Longtime New York Times columnist Frank Bruni blasted what he called Trumpworld’s “pageantry of peculiarity” in a blistering opinion piece ripping top administration officials.
In the new op-ed out Thursday, Bruni zeroed in on former Secret Service agent turned far-right MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino, who now serves as deputy director of the FBI – a role Bruni said he was “bafflingly given.”
Bruni went on to unload on Bongino for a recent Fox News interview he delivered, where the columnist said he appeared unglued while venting about his personal sacrifices, gym habits, and his work faucet.
“If you think we’re there for tea and crumpets — I mean, Kash is there all day,” Bongino said of FBI Director Kash Patel. “We share — our offices are linked. He turns on the faucet, I hear it.”
Bruni asked: “What does plumbing have to do with F.B.I.-ing?”
Bongino also informed Fox News viewers that he “stares at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife,” before clarifying that while he and his wife are actually not divorced, they are “separated,” due to his hard work.
“It’s hard,” he said. “We love each other.”
Bruni used the Bongino interview to highlight what he called a broader trend of “Trump-adjacent weirdness.”
“Next month will be the first anniversary of Tim Walz’s branding of Donald Trump, JD Vance and, by implication, some of their political associates as ‘weird,’ and it’s obvious now that Walz spoke too soon, before Trump won in November and his administration turned weirdness into a credential and an operating principle, before weirdness started afflicting Trump allies who seemed a little less weird in the past, before episodes of Trump-adjacent weirdness proliferated,” Bruni told readers Thursday.
The Times columnist concluded that “this pageant of peculiarity isn’t a laughing matter” while describing other eyebrow-raising activities of Trump administration officials, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
“It reflects Trump’s confusion of nonconformity with boldness. It speaks to his love of performance, even if it’s the fruit of a loopy performer,” he added.