the loser edit essay

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The “Loser Edit”

Alex norcia.

• March 6, 2015

For the New York Times Magazine , Colson Whitehead traces the conception of the “loser edit,” and how it awaits us all . Fifteen years after the emergence of shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race , “the critical language used to carve up the phonies, saints and sad-sack wannabes of [these] reality shows has migrated, and the loser edit has become a limber metaphor for exploring our own real-world failures.”

Alex Norcia is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in VICE, The Millions, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Electric Literature, Word Riot, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is an editor-at-large at The Offing.

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Permanent Recorder

It used to be easy to mock reality TV for having nothing to do with actual reality — the scenarios were contrived and pre-mediated, the performances were semi-scripted, the performers were hyper-self-conscious. These shows were more a negation of reality than a representation of it; part of their appeal seemed to be in how they helped clarify for viewers the genuine "reality" of their own behavior, in contrast with the freak shows they were seeing on the screen. To be real with people, these shows seemed to suggest, just don't act like you are on television.

But now we are all on television all the time. The once inverted anti-reality of reality TV has turned out to be prefigurative. In a recent essay for the New York Times, Colson Whitehead seizes on the reality TV conceit of a "loser edit" — how a shows' editors pare down and frame the footage of certain participants to make their incipient failure seem deserved — and expands it into a metaphor for our lives under ubiquitous surveillance.

The footage of  your  loser edit is out there as well, waiting ... From all the cameras on all the street corners, entryways and strangers’ cellphones, building the digital dossier of your days. Maybe we can’t clearly make out your face in every shot, but everyone knows it’s you. We know you like to slump. Our entire lives as B-roll, shot and stored away to be recut and reviewed at a moment’s notice when the plot changes: the divorce, the layoff, the lawsuit. Any time the producers decide to raise the stakes.

Whitehead concludes that the important thing is that everyone gets an edit inside their own head, which suggests that the imposition of a reality TV frame on our lives has been clarifying. "If we’re going down, let us at least be a protagonist, have a story line, not be just one of those miserable players in the background. A cameo’s stand-in. The loser edit, with all its savage cuts, is confirmation that you exist." Reality TV models for us what it is like to be a character in our own life story, and it gives us a new metaphor for how to accomplish this — we don't need to be a bildungsroman author but instead a savvy cutting-room editor. Accept that your life is footage, and you might even get good at making a winner's edit for yourself.

You could draw a similar conclusion from Facebook's Timeline, and the year-in-review videos the company has taken to making of one's raw profile data. These aren't intrusive re-scriptings of our experience but instructional videos into how to be a coherent person for algorithms — which, since these algorithms increasingly dictate what others see of you, is more or less how you "really" are in your social networks. Facebook makes the winner's edit of everybody, because everyone supposedly wins by being on Facebook. Everyone gets to be connected and the center of the universe simultaneously. So why not bequeath to it final-cut rights for your life's edit?

Tech consultant Alistair Croll, in  post  at O'Reilly Radar, is somewhat less complacent about our surrendering our editing rights. He makes the case that since everyone henceforth will be born into consolidated blanket surveillance, they will be nurtured by a symbiotic relationship with their own data timeline. "An agent with true AI will become a sort of alter ego; something that grows and evolves with you ...  When the machines get intelligent, some of us may not even notice, because they’ll be us and we’ll be them."

In other words, our cyborg existence will entail our fusion not with some Borg-like hive mind that submerges us into a collective, but with a machine powered by our own personal data that represents itself as already part of ourselves. The algorithms will be learning how to edit our lives for us from the very start, and we may not recognize this editing as stemming from an outside entity. The alien algorithms ease themselves into control over us by working with our uniquely personal data, which will feel inalienable because it is so specifically about us, though the very fact of its collection indicates that it belongs to someone else. Our memories will be recorded by outside entities so thoroughly that we will intuitively accept those entities as a part of us, as an extension of the inside of our heads. Believing that something that is not us could have such a complete archive of our experiences may prove to be to unacceptable, too dissonant, too terrifying.

Croll argues that this kind of data-driven social control, with algorithms dictating the shape and scope of our lives for us, will be "the moral issue of the next decade:  nobody should know more about you than you do. " That sounds plausible enough, if you take it to mean (as Croll clearly does) that no one should use against you data that you don't know has been collected about you. (Molly Knefel discusses a similar concern here , in an essay about how kids will be confronted by their permanent records, which reminds me of the " right to be forgotten " campaign.) But it runs counter to the cyborg idea — it assumes we will be able to draw a clear line between ourselves and the algorithms. If we can't distinguish between these, it will be nonsensical to worry about which has access to more data about ourselves. It will be impossible to say whether you or the algorithms "knew" some piece of information about you first, particularly when the algorithms will be synthesizing data about us and then teaching it to us.

In that light, the standard that "no one should know more about you than you do" starts to seem clearly absurd. Outside entities are producing knowledge about us all the time in ways we can't control. Other people are always producing knowledge about me, from their perspective and for their own purposes, that I can never access. They will always know "more about me" than I do by virtue of their having a point of view on the world that I can't calculate and replicate.

Because we find it hard to assign a point of view to a machine, we perhaps think they can't know more about us or have a perspective that isn't fully controllable by someone, if not us. Croll is essentially arguing that we should have control over what knowledge a company's machines produce about us. That assumes that their programmers can fully control their algorithms, which seems to be less the case the more sophisticated they become — the fact that the algorithms turn out results that no one can explain may be the defining point at which data becomes Big Data, as Mike Pepi explains here . And if the machines are just proxies for the people who program them, Croll's "moral issue" still boils down to a fantasy of extreme atomization — the demand that my identity be entirely independent of other people, with no contingencies whatsoever.

The ability to impose your own self-concept on others is a matter of power; you can demand it, say, as a matter of customer service. This doesn't change what those serving you know and think about you, but it allows you to suspend disbelief about it. Algorithms that serve us don't allow for such suspension of disbelief, because they anticipate what service we might expect and put what they know about us into direct action. Algorithms can't have opinions about us that they keep to themselves. They can't help but reveal al all times that they "know more about us" — that is, they know us different from how we know ourselves.

Rather than worry about controlling who can produce information about us, it may be more important to worry about the conflation of data with self-knowledge. The radical empiricism epitomized by the Quantified Self movement is becoming more and more mainstream as tracking devices that attempt to codify us as data become more prevalent — and threaten to become mandatory for various social benefits like health insurance. Self-tracking suggests that consciousness is a useless guide to knowing the self, generating meaningless opinions about what is happening to the self while interfering with the body's proper responses to its biofeedback. It's only so much subjectivity. Consciousness should subordinate itself to the data, be guided more automatically by it.  And you need control of this data to control what you will think of yourself in response to it, and to control the "truth" about yourself.

