New York Times columnist David Brooks is theoretically supposed to be PBS News Hour’s conservative half of its weekly Friday news recap with Washington Post associate editor and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart. However, he constantly fails to live up to this arrangement, and this Friday was no exception, as he alleged that people all over the world will die because the Trump administration simply wants to “break things.”
Host Geoff Bennett set the table for Brooks by reading part of one of his recent columns, “And you wrote about this your — past week in a column, where you said that it's ‘the working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions,’ that people who voted for change want to see that change.”
Brooks began by trying to contrast the mindset of Trump voters with the Trump administration, “Yes, the people who voted for Trump had a good reason to. Like, high school-educated people die eight years sooner than college-educated people. High school-educated people, their kids, by sixth grade are four grade levels below college-educated people. They're much more likely to say they're lonely. They're much more likely to live in devastated communities without social capital. So, if you had a populist government, they would have policies to address these serious issues.”
Instead, Brooks alleged:
The Trump administration is not leading with that. They really don't have plans for any of this. And when you look at who's in the administration, it's obvious why. The president and Elon Musk are University of Pennsylvania graduates who are billionaires. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Yale. J.D. Vance went to Yale. Stephen Miller went to Duke. These are the highly educated right-wingers. And I have been around these — all these people all my life. I used to be one. And there are two types. There are, one, people who believe in conservative governance.
And then there's the other type. They're just anti-left. They don't have a positive vision for conservative governance. They want to tear down the institutions that they believe the left controls.
Dialing up the rhetoric, Brooks continued, “He goes after USAID. He goes after the Forest Service. He goes after the Department of Education. And so it's all tearing down institutions that they believe the left controls. And the problem with that is that the pain is born by the woman in Namibia who's going to die of AIDS, the kid in Ohio who's going to die of cancer because NIH, medical research has been gutted. And so it's — F. Scott Fitzgerald put it well. Rich people are careless. They break things. And I think that's what's happening here.
Brooks chose to immediately go for the most sympathetic examples, but what do the Department of Education or USAID’s funding of Serbian DEI initiatives have to do with cancer research?
Here is a transcript for the February 21 show:
PBS News Hour
2/21/2025
7:44 PM ET
GEOFF BENNETT: And you wrote about this your — past week in a column, where you said that it's “the working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions,” that people who voted for change want to see that change.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, the people who voted for Trump had a good reason to. Like, high school-educated people die eight years sooner than college-educated people. High school-educated people, their kids, by sixth grade are four grade levels below college-educated people. They're much more likely to say they're lonely. They're much more likely to live in devastated communities without social capital.
So, if you had a populist government, they would have policies to address these serious issues. The Trump administration is not leading with that. They really don't have plans for any of this. And when you look at who's in the administration, it's obvious why. The president and Elon Musk are University of Pennsylvania graduates who are billionaires.
Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Yale. J.D. Vance went to Yale. Stephen Miller went to Duke. These are the highly educated right-wingers. And I have been around these — all these people all my life. I used to be one. And there are two types. There are, one, people who believe in conservative governance.
And then there's the other type. They're just anti-left. They don't have a positive vision for conservative governance. They want to tear down the institutions that they believe the left controls. And so that's what they're doing. That's what Bush — that's what Trump goes after.
He goes after USAID. He goes after the Forest Service. He goes after the Department of Education. And so it's all tearing down institutions that they believe the left controls.
And the problem with that is that the pain is born by the woman in Namibia who's going to die of AIDS, the kid in Ohio who's going to die of cancer because NIH, medical research has been gutted. And so it's — F. Scott Fitzgerald put it well. Rich people are careless. They break things. And I think that's what's happening here.
