Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why

by Alexandra Petri

  The colors red, green, blue, and white also recur repeatedly throughout this book. Green symbolizes spring, renewal, money, and envy. It can also symbolize Personal Privacy. Yellow symbolizes cowardice. It also refers to portions of the book that deal with Investigative Techniques, but I think it can mean both things at the same time. Red is usually blood or anger but here alludes to the Grand Jury, whose presence was felt throughout this book.

  This whole book is an example of synecdoche, in which a part stands for the whole. For instance, you say “wheels” when you mean “a car,” or “the unredacted portions of The Mueller Report” when you mean The Mueller Report. Synecdoche is a useful rhetorical device and I like it a lot, even if it is not one of the ones Winston Churchill mostly used.

  The conflicts of Man vs. Man and Man vs. Society are very prominent conflicts that are demonstrated throughout this book. Sometimes, a character will find himself opposed to other characters, who will try to stop him by just not doing what he has asked or by pretending they are confused by his request or sometimes by resigning. The Deep State, in this book, can represent society.

  One way in which this book did not succeed was its lack of female characters. Ivanka Trump appeared briefly, but her character was not as developed as it could have been. Hillary Clinton was, in some ways, the villain of this book, according to some, but I think if it were their intention for her to be the villain, they should have made her do more. They just say she is crooked without stating why, which is an example of telling without showing.

  Throughout the book, the character of Donald Trump was looking for protection, which we see from the fact that the word “protect” occurs more than eighty times in the course of the book, although some of those times, I am now realizing, are at the top of the page next to the title of the report. But mostly they are in the text. He wants protection, which is demonstrated by him saying, “ ‘You were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect” to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, whose name is a telling reference to lost causes.

  This book examines the theme of protection through all three types of irony. In his quest for protection, Donald Trump makes an allusion to the play Angels in America when describing what a good protector should do (not take notes, just like Roy Cohn). This is an example of verbal irony. Secondly, the character Michael Cohen also says he wants to protect the president, but some characters disagree that this is what his actions accomplish (situational irony). And lastly, when Donald Trump says, “I’m f—ed,” it is an example of dramatic irony, because he does not yet know that Congress is going to protect him and never take any action that could possibly lead to him not being in office anymore, which is something we as the reader already know.

  A character I really liked was George Papadopoulos, who was referred to as “Greek Guy” in a footnote to show comic relief. It is good to have some characters whom you do not have to take seriously, especially if the book is long.

  The narrator seemed very ambivalent. Sometimes I thought, am I supposed to trust this narrator? Sometimes the narrator seemed on the verge of saying something very profound, but then there would be another black box. Black boxes can also symbolize censorship.

  I found the black boxes distracting but also moving. This book asks, in a way, are we not all trapped in boxes, unable to connect? I think the boxes were very indicative. Sometimes the box looked like a Tetris that was successful, as on page 44. Sometimes the box looked like a brutalist beret. I think the boxes were a kind of Rorschach test for the readers to see whatever they are inclined to in them. I saw the craven darkness at the heart of everything. This is like in the famous book Heart of Darkness.

  Also they symbolized the American Dream.

  One thing that I liked about the book was that it let you draw your own conclusion about what people’s motives were and whether they were wrong to do what they did. I think it will be fun to discuss that part a lot.

  I did not identify with any of the characters in this book.

  I would recommend this book, in spite of how it ended.

  April 18, 2019

  You Think Trump’s Getting Impeached? I Defy You to Convince Anyone at This Cursed Truck Stop.

  YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING to find support for impeachment, do you? You dare suggest that this presidency is embroiled in chaos? Well, I am at a truck stop right now to wait out an electrical storm, and nobody here agrees.

  I’ve been interviewing for what I figure is at least an hour—the clock on the wall is broken—and everyone I speak to still supports the president just as much as they did the day he was elected. They are happy to say so, even if it means talking to folks like me on a daily basis.

  The old man at the end of the counter shakes his head when I tell him the president is beleaguered by scandal. He’s not tied to his phone, like some of you coastal types. He’s not bound even to the latest fashion. I notice he’s wearing an old wide-brimmed hat and rimless spectacles, the kind I haven’t seen outside of movies. He says he’s still with the president, and that he doesn’t pay attention to the daily buzz of news. He has priorities like many real Americans have.

  I want to go out to my car, but it’s raining too hard. Coffee here is only a nickel. I order another cup.

  I try to say something about the impeachment, but no one can hear me over the noise of the soybeans, growing healthy and strong. I have never heard a soybean so loud before. Here, we have our priorities straight, straight as the corn growing just outside the window. I can’t see my car.

  The TVs here aren’t tuned to CNN or MSNBC for the scandal of the day. No, sir. They’re playing what appears to be Rudy Giuliani chanting an uninterrupted mantra for the past six hours. When I look at my watch, the hands don’t seem to move, but when I look at it again after my next sip of coffee, it says hours have passed. How long have I been here?

  Someone tries to mention the phone call to the president of Ukraine, and out of nowhere, pigs in all the neighboring fields begin to screech, horribly, an almost human sound, and they only stop when he gives up mentioning it.

  The storm is still going.

