By David Brooks
Friday, 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.
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