incurred by promoting Trump’s election lies: With Trump, there are no alms for the addled. He doesn’t spare his friends the kind of humiliation that he visits upon his foes. His favors are contingent not on your past servitude but on your present utility.
And when you sell your soul to him, you get no receipt.
Ah, the travails of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In The Times, Bret Stephens questioned “how McCarthy can manage a Republican circus in which Donald Trump is the ringmaster, Matt Gaetz cracks the whip, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is in charge of the clowns.” Bret also wrote that if McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry “were any more premature, it would be a teenage boy.” (Thanks to Rosemary A. Fletcher-Jones of New Milton, England, and Michael Melius of Hermosa, S.D., among many others, for singling out Bret’s descriptions.)
In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank added: “McCarthy, whose main strength as a leader has always been his steadfast devotion to self-preservation, recognized that he was about to get trampled by the impeachment parade. So he stepped out in front of it and pretended to be the drum major.” (Arlyne Willcox, Manhasset, N.Y., and Mike McNeely, Washington, D.C.)
In USA Today, Rex Huppke wondered at the fierceness of many conservatives’ resistance to a certain accessory — and emblem — of self-protection: “It’s nearly autumn, and that means football, pumpkin spice everything and the new liberal tradition of hanging a KN95 mask on the front door to ward off Republicans.” He later jested that in addition to the front-door mask, “I might sprinkle a little hand sanitizer on the welcome mat for good measure. You can’t be too careful these days.” (Mary Ellen Scribner, Austin, Texas)
In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Robert Mason Lee recalled the verbal flourishes of Peter C. Newman, a journalist who recently died: “Rather than block a metaphor, he would baste it in a Scheherazade of purple sauce, turning it on a spit until it emerged, plump and dripping in word fat, to be enjoyed time and again.” (Lesley Barsky, Toronto)
The Economist assessed Britain’s official “risk register” of looming threats to society, which seemed “an eccentric bureaucratic hobby” at its inception in 2008. “Since then, Russia has invaded Ukraine; A.I. has threatened to develop godlike intelligence with Old Testament consequences; and the pandemic has killed 25 million people worldwide,” The Economist wrote. “Toby Ord, a philosopher at Oxford, puts the odds of humanity suffering some sort of existential catastrophe within the next century at about one in six. The end, if not yet nigh, feels rather nigher than before.” (Ian Proud, Lewisburg, Pa.)
Returning to The Times: Bill Carter explored the paradox of television talk shows like Jimmy Fallon’s. “On air, the fun is infectious. Off air, the ambience can be like the hold of a Roman galley: Everybody’s rowing, but the flogging can get unpleasant,” he wrote. (Molly Mabe, Virginia Beach, Va., and Daniel Zadunaisky, Mexico City, among others)
Also in The Times, Rowan Ricardo Phillips found an original way to say that it rained: “If you live in New York, you noticed a drop in the temperature this past week; the stifling heat and haze of high-pressure systems passed, and clouds that had loitered for days finally, and rather theatrically, drained themselves and moved on.” (Suzanne Samson, Boonton, N.J.)
Ellen Barry evoked the lingering pain of children whose father died in a plane crash in July 1973. “That summer was a perforated line, separating life with their father from life without him: Tear here.” (Judy Distler, Teaneck, N.J.)
And Tom Friedman cut to the chase: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil.” Tom went on to characterize Putin’s outreach to North Korea as “the biggest bank in town having to ask the local pawnshop for a loan.” (Dan Conti, Concord, Mass., and Mike Silk, Laguna Woods, Calif., among others)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
She has an instinct, my Regan, for positioning herself at entrances, exits, intersections — places that afford her a prime view of what and who might be coming and going, spots that allow her to insert herself into the action as quickly as possible. Lately, though, she hasn’t done much inserting — the late-summer heat discourages it. She just twitches a bit and maybe barks a few times, softly, or makes a humming sound that’s like a noncommittal growl or a reconsidered whimper.
She’s pictured above at one of her favorite vantage points, where our brick front walk meets the concrete driveway, and while I often leave her there on her own — she never wanders beyond the edge of the front yard, not even for squirrels — I sometimes pull up one of several cheap, light, plastic Adirondack chairs from Wegman’s that I keep in the garage and sit with her for a while. I’ll retreat quickly into the kitchen and return with a glass of white wine for me, a fresh bowl of water and a chew treat for her. It’s our cocktail hour. We’ll keep watch together. I’ll even do a little humming myself.
My fellow scribes have produced terrific analyses — including this column by David Brooks and this one by Michelle Goldberg — of the political significance of Mitt Romney’s planned retirement and of his candid admissions in “Romney: A Reckoning.”
I want to talk about his salmon sandwiches.
According to the excerpt from the book in The Atlantic, Romney’s Senate colleague Lisa Murkowski gave him enough salmon fillets from her home state, Alaska, to fill the freezer of his Washington, D.C., townhouse. It was a lovely gesture except for one pesky detail. Romney doesn’t like salmon.
So did he foist the fillets on someone else? Discard them in another fashion? No. He deduced that if he put ketchup on the fish and swaddled it in a bun, it was tolerable. And he ate the salmon like that. Which, of course, is repulsive.
But also fascinating. And, I must say, charming.
Romney is rich enough that he was mocked during his 2012 presidential campaign for plans to put a car elevator in a house he was remodeling in the hyper-affluent enclave of La Jolla, Calif. He’s rich enough that after he was elected to the Senate in 2018 and needed lodging in Washington, he bought a $2.4 million townhouse on Capitol Hill to supplement his other residences in other states. He’s rich enough that he had the townhouse professionally decorated in a manner that might make his wife, Ann, like it better.
But according to Coppins, Ann doesn’t come much, leaving Romney on his own during his many nights in the nation’s capital. And instead of going out on the town with other power players and eating in fancy restaurants, he’s a loner and a homebody, parked in a leather recliner positioned before a large-screen TV on which “Ted Lasso” and “Better Call Saul” frequently play.
Before Trump made every previous Republican presidential nominee look like a pillar of virtue, Romney was often seen as a paragon of greed, his career in private equity cast as capitalism in its coldest form. And his prime-location homes, storybook marriage, textbook handsomeness — it was all too charmed, all too glossy, all too much. In his life as on his head, there seemed never to be a hair out of place.
But the Romney whom Coppins visits regularly at that Capitol Hill townhouse has crumbs on his kitchen counter and, to judge by those bastard burgers, a waste-not, want-not humility. He has pages upon pages of journal entries in which he reflects on the degradation of American politics and agonizes over how best to respond to it. No gloss here. Just anxiety, even anguish, slathered with ketchup.
It’s a surprising portrait — and a meaningful reminder of how little we sometimes understand people in public life, and how untidily they fit into the boxes that we assign them.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram • @FrankBruni • Facebook
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