David Brooks
@nytdavidbrooks
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Op-Ed columnist, @nytopinion. Author of The Road to Character, The Social Animal, and Bobos in Paradise.
Joined July 2012
I get the sense that this is not only the low point of the Trump presidency but the low point of the American presidency ever. Has any president ever been this overmatched by a crisis?.
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If it comes to Trump vs. Warren, the only plausible choice is Warren. Over the past month Trump has given us fresh reminders of the exceptional ways he corrupts American life. You’re either part of removing that corruption or you are not.
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Biden is best when he speaks from his moral core. Trump doesn’t have one. It’s evident.
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I believe in democracy. I believe in a free press. I believe in open debate. I love it when my newspaper prints pieces I disagree with. It causes me to think.
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When I started covering politics I was struck by how often politicians made physical contact with voters and journalists. It wasn’t about sex. It was about connection. Joe Biden, who emerged in that era, is one of the finest people I’ve ever covered.
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The intellectual decline of the GOP is astonishing, especially when your remember how different it was just 15 or 20 years ago.
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This convention is targeted to one voter: Donald Trump. The whole convention is to make his lonely soul feel affirmed.
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Instead of spending the past 3 years on Mueller and impeachment suppose Trump opponents had spent the time on an infrastructure bill or early childhood education? More good would have been done.
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What a night. Usually when I’m up this late it’s because I’m listening to NBA Youngboy.
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I only wear New Balance because Nike was a goddess in a Greek culture that practiced slavery.
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I’m the most horrified I’ve been in my career as a political journalist and the most relieved. This election won’t be close. Have faith in the American people!.
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Yesterday I had one impression of the maga kids from Kentucky. Now after seeing more videos I have a different more complicated impression. Makes all the hot takes seem silly.
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This has been one of the worst weeks of our collective lives: 100K dead, an economy still collapsing, racism, murder, conspiracy mongering, a president more contemptible by the day. Hang in there. It will get better.
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Beto O’Rourke and John Brennan owe Donald Trump a public apology. If you call someone a traitor and it turns out you lacked the evidence for that charge, then the only decent thing to do is apologize.
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This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.
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Best Biden speech I’ve seen. Fascinating volleying between the personal and the political.
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Would you be Zelensky? Would I? What a high and heroic standard that guys has set for us in the years ahead.
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A lot of young people are going to be jobless and school-less this fall. This is the perfect moment for a national service program.
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Some obits are reporting that John McCain was driven by “raw ambition.” In my experience he was driven by an inherited sense of honor and a ferocious love of country.
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Only 12 percent of Millennials call themselves consistently conservative or mostly conservative. This is the most important statistic in American politics right now.
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Sometimes you change your mind in ways you never could have imagined.
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Our job in the media is to capture reality so that when reality voices itself, like last night, people aren’t surprised. Pretty massive failure. We still are not good at capturing the rightward half of the country.
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This is how moral corrosion happens. Supporting Trump requires daily acts of moral distancing, a process that means that after a few months you are tolerant of any corruption. You are morally numb to everything.
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Just saw a great t shirt worn by a young Black woman: “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”.
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Trump is like those French soldiers who celebrated their glorious early victories on the March to Moscow. Winter is coming.
The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke and out of business. Too bad. May it rest in peace!.
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Mark Shields is stepping down from his weekly slot on the PBS Newshour. He’s the best colleague I’ve ever had in any job. Warm, wise, considerate, generous, a man of unimpeachable good character. He puts his love of country to excellent use!.
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This is the nightmare scenario we were worried about.
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Waiters are 87% friendlier as they hand me the bill and I’m about to decide the tip amount than they are at any other point in the meal.
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This was my attempt to capture one of the finest and beloved men I’ve ever known. We will miss him.
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When the indictments come down, Trump won’t play by the rules. He’ll seek to delegitimize those rules. He’ll seek to delegitimize our legal institutions. He’ll seek to destroy the edifice of law in order to save himself.
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Republicans have now flipped 15 Democratic House seats even with a losing candidate atop their ticket. Somehow it seems foolish to govern as if progressive views are all that matter.
