David Brooks Realizes He Is Terrible At His Job

Better late than never

Having found himself alone in a bar at closing time, with no Republican candidate even coyote ugly enough to drag his sad stumbling ass home, New York Times columnist David Brooks at long last admits defeat. His boyhood crush on Marco Rubiofailed. His campaign against the "pagan brutalism" of Ted Cruz has been utterly ineffective.

"The voters have spoken," writes Brooks in his latest pixelated trash fire of self-loathing. And it is Donald Trump's name they cry out in racist "poorly educated" orgasms of white man rage. All of which has forced Brooks to come to the inevitable (and seriously LONG overdue conclusion) that perhaps Brooks does not have his delicate manicured finger on the pulse of Real America after all:

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. 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.

Oh, broheim. Accurately reporting on this country has never really been your job, that we are aware of, since you have never actually done it. The extensive catalog of your inaccuracies is so famous, it is cliche to point out that there is no salad bar at Applebee's, that it is certainly possible to spend more than $20 on dinner at Red Lobster , that every other stereotype Brooks has hallucinated to make some kind of A Point about Red America and Blue America has thus far demonstrated he understands neither. It was but a week ago that you asserted, contrary to existing evidence, that the "Romneyesque assault on Trump ... may be working."

That was when Brooks also dramatically declared:

The hour is late and the odds may be long. But there is still hope.

But not anymore. Even though stopped-clock Brooks knows Donald Trump would be a disaster for the Republican Party, and for America, he acknowledges, sort of, the futility of his resistance and the complete failure of his pleas for "reason" from his fellow Republicans.

"And yet reality is reality," Brooks writes, and then lists his grievances about Trump, all of which might be fair and reasonable if they were coming from someone who still can't wrap his brain around how the Republican Party could embrace a guy who so perfectly represents the id of the Republican Party.

Like every other Republican in America, Brooks cannot bring himself to say he will not vote for Trump if Trump is the nominee. But he's not going to like it, he swears, so take that!

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.

We're sure Trump will cry himself to sleep tonight, wondering how he might win the respect of David Brooks. However, brava and mazel tov to the walking midlife crisis columnist, for finally considering the possibility that he has no idea what the fuck he is doing. It's about time.

[ NYT ]