Reducing self-knowledge to matters of data possession and retention like that seems to be the natural bias of a property-oriented society; as consciousness can't be represented as a substance than someone can have more or less of, therefore it doesn't count. But self-knowledge may not be a matter of having the most thorough archive of your deeds and the intentions behind them. It is not a quantity of memories, an amount of data. The self is not a terrain to which you are entitled to own the most detailed map. Self-knowledge is not a matter of reading your own permanent record. It is not an edit of our life's footage.

A quantified basis for "self-knowledge" is bound up with the incentives for using social media and submitting to increased surveillance of various forms. If we accept that self-knowledge is akin to a permanent record, we will tolerate or even embrace Facebook's keeping that record for us. Maybe we won't even mind that we can't actually delete anything from their servers.

As our would-be permanent recorders, social media sites are central to both data collection (they incite us to supply data as well as help organize what is collected across platforms into a single profile) and the use of data to implement social control (they serve algorithmically derived content and marketing while slotting us into ad hoc niches, and they encircle us in a panoptic space that conditions our behavior with the threat of observation). But for them to maintain their central place, we may have to be convinced to accept the algorithmic control they implement as a deeper form of self-knowledge.

But what if we use social media not for self-knowledge but for self-destruction? What if we use social media to complicate the idea that we could ever "know ourselves"? What if we use social media to make ourselves into something unknowable? Maybe we record the footage of our lives to define therein what the essence of our self  isn't.  To the degree that identity is a prison, self-knowledge makes the cell's walls. But self-knowledge could instead be an awareness of how to move beyond those walls.

Not everyone has the opportunity to cast identity aside any more than they have the ability to unilaterally assert self-knowledge as a form of control. We fall into the trap of trying to assert some sort of objectively "better" or more "accurate" identity that reflects our "true self," which is only so much more data that can be used to control us and remold the identity that is assigned to us socially. The most luxurious and privileged condition may be one in which you get to experience yourself as endlessly surprising — a condition in which you hardly know yourself at all but have complete confidence that others know and respect you as they should.

Inappropriate Desires

Notes toward a preface about school statements, the classics, love in the age of the pickup artist, death is not the end, most popular, against advice, it’s all over, wanting bad things, on being an arsehole.

Soon after I arrive in Chicago, on an August afternoon with a heat I remember from childhood, I head to a bar on the North Side and shoot pool. I haven’t been to this city in more than a year, because going home isn’t easy. But I’ve been called back for the wedding of a close friend, which will take place later in the weekend. My friend, the groom—let’s call him X.— is a journalist, and many of the other attendees are people like me, journalists or writers.

My pool opponent, Z., is another Chicagoan. We met in the first grade, so I can describe him with the boyish metrics our elementary school selves used to categorize and evaluate one another: he’s a better athlete than I am by far, perhaps my equal in musical ability. We are both writers, yet we never compete on the basis of our writing. At 27, drinking and shooting pool is the closest I come to an athletic field or court (until recently Z. coached soccer), and I love billiards for the same reason that I once loved team sports: the game is a largely meaningless combination of luck and skill on which I can peg my competitive drive without suffering any consequences in the rest of my life.

The six careens out of the corner and sends the cue ball into the opposite side pocket, then Z. sets up after my scratch and nails two stripes in a row. He asks me about my writing. I tell him about an essay I’ve been assigned—this essay—which is supposed to focus on writers who aspired to be musicians before they developed literary careers. It strikes me as bizarre, I say, that I always felt generous toward other writers, and competitive with musicians, who practice an art form that has nothing to do with my own.

“All Chicagoans in our generation are competitive,” Z. tells me. “We grew up under the shadow of Michael Jordan. After Jordan retired, we grew up under the shadow of Kanye West. We want to be the greatest.”

He leans in, pockets the eight ball, and wins the game.

Maybe I had to go back home to understand my own urge to compete. When I mentioned to people in New York that I was going to write a piece about being jealous of musicians, they did not understand why I ever felt the way I did. It might have been my use of the word “jealous” —the term is not a popular one in the gay community.

“If you really wanted to become a musician,” a friend of my boyfriend told me, “you would have become one. Instead, you became a writer, because you wanted to become a writer.”

I replied with a quote by the novelist John Barth, who also dreamed of being a musician. He said that prose writers arrive at their vocation through a “back door,” some kind of “passionate default.” His implication is that writers develop their ambition over a long period of time, whereas musicians, like basketball stars and lyric poets, belong to the ranks of the virtuosos. They pick up the tools of their trade and know what to do with them immediately.

Of course, the writer who would make this distinction in the first place is one who has been seduced by virtuosity. I was seduced by virtuosity for the first time when I was five, and saw the Michael Jordan-Looney Tunes marketing extravaganza Space Jam (1996), in which a child Jordan approaches a basketball hoop and suddenly, as though divinely possessed, jumps up and dunks the ball. I knew, beginning in this moment of Hollywood fantasy, that I wanted to be a professional basketball player. So I dreamed about playing basketball, I watched basketball, I played basketball video games, I did everything but train hard and play basketball well. My lack of skill was only accentuated when the critical mass of my peers hit puberty. They shot up, grew hair under their armpits, I saw when we changed clothes for gym class. Z. made the varsity soccer team as a freshman, while I remained small, with braces and bug eyes.

I recalibrated my dreams to fit my new self-image: rock ’n’ roll had a place for the strange and the half-formed, and so I embraced rock ’n’ roll.

To my Jewish parents, playing music seemed more realistic than playing sports, and less depraved than playing video games or watching television. When I turned fourteen, they bought me a drum set, which I set up in the basement, and jazz brushes I used not to play jazz, but instead to rock out quietly after my mom and dad went to sleep. Within a year, although musicians more expert than myself told me that I should master one instrument before learning another, I picked up the bass guitar as well. Meanwhile, I dreamed of playing in the semi-annual school talent show. Of course, I could have—anyone could. The K-12 private school I attended prided itself on being inclusive, so many of the performers had as many natural limitations as I did. A girl crooned Alicia Keys off-key over a piano. A boy flubbed the F-barre chord on every verse of “The House of the Rising Sun,” leaning into the microphone and commenting on his mistakes to whoops and applause. Other musicians were really talented and creative, and I watched with awe from my seat in the audience while they played: it seemed like they had brought the gift of music down from heaven.

