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      Could Boris Johnson Make a Comeback as U.K. Prime Minister?

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      A comeback by Mr. Johnson is viewed as a very real possibility, delighting some Conservative Party lawmakers and repelling others.LONDON — It seemed at once incredible and inevitable.No sooner had Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain announced her sudden resignation on Thursday afternoon than a familiar name surfaced as a candidate to succeed her: Boris Johnson, the prime minister she replaced a mere 45 days ago.Mr. Johnson, who is vacationing in the Caribbean, has said nothing publicly about a bid for his old job. But the prospect of Boris redux has riveted Conservative Party lawmakers and cabinet ministers — delighting some, repelling others, and dominating the conversation in a way that Mr. Johnson has for his entire political career.Nor is the idea of his return merely notional: Among those who are keeping tallies of the voting intentions of lawmakers, including some London news organizations, Mr. Johnson is only slightly behind his chief rival, Rishi Sunak. On Friday morning, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is currently the business secretary and served under Mr. Johnson, became the first cabinet minister to endorse his former boss.But the prospect of Mr. Johnson back in 10 Downing Street appalls many Conservatives, who cite the serial scandals that brought him down in July and argue that voters would never forgive the party for rehabilitating him. Embracing such a polarizing figure, they say, would splinter the Tory ranks, perhaps irrevocably.“Only a nation which was gripped by pessimistic despair and no longer believed that there could be a serious response to its unfolding tragedies would want to take refuge in the leadership of a clown,” Rory Stewart, who ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Johnson in 2019, wrote on Friday on Twitter.Rishi Sunak on Friday in London. Mr. Sunak lost to Liz Truss in the contest to replace Boris Johnson, but now he may get another shot at the job.Beresford Hodge/Press Association, via Associated PressAnd yet, as Mr. Johnson’s supporters never tire of pointing out, he delivered a landslide Conservative victory in the general election of 2019. After the calamitous tenure of Ms. Truss, in which she tried to engineer a radical economic agenda with the support of only a third of the Tories in Parliament, some say that mandate gives him — and him alone — the capacity to restore the party’s depleted electoral fortunes.More on the Situation in BritainA Rapid Downfall: Liz Truss is about to become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. How did she get there?Lifelong Allowance: The departing prime minister is eligible for a taxpayer-funded annual payout for the rest of her life. Some say she shouldn’t be allowed to receive it.Staging a Comeback?: When Boris Johnson left his role as prime minister in September, he hinted he might return. He is now being mentioned as a successor to Ms. Truss.“One person was elected by the British public with a manifesto and a mandate until January ‘25,” Nadine Dorries, a former cabinet minister who is one of Mr. Johnson’s most outspoken backers, wrote on Thursday on Twitter.Under election rules laid out by the party on Thursday, candidates need 100 nominations from lawmakers to appear on the ballot next week. According to the informal tallies, neither Mr. Johnson nor Mr. Sunak is close yet, though in one spreadsheet, which includes unnamed supporters, Mr. Johnson is at 52.Setting a threshold of 100 nominations was intended to winnow the field to a handful of candidates and keep the race brief, thus avoiding the drawn-out, divisive campaign that was won by Ms. Truss. Given that there are only 357 Conservative lawmakers, there can be, at most, three names.There is a lively debate in political circles about whether Mr. Johnson can clear that hurdle, but with several more lawmakers coming out in his favor on Friday, it no longer seems implausible. Asked who was likely to be the next prime minister, a member of the government texted in reply, “Boris?”Andrew Gimson, who wrote a biography of Mr. Johnson, said, “I think he’s got a very good chance of coming back. He’s got real momentum.” For a demoralized party trailing in the polls, Mr. Gimson said, “It would be a much better story if Boris came back. There would be a sense of incredulity — the sheer spectacle of it.”If Mr. Johnson were to emerge from the ballot as one of two surviving candidates, the odds of his winning could rise considerably. The choice would then go to the party’s 160,000 or so members, among whom Mr. Johnson remains enduringly popular. Mr. Sunak, whose resignation as chancellor of the Exchequer in July helped set in motion Mr. Johnson’s downfall, is viewed with suspicion by many party members, even if he has solid support among the lawmakers.Parliament in London. Mr. Johnson is under investigation by a parliamentary committee over whether he misled the House of Commons about parties held in Downing Street that broke pandemic rules.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThat is why some political analysts expect the party’s elders to lean on the candidate with fewer votes to withdraw before that stage.There are other significant hurdles to Mr. Johnson’s return: He is under investigation by a parliamentary committee over whether he misled the House of Commons about parties held in Downing Street that broke pandemic rules. It could recommend Mr. Johnson’s expulsion or suspension from Parliament.For all of his charisma, it is also not clear that Mr. Johnson retains the same power to turn out voters that he did three years ago. The scandals that brought him down eroded his popularity with many Britons, and it was under his watch that the polls began to tilt heavily toward the opposition Labour Party.Finally, there is the question of whether Mr. Johnson is actually ready to return. In his farewell speech to Parliament, he signed off with, “Hasta la vista, baby,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line from the movie “Terminator 2.” He later compared himself to Cincinnatus, a fifth-century Roman politician who saved the state from an invasion, retired to his farm, then subsequently returned to Rome as leader.Still, as a highly visible former prime minister, Mr. Johnson is in line to take in millions of dollars on the after-dinner speaking circuit. He is expected to write another newspaper column, a gig that could bring him several hundred thousand pounds a year.Mr. Johnson could also receive a lucrative advance for his memoirs, though that is complicated by the fact that he already owes the Hachette Book Group a biography of Shakespeare. Publishing executives said that if he sold the memoir to Hachette, it could allow him to set aside the Shakespeare book.With two young children with his wife, Carrie, and several other children by his former wife, Marina, people who know Mr. Johnson say he is keen to make big money — something he cannot do as a serving prime minister, even if the job comes with housing and a comfortable salary of £164,080, or about $182,400. More

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      Ben Sasse Is Nothing if Not Thoughtful. Right?

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      Among the hundreds of books I read during my years as a critic for The Washington Post, only three proved so paralyzingly pointless that, upon reaching the last page, I found I had nothing to say. One was an unnecessary memoir, another a dispiriting manifesto. The third book was “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal” by Senator Ben Sasse.It’s not that “Them” is a terrible book; I have read and reviewed worse. Bad books can be valuable, even delightful, to read and critique, as long as their shortcomings lead to worthwhile questions or send readers down unexpected paths. But “Them,” which came out in 2018, offers few such consolations. Sasse, the junior senator from Nebraska and now the sole finalist to become president of the University of Florida, delivered a generic, forgettable work: packed with big-think buzzwords rehashing old arguments, clichés and metaphors passing for analysis, thought-leader-ese masquerading as vision. It was not compelling enough to dislike in public. At least not then.I was reminded of “Them” when I read the Republican senator’s brief statement on his potential move to Gainesville — a possibility that has elicited campus protests and varying reactions from state and national leaders. Sasse wrote that the University of Florida is “the most interesting university in America right now,” and that he would be delighted to help it become the nation’s “most dynamic, bold, future-oriented university.” Interesting. Dynamic. Bold. The future! It sounded a lot like “Them.” Nothing the book or statement says seems really wrong, but only because they both say so little.Dirk Shadd/Tampa Bay Times, via ZUMA PressThe central message of “Them” is that community life in the United States is in decline because of various cultural, technological and political forces, and that the isolation and anger replacing them threaten American democracy. This phenomenon has been documented and discussed at length for decades, yet the senator approaches it with a big-reveal vibe. “Something is really wrong here,” he writes. “Something deeper is going on.” Americans have a “nagging sense that something bigger is wrong.” The mayhem of the 2016 presidential election was “only the consequence of deeper problems.”The problems may be deep, but Sasse clings to the surface of things. “America seems to be tearing apart at the seams,” he writes, so much so that “there are, today, effectively, two different Americas.” (Somewhere, John Edwards is tearing out his $400 hair.) The term “disruption” recurs throughout the book, a reliable sign that an author was vaguely tech-savvy a decade ago. Facebook and Twitter are frowned upon, naturally, while italics are strategically deployed throughout the text to give concepts a weighty air. “Our world is nudging us toward rootlessness, when only a recovery of rootedness can heal us,” he writes, and the word “connections” is occasionally rendered as “connections,” which I gather makes it more significant. Sasse has a weakness for the melodramatic single-sentence paragraph. “We’re hyperconnected, and we’re disconnected.” Or: “We live — and work — in unusual times.” And, in case you hadn’t heard: “America is an idea.”“Them” relies on exactly the roster of social scientists and assorted thinkers you’d expect to see in a work of this kind. Kudos to the senator for reading Robert Putnam, Bill Bishop and many other luminaries of the America-is-coming-apart genre, but their presence only underscores the book’s secondhand feel. (Chapter one relies so heavily on Putnam that the senator could have skipped it and just encouraged readers to pick up “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids.”) Sasse summons the ghosts of the American Revolution, but in the most Founders 101 way possible. Ben Franklin makes an appearance to say, “A republic, if you can keep it,” whereas James Madison shows up to remind us that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” I learned more from “Hamilton,” and I never even saw it with the original cast.I may have expected too much from this book; my impressions are likely colored by my disappointment. In addition to his time in the Senate, Sasse is a scholar (with a Ph.D. in history) and an educator (the former president of Midland University in Nebraska), and with his early willingness to question Donald Trump’s candidacy he seemed a promising and thoughtful new voice on the shrinking center-right. Published just weeks before the 2018 midterms — when Trump was promising to make the elections all about migrant caravans and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation — “Them” was an opportunity for this lawmaker-teacher-historian to offer a meaningful alternative to the politics he decried.Instead, “Them” is on the dulling edge of political thought, a book that can safely be omitted from the syllabus of any University of Florida seminar unless Sasse himself teaches it. “Genuine wisdom will require not just acknowledging the disruption of our ways of making a living, but also our way of thinking about ourselves, our identities and our places in the world,” Sasse offers in a typically vapid sentence. He cautions us not to tackle America’s troubles with a “formula” or a “silver bullet” or a “one-size-fits-all solution,” an impressive trifecta of triteness.Sasse, who was against Trump before he supported him before he was against him once again, is disappointed by both Fox News and MSNBC. (Same.) At the end of the book, after lamenting how a politics-obsessed country has split into us-versus-them factions, he urges Americans to resist partisan tribalism, de-emphasize politics and spend more time with their families. That’s fine, except the inverse of your problem is not its solution. It’s just another way of phrasing the same problem.Books, like politicians, can impress on their own merits, or they can just sound good compared to the competition. No doubt, Sasse is more intellectually stimulating than the election-denying conspiracists who have overrun his Republican Party. But shouldn’t the bar remain higher than that?Unfortunately, “Them” is that familar type of book, one that serves only to affirm the author’s rep as a Washington intellectual or — what journalists call people with “Master of the Senate” in their Skype backgrounds — a “student of history.” Sasse, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Cold War-era debates over religion in American public life, requires no such validation. But he is committed to the bit.“Them” followed the senator’s 2017 volume, “The Vanishing American Adult,” which extols the value of hard work, self-reliance and adversity for young people — listen up here, Gators — lest their passivity torpedo the nation’s freedoms and entrepreneurialism. The links between greater individualism (book one) and greater community (book two) as the cures to America’s ills seem intriguing enough to explore, but the author takes a pass. Maybe he’ll write another book on campus.In hindsight, “Them” hinted at Sasse’s discontent with the world’s greatest nondeliberative body. “It was not Washington, D.C., that gave America its vitality,” he writes, one of many times he dings the capital and his role in it. “Deep, enduring change does not come through legislation or elections,” Sasse writes, but from “the tight bonds that give our lives meaning, happiness and hope.”In a Q. and A. at the University of Florida on Monday, Sasse said that he looks forward to “the opportunity to step back from politics.” That opportunity seems unlikely to materialize should he win the top job. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, whose office issued a statement calling Sasse a “deep thinker” and a “good candidate” for university president, has made a culture war out of the state’s education system at multiple levels, and Sasse must now take sides in those battles.Former President Trump reacted to the news in his usual measured tones, predicting that the university would “soon regret” hiring “Liddle’ Ben Sasse,” calling him a “lightweight” and a “weak and ineffective RINO.” And the students who protested during Sasse’s visit denounced the opacity of the university’s selection process and the senator’s past positions on same-sex marriage. (Sasse has stated that though he disagrees with the protesters, he “intellectually and constitutionally” welcomes them.)Based on the senator’s Twitter statement, “Them”-style ideas may be on their way to Gainesville. “The University of Florida is uniquely positioned to lead this country through an era of disruption,” Sasse wrote. (Disruption: check.) “Technology is changing everything about where, when, why, what and how Americans work.” (Technology: check.) “Washington partisanship isn’t going to solve these work force challenges” (Washington, bad: check). And Sasse is “delighted to be in conversation with the leadership of this special community about how we might together build a vision.”If having conversations about maybe building visions is the job on offer here, Sasse is the right guy for it, and “Them” the right blueprint.I guess I could have reviewed the book after all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘Confidence Man,’ Maggie Haberman’s Book on Trump: Review

