David Brooks

So I think we'll hold.

Yeah.

Just quickly, the one difference there is we had a major issue that really did divide the nation.

And now we have Donald Trump, who's a force for chaos.

But I don't think we're as ideologically divided over some major issue as they were over slavery.

Say an intern released that video by accident or whatever, you take even their version.

A normal person said, America has oral history and racism.

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.