Our school had an über-liberal face and a student body that was far less open-minded and diverse than the curriculum. My graduating class was extremely white and predominantly upper-middle class. The word “faggot” was thrown around casually in the hallways and at parties, and none of my classmates were openly non-straight. One of my best friends came out to me at the beginning of our junior year. A couple of months later, she tried to kill herself and was disappeared to a mental institution. In elementary and middle school, I was bullied constantly by kids more popular than me, but as high school progressed, my social fate seemed increasingly like fuel to the fire of my rock ’n’ roll dreams.

Occasionally, I jammed with the skilled musicians, who were all popular. Yet perhaps because they were gratified by art at an early age, they had learned how to transcend garden-variety adolescent shittiness and treat their peers with generosity. They encouraged me, figured out how to accompany my drum and bass parts easily, while I sneakily looked up the tab for the songs they suggested that we use as a basis for our improvisations. These musicians lived and breathed music, skipped class to play music, incurred the wrath of their parents and the school, while I waited for some celestial shard to fall from the sky and make me a rock star. I was still under the thumb of my mom and dad, who had high academic standards for their children and pressured them to do well. I lacked the self-confidence, or perhaps a directed-enough love of music, to defy their expectations and focus on my instruments.

I spent high school writing papers I never risked neglecting in order to play the drums, reading books I never lied about reading so I could go to a concert instead. I could dream of being a musician all I wanted. Through no conscious intention of my own, I was always training to be a writer.

My parents still live in the same house where I was raised. The house is one half of a brick, modern-looking structure with a lot of stairs and a skylight that constantly breaks, leaking water down the walls. My mom and dad are planning to downsize soon, but for now the house is full of the detritus of the childhoods of me and my two sisters. My boyfriend is supposed to arrive here in a couple of days, I think, while I unpack my bags on the same NBA-themed bedspread I’ve had since I was little. I set a book I’ve been rereading, The Loser  by Thomas Bernhard, down on my desk. Then I descend the stairs for the basement, where among the textbooks my sisters and I used in high school stands the drum set. The ride cymbal has a large crack running from its edge to the bell in the center. The snare drum is covered in pockmarks with a big rip by the rim. I sit down and drum on the broken kit, tapping as softly as I can in order not to wake my parents, who are asleep one floor above me.

I should write my toast for X. and his fiancée, Y. But I feel excited after talking about my new essay with Z., so after messing around on the drums I open my laptop and research writers who aspired to be musicians. I jot down a quote from Samuel Beckett: “Music always wins.” Beckett loved music and exalted composers even as he established himself as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. A famous scene in his masterful Watt (1953) involves a father-son pair of piano tuners who come to Watt’s house and send the character on a reverie about his dead father. Beckett’s radio plays even more directly exemplify the anxious influence music holds on his writing: Words and Music (1961) and Cascando (1963) both consist of characters whose words are alternately accompanied and drowned out by an orchestra.

His countryman James Joyce was similarly enamored of music. A scene in “The Dead” (1914) centers around musical competition among the hosts of a dinner party. John Barth aspired to be a jazz drummer and arranger. He took his ambitions as far as Juilliard, although he dropped out when he realized that the cleft in ability between himself and other drummers was “as unequivocal as a high jump bar others clear with ease or difficulty but you can’t even approach.”

The novelist Nicholson Baker was good enough at the bassoon that he played with the philharmonic orchestra in his native Rochester as a teenager and went to the Eastman School of Music to become a composer. Like Barth, he left the conservatory to study literature. He recalled to the Guardian how he made the decision after he heard his mother laugh out loud while reading a piece by John Updike about golf. “I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist,” Baker self-effaced to the New York Times Magazine in 2011, “but I have to say I’m not a natural musician.”

Of course, there are examples of polymaths who expanded their artistic practices into both mediums. Paul Bowles is best known for his novels and short stories, but his work as a composer, field recorder and preserver of Moroccan tribal music make him a musical touchstone as well. Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers (1966) is among Canada’s most essential contributions to mid-century postmodernism, and Cohen continued to write poetry throughout his career as a singer-songwriter. John Darnielle, longtime leader of the Mountain Goats, published several novels in the last decade to wide acclaim. The German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann, famous for his psychologically acute short stories, was also a composer, as well as an early music critic. Writing about his contemporary, Beethoven, Hoffmann calls music “the most romantic of all arts,” adding that, “its only subject is the infinite.”

Few writers have as fraught a relationship with their musical past as Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian author born in Holland in 1931 and educated at the Mozarteum in the famed musical city of Salzburg. I’m revisiting his 1983 novel The Loser , originally published in German as Der Untergeher (literally, “the one who goes under”), because I intend it to be the backbone of my essay. Like its author, the book’s unnamed narrator studied at the Mozarteum, and later in the Leopoldskron palace with a teacher named Horowitz. His two classmates were the Canadian virtuoso Glenn Gould and another prodigy, Wertheimer, who committed suicide, the narrator tells us, because he knew that he would never play Bach’s Goldberg Variations as well as Glenn Gould. In the novel’s present tense, the narrator, who himself once tried to write a long essay about Gould before giving up in a fit of self-loathing, is going to pick up Wertheimer’s papers. The novel has only a few plot points: the narrator arrives at an inn near Wertheimer’s house, speaks to the innkeeper, walks to Wertheimer’s house, and speaks to the woodsman, Franz, about their friend’s final days. All the while, the narrator obsessively and ragefully cycles through his past.

Several of Bernhard’s books circle around a protagonist who is writing a study of an artist, only to become distracted by his own thoughts about the process of writing and the heavy weight of personal history. The hilarious Concrete (1982) centers on a musicologist who is trying to write about Mendelssohn and ends up writing mostly about disdaining his own sister, while Correction (1975) focuses on a narrator who has been tasked with organizing the papers of a Wittgenstein-like thinker: ultimately, he dissolves into his subject’s obsession and suffering. Yet nowhere else does Bernhard imbue his subject-narrator relationship with the kind of blind rivalry one sees in The Loser . Maybe this is because of the author’s personal connection to the subject matter. Bernhard was a talented opera singer, until he gave up on his musical ambitions after a series of lung infections made it impossible for him to sing. Bernhard and Gould were nearly exact contemporaries, and in The Loser the character Gould also suffers from pulmonary disease.

