Michael Gerson writes an unusually powerful column about the racism that Donald Trump is feeding and exploiting, but David Brooks wrote something breathtakingly better, and deeper, than even that.
- He identifies what Election 2020 is really about, and it’s not something that debate moderators appear to have brought up.
- He provides one of the best descriptions I’ve seen of the intolerability of the Trump Presidency.
- He points out how the Democrats have no freakin’ idea how to address the two preceding items – with one exception (and it’s not Parson Pete’s moralizing).
- There’s an “infrastructure” problem the Democrats haven’t noticed (neither have Trump’s Evangelical fans).
I will not quote him because you really need to read it.
I said 2016’s choice was God’s judgment. I’ve said 2020 is shaping up that way, too. Brooks helps confirm it. He’s getting near bedrock principles here — deeper even than anti-racism.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 
Forgive me if I’m missing the point here: Isn’t Brooks just preaching to the choir, to the conservative-minded “never Trump-ers”? My friends and family who voted for Trump did so *in spite of* decency. (We don’t mind the racism as long as Roe v Wade is overturned!) They have explicitly and implicitly sided with the buffoon for the sake of policy, and no moral or cultural revolution on the left will move the needle on those calculations.
In a sense, Brooks certainly is preaching to the choir. For instance, he never tries to prove his indictment of Trump. You either get it or you don’t. He’s trying to get us to assign appropriate weight to what we all can see with our own two eyes, hear with our own two ears.
Donald Trump truly is operating at the level of dominance and submission. Republican Congressmen live in terror of being targeted by his Tweets, an invitation for someone to “primary” them. The only black Republican in Congress announced today that he won’t run for re-election. He’s far from the first or the last. Justin Amash, an Orthodox Christian, left the GOP. His fate is up in the air.
If your family can’t see Trump’s toxicity, or think a few policies are more important, I don’t know how to change their minds. I, too, was once a “single-issue pro-life” voter until I saw how evil some of the candidates were who flew the pro-life flag.
We live in terrible times.
Thanks for writing, though. I don’t get much feed-back, really — which is fine since I often write to see what I think.