Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Frank Bruni:

We’re living at a moment in time when there’s a political and cultural currency to portraying yourself as a victim. The way you get people to relate to you and the way in which you carve out space to be heard in the public square is all too often by defining yourself in terms of how you’ve been wrong. There’s a strange power and currency in that.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Frank Bruni. He’s a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a prolific author Bruni’s new book is called The Age of Grievance. In it, he chronicles the recent uptick in feelings of anger and injustice and the growing sense across the political spectrum of having been wronged. Bruni joins me this week to discuss how grievance has transformed our civic discourse, why people have become so quick to take offense, and why humility is so important. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. Hey folks, I’m traveling this week, so in lieu of our usual Q&A, I’m handing the mic over to Joyce Vance, my co-host on the CAFE Insider podcast and Elie Honig, CAFE contributor and CNN legal analyst. They discussed the latest trial updates as the Manhattan DA’s office wraps up its case against former President Donald Trump.

Joyce Vance:

So, Elie, I’m so glad to get a chance to talk with you now that we’ve heard all of the evidence come in the Manhattan trial, because I know you weren’t a big fan of this case at the get-go. At the start, we talked about it, you weren’t really warm on it. Now that you’ve seen most of the evidence come in, all of the evidence really, has that changed at all?

Elie Honig:

It’s changed. First of all, great to talk to you. Always lightens my day.

Joyce Vance:

Happy almost Memorial Day.

Elie Honig:

Yes, I feel good, isn’t it… By the way, I’ll get to your question, isn’t it odd to have this seven-day break between the end of the evidence and then closings? I mean, I’ve never had a break anywhere near this long, have you?

Joyce Vance:

No. I mean, this is really bad. I feel like the judge made the best of a bad situation with how he scheduled it, but it seems like watching this coming from afar, they might’ve tried to do something, work through a couple of Wednesdays or something to avoid the big gap because-

Elie Honig:

He tried. Remember he asked the jury to work Wednesday of the week before Memorial Day and they said no. But yeah, I was briefing our decision-makers here at CNN, and I was like, “He’s not going to divide this up,” because it’s the right move. In other words, he’s not going to have them start deliberating then take a four-day weekend then come back. That’s way too risky.

Joyce Vance:

Right. That was the one outcome you simply couldn’t afford to have.

Elie Honig:

Right. So I think he did the right thing here. Okay. To your question.

Joyce Vance:

Yes.

Elie Honig:

I remain skeptical of this case, but I think my skepticism has maybe changed and evolved a bit. And let me tell you my two main sources of skepticism. One, and we can dig into both of these. One, the way they’ve charged this case, I think it probably passes muster under New York law. I know it’s been litigated before Judge Merchan-

Joyce Vance:

I’ve got to jump in and say that’s the only law that matters, right? We don’t get to be supercilious federal prosecutors and judge state court proceedings by our standards.

Elie Honig:

Right. And again, this is more of I guess a judgment. This isn’t going to impact the legality of it, but just in terms of is this a good fair and just prosecution. When you’ve taken a misdemeanor that probably had expired, you’re putting the, what’s it called, those things you put on a heart to start them? You know what I mean? There’s a word for it.

Joyce Vance:

Give it a little bit of CPR to get it going.

Elie Honig:

Yeah, right. Electroshock it back into life by a probably federal campaign finance crime. I know they’ve also talked about state, finance crime, campaign finance crime and tax, but I mean, just when they were doing the charging conference the other day, the very fact that the dynamic in the room, and I talked to a couple of people who were in the courthouse and I said this on air and everyone said that this was what it was. The fact that the defense is saying, “Your Honor, please give the jury specificity as to what the other crime is.” And the prosecutors were saying, “No, judge, let’s keep it broad and vague.” That just doesn’t speak well to me about whether it’s the strength of the case or the wisdom or fairness of bringing it. That’s number one, but let’s get a little more brass tacks here.

Joyce Vance:

Well, before we move off of that though, can I say I had that same initial reaction until I went back and parsed the transcript really carefully. I thought Matthew Colangelo, the prosecutor who’s doing all of the argument here on the fine legal points, did a really good job of saying, here’s what New York state law requires us to prove. If we go into the depth that the defense wants, we’re going to confuse the jury, and that’s not our job here. When you judge, because this is all in the construct of the jury instructions, the judge will read, when you instruct jurors on the law, you should instruct them on what New York law requires, and they don’t need to know about these finer points of campaign finance law that are confusing. I actually thought it made a lot of sense, and it was what we would’ve done as federal prosecutors, right? You’re not going to ask the jury to be instructed on stuff you don’t have to prove. That’s just not how it works.

Elie Honig:

Right. I agree that they’re taking all the ground that New York law allows them, and I don’t fault them for that. I think it just doesn’t sit well with me as a member of the public. Forget about my prosecutor side or whatever, or my media side, that the other crime remains so poorly defined.

Joyce Vance:

So your quibble is with New York law, right? Not with the prosecution. I always tell my law students, if you don’t like the law, go run for the legislature.

Elie Honig:

Well, with New York law and the way that prosecutors have chosen to deploy it here, I mean, let me give you one practical problem. If the jury is going to be instructed, okay? The other crime here is state or federal campaign finance law. Don’t you have to get into what that means? I mean, in other words, the example that people who are arguing for the DA will always give as well, the burglary statute says if you go into a home and you have zip ties and a ski mask and a stun gun, and it’s obvious you’re planning on assaulting somebody, you can be then convicted for conspiracy to do the other crime.

But that’s much more intuitive than a conspiracy to violate campaign finance crime. I mean, what if the legal limit on federal campaign donations was $131,000? Right? I picked that because the amount they paid Stormy was 130. Doesn’t the jury need to know that? And you can’t just assume, I don’t even know, it’s sitting here. It’s like 3,000, whatever. So I know it’s way less than 130, but how can you possibly not instruct them on what violates federal or state campaign finance?

Joyce Vance:

Yeah, I mean, I guess I hear you. The only thing that I’m worried about is whether they’re meeting the elements of the statute so that a conviction gets affirmed on appeal. And since it’s not a mini trial on the campaign finance crime, all the prosecution has to prove is that they intended to commit another crime. It’s like burglary, but when you’ve got simple trespass, you come into my house, you’re trespassing. But if you come in with the intent to commit another crime, it’s burglary. And here it’s the same deal, right? I mean, you make the false business records, misdemeanor. You do it with the intent to commit another crime. You don’t have to commit that crime, you don’t even have to be able to commit that other crime. You just have to intend to get around campaign finance laws. And I think the government bears that burden of proving that. And as long as they do, I think that’s enough. So I guess we won’t find out which one of us is right until this case, if there’s a conviction, goes on appeal and the New York-

Elie Honig:

Oh, I mean the appel-

Joyce Vance:

… Yeah, doubt appeals weighs in.

Elie Honig:

It sounds to me like the DA’s office is smart enough to hew to the law. I don’t think a reversal is especially likely on this. My point is just in consuming this case as a member of the American public, that would rub me a bit wrong. It feels-

Joyce Vance:

I hear you.

Elie Honig:

… Like an unfair way to charge and prosecute a case. So we’re not that far apart on that.

Joyce Vance:

I think we’ve all had concerns about that. Frankly, at the get-go, I wanted them to come out and say, and here are the other crimes and here’s what we have to prove. But again, I recognize I’m a federal prosecutor. They work in a different system. So, Elie, if you had to argue, if you had to be an advocate for the DA’s case, what do you see as the strength in this case?

