David Brooks

What that video showed was abominable.

And I denounce it.

Like, how hard is that?

And so, but, you know, this is a president who, A, needs to be the center of attention.

That's part of tyranny, by the way, the need to constantly be the center of attention every second of every day.

But second, a simply lack where the moral backbone would normally be or even the moral sentiment wouldn't normally be.

And he stands for nihilism, a belief in nothing that, you know, he stands for the idea, as Stephen Miller sort of put it, or Thucydides, if I'm going back from the Romans to the Greeks.

That the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

And he's tried to create a world not only domestically but internationally where gangsters can thrive without any sense of internal restraint.

And to me, the interesting question is, what the hell happened to us?

Why do 77 million people last election took a look at Donald Trump and didn't see anything morally disqualifying?

And I do not think that would have happened in America 50 years ago.

I think there was a moral ruination, a loss of moral knowledge that preceded Donald Trump's arrival on the scene.

And my quick story about that is for all of American history, we had some sense of a shared moral order.

There's a historian, George Marsden, I'll paraphrase what he wrote, that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such force was the idea that moral law was written into the fabric of the universe, that slavery and segregation were not just wrong sometimes, they're always wrong.

And over the last 50 years, in my view, we've sort of privatized morality.

We said there are no shared moral values.

There's no ultimate truth, but everybody gets to come up with their own values.

To each his own narrative.

Yeah, you do you.