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      CONFIDENCE MAN: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, by Maggie HabermanDonald Trump is too much with us. We are stalled, rubbernecking the endless carnage of his road rage. There have been far too many books about him, with far too many “revelations.” After a while, the revelations melt into an indistinguishable muck; his boorish narcissism, a bludgeon. And so it’s hard to assess the news value of “Confidence Man,” Maggie Haberman’s much anticipated biography of the president she followed more assiduously than any other journalist. No doubt, there are revelations aplenty here. But this is a book more notable for the quality of its observations about Trump’s character than for its newsbreaks. It will be a primary source about the most vexing president in American history for years to come.Haberman is famously formidable. She is a native New Yorker, a competitive advantage given her subject. She has worked for the trifecta of local dailies — The Post, The Daily News and, most notably, The Times (plus a stint at Politico). She was awarded a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for her work with The Times. The only other journalist who can match her access to a recent president is Lou Cannon, who spent much of a lifetime covering Ronald Reagan, a far less enervating task than Haberman’s. Trump has called her “a crooked H[illary] flunky” and “an unprofessional hack” while giving her endless interviews, including three for this book. She is an exemplar of her craft, relentless, judicious and even-keeled, giving credit, where due, to her colleagues and fellow biographers, while admitting and adjusting her occasional mistakes.Haberman’s thesis is that you can’t really understand Donald Trump unless you’re familiar with the steamy, histrionic folkways of New York’s political and construction tribes. She devotes nearly half her book to his life before the presidency. “The dynamics that defined New York City in the 1980s stayed with Trump for decades,” Haberman writes. “He often seemed frozen in time there.”Haberman’s Trump is very much a child of Queens, although of an exotic sort — a white Protestant. I, too, am a child of Queens, and Trump’s use of phrases like “the Blacks” and “the gays” brings back memories of my grandmother denigrating “the Irish” who lived next door. Outer-borough bigotry was endemic, but it tended to be casual, not profound. Ethnic street fights were followed by interethnic marriages; they still are. And always, for all of us — and even for a rich kid like Trump — there was the allure of Manhattan, a place far more glamorous than our humble turf. If we could make it there…“I can invite anyone for dinner,” Trump said after his inauguration in 2017. But he remained an outer-borough brat, intimidated by elites. As president, he threw tantrums when he thought people were lecturing or talking down to him. In an infamous meeting with the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon, “Trump knew that he was being told something he did not fully comprehend,” Haberman writes, “and instead of acknowledging that, he shouted down the teachers.”Trump at his Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, in 1990.Angel Franco/The New York TimesTrump was schooled by media-obsessed bullies and assorted wiseguys like Roy Cohn, Rudy Giuliani, George Steinbrenner, various Cuomos and the irrepressible mayor Ed Koch. Cohn taught this lesson: “I bring out the worst in my enemies. That’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” Other lessons were learned the hard way: When Trump tried to threaten Richard Ravitch of New York’s Urban Development Corporation, telling him, “If you don’t give me the tax abatement, I’m gonna have you fired,” Ravitch ordered him to get “out of here before I count to three or I’m going to have you arrested.” And it’s not hard to discern Ed Koch’s influence on the future president’s later Twitter style: When Trump asked for another tax break, Koch replied, “Piggy, piggy, piggy.” Haberman notes, deftly, the similarities between Trump and the Rev. Al Sharpton, which went well beyond tonsorial excess. Indeed, Sharpton expressed admiration for Trump’s manner: “If Trump had been born Black, he would have been [the boxing promoter] Don King. … Because both of them — everything was transactional.” Trump learned from Sharpton, who backed the Black teenager Tawana Brawley even when evidence mounted that her story of a racist attack was a fabrication.In a more profound sense, Trump was a creature of his times. He traversed the commercial arc of the past 40 years — moving from (failed) business mogul to celebrity to “brand,” just as American free enterprise moved from the production of steel, to casino games on Wall Street, to celebrity “influencers” on reality TV. He wasn’t a very good businessman, but he played one on “The Apprentice,” which was how most Americans met him. An Iowa man explained his reason for supporting Trump: “I watched him run his business.” In fact, there is a perverse truth to that. Trump found his true calling when he started selling his name to foreigners who wanted to put it on buildings. He peddled products like Trump wine and Trump Steaks, and scams like Trump University, to a gullible public seeking gilt by association. “His personal brand mattered more than what was on his balance sheet,” Haberman writes. It sure beat working.The fantasy of decisiveness — his big line was “You’re fired!” — added to his political appeal, but that was phony, too. Haberman reports numerous occasions when Trump lacked the stomach to sack staffers face to face. At one point, he tried to lure Vice President Mike Pence’s top aide, Nick Ayres, to become his own chief of staff — but only if Ayres agreed to tell the incumbent, Gen. John Kelly, that Trump wanted him gone. Ayres refused to play. So Trump resorted to an old New York modus, backstabbing and rumor-mongering and humiliation, to get Kelly to resign. Trump “enjoyed the chaos of [his staff] fighting with one another,” Haberman writes.There were two other significant New York lessons. One was that the press — especially the tabloids and TV news, and, later, social media — could be overwhelmed by brazen performance art. Trump managed to gin his divorce from his first wife, Ivana, into a war between competing gossip columnists, Liz Smith and Cindy Adams. He played the tabloids like a pipe organ: The divorce was on the front page of The Daily News for 12 straight days, “a car wreck where the victims repeatedly tried to hurt themselves more instead of accepting medical help,” Haberman writes. Trump eventually came to understand that he could use his own raw, outer-borough resentments to feed the public’s latent anger against the politically correct snootiness of the establishment media. When he cried, “Fake news,” they believed him. During the 2016 presidential campaign, I continually interviewed people who loved Trump because “he sounds like us.” And somehow, in a miracle of salesmanship, the way Trump’s supporters saw him became identical with the way he hoped to be seen.He was amazed by this. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they’d still support him, he said. But the relationship was symbiotic and subtle. One of the many services Haberman performs in “Confidence Man” is to set out the process by which Trump came to his outrageous positions — like the ugly notion that Barack Obama wasn’t born here, and the insinuation that most immigrants coming across the southern border were violent criminals. He didn’t just blurt out these thoughts; he was nudged into them by the reactions of his most extreme supporters. Even his desire to build a wall at the Mexican border came gradually: Only when he began to see it as a crowd-pleasing construction project — like his triumphant restoration of New York’s Wollman Rink — did the idea achieve pride of place in his campaign pitch. It becomes clear, as Haberman builds her case, that Trump wasn’t just a grotesque, a lucky nincompoop, but a genius — though not a particularly “stable” one — when it came to reading the terrain of the digital-age media.The final New York lesson was, perhaps, the most significant: He learned how to stay one step ahead of the sheriff. This was, and remains, his greatest skill. There were numerous ways to do it. The most obvious was political influence. Trump made generous campaign donations to Giuliani and the old-money Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau. They, in turn, never got around to investigating him despite a strong whiff