Marching through Trumpia

Alexander Hay Ritchie, 1867, Sherman's March to the Sea. Via Wikipedia.

Even David Brooks is out with the penis references:

Now, at long last, the big guns are being brought to bear.

Nah, I kid, it's just a military analogy:

Now, at long last, some major Republicans like Mitt Romney are speaking up to lay waste to Donald Trump.

Before it was just the minor Republicans or little guns like Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich. It's a pretty weird analogy, though, to envisage Trump as a kind of terrain, dotted with forests and small farms, and General Romney taking his troops across it burning and pillaging.

For months Trump’s rivals and other Republicans have either retreated in silence

Or getting off the land of Trump, in nighttime marches, fleeing.

or tentatively and ineptly criticized him for exactly those traits that voters like about him: for being a slapdash, politically incorrect money-hungry bully.

You really don't think much of Republican voters, do you? And what is it, exactly, about slapdash and money-hungry that attracts them?

But now finally — at long last — major Republicans are raising their heads and highlighting Trump’s actual vulnerability: his inability to think for an extended time about anybody but himself.

Watch out for this man, America! He's the worst boyfriend ever!

To my mind, it's precisely that that 30 to 40% of Republican voters are smitten by: Trump's honesty, really, on this subject, his refusal to pretend solemnly that it's about anything other than the central fact that he's Donald Trump and the rest of us aren't. It's not that Trump can't think about anybody but himself, it's that he doesn't bother to talk about anybody but himself, mentioning the names of others only in connection with how much they admire him or how inferior they are. (Actually, Kasich doesn't talk about anybody but himself either, but he does it in such a boring way nobody notices.)

Marco Rubio thinks he is so important to America that it's morally wrong for him to be in the Senate sharing power with 99 other people and an entire lower chamber, the nation needs him to be exercising solitary power from the Oval Office. Ted Cruz is literally an anointed king of America. The egos of these men are every bit as monstrous as Trump's, but they have one thing he hasn't got: the equally monstrous hypocrisy that enables them to maintain a continuously grave, concerned tone and make it all about what Jesus wants. And I'm guessing that the typical Trump voter may be a racist and a nihilist, but he isn't stupid: he recognizes the hypocrisy for what it is. It takes somebody like Brooks to fail to see that.

Most of today's column is devoted to the Trump scam cases, in particular the so-called Trump University, now the subject of a $40-million class action lawsuit, which Brooks thinks the other candidates should make more of (a little late; they've started already). I too wonder what took them so long. (Perhaps it was courtesy to Huckabee, Paul, and Carson and their grift campaigns until Carson finally gave it up this week.) But the postmodern conservative principle is that human progress is driven essentially by entrepreneurs seeking profits (Brooks's phony communitarianism isn't a countercurrent to that, since it's directed at the lower orders and the need to control them, while the entrepreneurial class requires total freedom), and from that perspective Romney and Trump are pretty much the same. Romney just has better manners—he does boxing, Trump does WWE wrestling—and Republicans got fatigued with good manners around 1992.

And now it's the year Mad Max came back. The freaks are out. At long last.

Update: Susan says "David Brooks is the King of Hell."