David Brooks

I am still a New York Times columnist, but this is my final act of journalism with the New York Times, which is great for me and even greater for the future of the New York Times.

Yeah, well, those four unravelings.

First, the unraveling of the Western alliance, the post-Cold War alliance.

Second, the unraveling that TJ just described, our democratic order.

Third, the unraveling of our domestic security, the sense that we live in a relatively free, at least free of state violence.

And we can no longer be sure of that.

And then the fourth, and to me, the most important and the primary one is the unraveling of Trump's mind, if you want to put it that way.

I do think, you know, I've never met a president who wasn't more full of himself at the end of his term than at the beginning.

They all become a little egotistical.

If you start with Donald Trump's ego, you're really going places.

And so, you know, if you look through history at the minds of people who are driven by a lust for power and who have tyrannical tendencies, the arc of history bends toward degradation.

There's just not many cases where somebody was becoming more and more power hungry, more and more tyrannical.

And they said, oh, I better put on the brakes here and become more moderate.

That just doesn't happen.

You get this process of mental deterioration that's in part caused by the way the lust for power makes you drunk on power, really, and is insatiable.

partly because as you're driven by the lust for power, the environment you create around you becomes more sycophantic and has less checks, and partly because the people in this country have a tendency to lose the habits of democratic self-government.

And so I was looking at these classical historians, Tacitus and people like that, Sallust, and then later ones, Plutarch, Edward Gibbon,

They had a front row seat at tyranny.

And so they really understood it pretty well.

And they talk about the fact that citizens lose the capacity for persuasion, for compromise, for interpersonal trust, the very fabric of democratic society.