of ordure emanating from his dealings with Mafia-controlled construction unions and casino thugs. (Later, Haberman writes, Trump accepted a $20 million Super PAC contribution from the billionaire Sheldon Adelson to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.)Trump understood that the best defense was, at times, to be offensive. He threatened to out the publisher Malcolm Forbes, a closeted gay man, if he ran a negative story. He threatened lawsuits left and right. He lost occasionally: His corporations went bankrupt; he settled a fraud case with the Securities and Exchange Commission; he paid a variety of paltry fines. But he always managed to muddy the waters when he lost, claiming victory or threatening still more lawsuits.Most important, he developed a very precise sense of what the traffic would bear. He knew he could stiff his lawyers and the small businesspeople who were his subcontractors. “Do you know how much publicity these people get for having me as a client?” And, for all the sloppiness in the rest of his life, he deployed words with a litigator’s precision — even if it sounded the opposite. Just think of his “perfect” phone call with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was, in fact, a master class in veiled intimidation: “The United States has been very, very good to Ukraine.” Just think of his instructions to the Proud Boys, a mixed “Stand back and stand by.” Just think of his speech on Jan. 6: He never said directly, “Go down to the Capitol and try to overthrow the government.” He always gave himself room to duck and cover.We can hope that Trump is an aberration, not an avatar, but that would probably be delusional. He has created a brutish new standard for American politics, and put a terrible dent in our democracy. Maggie Haberman has been there for it all. The story she tells is unbearably painful because Trump’s success is a reflection of our national failure to take ourselves seriously. We will be very lucky, indeed, if he doesn’t prove our downfall.CONFIDENCE MAN: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America | By Maggie Haberman | Illustrated | 597 pp. | Penguin Press | $32Joe Klein is the author of seven books, including “Primary Colors,” “Woody Guthrie: A Life” and “Charlie Mike.” More

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      How ‘Lord of the Rings’ Inspires Italy’s Giorgia Meloni

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      Giorgia Meloni, the nationalist politician who is the front-runner to become prime minister, sees “The Lord of the Rings” as not just a series of novels, but also a sacred text.ROME — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is likely to be the next prime minister of Italy, used to dress up as a hobbit.As a youth activist in the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, she and her fellowship of militants, with nicknames like Frodo and Hobbit, revered “The Lord of the Rings” and other works by the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien. They visited schools in character. They gathered at the “sounding of the horn of Boromir” for cultural chats. She attended “Hobbit Camp” and sang along with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring.All of that might seem some youthful infatuation with a work usually associated with fantasy-fiction and big-budget epics rather than political militancy. But in Italy, “The Lord of the Rings” has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, “The Lord of the Rings” was also a sacred text. “I don’t consider ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fantasy,” she said.Tolkien’s agrarian universe, full of virtuous good guys defending their idyllic, wooded kingdoms from hordes of dark and violent orcs, has for decades prompted scholarly, and convention center, debate over the author’s racial and ideological biases, his view of modernity and globalization. More recently, his works have also provided a fertile shire for nationalists who see themselves in his heroic archetypes.But in Italy, the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the maps of Mordor have informed generations of post-Fascist youths, including Ms. Meloni, who, the latest polls strongly suggest, will emerge from the election on Sunday as Italy’s first female prime minister — and the first descended from post-Fascist roots.Ms. Meloni, who leads the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, and who has called for a naval blockade against illegal migrants and warns her supporters about the dark, conspiratorial forces of internationalist bankers, first read Tolkien, a conservative who once called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus,” at age 11. She became a fantasy fanatic.In her early 20s, she surfaced in chat rooms under the nickname Khy-ri, calling herself the “little dragon of the Italian undernet.” More recently, she named her political conference Atreju, an Italian rendering of the name of the hero of “The NeverEnding Story,” best known as a 1980s cult film featuring a flying animatronic character that appeared to be half dragon, half Labrador retriever.As a government minister in 2008, Ms. Meloni posed for a magazine profile next to a statue of the wizard Gandalf. In 2019, she honored a manga character, Captain Harlock, the “space pirate,” as a “symbol of a generation that challenged the apathy and indifference of people.” Last month, she lamented that her busy campaign schedule had kept her from mainlining Amazon’s new “Rings of Power” series.But Ms. Meloni’s otherworldly interests have as much to do with politics as personal taste.“The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right,” said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy’s culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a “vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world.”A supporter of Ms. Meloni wearing a hobbit T-shirt at one of her rallies this month in Cagliari. Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThe modern world did not work out so well for the die-hard Fascists who stayed loyal to Hitler and Mussolini after the official Italian government switched sides to join the Allies during World War II.After the war, many of those Fascists flocked to the Italian Social Movement, but the party’s efforts to reintegrate into Italy’s institutions eventually hit a wall. Its younger members, feeling excluded from civil society, seized on an Italian edition of “The Lord of the Rings,” prefaced by Elémire Zolla, a philosopher who was a point of reference on the hard right and who argued that Tolkien was “talking about everything we confront every day.”That resonated with a small group of the party’s Youth Front, already bristling at the cultural dominance of the left. They saw themselves, as one of their leaders, Generoso Simeone, put it, as “inhabitants of the mythical Middle-earth, also struggling with dragons, orcs, and other creatures.” Seeking a more palatable alternative to quoting Mussolini’s speeches and spray-painting Swastikas, which, Mr. Croppi pointed out, “was easy to reproduce on walls,” in 1977, they created the first Camp Hobbit festival.“The idea to call it Camp Hobbit came from a real strategy,” said Mr. Croppi, one of the founders. The thinking was to move beyond the old symbols and to capitalize on the party’s isolation, smallness and victimization by violent leftist enemies to make their hero “not the warrior Aragorn, but the little hobbit — we wanted to get out of this militarist, heroic idea.”The party’s old guard was perplexed. But, with the support of hard-liners, Camp Hobbit festivals emerged as formative touchstones for the young activists. Celtic cross flags that meshed perfectly with the Tolkien aesthetic waved. The band Fellowship of the Ring played songs about European identity, including what became the anthem of the party’s Youth Front, “Tomorrow Belongs to Us.”The song echoed a ballad “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” sung by a member of the Hitler Youth in a chilling scene in the movie “Cabaret.” Mr. Croppi acknowledged that the camps had their fair share of Fascist salutes, but argued they were “ironic.”When Ms. Meloni entered the picture as a teenage activist in the Youth Front in Rome in the 1990s, the far right — especially in the capital — was still in a trenchlike mentality, struggling to break with the previous generation.Francesco Lollobrigida, a leader in Ms. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy (as well as her brother-in-law), said that he and others had a desire starting in the 1980s “to break with the patterns of a party that still had inside of it people who had been in the Social Republic, who had done fascism.”Ms. Meloni, seated across from him, agreed.“There was a desire to get out of that,” she said.Ms. Meloni attended a new iteration of Camp Hobbit in 1993, which she called a “political laboratory” and where she sang along with Fellowship of the Ring and discussed culture and books.