Brooks's feet were almost gone; his steps had well nigh slipped.

Folly holding court, after Hans Holbein, from an 1876 English edition of Erasmus In Praise of Folly.

Today's Brooks ("No, Not Trump, Not Ever") joins in the chorus of concern over the spectre of Trumpism and those under-educated, middle-aged, white voters, not in Williamsonian rage but in dignified regret:

Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

 Is he interested in doing something about restoring jobs or wages or dreams? No, he's interested in deciding whether they're morally right or wrong:

Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?

No prize for getting the answer to that one.

Brooks seems to think—a lot of them do—that the majority of the Republican party has succumbed to Trumpery, which is of course not true. Trump hasn't won a majority in any contest yet (though he came very close in Massachusetts, Mississippi, Florida) except the one in the Northern Marianas, where he scored a landslide 73%. Trump is really a loser; just considerably less of a loser than his Republican rivals. The ongoing story really isn't about Trump, fundamentally, but about the death struggles of the GOP.

Honest to God, remember what Kevin D. Williamson was saying about the folks who vote for Trump? That they brought their catastrophe on themselves? The harsh judgment really applies to the Republicans, who continue to cast around looking for somebody to blame, and debate over that fascinating Secret-Santa bag of policy proposals (flat tax? VAT? medical savings account? retirement savings accounts?) that the vast majority of people interested in voting Republican take no interest in whatsoever. (Why are you offering me a tax break when I can't find a job that pays me enough to pay income tax? Why are you giving me tax-free accounts when I have no money to put in them, spending my whole paycheck and a bit more?)

But while it is starting to seem really likely that Trump will get the nomination, all he's doing is gathering the spoils of the party's failure to find a halfway decent candidate. He's like the male lion—the real one, not the mighty hunter of popular mythology; the one who preens while the females do most of the effective hunting, but who, when he takes the trouble, tends to seek out a pack of hyenas who have made a fresh kill, bully them into running away, and steal their lunch.

Most pathetic moment:

many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

I guess I accept your apology, but when have you ever reported on this country since that summer job after you finished college in 1983? You'll not only have to change the way you do your job, you'll have to change jobs. Or did you mean back around the turn of the millennium when you used to be a famous public intellectual, making up quirky-sounding data? That wasn't reporting either.

I expected Trump to fizzle because I really couldn't believe you couldn't come up with a better candidate than that. Christie? Jindal? Really? Fucking demon sheep Carly Fiorina? All those tentatives showed that you might as well give them Trump. At least he's an authentic TV star.

Shall I tell you what you have done, reforming conservatives of the reformed persuasion, you little intellectual elite, you? You have drunk your own Kool-Aid. You think you're a super-smart brain trust, with your BAs from Yale and Princeton and Chicago to prove it, and you think Barack Obama is an inexperienced, overambitious lightweight of ambiguous ethnicity, and you fixed your hopes on another first-term senator with all the bad qualities you told yourself Obama had and figured he was bound to win. That was your whole strategy! You mistook your own Trump-sized vanity and your envious judgment of Obama as a cool assessment of reality. "The voters seem to like this kind of idiot, why don't we run one?" And you put your cards on little Marco.

Now little Marco's gone, and you're trying to tell us Trump is frightening. Tell whom? I'm frightened enough already.

Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.

I'll take that first sentence. For the second, given the Republican governors who literally pollute our children's water supply (Snyder, Christie) and air, maybe you should look for a better metaphor. For the unspoken rules of political civility, we're talking at a time when the majority leader of the Senate has announced and intends to enforce an unprecedented rule that the judiciary committee may not consider a Supreme Court nominee unless Obama is not president. The dog-eat-dog war of all against all is, according to the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, what you would get if Grover Norquist finally got to drown the government in the bathtub. And Trump doesn't have a regime, savage or otherwise.

Oh, and then there's the 73rd Psalm:

History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, stretching back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: “Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. … They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.”

And yet their success is fragile: “Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.”

I think it should be mentioned that the psalm is about judging oneself, not other people, and the sin of envy, when God sets up others in positions of magnificence and you're struggling yourself. The misconduct of the oppressors is just the background:

2 But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped.

3 For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

Trump is pretty disgusting:

6 Therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain; violence covereth them as a garment.

7 Their eyes stand out with fatness: they have more than heart could wish.

8 They are corrupt, and speak wickedly concerning oppression: they speak loftily.

His eyes, in any case, certainly stand out with fatness, though I don't think it's fair to accuse him of speaking loftily.

But I suspect Brooks of some of that unreconstructed envy at the prosperity of the foolish and wicked, and while he recommends a kind of general virtuousness in the face of Trumpery—

the proper thing to do in the face of demagogy is to go the other way — to make an extra effort to put on decency, graciousness, patience and humility, to seek a purity of heart that is stable and everlasting

—he himself goes on pontificating, endlessly, ordering us around. Trump's a fool, but David Brooks is something Proverbs 26:12 warns us is worse:

Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.

Update: Lots more from Susan. A quick but lethal rapier thrust from BooMan. And at greater length from Driftglass. And from the Rude One, not addressing himself directly to anybody as puny as Brooks, but he might as well be.

And from Donald J. Trump!

While I have never met @nytdavidbrooks of the NY Times, I consider him one of the dumbest of all pundits- he has no sense of the real world!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 19, 2016