January 2017.

     This is part two of the David Brooks trilogy.  A phrase cribbed from the Ramones says it best:  “Second verse, same as the first.”  There’s no subtlety in Mr. Brooks’ effort to paint President Id Incarnate as the right-wing Other, an aberration that could not possibly be Republican.  Is it possible that Mr. Brooks, as a conservative thought leader, breathes such rarified air in his high sinecure that he has sniffed not a single whiff of what’s been wafting from the dank right-wing dungeon for decades?  Is he inobservant or disingenuous or both?  Whatever the case, he called for all good Republicans to stiffen their spines and limit The Chiseler In Chief’s depredations.  Mr. Brooks would have been well advised not to hold his breath on this one, as he should now know.

Here’s David Brooks’ opinion:

David Brooks, “The Republican Fausts,” The New York Times, 31 January 2017, A29 (www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/opinion/the-republican-fausts.html).

Here’s the unpublished letter:

David Brooks correctly characterizes the GOP’s “Faustian” bargain with Mr. Trump and commendably urges Republican legislators to oppose the Trump administration’s manifest incompetence and overreach.  However, confidence in Mr. Brooks’ prescriptions is difficult to find.  His recently expressed hope – that the new cabinet and the executive branch’s professional staff would blunt Mr. Trump’s worst impulses (“The Internal Invasion,” January 20, 2017) – was proven illusory by the rollout of the executive order on immigration.  Does Mr. Brooks believe that the GOP, beholden to its base and more fearful of primary challengers than Democratic opponents, will effectively resist a president ticking off the base’s entire wish list?  The low impulses he ascribes to Mr. Trump gestated in the conservative movement’s fever swamps and have long been cynically manipulated by the GOP for electoral gain.  Mr. Brooks should ask himself whether Mr. Trump would have risen to the presidency had he run as a Democrat.  A cure requires clearheaded diagnosis of the illness’s genesis.