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      Book Review: ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,’ by Tim Alberta

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      In his new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” the journalist Tim Alberta subjects his faith’s embrace of right-wing extremism to critical scrutiny.THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim AlbertaWhat would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to.Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, asks how so many devout Christians could be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.” According to one of the scoops in the book, Trump himself used decidedly less vivid language to describe the evangelicals who supported Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, telling an Iowa Republican official: “You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.” Many of Cruz’s evangelical supporters eventually backed Trump in 2016; in the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the white evangelical vote even more, to a whopping 84 percent.This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”Alberta’s previous book, “American Carnage” (2019), detailed Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. His new book reads like a sequel, tracing the Trumpian takeover of American evangelicalism, but this time Alberta begins with his very personal connection to his subject. He is “a believer in Jesus Christ,” he writes, “the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community,” a suburb of Detroit.In the summer of 2019, just after “American Carnage” was published, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. At Cornerstone, his father’s church, some of the congregants approached the grieving Alberta not to console him but to complain about his journalism, demanding to know if he was on “the right side.” One church elder wrote a letter to Alberta complaining about the “deep state” and accusing him of treason.The experience was so surreal that Alberta decided to find out what had happened to his religious community. During Trump’s presidency, his father had moved farther to the right, but despite their differences their love for each other was undiminished. Alberta interviewed his father’s handpicked successor, Chris Winans, who is “not a conservative Republican” and spoke candidly about how “God’s people” have always had to contend with worldly temptations that could lead them astray: “I want to be in power, I want to have influence, I want to be prosperous, I want to have security.” Many of Winans’s congregants left for a church down the road that preached the kind of “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism” they wanted to hear. “The church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans says. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged.”“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”A crisis of leadership has compounded the problem. Alberta offers a deeply reported account of the cascading scandals that have consumed Liberty University, an “insular, paranoid family business” coupling authoritarian rules with “flagrant misconduct.” (Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty and the son of its founder, was already indulging his “tyrannical instincts” long before “he became ensnared in a love triangle with his wife and a Miami pool boy,” Alberta writes.) Another chapter describes the struggle to bring to account pastors who victimized congregants in a church that has become “institutionally desensitized” to sexual abuse.Alberta takes heart that new congregations are springing up in unlikely places. Attending a service in an Atlanta distillery, he sees people who are there “to be discipled, not demagogued.” But his reporting keeps leading him to opportunistic impresarios who realize that the painstaking work of building a congregation can be made infinitely easier with expedient shortcuts. Political mudslinging offers a “dopamine rush.” Exaggerating threats and calling the other side evil means that whatever you do, no matter how outrageous or cruel or contrary to Scripture, can be defended as righteous.In 2021, at a rowdy protest against pandemic shutdowns hosted by FloodGate Church in Michigan, a few miles from Cornerstone, Alberta saw a lot of American flags in the sanctuary but not a single cross. “I couldn’t suppress a feeling of absolute disgust,” he writes about the spectacle that followed. To get a fuller picture, he returned repeatedly to FloodGate and talked to its pastor, but the church was committed to political warfare at all costs. “I never ceased to be aghast at what I heard,” he writes.For the most part, though, Alberta hangs back, letting the people he interviews say what they want — or refuse to say what they don’t. The most belligerent culture warriors tend to shy away from talking about helping immigrants and the poor, since bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek. The dynamic turns out to be mutually reinforcing — or mutually destructive. One preacher, a “former Southern Baptist,” says that pastors are now “afraid of their own congregants.”It’s a situation that recalls Alberta’s account in “American Carnage,” in which establishment Republicans naïvely thought they could use Trumpism to their advantage while maintaining control over their party and constituents. “Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed,” Alberta writes in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Instead of issuing guidance, too many “so-called shepherds” resort to pandering — and their congregants end up even more wayward than before.At an event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Alberta meets a man selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands in for a four-letter expletive directed at Joe Biden. The T-shirts include the hashtag #FJB as a handy reminder. The proprietor explains that his merchandise is responding to the fact that “we’ve taken God out of America.”Alberta asks the man whether the #FJB is an appropriate way to bring God back. “People keep on asking for it,” he replies with a shrug. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism | More

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      It Isn’t Easy to Be Mitt Romney

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      It’s a wretched time to be an institutionalist in the Republican Party. But it’s a vital time to read about one.The new speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is an election denier who finds the separation of church and state passé, while his party’s base seems eager to renominate a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president for the White House. It is in this era of degraded Republicanism that McKay Coppins has published “Romney: A Reckoning” — a look inside the public life and private misgivings of Willard Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, 2012 Republican presidential nominee, current senator from Utah and politician eternally miscast for his time and his party.“You don’t want to be the only one sitting at the table and no one wants to sit with you,” Romney says to Coppins, explaining how he feels during Republican caucus lunches. The feeling has trailed Romney throughout his political life.The easy story to write about Romney today is that of the courageous apostate, the lone Republican senator who voted to convict Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial, the throwback to a vision of a party that barely exists today: fiscally conservative, morally upright, constitutionally conscientious. Washington journalists love tales of party-bucking mavericks, and Romney fits the part. Yet that is not the sole story that Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has chosen to tell.Instead, he explores the extent to which Romney wrestles with, and intermittently accepts, his role in what the Republican Party has become. When Coppins asks Romney if he would still have taken that courageous vote in Trump’s impeachment trial had the senator been 30 years younger, with many campaigns and elections still ahead of him, Romney demurs. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he admits. “I think I recognize now my capacity to rationalize decisions that are in my self-interest.”It is a memorable distillation of a life in politics, of the tension between high principle and unseemly justification. It’s a tension Romney has navigated better than most, in part for his willingness to acknowledge its existence.Rationalizations appear throughout Romney’s career. One came in 2012, when, as a presidential candidate, he sought and publicly accepted Trump’s endorsement for president, at a time when Trump was a reality-show host promoting the birtherism canard about President Barack Obama. Stepping on a Las Vegas stage with Trump was “one of the more humiliating chores” of Romney’s political life, Coppins writes, but the candidate explained it away as one of those things that politicians do. After all, if Obama could welcome endorsements from Kanye West and Lena Dunham, why couldn’t Romney stand alongside the host of “The Apprentice”? The awkwardness of the meeting was exquisite. “There are some things you just can’t imagine happening,” Romney said in front of the microphone. “This is one of them.”Four years later, during the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Romney delivered a brutal speech at the University of Utah attacking Trump’s policies (“The country would sink into a prolonged recession”), intelligence (“He is very, very not smart”), honesty (“His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University”) and character (“Imagine your children and grandchildren acting the way he does”). He almost seemed to enjoy himself, delivering zingers and pausing for laughs as though Trump’s ascent to the White House was one more thing he couldn’t imagine happening. During the race, he also assailed prominent Republicans, like Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and one of the first mainstream party leaders to back Trump. The endorsement “diminishes you morally,” Romney told Christie in an email, and only withdrawing it could “preserve your integrity and character.”Romney also tried to coordinate strategy with Trump’s primary opponents and, once it was clear Trump had secured the nomination, he even hoped to rustle up a third-party candidate. All such efforts are part of a self-perceived family trait that the senator calls the “Romney obligation” — the compulsion to run toward a crisis, whether that means saving the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from mismanagement and corruption or trying to rescue the 2016 Republican Party from its Trumpian fate.But Coppins raises the inevitable question: “Where was this principled stand when Romney was running for president himself?” Romney’s answer comes off as vaguely dismissive. “Obviously if I did anything to help legitimize him, I regretted it,” he said. That’s a big “if.” Obviously.John Angelillo/UPI, via Associated PressPerhaps, as Coppins suggests, Romney didn’t consider Trump much of a political threat in 2012, just one more bombastic donor to attract and appease. But there was no such excuse four years later, when Romney legitimized Trump yet again, this time shortly after the 2016 election, agreeing to meet with Trump to discuss becoming his secretary of state. After meeting with Trump, Romney even told reporters that he had “increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future.” It is hard to reconcile the man who pilloried Trump at the University of Utah earlier that year with the one sitting at dinner with Trump and Reince Priebus at Trump Tower’s Jean-Georges, with a look, as Coppins writes, of “forlorn defeat.”To his credit, Romney fesses up to his mixed motives. “I looked at what was happening in the world, and these were really troubling times,” he said to Coppins, arguing, as many Republicans did at the time, that the country needed serious people in the new administration. But Romney also relished the power and the relevance. “I like being involved and being in the middle of things, and having something important to do,” he said. “If you can’t be president, being secretary of state’s not a bad spot to come thereafter.” Trump wanted Romney to go further and repudiate his earlier attacks against him, but Romney declined. In a recent interview with me, Coppins described the secretary of state dalliance as “the last temptation” for Romney.The earlier temptations emerge well before Trump appears on the scene. As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Romney traveled the country in 2006 to raise funds for candidates and try out his own message ahead of the primary season. He wanted to talk about jobs, but conservative crowds preferred to talk guns and terrorists and abortion. Romney complied. “When you speak to the N.R.A.,” he told Coppins, “you change your tone. I admit it.… You say the things that make the audience respond positively.”It’s quite a Trumpian approach, though maybe just a political one, too. “A new incentive structure took shape on those stages,” Coppins writes. “A new persona formed.” Soon, Romney began blasting the “death tax” during speeches, for instance, mainly because doing so got a good response. “It was one of those things you say because you don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re first running for president,” he told Coppins, a seemingly banal quote that grows more stunning with each rereading. Romney complains that he is “the authentic person who seems inauthentic,” but moments like those help explain why.There is a certain obliviousness to Romney’s campaigning, especially so during his 2012 presidential run, when the candidate still regarded the Tea Party as merely a movement for fiscal discipline. His campaign strategist, Stuart Stevens (who in the years since has become one of the most vociferous anti-Trumpers and one of the most disillusioned ex-Republicans), harbored no such illusions, telling Romney at the time that the primary was not about policy or ideology but about grievance and tribalism. “The base is southern, evangelical, and populist,” Stevens said. “You’re a Yankee, Mormon, and wealthy. We’re going to have to steal this nomination.”Observers of American politics often marvel that a country that twice elected Barack Obama could then replace him with Donald Trump. But it’s no less remarkable that a Republican Party that nominated Romney in 2012 could then turn around and choose Trump as its standard-bearer in 2016.Maybe Romney did steal the 2012 nomination from the proto-Trump Republican Party, or maybe Trump snatched the 2016 primary from the last gasp of the party establishment, or perhaps both are true. Regardless, Romney and his wife, Ann, were shocked as they watched Trump’s rallies on television, with the crowds “crescendoing to a state of near-delirium that bordered on bloodlust,” Coppins writes. As Ann Romney said to her husband, “Those people weren’t at our events.”Unless they were. In politics, people can be as extreme, or as reasonable, as their options.Damon Winter/The New York TimesCoppins depicts Ann Romney as the pivotal influence in her husband’s life; he is always trying to win and preserve her approval. A close second is his father, George Romney, the governor of Michigan, Republican presidential candidate and Housing and Urban Development secretary in the Nixon administration. “He’s both inspired by and at times haunted by his dad’s legacy,” Coppins told me, and their political careers feature parallels as well as divergences. Mitt’s stand against Trump is reminiscent of George’s opposition to the 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater, and during the protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Mitt thinks back to his father’s steadfast support for civil rights in the late 1960s, even as urban unrest spread and Richard Nixon peddled law and order.Decades later, Romney remains aggrieved at the news media’s response when his father — in an infelicitous choice of metaphor — complained that he had undergone a “brainwashing” by the government spin about the Vietnam War. The controversy surrounding his use of that term finally derailed George Romney’s presidential aspirations. At the start of his own campaign for the 2008 nomination, Romney gave his senior staff a copy of an 88-page master’s thesis, written in 1969 by a George Romney campaign staffer, describing how his father had gone from front-runner to also-ran. The elder Romney’s crucial political misstep, Coppins writes, was a compulsion to speak his mind and stick to his beliefs, no matter the consequences, even when seeking the nation’s highest office.His son sought to avoid that mistake in his own White House bids. “The one question Romney would struggle to answer — even a decade later — was whether he had been true to himself in his pursuit of the presidency,” Coppins writes. (I hate to say it, but if you can’t settle that question after all those years, maybe you know the answer.) When Romney speaks to student groups these days, Coppins reports, the senator advises them never to trade away their integrity for political gain, and he says it with an air of someone who has lived that trade-off. “It’s not worth it,” he tells them. “Believe me.”Upon joining the Senate in 2019, “Romney finally felt free to follow his father’s example — the way he’d always wanted to — without worrying about the politics.” He knew that voting to convict Trump of abusing the powers of the presidency would marginalize him in the modern Republican Party, and he agonized over the decision; after all, it is one thing to be an outlier, another to be an outcast. (His 2012 running mate, Paul Ryan, a former House speaker, showed his colors by reaching out when he had learned how Romney would vote, not to offer support but to try to talk him out of it.) “My promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and political biases aside,” Romney said on the Senate floor, a brief but indelible counterpoint to what his party had become.Did this moment come late in Romney’s career, only once the prize of the presidency was no longer possible? Yes. Did it allow Romney to make a statement rather than a difference, in that his isolated vote could not produce Trump’s conviction? Of course. But over time, a statement can become a difference. As a senator, Romney still voted in line with Trump’s agenda most of the time, but his declaration that Trump’s behavior was “wrong, grievously wrong” was the assertion of principle over self-interest, affirming his father’s legacy and bringing him closer to fulfilling the Romney obligation. When I asked Coppins how history might look upon Romney, he answered: “If we could all be remembered for eventually reaching the best version of ourselves, I think that would be wonderful. And I think that would be fair for him.”Romney has long kept private journals, and Coppins noticed that the most copious entries came during the 2012 campaign, when Romney imagined he was gathering material for a memoir. He would never write one because, as he explained to Coppins, no one reads memoirs by the losers. That may be so. But “Romney: A Reckoning” shows that books about the losers can be worth the read, and that eventual victories can be worth the losses.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Democrats Are Their Own Worst Enemy

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      This should be the Democratic Party’s moment. Donald Trump’s stranglehold has lurched the G.O.P. toward the fringe. Republican congressional behavior echoes that of an intemperate toddler and the party’s intellectual and ideological foundations have become completely unmoored.But far from dominant, the Democratic Party seems disconnected from the priorities, needs and values of many Americans.Current polls show a 2024 rematch between Trump and Joe Biden too close for true comfort; the same is true should Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis be the Republican nominee. Many constituents who were once the Democratic Party’s reliable base — the working class, middle-class families, even Black and Latino Americans and other ethnic minorities — have veered toward the G.O.P. In a development that has baffled Democrats, a greater share of those groups voted for Republican candidates in recent elections.Something worrisome has happened to the party of the people.This worry isn’t entirely new. In 2004, Thomas Frank’s book asked, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Why, Frank wondered, did working- and middle-class Americans vote Republican when Democratic policies were more attuned to their needs?The question to ask now is: Why isn’t the Democratic Party serving their needs either?John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, authors of 2002’s hugely influential “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” might seem like the last people to have an answer, given that book’s failed prophecy that America would be majority Democratic by 2010 given shifts in the electorate and the population.But in “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” they give a pretty persuasive explanation — one that should be read as a warning.If the answer to Frank’s question was that cultural issues can trump issues of class in ways that favor Republicans, Judis’s and Teixeira’s answer looks doubly troubling to Democrats: Not only is the Democratic Party increasingly failing on matters of culture (despite its strength on abortion rights), it’s also seen as failing in matters of class. In a country that has become more overtly populist in its values and needs, Democrats are the ones who look like the party of out-of-touch elitists.“We’ve had this peculiar situation where the reigning power in the Democratic Party has been between progressive social organizations and the neoliberal business elite,” Judis told me when I spoke to him last week. The majority of Americans are feeling left behind.This bodes ill for Democrats. As he and Teixeira write in the book, “The Democratic Party has had its greatest success when it sought to represent the common man and woman against the rich and powerful, the people against the elite, and the plebians against the patricians.”When it comes to economics, the authors say, Democrats have too often pursued the interests of their own elites and donors. Since the 1990s, the party has pursued policies that worsen the economic plight of Americans who are not well off. President Bill Clinton, for example, supported NAFTA and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which undermined American manufacturing; the administration also endorsed the Banking Act of 1999, which accelerated the financialization of the American economy. While Barack Obama conveyed a populist message on the campaign trail, as president, they say, he became captive to neoliberal Washington.Much of the Democratic Party’s agenda has been set by what Judis and Teixeira call the “shadow party,” a mix of donors from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, wealthy foundations, activist groups, the media, lobbyists and scholars.Democratic leaders seem too willing to settle for a kind of cheap progressivism — a carbon-neutral, virtue-signaling, box-checking update on what was once called limousine liberalism. But the Democratic Party cannot win and America cannot flourish if it doesn’t prioritize the economic well-being of the American majority over the financial interests and cultural fixations of an elite minority.Biden has curtailed some of its shadow party’s economic agenda — less so its cultural and social policies. There, Judis and Teixeira argue, the party seems bent on imposing a narrow progressive stance on issues like race, “sexual creationism” (commonly known as gender ideology), immigration and climate, at the expense of more broadly shared beliefs within the electorate.The moral values may differ at each extreme of the two parties, but their efforts to moralize can sound an awful lot alike to many Americans. Even though Democrats themselves are adopting “a pretty aggressive way to change the culture,” Teixeira told me, the Democratic Party acts as if anyone who reacts against the assumptions of its progressive wing is completely off base.“There’s a certain amount of chutzpah among Democrats to assume that it’s only the other side pursuing a culture war,” he said.For too long, the Democratic Party depended on shifting demographics to shore up its side. Then it relied on the horror show of the G.O.P. to scare people onto its side. Both have been an effective and damaging distraction. As Judis and Teixeira put it, Democrats “need to look in the mirror and examine the extent to which their own failures contributed to the rise of the most toxic tendencies on the political right.”We can no longer afford to avoid the hard truths. If the Democratic Party doesn’t focus on what it can deliver to more Americans, it won’t have to wonder anymore where all the Democrats went.Source images by John McKeen and phanasitti/Getty ImagesThe 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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Book Review: ‘Blowback,’ by Miles Taylor; ‘Renegade,’ by Adam Kinzinger; ‘Losing Our Religion,’ by Russell Moore

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      Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official in the Trump administration and the author of the new book BLOWBACK: A Warning to Save Democracy From the Next Trump (Atria, 335 pp., $30), made his dramatic entrance in 2018 with an anonymous essay for The New York Times entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” In it, he heralded the “unsung heroes” who were “working diligently from within” to impede Trump’s “worst inclinations.” The following year, having resigned from the D.H.S., Taylor published “A Warning,” also under the moniker “Anonymous.” Finally, in 2020, Taylor criticized Trump under his own name, endorsed Joe Biden and identified himself as “Anonymous.”Taylor now provides a more detailed accounting of the chaos inside the White House. Some of his allegations — that the Trump aide Stephen Miller wanted to blow up migrants with a predator drone; that the former White House chief of staff John Kelly described the president as a “very, very evil man” in response to Trump’s sexual comments about his daughter Ivanka — have made headlines and prompted some denials.The reference to “the next Trump” in the subtitle is already moot (we’re still dealing with the original one), but “Blowback” is bedeviled by a bigger problem: The more we learn of the outrageous behavior behind closed doors, the more enraging it is that Taylor — and his allies among the “axis of adults” — failed to speak out sooner. In 2018, after a particularly deranged set of phone calls about the so-called migrant caravan, Taylor told Kelly that things were getting really messed up. I wanted to shake him. Yes, Miles, it was getting pretty messed up.To Taylor’s credit, “Blowback” is full of regret. The 2018 opinion piece, while gutsy, was a sly justification for silence. By book’s end, Taylor has decided that anonymity itself, the mask he wore for years, “symbolizes the greatest threat to democracy.” The most moving passages in the book are those in which Taylor wrestles not with political monsters, but with his own demons. The mask of anonymity is entwined with his alcoholism; his recovery only arrived when he spoke truthfully in his own name. Taylor describes how falsity gnaws at the soul. Courage doesn’t always come on time, but as many an addict has ruefully remarked, it’s better late than never.The former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger — one of 10 Republicans to vote for Trump’s second impeachment and one of two to serve on the House’s Jan. 6 committee — is a late-breaking hero of the anti-Trump cause. RENEGADE: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country (The Open Field, 295 pp., $30) tracks Kinzinger’s childhood in the 1980s, his Air Force career, his six terms in Congress and his disillusionment with Trump’s Republican Party.Alas, it has none of “Blowback”’s redeeming anguish. Even Kinzinger’s sporadic insights about the roots of Trumpism (e.g. in the Tea Party) serve less to implicate the pre-Trump G.O.P. than to flatter Adam Kinzinger, who always appears presciently distressed by the intransigent drift of his own party.“Renegade” has applause lines for Kinzinger’s new liberal fans — he describes the senator and presidential aspirant Ted Cruz as an “oily, sneering manipulator” with a “punchable face” — and he adds some (unrevelatory) texture to the cowardice and bullying displayed by his colleagues. Kevin McCarthy, Kinzinger writes, behaved “like an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line” when he was minority leader. Twice after Kinzinger turned on Trump, he reports, McCarthy shoulder-checked him in the House chamber. (A spokesman for McCarthy has dismissed such criticism from Kinzinger as “unhinged tirades.”)What “Renegade” resembles most of all — down to its professional co-authoring by the award-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio — is a campaign book in search of a campaign. When Kinzinger announced his retirement in 2021, he said, “This isn’t the end of my political future, but the beginning.” Still, it’s difficult to imagine what sort of future that might be — unless Kinzinger gets much better at persuading other Republicans to join him out in the cold. “Renegade,” a book primarily about how much nobler Kinzinger is than his former colleagues, is unlikely to do the trick.Russell Moore’s LOSING OUR RELIGION: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Sentinel, 256 pp., $29) is another book about a conservative suffering exile from his tribe for turning on Donald Trump.It is far more interesting, however, because Moore — the editor in chief of Christianity Today and a former bigwig in the 13-million-member Southern Baptist Convention — remains a dedicated evangelical. His “altar call” is addressed to fellow believers; to leaders of congregations riven by conflict; to pastors, like himself, whose theology is orthodox but whose politics, by Trump-era standards, are liberal; to churchgoers who’ve lost faith in their church but not in Jesus Christ. It is a startlingly open, honest and humble book, a soulful, fraternal entreaty for integrity, repair and renewal.Taylor and Kinzinger, putatively trying to convince readers to take the danger of Trump seriously, adopt a tone that is only tolerable if you already agree with them. Their books, in other words, are most likely to appeal to liberals eager for apostates from conservatism to flatter their anti-Trump indignation. By literally “preaching to the choir,” Moore, on the other hand, ironically avoids preaching to it figuratively.He is better equipped to lovingly cajole, carefully critique and persuade his readers, because he speaks to his audience in their own idiom, relying on theological concepts that hold particular potency for his fellow congregants, especially those who find themselves called to decry an evil they fear they have abetted.He is also sympathetic to the ways in which belligerent Trumpism can seduce Christian conservatives; it satisfies many of the same longings that religion does. “There is more than one way for you to secularize,” Moore writes. “All it takes is substituting adrenaline for the Holy Spirit, political ‘awakening’ for rebirth, quarrelsomeness for sanctification and a visible tribal identity for the kingdom of God.”Most of all, Moore resists the impulse to try to beat Trump at his own game. So many prophets of Trumpian doom respond to the former president’s howling narcissism with a narcissism of their own, implicitly ratifying Trump’s most noxious conceit: that he alone can fix it. But our moment calls for less heroism than humility; fewer grand self-portraits and more intimate self-searching. More

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      Book Review: ‘Romney,’ by McKay Coppins

