How ugly was he?

That's from my son Chris, who, as I told you before, is in the midst of a project of reading a biography of every American President. He reads his books in book form, so he texts photos of paragraphs when he's got something to share.

The paragraph above comes from Ron Chernow's "Grant" (commission earned).

How ugly was General Benjamin Butler? Pictures, here, at Wikipedia. He looks bad, but not as bad as those words make him sound. As Chris put it: "You have to really hate someone to describe them that way."

Here's Butler's General Order No. 28 (with rhetorical flourishes that may remind of a certain modern-day President):

Chris and I independently thought that seemed like a Trump tweet! The capitalization is so evocative. And that willingness to use strong interpretations of law to intimidate those who are affronting you....

Maybe Trump is tapping into a deep vein of American rhetoric.

"Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion."

That's the crushing first sentence of Dwight Garner's book review, "A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn’t Have Much of What Made Him Great/Ron Chernow traces the life of a profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty writer" (NYT).

[Chernow's] book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign.

Chernow is the author, most famously, of “Alexander Hamilton” (2004), which Lin-Manuel Miranda devoured while on a vacation

"Women and people of color are not considered the readers of presidential history. And I think that’s related to this emphasis on masculinity."

Said Alexis Coe, author of the George Washington biography, “You Never Forget Your First,” quoted in "Why are historians obsessed with George Washington’s thighs?" (WaPo).

Ron Chernow (“Washington: A Life”) fixated on his “virile form,” particularly his “wide, flaring hips with muscular thighs.” Richard Brookhiser (“Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington”) remarked on his “well developed” thighs and quoted a bodybuilder who examined a Washington portrait and said, “Nice quads.” Joseph J. Ellis (“His Excellency: George Washington”) wrote that his “very strong thighs and legs ... allowed him to grip a horse’s flanks tightly and hold his seat in the saddle with uncommon ease.”... 

Why does Coe think women aren't interested in male body parts?! It seems to me that the focus on the physical body is especially interesting to women. I think biographies should tell us a lot about how people looked and what sort of physical powers and problems they had. I'd think male authors may tend to want to tell us about the physical attributes of the female characters, so it's good for them to make an effort to depict the masculinity of the men. 

By the way, since when are "wide, flaring hips" considered highly masculine?

"An exuberant President Trump is considering attending the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, which he boycotted the last two years."

Axios reports.

Yesterday's post-Mueller trip to Capitol Hill was being called a "victory lap" — and this could be his next stop.... Historian Ron Chernow is the featured speaker. The association isn't having an entertainer this year.

Well, if they have Trump, they will have an entertainer.

It goes without saying: It could be awkward for both sides.

Ha ha.

I hadn't noticed that Trump went to Capitol Hill yesterday. Here's the AP article about that:

Trump strode into a high-spirited gathering of Senate Republicans on Tuesday, flanked by party leaders, saying the attorney general’s weekend summary of Mueller’s report “could not have been better.” GOP senators applauded his arrival, and he celebrated what he called his “clean bill of health.”...

Trump’s hour-long talk to Senate Republicans touched on trade, foreign policy and a vote later in the day on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which the Senate declined to take up. Trump said the climate-change proposal would be a good campaign issue to fight over with Democrats.

"declined to take up" = voted 57 to 0 against. There was a vote, so they "took up" the idea in the sense that they had a vote. AP is ambiguous in a way that feels pro-Democrat to me.

"The White House Correspondents’ Association announced on Monday that for the first time in 15 years, no comedian would crack jokes at its annual black-tie dinner in April."

"Instead, Ron Chernow, the historian and biographer of Alexander Hamilton and John Rockefeller, will speak on the First Amendment. The dinner, intended to commemorate comity between the president and his press corps, has come under immense pressure in the age of 'fake news,' and President Trump has declined to attend two years running. This year’s performer, the comedian Michelle Wolf, outraged the Washington crowd with her off-color jokes about members of the administration. Mr. Trump, for his part, declared the dinner 'DEAD as we know it.'"

The NYT reports.

This one certainly gets my Era of That's Not Funny tag.