Give Trump a Nobel! And an Emmy. And an Oscar …

New York Times

9 hours ago

'I waited and waited and waited, and I said, 'The hell with it, I'll become chairman and I'll give myself an honor.' Next year, we'll honor Trump, OK?'
— President Donald Trump, who is now also the chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, using the announcement last week of its newest honorees to complain that he hasn't been accorded that distinction — yet.
Maybe Trump was joking, but I think he's onto something. I really do.
I say we give him one of the Kennedy Center Honors. And after that, the Nobel Peace Prize, his lusting for which almost certainly factored into his meeting with Vladimir Putin. And then, well, there's no end to the accolades we could bestow on him, the trinkets we could throw at him, the trumpets we could blow for him, if we think creatively enough. Just as there's no limit to his need for validation, veneration, feting, festooning.
We can't wish away his vanity any more than we can take the wetness out of water. So why not work with it?
If we keep him busy with award ceremonies and bury him in gleaming trophies, glittering medallions and gaudily framed certificates, he might not be so free or feel so compelled to assert his dominance in other ways, such as stripping poor people of their health insurance, immigrants of their humanity, the judiciary of its integrity, academia of its autonomy, Democrats of winnable congressional districts and America of democracy. A megalomaniac has only so much time and energy, especially at his age — though he looks a good 50 years younger than 79. That's the kind of thing we must tell him constantly and invent a prize for; besides which, whoever recorded the date that he entered this world was clearly a Trump-hating partisan who fudged the numbers to make him look bad. Everybody knows that birth certificates are rigged!
We give Trump an Emmy. That's a no-brainer. Roughly two decades ago, he was actually nominated for that award, multiple times, as an executive producer of 'The Apprentice.' And he was somewhat less than gracious about watching 'The Amazing Race' be repeatedly crowned the best reality TV program instead. He mocked the ceremony on Twitter through the Obama years and was still raw about his absent Emmy during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016. 'Should have gotten it,' he grumbled.
We remedy that with a lifetime achievement Emmy, because he has been a television spectacle in so many ways for such a long time. In fact, he has done more than provide countless hours of television content — he's TV's most worshipful acolyte and devoted evangelist. It's his god, for Nielsen's sake. His entire political agenda is prompted by what he sees on TV. Or by how it will play on TV. He picks aides based on how they'll look on TV. I hate to break this to Pete Hegseth, but managerial prowess and military genius aren't how he landed defense secretary. Likewise, Pam Bondi didn't ride her legal acumen to attorney general.
Of course, once we've given Trump an Emmy, he'll also want a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony, so he can join the rarefied ranks of artists who've run that golden gamut and are known as EGOT royalty. We can just fast-track the president on alphabetical grounds. Much as he redefines reality, we can redefine the acronym, and from now on, EGOT will also stand for Trump's most prominent attribute affixed to his last initial.
It's not much of a stretch to present him with a Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. While it's currently reserved for brainiacs under 40, such norms are for chumps, not Trumps, and matter less than the singular brilliance of this president, whose novel formula for calculating trade imbalances and tariffs captivated economists.
His analysis of election margins was equally innovative. In 2016, he converted the slenderest of triumphs in the Electoral College and a sizable loss of the popular vote into proof of 'a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen,' in the words of his own inauguration speech. (Is there a Nobel for self-congratulation?) Four years later, he transformed defeat in both arenas into fulminations about a wrongly and cruelly denied victory.
Just this month, he brandished lavishly capitalized Truth Social posts, enterprisingly contrived charts and wounded pride to expose a numerical heresy accepted by less arithmetically gifted politicians: Deep State functionaries in the Bureau of Labor Statistics were cooking the books! In a method (sous vide?) that made Democrats look good. He'll fix that by deep-frying the data, then serving it with Republican-red ketchup.
Perhaps, with a few tweaks of the criteria, we could even snag a Heisman for Trump. He went to college. Around that time, he was undoubtedly running back to his affluent father for help. He received an exemption from military service in Vietnam because of bone spurs, which aren't so far from the ball of a person's foot. And he was surely exhibiting back then what he has exhibited over the past decade, which is a phenomenal ability to evade all would-be tacklers and reach the end zone.
