When George W Bush was president, David Brooks was on the Newshour continually defending the indefensible.  When DT came along, he changed sides.  I offer this long commentary that he wrote for The Atlantic magazine.  See the excerpts and then the article.

Sincerely,

Ed

Trumpism has become a form of nihilism that is devouring everything in its path.

If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere.

It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches.

This Trumpian cocktail has eaten away at Christianity, a faith oriented around the marginalized. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The poor are closer to God than the rich. Again and again, Jesus explicitly renounced worldly power.

Yes, we have reached a point of traumatic rupture. A demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down. But what’s likely to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes, because incompetence is built into the nihilistic project. Nihilists can only destroy, not build. Authoritarian nihilism is inherently stupid. I don’t mean that Trumpists have low IQs. I mean they do things that run directly against their own interests. They are pathologically self-destructive. When you create an administration in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his voracious ego, stupidity results. Authoritarians are also morally stupid. Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they are practical tools that produce good outcomes. When you replace them with greed, lust, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, terrible things happen.

in the long term, Trumpism is doomed. Power without prudence and humility invariably fails. Nations, like people, change not when times are good but in response to pain. At a moment when Trumpism seems to be devouring everything, the temptation is to believe that this time is different.

I Should Have Seen This Coming

When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.By David Brookshttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-populism-power-pursuit/682116/?utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20250407&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=The+Atlantic+Daily