“We read everything,” Ms. Meloni said.The bookstore of choice for the hard right in Rome was Europa, just outside the Vatican walls. On a recent visit, it displayed titles like “Mussolini Boys” and “The Occult Origins of Nazism.” A picture of Hitler stood watch above the register next to a cup of pens.Europa has a section dedicated to Julius Evola, an esoteric, deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated Italian philosopher who became a favorite of Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists and bourgeoisie-loathing nostalgists. Evola argued that progress and equality were poisonous illusions.“A bit boring,” Mr. Lollobrigida said of Evola’s work.Ms. Meloni said that instead a more influential writer at the time was the more mainstream Ernst Jünger, a German former soldier, who sought to make sense of war but also glorified combat.But for Ms. Meloni, all of those took a back shelf to “The Lord of the Rings.” She said she had learned from dwarves and elves and hobbits the “value of specificity” with “each indispensable for the fact of being particular.” She extrapolated that as a lesson about protecting Europe’s sovereign nations and unique identities.In the 1990s, after becoming the leader of the youth wing of the National Alliance, the party that succeeded the Italian Social Movement, Ms. Meloni started her own political festival, which she called “similar” to Camp Hobbit. But this time, she named it Atreju. “It was the symbol of a boy in battle against nihilism, against the Nothing that advances,” she said.She joked that Italians could hardly pronounce Atreju, but she said that the annual conventions, including the first one, in 1998, which was about the dangers of globalization, had reach.“We wanted to say that globalization, you have to govern it,” she said. “If you look around, we weren’t wrong, were we?” she added.At the Atreju convention in 2018, the guest of honor, Stephen K. Bannon, walked by patriotic posters of “Italy’s heroes” and desks selling Evola-themed T-shirts and works by Evola. Ms. Meloni’s supporters have interpreted her calls to defend Italy from mass migration — and the replacement of native Italians by invaders — as a battle cry to protect Middle-earth. This month, at a rally in Sardinia, Davide Anedda, 21, the leader of the local youth wing of the Brothers of Italy, wore a T-shirt reading “Hobbit.”“If you’re not from our world, it’s very hard to understand,” Mr. Anedda said, explaining that Hobbit was a post-Fascist far-right rock band and that Tolkien had written “a fundamental part of our history.”And for Italy, maybe a part of its future.Ms. Meloni, who seems poised to grab her own brass ring after decades in the political trenches, said that her understanding of power and its ability to corrupt and isolate a person was “closely tied to Tolkien’s reading.”“I consider power very dangerous,” she said. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.” More

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      Your Thursday Briefing: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping Likely to Meet

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      Plus India’s growing economy and China’s “zero-Covid” trap.“I hope to see Chairman Xi Jinping soon,” Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said.Pool photo by Greg BakerPutin and Xi are expected to meetVladimir Putin, Russia’s leader, said yesterday that he expected to meet next week with Xi Jinping, his counterpart in China.Putin will attend a gathering of Asian leaders in Uzbekistan on Sept. 15 and 16. Chinese officials did not immediately confirm that Xi would attend; he has not left China since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. But Russia’s ambassador to China described the session as the leaders’ “first full-fledged summit during the pandemic.”An in-person conversation could help the Kremlin expand its strengthening partnership with China. Russia reoriented its economy toward Asia after European and American countries severed economic ties with Moscow after its invasion of Ukraine.Context: Putin said he also hoped to have a joint meeting with the president of Mongolia, where Russia is considering building a natural gas pipeline that would reach China.Diplomacy: Beijing has not endorsed the invasion, but it has echoed Kremlin talking points in describing the U.S. as the “main instigator” of the conflict and provided Russia with much-needed economic support. Russia has offered geopolitical backing to China, including in the escalating tensions around Taiwan.Other updates:In a speech, Putin appeared to brush off the toll of the war, which U.S. officials estimate has killed or wounded 80,000 Russian soldiers. “We have not lost anything and will not lose anything,” he said.European countries are growing more confident that they can move away from Russia’s fossil fuels. Yesterday, the European Commission said it would ask countries to approve a price cap on Russian gas.Despite the war, daily life in Moscow seems almost unchanged.India’s economy must support 1.4 billion people.Atul Loke for The New York TimesIndia’s resilient economyIndia’s government expects the economy to grow 7 percent or more this year. That’s more than double the projections for global growth, which has slowed sharply as major economies stall.The rapid expansion partly reflects the depths to which the economy had fallen during the most devastating shocks of the pandemic, which forced an exodus of laborers from cities. It also reflects the nature of India’s economy, which is partially insulated from global trends because it is driven more by local demand than exports.Many also credit a suite of government policies — including increased public investment, relief to debtors and credit guarantees — which have helped keep inflation relatively in check and cushion the public from economic shocks. And discounted oil from Russia, against the wishes of Western allies, have helped buffer rising energy prices.The State of the WarZaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid continuing shelling and fears of a looming nuclear catastrophe, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.An Expanding Military: Though President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, he seems reluctant to declare a draft. Here is why.Russia’s Military Supplies: According to newly declassified American intelligence, Russia is buying millions of artillery shells and rockets from North Korea — a sign that global sanctions have severely restricted its supply chains and forced Moscow to turn to pariah states.Far From the War: Though much of Russia’s effort on the battlefield has not gone as Mr. Putin had planned, at home he has mostly succeeded in shielding Russians from the hardships of war — no draft, no mass funerals, no feelings of loss or conflict.Data: India’s economy is now the fifth largest economy in the world. It surpassed Britain, its former colonizer.Challenges: India’s economy remains unable to create enough jobs for the waves of educated young people who enter the labor force each year, and its growth remains top-heavy, analysts said. Growth is projected to slow next year to about 6 percent.In Chengdu, roads were nearly empty as a lockdown continued.CNS, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesChina’s “zero Covid” bindAlmost every country in the world has moved past Covid restrictions. But tens of millions of people in China are again under some form of lockdown as the country continues its total commitment to fighting the coronavirus.Economic and social costs are mounting. Youth unemployment reached a record 20 percent in August, according to official statistics. But Beijing has backed itself into a corner.It has repeatedly prioritized politics over science: China has been relying only on homegrown vaccines, which are less effective than foreign ones. And buoyed by its early success at containment, Beijing was slow to encourage shots, leaving a disproportionate number of older people unvaccinated.Since few Chinese people have natural immunity, the risks of loosening controls may be even higher. “That sort of makes the zero-Covid policy self-sustaining,” a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations said.Politics: Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, has tied support for the “zero Covid” policy to support for the Communist Party, ahead of a meeting in October where he is all but assured to extend his rule.THE LATEST NEWSNatural Disasters in AsiaXi Jinping, China’s leader, personally ordered that the government will “spare no effort to rescue” people.Ye Xiaolong/Xinhua, via Associated PressThe death toll from the earthquake in southwestern China has risen to 74, The Associated Press reports. People in Chengdu, which is under lockdown, were prevented from leaving their homes even as their buildings shook.At least 10 people died after Typhoon Hinnamnor hit South Korea, BBC reports.Flooding in Pakistan damaged Mohenjo-daro, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is at least 4,500 years old, The South China Morning Post reports. Reuters reports that Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister, said some areas look “like a sea.”Other Asia and Pacific NewsFive speech therapists in Hong Kong were found guilty of sedition, Reuters reports. Authorities said they planned to publish anti-government children’s books.At least 32 people died in a fire in a karaoke parlor in Vietnam, BBC reports.Archaeologists found a 31,000-year-old skeleton in Borneo, which appeared to have the earliest known evidence of surgery, The Guardian reports.The Japanese yen continues to slide, Bloomberg reports. It is on track for its worst year on record.Around the World“It is great to be back,” Barack Obama said at the ceremony.