From time to time, I read the NYT opinion page. And to be sure — I rarely agree wholeheartedly with what I see there. But that is the beauty of a free America: I can think (and more importantly, decide) for myself.

I am more than a little worried that many of my fellow Americans, those cheering Tangerine 2.0… lack the critical thinking skills to evaluate what they hear, and decide whether it rings true. Just see this, as one poignant example (these people believe he keeps promises?!).

Well… I cannot help them. And while I disagree about Brooks’ closing advice to Democrats (it is largely a troll operation / subterfuge — to build an imagined “glide path”, for a future Vance run/win — if he’s the nominee in 2028. This, as Brooks purports to say… a more competent authoritarian is what America needs. Not). I will reprint some of what he wrote, in spite of this.

Here’s what David Brooks had to say — and I will confess that at least half of it rings… pretty true.

…Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley….

The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn’t work. Between 1825 and 1901 we had 20 presidencies. We had a bunch of one-term presidents; voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not happy with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country….

“Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms.” In other words, they thought they could solve the disruptions of industrialization if only they could find the evil conspirators who were responsible for every ill. Their diagnoses were simple-minded, their rhetoric over the top; their proposals, Hofstadter noted, wandered “over the border between reality and impossibility.” Sound familiar?….

Here’s how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — like the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, disgusted by corruption, intellectually rigorous (and sometimes priggish and arrogant) did not have that problem….

I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent….

Thanks David. But that last bit… looks a lot like laying the groundwork for a Vance nomination in 2028. Hard pass.

We Democrats are not in the hurt you imagine us to be — or the one you spin to your MAGA masses. We are coming for your boy — peaceably and rationally. He will have imploded by 2026 (if not much sooner). We will then hold the Congress.

And Vance will be as relevant to the conversation… as Mike Pence or Dan Quayle is, now.

Y A W N.

Out.