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      ROMNEY: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins“For most of his life, he has nursed a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently.” One doesn’t expect these opening words from an authorized biography of a handsome, wealthy, happily married and instinctively moderate man, but this is how McKay Coppins’s “Romney” begins. Perhaps Mitt Romney fears his severance from so many blessings, but as Coppins’s revealing new book demonstrates, this businessman-politician has often wondered if he deserved such an abundance of good fortune at all.Coppins conducted 45 interviews with Romney over two years and had access to hundreds of pages in private journals that the now 76-year-old senator has kept since 2011. “Romney” presents a man given to cycles of rationalization and guilt, to sometimes near-O.C.D. levels of repetitive thinking and self-recrimination. The biographer pronounces his “defining trait” to be a “meld of moral obligation and personal hubris.”Romney has, in fact, had two brushes with sudden death, the first in a terrible automobile accident in 1968 when he was a 21-year-old Mormon missionary in France. The second came a half-century later on a January afternoon in the besieged Senate chamber of the U.S. Capitol, to which the better angels of Romney’s conscience had led him after a long up-and-down political life.His father, George, was a progressive Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s, marching with civil rights activists even as his own church banned Black members from the priesthood. His 1968 run for the presidency collapsed after he referred to the military cheerleading for the Vietnam War as “brainwashing.”Mitt grew up with predictable comforts but nothing like a sense of direction until, during his Mormon mission, sick with diarrhea, he knocked on doors in the French port city of Le Havre that might as well have been brick walls. It eventually “struck him with the force of something divine” that, however futile they seemed, his sacrifices were accepted by God.Once back home he was on his way, along a path both faithful and lucrative, into the expanding worlds of business consulting and private equity in the 1970s and ’80s. Straining to make time for both his church and the five sons he and his wife were raising in suburban Boston, Romney achieved big success at Bain Capital, the investment firm he helped found that guided the office-supply chain Staples toward explosive growth and cut jobs at Ampad, one of the stationery manufacturers that stocked Staples’ shelves.Romney was moving fast, and Coppins himself is a bit headlong in the book’s early going, which includes Romney’s ill-fated 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy. Romney’s later repair of Utah’s shambolic preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics propelled him to a single term as governor of Massachusetts, during which he enacted the health-insurance plan that came to be seen as a state-level precursor of Obamacare. The governor was logical and naïve enough to believe that the program’s success might get him the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But after running into Iowans’ suspicions of Mormonism, he limped toward an early withdrawal from the race.Four years later, he somehow succeeded with Republican primary voters newly jazzed by tea-partying and birtherism and not particularly craving a candidate who had to spend time convincing them that Romneycare was actually quite different from Obamacare. To overcome Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and the two Ricks (Perry and Santorum), Romney needed to dial his rationalization settings high enough to endure mad conversation with the conservative provocateur Glenn Beck.Securing the nomination proved only a prelude to what Coppins, with some justice, calls “one of the pettiest, most forgettable presidential elections in modern history” — no matter that it’s been all downhill since then. Romney was demagogued by Vice President Joe Biden, who told Black voters in one audience that the Republican candidate hoped to “put y’all back in chains,” and mocked by Obama for having observed that Russia would be our most dangerous long-term adversary. But he lost the election mostly on his own, with a gaffe worse than his father’s old brainwashing one: Romney was caught on tape dissing the “47 percent” of voters “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.”Few moments of that year’s campaign will be more cringe-inducing to a reader than Romney’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s endorsement, in Las Vegas, for the Republican nomination. Throughout Coppins’s narrative Trump, the supposed billionaire, morphs from comic relief into devouring nemesis. As late as May 2012, Romney was confiding this description of Trump to his journal: “No veneer, the real deal. Got to love him. Makes me laugh and makes me feel good, both.” Four years later, having come to his senses, Romney refused Trump his own endorsement, earning the candidate’s fury.Romney also sent a blistering email to Chris Christie after the New Jersey governor came out for Trump: “He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic.” Even so, after Trump’s victory, thinking he could perhaps be a force for restraint, Romney allowed himself to be humiliated by Trump’s prolonged public dangling of the secretary of state job.It took two more years for him to arrive at his finest — and final — hours in politics. In 2018, as a handful of anti-Trump Republicans like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake left Congress, Romney jumped in. His becoming a freshman senator from Utah was made possible by his own humility and the Mormon state’s temperamental aversion to the president’s personality, which had helped depress Trump’s 2016 margin of victory in the state.Setting up shop in a lousy basement office, Romney abandoned his plan “to fight Trumpism while ignoring Trump,” at last realizing he had to face the man head-on. While should-have-known-better Republican colleagues waffled (Ben Sasse) or submissively swooned (Lindsey Graham), Romney kept his head above the fetid waters, eventually developing a particular contempt for J.D. Vance, the once anti-Trump hillbilly elegist who reached the Senate via what Romney’s father might have called self-brainwashing. Resistance to Trump’s election-fraud claims left Romney to be jeered by fellow passengers on a flight from Salt Lake City to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021. Even before his vote to convict Trump in a second impeachment, private security for his large family was costing him $5,000 a day.“Romney: A Reckoning” is in many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions: One remembers Monica Crowley’s “Nixon Off the Record” (1996) and Thomas M. DeFrank’s “Write It When I’m Gone” (2007), a collection of opinions that Gerald Ford wanted to make public, though not too soon.Romney has not waited until he’s dead to unleash his candor and surrender his journals, but he has announced his retirement from electoral politics, on the sensible grounds that it is already too geriatric an arena. Even so, a second Senate term was hardly guaranteed to him. Whatever remains of Mormon distaste for Trump’s vulgarity and meanness, 2024 will be a meaner year than 2018; in a poll taken in the spring, more than half of Utah’s Republicans did not want Romney to run again.Coppins, a fellow Mormon, is generally as polite as his subject, though the characterization of Romney’s “late-in-life attempt at political repentance” seems a bit stark. As this able book shows, Romney almost certainly has less to repent of than the average politician. Indeed, one believes Coppins when he says that “watching Trump complete his conquest of the G.O.P. was even more devastating to Romney than losing his own election in 2012.”The depicted “reckoning” is actually lifelong and, more important, something that has always been made from within. Romney’s moral vitality, for all its fitfulness and ambivalence, has kept him a free man. Only a morally dead one, whose self-worth comes entirely from without, will find that stone walls do indeed a prison make.ROMNEY: A Reckoning | By McKay Coppins | 403 pp. | Scribner | $32.50 More

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      Oprah Floated a 2020 Presidential Ticket With Mitt Romney, Book Says

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      Ms. Winfrey wanted to form the independent ticket to stop Donald J. Trump, according to a forthcoming book. Mr. Romney listened to the pitch but passed on the idea, the biography says.Concerned that the Democratic field wasn’t up to the task of stopping President Donald J. Trump in 2020, Oprah Winfrey pitched Mitt Romney on the idea of running for president as an independent, with her as his running mate, according to a forthcoming biography of the Republican senator from Utah.Ms. Winfrey floated the unusual ticket in a phone call she placed to Mr. Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, in November 2019, according to an excerpt from the book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” that was shared with The New York Times.Mr. Romney at least listened to the idea. (It was Oprah calling, after all.) He “heard the pitch, and told her he was flattered, but that he’d have to pass,” the author, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, writes.Liz Johnson, an aide to Mr. Romney, declined to comment on Monday. A spokeswoman for Ms. Winfrey said in a statement that she had urged Mr. Romney to run, but not with her.“In November 2019, Ms. Winfrey called Senator Romney to encourage him to run on an independent ticket,” the statement said. “She was not calling to be part of the ticket and was never considering running herself.”Mr. Coppins’s book was based on hours of interviews with Mr. Romney, as well as emails, texts and journals that the senator had been saving to potentially write a memoir. Realizing he could not be objective about himself, Mr. Romney has said he chose to have a journalist write about him instead.Ms. Winfrey’s interest in forming an independent ticket with Mr. Romney, which was reported on Monday by Axios, is among several dishy items from the book, which is to be released on Oct. 24.She has known the Romneys since 2012, when she interviewed them at their lakeside home in New Hampshire as Mr. Romney was running for president. Ms. Winfrey had also seen Ms. Romney at various social events, and was “especially fond” of her, according to the book.On the phone with Ms. Romney, Ms. Winfrey explained that Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, was preparing to enter the race and had approached her about joining his ticket. Before she decided, she wanted to gauge Mr. Romney’s interest.She doubted that Joseph R. Biden Jr. or Pete Buttigieg could beat Mr. Trump and was “certain” that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts could not, according to the book.Ms. Romney responded that her husband would not run for president in 2020, either as a Republican or as an independent, Mr. Coppins writes. Mr. Romney also politely batted down the idea, according to the book.An aide to Mr. Bloomberg declined to comment.Ms. Winfrey has at times been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate herself.In 2018, after she delivered a rousing speech at the Golden Globes, some were clamoring for her to run. But she told “60 Minutes Overtime” that she would not become a candidate in 2020 even though “I had a lot of wealthy men calling, telling me that they would run my campaign and raise $1 billion for me.”“I am actually humbled by the fact that people think that I could be a leader of the free world, but it’s just not in my spirit,” she said. “It’s not in my DNA.”Mr. Romney, 76, recently announced that he would not seek re-election in 2024, saying he wanted to make way for a “new generation of leaders.” He strongly suggested that Mr. Trump and President Biden should also bow out, arguing that neither was effectively leading his party to confront the “critical challenges” the nation faces. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Is Confused

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      The theatrically combative presidential candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy seems to be premised on two messages. One is his disdain for identity politics, which he argues creates a citizenry obsessed with victimhood and a corporate sector in thrall to trendy left-wing obsessions, leaving America trapped in a “cold cultural civil war,” as he put it last month in the first Republican debate. The other is his devotion to Donald Trump, whom Ramaswamy relentlessly defended in the debate, promising to support the former president, if Trump wins the Republican nomination, or to pardon him, if Ramaswamy wins the White House. He called Trump “the best president of the twenty-first century.”Both these stances, however, are complicated or contradicted by Ramaswamy’s literary trilogy: “Woke, Inc.” (2021), “Nation of Victims” (2022) and “Capitalist Punishment” (2023). In these works, Ramaswamy is more thoughtful, but also more confused, than his smiling, trolly, rapid-fire campaign persona. He can’t seem to decide if woke capitalism is a public-relations ploy or a mortal threat to the republic. And even as he lionizes Trump among his conservative heroes, he writes that Trump’s calls for American greatness degenerated into “just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole.” (Swallowing much of something whole is a typical Ramaswamy hedge, one of several categorical assertions in these books that find room for a little wiggle.)In “Woke, Inc.,” published some seven months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Ramaswamy assails the rise of so-called stakeholder capitalism, the notion that companies should not solely serve the interests of shareholders but should also serve the interests of workers, the environment or society writ vague. The traditional principle of maximizing shareholder value is not just about encouraging corporate greed, he argues, but about keeping capitalists in their lane, making sure that their business judgments do not lapse into moral ones. Yet that is precisely what happens, Ramaswamy complains, when chief executives and investors conspire with activists to push for, say, racial equity audits or socially responsible investing.Here, Ramaswamy struggles to make up his mind. Stakeholder capitalism is a “farce,” he writes, an example of “corporate opportunism” and “self-interest masquerading as morality,” a “do-good smoke screen” through which businesses distract the public from their perfidy. “The social causes simply serve as a form of reputational laundering for those same companies’ profit-seeking,” Ramaswamy maintains, with businesses “performatively one-upping each other to show that they’re the good guys.”But if the whole thing is just a lucrative P.R. scam, then it is hard to see how it is also “the greatest long-run threat of all to American democracy itself,” as Ramaswamy warns readers. On one page, businesses are pushing radical agendas and imposing their elite progressive values on our democratic process; on another, they are just “feigning wokeness” to win favor with consumers, “pretending to care about justice in order to make money.” So, is stakeholder capitalism a punch in the mouth to our nation’s principles or just lip service to justice? In Ramaswamy’s writing, the answer is never quite clear.Even when he is certain that something nefarious is underway, Ramaswamy doesn’t seem quite sure who the bad guys are. He warns that Facebook and Google “have effectively assumed the role of the state itself,” censoring public discourse under the guise of fighting hate speech and misinformation. “The rise of Wokenomics consummates Silicon Valley’s coup over our democracy,” he writes ominously. Yet just a few pages later, readers learn that it is Congress that has “co-opted Silicon Valley” to restrict speech for its own purposes. So, is the tech industry the puppet or the master? Consistency seems irrelevant to Ramaswamy’s scattershot populism. In “Woke, Inc.” there are enough culprits to satisfy everyone.Ramaswamy can be hazy about his own basic tenets. “I don’t believe in ‘systemic