David Brooks

But he exemplifies resentment in that he does not acknowledge the higher registers of human nature.

If you remember in his first term, he went to Normandy.

And he was like, the war debt are just suckers.

Why would anybody risk their life for country?

It just didn't make any sense to him because he had cut off the higher registers of human nature.

John McCain, his heroism did not make any sense to him.

Even this week, attacking the Pope, Catholic social teaching just would not make any sense to Trump because the resentful person assumes that which is lower is more real.

That selfishness, venality, the lust for power, those things are real.

And the things at the upper register of human nature, those things don't exist.

So I asked myself, how do we get out of a resentful age?

And that's the kind of subject that takes, you know, 6,000 words to get into and out of.

Yeah, I make a pretty sharp distinction between Trump and Trump supporters.

And so I think Trump is a monstrous human being.

But I think most Trump supporters that I know had good reasons for supporting him.

I ran into a guy years ago in South Dakota who said, my best day in my life was when I was 35 and I was foreman of a section of a plant that made casings for refrigeration units.

And they laid me off because they had updated the equipment.

I was no longer qualified.

And I said, you know, I thought I'd disappear quietly.

So I packed all my stuff in my little office.

I put them in a box and I carried it out.