Elie Honig:

So the bigger weakness… Well, the weakness, which is the flip side of that to me is Michael Cohen. Look, I know Michael Cohen personally. I’ve considered him a friend. I understand he’s quite angry at me, which is fine, but he is a worse witness than I realized he would be. Now, look, he didn’t blow up on the stand. I thought that was an artificial binary that had been, “Oh, is Michael Cohen going to keep his cool?” Of course he’s going to keep his cool. He’s a smart guy. He’s ends driven. He was never going to flip out on the stand, nor is that the test. But if you strip away all that we already know about Michael Cohen, all that was already baked into Michael Cohen, he might be the single worst witness I’ve ever seen. And I mean that in the sense of, oh, look, I’ve put horrible people on the stand that have done things that thousand times worse than what Michael Cohen’s ever done.

But when you combine the fact that he has this history of lying to everybody and everything, and not just for Trump, contrary to his favorite talking point, he lied plenty for his own purposes. When you put the level of bias and hatred that he has for the defendant, the fact that he’s doing shows, tweeting all day long about how badly he wants this defendant in prison. He’s selling T-shirts. When you add on the fact that he lied on the stand, let’s be real, he lied on the stand. He did not… His whole explanation for why he recorded secretly recorded Donald Trump to play for David Pecker is utter, I’m going to violate CAFE rules here is bullshit of the highest order. He has told various people I know that the reason he recorded was it was an accident. He inadvertently hit it. He lied on the stand about that.

He lied on the stand about I wasn’t really bitter about not getting the AG position or a White House counsel. I know many people, there was evidence in the case. I happened to be sitting in a room with three people who said, “Bullshit, he told me he was bitter about it.” He lied on the stand about not wanting to pardon. The whole thing with the fourteen-year-old kid, I wouldn’t go so far as to say he got caught lying on the stand, but I think that’s a bad moment. And by the way, Joyce, he stole, not just did he steal $60,000 from the Trump organization, he stole $60,000 in the course of the very transaction at issue. So when prosecutors say, as they’ve constantly said, Donald Trump knew exactly what was going on. He knew exactly what was up with the reimbursements. No, he didn’t. You know how we know he didn’t? Because he got robbed by Michael Cohen during the course of that very transaction.

He sure as hell didn’t know that was going on. So Michael Cohen is an atrocious, horrible witness. I know he performed okay. I think the cross had its ups and downs. I think Todd Blanch could have done better, but to me it is an outrage to ask any jury, I don’t care who the defendant is, to separate a human being from his family and his liberty based on the word of Michael Cohen. I know he’s corroborated, I’m well aware of the handwritten notes and all that, but they still have to put faith in his core testimony about we told Donald Trump what was up with this. He said, good and do it. And to me, I think if you take this case, if you take Donald Trump away from the defense table, you put John Smith there, you take this case out of Manhattan, this guy walks in two seconds. That’s my view of the negative side.

Joyce Vance:

So, let me ask, do you think that the jury will outright acquit because they don’t believe Cohen? Or do you think it’ll be a hung jury with the jurors splitting on that?

Elie Honig:

Well, here comes the twist, I still think it’ll convict. I still think it’s 50, 60% that they’ll convict because my point of view of this is I’m pretty sure Trump did this. I’m pretty sure Trump did it, but being pretty sure or feeling it in your gut, as you know, you don’t need me to tell you this, isn’t enough. I do not think the prosecution has carried its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But I think when you look at the jury composition, just being Manhattanites, I’m not saying they’re going to be blinded by prejudice.

I’m not saying this is an unfair trial, but it certainly makes a difference if this case is being tried in Manhattan versus Oklahoma. And I think just the public hatred around Trump, I think it’s still more likely than not that they convict, but I think there’s a much higher risk than normal of a hung jury. So I think it’s roughly 50 to 60% conviction and the rest would be hung. I don’t think there’s any real chance they come back 12/0 to acquit, although I think the chance went from maybe zero to 5% given the way the evidence came in.

Joyce Vance:

So are you suggesting that people should be careful about where they commit crimes so that they’re only prosecuted in friendly venues?

Elie Honig:

No, no, no. I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault, I’m not saying the prosecutors did anything wrong here. In fact, if they were to charge this case, this is the absolute appropriate venue to charge it. This is where the crime was committed. So I’m not saying play a violin for poor Donald Trump. The DA did the right thing by charging it in Manhattan, but the real world consequence of that is really bad for Trump. I mean, let me ask that back to you. Do you think there’s any chance Donald Trump gets convicted if this case gets charged in Woods County Oklahoma where Donald Trump got 82% of the vote?

Joyce Vance:

Well, I don’t know Woods County, but I do know Birmingham-

Elie Honig:

Let’s use Birmingham.

Joyce Vance:

And I would say that on a bad day you would get a juror or two that would hang, but if I was the prosecutor, you’d get a conviction.

Elie Honig:

I like that. I like that confidence.

Joyce Vance:

Well, okay, so I think that that is the biggest weakness in the case. What about strength? Is there anything that you like about this case?

Elie Honig:

Yeah, I mean, the evidence really hung together nicely. There’s a lot of corroboration, there’s a lot of good overlap, and this is going to be the task in closing. David Pecker is a distant memory and Keith Davidson and Hope Hicks, but the prosecution, it’s there for them to link up Michael Cohen’s testimony to those pieces of testimony in ways that really mutually reinforce. There is good corroboration from Michael Cohen. The checks are nice. The handwritten notes showing the way they hashed out the 420, $420,000 is really helpful. It’s not quite the nail in the coffin that I think it’s glibly referred to because you have to still link that document or it’s content, it’s substance to Donald Trump, and you need Cohen for that. But that’s a great piece of evidence.

And I also think I am completely unmoved by the defense argument that Donald Trump wasn’t thinking about the election in some way. I mean, I said that in a triple negative, let me put that in a positive. Of course, and they have amply proven that Donald Trump’s motives in paying Stormy Daniels were to impact and protect himself in the 2016 election. To me, as you can probably tell, I think the front end of the crime is the harder part for prosecutors, the tying Trump to the falsification. But I think the back end and he did it for campaign purposes is very well established.

Joyce Vance:

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really interesting because I view it a little bit like this. The way I teach first year criminal law, I guess this is the day I talk about teaching a lot. I tell my students, even though it doesn’t appear in the statute, in many cases, identity is always an element that prosecutors have to prove. You have to prove the actus reas the act. You have to prove the mens rea of the state of mind and any other conditions, and you’ve got to prove the identity that it was this defendant that did it. Here I think that’s the issue. It’s clear that fraudulent records were created. The question is, was this defendant a part of that? Right?

Elie Honig:

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, I think that a lot of this case is really undisputed or unmeaningfully disputable, if I can make up a word on the fly, right? There’s no question Stormy Daniels got paid 130. There’s no question Donald Trump knew about that and blessed it. I don’t think there’s any meaningful question. There’s no question Michael Cohen’s reimbursed, and there’s no question that at least Michael Cohen and Allen Weisselberg falsified business records to say these are attorney retainers or attorney fees. The trick here is getting that knowledge of the falsification over to Donald Trump, and that’s why Michael Cohen… I think the main thing the prosecutors have been doing, Michael Cohen was always going to have to bridge a certain gap. And I think they’ve done a good job prosecutors of narrowing that gap to the smallest distance possible. You still need Michael Cohen, but he doesn’t have to leap over a 10-foot moat. He more like has to step over an 18-foot gap in the bridge.