  You might think Donald Trump is mired in scandal, but here at this diner, we don’t agree. We like to see the media get riled up. The corn and soybeans don’t care about what the president has been doing on his phone calls to Ukraine.

  Whenever I try to ask, something rustles against the window, and it’s corn. I think it must be higher than an elephant’s eye now. The corn is pressed right up to the glass. I think the corn wants to get inside.

  There’s a Norman Rockwell painting hanging on the wall, and it says it doesn’t think the president has done anything bad. There’s a scarecrow in a pair of dungarees with a big pitchfork. He and his pitchfork both voted for Trump. They will vote for him in the next hundred elections. When I turn around from talking to them, I don’t see the windows anymore. Is it day or night? I thought there used to be windows. Has it always been so dark? Are we underground?

  The waitress refills my coffee.

  Do we even have foreign adversaries? I forget.

  At this truck stop, no one has a reflection. It is 2016 here, I think. Joe Biden has done something wrong. Joe Biden has done something very wrong. Hillary Clinton had better not win. If she wins, the country will be broken for good.

  I can’t see out the not-windows at all. I think we’re definitely underground now. The walls are packed earth and so is the clock and it still hasn’t moved and now there is something crawling in the wall.

  The wall bursts! There’s an enormous worm here, and I pledge allegiance to it, willingly. I burn my notebook for King Worm! We are burning everything.

  My arms are now guns. Everyone laughs. This is our joke together.

  We don’t care about a single thing that President Trump has done since taking office. We are not ashamed to say so. We love the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We love the stock market. There’s a crude drawing on the wall of a stock market going up and up, but it does
n’t have a scale indicated on it. I don’t remember coming here.

  Real America Doesn’t Care About This Trumped-Up Scandal! Real America Doesn’t Care About Any of This! Giuliani’s voice chants and chants and reaches a crescendo and the radio chants with it. We are here in the heart of America! The walls squeeze in and out, like the clenching of an enormous fist!

  Something somewhere is screaming. Maybe it is the something that used to be me. I feel calmer than I ever have. The scandals don’t touch us here.

  September 26, 2019

  Part II

  ROUT INE NIGHTMARES AND SOOTHING FABLES

  IF YOU HAVE A NIGHTMARE OFTEN ENOUGH, IT becomes more disturbing to go to sleep and not find the nightmare there. At a certain point the nightmare becomes home. At a certain point it is stitched underneath your skin. If it were not for the nightmare, you might not be certain it was Thursday.

  Who are we to say that these are nightmares? They are too familiar. These are perhaps not horrors at all, but features of the landscape, geysers that spout forth scalding, sulfurous steam hourly, like clockwork.

  No, these are not nightmares. These are simply stories we tell ourselves to illustrate more fully the beautiful intricacy of our matchless world. The hideous sound you hear now is a lullaby.

  It Is Very Difficult to Get the Train to Stop

  I was . . . wondering whether I would just be jumping in front of a train that was headed to where it was headed anyway, and that I would just be personally annihilated.

  —CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD, ON WHETHER TO COME FORWARD DURING THE KAVANAUGH HEARINGS

  I AM SO TIRED.

  The train is very, very urgent. It is moving a man’s career forward. It is very difficult to get the train to stop.

  The presumption is that the train will not stop. The presumption is that you will be a scream thrown on the tracks. That it will require a great many of you to be thrown onto the tracks before the train will grind to a halt. It can never be just the one; it must be several at once. Someday we will know the precise conversion. We will tell them: Do not bother unless there are twenty others like you, because the train will continue, and you will be crushed.

  It is painful to watch a woman caught and torn in the gears of a man’s progress. To watch the meaning of her name change into a thing that happened to her once. To watch the first sentence of her obituary get rewritten. To watch her name be linked to this man’s name (Anita, accuser of Clarence; Christine, accuser of Brett). All she asks is for the train to stop.

  To make the train stop, you must throw yourself in front. Your whole self. Your fear of flying. Your family.

  You must throw yourself in front of the train, but still it may not be enough. These trains move very fast. We must not ask why.

  Maybe the train will stop for a week. That seems fair. A week, just to make sure. A week, to take this seriously, at a gentleman’s request.

  But I am so tired.

  I am so tired of this constant parade of pain.

  In the Bible, Thomas says he will not believe that Jesus has survived unless he can stick his hand into the wounds. But this is not a reasonable thing to ask of someone who is not God, to stick your hand into their wound. I am tired of watching people become wounds. Half the Internet is a wound. Have you stuck your hand in it enough? Do you believe yet? The #MeToo movement lurches forward over a path of scars. The change is so slow and the sacrifice it demands so great.

  Even as she testified Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford kept apologizing. (“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can read fast!” she said. She was here to be “helpful,” she said.)

  Someday I want to not be tired.

  Someday I want us not to apologize.

  Women are used to squinting to see our own stories in the stories of others. To reading ourselves into the words “all men are created equal.” To being the thing tied to the tracks to raise the stakes.

  I am so tired of the moment when you discover how little your weight counts against the train’s.

  I want us to be the train and not the thing thrown under it.

