Frank Bruni on Trump, Weaponizing American Pessimism & “The Age of Grievance”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, today is a day off from the courtroom and onto the campaign trail for Trump, where no doubt he’ll be airing his grievances about his criminal trial as usual. No one likes to amplify complaints quite like him. And my next guest says that we are actually living in the age of grievance. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni joins Michel Martin to discuss his latest piece which explores how grievances have come to define American politics on both the left and the right now.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks Christiane. Frank Bruni, thank you so much for talking with us.

FRANK BRUNI, AUTHOR, “THE AGE OF GRIEVANCE” AND COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you.

MARTIN: Your new book is called “The Age of Grievance,” which is, you know, immediately brings a lot of things to mind. Give us one thing that kind of sparked your thinking in this area.

BRUNI: At a certain point, it seemed to me that so much of what I was hearing people say when they entered the political arena, so much of what I was hearing political candidates say boiled down to these overwrought and sometimes illegitimate complaints that mingled with the really important stuff in the urgent causes and kind of turned the soundtrack of our public life into this din of complaint, complaint, complaint. And it seemed to me we were living in a kind of grievance culture, an age of grievance, and I really wanted to understand how we got there. I wanted to look at what it was costing us, and I wanted to, you know, contemplate how we might visit to a better place.

MARTIN: You open with, this won’t shock too many people, a number of anecdotes from Fox News where the opinion hosts in particular seem to really rely on this as kind of a business model. And you describe a particular circumstance that seemed to really set off a number of their hosts. Just tell that story if you would, and what it is about it you found so troubling.

BRUNI: Yes. So, I mean, about two years ago, we had a real baby formula shortage. There’s a lot about it in the news. But what happened on Fox News on “Sean Hannity Show” and then kind of became an obsession of Fox News personalities and of the kind of Twitter right, was he showed this picture that he said was baby formula being kind of held back from the public and stockpiled and being given to people who had immigrated illegally, to migrants on this side of the border, and they were getting baby formula and you Americans, you were not getting baby formula. But if you zoomed in on the picture he was showing, it wasn’t baby formula, it was powdered milk for older children, which was not in short supply. But this minting of an us versus them scenario, this attempt to whip people into a state of fury about they were — about the way they were being wronged was not just kind of part and parcel of Fox’s business model or really the essence of it, but it was emblematic of a kind of thing that happens in politics increasingly and all the time. We are asked to be angry. We are asked to consider how wronged we are. This happens across the ideological spectrum. It’s non-partisan. And so, I began there because I thought it was such an emblematic episode.

MARTIN: Well, you said that this is across the political spectrum, but just for the sake of fairness, an example of where you think this has kind of manifested on what I think we would sort of broadly defined call the political left, what’s an example of that?

BRUNI: I’ll give you an example. When Brittney Griner was horrifically and unjustly imprisoned in Russia I saw on the left — when I went to Twitter and I looked at some accounts on the left, when I was just reading commentary and publications that had a leftward lean, I saw the complaint that she was not getting much attention, that the Biden administration and Americans didn’t care enough because she was black, because she was a woman, and because she was a lesbian. Now, racism in this country is very real. Homophobia is real. Sexism is very real. Brittney Griner was getting more discussion and more exposure than any political prisoner I can remember in the last decade. In fact, a lot of us only learned about Paul Whelan, who’s still being held by the Russians because of the Brittney Griner story. And what concerns me about that, and where that is a part of grievance culture that is so disturbing and destructive is when you claim racism, sexism, homophobia in situations where that doesn’t fit, you give your opponents a way to dismiss you when you’re making those claims in the most urgent and necessary way. But that’s an example of grievance run amok on the left.

MARTIN: You describe this as a kind of not just a sort of a political problem, but a cultural problem, something you feel like has it kind of infused the kind of broader American experience of public life, which you say in the book is, you know, where there was trouble, where there was disappointment, when dreams were unrealized, when goals were unmet, and sometimes even when things were going perfectly well but not exactly perfectly, they look for insult and invariably found it, even if they had to invent it. So, where do you think this started?

BRUNI: Why have we gotten here? I think there’s so many different streams, you know, that feed this confluence. Income inequality, the decline of social mobility in America, this legitimate sense among many Americans that opportunity isn’t equally distributed and that our growth and our future, our bright future are not to be taken for granted. Social media is an enormous aggravate (ph) and accelerant of this because, well, it prompt — while the internet was this great promise of connectedness, it turns out to be this great curse of disconnectedness that allows us to sort ourselves ever more efficiently and ruthlessly. And I think one more big component of this is a whole new American pessimism that represents a real alteration, even rupture in the American psyche. When you look at survey data, it used to be the case that when you said to a random sampling of Americans, do you think your children will have a better, brighter future than you did, or will have a better life than you have right now? A dependable majority of Americans would say, yes, that’s no longer the case. And that’s a real profound change in this country and its psychology, and it affects the way we relate to one another.