Joyce Vance:

Yeah, I think that makes sense. So, given that, what strategy should prosecutors take in closing argument? I mean, should they be arguing, here’s why Michael Cohen is corroborated and you can believe him, or should they be arguing, you don’t have to believe Michael Cohen to convict?

Elie Honig:

So they can’t quite say the latter because that would just almost seem like a concession, right? But I think it’s going to be heavy on the first thing you said, which is the star of this case, the star witness is not Michael Cohen. It’s these documents. It’s these checks, invoices, handwritten notes, whatever. Now the guy who’s going to really bring those to light for you is Michael Cohen. But you and I have done this a million times. You don’t have to love Michael Cohen. Well, normally we would say, you don’t have to love the guy. You just have to believe him. I would even modify that further here. You don’t have to love Michael Cohen, you just have to let him walk you through the other documents, basically. So that’s how I would try to phrase it as minimizing the extent to which they have to take a leap of faith on Michael Cohen.

I don’t think you can rehabilitate Michael Cohen as a truth teller of some sort or a person with decent motives of some sort. I would try to get away from that whole morality tale, and I would just try to keep it as dry as possible. Now, I’ve said for a while, I don’t think the prosecutor’s office has done itself a service in terms of the bottom line prosecutorial ball by trying to spin this case as the 2016 election fraud case, I think they would be better served to stick to their actual indictment, which charges an accounting crime basically. But they’ve made that choice for certainly PR purposes and maybe for trial purposes. But I would just be like Kevin Bacon, his jury address, and a few good men were right. He says, those are the facts, and they’re undisputed. Something like that. Right?

Joyce Vance:

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. What advice would you give Todd Blanche presuming that Blanche is going to argue for the defense? What do you think that he tells the jury?

Elie Honig:

So I would try to make it all about Michael Cohen. Basically, my pitch would be you cannot convict unless you credit Michael Cohen. And you cannot credit Michael Cohen for, I won’t rehash all the things I said earlier in this podcast, but I would just say you cannot separate a man from his liberty based on the word of Michael Cohen. He has peripheral corroboration. I would never use the word corroboration as a defense lawyer, but I would say, yeah, they showed you documents and you heard from all these other witnesses. But the bottom line is you cannot put this crime on Donald Trump unless you credit Michael Cohen’s word to some extent, and you cannot do that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Joyce Vance:

So how much of an advantage is it to the prosecution that they get to go last?

Elie Honig:

We prosecutors are so spoiled aren’t we? We get to go first, we get to close last. It’s a little bit better for the defense than in this state court, right? Because you and I, Joyce, are used to that. We get to go… The way it works in federal court is prosecutor closes, defense closes, and then prosecutor rebuts. We get two closings really. In state court, it’s just defense goes first, prosecutor goes second. I would definitely prefer second. I always would prefer second. I would always prefer to be the last word. So it’s a substantial advantage, but it’s the same as in any other courtroom. But where are you in terms of your expectations? And again, what I would do as a juror is very different from my expectations as to what would happen. I still do expect a conviction, although I don’t personally think that they satisfy their verdict.

Joyce Vance:

I want to see the final version of the jury instructions the judge is going to give. Like you, I lean towards thinking that the jury will convict, but for slightly different reasons. I think that there’s enough corroboration of Michael Cohen that the jury will go ahead and say, yes, there’s enough. We just don’t see a reasonable doubt. Trump will offer some sorts of doubts, but they won’t be reasonable ones, and I think that’s where they’ll end up. But I do think that there’s a possibility that there will be one or more jurors who will hang.

Elie Honig:

Yeah. And by the way, and this is you’re previewing my note for this week very nicely.

Joyce Vance:

Oh, excellent.

Elie Honig:

Let me just say one other thing. I don’t think this is a situation where no juror can or should convict or no reasonable juror can or should convict. I think this is in that fairly broad range where reasonable jurors can come out on either side of this. So, in other words, this isn’t a case where if I was the judge, I would enter a judgment of acquittal and take it away from the jury. I personally, having seen this case, not firsthand, but having followed it basically word for word, I personally would not find the burden back. But I don’t think someone’s out of line or out of their mind if they find that. So I want to make that distinction.

Joyce Vance:

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I wrote a note, I guess it’s been a couple of weeks ago now, saying essentially that I believed in the jury system and I do. Put 12 New Yorkers, put 12 American citizens in a room any place, let them hear the evidence, they see the witnesses testify. They take in every minute of the proceedings. In a case like this, where all we can do as observers is read the dry transcript, I’m going to put my faith in the jury.

Elie Honig:

Yes, this has been a fair trial. And even though I think it absolutely matters as a practical matter who the jury pool is, as I said, this case was charged in the right place. And whether a person’s politically popular or not, I think it matters. But I don’t think it means that a trial is unfair in the constitutional sense or even the practical sense. And one thing that I am very pleased to see, just from my point of view as an institutionalist I guess, is this has been a clean and fair trial. The judge, by and large did a very good job. The lawyers did their jobs. They weren’t outrageous. They weren’t pulling stunts. This is more or less putting aside the fact that Donald Trump was sitting there, this is what trials look like and should look like. So I am willing to go on record now, and I’m sure you’ll join me, that whatever the verdict is, I accept it as legitimate, even if I personally disagree with the assessment that comes out, this has been a fair trial and the verdict will be legitimate.

Joyce Vance:

Totally agree with that. I think if you put 12 people in a room, they tend to hold each other accountable to the fairness standard. They won’t consider who Donald Trump is. They’ll look at the law that the judge tells them that they have to apply, and they’ll render a verdict based on how they saw the evidence. We may or may not like the outcome, but I have confidence that they’ll do the right thing.

Elie Honig:

Yep, agreed.

THE INTERVIEW

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Frank Bruni. Has victimhood become a currency? Is optimism a losing political message? These are some of the complex questions author Frank Bruni wrestles with in his new book, The Age of Grievance. Frank Bruni, welcome back to the show.

Frank Bruni:

Thanks so much for having me.

Preet Bharara:

Let me just ask first after I congratulate you on your new book, The Age of Grievance, how are you? How’s your health? How’s your eyesight?

Frank Bruni:

My eyesight is stable. Thank you for asking my health. I could stand to lose a few pounds. I should probably get a few more steps on Eva. Can we all? But no, I have no complaints. I’m a fortunate person.

Preet Bharara:

Obviously for folks who don’t remember, I’m asking you about those particular things because your last book talked about some of that and it was if very compelling conversation. So thank you for that.

Frank Bruni:

Thank you for that and for your concern. I really appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

The Age of Grievance, say a couple of things before we get to the substance of it. I know that there’s no subheading, there’s no subtitle, that’s unusual. Is there something going on there, Frank?

Frank Bruni:

No, it’s interesting you say that because I said to my editor, we talked about the book with that title from the very beginning. In fact, it was his title, his idea. And I said, “Do we have to worry about a subtitle?” And he said, “You know, I actually think The Age of Grievance says it all.” I don’t think it needs a lot of elaboration for people to understand what it’s referring to. And I agree with him. I think it encompasses everything right there.

Preet Bharara:

Many, many years ago, and I told this recently to one of my kids who’s in college, I read some study and I have no idea if it was correct or not, but it stuck with me that in an experiment in college, they had professors grade papers, and in one set of papers, it was just a regular title. And in another there was a title with a colon and a subtitle, subheading. And the second group of papers got better grades than the first group of papers. So throughout my college career, every single title of a paper I ever had contained a colon, is that silly?

Frank Bruni:

There is something about the colon that it does have this air of formality and air addition to it. So, yes, I still look at the book’s title and I feel like it’s somehow naked or it’s missing a crucial accessory like we need to put an Ascot on it or something.

Preet Bharara:

Now this is obviously an audio platform, so people can’t see the cover, but I’m looking at it as I’m speaking to you, and I guess I should have noticed this at outset, it says The Age of Grievance, and there’s I guess gasoline being dripped on a fire. Is that correct?

Frank Bruni:

Yeah, on the lit match, I think.

Preet Bharara:

Right. On the lit match.

Frank Bruni:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

And the lit match is red and white. Am I correctly seeing that the white part of the flame on the lit match is also a middle finger?

Frank Bruni:

You are correctly seeing that. And it’s very funny you went to that because when they first showed me the proposed cover, I looked at it and I thought, that’s very blunt. That’s very interesting. And I didn’t notice it at first because I think it is a little bit subtle, but when I did, well, I think it’s provocative. I also think it captures something essential. I mean, the way we deal with one another in our political engagement in public life and too much of our discourse, it is as if we are always giving our enemies the finger.

Preet Bharara:

It’s funny because I’ve been reading your book all weekend and anticipating this interview, and I just pulled it out to look at it for this interview, and literally five minutes ago I realized it was flipping the bird. So congratulations. Congratulations on the middle… Well done. Are we going to get your book banned now? Is your book now going to be inappropriate?

Frank Bruni:

I don’t think. Well, I mean, anything could be banned these days. But there’s one other interesting thing about the cover that I’m wondering if you noticed.

Preet Bharara:

No, on the side of is a italics?

Frank Bruni:

No, no, on the side they’ve carried that lit match-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, yeah.

Frank Bruni:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

There’s two middle fingers.

Frank Bruni:

No, no. It’s like what you strike on a classic box of matches. It’s like the strip that you strike to make the fire.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I did not notice that. I did not notice that. See, it’s a festival of subtlety. Of course listeners are like, I don’t know what the hell anyone’s talking about because this is an audio format. So I have so many questions, and I think there’s so many aspects of this proposition that you have about how we’re in the age of grievance. I guess let me start with the fact that it is true that grievance has been a part of life, a part of the workplace, a part of politics since forever, right? What’s different now?

Frank Bruni:

What’s different now, and yes, that’s exactly, I mean, we’re a nation born of grievance, right? Some of the most important, most urgent, most necessary social justice movements across the centuries were born of grievance.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s pause on that for a second. You have a line in here. You didn’t intend it to sound like Gordon Gekko from the Moving Wall Street, but you-

Frank Bruni:

Oh, I know which one you’re referring to. I did.

Preet Bharara:

Grievance is good.

Frank Bruni:

Yes, yes. There is an homage to Michael Douglas’s Oscar-winning performance in that line. You’re correct.

Preet Bharara:

So how is grievance good, and how is it different?

Frank Bruni:

Well, I mean it’s interesting. I mean, grievance was not a dirty word and still in some senses shouldn’t be. But if you go back, I mean the word grievances is in the first Amendment. It’s in other documents around that time, and it’s always introduced as the prompt, the pivot for necessary change. But if you look today, if you just started for the next week to take note of when you read the word grievance and something that’s published, when you hear it in a conversation, it more often now has a negative connotation. The context is usually pejorative, and that right there is the signal and the reflection of what’s changed. The intensity of our grievances has increased and they have become overwrought in circumstances where they needn’t be. We mingle absolutely necessary causes with absolutely unnecessary complaints. And so when I say the age of grievance, I’m referring to an era and a culture in which we are shouting at one another claiming that we have been wronged both when that makes sense and when that makes no sense whatsoever, and it’s in that jumble that I think important things get lost.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s a question of language. Grievance has a connotation of being pejorative as you’ve said, but I was just thinking as you were speaking, my entire profession, at least on litigation side, is entirely premised on the idea of grievance and redress for grievance. I mean, it’s the whole job of filing a suit against someone because you have a grievance. So on the good side, talk about what some of the good is and then we’ll get into some of the weirdness.

Frank Bruni:

I mean, the good and the weirdness are intertwined, so I can talk about both in the same breath. So I mean, we live in a country that still has a lot of racism in it, has a lot of sexism in it, et cetera. And the grievance that we need to eradicate racism as best we can, hopefully completely and ditto with sexism and ditto with homophobia and on and on, those are all examples of good grievances. But where grievance gets bad or where we get into trouble is when we take those lenses, those prisms, and we apply them to situations where they don’t belong.

An example that I use in the book, because I think it’s just a very clear one, when Brittney Griner was horrifically imprisoned in Russia and we needed to get her out and get her back to America, I actually saw on social media, but not even only on social media, but even in commentary on the left, I saw the claim being made that she was languishing and she was not getting the attention that she must, and there was not enough urgency in the Biden administration, et cetera, because she was Black, because she’s a woman and because she’s gay, right?

We knew more about Brittney Griner and we read more about her as a political prisoner than about any other political prisoner I can remember in recent years. And in fact, many of us only learned about Paul Whelan, who is still being held in Russia on ridiculous charges because he entered the conversation that we were having about Griner. And the fact that people who I sometimes think of, and I think in the book I label grievance entrepreneurs, the fact that they took her situation and said, okay, here’s another place where I can scream sexism, where I can scream homophobia, or where I can scream racism, that’s a real problem because it erodes your credibility on subjects that are very important. And it gives your opponents the people who disagree with you, a reason to tune out and say, well, this is just indiscriminate shouting that is divorced from the facts. So, that to me, is where we go from good grievance into counterproductive and not constructive grievance.

Preet Bharara:

The other category, and you put it very compellingly in the book about where grievance shows its face, you have a line in the book in which you write “It flares even where that makes the least sense. It burns at the very pinnacle of privilege.” So for time immemorial, people who were downtrodden were suffering or under the yoke of injustice in all sorts of ways. Racism, sexism, not having the right to vote, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know if grievance is the right word, but they had some reason to want justice for themselves because they were not as well off in society or in their community. Now you have grievance as you talk about in the book, at the highest levels of privilege, people who are billionaires have grievances, people who are at the height of power, including somebody who was the commander in chief of the country and may be again, where does that come from? People with the most power and the most success? Lodging claims of grievance.

Frank Bruni:

I mean, I think one of the things it comes from is we’re living at a moment in time when there’s a political and cultural currency to portraying yourself as a victim. The way you get people to relate to you and the way in which you carve out space to be heard in the public square is all too often by defining yourself in terms of how you’ve been wrong. There’s a strange power and currency in that. And I mentioned a couple of examples of this grievance burning at the pinnacles of privilege in the book. Will Smith, for all that was said and watched and talked about in terms of when he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. I didn’t hear many people home in on an aspect of the acceptance speech he made minutes later when he won the best actor Oscar for his performance, his terrific performance in King Richard.