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe White House unveiled the long-delayed official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama.Liz Truss, Britain’s new prime minister, is assembling a racially diverse but ideologically uniform cabinet. Most are conservatives loyal to her.France expelled a Moroccan imam accused of hate speech after a legal fight and debate over civil liberties.What Else Is Happening“I feel like I’ve let so many people down,” Nick Kyrgios said. Julian Finney/Getty ImagesNick Kyrgios, the temperamental Australian, lost at the U.S. Open after beating Daniil Medvedev, the top seed.Apple unveiled its new iPhone and expanded its line of smartwatches.Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, will lead the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.A Morning ReadPresident Xi Jinping, in his trademark blue wind jacket with oversize trousers, has not been seen as a fashion influencer. Until now.Li Xueren/Xinhua, via Associated PressYoung men in China are donning an understated, middle-aged “office and bureau style”: Oversized trousers, dull colors, maybe a small briefcase.Some trend followers may be poking fun at China’s conformity. But others are earnest: They say that the unabashedly conservative look suggests a stable career path and a respectable lifestyle — sort of a Communist Party version of preppy.Lives lived: Dr. Ronald Glasser, a U.S. Army physician, wrote the acclaimed book “365 Days” about wounded soldiers. He died last month at 83.ARTS AND IDEASBooker finalistsSix novels have been named finalists for this year’s Booker Prize. Several of them use humor to address painful chapters of history: In “Glory,” the Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo writes about the fall of an African dictator from the perspective of talking animals. Percival Everett’s story of Black detectives, “The Trees,” lampoons the inescapable nature of American racism.The authors come from four continents and have a wide range of styles — from quiet, introspective fiction to fantasy. “The prize is a moment for everyone to pause and to marvel at what English as a language can actually do,” Neil MacGregor, the chair of this year’s judges, said.Read more about the finalists.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookDavid Malosh for The New York TimesThis baek kimchi jjigae, or white kimchi stew, is deeply savory with a gingery bite.What to Listen toTake five minutes to experience Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz.What to Read“Strangers to Ourselves,” by the New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv, is an intimate and revelatory account of mental illness.Now Time to PlayPlay today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Dead Sea and Caspian Sea, despite their names (five letters).Here are today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. The Times is launching a new team focused on data analysis of U.S. elections.The latest episode of “The Daily” is on the nuclear plant standoff in Ukraine.You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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      Republicans Seek Path for Constitutional Convention

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      A new book by a former Democratic senator warns of the risks of allowing states to call for a convention. Some in the G.O.P. see it as the only way to rein in the federal government.WASHINGTON — Representative Jodey Arrington, a conservative Texas Republican, believes it is well past time for something the nation has not experienced for more than two centuries: a debate over rewriting the Constitution.“I think the states are due a convention,” said Mr. Arrington, who in July introduced legislation to direct the archivist of the United States to tally applications for a convention from state legislatures and compel Congress to schedule a gathering when enough states have petitioned for one. “It is time to rally the states and rein in Washington responsibly.”To Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator from Wisconsin and president of the American Constitution Society, a liberal judicial group, that is a terrible idea. Mr. Feingold sees the prospect of a constitutional convention as an exceptionally dangerous threat from the right and suggests it is closer to reality than most people realize as Republicans push to retake control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.“We are very concerned that the Congress, if it becomes Republican, will call a convention,” said Mr. Feingold, the co-author of a new book warning of the risks of a convention called “The Constitution in Jeopardy.”“This could gut our Constitution,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview. “There needs to be real concern and attention about what they might do. We are putting out the alert.”While the rise of election deniers, new voting restrictions and other electoral maneuvering get most of the attention, Mr. Feingold rates the prospect of a second constitutional convention as just as grave a threat to democratic governance.“If you think this is democracy’s moment of truth, this is one of those things,” he said.Elements on the right have for years been waging a quiet but concerted campaign to convene a gathering to consider changes to the Constitution. They hope to take advantage of a never-used aspect of Article V, which says in part that Congress, “on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments.”Throughout the nation’s history, 27 changes have been made to the Constitution by another grindingly arduous route, with amendments originating in Congress subject to ratification by the states.With sharp partisanship making that path near impossible, backers of the convention idea now hope to harness the power of Republican-controlled state legislatures to petition Congress and force a convention they see as a way to strip away power from Washington and impose new fiscal restraints, at a minimum.“We need to channel the energy to restore and reclaim this country’s traditional values and founding principles of limited government closest to the people and individual freedom and responsibility,” Rick Santorum, the former Republican senator from Pennsylvania who has become a convention champion, told a conservative conference this spring in the state.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsAn Upset in Alaska: Mary Peltola, a Democrat, beat Sarah Palin in a special House election, adding to a series of recent wins for the party. Ms. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is one of the latest examples.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are still favored in the fall House races, but former President Donald J. Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress party insiders.Digital Pivot: At least 10 G.O.P. candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to minimize their ties to Mr. Trump or to adjust their uncompromising stances on abortion.Mr. Santorum was pushing for Pennsylvania to become the 20th state to formally call for a convention in recent years, out of the 34 states required. But it is not clear exactly how many states have weighed in, since not all have adopted the same language and some petitions were submitted decades or longer ago and may even have been rescinded.Mr. Arrington believes that when pending petitions are fully tallied, the 34-state goal might already have been exceeded. His legislation would require the archivist to “authenticate, count and publish” applications by the states, forcing Congress to act.“The problem is that they haven’t had a ministerial, clerical mechanism for the archivist to keep a count and report to Congress,” Mr. Arrington said. “I do believe we have crossed that threshold, and it is not congressional discretion — it is a constitutional mandate — that Congress should pick a date and a place for the convention.” More

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      Book Review: “The Unfolding,” by A.M. Homes

