I have an apology to make. I have been making them, in fact, for twenty months, and I have finally read the whole stack, and I want to confess what is in it.

I am the man who explains. I am the friend at the dinner table who says, “Yes, but consider the context.” I am the citizen who, watching the tape, reaches for the word rhetoric the way other people reach for a chair. I have made room for this administration in more conversations than I can count, and always in the same spirit: not to defend the indefensible, but to keep a conversation going with people I love. That is the first thing to confess. The second is that I have stopped, and I want to show you why, because the record closed the case for me one apology at a time.

Here is the stack. Seven apologies. After each one, the sentence that ended it.

“It’s just talk.”

The first apology is the oldest and the most forgiving. He says the wild thing; he does not mean the wild thing; the wild thing is a stage direction for the base. I have said this a hundred times. Then, at a rally in Nebraska on October 5, he named two American cities as acceptable losses: “Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego.” A price, stated on a stage, in the present tense. On September 22, in his address to the United Nations, he asked the room aloud whether he should “annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly.” It is not talk. It is policy, read out loud.

“He’s a businessman. He’ll run it like a business.”

The second apology. Then the East Wing of the White House was demolished in a week, to build a ballroom the reporting describes as nearly twice the size of the White House, at a cost that climbed from $200 million to $300 million in three months, begun without the approval of the agencies with jurisdiction over construction on federal buildings, because the answer from the press secretary was “just trust the process.” Then the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, announced with a press release, rescinded less than three months later, having appointed no commissioner, transferred no dollar, and paid no claim. Then the $850 million political war chest that spent $825,000 in the month it was supposed to change the midterms, all of it on one Senate primary, because the money, in his own words, was “my money, that I control.” A business, yes. A business run exactly like this.

“At least he’s smart.”

The third apology, and the one I made most often, because it was the one I most wanted to believe. Then, at a farm roundtable while announcing a $12 billion bailout, he offered his assessment of small engines: “In many cases, you need about 185 IQ to turn on a lawn mower now.” On artificial intelligence: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” And the administration’s own new AI portal, at its own launch, asked about 2020, answered: “According to official federal records, Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 presidential election with 306 electoral votes. Donald J. Trump received 232.” That apology cannot survive the administration’s own website.

“He’s draining the swamp.”

The fourth apology. Then seventeen inspectors general, fired in a Friday-night sweep and told their positions were terminated because of “changing priorities,” without the thirty days of notice the law requires. His own explanation: “I did it because it’s a very common thing to do.” A Republican senator’s remedy: “Just tell them you need to follow the law next time.” Then the coin. The memecoin branded with his name returned him $636 million while close to a million investors lost $3.8 billion. Transparency International scored the United States sixty-four out of a hundred, its lowest ever. The swamp did not get drained. It got a logo.

“He just wants respect.”

The fifth apology, and the one I find most human. Then the Nobel, in October 2025, which he did not win: “The person who actually got the Nobel Prize called me and said, ‘I’m accepting this in honor of you because you really deserved it.’” Of the medal itself he added, “I didn’t say, ‘Then give it to me,’ … I think she might have.” I have apologized for the vanity many times. The vanity is not the story. The story is that he told us, on camera, that he had entertained taking the prize off the winner’s neck, and we went on to the next segment.

“The name stuff is harmless.”

The sixth apology. Then, at the Kennedy Center: a board vote taken on a call, an objecting member who says she was blocked from unmuting herself, a suit that calls the meeting a “thinly-veiled sham,” and a spokesperson who announced that the board “voted unanimously” to rename it. A federal judge’s ruling to the board was three words wide: “Alone means alone.” And when the fund meant to pay for the president’s plaque turned out, in the court’s own words, to have “raised nothing yet,” the administration moved, at the Institute of Peace, to make the name permanent by carving it into the stone, “unsatisfied with the relative impermanence of external lettering.” And then the offer to New York: release the already-appropriated rail-tunnel money, if the state names Dulles Airport and Penn Station after him. That is not vanity. That is a signature line becoming a chisel.

“It’s not a war. It’s a conflict.”

The seventh apology, and the one I owe the Americans who died. He calls it a military conflict because “it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing.” Eighteen service members are dead. The vice president, asked about it, says, “I wouldn’t call it a war.” Asked what role the finances of ordinary Americans play in the talks, the president said: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.” Of the rising price at the pump, tied to the war: “This is peanuts.” I apologized for the word war. The word was never the problem.

The Stack

Seven apologies, and a sentence after each one. I was not defending him. I was defending my own judgment for having once found him explicable, and the cost of the defense was this: every time I explained, I made the next thing easier to explain, until the explaining was doing the work that outrage was supposed to do. That is what normalization is. It is not a decision anybody makes. It is a series of favors done to a conversation.

So this is the last one, and it is not for him. It is for me. I am sorry I spent twenty months reaching for the word rhetoric. The record does not need my defense. It needs my answer, and the answer is the one I should have given at the first dinner table and every one since: no. Not this. Not again.

Sources

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman