Tuesday, May 16, 2017

David Brooks Hates Trump

David Brooks professes to be a conservative. He writes for the New York Times. In that realm, I guess he could be seen as conservative. Wherever he sits on the conservative/liberal spectrum, we know that Brooks was head over heals for Barack Obama.

From NewsBusters:

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”
It's no surprise that the Trump haters are rushing to praise Brooks' most recent column, "When the World Is Led by a Child."

It is brutal.

At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.

First, most adults have learned to sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around the classroom.

...

Second, most people of drinking age have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself.

...

His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself.

He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence.

...

Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent.

...

Which brings us to the reports that Trump betrayed an intelligence source and leaked secrets to his Russian visitors. From all we know so far, Trump didn’t do it because he is a Russian agent, or for any malevolent intent. He did it because he is sloppy, because he lacks all impulse control, and above all because he is a 7-year-old boy desperate for the approval of those he admires.
OK, but what about Trump's pants?

Perfectly creased?

Tell us about his pants.





2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll never understand the cult of personality and borderline Messiah worship around how a lot of people talked about Obama, whether the pants or the infamous thrill up the leg (both of which are below the belt, making it creepier).

All of that said, any counterpoints to his arguments? Or are we just doing the same whataboutisms and being anti-anti-Trump like Sykes discussed in his NYT piece? I suspect there's nothing there because David Brooks is right. It's all in the arrested development and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Mary said...

I gotta tell ya, anonymous, I don't read Sykes NYT crap, don't watch him on MSNBC, don't follow him on Twitter. So, I don't know what he discussed. He has taken up residency in a different universe, one he spent decades assailing.

Brooks is an embarrassment. He's entitled to his opinion, of course, but this assault on Trump is getting ridiculous. The Leftists/Trump haters are so hypocritical they apparently are too hypocritical to comprehend their own hypocrisy.