Trump's visionary reconceiving of the necktie as something of a low-hanging neck pendulum — part boa, part bib — must qualify him for an existing fashion award or at least give us the opportunity to fashion a new one, ideally bestowed on him at an event in New Zealand, to maximize his travel time and eject him from the country for as long as possible. We'd have him host the event as well and, to further cram his schedule, any other festivity that caught his fancy. After all, he's slated to play that part at the Kennedy Center ceremony in December, and though he claimed at the news conference where he announced this year's honorees that he'd been coaxed into the role, an audio recording obtained by The Times shows that he himself floated the idea five months ago.
At that news conference he rambled on and on, the expanse and eclecticism of his remarks a testament to his indefatigability when it comes to the sound of his own voice. And to his obsession with tributes — or at least with tributes to him. 'I'm on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,' he boasted, apropos of ego. He also slammed the Academy Awards for 'lousy ratings,' which is, of course, the greatest shame — the greatest sin — of all.
With a ready solution. Have Trump take charge of the Oscars — behind the scenes, in front of the scenes, in as many scenes as he can be cast in. Have him choose the nominees and winners, just as (according to him) he ruled over the Kennedy Center Honors this time around. Have this big gold man hand out all the little gold men and get one (or more!) of his own, maybe for whatever hand he has in that Melania Trump documentary that Jeff Bezos's Amazon Studios reportedly purchased for the bargain price of $40 million.
I figure that every second he's on the Oscars stage is a second he's not at the Resolute Desk, pursuing or setting some record for executive orders signed. That's a big, beautiful trade-off, the likes of which the world has never seen.
What I'm Listening To and Watching
My catch-up reading about Tucker Pillsbury — a singer-songwriter who performs under the name Role Model — suggests some skepticism about his musical bona fides versus his genre-hopping, TikTok-savvy pursuit of fame, and there's indeed an air of excessive calculation and insistent adorability about him. But I've been listening frequently and very, very contentedly to his album 'Kansas Anymore (The Longest Goodbye)' for the past two weeks, struck by how irresistibly and skillfully tuneful his songs are. Some indie artists seem wary of music that's too catchy and of lyrics too easily discerned and ripe with rhyme, as if such accessibility equals selling out. Not Pillsbury — and that's the glib beauty of him. The single 'Sally, When the Wine Runs Out' has become not just a hit but a thing: The gently goofy video went viral, and various celebrities (Kate Hudson, Natalie Portman, Bowen Yang) joined him onstage — as the Sally of the night — during live performances over recent months. But I don't even think it's the best track in a country-tinged pop collection of remarkable polish and poise. I appreciate how the words in 'Oh Gemini' curl around the chorus. A lovely breeze blows through 'Look at That Woman' and 'Old Recliners.' And 'Scumbag' turns self-loathing (feigned, clearly) into a foot-stomping anthem.
I tend to make somewhat random musical associations, and 'Kansas Anymore' — in terms of its exuberance, emphasis on hooks and classic song construction — brought to mind and persuaded me to return to two other albums I've greatly enjoyed. One is 'Martinis & Bikinis,' which the singer-songwriter Sam Phillips released back in 1994; the tracks 'Strawberry Road' and 'I Need Love' are as addictive as I remembered them. The other is 'Being Funny in a Foreign Language,' a 2022 release by The 1975 whose highlights include 'Oh Caroline' and 'I'm In Love With You,' the two songs that the band wisely chose to perform on 'Saturday Night Live' in 2023.
Enough has been said about the politics and postmodern superhero sensibility of the latest 'Superman' movie, directed and co-written by James Gunn. I want to draw attention to a pleasure somewhat overshadowed by that — Nicholas Hoult's delicious performance as Lex Luthor. From the Hulu television series 'The Great' and the movie 'The Menu' in 2022 through the movies 'Nosferatu' and 'Juror No. 2' last year, Hoult has emerged as one of the most versatile, dependable and sought-after actors in the business. And I get the exciting sense that the best is yet to come.
For the Love of Sentences
At least once a month I try, as necessary relief, to purge Trump — to purge government — from this section of the newsletter. I hereby present a bouquet of colorful prose with no political thorns.