racism,’” he declares in the third chapter of “Woke, Inc.” Yet in chapter 14, he acknowledges its reality. “My problem with woke complaints about ‘systemic racism’ isn’t that it doesn’t exist,” he writes. “It’s that too often it’s used as a vague, judgmental catchall phrase for all of America’s woes.” An author’s views can evolve over time, of course, and a politician’s are almost required to do so. It is less common to see them contradicted across the pages of the same book.I don’t know if Ramaswamy has an underlying philosophy or just an underlying shtick, but if one of these books captures it, it is probably “Nation of Victims.” In this book, Ramaswamy laments that Americans have lost their scrappy, underdog attitude and defaulted to a mentality of group identity and collective grievance — an outlook that becomes self-fulfilling. “If we divide the world into black and white, virtuous victims and evil oppressors with no shades of gray, we will create the nation that we see,” he writes.This is not a novel argument, and Ramaswamy highlights the post-Civil War Lost Cause narrative as an early example of the country’s enduring cultural resentments. “Modern America’s victim complex began as a tale of conservative white victimhood after the Civil War,” he writes, only to mutate into “an ongoing story of liberal white victimhood.”Ramaswamy concedes that “the Constitution brought justice to black Americans with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education,” but since then virtually every possible identity group has been battling for a perch on what he derides as the “victimhood podium.” The result, he concludes, is a nation that has lost confidence in itself — a culture in decline, a less productive economy, a society that produces activists rather than engineers, a country so weakened that it “would almost certainly lose” a naval war with China over Taiwan.This could be the core of Ramaswamy’s political message: He marries anti-woke messages to pro-growth ones and links culture wars at home to shooting wars abroad. If Ramaswamy makes any contribution to the long-term electoral prospects of the Republican Party, it will be in broadening the case against identity politics from the realm of book bans and bathrooms to that of economics and national security.In “Nation of Victims,” Ramaswamy privileges the misdeeds of the progressive left, which he says is so taken by its own fantasies and slogans that it “replaces the voices of black people themselves” who, he suggests, may want more police presence in their communities rather than less. But his critique encompasses the right as well. “The worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives,” he writes, “is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen.” Aside from policy differences with Trump over tariffs and spending, Ramaswamy blasts the former president as a “sore loser,” even likening him to Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for governor of Georgia who refused to concede her 2018 defeat — and to be clear, in conservative politics, that’s a serious burn. Ramaswamy also writes that the events of Jan. 6 shook his faith in the United States: “Rome fell to invading barbarians, but us Americans have become our own barbarians, sacking ourselves.”These books are not the sanitized autobiographies one usually gets from self-congratulatory business executives or aspirants to high office. Ramaswamy offers some family background to animate his political and cultural awakenings — he was drawn to the expansiveness of capitalism, he reports, in contrast to the rigidity of caste he witnessed in his parents’ India, and his youthful conservatism was in part an “emotive choice” to counter the liberal convictions of his father — but these volumes are far more about principled arguments than personal stories, and he includes an eclectic mix of policy wonkery and moral maxims.Ramaswamy proposes mandatory national service for American high schoolers — he cites Pete Buttigieg’s similar call during his 2020 presidential campaign — and calls for “a hefty inheritance tax with no gaping loopholes” to prevent America’s meritocratic winners from morphing into aristocratic ones. He emphasizes the need for stronger job retraining programs for displaced blue-collar workers, the deregulation of housing markets and the easing of professional licensing requirements. He urges companies to prioritize “diversity of thought” among their employees rather than a diversity “crudely measured by appearance or accent.” And he longs for a “Manhattan Project” (an obligatory reference for policy mavens) for the national semiconductor industry to raise America’s economic and military competitiveness.Particularly striking are Ramaswamy’s thoughts on how to move the country beyond the identity conflicts that, in his view, erode our sense of nationhood. “The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim,” he writes. Our true selves do not equal our superficial identities, Ramaswamy insists, and we become better people when we see ourselves and others as individuals with the power to direct their own lives. “When you free yourself from the illusion that you’re a mere victim, you simultaneously free yourself from seeing others as mere oppressors,” he writes. This plea for collective forgiveness is a welcome break from the hyper-pugilism of Ramaswamy’s campaign appearances, even if his harsh exchanges on the Republican debate stage suggest that his conciliatory side has not yet taken hold.“Capitalist Punishment,” the latest and slimmest of his books, is something of an outlier in the Ramaswamy canon. It is narrowly cast, focusing on his criticism of investment funds that adopt E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance) principles to guide their strategies. Here, Ramaswamy’s transgressors are the investment firms BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. “The Big Three are becoming a threat to democracy,” he contends, because they impose social-activist values onto the industries in which they hold significant positions, including the oil and banking sectors, and because pension fund managers adopt E.S.G. investing even if individual pensioners may be ignorant of (or hostile to) such principles. “When elites force their values onto everyone else,” he writes, ordinary people lose trust in important institutions. “And that, in turn, makes society fall apart.”As in his other works, some tensions emerge in “Capitalist Punishment.” When Ramaswamy complains that E.S.G. investing is radically transforming corporate America but also revels in the fact that E.S.G. funds are “underperforming” and “dropping like flies,” it’s hard to tell if E.S.G. investing is pervasive or in decline. Yet, near the end of the book, readers gain some clarity on Ramaswamy’s own interests and motives.He calls for antitrust lawsuits against the big three and suggests that Black Rock break itself into two smaller firms. Ever helpful, he also offers an alternative for investors — an investment firm called Strive, co-founded in 2022 by Ramaswamy himself. And here the book reads almost like a fund prospectus:Strive’s mandate to underlying companies is simple: focus on excellence over politics; provide excellent products and services to your customers; and maximize value for your shareholders by doing that rather than advancing any particular social or political agenda.Though he retains a multimillion-dollar stake in the company, Ramaswamy resigned from the board and relinquished his day-to-day responsibilities at Strive earlier this year because he was running for president. Even so, depending on the standards to which one holds politicians, Ramaswamy’s self-serving approach in “Capitalist Punishment” may be disheartening or pedestrian. At the very least, encountering it does persuade me, as Ramaswamy argues in these books, that there are plenty of business people out there “pretending to care about justice in order to make money.”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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Does Therapy Culture Help or Hurt Us?

