Quote:No, Not Trump, Not Ever
David Brooks MARCH 18, 2016
The voters have spoken.
In convincing fashion, Republican voters seem to be selecting Donald Trump as their nominee. And in a democracy, victory has legitimacy to it. Voters are rarely wise but are usually sensible. They understand their own problems. And so deference is generally paid to the candidate who wins.
And deference is being paid. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida is urging Republicans to coalesce around Trump. Pundits are coming out with their “What We Can Learn” commentaries. Those commentaries are built on a hidden respect for the outcome, that this is a rejection of a Republicanism that wasn’t working and it points in some better direction.
The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?
Well, some respect is in order. Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.
Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.
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.
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.”
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.
1416Comments http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/opinion/no-...-ever.html
Robert Crosman
Berkeley, CA 8 hours ago
I wonder what "conservatives" David Brooks still supports now that he has denounced his own party's likely nominee for president. Perhaps he endorses Mitch McConnell, who announces that he won't even consider the President's candidate for the Supreme Court? Or does he love Ted Cruz, the Republican runner-up, whose dogmatic, negative personality is so poisonous that even his fellow right-wing Senators won't endorse him in preference to Trump?
Or perhaps Paul Ryan, whose economic theories derive directly from an Ayn Rand novel - the author who once insanely wrote that "society does not exist" - only the individual is real. Is that the conservatism Brooks endorses? Even the venerable conservative Oren Hatch, who once praised Judge Garland to the skies, now says that he does not deserve consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In this Rogues' Gallery of fools and knaves, Trump is only the latest and largest addition. Decades ago, American conservatism fell victim to the Reagan Doctrine that capitalism was the cure for all economic and social ills, and that U.S. government, which as designed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights is the envy and pattern of the rest of the world, is the PROBLEM rather than the SOLUTION to our ills - racial prejudice, global warming, income inequality, and all the rest. This "conservatism" is NUTS! Just, simply, NUTS!
greenie
Vermont 8 hours ago
Sorry David, but I blame the Republicans for this one.They have for years fanned the flames of anger towards "others". The backwards thinking on so many issues that they display is a travesty. The old-time conservative Republican of the past is long gone.
Trump appeals to the lowest-common denominator. He is coarse and vulgar. A lot of Americans are coarse and vulgar. Look at our popular music, videos, games, clothing, tattoos, piercings etc.
It's not just people angry over job loss and diminished prospects David. If that were so, they'd support Sanders, a clear champion of the under-dog if ever there was one. Nope. Trump supporters are not just angry over NAFTA and lost jobs. They are full of hate and looking for an outlet for it. In Trump they have found one. Good luck with that.
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