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Stop scoffing. Melania’s speech is at least relatively decent and humane.
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If you lived your life on Twitter you would never know music existed.
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Did Joe Manchin really just cripple the Biden presidency and make a second Trump term much more likely? Really???.
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I’m already enjoying using the past tense when I write about Donald Trump.
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McConnell is betting that Trumpism will fade without being pushed. That’s a foolish and unrealistic dream.
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Interviewing people in Watts and Compton, Calif. Bernie has a ton of support in the black and Latino communities here. Biden has not been mentioned.
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I’ve just watched populism destroy traditional conservatism in the G.O.P. I’m here to tell you that Bernie Sanders is not a liberal Democrat. He’s what replaces liberal Democrats.
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The Trump administration is like the Covid pandemic. The end is in sight but the last chapter is just the worst.
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“White Fragility may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.”
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The polarization industry describes an America divided over the virus. That’s false. 98% of D’s and 82% of R’s support the social distancing regime. All things considered we’re quite united.
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The most important speech in American history. Can anybody think of a rival?.
Lincoln’s handwritten second inaugural address (“With malice toward none; with charity for all…”) today 1865:
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One of the great problems of the moment is that morality has been replaced by politics—the language of sin, forgiveness and redemption by the language of power competition.
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We’re not asking you to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima; we’re asking you to walk into a damn CVS.
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After apartheid, some South Africans told me financial sanctions were minimally effective but sports sanctions really worked. On top of everything else maybe we should ban Russian teams/athletes.
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The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.
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Ari, this is inaccurate cynicism. I have never heard of one of my colleagues doing anything like what the Fox pundits did with Trump. Not even in the same universe.
I wonder what it would look like if MSM anchors, columnists and reporters released their texts to Obama officials, Hillary’s campaign team as well as Biden’s staff.
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It’s a thrill to see this on Twitter! Irving Browning was my great uncle. Click the image. Hauntingly beautiful.
Flatiron Building and Madison Square Park, photographed by Irving Browning, 1920s, resembling Japanese woodcut: #NYHS
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Never in my life have I seen a candidate so confidently avoid wedge issues. Biden is instead running on the conviction that, despite it all, Americans deeply love their country, and viscerally long for its unity.
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McConnell must have anticipated Trump’s attack on him. He should have voted to convict. If you’re going to take Vienna you better damn well take Vienna.
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The small detached nuclear family is great for the upper middle class. It’s been a disaster for almost everybody else.
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The problem with today’s left-wing and right-wing ideas is that they are both based on the fantasy that the other half of America can be conquered, and when it disappears we can get everything we want.
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I guess the next pandemic is a pandemic of hypocrisy.
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This is once again a country that self confidently believes in itself.
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Don’t make up your mind about Kavanaugh without reading this.
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Fed-Exed the final hand edited manuscript of my next book to my publisher. Somebody at Fed-x sliced open the package and stole it, except for one chapter. Now I’m wondering: what’s wrong with that chapter?.How writers think.
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On Meet The Press I mentioned that school shooting rates have been plummeting since the 1990s, causing some outrage and shock on Twitter. Here’s a write up of the data. 4X as many kids were killed per year back then.
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I pray for Donald and Melania Trump’s speedy recovery from this awful disease. I know we’re all united in this wish regardless of our political views.
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I had to work harder on this than any other magazine piece I’ve written. But in the end it was among the most rewarding.
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I just got off a call with the House and Senate members of the @NoLabelsOrg group who wrote bipartisan the COVID relief compromise. I have never seen so much cohesion and loyalty among members of Congress. Something big is happening there.
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This moment of heightened danger and crisis makes it even clearer that the No. 1 domestic priority for all Americans who care about democracy is to make sure Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office ever again.
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I fell in love with conservatism as a young man. What the hell happened to it?
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“The anti-Trump echo chamber is becoming a mirror image of Trump himself — overwrought, uncalibrated and incapable of having an intelligent conversation about any complex policy problem.”
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Christopher Hitchens was one of the great essayists in America. He would be unemployable today because there was no set of priors he wasn’t willing to offend.
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Steve and Jonah have been two of the bravest journalists during this whole mess. They’ve taken positions that carry real costs. Think about supporting @thedispatch.
