All posts tagged: such statements

The GOP’s ongoing moral surrender to Trump

[ad_1] This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The elected officials who quietly defend Donald Trump’s immorality even though they know better are just as bad as the comically devoted Trump courtiers. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Mushy Equivocations “I didn’t come here,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina complained last week, “to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy.” Tillis was referring to Republicans who were abandoning a deal on border security because they thought reaching a solution with President Joe Biden would hurt Trump’s electoral chances in the fall. It is immoral, Tillis added, to look “the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.” As Bruce Willis’s fictional cop John McClane would say: Welcome to the party, pal. In theory, …

How to Know Your Frenemy

[ad_1] Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. There are many different kinds of friends. Aristotle distinguished among friendships based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Michel de Montaigne wrote about true friendship, which “grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by its practice.” In this column, I have written about the difference between real friends and deal friends. And then there is the frenemy. This portmanteau of friend and enemy first appeared as long ago as the late 19th century. It signifies a discordant relationship in which someone appears to be your friend or has a superficially friendly demeanor toward you but behaves in ways that real friends wouldn’t and shouldn’t. Perhaps the frenemy undermines you, manipulates your feelings, gaslights you, or says mean things about you behind your back. Identifying frenemies isn’t always easy, because the behavior can be designed to go undetected, or perhaps to be so …