It seems as if New York Times columnist David Brooks has crawled back from the Antifa ninja play warrior resistance limb he went out on right after the last election and has decided that he can now just barely tolerate the crease in the pants of President Donald Trump. His April 28 column has announced that he is dialing back his "Outrage Level 11" Trump derangement syndrome down to a mere level 3 or 4 on the outrage scale.
You’ve got to give him credit — Donald Trump is a lot more adaptable than many of his critics.
Many of them reacted to Trump’s shocking election victory in the fall with the view, which was justified at the time, that Trump represented a unique and unprecedented threat to the republic. He was a populist ethnic nationalist aiming to drag this country to a very ugly place. He was a crypto fascist, aiming to undermine every norm and institution of our democracy.
Many of us Trump critics set our outrage level at 11. The Trump threat was virulent, and therefore the response had to be virulent as well.
The side benefit was we got to luxuriate in that rarest of political circumstance: a pure contest between right versus wrong. Everything seemed to be in such stark polarities: pluralism versus bigotry, democracy versus fascism, love trumps hate.
Trump’s totalistic menace allowed us to stand deliciously on the side of pure righteousness.
The problem is that Trump has now changed and many of his critics refuse to recognize the change. He’s not gotten brighter or humbler, but he’s gotten smaller and more conventional. Many of his critics still react to him every single day at Outrage Level 11, but the Trump threat is at Level 3 or 4.
Um, I hate to burst your bubble, David, but Trump is basically still the same as before. What changed is that you have found your "totalistic" opposition to Trump which placed you in the same "resistance" camp as anarchistic thugs to be quite embarrassing. To get an idea of just how far Brooks went out of the limb, let us take a look back at his first post-election column published on November 11:
Trump’s bigotry, dishonesty and promise-breaking will have to be denounced. We can’t go morally numb. But he needs to be replaced with a program that addresses the problems that fueled his assent.
After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think.
So rather than remain in the embarrassing laughable loon mode, Brooks is now attempting to save face by feigning bare toleration of Trump. The problem for him is that he risks alienating his New York Times colleagues and fellow Bruce Springsteen fans with observations such as this:
Parts of the Trump economic policy agenda are pretty good — corporate tax rates are indeed too high. Parts are pretty bad — threatening the Paris accords on global warming. But there’s nothing unusual. It looks like any Republican administration that is staffed by people whose prejudices were formed in 1984 and who haven’t had a new thought since.
The good news for Brooks is that his "conservative" mini-me, Ross Douthat, delivered up some very faint Trump praise a couple of days ago. Perhaps they can now bond together in fellowship (Fellowship of the Sting?) by the hallway water fountain under the angry glares of Trump-intolerant NYT staffers such as Paul Krugman.