He did not apologize at that moment. It was like 10 minutes later, 15 minutes later, he did not apologize for having just assaulted Chris Rock in front of millions of television viewers. He talked about how hard he has it, and there’s a line in his speech where he says, “Nobody understands. As a celebrity you have to take all of these people talking about you and you’re supposed to just bear up under it and soldier on.” And he’s asking for the audience’s pity and he’s pitting himself and he’s standing there with a gold Oscar statuette as one of the richest and most powerful actors and producers in Hollywood. But he understood something about the cultural moment, and he understood that if he could portray himself not as triumphant but as wronged, he might get a better reception at this moment in time and talk about grievance burning at the pinnacles of privilege.

I also mentioned in that same stretch of the book, a certain Supreme Court justice named Samuel Alito who has been in the news in recent days because there was a flag being flown upside down outside of his house. And he and other justices on the court, the kinds of public statements they make, the speeches they give, they’re often saying, woe is me, and these are people who occupy the most August positions in American society, and that’s a very strange reality that tells us something about our values and where perhaps we’ve gone astray.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s very weird, Frank, I got to say. Because I was reading your book, I guess I can understand how someone, some of the people you mentioned and others might want to portray themselves as victims, but why do the rest of us buy it or why does the fan base or the voting base of those people who cry grievance, buy it? I had always understood as an aesthetic psychologically in friendships in most social contexts that the person who was most annoying was the whiniest person in the group. If you complained particularly when you had it good, you would be ostracized, you would be mocked. People would make fun of you. So I don’t understand how the rest of us are falling for it.

Frank Bruni:

It’s a great question. I think that it is attractive in some cases to many of us because it collapses the distance between us and them. It gives us a off ramp from simply envying them and thinking that they have it all and we have very little. I think that-

Preet Bharara:

The grievance is relatable?

Frank Bruni:

Yeah, it is relatable.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Frank Bruni:

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tell you how terrible they’ve in fact had it, you’re no longer saying them as these royals who have this gilded life. You’re like, “Oh, okay.” Even they have their woes and even they have their complaints, and maybe I don’t have it quite as bad as I thought I did. Maybe that’s part of it.

Preet Bharara:

I was just thinking as you were speaking, by this picture that people love, it’s a picture of Ben Affleck looking very just weary and overwhelmed, seemingly dealing with his on again, off again romantic partner, Jennifer Lopez, which I think a lot of people have found to be the most relatable photograph they’ve ever seen.

Frank Bruni:

Yeah, it collapses the distance.

Preet Bharara:

I was thinking of it another way too, as you were talking, is part of it the American ideal of always wanting to be the underdog? Right? So in political races, if you’re the presidential candidate of your party, whether you’re the incumbent or not, I feel like there’s always a desire and a drive to portray yourself as the underdog because America loves the underdog. Is there anything to that?

Frank Bruni:

I think there’s something to that, but I think that also gets into just pure political tactics. You do not want your supporters for a moment to believe that you’ve got it in the bag and that they can rest easy. I mean, I wonder to this day, and I’m curious for your thoughts on this, I wonder to this day, how much Hillary Clinton was hurt in 2016 by the belief among most people I know that she had it in the bag. Were there people who did not turn out in that election because they thought there was no chance that Donald Trump was going to beat her?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, look, I think there probably was some complacency, and I worry about that again, even though it happened once before. Everyone I knew in politics and otherwise, and by the reporting including Hillary Clinton who you mentioned, but also Donald Trump didn’t think he was going to win. I believe it was reported that he didn’t have a speech prepared for victory. And as you write in your book, “Donald Trump was like every president before him, he personified key aspects of his era and served as a tuning fork for its temper.” And then you write in a great line, “He became a victor by playing the victim.” I guess it’s a version of a question I’ve already asked, how did people buy that?

Frank Bruni:

It is one of the greatest acts of political sorcery that I’ve seen in my lifetime because as your question reflects, Donald Trump has had a great deal of good fortune in his life, starting with a dad who was quite wealthy and got him started, and he’s someone who’s flying around the country in private planes and living a life trimmed in gold and saying, “Woe is me.” How he got away with it, I’m not really sure, but the fact that he did says so much and he basically said to his people in more words than he distilled it into later on, he said, “I am looked down on by the same people whom you believe look down on you.

I’m condescended to by the same people to by who you feel condescend to you. They feel about me the way they feel about you, and so here’s how you get back at them. You support me, you inflict me on them.” And he’s basically been saying that since 2015 when that first presidential campaign got off the ground, but it became so distilled and clear when I think about a year ago when he was kicking off this campaign, he used those four words that I think we will be hearing and remembering for a long time, which is, I am your retribution.

Donald Trump:

And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

Frank Bruni:

So he got away with it by basically saying, consider me a symbol of you and consider me an instrument of your revenge.

Preet Bharara:

I will be right back with Frank Bruni after this. Part of what’s going on here, also implicit in what you’ve just said and throughout the book, it’s not just I have grievance against the universe or bad fortune and God is punishing me, and I have just terrible luck. It’s grievance that comes at the hands of some other group that I need to scapegoat. Fair?

Frank Bruni:

Very fair, very fair. I think what’s going on is so many people define themselves politically and in other ways, not simply by how they’ve been wronged and their obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their determination to measure that precisely, but by who has wronged them and what payback they’re going to take. And it’s a very us versus them situation. It’s reflected in our polarization, in our partisanship, and there’s been a lot of scholarship on this, but it used to be, if you go back three, four decades, it used to be you disagreed with people politically, but you didn’t necessarily think they were evil. Now you see surveys where most Democrats see Republicans as morally repugnant, as active threats to the country, and most Republicans see Democrats that way. It’s a much starker and more charged situation than simply political disagreement.

Preet Bharara:

Is that a natural evolution or devolution when a country becomes prosperous or has this dynamic been egged on by opportunistic politicians who are capable of engaging in the sorcery that you described or something else?

Frank Bruni:

Both of the above, plus something I think more important than either one of those phenomena, and the more important thing is the change in media and specifically social media. We are living at a moment, and this is new in the last 20 years, and it’s really intense only in the last 10 years, we’re living at a time whereas never before you can choose the information you get. You can choose the version of the truth that you hear. You can choose your own reality. You turn on the TV and if you’ve got cable or whatever, the number of news purveyors and news isn’t even the right word for it, they are in the, not just scores, but hundreds. And you can have one that’s tailored to your liking. And then of course you go on social media and whom you follow, whom you share the algorithms kicking in, you end up being sorted into very, very narrow ideological enclaves and enclaves of sensibility.

It is fascinating when you go back and you look at the Dominion voting systems lawsuit against Fox News, which of course they had to settle for, what was it, $787.5 million. Why did they have to settle? Why did they get in so much trouble? Because the internal documents, the communications among Fox News hosts, among Fox News executives, showed that they knew they were putting lies on the air. They knew that this crap about rigged dirt or corrupted or manipulated voting counting machines, they knew that was total bunk. But what they were saying to each other is, if we don’t give our audience this bunk, they’re going to go somewhere else to get it. And the key takeaway there is these consumers are not interested in truth, they’re interested in exactly the version of events and reality that flatters their prejudices and keeps their anger alive. And the Fox News hosts and executives, they knew that, and that’s what led to that lawsuit and that whole problem.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Just going back to the theme of how things have changed, you have a great chapter title, the Lost Shimmer of the City on the Hill, in which you harken back to a bygone era, if I can use that phrase, where you write “American Dream, American exceptionalism, land of opportunity, endless frontier, manifest destiny.” Those were the pretty phrases that I grew up with. Words that appeared not only in political ads, but also in history lessons and elevated analyses of the American psyche. Is that gone? If a new candidate came along and talked about these things and talked about optimism and everything is going to be greater and America is wonderful and I have a lot to be thankful for and grateful for, is that a losing message now?

