New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “just can’t behave in even a modicum of presidentality” and “can always be counted on to cruel to those who are weak” on Friday’s “PBS NewsHour.”
Brooks said, “given all that he’s won, and given what everybody, including his wife apparently, is telling him, be more presidential, he can’t control himself. He can’t control himself temperamentally, with the aggressive attacks on everybody. He can’t control his own ignorance, which causes the abortion statements. And so he is a perpetual destabilizer, just at the moment when frankly, a lot of the party were ready to submit to him, and he just can’t behave in even a modicum of presidentality.”
Brooks added that Trump “feels no compunction, [to read up on issues] and his knowledge base is minuscule. We’ve seen it in every single interview. It’s just minuscule. But there is a consistency to donald trump. He can always be counted on to cruel to those who are weak. And a woman in that situation [having an abortion] is weak. And so no moral alarm bells went off when he said that, which they would to a normal human being. And so — but, so far, that bullying manner has been accepted by his voters, because they think, well, he’s a bully on our behalf.”
Brooks later discussed Trump’s voters. He stated, “There are some sympathetic reasons why people are voting for him. … [I]n some sense, I don’t blame them at all. In some sense, a lot of these people are disaffected, they’ve had severe losses in their lives, whether it’s jobs, or their kids adrift. In some senses, they’re just sick of Washington, nothing happening, and we’ve been — had a front row seat to that for 10 or 15 years, and so they just want a change agent. And so, some of those are sympathetic. The issue of how he treats the weak, or people he perceives as weak, how he takes economic insecurity and translate[s] it into bigotry and misogyny, that’s not to be sympathized with at all. And to some extent, his supporters have to answer for that.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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