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      More from our inbox:Trump Pardoning Himself? An ‘Appalling Idea’Trump’s WeightImproving Access to E-BooksGraphicaArtis/Getty ImagesTo the Editor: Re “Hey, America, Grow Up!” by David Brooks (column, Aug. 11), about how an emphasis on trauma makes adults immature:As a psychiatrist, I feel that Mr. Brooks makes several valid points regarding trauma but fails ultimately to thread the needle.A good psychiatrist or therapist identifies the real trauma in a patient’s past — typically from events in childhood at the hands of parents or other family members — while simultaneously discouraging the kind of victim mind-set that displaces past pain onto present-day scapegoats.The goal is to illuminate the real trauma, which requires re-evaluating what is often an idealized remembrance of one’s upbringing, so that the patient can stop projecting malice onto anyone and instead regain a sense of agency. As the saying goes, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.If we fail as a culture to acknowledge the well-established long-term consequences, both physical and psychological, of legitimate trauma, we will wind up creating more people who identify as victims, not fewer.Christopher BaileyKirkland, Wash.To the Editor:One thing David Brooks’s good column leaves untouched is how much resistance to the hyperinflation of “trauma” there has been among psychotherapists themselves.In 1967, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, wrote that the concept had become so “carelessly used” that its “blurring” could lead to “abandonment and loss of a valuable concept.” In 1978, psychiatrist Henry Krystal, an Auschwitz survivor and founder of contemporary trauma theory, said flatly that the use of the term “has become so loose that it has become virtually useless.”Of course, “trauma culture” has a life of its own, independent of psychiatric or psychological knowledge. And no small number of therapists have fully cashed in from Trauma, Inc., which is, indeed, big business.But my sense is that, even in the culture at large, “trauma” hype may have run its course. What follows may be greater “maturity,” as Mr. Brooks and many others would hope, or it may be just the next form of mishegoss.Henry GreenspanAnn Arbor, Mich.The writer is an emeritus psychologist at the University of Michigan.To the Editor:Wouldn’t it be nice if David Brooks’s ideas about how people should “throw off some of the tenets of the therapeutic culture” and “weave their stable selves through the commitments to and attachments with others” in order to build a culture of maturity were realistic?But try telling that to people who have grown up in poverty, who have never had adequate health insurance or medical care, who grew up in families rife with violence and abuse, who live in communities with chronic gun violence, and who have to drop out of high school to give birth to a baby.What can you weave in there? And who can you attach to when your life and the lives of those around you are a mess, and you live in a world that you have little hope of escaping?Debra KuppersmithDobbs Ferry, N.Y.The writer is a psychoanalyst.To the Editor:David Brooks made some excellent observations about our country’s growing narcissism. But he missed a key prescription for change: helping Americans develop a sense of purpose.This starts with treating challenges as temporary setbacks and harnessing our talents and efforts in the service of something bigger than ourselves. We need to lose the “me” and find the “we.”Studies show that people who feel a sense of purpose in their lives — through family, friends, work or community — are overall more resilient and report a greater sense of well-being. This message feels especially urgent for adolescent girls in America who are experiencing record levels of isolation, depression and suicidal thoughts.Until Americans commit to a purpose-driven mind-set, we will continue to wallow in our current obsession with victimization and search out cheap ways to validate our self-worth.Suzanne ChazinChappaqua, N.Y.Trump Pardoning Himself? An ‘Appalling Idea’Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTo the Editor: It has become commonplace to suggest that one difference between a state and a federal conviction of Donald Trump is that Mr. Trump could not pardon himself from a state conviction if he is elected president, implying that he could pardon his own federal offenses. It’s long past time to stop giving this appalling discussion of self-pardons any air.A president pardoning himself for his own crimes is the very definition of unchecked power. Revolutionaries called it tyranny, which in this context is a better word. The idea that our executive has so much power that the rule of law does not apply to him because he could forgive himself betrays what the Revolutionary War was about.The Constitution separated the powers of the government into three branches. It empowers Congress with the legislative power and the courts with the judicial power. The idea that a president could make himself immune from both other branches — in the furtherance of a crime — is inexcusable.Mr. Trump has floated this idea before and some allies are resurrecting it again. It’s born in the brevity of the Constitution’s pardon power. But it flouts both the rule of law and the separation of powers essential to the Constitution. We should be outraged.Andrew J. KennedyMonroeville, Pa.The writer is a lawyer.Trump’s WeightTo the Editor: Re “Trump Is Booked at Jail in Atlanta in Election Case” (front page, Aug. 25):Donald Trump weighs only 215 pounds? Forget the mug shot T-shirts; his campaign should be selling whatever brand of scale he’s using.Alan RutkowskiVictoria, British ColumbiaImproving Access to E-BooksAnn Johansson for The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “What Does It Mean to Own a Book?” (Business, Aug. 13):I would like to thank David Streitfeld for his piece shining a light on the innovative and visionary work done by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive. In the discussion about the complexity of providing digital access, the work of our nation’s libraries and nonprofits like the Digital Public Library of America that support them should not be overlooked.Public libraries across the country offered access to over a billion digital e-books and half a billion digital audiobooks in fiscal year 2021. They circulated 460 million digital items and spent nearly $600 million to provide that access. And these numbers continue to grow.Mr. Streitfeld rightly points out that many titles are increasingly expensive for libraries to acquire, especially those from the “big five” publishers, which only offer licenses that are limited to a certain number of loans or length of time. However, the Digital Public Library of America works with hundreds of midsize and independent publishers to offer more reasonable terms including, for example, a perpetual one-user-at-a-time license that functions much like library ownership of a print book.Right now, legislators in several states are working with librarians to draft legislation that would enshrine the rights of libraries to acquire digital content on reasonable terms.Libraries need our support to ensure that as the transition into a digital world continues, access to knowledge becomes more and not less accessible.John S. BrackenChicagoThe writer is the executive director of the nonprofit Digital Public Library of America. More