Frank Bruni:

It seems to be right now, but boy, would I love for someone to try that out and prove me wrong and maybe elevate us.

Preet Bharara:

Well, didn’t Obama do that? Or you’re saying that’s before the shift?

Frank Bruni:

I think Obama did do that. I mean, hope and change was that, but that was 2008, and I think-

Preet Bharara:

I was doing the math correct. I think that’s 81 years ago roughly.

Frank Bruni:

Feels that way, doesn’t it?

Preet Bharara:

Yes, it does.

Frank Bruni:

I mean, I’ll tell you a really good illustration of how much we’ve changed in terms of our optimism or lack thereof. And in terms of our receptiveness to that message, Gallup, several times a year, about three or four times a year for many decades now, has asked the question of survey respondents, are you generally satisfied with the way things are going in America? And up until 2004, there were many, many years, many times in a year when more than 50% of respondents said yes, they were generally satisfied. It was not at all unusual, that number to Crest 60% since 2004, they have never taken that survey and gotten 50% or more of Americans to say they’re generally satisfied with life in this country. And typically when they do this survey against several times a year, that number is below 40% or even 30%.

So for 20 years running, they have not had 50% or more of American respondents say, I’m generally satisfied with life in this country. That is a fundamental and profound change in the American psyche, and I think that is reflected in our politics and in this grievance culture, if you don’t believe that there’s a chance the future will be brighter than the past if you don’t believe that we can continue growing and achieving kinds of prosperity we didn’t before, you have a completely different relationship to the people around you. You see them as being in competition for limited bounty as opposed to being collaborators on a project of shared wealth. You become much more possessive of and petty about your slice of the pie because you don’t think the pie is expanding. And that’s an enormous part of what’s going on.

Preet Bharara:

There’s another way of saying that we’ve become or are becoming a nation of brats in some measure. I don’t want to offend the great brat population out there, but that’s what it’s sounding like. We have it good generally. There are lots of problems. We have it good by some measures, we’ve never had it better. No one’s going to believe that, and that’s a controversial statement, but I think you could prove that on a lot of measures and a lot of metrics, and we’ve never complained more.

Frank Bruni:

Well, and who agrees with you on that is former President Obama. It’s interesting, and I mentioned this speech in the book in the last year of his presidency, I think it was the last year or close to that, he went to Hanover, Germany. And this is a man at that point who’s no longer campaigning for reelection, who’s toward the end of his eight years, so feeling very reflective and soulful. And I think if you look at his remarks during that phase of his presidency, there was a introspection, and again, a soulfulness that was really pronounced, and Hanover Germany, he said, we forget this. We tend to look away from this. But if you were to choose any moment in history to be alive and any place in the world to be alive, you would choose now and you would choose the United States of America.

Now, again, he wasn’t selling anything at that moment. He was just telling it like it was, and you would not have known that to look at what was happening on the political scene, on the campaign trail. That was of course, as Trump and Hillary were facing off. And I do wonder, and you mentioned before, is this the inevitable trajectory of a prosperous country? I do wonder if part of what’s going on is having won some of the biggest battles, or at least having made progress on them, having achieved a fundamental baseline dependable level of prosperity. If we’ve become pettier and pettier, use the word brats, brattier, because we’re not at war, because we’re not in a famine and on and on, and maybe that makes us turn to stuff that is less urgent and to see and to exaggerate the stakes of it because some of the bigger things are not what we’re worried about.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, I guess the theory is lots of people have enunciated before is that the more you have, the more everyone has, the more you are slighted by smaller differences between you and your neighbors, right?

Frank Bruni:

Yeah, I think that’s right. But again, there still is this pessimism that we have to recognize. We have never been quite as optimistic a country as the mythology says. And the idea that Ronald Reagan’s brand of optimism was the most fundamentally and perpetually American thing. I mean, not exactly. Tocqueville wrote about what complainers we could be, how dissatisfied we could be. That said, again, if you look at the numbers there were for most of American life, if you asked Americans, do you expect your kids to have a better life than you have? The answer was yes. That was so central to the premise and the promise of this country. That’s not the answer you get today. And that really changes the psychology, the culture, and the interpersonal relations of Americans.

Preet Bharara:

How unique is this to America? I mean, you write in the book that Brexit was an act of grievance or carrying out of grievance. How much of this is an American problem versus a global problem?

Frank Bruni:

I think it’s an especially pronounced and interesting problem in America, but it is not just an American problem. You see it in a lot of western democracies. I mean, we saw an eerily exact replay of January 6th, 2021 in Brazil about a year later, we saw the same thing there. And one of the reasons you see it many places is the media has changed in the same ways I described earlier all throughout the world. Social media has performed its divisive role all around the world, et cetera. But I think in America, it’s particularly interesting when you have a country, America makes promises and makes a magnitude of promise to its citizens that is distinctive. And when you promise so much, when you say the sky is the limit, or when you have traditionally said that, that is fertile soil for disappointment. I mean, there’s a lot of scholarship. There’s been a lot of studies of people who are happy or unhappy.

It has less to do with the raw measure what they have in their lives than in how their lives are next to the expectations they had. And this is a country that encourages the grandest of expectations, the greatest of expectations. And it means when things fall short of that or when you feel you’re getting a raw deal, you may experience that in a much more acute and fury-making way than someone in another country does.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s very interesting because I’ve always understood an explanation for why, even though there’s lots of discussion about it, and it’s a huge problem and people do care about it, income inequality, that one reason there’s not a radical movement with respect to that is that we tell kids in this country, people tell their children, you can grow up to be president. You can grow up to be a billionaire yourself. And so large swaths of the population, rather than have antipathy towards the very rich, look to them and think, well, maybe I can do that because what I’ve been told, or maybe my kids can do that or my kids’ kids can do that. And I guess some people view that as very hopeful and what America is all about. And some people maybe view that as a way to keep people down and away from revolution. Does any of that make sense?

Frank Bruni:

Oh, it makes a lot of sense. And you saw this observed, I think correctly about Trump. And I worked for the times in Italy during one of the phases of Berlusconi’s government there, and you actually heard the same thing said about him. A lot of voters did not resent Trump, did not resent Berlusconi, because in their minds that’s who they might be someday or that’s who they wanted to be. So it’s exactly as you say, but there are things that have changed that I think make this more complicated and more fraught now. Just yesterday, I think I was reading this in Axios, I think, and I think it was the Jim Chain Equinox, but they now have, I think it’s them, they have a $40,000 longevity supplement you can pay to your annual membership that gets you all of these various services that supposedly will help you live longer.