MARTIN: Yes, but some of those things — this is the thing we wanted to talk about here, Frank, is that, you know, some of those grievances are real. There is vast income inequality in this country. And even for some groups, especially less educated Americans, their life expectancy is actually going down. So, the substance of some people’s grievances is correct, right?

BRUNI: The foundation and the cornerstone of some of these grievances, not all of them, is correct. The problem becomes where you travel with them, where you take them. So, you mentioned life expectancy declining among some Americans, and that’s particularly true, as you said, among less educated Americans. And a lot has been said and written about people in the “heartland” in areas that have been decimated by factory closings and by drugs. And a lot of that diminished life expectancy has to do with opioid overdoses and drug deaths, right? So, talking about that, for the people who are affected by that, whose loved ones have been affected by that, to talk about that and to ask the question, is the government paying me and the people I live among enough attention? Is it coming up with the right solutions? That’s a good grievance, right? But what you see is that carried to places that are absolutely loopy and really destructive. J. D. Vance, who is currently seemingly on Donald Trump’s short list for vice presidential running mate consideration, actually went on a talk show, I quoted in the book, and said that he believed Biden and the Biden administration wanted a porous border, because making sure a certain amount of fentanyl got across the border would up the deaths that we’re talking about and would eliminate Trump voters. Now, that is grievance run amok. That’s a particularly cartoonish example, but that habit of going from something legitimate into the realms of the absurd, that happens in other instances as well.

MARTIN: One of the other things you say in the book is that the American soundtrack has become a cacophony of competing complaints. Some are righteous and others specious. Some are urgent and others frivolous. Those distinctions are too often lost on the complainers. So, this is a question of where, you know, you have to ask, how do you decide what’s frivolous and what’s serious? You know, who — and who is to decide that?

BRUNI: Well, obviously, I mean, in some sense, voters get to decide that by whom they reward by putting in office. It is a subjective judgment. But I think, for me, what I would say, and I think this is probably not a controversial thing to say, it’s frivolous if it’s fictive. It’s frivolous if it’s J. D. Vance saying the Biden administration wants drugs coming across the border to kill Trump voters. It’s frivolous if Sean Hannity is calling powdered milk infant formula. Like when you actually invent facts and when you become so overwrought that all you’re trying to do is construct a nonexistent us versus them narrative, when all you’re trying to do is whip people into fury, whether it’s to raise political — whether it’s to raise donations in a political campaign, a la Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, or whether it’s simply to kind of get elected and to ride the currents of anger into office in an indiscriminate and self-serving way, all of that, to me, would belong in the category of the frivolous.

MARTIN: You make clear in the book that this kind of grievance culture that you speak about didn’t begin with Former President Trump, but he certainly is emblematic of it. He’s currently on trial — as we are speaking now, he’s currently on trial in New York where he’s made very clear that his, you know, grievances about a lot of things. But could you just be more specific in how you think that he stoked this kind of culture of grievance and what role you think he specifically has played in it?

BRUNI: Well, he stoked it in so many ways, but one right out of the gate, and that has continued to this moment in time, is he basically said to his supporters, all of the cultural elites that you believe look down on you and that you dislike or maybe even despise, they’re against me too. They look down on me too. So. vote for me as a measure of revenge against them, right? That was the negative part. And it was a big part of this political message. I would argue it’s the cornerstone of his political career. He was saying, you are rightly angry that all those people in the society who you think have had an easier time than you, who’ve been on a glide path, you are correct that they are bad people who look down at the rest of us. Now, the crazy political sorcery here is Trump is elite himself, but he somehow made himself an ambassador of a whole different group of Americans. And he said, you know, I — like, if you want to torment them, the greatest way to torment them is by embracing me. That was a message of his across the years, and he distilled it and, you know, for lack of a better verb, perfected it just about a year ago when he launched his current campaign to go back to the White House, and he used four words that I think will long be remembered and that I think are just the perfect distillation of his political identity. He told the people whom he wanted to vote for him again, I am your retribution. That is grievance on steroids.