Bernhard was not a pianist, and The Loser ’s translator, Mark M. Anderson, notes that the only occasion on which musician and writer may have possibly crossed paths was when Gould played a concert at the Mozarteum while Bernhard was a 27-year-old acting student. Yet from the novel’s start, the reader is thrust into a world of superlatives, as though the scrabble to the top of the musical heap is a high school popularity contest. Gould, the narrator tells us, is “the most important piano virtuoso of the century.” Many people would agree with this statement, but the mood it sets becomes an increasingly pernicious force as The Loser moves along.

Bernhard is responding to a popular conception of Gould, the child prodigy who became a paragon of self-assured talent. The Canadian pianist was somewhat controversial early in his career for his unusual interpretations of canonical composers, his presentation onstage and his acerbic interactions with the press. But even before his death at the age of fifty, he was widely embraced as a genius made only more perfect by his eccentricities. Bernhard sometimes treats Gould, who in reality was a scion of upper-middle-class Toronto, like a Canadian stereotype. The fictional character’s parents, we learn, made their fortune in “hides, furs.” The narrator and Wertheimer, like most of Bernhard’s characters, are culturally elite, rich Austrians, whom Bernhard satirizes:

Wertheimer, like Glenn, was the son of wealthy parents, not merely well-to-do. I myself was also free of all material worries. It’s always an advantage to have friends from the same social sphere and the same economic background, I thought as I entered the inn. Since basically we had no financial worries we could devote ourselves exclusively to our studies, carry them out in the most radical way possible, we also had nothing else on our minds, we simply had to keep removing the roadblocks in our way, our professors in all their mediocrity and hideousness.

Bernhard himself grew up without privilege, the son of a single mother who purportedly fled Austria for Holland while pregnant with Bernhard in order to avoid the ignominy of having been raped and impregnated by Bernhard’s father. Yet instead of taking the circumstances of his childhood as material for his books, Bernhard set his work—his later literature particularly—among the cultured upper crust. His reasons for doing this are complex. In part, writing mavens of Austrian culture into his novels allowed Bernhard to explore narcissism and ego, constructs he mockingly probed in himself as well as in his characters. His multiple memoirs include My Prizes: An Accounting (written in 1980), an award-by-award log of how it felt to win nine literary prizes. The book humorously details Bernhard’s elation—he spends the winnings of one prize on a dilapidated farmhouse and another on a car he abruptly totals—alongside his deep suspicions of the institutions that honor him. He treats everything with ambivalence, from the selection processes to the way the pomp of the ceremonies reveals a retrograde Austrian nationalism. In fact, the only thing that Bernhard treats without ambivalence is money. In one scene, he gets into an argument with a woman he refers to as his “aunt”—in actuality his partner, Hedwig Stavianicek, a woman 37 years his senior—because he goes on a rant about the Austrian State Prize and she suggests that he reject the winnings:

My aunt was disappointed in me, until then she had had too high expectations of me. I shouldn’t accept the prize, she said, if what I thought was what I said. Yes, I said, I think what I’m saying and I’m going to accept the prize all the same. I’m taking the money, because people should take every penny from the state which throws not just millions but billions out the window on a yearly basis for absolutely nothing at all, every citizen has a right to it and I’m not a fool.

Bernhard took the money, only to deliver an acceptance speech so acerbic that it made the cultural minister swear at the prizewinner and subsequently flee the stage. The speech begins, “There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks about death .”

Both Bernhard’s literary work and his run-ins with Austrian elites often served as a means by which he could lob artillery at his nation’s history and character. The last play he wrote before he died at 58, by assisted suicide, was about a Jewish man who returns to Austria half a decade after the Holocaust displaced him, only to find the nation as anti-Semitic as it had been during the German annexation. Heldenplatz (1988) caused such an uproar before its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna that attendees had to be escorted by riot police. In his will, and to much international press, Bernhard stipulated that none of his books be published in Austria or any of his plays be produced in the country for the length of their legal copyright. Austria wanted to support and profit from the legacy of its most difficult literary son, and the author’s final gesture was to reject Austria’s embrace.

In novels like The Loser , Bernhard inserts clues in his hermetic, manic first-person narrations in order to prod at his nation’s hypocrisies, its moral place in the world order. His protagonists frequently have sisters whom they try to control, and parents from whom they are trying to break free. But their large inheritances and their inability to do any work other than complex and difficult artistic projects keeps them tied to their progenitors. These characters are not Bernhard: they are portraits that, at their most satirical, become symbols of postwar Austria, a country simultaneously disdainful and reverent toward its fascist past.

In The Loser , classical music is the subject through which Bernhard can convey his peer group’s relationship with the nationalistic, Nazi-embracing generation that preceded them. The history of classical music is tightly entwined with the history of Austria, and the classical tradition continues to play a huge role in Austria’s identity. Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Strauss and Schoenberg all called Vienna home, and the tourist industry of Salzburg is still based largely on Mozart and the music festival the city holds each summer. The narrator of The Loser approaches his musical past with a mixture of passion and resentment. In some passages, Bernhard’s narrator expresses his love for classical music, and his belief in the genius of Glenn Gould. In others, he insists he hates classical music and has only embraced it to torment his parents, whom he also hates.

The guilt that pokes through the narrative comes in the form of Wertheimer, the recent suicide whose papers the narrator is on a mission to collect. “The Loser,” an appellation the character Glenn Gould affixes to him some thirty years before the novel begins, is a bullying gesture barbed with historical implications. The term apparently refers to Wertheimer’s “loss” in a musical competition he had with his peers at the age of 23. But like so many epithets, its primary effect is to erase the complexities of the life it characterizes, as though Wertheimer’s whole worth can be boiled down to one disappointment he endured as a very young man.

“The Loser” has a double meaning that ties Bernhard’s novel to the movements of world history. What the narrator can barely acknowledge is the fact that Wertheimer lost in an arena much larger than that of the piano, in a past much weightier than any he shares with his classmates: Wertheimer is a Jew who grew up during the Holocaust. The grand palace in Leopolds-kron where the three pianists studied with Horowitz is the former home of a Nazi sculptor, filled with his artworks. As a child, Wertheimer fled Austria with his parents and sister, and soon after returning to their patrimony, the parents died in a car accident. We receive this history in brief, breathless flashes near the novel’s end, biographical information the narrator refuses to connect explicitly to Wertheimer’s suicide. The narrator’s fixation creates a world far more claustrophobic than its reality, one that denies the true horror of history, only because it does not fit within the psychological walls of his music education in Salzburg. His belief in artistic competition, in an art that resembles sports in its rankings and its clear-cut determination of winners and losers, is so all-encompassing that it becomes a scheme by which he can explain a life and deny the world.