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      “The Unfolding” takes readers inside the homes and meeting rooms of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with big plans for change.THE UNFOLDING, by A.M. HomesWe are living in fractious times. Two decades into the new century, our nation is bitterly divided and our political institutions have never seemed more fragile. The genesis of these fissures in the American body politic is the central concern of “The Unfolding,” a sharply observed, wickedly funny political satire by the reliably brilliant A.M. Homes.The novel opens on election night, 2008. Candidate John McCain has just conceded to Barack Obama, and not everyone is celebrating. In a Phoenix hotel bar, our protagonist — a 60-something business tycoon referred to only as the Big Guy — is drowning his sorrows and contemplating next steps. “Something big,” he tells a stranger he meets in the bar. “A forced correction.” He scribbles notes on a napkin: “A patriot’s plan to preserve and protect.”The Big Guy is an old-school Republican — in his own words, “the last of an era.” His conservatism is sentimental, backward-looking, patriotic to its core. Fantastically rich, he bounces between Palm Springs and his ranch in Wyoming, an affable fellow who adores his teenage daughter and is largely faithful to Charlotte, his clever, acerbic and extravagantly alcoholic wife. For the Big Guy, McCain’s defeat sparks an existential crisis. “I can’t live like this,” he tells Charlotte. “I can’t spend the next 30 years watching it all come undone.” The “it” in question is an idealized version of the American past. Though the phrase is never uttered, it’s clear that the Big Guy hopes to Make American Great Again.Homes is a gifted satirist, a keen observer of bourgeois manners and mores. Here, she nails the psychic particularities of the politically conservative American male: the glorification of American military conquests, the quasi-religious reverence for the Founding Fathers. (“How much do you love George Washington?” the Big Guy’s daughter teases him.) Hoping to school her in his ideals, “he doesn’t talk about himself or his childhood. He talks about historical figures, battles, wars, treaties and the three branches of government.”In one of the novel’s most indelible scenes, the Big Guy indulges in his favorite pastime — staging miniature battle re-enactments on his basement pool table, with toy soldiers and orange Jell-O powder standing in for Agent Orange. “This is his idea of a good time, re-enactments, skirmishes,” Homes writes. “His men are the highest quality, tin, lead, mixed metal.”As he plays, the Big Guy ruminates on military strategy and ethics: “Today he is using rainbow herbicides, orange and strawberry mixed together, to defoliate the trees. People were allergic to it. Vietnamese babies were born deformed. Soldiers claimed it gave them everything from acne to diabetes to heart disease. Maybe the stuff wasn’t perfect or wasn’t handled properly, but people have to quit complaining; they can’t be expecting everyone to take care of them. This is war.”While the Big Guy plays with his Army men and ponders the future of the nation, his family is quietly coming apart. His daughter goes AWOL from boarding school and begins to question his conservative values. After finding Charlotte drunk and nearly drowned in the family pool, he packs her off to the Betty Ford Center. (Gerry and Betty were family friends.) Thus unencumbered, he is free to devote all his energies to saving America from ruin.He assembles a quorum of consiglieri reminiscent of the Eisenhower Ten, the group of civilians secretly tapped by the president to run the government in case of national emergency. Ike’s picks were titans of corporate America, captains of industry. The Big Guy chooses billionaires, a rogue general, a speechwriter and a tax attorney. The group’s first meeting is “like a eulogy for an America that perhaps never was. The air is awash with the unsmoked scent of cigars chewed on, gone wet — damp with the drool of men still dreaming.”To fans of the overheated telenovela that is American politics, “The Unfolding” is studded with Easter eggs, miniature romans à clef: a defeated John McCain thanking his supporters on election night, Condoleeza Rice eating Thanksgiving dinner, George W. Bush cleaning out his desk in the Oval and gifting the Big Guy’s daughter several boxes of commemorative White House M&M’s.Fittingly, the novel ends on Inauguration Day. At a restaurant in Great Falls, Virginia, the Big Guy’s cronies plot ways to foment revolution, swapping dire predictions of the chaos to come. “A slow-moving wave, a coup of sorts that will sweep across the country largely unnoticed until the American people have been decimated economically, intellectually and spiritually,” says one of his co-conspirators. (Which one is hard to discern and doesn’t really matter; like characters in a David Mamet play, they all speak in the same voice.) “People will be ordered to stay home, not to congregate. It will be difficult to reach consensus about anything; no one will know what is fact and what is fiction. Between the plague and the toxic waste and the decentralization of the government, America will be a dead zone.”The Big Guy finds these predictions appalling. “We’re not here to self-destruct,” he protests. “We are here to protect and preserve.”“Sometimes you have to rebreak a bone to set it right,” his henchman counters. “We are breaking the back of America to set it straight.”In “The Unfolding,” Homes puts her finger on the fault line, giving voice to the nebulous fears and fantasies of the old Republican plutocracy. At the root of it all, the novel suggests, is race. With characteristic aplomb, the Big Guy sums up his current existential crisis: “My wife is a drunk, my kid is running off into the woods and the people elected an African as president.”His racism is presented as fact but never explored — a missed opportunity and ultimately, the novel’s greatest failing. From the outset, Homes walks a fine line between realism and caricature. By choosing not to examine her protagonist’s racism, she denies us full access to his psyche. This lack of particularity has a flattening effect: the Big Guy is racist not because of his own specific background and experience and psychological idiosyncrasies, but because he’s the kind of person who would be racist. Instead of a deeply imagined, fully human character, rife with complexities and contradictions, The Big Guy is reduced to a type.Novel-writing is a slow business. Producing a good one — or even a bad one — takes such an ungodly long time that any relevance to the current moment is largely a matter of luck. And indeed, “The Unfolding” — Homes’s first novel in 10 years — reads like a story conceived in another era. After all the nation has lived through in the Trump years, the 2008 election seems very far away.The publisher’s marketing copy attempts to address this, calling the book “prescient.” It’s a puzzling claim — “The Unfolding” was written long after its characters’ predictions had already come to pass — that ultimately does the book a disservice. Homes isn’t trying to predict the future. Her intentions are forensic. Obama vs. McCain may seem like a lifetime ago, but this witty, perceptive novel underscores its continuing relevance. Like an insurance investigator reconstructing an accident, Homes is interrogating the recent past. In “The Unfolding,” she connects the dots for us, tracing the tortuous path that got us where we are.Jennifer Haigh’s most recent novel, “Mercy Street,” was published in February.THE UNFOLDING, by A.M. Homes | 416 pp. | Viking | $28 More

