David Brooks, a “conservative” columnist for The New York Times, famously reminisced about how he knew Barack Obama would become President of the United States right after he was elected Senator from Illinois. He even knew that Barack Obama would be a good president.
What gave him this semi-prescient insight? (He was half right–Obama did become president, but was an awful one).
I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pants, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.
After meeting Obama and being blown away by his sartorial splendor, Brooks urged Obama to run for president in a New York Times column. He was just so dreamy.
Donald Trump is decidedly not dreamy in a way that people of Brook’s (or my) class could possibly respond well to. He is, in fact, nightmarish. So nightmarish that, if one is to remain loyal to the upper-middle-class college-educated set of norms and values with which one grew up, one is led inexorably to reject Trump and Trumpism with an almost violent passion.
PBS’s Marx-Quoting ‘Conservative’ Urges Nationwide Strikes To Protest Trump https://t.co/3jf5kqIMbo
— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) April 20, 2025
Brooks is at one extreme of the Bell Curve–his loyalty to the class values is so great that even something so simple but symbolic as the crease of a man’s pants will tell him almost all he needs to know. Sure, Obama had other things going for him: he speaks very well and can drop some impressive quotes, and he went to the right schools. He quoted Burke once. And, of course, he is, as Joe Biden said, “bright and clean and good-looking.”
He has all the social markers that appeal to the laptop class. To this day, the first African-American president remains a hero not so much to the African-Americans who soured on him, but to the David Brooks class, whom he made feel so good about themselves.
Donald Trump is crass, boorish, and seemingly incapable of stringing a sentence together without making grammatical errors. His suits are rumpled, and his appetites in all things are large and for low-quality versions. He loves McDonald’s! His suits look rumpled!
Trump is Andrew Jackson, and Obama is JFK. Out of such things are Constitutional crises made.
Barack Obama drew enormous loyalty because he kept up appearances. Almost every single person bleating about a Constitutional crisis today loves Barack Obama, and will insist that there were no scandals or pushing the constitutional boundaries during his administration.
Really? Barack Obama had journalists bugged, drone-striked American citizens, had the NSA collect individual electronic data on every American citizen, and had his NSA Director commit perjury before Congress without consequence, sent the CIA and FBI after Donald Trump based on zero evidence, and was briefed on Hillary Clinton creating a hoax about Donald Trump and Russian collusion and blessed the psyop. The IRS was weaponized against conservatives (remember Lois Lerner?). I could go on, but not one of those things mattered, just as the fact that JFK was a rapist doesn’t matter: he was a Harvard man and damn good looking.
Obama, too, was a Harvard man, don’tcha know? Harvard Law!
John F. Kennedy is consistently ranked among the best presidents ever, often beating out Lincoln and Washington, yet objectively speaking he was among the worst. Under him, the Berlin Wall was built, US involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, and the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly wiped humanity out. The Cold War escalated at a frightening rate due to his recklessness and fecklessness, and much of the chaos of the 60s can be laid at his feet.
Obama bequeathed to us the divided nation we have today. Race relations were healing before his presidency. Today we are as divided as we have been in a century.
The David-Brooks-types are ramping up the crisis because for them, Donald Trump IS an existential crisis. It is not the Constitution about which they are worried–they were fine with Obama’s extra-Constitutional moves and his politicizing every bureaucracy–it is the assault on their class consciousness.
As you can see in that clip, a Constitutional law scholar telling them that there is no Constitutional crisis because Trump hasn’t actually violated a court order is irrelevant. They will grasp a League of Women Voters quote as proof because they already KNOW that a crisis is upon us–Donald Trump is president!
It is Trump, much more than his actions, that bothers them. Not a one of them even thought for a moment about Obama’s deportations and how relatively few deportees were given hearings. It didn’t matter. Obama did the deportations, so it must be OK.
The proper lens to use in understanding what is going on politically is class, not law. Obama was not born of the proper class, but he exudes “class” to them. Trump WAS born in the right economic class, but his manner appeals to the working class, not the upper class.
He is so gauche.