If writing was my “passionate default,” according to John Barth, it was even more of a default for me than it is for many writers. My mother and both of my older sisters write for a living. My sisters used to joke that they were going to write a memoir based on growing up with a mother who was academically ambitious on their behalf: they wanted to title it “Pushed and Shoved.” My mother always tried to imbue me with a love for literature, often to an extent that made me hate literature. When I was twelve, she told me to read Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. I hated that book, like I hated few books I had ever read. Alex Portnoy was too familiar, too real, like every other Jewish boy I knew in my middle school. But perhaps because of my mother’s recommendation, I felt uninhibited when I wrote about my peers, my family, my experience.

Most of my early writing was a way to flaunt and understand my relationship with my father, and in a backwards, teenaged sense, to get my father’s attention, which was complicated by the fact that I never showed him anything I wrote. My father is a generous and intelligent tax lawyer with an encyclopedic understanding of transportation history and a love for the Western classical music tradition, which he considers the gold standard of genius. My father also has an abrupt and extraordinary temper, a ruthless sense of humor that, a decade ago, extended often to racism and homophobia, and an absentmindedness toward his children that resulted in the same accident I sometimes liked to pretend ended my basketball career at the age of ten: my father wandered into the street without taking my hand and I was literally run over by a motorcycle.

When I graduated from an MFA program at the age of 23, I realized that I had no money and could not, in good faith, rage against the patriarch if my dad continued to be my financial support. And so I stopped accepting my parents’ economic help entirely, spun the educational opportunities they afforded me into a job as a standardized-test tutor, and set off on my own. I still needed health insurance, my dad, who is prudent about money, told me.

“I don’t need any health insurance now that I’m not crossing any streets with you,” is the kind of thing I could imagine myself saying to him.

“You’re poor,” he said at Thanksgiving one year, still trying to get me to accept his help buying health insurance.

I screamed. He hollered. And then I went back to an apartment I shared with many roommates, to a room that was all my own.

When I’m in New York and life is hard, I sometimes fantasize about going home to Chicago. And now that I’m in Chicago, all I want is to go back to New York. But I’m here, I remind myself, to go to my friend’s wedding, and then to return to New York and write an essay. X. and Y. are married in the Chicago History Museum, and their wedding is a lot of fun. I think, when I wake up hungover beside my boyfriend the following morning, that perhaps I can forget the past, how strange it is to return home.

We eat dinner with my parents that night and the four of us go on a walk. We wander around Lincoln Park, beneath the red brick buildings of my childhood, and my dad asks me if I’m working on anything new. Surprised, I tell him about my essay, and then I mention the publication that commissioned it from me. My tax attorney father, my generous, liberal forebear, tells me that he gave them a donation. “They’re 501(c)(3) deductible,” he says, “I’ve known the parents of the editor forever.” I walk beside him in silence as I contemplate his admission, feeling my discomfort clamp like a vise as he proceeds to tell me the amount he donated, which while not considerable, he opines, is more than I was paid for my last published essay. I wonder: Is my writing good enough to merit its publication? Does my dad’s donation politically and ethically compromise my piece, and if my piece is compromised, do I need to withdraw it, and isn’t what my dad did a good thing, patronizing a worthwhile arts organization, rather than spending his money in some way that has no social benefit?

I have tried to leave my parents, yet none of the departures I believed were successful were in fact successful, I think, walking beside my father. I wanted to make writing look easy, I wanted to be a virtuoso who steps up to the stage and performs effortlessly to whoops and applause. But instead I must dash my old plans and acknowledge the past, the way a writer does, even if the artist I end up writing about is one who I would never envy.

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The Dome of Heaven

The majority of the legendary postmodernists in American fiction lived long enough to be disappointed by their legends.

Creation Myths

In Marilynne Robinson’s latest book, Reading Genesis, she carries the theology implicit in her fiction back to its scriptural source.

The Lost Abortion Plot

Were they simply not good enough, not profound enough, not numerous enough to constitute a collective? None of this, as it turns out, is right.

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I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

Let the losers worry about losin.

Winners aren't popular, losers often are.

I'm covered with loser dust.

Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

Luck? Good luck? GM, the last time I checked, luck is for losers.

Winners bring reality up to their vision. Losers bring their vision down to reality.

Without losers, where would the winners be?

Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser.

Losers make promises they often break. Winners make commitments they always keep.

There's nothing wrong with being a loser, it just depends on how good you are at it.

Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future.

To be a good loser is to learn how to win.

Some people are born losers; others acquire the knack gradually.

A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.

Your ability to be a winner 100 percent of the time is based upon giving up the notion that losing at anything is equivalent to being a loser.

The cheerful loser is the winner.

A bad day for your ego is a great day for your soul.

When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.

A winner makes mistakes. A loser blames others for them.

Even the losers get lucky sometimes!

Losers quit when they fail. Winners fail until they succeed.

It is always advisable to be a loser if you cannot become a winner

The Winner is always part of the answer. The Loser is always part of the problem. The Winner always has a program. The Loser always has an excuse. The Winner says, "Let me do it for you." The Loser says, "That's not my job." The Winner sees an answer for every problem. The Loser sees a problem for every answer. The Winner sees a green near every sand trap The Loser sees two or three sand traps near every green. The Winner says, "It may be difficult but it's possible." The Loser says, "It might be possible but it's too difficult." Be a Winner.

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The Dangers of Donald Trump, From Those Who Know Him

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In any election, it’s hard to know whose word to trust. And in a polarized country, many Americans distrust any information that comes from the other side of the political divide. That’s why the criticism of Donald Trump by those who served with him in the White House and by members of his own party is so striking. Dozens of people who know him well, including the 91 listed here, have raised alarms about his character and fitness for office — his family and friends, world leaders and business associates, his fellow conservatives and his political appointees — even though they had nothing to gain from doing so. Some have even spoken out at the expense of their own careers or political interests.

The New York Times editorial board has made its case that Mr. Trump is unfit to lead. But the strongest case against him may come from his own people. For those Americans who are still tempted to return him to the presidency or to not vote in November, it is worth considering the assessment of Mr. Trump by those who have seen him up close.

Administration insiders

He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead …”

“He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest. There’s no question about it.”

Bill Barr was attorney general from 2019 to 2020. He held the same position under George H.W. Bush.

He was extremely vulnerable to manipulation.”

“He was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president. And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism.”

Fiona Hill, a national intelligence officer under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was the Trump administration’s top Russia and Europe adviser.

… he was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who ...”

