Hey, remember David Brooks, the New York Times “conservative” columnist who gushed about Obama’s creased pants leg? Conservatives pretty much stopped paying attention to him then, be he went on to be (naturally) a #NeverTrumper.
So it’s interesting to find Brooks debunking the excesses of #NeverTrump:
People who go into the White House to have a meeting with President Trump usually leave pleasantly surprised. They find that Trump is not the raving madman they expected from his tweetstorms or the media coverage. They generally say that he is affable, if repetitive. He runs a normal, good meeting and seems well-informed enough to get by.
For “repetitive,” I direct people to read (yet again) Scott Adams explaining how Trump uses standard persuasion techniques, including, yes, repetition.
The White House is getting more professional. Imagine if Trump didn’t tweet.
Imagine if Trump didn’t keep pantsing our intellectual class by trolling them into overreacting and letting him dominate the news cycle.
The craziness of the past weeks would be out of the way, and we’d see a White House that is briskly pursuing its goals: the shift in our Pakistan policy, the shift in our offshore drilling policy, the fruition of our ISIS policy, the nomination for judgeships and the formation of policies on infrastructure, DACA, North Korea and trade.
It’s almost as if there are two White Houses. There’s the Potemkin White House, which we tend to focus on: Trump berserk in front of the TV, the lawyers working the Russian investigation and the press operation. Then there is the Invisible White House that you never hear about, which is getting more effective at managing around the distracted boss.
I sometimes wonder if the Invisible White House has learned to use the Potemkin White House to deke us while it changes the country.
“Learn.” As if this wasn’t part of Trump’s strategy from the git-go.
I mention these inconvenient observations because the anti-Trump movement, of which I’m a proud member, seems to be getting dumber. It seems to be settling into a smug, fairy tale version of reality that filters out discordant information. More anti-Trumpers seem to be telling themselves a “Madness of King George” narrative: Trump is a semiliterate madman surrounded by sycophants who are morally, intellectually and psychologically inferior to people like us.
You know #NeverTrumper has reached an apex of arrogance when David Brooks calls them smug. It’s like having Liberace declare that someone is “way too gay.” And believing that people whose politics differ from yours are “morally, intellectually and psychologically inferior to people like us” is pretty much the 21st Century’s Democratic Party platform.
The anti-Trump movement suffers from insularity. Most of the people who detest Trump don’t know anybody who works with him or supports him. And if they do have friends and family members who admire Trump, they’ve learned not to talk about this subject. So they get most of their information about Trumpism from others who also detest Trumpism, which is always a recipe for epistemic closure.
“Epistemic closure” seems to be the motto of our entire anti-Trump chattering classes these days.
To be sure, much of the rest of the piece is the usual elite disdain for those uncouth ruffians Trump has empowered:
There’s a hierarchy of excellence in every sphere. There’s a huge difference between William F. Buckley and Sean Hannity, between the reporters at this newspaper and a rumor-spreader. Part of this struggle is to maintain those distinctions, not to contribute to their evisceration.
“Never forget that we cultural elites are your betters! Your betters!”
There remains a huge difference between William F. Buckley, Jr. and David Brooks.