  I want us to be the thing too urgent to be stopped, not the thing that must curl up apologetically to make room for it.

  Is it too much to ask to be the train sometimes? Not all the time, just sometimes.

  I am so tired of watching us jump.

  I am so tired of watching the trains keep going.

  September 28, 2018

  A Humanizing Profile of Your Local Neo-Nazi

  ARE WE DOING THESE? OKAY!

  One thing that may surprise you to learn about Neo-Nazis is that they live in houses! You would think that maybe one would live in some kind of enormous bone hut, or a stack of burning newsreels, or a large tent constructed entirely from problematic flags, but actually no. Actually Henrik (whose last name I am withholding, for some reason) lives in a regular house. With a two-car garage, where a tennis ball hangs on the end of a sturdy rope as a caution to those who want to move forward too far. Henrik immediately drew an analogy from this ball that I don’t want to repeat! But amazingly, the tennis ball is there in his house, just like in other people’s houses. It doesn’t just corrode away the moment he touches it. WILD!

  Strangely, in pictures, Henrik appears in full color, not sepiatinted or wearing a little pickelhaube. This surprised me very much.

  It surprised me less, but still a little bit, to learn that he has a dog and that the dog is just as loyal to him as a dog would be to a regular person. I don’t know if the dog understands all of his beliefs. The dog sits at his feet and he pets it and scritches it behind the ears.

  Henrik and I go to a Putt-Putt golf course. He puts on a shirt that expresses his beliefs, just like it’s a normal shirt. But it’s not a normal shirt! The shirt says some pretty impolite things. Wow! And yet: He puts it on one arm at a time! And his head goes through the hole at the top, just like a regular person’s head.

  When he hits the ball, no talons come out, and when he retrieves the ball from the hole, he does not shiver away into dust! He likes art and music, not just Wagner. He also loves Hatecore. He said it isn’t a contradiction to love Hatecore. He acts like “Hatecore” is just a genre of music, like other genres! I’m so confused.

  His lights turn on and off, with a light switch. Can you believe this guy?

  On the surface, Henrik is a striking young man, with a sharp and well-delineated chin and eyes that seem to open the windows to his soul. His eyes (and soul), like the lives he thinks #matter, are blue. When he stands next to the exposed brick wall of this coffee shop in excellent lighting for my photographer to snap pictures, he crosses his arms. I ask why he is crossing his arms. Is he trying to keep people out?

  Yes, he says. Keeping people out is actually his thing, politically. Also, he thinks it looks metal. Which, honestly, it does.

  His shirt is off-white, as he hopes America soon won’t be. He is wearing a belt with a buckle, which isn’t like anything, but it’s a very fetching belt.

  How do I put this? Like many regular people, Henrik is a LOOKER! At least an 8, a number I am told he appreciates more than some numbers but less than others! Just like people! I’m losing my mind here!

  He has a girlfriend! WHAT? Can you believe this guy? I can’t believe this guy. Just like people! Is this even allowed? He’s so—what’s the word?—mundane. But also another word that I won’t remember in time for this article.

  He has a computer, not, as I had kind of expected, an ENIGMA machine, and he is busily typing away on it, just posting his words and videos on the Internet with other people’s words and videos, like they are just the same. People might see them and think these were things that a person, living today, with a dog and a garage with a tennis ball, thought! He voted for the president! When he isn’t rallying or posting hate-filled screeds, he likes to go fishing, and sometimes he even catches fish!

  Once someone did not serve him at a chicken restaurant, he says, and it made him very unhappy, almost as unhappy as
one time when he went to a playground and saw little children judging one another by the content of their character.

  We sit down. He thanks me for being here, for taking this time with him. He wishes more people would see him as a person. Just like he also sees some people, but not everyone.

  Now Michelle and Ivanka Are Neighbors

  Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump moved to a house in Kalorama—less than two blocks from where the Obamas reside after vacating the White House. Here, naturally, is what ensued from such proximity.

  AT THE OBAMA HOUSE in Kalorama, a Secret Service officer rings the doorbell. Another Secret Service officer answers. After a brief period of negotiation, Ivanka Trump appears on the doorstep with a casserole. She is wearing an impeccable blue sheath dress and her hair has been blown out in long, beachy waves. “Hey, neighbors!” she says, in a pleasant, low voice. “I brought a casserole. I hope that we can be friends.”

  “Thanks,” Michelle says.

  “Also, Chelsea and Al say hi.”

  “Chelsea . . . Clinton and Al . . . Gore?” Michelle asks. She cannot help noticing Ivanka’s shoes: black kitten heels made of a shiny patent leather. They look fantastic.

  When the door shuts behind her, Michelle and Barack smile at each other. “She seems nice,” Barack says.

  “I loved her shoes,” Michelle says.

  The casserole is delicious. Between themselves, the Secret Service, and the girls, they finish the whole thing.

  The next day, Michelle takes back the pan.

  Ivanka greets her cheerily at the door. “Come in,” she says. “I hope you liked the casserole.”

  “We did,” Michelle says. “You know, if you need to talk about anything—climate change, maternity leave—I’m always here.”

  Ivanka beams. “Do you really mean that?” she asks. “That means a lot.”