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      Did Biden Just School the Republicans or His Own Party?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Depending on whom you ask, Joe Biden’s decision to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans is either the Democrats’ political masterstroke or a major political gift to Republicans. What’s your take?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, allow me to take the middle road. Gee, I really do enjoy saying that. Makes me feel so … judicious.Politically, I think it’s more a winner than not. Tens of millions of people who have college debt in their family are going to be grateful; almost everybody else has other things to focus on. I doubt anybody who started last week liking Joe Biden’s agenda is suddenly going to turn on the Democrats.Bret: I wonder. This just seems to me like yet another case of Democrats getting on the wrong side of working-class America. Most Americans don’t have a bachelor’s degree, sometimes because they couldn’t afford it. Most Americans who did go to college either have paid their loans off or are paying them off. Now they have been turned into chumps for living within their means — while paying, through their taxes, for those who didn’t.Expect Republicans to run on this in the fall the way Democrats are running on abortion rights. What do you think of the decision on the merits?Gail: Policywise, I just wish it had been tied to some serious reforms of the current system that helped create all that debt in the first place.Bret: Agree. One-time student loan forgiveness isn’t going to get educational costs under control. If anything, it will create a moral hazard in which people take out student loans they may not be able to afford in the expectation of future loan forgiveness. What’s your reform proposal?Gail: First and foremost, a deep dive into for-profit schools. Many of them are total scams, and even the ones that aren’t often charge more for programs people can get elsewhere.Bret: I’d add that there are plenty of nonprofit schools also charging way too much for dubious degrees.Gail: After that, a serious look at overall price tags. The fact that loans are so easy to get has encouraged even very fine schools to charge too-high tuition in order to get money for programs that feed the ego of the administration more than the quality of the education.And then … well, hey. Your turn.Bret: It wouldn’t hurt, either, if colleges and universities started cutting down sharply on the army of administrators they’ve hired in recent years, who contribute a lot to fiscal and bureaucratic bloat and therefore to overall costs.Gail: Watch out, administrators — if Bret and I are in accord, you’ve probably got a problem.Bret: Longer term, we should help steer teenagers away from the idea that four-year college is their one and only ticket to prosperity, status and success. We should shift our funding toward community colleges, vocational schools and a wide range of adult-education programs. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of expanding opportunities for shorter enlistment times for young people who want to join any branch of the armed forces. It could help fund their future education, and it would make them more disciplined students when they do.Gail: While we’re being hard-nosed about what we want students to get out of college, I feel obliged to point out that some of the less practical aspects of higher education can be terrific experiences. I went to graduate school and got a master’s degree in government, which I don’t think has ever once convinced a potential employer I was a superior candidate. But I had a great time, met some fascinating people, including my future husband, and learned a lot.I paid for it through on-campus jobs, some of which you could argue amounted to a kind of public financing. Not saying this should be a universal goal. But when I’m cheerleading for the most practical possible approach to higher education, I feel obliged to toss it in.Bret: True and fair. Liberal-arts education is great when students are engaged and teaching quality is high. Wish that were more often the case.On another subject, Gail, any takeaways from the release of the redacted affidavit on the Mar-a-Lago search?Gail: Have to admit I was disappointed by all those redactions — I was hoping for something that looked a little larger. More dramatic. More specific. More … something. How about you?Bret: Here’s my hunch: Donald Trump has only a vague idea of what’s in all of these documents. The notion that he read through boxes and boxes containing hundreds of documents with classification markings and chose to take these particular items strikes me as … unlikely.Gail: Yeah, I hear he’s currently way too engrossed in rereading the collected works of Tolstoy.Bret: Right. He’s so upset by Anna Karenina’s suicide that he hasn’t been able to focus on anything.What is very much like Trump is that, as soon as the administration sought to recover the boxes, he saw an opportunity to set up a test of strength against Biden — one that would stoke the paranoia of his supporters, rally wavering Republicans to his side and set up the Justice Department to fall on its face barring some spectacular disclosure.So my bottom line is that the Justice Department had better come up with something very damning, not just a charge relating to mishandling classified documents. If it doesn’t, it will be the fourth or fifth time in six years that the F.B.I. has meddled in politics, only to cause irreparable damage to its own reputation.Gail: Congratulations, you’ve flung me into depression. I do agree with you that the story on Trump’s end is less likely a sinister plot than messy grabbiness, perhaps along with a reasonable paranoia that, given the number of things he’s done wrong, there’d be evidence of something bad somewhere.Bret: I’ve always maintained that with Trump, there are no deep, dark secrets: His absolute awfulness always stares you squarely in the face, like a baboon’s backside.Gail: Short term, this saga is just giving ammunition to the right. But I can’t envision a whole lot of people switching their allegiance to Trump because of it.Bret: Not among people who never voted for him. What worries me for now is that he’ll recapture wavering Republicans who were nearly done with him.Gail: Republicans who race to the polls because they’re outraged by the F.B.I.’s Mar-a-Lago adventure are going to be a fraction of the number of folks who’ll want to register their very strong feelings on behalf of abortion rights.Bret: We’ll see.Gail: But let me poke you on another federal agency that conservatives tend to find … problematic. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes about $80 billion to update the I.R.S. I think it’s a great idea, given its current pathetic state. Overworked agents sitting around stapling papers together aren’t going to be able to win a lot of battles with high-end accountants and lawyers protecting their rich clients from an audit.But as I’m sure you know, a lot of Republicans are howling about what the dreaded Ted Cruz calls a “shadow army” of I.R.S. agents. What’s your take?Bret: I recently read that the I.R.S. answers just 10 percent of calls. So if the money goes to making the agency more responsive to distressed taxpayers, I’m fine with it. My worry is that the agency will initiate lots of audits against people who don’t have the benefit of fancy accountants and lawyers and who are at the mercy of an agency that has almost limitless power and not much accountability.Gail, we’re getting to the end of summer, and some of our readers may be looking for a final book recommendation before Labor Day. I know you’re working on a memoir, but are there any books you’d suggest?Gail: The last time we talked books I said I was enjoying the novel “A Gentleman in Moscow.”Now you’re giving me a chance to share a letter I got from a reader, John Burgess, saying he’d put in a request for it at his local library, He continued: “The day I picked it up, my son tested positive for Covid. Now I am sequestered in my house (my son lives with me), reading about a Russian noble who was imprisoned in the Metropol hotel in Moscow in 1922. The setting could hardly be more perfect.”See, you never can tell when a novel you read is going to parachute into your real life.On the nonfiction front, I just happily finished “Thank You for Your Servitude” by our former colleague Mark Leibovich, one of the latest in what looks like a banner year for retrospectives on the Trump presidency.How about you?Bret: I spent part of the summer reading books by friends. I devoured Jamie Kirchick’s riveting “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” a landmark that deserves companion histories for London, Paris and other capitals. I was deeply moved by “When Magic Failed,” the posthumous memoir of Fouad Ajami, with its heartbreaking depictions of village and city life in his native Lebanon.I read an advance copy of Lionel Shriver’s forthcoming nonfiction collection, “Abominations,” appropriately subtitled “Selected Essays From a Career of Courting Self-Destruction,” which should be mandatory reading for college freshmen. And I finally got around, albeit 20 years late, to my old friend Mindy Lewis’s stunning memoir, “Life Inside,” centered on her institutionalization as a teenager in the late 1960s in a psychiatric hospital in New York. It deserves to be reissued in this new era of mental health crisis among younger people.Gail: I knew your summer list would be high quality and longer than mine. I like the idea that my excuse is that I’m writing a book, so there’s not much time for reading. But maybe if I stopped watching “Sopranos” reruns before bed …Bret: Can’t wait for your book. We’ve been revisiting some favorite French farces. Highly recommend “Le Dîner de Cons” and “Le Placard.”Gail: Next week we’ll be off, celebrating Labor Day with our readers, Bret. Then it’s on to September and the midterm election homestretch. Lord knows what’s going to happen, but it’s nice to know that whatever it is, I’ll get to talk about it with you.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More