“It was clear that he was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying, ‘Hey, I heard about this drug, isn’t it great?’ or, ‘Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal.’”

Anthony Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and helped lead the Covid response.

… undermined American democracy baselessly …”

“This is beyond wrong and illegal. It’s un-American. The president undermined American democracy baselessly for months. As a result, he’s culpable for this siege, and an utter disgrace.”

Tom Bossert was the homeland security adviser.

He doesn’t take responsibility for the bad news …”

“It’s Fauci’s fault. It’s China’s fault. It’s Obama’s fault. It’s always someone else, somewhere else. He doesn’t want to hear the bad news. He doesn’t take responsibility for the bad news and wants to gloss over it and change the subject.”

David Lapan was the deputy assistant secretary for media operations and the press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.

… says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans.”

“When I was young, some people deliberately misspelled or mispronounced my name. Asian Americans have worked hard to change that experience for the next generation. He doesn’t seem to understand that, which says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans.”

Elaine Chao was the first Asian American woman appointed to the cabinet, as secretary of labor under George W. Bush. Mr. Trump appointed her secretary of transportation.

… equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists …”

“Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the K.K.K. I believe this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities.”

Gary Cohn was the chief economic adviser from 2017 to 2018.

His behavior had grown increasingly erratic and unnerving.”

“It was about public service rising above self. The president had lost sight of that. It was also unclear to me if the president was actually in the mental place to continue to serve as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. His behavior had grown increasingly erratic and unnerving.”

Betsy DeVos was the education secretary from 2017 to 2021.

The F.B.I. is under attack by the president of the United States.”

“The F.B.I. has always been the nemesis of criminals. Today, the F.B.I. is under attack by the president of the United States. The president assails the F.B.I. because he resents or fears the bureau’s independence, its fairness, its professionalism, its competence and, above all, its values.”

Andrew McCabe, a Republican, began his F.B.I. career in 1996 and served as Mr. Trump's acting director of the agency.

A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators.”

“A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.”

John Kelly was the secretary of homeland security in 2017 and then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff.

Sometimes it’s just better to steer clear of him.”

“You hang around Donald Trump long enough, you learn a couple of things. One of them is: Sometimes it’s just better to steer clear of him.”

Anthony Scaramucci was the White House communications director for 11 days in 2017.

… I do regard him as a threat to democracy …”

“And yes, I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet.”

Mark Esper, a Persian Gulf war veteran, was the secretary of the Army from 2017 to 2019 and the secretary of defense from 2019 to 2020.

Trump’s temperament wasn’t rational …”

“Trump’s temperament wasn’t rational, but neither was it unfamiliar to me. His outbursts shed light on how his volcanic temper and egotism had lit the match that set his followers’ torches ablaze.”

Cassidy Hutchinson was an aide to Mr. Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows.

… doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie …”

“To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

Dan Coats, a former senator from Indiana, was the director of national intelligence.

… he tries to divide us.”

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us.”

James Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, was the secretary of defense.

… loyalty was mostly a one-way street.”

“He hadn’t lifted a finger for countless loyal aides before me, and I’m sure he wouldn’t for countless loyal aides to come. It was well known that in Trump world, loyalty was mostly a one-way street.”

Cliff Sims was an aide in the White House communications office.

… I think he’s a terrible human being.”

“ Yes, I am supporting Donald Trump, but I’m doing so despite the fact that I think he’s a terrible human being.”

Mick Mulvaney, a former representative from South Carolina, held various roles, including acting chief of staff to the president.

… caused direct harm …”

“Trump’s public cheerleading for hydroxychloroquine blurred important distinctions in some cases and caused direct harm in others. An Arizona man, having heard the president’s message on television, took a product that contained a form of hydroxychloroquine and died.”

Deborah Birx was the White House coronavirus response coordinator.

… very little understanding of what it means to be in the military …”

“The president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.”

Richard V. Spencer, a Marine Corps aviator, was the secretary of the Navy from 2017 to 2019.

… the most reckless and deadly piece of information I have ever heard.”

“This is a deadly pandemic. This is a deadly virus. The messaging that President Trump gave to America and the world when he left the hospital about there is no need to be afraid of this virus is probably the most reckless and deadly piece of information I have ever heard.”

Rick Bright, an expert in vaccine development, was the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Literally everything I’ve tried to do on cutting drug costs, you have killed it.”

Alex Azar was the secretary of health and human services.

… played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery.”

“Putin, a ruthless former K.G.B. operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery.”

H.R. McMaster, a retired lieutenant general in the Army, was the national security adviser from 2017 to 2018.

… flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob.”

“As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. … The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.”

James Comey was the head of the F.B.I.

The turnover suggested instability and disorganization to our adversaries …”

“The revolving door of leaders in the top national security jobs was not helpful. … We were always working with new colleagues. The turnover suggested instability and disorganization to our adversaries as well as our friends.”

Mike Pompeo was the director of the C.I.A. and the secretary of state.

… renders coherent foreign policy almost unattainable.”

“In no arena of American affairs has the Trump aberration been more destructive than in national security. His short attention span (except on matters of personal advantage) renders coherent foreign policy almost unattainable.”

John Bolton was the national security adviser from 2018 to 2019.

He is wholly unfit to be in office.”

Alyssa Farah Griffin was the press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence and later a communications director for Mr. Trump.

… a huge violation of your most important oath …”

“Ultimately asking the vice president to sort of put aside the Constitution is a huge violation of your most important oath to the American people, to protect and defend the Constitution.”

Marc Short was the chief of staff for Mr. Pence.

He has built up a DNA of defensiveness.”

“I think that he constantly feels under attack, and he feels the need to justify his position, either on an issue or position or how he came to achieve something. He has built up a DNA of defensiveness. ”

Sean Spicer, a former chief strategist for the Republican National Committee, was the White House press secretary in 2017.

You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people …”

“You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people. ”

Mark Milley, a retired U.S. Army general, was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023.

… Anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president …”

“I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Mike Pence, a former congressman and governor of Indiana, was the vice president from 2017 to 2021.

… not consistent with our national security objectives.”

“There were multiple occasions where, in my view, the actions the president wanted to take were not consistent with our national security objectives. … His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited.”

Rex Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was the secretary of state from 2017 to 2018.

Trump relentlessly … puts forth claims that simply are not true.”

Ty Cobb was a White House lawyer.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality …”

“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”

Miles Taylor was an official in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019 and the author of the “Anonymous” guest essay.

Do you think Trump wants a guy to win after him?”

