David Brooks mans the barricades

Yesterday, in his New York Times column, David Brooks called for a mass uprising against Donald Trump.

Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, much less read. But this is 2025, and with Trump on a rampage, things are getting very weird indeed. 

Brooks, a former senior editor at the Weekly Standard, among other things, is pretty much center-right, and his columns usually maintain a certain smug vapidity. He seems to love jabbing at anything even vaguely left. But Trump seems to have jarred him out of his usual complacency. And he’s beginning to see the light, at least on the danger that Trump poses to all that is good in America and the world.

Here’s how he describes the danger Trump poses:

Trumpism is … primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.

He makes clear that Trump’s assorted power grabs are not random, but part of a concerted plan: 

So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade.

But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.

And Comrade Brooks has some ideas about how to do that, which go far, far beyond the tepid non-responses of mainstream Democrats. He even argues that the mass rallies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez don’t go far enough, that they reek of politics as usual. 

What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.

So what should we do? RISE UP AGAINST OUR OPPRESSORS!

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

We can’t just call our Senators every few days, or wait until the 2026 midterms to vote some Republicans out of office. He suggests we get more direct and militant, using such tactics as “lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.” 

Now, Brooks is a somewhat reluctant revolutionary. I don’t expect to ever see him manning an actual barricade. But he still ends his column by unironically QUOTING THE GODDAMN COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Yes, that Communist Manifesto.

I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Damn. Things are getting interesting. Which is a step up from “almost completely terrible.” 

There must be something in the water at the old New York Times, because in a NYT podcast yesterday, Brooks’ colleague Bret Stephens–Bret fucking Stephens–launched into an extended tirade against Trump that sounded at times like, well, some of my own tirades against Trump, albeit with less cursing. 

Stephens, normally a pretty reliably terrible conservative (who nonetheless voted for Harris) starts off the podcast by declaring that “my feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench.” While he still approves of some things that Trump has done–this is Bret Stephens, after all–he thinks they’ve now been overwhelmed by the things he’s done that are “reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad — not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement … I think that there is a meanspiritedness of vulgarity that sits outside of the spirit of the America that I love.”

Come on, Bret, tell us what you really think!

I think he wants a nation of toadies. If there is some kind of reptilian cunning to what he does to his entire approach, it is to turn everyone into a supplicant. I’m thinking of the way in which he went after law firms so that they had to bend the knee.

Even the tariff scheme. By imposing these tariffs, it means that the Tim Cooks of the world, the tech people, have to go begging to the White House to carve out exemptions. And I think that’s essentially the way in which Trump operates. He gets the most satisfaction when he sees that he’s managed to turn someone into a dependent on him. …

That’s how Trump likes it. He likes the feeling that he has conquered and humiliated another person, and that they are now paying him court.

Stephens, who is Jewish, is also quite clear that Trump’s alleged crusade against “antisemitism” is nothing of the sort, but rather 

an effort to destroy academic freedom. So he latched onto the question of the issue of antisemitism on campus, which is real, which is right and which I think the left was in denial about to a great extent. But he’s using it for an agenda, which is destructive to American liberty.

At one point, Stephens notes that he finds Trump “at some level vomitous.” Which is pretty direct, if you ask me.

Now, Stephens is not exactly joining the resistance. Indeed, he notes with a hint of contempt that 

one of the reasons I resist the term “resistance” is that once you join the resistance, your brain goes off, and you have a hard time understanding the deeper sources of [Trump’s] appeal or the ways in which, even if he’s not entirely right, he’s at least half right.

Obviously, anyone who thinks Trump is “at least half right” still has terrible politics. And Stephens sprinkles some of his other terrible opinions throughout the podcast, on a range of topics from the evils of DEI to the alleged leftism of Joe Biden. 

But again, having one of the most prominent conservative voices in op-ed land calling Trump “vomitous” is indicative of something changing in America. And frankly, it can’t change fast enough. 

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