{"id":275705,"date":"2026-06-23T21:04:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T21:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/275705\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T21:04:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T21:04:08","slug":"opinion-if-you-love-america-cringe-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/275705\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | If You Love America, Cringe for It"},"content":{"rendered":"

My father<\/a> was fond of the Spanish expression \u201cen los peque\u00f1os detalles se ve la persona\u201d \u2014 the person is revealed in the small details. Last week, at the summit of the Group of 7 leaders in France, two details revealed two people in two starkly different lights.<\/p>\n

The first \u2014 who else? \u2014 is Donald Trump, the world\u2019s most powerful man yet possibly the world\u2019s smallest. Speaking to a journalist, the president claimed that Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, with whom he was once friendly but has since fallen out, \u201cbegged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly,\u201d before adding, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have done it, but I felt sorry for her!\u201d<\/p>\n

Meloni\u2019s response came swiftly. Trump\u2019s statement, she said, was \u201ctotally invented.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know why the president of the United States behaves this way toward his own allies,\u201d she said in a video<\/a> posted to social media. \u201cAfter all, this is not the first time it has happened. I can only say that it\u2019s upsetting that he doesn\u2019t have the same resolve toward the enemies of the West, toward the enemies of the United States, toward leadership to which he instead proves much more indulgent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is one thing he should remember,\u201d she concluded. \u201cI never beg \u2014 and neither does Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n

No prizes here for guessing who\u2019s telling the truth \u2014 or who, despite their very considerable difference in physical size, is the bigger and braver person. But there\u2019s also a lesson in this relatively trivial but telling episode that it behooves Americans to learn on the eve of our semiquincentennial: If you love America, now is the time to cringe for it.<\/p>\n

Cringing is not simply a physical reflex stemming from embarrassment or disgust. It also involves a mix of compassion and empathy. You cringe when someone\u2019s child flubs their lines in a school play. You cringe for a spouse trying to calm an abrasively drunk partner at a dinner party. You cringe whenever you feel implicated, if only as a human being, whenever someone humiliates those near them, even when they\u2019re the last to know it. It\u2019s how I felt for Jill Biden the night of her husband\u2019s debate debacle.<\/p>\n

To exist as a sentient American in the age of Trump is to live in a perpetual cringe \u2014 morally, aesthetically, intellectually, politically. If the administration were a play or film script, it would be neither farce nor tragedy but instead a kind of absurdist travesty, \u201cWaiting for Godot<\/a>\u201d meets \u201cPulp Fiction<\/a>\u201d meets \u201cDumb and Dumber<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

However much we may disdain him, the president has the rest of us on the hook, as the face and voice of a country that ought to know better. Trump\u2019s angry visage<\/a> draped between the exterior columns of the Department of Justice? That\u2019s us. His gilded<\/a>, meretricious redecoration of the White House? That\u2019s us. His repeatedly avowed admiration<\/a> for Vladimir Putin? That\u2019s us. His laughable claim<\/a> about having achieved regime change in Tehran? That\u2019s us. His Mafia-like threats<\/a> against NATO allies? That\u2019s us. His indescribably vain (and pathetically fruitless<\/a>) effort to affix his name to the Kennedy Center? That\u2019s us. His venal family profiting off his presidency<\/a> in ways both transparent<\/a> and tacky<\/a>? That\u2019s us.<\/p>\n

The same goes for his insult of Meloni, which may be far from the worst of his sins but is also the most emblematic for being at once so utterly unnecessary as well as dementedly self-defeating. That\u2019s us. The same country that freed its slaves, welcomed immigrants, invented airplanes, liberated concentration camps, landed men on the moon and challenged the Soviet Union to tear down this wall now bids to be the global equivalent of the expensively dressed man soiling his pants at a cocktail party.<\/p>\n

For 10 years, I\u2019ve watched my former political party work overtime not to cringe; to pretend that the Vesuvius of verbal infamies erupting daily from Trump\u2019s mouth is either unimportant, or hilarious, or calculating and shrewd. Republicans turned their tolerance for the president\u2019s mental goo into a shot-drinking contest \u2014 the more you drank, the manlier you were supposed to be. John McCain and Mitt Romney<\/a> refused to play, to their everlasting credit; other Republicans<\/a>, less admirably, did so only after Trump had ended their political futures.<\/p>\n

But for 10 years, too, I\u2019ve also watched the president\u2019s opponents fail to appreciate the necessity of cringing \u2014 by understanding their role in Trump\u2019s rise. The Democrats and their media enablers<\/a> who, until June of 2024, insisted Joe Biden was fit for a second term (surely knowing, somewhere in the dim recesses of their minds, that this could only help Trump) are complicit. So are the progressives who, on one cultural issue<\/a> after another<\/a>, shoved the Democratic Party so far to the left that it became the very caricature of what MAGA-world said it was.<\/p>\n

Here, then, is our American challenge: Let\u2019s not be afraid to cringe. Ronald Reagan predicted, correctly, that the Soviet Union would end up on the ash heap of history<\/a>; now it\u2019s our turn to risk winding up on the ash heap of idiocy.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s not look away from the parts we played in bringing America to this moment. Let\u2019s remember who we once were, because it\u2019s what we may yet be again \u2014 if only we feel the sting of our present shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My father was fond of the Spanish expression \u201cen los peque\u00f1os detalles se ve la persona\u201d \u2014 the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[103787,92736,103786,9,11,10,1671,11770,5285,1876,79268],"class_list":["post-275705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-giorgia-1977","tag-group-of-seven","tag-meloni","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-politics-and-government","tag-presidential-election-of-2024","tag-republican-party","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-united-states-semiquincentennial-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}