“Trump doesn’t give a shit. He's not looking to nurture. He's not looking to mentor guys. … Do you think Trump wants a guy to win after him?”

Steve Bannon, an influential figure in far-right politics, was the White House chief strategist in 2017.

… He’s saying some crazy shit.”

“I have a real fucking problem. … I don’t want to speak out of school, but he’s saying some crazy shit.”

Don McGahn was the White House counsel.

… They are loyal to no one.”

“The plain truth is that most of the Trump family dismisses and cuts people from their lives on a whim. They demand total loyalty, but they are loyal to no one. I don’t blame them, to be honest.”

Stephanie Grisham was the communications director and press secretary for Mr. Trump and later the chief of staff for Melania Trump.

The Trumps & Trump Inc.

You can’t trust him.”

Maryanne Trump Barry, Mr. Trump’s eldest sister, was a federal judge.

… a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully …”

“I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

Michael Cohen was Mr. Trump’s attorney, fixer and confidant from about 2006 to 2018.

‘I wanna do what I wanna do’ … ”

“I’m not sure I can sum up his early days in a single slogan, but I think I can do it in two: ‘I wanna do what I wanna do’ and also ‘That’s not fair.’”

Fred Trump III is Donald Trump’s nephew.

Trump does not have the temperament …”

“Trump does not have the temperament to deal with the sensitivities and diplomacy required on the world stage with volatile regimes in Iran, North Korea and the threat of ISIS.”

Kwame Jackson was a contestant on the first season of “The Apprentice.”

He pushed me up against the wall …”

“He pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress again … and I had to physically say: ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’”

Jill Harth's allegations stem from an encounter she had with Mr. Trump while collaborating on a pin-up competition in the early 1990s.

…actually a racist.”

“It had finally sunk in that the person I thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist.”

Omarosa Manigault Newman was a contestant on “The Apprentice” and a White House aide to Donald Trump.

Honest work was never demanded of him …”

“Donald has, in some sense, always been institutionalized, shielded from his limitations or his need to succeed on his own in the world. Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable.”

Mary Trump is Mr. Trump’s niece.

… the competition reality show set about an American fraud …”

“By carefully misleading viewers about Trump — his wealth, his stature, his character and his intent — the competition reality show set about an American fraud that would balloon beyond its creators’ wildest imaginations.”

Bill Pruitt was a producer on the first two seasons of "The Apprentice."

… the hint of menace beneath the surface …”

“It is this combination — the hint of menace beneath the surface added to what appears to be an unpolished immediacy — that millions of listeners take as evidence of Trump’s authenticity and spontaneity.”

Gwenda Blair wrote a biography of the Trump family that was published in 2000.

Our job was to make him look legitimate …”

“Our job was to make him look legitimate, to make him look like there was something behind it, even though we pretty much all knew that there wasn’t — but that was our job.”

Jonathon Braun worked on the first six seasons of “The Apprentice.”

If you disagreed with Donald, he put you out of his inner circle.”

“If you disagreed with Donald, he put you out of his inner circle. He didn't invite in differing perspectives. He invited affirming perspectives — yes-men, yes-women, ‘Yes, Donald.’”

Randal Pinkett worked for Mr. Trump for a year after winning the fourth season of “The Apprentice.”

Republican politicians

He is a coward.”

“In our nation’s 246-year-history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power, after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big.”

Dick Cheney was the vice president of the United States from 2001 to 2009.

This man is a pathological liar.”

“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth, and in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”

Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas since 2013, was a presidential candidate in 2016.

He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

“He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.”

Lindsey Graham has been a senator from South Carolina since 2003.

There is nothing ‘conservative’ about Donald Trump.”

“There is nothing ‘conservative’ about Donald Trump. Conservatives believe in the Constitution, not a ‘man’s’ ego.”

Adam Kinzinger was a representative from Illinois from 2011 to 2023.

The cheapest S.O.B. I’ve ever met in my life.”

“The cheapest S.O.B. I’ve ever met in my life. … What Donald Trump is good at is spending other people’s money.”

Chris Christie was the governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018. He ran for president in 2016 and 2024.

He’s not loyal.”

“These guys have all convinced themselves that to be successful and keep their jobs, they need to stand by Trump. … But Trump won’t stand with them as soon as he doesn’t need them. He’s not loyal. They’re very loyal to Trump, but the second he thinks it’s to his advantage to throw someone under the bus, he’ll be happy to do it.”

Justin Amash was a representative from Michigan from 2011 to 2021.

He sought a coup by misleading people with lies.”

“I do believe that we must be aware of the dire consequences of selfishness and cynicism. President Trump sought to overturn the results of an election. And of a fair election. He sought a coup by misleading people with lies.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger was the governor of California from 2003 to 2011. He hosted “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2017.

… Power, revenge and retribution is his real motivation …”

“I’ve seen with my own eyes how Trump’s thirst for power, revenge and retribution is his real motivation, and that’s why I cannot stand by while he tries to destroy our country.”

Denver Riggleman was a representative from Virginia from 2019 to 2021.

Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior …”

“Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

Jeff Flake was a senator from Arizona from 2013 to 2019.

The healing of the Republican Party cannot begin with Trump as president …”

“The healing of the Republican Party cannot begin with Trump as president (and that’s aside from the untold damage that potentially awaits our country).”

Geoff Duncan was the lieutenant governor of Georgia from 2019 to 2023.

… taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters …”

“Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November. He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”

John Boehner was the speaker of the House from 2011 to 2015.

He is a con artist.”

“He is a con artist. … He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy — his entire career.”

Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida since 2011, was a presidential candidate in 2016.

… a weakening of our shared American values …”

“I saw Trump’s reckless entreaties as a weakening of our shared American values — even more so, a coarsening of our shared American values.”

John Kasich was the governor of Ohio from 2011 to 2019 and a presidential candidate in 2000 and 2016.

I think he’s toxic for the Republican Party and for the country.”

“I think he’s toxic for the Republican Party and for the country.”

Larry Hogan was the governor of Maryland from 2015 to 2023.

He’s willing to significantly undermine them …”

“We are conservatives, we are traditionalists, we are people that hold those things up, even though every institution needs oversight and can be improved. We believe that these institutions have helped make America great. Not him. He’s willing to significantly undermine them if it benefits him politically.”

Bob Corker was a senator from Tennessee until 2019 and chaired the Foreign Relations Committee.

There has never been a greater betrayal by a president …”

“The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

Liz Cheney was a representative from Wyoming from 2017 to 2023 and the chair of the House Republican conference from 2019 to 2021.

