Inside:
The Death of Beauty
Natalie Harp Won’t BE Ignored
What The AI Companies Should Pay To Stop The Guillotine
Bannon Previews the Election
Surveillance State Update
Trump’s Magic Primary Endorsement…Isn’t
Bubbas and Byron
Do They Want To Lose Florida?
The Big Picture
The Death of Beauty
I saw an article earlier this week on the end of beauty, and the theme triggered something in me, an itch to write about it, but I couldn’t quite nail the approach.
Then I drove past a house yesterday on a road in one of Tallahassee’s old neighborhoods, the kind known for gracious homes set far back from a canopy road, live oaks arching overhead burdened with old stories and Spanish moss.
The street once housed a former U.S. senator, a dozen wealthy lobbyists, a scattering of doctors, and old money, with a sort of particular Old Florida charm sustained by an unspoken compact among the neighbors: a desire for beauty, for presence, a memory of a time when no one was ashamed to live in an older home, creaky floors, questionable wiring and all.
But one of the houses I loved on that road is gone, replaced by an enormous black-and-white modernist box with all the aesthetic grandeur of a stack of shipping containers dropped from a crane. A driveway the size of a carrier deck has been poured across what was a pine-and-oak-shaded lawn. The house it replaced wasn’t even the most spectacular home on the road, but I felt its loss.
This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to my town. Across America, old homes in soft, quiet, green neighborhoods are being replaced by soulless black-and-white boxes, stark, blunt, and unwelcoming. Inside, bright white walls and bright white lights feel like an emergency room, not a home, and cavernous spaces offer not a single spot of warmth or comfort. The culture that accepts them as beautiful has lost something in its soul.
We lost so much in this grotesque era that beauty and architectural grace may seem to some to be low on the list. The nation has been rendered like a hog, our politics turned into ugly butchery and filth. Our financial system is an extraction tool, milking the old middle- and working-class cow one last time.
But for some reason this week, I’ve wondered more than I have in the past about the loss of an appreciation for beauty. It isn’t just Trump’s natural vulgarity and tastelessness rippling down into the culture, though that’s a part of it.
There are a million reasons to want the Trump era to end: the corruption, the cruelty, the demolition of American law and institutions, the abandonment of everything we once called our most fundamental values. It is easy, and correct, to hate the autocracy, the racial animus, the pointless wars, the eager alignment with dictators, the whorehouse decor.
But those things are almost too easy. I was thinking this morning about a common accusation from 2015, when the small tribe of Never Trump Republicans first began making our case. MAGA world kept lodging an odd but oddly persistent complaint: that we hated Trump for merely aesthetic reasons.
At the time, I argued it went far beyond the aesthetic. A decade in, I’ve come to believe the aesthetics were the tell, all along. The raw sewage pipe of Trump’s vulgarity. The gimcrack gold leaf slathered on every surface. The Mar-a-Lago plastic-surgery pageant of big lips and bigger implants. The anxious toadies simpering and capering at his every word as if he were some combination of Churchill and Demosthenes.
All of it adds up to a crass, shameful environment, and none of us stands outside it. The savage world of social media incentivizes us all, your author included, to cut deeper, to win uglier, to push the blade a little further into our opponents. Perhaps the world has changed forever, and this is the new normal. Perhaps Trump unleashed something dark in the American character that we cannot unwind.
Part of this really does come down to choosing between ugliness versus beauty. Graciousness assaulted by abuse. Spleen swapped for hope.
I am aesthetically traditional across too many domains to mention; I do not believe function is the only thing that should dictate form, in architecture or in society. Our home is decorated in my English-hunting-lodge-meets-alchemist’s-library style, a bit eccentric, but warm and, we hope, inviting.
But some people choose to live in a sterile box, an ugly prison for blank souls. There’s a metaphor there.
The MAGA movement is wired to display the worst elements of humanity, to post endlessly about its broken soul but never take a single step to heal it. It’s a broken, empty, angry box, echoing and lonely.
This is not a culture that will build a casino, not a cathedral, a strip club, not a library.
It will not and cannot produce great art, great literature, or great music. At its absolute best, it imitates a schmaltzy, mass-produced Americana, a plastic memory of an imaginary country that never existed, stamped MADE IN CHINA and sold at a discount.
At its worst, it produces only monuments to appetite: bigger, louder, cheaper, crueler, more gold leaf and less taste.
But we should at least remember that grace existed. We should remember that beauty is worth defending. We should reject the lie that cruelty is strength, vulgarity is authenticity, and ugliness is inevitable.
When he goes, and someday he will go, we will not get back what we had, at least not all at once. It will be a long season of work and reform, of sacrifice and demands on our discipline as citizens and neighbors that go beyond easy answers. I’ve always been struck by the stories of generations of craftsmen working on cathedrals, grandfathers, fathers, sons, all shaping stone over decades, none of whom would see the completion of a monument to the glory of God.
But they kept working, shaping one stone at a time, because the idea and ideal of creating something beautiful and uplifting made it more than a job.
The compact on that old canopy road took generations to build and one bulldozer to break. But remember what this era taught us: the ugliest aesthetics were married to the ugliest politics, and neither was an accident.
The oaks on that street took a century to grow and an afternoon to cut down.
What we plant next determines what shades the road for whoever drives past when we are long gone.
Intel and Observations
Natalie Harp Won’t BE Ignored
Natalie Harp is not the story. She’s the symptom.
The story coming out of Donald Trump’s White House is ostensibly about his increasingly intense and strange relationship with Harp, the 35-year-old former OAN host who has become his near-constant companion.
She’s on the plane when he escapes Iran’s terror threats. She’s in the car, sometimes in the trunk. She’s in the Oval Office. She’s the famous “human printer,” carrying around a portable printer so Trump can consume the only information he really wants: stories about how Donald Trump is the smartest, tallest, most handsome man in the room.
People immediately want to make this a sex story. Maybe it is. I doubt it, for medical and biological reasons. MAGA certainly tried with their phony outrage routine to make any observation about Harp into a story about sex, but it’s only tangential, if it is at all.
What’s happening is weirder, and considerably more dangerous.
Donald Trump is a man in political, medical, and psychological decline, watching his popularity collapse and his political power begin to bleed away. And like every declining autocrat, his circle is shrinking. Trust disappears, paranoia grows, and even the old courtiers become suspect. Loyalty is never total enough.
And then there’s Natalie.
Harp offers Trump something nobody else can: absolute, unconditional, almost
