Donald Trump blasted in a scathing Op-Ed piece published by The New York Times.
American conservative political and cultural commentator David Brooks blasted Donald Trump in a Friday Op-Ed column entitled: “No, Not Trump, Not Ever.“
The Republican presidential front-runner has been the subject of several scathing pieces recently, including a piece by the editorial board for The Washington Post calling Trump “a threat to American democracy” and a piece by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), who released their updated global risk assessment on Wednesday, warning that a Trump victory “could disrupt the global economy and heighten political and security risks in the US.”
Brooks begins his piece by noting that “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.”
He goes on to note that the operative question is “Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?”
Brooks then explains that the media clearly misjudged Trump’s ascendance and notes that his followers are “are a coalition of the dispossessed,” who “have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams,” and “naturally they are looking for something else,” as the American Dream has failed them.
He then blasts Trump, calling him “epically unprepared” to serve as president and “perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes.”
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.
As support, he cites a recent report by Politico in which three reporters fact-checked nearly 5 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences, finding on the average that Trump delivered a false statement every five minutes on the average.
Brooks continues, writing:
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.
Nearing the end of his Op-Ed, Brooks writes:
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.
Brooks concludes with a hat tip to Trump’s supporters, writing they “deserve respect,” but in regard to “Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.”
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