David Brooks on Trump

David Brooks from the New York Times is a conservative Republican.  While I disagree with many of his opinions, I really respect him.  He is reasonable.  He is smart.  He is articulate.  He is respected.   He can disagree without being disagreeable.  I hear him most Friday afternoons on my drive home on NPR with E. J. Dionne, thinking about the issues of the week.  I wouldn't even call it a debate, because both men are just so intelligent.  They are both brilliant men on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

When I read David Brooks' pieces, I feel smarter.  Enlightened.  He often gives his readers another way of looking at things.  I tend to be a little more black and white.  David Brooks teaches me to be a little more gray.

So, I am very interested about how an intelligent Republican sees Trump.  Here is an excerpt from his latest op-ed piece.

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

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.

“His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources,” they wrote.He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants.