"No, not Trump. Not ever." Conservative columnist David Brooks rips Trump to shreds.

[pnwmom]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/opinion/no-not-trump-not-ever.html

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.

[pangaia]

1. Trump supporters do not in fact deserve respect.

THEY are the greater danger

[moriah]

2. Well, how about pity?

I really do feel sorry for anyone with too much hate and too few braincells to see through his act.

[Hydra]

5. This is what happens when you limit people's options

All they want to do is go to work, raise their families, have a decent standard of life and give their kids a leg up.

Leadership of both parties are not offering that. Trump may not be sincere in being an outsider, but do you take a chance when you are in danger or do you let go and fall?

[63splitwindow]

15. Yet Trump personifies the class of people...

who would use and abuse the less affluent to build his own wealth. And by abuse I mean work and conditions that are dangerous, inhumane and worse.

[Hydra]

16. And again, what is the alternative?

Trump is tapping in to all the anger and frustration the establishment has been brewing for decades. Bernie is doing the same. Trump will be on the ballot, Bernie may not be.

Not advocating for Trump, but what do you do if you are on the right and hurting? Vote for a continuation of policies from a person you don't like or trust? Or do you take a chance and hope that the guy on "your" side will not be beholden to big money?

[63splitwindow]

20. Don't you see...

that he is worse than "beholden to big money"------- he IS big money!!! He simply cuts out the middleman in the corruption being railed against----- he IS the corruption being railed against and his gross ineptness in both domestic and foreign policy has a higher chance of potentially disastrous (including existential) failure that any, ANY, alternative.

[pampango]

25. And the turn to the right is happening everywhere, not just here.

The stunning truth that explains the rise of the far-right in Britain and elsewhere

The same thing that's happening everywhere else. Right-wing populists are trying to make their country great again by, you guessed it, keeping immigrants out and negotiating great, and I mean great, deals. ... The other part of this is that, as de Tocqueville told us, there's nothing more dangerous than unmet expectations. ... Which is just another way of saying that it wasn't a question of how fast you were moving toward where you thought you'd be, but rather how far you were from it.

That's why it's no surprise that right-wing populism is on the march in Britain and everywhere else for that matter. People are poorer than they thought they'd be, so they don't feel like they can afford to be as generous to immigrants anymore. That's even true in the erstwhile socialist utopias of Denmark, Sweden and Finland, where the right-wing Danish People's Party, Sweden Democrats (who have their roots in neo-Nazism), and Finns Party have all risen near the top of the polls.

Today's right-wing populists, depending on your opinion of Donald Trump, aren't fascists so much as nationalists. So they might exploit racial tensions and they might be illiberal, but they probably don't want to start World War III. ... That's because immigration and globalization are both social issues as much as economic ones that have been fertile ground for nationalists regardless of the state of GDP growth.

What we're saying, then, is that there's been a baseline of right-wing populism the past 25 years as immigration has reshaped countries' identities and deindustrialization has reshaped their economies. And that it's spiked as economic growth has flatlined since 2008. The result is right-wing populist parties are, if not getting closer to power, at least setting the terms of the debate in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, and Croatia, not to mention actually winning it in Hungary and Poland.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/31/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-that-explains-the-rise-of-far-right-politicians-everywhere/

[JustAnotherGen]

27. They take the chance that Trump is right

If only "those people weren't here" my life would be better.

He's chipping away at their sense of common decency and getting them to buy into the idea that certain ethnic groups, religions and races are not human. When we aren't human - it will be easy to marginalize us.

The Hutu leadership was very good at this and Trump is an apt pupil.

[moriah]

22. But he's everything they really should hate. And don't see it. That's the act.

It's people like him who are responsible for the middle class diminishing. Every time he used one of his company's bankruptcies to make a personal profit, all the taxes those damaged companies would have paid on the debts owed to them got written off as tax reductions by yet other companies.

If they're at all religiously motivated, his inability to even say the names of Bible chapters should reveal him as a phony whose never actually listened to a sermon in his life if he did attend the Presbyterian church whete he claimed he felt "cleansed" by "eating the little cracker".

[Zo Zig]

3. Bo Bo

This is the bullshit you and your party have been selling since Nixon. You fucking own this, you and all the lackwits that are repubics. Haters is what you are.

[Hydra]

4. LMAO

"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."

I'll be holding my breath.

[Jesus Malverde]

6. His record is not so good...

https://m.

[pnwmom]

8. Most media people vastly underestimated him. n/t

[Jesus Malverde]

9. Watching Scott Adams branding video makes me think it's going to be a bumpy road...nt

[pnwmom]

12. I haven't seen the video, but I know Adams supports Trump. Which makes

me lose all respect for Scott Adams (not that I've had much since he emerged as a libertarian.)

[Jesus Malverde]

13. Here his skill at branding.

https://m.

The money shot at one point Trump had the crowd debating whether Hillary was more crooked or more heartless. At the 2:40 mark or so.

[pnwmom]

14. Adams is not objective on this -- he's using his own powers of persuasion

to convince us of Trump's.

I agree that Trump is a serious risk. But I can't understand why Adams is a supporter.

[basselope]

19. He's not a supporter... but he is an admirer of the technique Trump is using.

Those are two different things.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/141605245101/whos-afraid-of-donald-trump

[ProudProgressiveNow]

7. He really blasted him...

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.

[First Speaker]

10. I welcome Brooks saying this...

...I don't have a lot of respect for him, and he's remarkably obtuse most of the time. But anyone who stands for basic decency, and opposes demagogues, is on our side in 2016. I hope that some more "conservatives" find some vestiges of their souls before November...

[davidthegnome]

11. Neither Trump's supporters... nor David Brooks

deserve respect.

[hibbing]

17. David Brooks + Iraq War

Keep living in that bubble David.


Peace

[Wounded Bear]

18. Ah, yes, Mr David "Tardy to the Party" Brooks...

now he tries to come out as the 'moderate' Republican in the room. This after years upon years arguing for the Repub party to go down this road, and now he needs a change of direction. Maybe he should start to shun the RW echo chamber mediabots that pumped fuel on this fire for so many years and paid him handsomely for countless appearances on TV.

Yeah, David, you are at least in part to blame for this shit storm that your party has become. I'm not really ready to forgive you. As for Trump supporters, sorry, can't respect people who have bought into your propaganda with no critical thinking for so many years. When they start to 'respect' the carnage they have perpetrated on low income and minority people throughout the country, perhaps I'll feel some pity or respect for their hurt feelings.

[yellowcanine]

28. Evidence of David Brooks "Tardy to the Party" credentials.

Brooks was in the thick of the false equivalency of - "Yes the Republicans in Congress don't have a plan for the economy but neither does Obama" which played a big role in the rise of Trump.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/david-brooks-obama-plan-birther.html

[L. Coyote]

21. Trump supporters should be feared. That kind if ignorance is dangerous.

Hatred will never have my respect. Hatred is the foundation of wars and genocide.

[JNelson6563]

23. Guys like this made people doubt the divine right of kings.

Hard to believe there are people who would actually want him as a leader.

[JHB]

24. You. Made. Him.

[JustAnotherGen]

26. I don't believe him

He will fold. If not sooner, then later.

And Trump is a product of his supporters. Brooks may have let them off the hook, but I refuse. Not ever.