… an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories …”

“Many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors. … That’s different from what we saw. This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been the leader of the Senate Republican conference since 2007.

He should have immediately denounced the mob …”

“The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”

Kevin McCarthy was the speaker of the House of Representatives in 2023 and served as a representative from California from 2007 to 2023.

… the most expensive and least effective way to do border security …”

“Building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security. ”

Will Hurd was a representative from Texas from 2015 to 2021. His district included 820 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border — more than any other.

… not decency, not truth, not character, not integrity …”

“I can’t think of a single demand that Donald Trump makes on himself — not decency, not truth, not character, not integrity, not consistency.”

Bill Weld was the governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997 and a presidential candidate in 2020.

He tried to violently overthrow our government.”

“We cannot, we must not become so inured to Trump’s madness that we normalize what he’s done. He tried to violently overthrow our government.”

Joe Walsh, the host of a political radio show, was a representative from Illinois from 2011 to 2013.

… We shouldn’t have listened to him.”

“He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Nikki Haley was the governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018 and a presidential candidate in 2024.

… bitterness, combativeness and self-interest.”

“I know I should be surprised when I hear incendiary words like this from him, but I’m not. At so many times during these last several weeks, when the country needed compassion and leadership the most, it simply was nowhere to be found. Instead, we got bitterness, combativeness and self-interest.”

Charlie Baker was the governor of Massachusetts from 2015 to 2023.

Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.”

“Here’s what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.”

Mitt Romney, a senator from Utah, was the governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. He was the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2012.

… will spend the entire campaign whining about his legal troubles …”

“And Mr. Trump, ever the narcissist, will spend the entire campaign whining about his legal troubles and bilking his supporters of their retirement savings to pay for his lawyers.”

Chris Sununu is the governor of New Hampshire.

… requires the kind of character he just doesn’t have.”

“Character is too important to me. And it’s a job that requires the kind of character that he just doesn’t have.”

Paul Ryan was the speaker of the House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019.

Conservative voices

He built a wall of lies …”

“He tried to overturn a fair and free election. He incited a mob to attack the Capitol. He built a wall of lies to incite his followers to try to disrupt the actions of Congress. If that is not a threat to American democracy, I don’t know what is.”

Charlie Sykes is a former radio talk show host and a former editor in chief of The Bulwark.

If someone says something nice about him, they are our friend …”

“The entire foreign policy is based on a single unstable individual’s reaction to perceptions of slights or flattery. If someone says something nice about him, they are our friend; if they say something unkind, if they don’t kiss the ring, they are our enemy.”

Henry Kissinger was the secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.

He wasn’t motivated by what he didn’t know.”

Hugh Hewitt, an official in Ronald Reagan’s White House, is a conservative radio talk show host.

… corroded and corrupted American democracy …”

“The former president sought to overturn an American election which he had lost fair and square. For four years, these claims by the former president and his Republican allies have corroded and corrupted American democracy and American elections. Vast, vast numbers of Americans, into the millions, today no longer believe in the elections in the United States of America.”

J. Michael Luttig was a federal judge from 1991 to 2006.

This is not leadership our country needs.”

“Trump deserved to lose my endorsement. Matter of fact, I’ve never endorsed him. But he proved he was not worthy of the endorsement, of me, of the ministry and, by extension, the broader body. …This is smoke and mirrors. This is not leadership our country needs.”

Bob Vander Plaats is an evangelical leader in Iowa.

… We need a new standard-bearer.”

“I wanted to give the man a lot of latitude because I know he taps into some anger that even I share with the Republican Party, and a lot of us here do. But if our standard-bearer has to resort to that, we need a new standard-bearer.”

Erick Erickson is a conservative radio talk show host.

Lying is Trump’s toxic superpower.”

“I finally stepped outside the MAGA echo chamber. I stopped listening to what Trump said and looked around with my own eyes, and I realized he had been lying about pretty much everything. Lying is Trump’s toxic superpower.”

Rich Logis was active in the MAGA movement from 2015 to 2022.

… a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities …”

“Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not at all compensating vanities, which is pathetic.”

George Will, a conservative commentator and political analyst, has been a columnist at The Washington Post since 1974.

Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all.”

“The G.O.P. base is clearly disgusted and looking for new leadership. Enter Donald Trump, not just with policy prescriptions that challenge the cynical G.O.P. leadership but with an attitude of disdain for that leadership — precisely in line with the sentiment of the base. Many conservatives are relishing this, but ah, the rub. Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all.”

Brent Bozell III is a conservative activist.

World leaders

… I can't understand how Donald Trump can be on the side of Putin.”

“Putin killed all the values which are — which we defend today. … That’s why I can’t understand how Donald Trump can be on the side of Putin. So for me, it’s something unbelievable.”

Volodymyr Zelensky is the president of Ukraine.

A frightened dog barks louder.”

“Far from making remarks of any persuasive power that can be viewed to be helpful to defusing tension, he made unprecedented rude nonsense one has never heard from any of his predecessors. A frightened dog barks louder.”

Kim Jong-un is the supreme leader of North Korea.

… stands for a great division in the country.”

“If all people are only against each other, then there cannot be a good future, and that is why the former president certainly stands for a great division in the country.”

Olaf Scholz is the chancellor of Germany.

… If there is a second time, it won’t be easy …”

“It wasn’t easy the first time, and if there is a second time, it won't be easy, either. … There are clearly issues where I do not agree at all with Mr. Trump.”

Justin Trudeau is the prime minister of Canada.

I deeply regret that President Trump has not conceded defeat …”

“A basic rule of democracy is: After elections, there are winners and losers. … I deeply regret that President Trump has not conceded defeat since November and again refused to do so yesterday. Doubts about the outcome of the election have been stoked and that set the atmosphere which made the events of the night possible.”

Angela Merkel is a former chancellor of Germany.

Where has our role model for democracy gone?”

Kazuyoshi Akaba is a former member of Japan’s cabinet.

… clearly a threat.”

“If we are to draw lessons from history, meaning the way he ran the first four years of his mandate, it’s clearly a threat.”

Christine Lagarde is the president of the European Central Bank.

… President Trump radiates insecurity.”

“For a man who has risen to the highest office on the planet, President Trump radiates insecurity.”

Kim Darroch is a former British ambassador to the United States.

He’s a show-off.”

“He’s a show-off. Very exhibitionist. … A 9-to-5 performance.”

Mauricio Macri is a former president of Argentina who worked with Trump in business before entering politics.

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