MARTIN: You know, so let’s — I’m also intrigued by your notion of like, how do we decide what’s serious and how do we decide what’s frivolous if it’s a matter of who the public elevates, you know, by that standard, the J. D. Vances, the Donald Trumps, all those who are emblematic of that sort of the language of grievance, they are setting the priorities, right? So, if people have chosen these people with that message of grievance, does not that say something about the priority that the public at large, whoever voted for them, wasn’t everybody, gives to whatever they’re saying?

BRUNI: It does, but it doesn’t mean that priority is wholly warranted and is justly and accurately given. But what I would say, because I really want us to try to understand one another better rather than to — in the case of like, say, the MAGA movement and Trump supporters, rather than to just reflexively look down and say, they’re all crazy or whatever. I think in that situation, as in many others, what’s constructive and productive is to ask, OK, Donald Trump is grievance run amok. Donald Trump weaponizes grievance in a way that travels so far from the truth, and we should never stop calling that out. Why does that message resonate? What are the real frustrations that if we looked at harder and attended to and talked about in a more mature way, could we come up with more collaboration as a society and could we make the crazy part of it recede a little bit? I mean, those are the questions I want to ask, those are the discussions I want to have, because I think we’re in a really not just divisive, but dysfunctional place.

MARTIN: One idea — one sort of solution that you offer I found really fascinating that the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, issued an executive order opening up a large number of state jobs to people who don’t have a four-year degree. The argument being that a lot of these jobs didn’t need one, didn’t really require one. And why do you think that that’s so important? And what do you think that has to do with the sort of the call for collegiality, comedy, and civility that you’ve been calling for? Why would that help? Why do you think that something like that helps?

BRUNI: I think that helps enormously on both the symbolic and substantive level. And interestingly, that has become something of trend debt among governors. It’s happened in Utah. It’s happened in a bunch of other states. He was one of the early ones to do it. And by doing it via executive order on his first day in office, he was attaching great symbolic and messaging weight to it. He was recognizing that a lot of the people who don’t support him as a Democrat, who don’t support the Democratic Party, rightly or wrongly, see the Democratic Party as a party of educated elites who look down on people who don’t have as much education, who aren’t as intellectually refined or whatever. And he was saying, I want to do something that shows that that’s not the case. I want to do something that is going to help as many people who did not vote for me as it will people who did vote for me. I’m not just parceling out rewards to the faithful, I’m showing voters that I am the governor of everyone, I care about everyone, and I want to extend opportunities in ways that you may not associate normally with me or my party. That is such a conciliatory act. That is such a deft expression of empathy. And I think it changes the tone somewhat. Josh Shapiro is the governor of a very purple state. I believe opinion — I believe the most recent polls show that it looks like Pennsylvania, if the election were today, would go to Trump. And yet, Josh Shapiro has a robust approval rating and just because he’s doing those sorts of things and there’s an enormous — there’s a great lesson and a model in that for other politicians and for the rest of us.

MARTIN: And — OK. So, what about the rest of us? What are some things that I don’t know, like that Frank Bruni could do?

BRUNI: Well, I teach at Duke University. I’m a full professor at Duke. And in my classes, I am very clear with students that I want discussions that are ideologically diverse. I want them to work really hard to have respect for and listen to people who disagree with them. Now, that’s just one small environment. That’s a tiny seed. But if more of us within those domains where we have influence would prioritize engagement across ideological lines, respect with people — respect for people with whom we disagree, if enough of us did that in enough environments, it might move the needle in a really meaningful way.

MARTIN: But still, having said all that, this leaves a wound that then becomes hard to heal. And it also creates an environment where people feel justified in staying in their enclave, as it were, because it feels better.

BRUNI: You know — and that’s what concerns me. And the portion of the book that I think is most important to me is where I discuss along those lines what this is costing us, and it’s costing us the ability to have any kind of conversation across differences. And it’s creating this sort of tit for tat, constantly ratcheted up dynamic that you describe. For some reason, people think, I need to be more provocative than the other side because that’s how I win the day. I need to shout louder. I need to use more hyperbolic vocabulary. They’re confusing confrontation with conviction. And they’re confusing provocation with passion. And it just becomes this deafening noise that sends everybody even deeper into their corners that has them manning their battlements in an ever more aggressive way. We need to pause and stop and say, where does that get us? Where is it leading us? Nowhere productive and constructive. And are we really prepared to be trapped in this cycle for years and years and decades? Because at the far end of that, we’re going to have a country even more dysfunctional than the one we have now. And I don’t know if we go too far down that road that there’s any turning back. I think we can turn back now, but we need to take a really good, long, hard look at the way we talk to one another, the way we behave, and we need to ask ourselves if it’s who we really mean to be.

MARTIN: Frank Bruni, thank you so much for speaking with us.

BRUNI: Thank you.