In The Boston Globe, Christopher Muther celebrated a New England roadway rest stop with food options beyond the ultraprocessed and prepackaged norm. He contemplated getting the avocado toast. 'But I'm in the mood for poutine on this rainy Sunday afternoon,' he wrote. 'I know what you're thinking. 'Rest stop poutine? Are you sure?' Rest stop poutine sounds like the name of an indie rock band, or a French Canadian laxative.' (Thanks to Jane Abbott of Hubbardston, Mass., for nominating this.)
In The Asheville Watchdog, John Boyle bemoaned the latest example of inadequate transparency regarding the University of North Carolina at Asheville's development of woodland near the school: 'That's just one more sheet of tar paper slapped over the project's skylights so no one can look in and see what's happening.' (Maria Juarez, Asheville, N.C.)
In The Washington Post, Gaya Gupta invoked one of Minnesota's promotional tag lines to report on an accidentally drained body of water in the state: 'The 'Land of 10,000 Lakes' is going down to 9,999 for a little while.' (Aimee Germain, Clinton, N.Y.)
In The Times, Franz Lidz dropped a reference to the performers famous (or infamous?) for 'Y.M.C.A.' and 'Macho Man' into an essay on a much different band of swaggerers: 'The Vikings, beyond their reputation as medieval bad boys — Pillage People, if you will — were accomplished traders who established commercial routes that stretched all the way to Baghdad.' (Mark Flannery, Fullerton, Calif., and Terry Burridge, Arlington, Va.)
Also in The Times, Jessica Grose identified proof in nature that humans aren't the only species whose reproductive health is compromised by contaminants: 'Studies have shown that endocrine-disrupting chemicals also affect the fertility of many different kinds of male wildlife, and it's not as if fish are deciding to put off childbearing until they're more financially stable.' (Peggy Sweeney, Oviedo, Spain)
And Rob Copeland puzzled over a contemporary currency: 'I've always thought of crypto as an unlikely addition to mainstream finance, like mustard on spaghetti.' (Maureen Holtz, Champaign, Ill.)
In Word Smarts, Samantha Abernethy argued for the importance of strategically placed semicolons: 'We visited Bologna, Italy; Nice, France; and Madrid, Spain. Try writing that sentence with only commas, and you'll get lost somewhere in southern Europe.' (Bob Gardner, Granite Bay, Calif.) I'm a semicolon enthusiast myself, evident in the headline that I wrote for this newsletter in late 2023.
In The Athletic, Andrew Baggarly described the pace of activity around the trading deadline in Major League Baseball: 'The transactions cook like a bag of Orville Redenbacher in the microwave — staggered sounds over the preceding days, a building noise in the early hours on deadline day, an insane number of deals exploding in the final minutes, then a few stray pops after the deadline passes as news gets out about last-second deals.' (Mark Sewall, Alexandria, Va.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Jared Diamond recognized how differently Hal Steinbrenner approaches his stewardship of a storied sports franchise than his father, George, did: 'The elder Steinbrenner ran the New York Yankees with all the patience of an Upper West Sider stuck behind a tourist in the whitefish line at Zabar's.' (April Stewart Klausner, West Cornwall, Conn., and Richard Holland, Oak Park, Ill., among others)
Also in The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay placed his advance coverage of a preseason pro football game in the context of the increasingly year-round obsession with the sport: 'Everywhere I look, the page has turned, and turned long ago — to football, football, football. Forget what the calendar says. The N.F.L. media is now the pharmacy that puts out its Christmas stuff during the first week of June.' (David Calfee, Lake Forest, Ill., and Paul Strieleman, Deerfield, Ill.)
A few days later, Gay cited the national mood in late summer to justify his report on the game itself: 'An exhausted America always warms to a fun, low-stakes story at this time of year, like a math whiz who sailed to the Bahamas in a canoe he built out of Fanta cans, or a giant squash that looks exactly like Clint Eastwood.' In that article, he added: 'It's only August, but this is fun. America is suddenly intrigued by the 2025 season of the Cleveland Browns. Try and compete with that, giant squash that looks exactly like Clint Eastwood.' (James Brockardt, Pennington, N.J.)
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.