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Charles Krauthammer is obviously brilliant, courageous and principled, but what leaps to mind is his boyish joy watching game after game at Nat’s Park. The sweetness of his heart matches the rigor of his intellect.
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Walter Mondale was possibly the kindest and most humble politician I’ve known.
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Progressives: If Trump-style Republicans were trying to impeach a President Biden, Warren or Sanders, and there was evidence of guilt, would you vote to convict? Answer honestly.
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One amendment to my column today. If Nadler believes the “constitutional crisis” is over Trump’s blanket refusal to cooperate with Congress (rather than the narrow subject of redaction) then is he correct.
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My core life lesson: take two trips. If you’re not sure you can carry it all, take two trips. I have nothing left to teach you.
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In elite institutions there is a minority who are progressive and intolerant. There is a large majority who are progressive and tolerant. Life is a lot more complicated and contested than many anti-wokesters imagine.
In which David Brooks seems to argue that there is no such thing as a woke revolution transforming all of our institutions. I'm against illiberal conservatism, but I'm not going to deny the new power of illiberal leftism.
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It’s hard to run for national office from California or New York. The urban parts of those states are so unrepresentative you don’t understand what you’re about to face.
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Obviously, proudest moment of my life.
Lovely room. The art is fantastic. The lighting is perfect. The exercise/pull up bar is a Room Rater first. Bravo, sir. 9/10 @nytdavidbrooks
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Readers, many of us got involved in the Black Lives Matter marches last summer. Do Black lives matter to you only when they serve your political purpose? Shouldn’t we be marching to get Black and brown children back safely into schools right now?
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The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. You don’t help your cause by wrapping your arms around an alleged sexual predator and a patriarchic bigot.
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The main takeaway. Attempts to argue that Biden is a tool of the hard left are failing. He’s created a center-left coalition well within the American mainstream.
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Moral formation is not like learning math. It’s not cumulative; it’s inverse. It’s through the sins and the ensuing repentance that moral formation happens. We try not to judge people by what they did in their worst moment, but by how they respond to them.
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As a DC resident I’m too young to get the vaccine. It’s been a long time since I’ve been too young for anything.
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This isn’t a state imof emergency. It’s a spoiled child awarding himself a participation trophy after he lost the game. It’s solely about Trumps need to tell himself he’s a winner after it’s clear he lost the shutdown.
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Today is the day for Biden to begin revamping his presidency in a more centrist direction. There’s no path forward for a leftish agenda.
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I don’t think it ever occurred to Trump or Giuliani that what they were doing with Ukraine was unethical. Life must be perpetually surprising when you have been denuded of all moral sense.
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Many affluent kids have fled the public school disaster for private schools. It’s Black and brown kids who live in cities with progressive mayors and powerful unions, and those are the places where in-school learning has been closed down.
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Is anybody else experiencing Covid lunch creep? I go to bed earlier, get up earlier and eat lunch earlier. Today I waited all the way until 9 am.
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In my NYT column I argue that Wednesday may have broken the fever. The WSJ edit board just called on Trump to resign.
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When I was a young Reaganite I used to dread his public remarks because God knows what he would say. But his fundamental judgements were historically right. Same with Biden today.
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America is sadly divided between the 90 percent who are obsessed with Joe Exotic and the 10 percent who’ve never heard of him. We need to come together as a nation.
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The Trump tax cuts seem to have worked better than many of us expected. Capital spending up 39 percent. Stock buybacks growing at a much slower pace.
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On my list of reasons Donald J. Trump is unfit for the presidency, the Russia-collusion story ranks number 971
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In this version you had a Native American man being swarmed by white (boo!), male (boo!), preppy (double boo!) Trump supporters (infinite boo!). If you are trying to rub the pleasure centers of a liberal audience, this is truly a story too good to check.
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Watching the night sky I can see Jupiter, Saturn and Mars all at once. According to my model, this means Biden wins by 7.7.
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If a non-fiction book doesn’t interest you in the first 10 pages it never will. Non fiction rarely starts out slow or dull and gets better.
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We in the educated class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
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