I mentioned that because we have in our service economy right now, in America, a tiering, a really exacting tiering and all these sorts of microclimates of escalating privilege that I think take normal income inequality and turn it into something cartoonishly perverse, where we are constantly being made aware that we are living one or two or three or a hundred degrees of coddling below someone else and we can see where everyone falls because not only do we have this whole new exacting tiering of the service economy with all of these new levels of coddling, all of these new microclimates of privilege and exclusivity, but social media shows us the people inhabiting those microclimates. And so I think there are engines of envy in our culture right now that go well beyond just the raw facts of income inequality and make it a much more emotionally difficult situation than just looking at someone richer and saying, maybe I’ll be that person someday.

Preet Bharara:

So you make the case that the politics of grievance are practiced both on the left and the right, but you also say and argue that it’s more pronounced on the right. What’s your case for that?

Frank Bruni:

What I say is that I think it has right now it is more pronounced than has more consequential… There are greater consequence to it and greater threat. My case for it is first of all, the MAGA movement is so grievance fueled in such obvious ways, and it is a movement. It represents a great number of voters and it’s a almost coherent grievance structure beyond what exists on the left. In my view, that’s a subjective view because as I say in the book, and as you just noted, there is plenty of grievance on the left. I also say that I don’t see a perfect symmetry because we have had a organized political violence on the right that doesn’t have its equivalent match on the left. It was a right wing movement or whatever you want to call it, that led to the events and that were reflected in the events of January 6th, 2021.

It was from the right that a plot was hatched to kidnap and perhaps harm Gretchen Whitmer. It is on the right more than the left that you see pervasive and profound election denialism. There was an elaborate sustained attempt to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election to steal the presidency for Donald Trump. And that happened on the right and not the left. That said, as I go into in the book, this insistence on offense, this determination to look at events and to see a pattern in which you are being specifically and uniquely wronged and this desire to take revenge on political opponents that exists across the political and ideological spectrum.

Preet Bharara:

Here’s the example, it’s a better one than I’ll remember of a feature of Twitter that is somebody will say, I love dogs. Another person will reply, I guess you hate cats. Why do you hate cats?

Frank Bruni:

A, that sounds like satire and it’s not, but it’s a perfect example. Why do we do that? Why this itch to take offense? You mentioned kindly at the beginning of our conversation, my previous book about the stroke I had and lost eyesight. One of the prompts for me to look at and study and puzzle out and try to figure out how we get beyond this grievance culture was a reaction that I got to book. So I was writing about the steps I took, the process I went through to try to find a silver lining and what had happened to me to hone a resilience.

And I talked about the progress I made and I wrote about all that in the hopes of perhaps helping other people. And most of the reaction I got was, thank you, Frank. I found that helpful. I found that inspiring, whatever. But I got no small number of comments and emails from people saying, how dare you, how cruel you are by talking about how you pushed past this terrible news by talking about how you coped. You are making a mockery of those of us who have not found our way to coping who deal with much more serious mental health issues.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, I read that and my eyes popped out of my head. Could you give us a sense of how many people?

Frank Bruni:

Oh, I probably got that from a few dozen.

Preet Bharara:

A few dozen people?

Frank Bruni:

Yeah, I mean, but that means there were more behind them. I got that sometimes in questions when I did public events. I got it in emails, and again, not the majority reaction, but it said something to me. And listen, there’s a grain of truth in it. I want to be humble and truthful about this. I actually for a moment paused and thought, boy, I maybe should have written more carefully. I maybe should speak more carefully because I do not mean to say to the world that if you fall into the pit of self-pity and if you can’t find a positive spin you are wanting and you have a lesser character than I have. I wasn’t saying that. And if that possibly came across, perhaps that is very much on me and my lack of skill or my lack of sensitivity. But I also think it illustrated this itch to take offense, this determination to feel wronged.

Preet Bharara:

Well, in your particular anecdote, if I recall correctly, you used the word depression or depressed and people took that as a term of art, which is why you say the point that the one person made to you was almost a great point, but you didn’t mean to use the word in its official meaning.

Frank Bruni:

Yes, that’s exactly right. This was an email I got after I’d done an interview on fresh air with Terry Gross and I had said, and we were speaking, it was a long interview, we were speaking somewhat casually when one says a lot of words in an interview like the one you and I are doing, not all of them are precisely sculptured because you’re doing them on the fly. And I had said to Terry Gross something like this, probably close to verbatim, I realized that if I fell into the hole of depression, the longer I stayed there, the harder it would be to climb out. And the person who wrote to me said, “Mr. Bruni one does not fall into depression any more than one falls into a stroke of the optic nerve,” which is what I had. And that’s true. But as I say in this book, The Age of Grievance, I was clearly speaking of depression with a lowercase D, not an uppercase D.

I fully understand that depression with a capital D is a malady, it’s not something that you fall into. It is something that people don’t have a lot of control over. But again, you have to decide, he had to decide and other people had to decide to hear what I said in a very certain and negative light. And the question I would ask about that is the question I would ask about the political engagement of so many of us. Why do we decide to approach things in such a negative fashion? Why do we want to be angry and offended in circumstances that don’t necessarily call for that? And what does that do to us and where does that get us?

Preet Bharara:

Can I make a radical suggestion, and this is going to not sound warm and fuzzy, but are people who take offense in that way, should they just be ignored and go through life and not worry about them and not be friends with them and marginalize them? Do you know what I mean?

Frank Bruni:

I do. I don’t want to say it that way because I think often there are people who are hurting, and so I don’t want to marginalize them. I don’t want to ignore them. I mean, there’s a part of me that wants to understand where it’s coming from.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Well, that’s a much more generous, I mean, the reason I’m saying that is I’m thinking of a different context. When I was a US attorney and I’ve said a million times, I adore, respect, and revere that office and adore and respect all the people who work there. But early on in my tenure, and I’ve been thinking about this since you’ve been talking about this subject, I sent an email around to the entire office praising what I thought was a heroic work on the part of a subset of prosecutors and investigators in the office. And it was particularly related to the investigation of the Times Square bombing and the capture of Faisal Shahzad who tried to killed thousands of Americans in Times Square. And he was on the loose for 53 hours and a lot of people did really amazing work and kept the country safe.

And it was very inspiring to me. And I wrote an email to the entire office a week later saying a week ago, these people did this great work. And most people thought that was wonderful and thought it was terrific. But there was some muttering that I heard from people of good faith who said some people didn’t like that email. I said, well, what is not to like about the heaping of deserved praise on one’s colleagues? And the suggestion was there were other people who also did heroic work, and I had not singled them out for praise in the last week. And they were upset about that. And I was very hurt by that. And I thought about it and I wanted to be a good leader.

And part of the conclusion I came to was, I think if there were people who thought that, and over the course of time, I hope that I praised and called out other people at other times over the course of a long tenure in that office, you can’t praise everyone every day all the time, otherwise it loses all its meaning. But ultimately, my conclusion is the people who were aggrieved, who had grievance about my praise for people who were highly, highly deserving, a praise and a public call out of their conduct and their service, I didn’t have a lot of respect for that. And I thought, I can’t be guided by and hampered by the thought that there are people like that.

Frank Bruni:

Well, first off, I would implore you not to cut the story you just told because I think… No, but I mean that in a heartfelt way because it is so emblematic. It is very important.

Preet Bharara:

And by the way, I tell the story in response to your point because none of the people I’m talking about were in harm’s way or in bad shape. They’re all highly credentialed, hugely successful public servants.

Frank Bruni:

No, I hear you. It’s not an outlier story, which is why you must keep it in. I mean, it goes hand in glove with the fact that, and I mentioned this in the book, that many schools have done away with valedictorians because they don’t want other students to feel bad. But what about that person that worked really hard for that distinction? Can we no longer celebrate or praise someone without it being seen as an inherent insult to the people we’re not praising? I mean, that’s nuts. I mean, there were schools I think that were actually faced lawsuits. There were schools this has been written about that failed to inform, I’m talking about high schools here, they failed to inform national merit scholars that they had been given that designation, that distinction, which is something that the school sometimes learns about and then has to inform the students so the student can then put that on his or their college application, et cetera.

There were schools that didn’t inform them because they didn’t want other children to feel bad. And thus you had these achievers who didn’t even have validation of their achievement that they could share with the world or colleges because that might hurt other people. I mean, these are things that are the absolute analogs to the story you just told, and it’s just just not right. It is a level of hypersensitivity that becomes its own insensitivity. And what also comes to mind in terms of this, let’s determine to be offended by things, these harmful language glossaries that some organizations have put out, that some colleges have put out in which they list these words that no one would ever think to be offended by.

And they tell you, you should be offended by them and avoid them. And one of the things that always catches my eye, and I use the word I deliberately, is a lot of these harmful, hurtful, no-fly zone language glossaries tell you you should never use the term blind faith or the term blind study because that is going to be offensive to people with vision impairment. Had George, we,

Preet Bharara:

George Packer on to talk about this a little

Frank Bruni:

Bit? Yeah, yeah. He’s written brilliantly on this. I have a vision impairment. I live with a 20% chance that I’ll go blind. And I am never offended pret when I see the phrase blind faith for blind study because I’m aware of something called metaphor. Let us all be reasonable adults about this stuff. Please, please, please.

Preet Bharara:

You say a thing that I totally understand and agree with, but I have a counterpoint. And you say that you have come to the conclusion that the antidote to grievance is humility. And so I want to ask you what you mean by that and why you think that is so, but B, to offer the idea that maybe the antidote or why you don’t think the antidote to grievance is confidence and hopefulness.

Frank Bruni:

I think confidence and hopefulness are probably very important. And of course for the purposes of writing, for the purposes of a conceit, I chose to end the book by focusing on one virtue, one value above others that I’d like us to cultivate. And I call it the antidote, but I don’t mean it’s the only antidote. I think there are all sorts of-

Preet Bharara:

Well, humility is very important for a lot of different reasons, but explain what you mean by that.

Frank Bruni:

Well, what I mean by humility, let’s go back to January 6th, 2021. When you look at what happened that day, the people who stormed the Capitol, they were frenzied, they were savage, they were violent, but I think above all, they were unhumble because they either believed that it was impossible that a majority of Americans that actually preferred a candidate other than the candidate they preferred, they were so unhumble as to believe that their perspective could not be the minority one, or they believed they were so right, and other Americans so wrong that even if theirs was the minority conclusion, it deserved to triumph over the other one. Those are fundamentally unhumble judgments and impulses.

By humility, I mean, understanding that the world does not always conform to your specifications, your desires to your liking. By humility, I mean understanding that your viewpoint is one viewpoint among many, and that others have as much right to be expressed as yours does, et cetera. And I think that when you’re aggrieved, when you say, I have been wrong, I deserve this x, y, and z, you are putting yourself before everyone else. You are elevating your individual desires too far above the collective good. And I think those are profoundly and fundamentally unhumble things.

Preet Bharara:

No, that all makes sense. It is weird to me on the right to see this phenomenon because when I was growing up, I always thought the right and Republican stood for the proposition of personal responsibility. You don’t blame everyone else for your state and your station, but you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, which I thought was a central theme of Republican and conservative thought no more.

Frank Bruni:

Well, it’s interesting. Charlie Sykes talked about this with me for the book. If you go back to the late ’80s and the early ’90s, if you go back to Alan Bloom and the Closing of the American Mind, if you go back to Robert Bork talking about radical egalitarianism in the culture, which essentially was wokeness with a lot more syllables, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Back then the right was looking at the complaints of the left, and they were basically saying, you all have no notion of personal responsibility. You all are insistent on seeing yourself as victims. You’re trying to use isms and a victim mentality to evade any accountability or personal responsibility.

But of course, now fast-forward, and if you listen to what many people in the MAGA movement say, what many of the people who voted for Donald Trump say, it’s basically the system is corrupt. We are being discriminated against. We are victims. Now they’ve taken what they used to mock and look down on, and it’s become their own ethos and their own credo. And that’s what I mean by now. This is across the whole spectrum. And that’s why our grievance culture today is different from grievance in Epic’s past. It is pan-partisan. It is super-partisan it everywhere.

Preet Bharara:

Pan-partisan did all this start when we started giving everyone trophies when they were kids.

Frank Bruni:

I think that’s a little too simplified. But I do think, and Jonathan Haidt is someone who has written so brilliantly about this. I do think there has been a child-rearing ethos and a coddling that does say that you should be protected from disappointment in the world. That does say that you should be on a glide path and adult should make sure you’re there. And that’s not, I mean, that would be lovely if life worked out that way, but that’s not the real world. And I think we have sometimes done a very poor job of preparing younger generations for the disappointments of the real world.

Preet Bharara:

I want to end in the last few minutes asking you how you think this is going to play out your theory of grievance, which I think makes a lot of sense. How is it going to play out in the presidential race? How will Trump further exploit this dynamic and this phenomenon? And is Joe Biden going to get in on this action?

Frank Bruni:

Well, so we know what Donald Trump is going to do. He’s doing it now, he’s going to continue doing it. Where grievance drives his campaign and in a way of immeasurable horsepower, is he’s basically saying, and he said not basically saying, he has said, we’re not going to have a country left if you elect Joe Biden. If you give Democrats unchallenged power, that’s the end of America.

Preet Bharara:

Well, in fairness, I say a version of that in the other direction.

Frank Bruni:

Well, I was about to go there, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I put more credence on what the other side says because I do think Donald Trump is a wannabe, would be authoritarian, and I do worry about the survival of American democracy if Trump is elected and gets his way, and there isn’t pushback and guard rails and all that thing. But I think the Biden campaign, and you see this in their back and forth and their wavering, for lack of a better word, they have a fundamental decision to make, which is what proportion of their message is going to be elect me because Donald Trump is the end of days.

That’s what Trump is saying, and what proportion of their message is going to be Joe Biden understands leadership and is a leader and is not going to stoop to that level and is not going to simply play that game. He’s not a leader who is going to win and prevail by inciting and amplifying and intensifying anger only. He’s someone who’s going to sound idealistic notes and appeal to our idealism as well. And one of the big questions I have about the campaign is what ratios of those things are we going to see from Joe Biden? Because we know there’s not going to be any such ratio with Donald Trump, it’s just going to be all rage.

Preet Bharara:

Frank Bruni, thanks for your insight. Congratulations on your book. Everyone, The Age of Grievance by Frank Bruni. My conversation with Frank Bruni continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, we discussed the prospective Biden-Trump debate and what President Biden must do to win it.

Frank Bruni:

He needs to do it because there are questions that voters have about him that will only be answered by his performance in those debates.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Frank Bruni. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads or can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24-Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE by the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper, the technical director who is David Tatasciore, the deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai. The audio producer is Nat Weiner, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.