Been a long time since you've seen Dave quoted here. Been a long time since Dave's been read here. Dave does not see a president in Donald Trump. However, each of Dave's columns on presidential candidates should come with the readers' advisory that, wince, Dave once saw a president "and a very good president" in a pant crease. Consider this that disclaimer.
With that disclaimer there is greatness here. David Brooks has written a serious, humorous, impassioned, reasoned, soulful, deeply moving brief against Donald Trump. This is true greatness:
...
The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?
...
And yet reality is reality.
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.
Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.
This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes. “His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources,” they wrote.
[One additional disclaimer: fact-checking Mr. Brooks' columns has revealed some non-facts.]
He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants. “You can always tell when the king is here,” Trump’s butler told Jason Horowitz in a recent Times profile. He brags incessantly about his alleged prowess, like how far he can hit a golf ball. “Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong?” he asks.
In some rare cases, political victors do not deserve our respect. George Wallace won elections, but to endorse those outcomes would be a moral failure.
And so it is with Trump.
History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, stretching back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: “Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. … They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.”
And yet their success is fragile: “Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.”
[That is the soul of the soul of this article. It is precisely on point with Trump and gives the Bible's imprimatur to the whole. David Brooks' application of Psalm 73 to Donald Trump will be remembered a very long time indeed. It is immensely powerful, immensely moving.]
The psalmist reminds us that the proper thing to do in the face of demagogy is to go the other way — to make an extra effort to put on decency, graciousness, patience and humility, to seek a purity of heart that is stable and everlasting.
The Republicans who coalesce around Trump are making a political error. They are selling their integrity for a candidate who will probably lose. About 60 percent of Americans disapprove of him, and that number has been steady since he began his campaign.
Worse, there are certain standards more important than one year’s election. There are certain codes that if you betray them, you suffer something much worse than a political defeat.
Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.
As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.
Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.
[A near perfect ending. "Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever." That ringing conclusion will ring in our ears forever." The elipses earlier omit claims of respect for Trump's supporters, just as the unbolded sentence in the otherwise perfect conclusion does. It is, in my view, a serious demerit to the article to the article. There would be no occasion for Mr. Brooks' magnum opus were there not 37% of the Republican electorate that has drunk willingly from his poisonous well and have come back for seconds and thirds. There is a messianic symbiosis between supporters, they feed off one another. If there wasn't 37% then Trump would not have become Trump, his poison would have been refused. No, the Trump supporters do not deserve respect. Many of them, seemingly normal people, like my brother, are responsible for Trumpism, some of are known by name, others are not difficult to identify. It is time for naming those names, "dispossessing" them further, arresting those who can be proven to have committed crimes, and every one of those, to shame and marginalize and disenfranchise where possible those who supported this Nazi. They should be monitored and closely watched forever, for they are the threat to the American experiment in self-government. every one of them.
I thought that in the powerful passage on Psalm 73 that David Brooks would reject the psalmists advice to meet "demagogy" with "decency and graciousness and patience." That will not do. They are not "left out of this economy," that is not their excuse. They are Americans with a latent strain of aurhoritarianism, with the Anerican curse of racism. "Baseball bats work better with Nazis," the political philosopher Woody Allen said in Annie Hall and we treat here of racists and proto-Nazis and the violent. We give them no quarter, no understanding, no respect. Baseball bats work best on them.
With that disclaimer there is greatness here. David Brooks has written a serious, humorous, impassioned, reasoned, soulful, deeply moving brief against Donald Trump. This is true greatness:
...
The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?
...
And yet reality is reality.
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.
Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.
This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes. “His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources,” they wrote.
[One additional disclaimer: fact-checking Mr. Brooks' columns has revealed some non-facts.]
He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants. “You can always tell when the king is here,” Trump’s butler told Jason Horowitz in a recent Times profile. He brags incessantly about his alleged prowess, like how far he can hit a golf ball. “Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong?” he asks.
In some rare cases, political victors do not deserve our respect. George Wallace won elections, but to endorse those outcomes would be a moral failure.
And so it is with Trump.
History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, stretching back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: “Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. … They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.”
And yet their success is fragile: “Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.”
[That is the soul of the soul of this article. It is precisely on point with Trump and gives the Bible's imprimatur to the whole. David Brooks' application of Psalm 73 to Donald Trump will be remembered a very long time indeed. It is immensely powerful, immensely moving.]
The psalmist reminds us that the proper thing to do in the face of demagogy is to go the other way — to make an extra effort to put on decency, graciousness, patience and humility, to seek a purity of heart that is stable and everlasting.
The Republicans who coalesce around Trump are making a political error. They are selling their integrity for a candidate who will probably lose. About 60 percent of Americans disapprove of him, and that number has been steady since he began his campaign.
Worse, there are certain standards more important than one year’s election. There are certain codes that if you betray them, you suffer something much worse than a political defeat.
Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.
As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.
Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.
[A near perfect ending. "Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever." That ringing conclusion will ring in our ears forever." The elipses earlier omit claims of respect for Trump's supporters, just as the unbolded sentence in the otherwise perfect conclusion does. It is, in my view, a serious demerit to the article to the article. There would be no occasion for Mr. Brooks' magnum opus were there not 37% of the Republican electorate that has drunk willingly from his poisonous well and have come back for seconds and thirds. There is a messianic symbiosis between supporters, they feed off one another. If there wasn't 37% then Trump would not have become Trump, his poison would have been refused. No, the Trump supporters do not deserve respect. Many of them, seemingly normal people, like my brother, are responsible for Trumpism, some of are known by name, others are not difficult to identify. It is time for naming those names, "dispossessing" them further, arresting those who can be proven to have committed crimes, and every one of those, to shame and marginalize and disenfranchise where possible those who supported this Nazi. They should be monitored and closely watched forever, for they are the threat to the American experiment in self-government. every one of them.
I thought that in the powerful passage on Psalm 73 that David Brooks would reject the psalmists advice to meet "demagogy" with "decency and graciousness and patience." That will not do. They are not "left out of this economy," that is not their excuse. They are Americans with a latent strain of aurhoritarianism, with the Anerican curse of racism. "Baseball bats work better with Nazis," the political philosopher Woody Allen said in Annie Hall and we treat here of racists and proto-Nazis and the violent. We give them no quarter, no understanding, no respect. Baseball bats work best on them.
