I admit, I do the David Brooks dance now and then.  In my version, I see how many paragraphs I can read from a Brooks column before he simply asserts something that’s more than mildly dubious, completely undefended, and yet essential to his argument.  (Evidence isn’t really his gig.)  No point in reading on after that.  He’ll keep building something gossamer from personal anecdotes and loose associations.

I usually bail somewhere the third paragraph.  It’s been pretty reliable.

Anyway, I hit yesterday’s piece, Trump Poisons the World, and I  was surprised to find myself well past my usual limits.  Let me defer to him for a bit:

This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath.

(The full Op-Ed is America First Doesn’t Mean America Alone, but you’ll hit the usual WSJ paywall.)

Brooks goes on about cooperation as a natural human trait, but I’d bailed by then.

Official result: paragraph 6.  Be proud, dude!

Instead, I was thinking about that whole ‘zero-sum’ approach to life.  I don’t know if McMaster and son are actually parroting Trump’s worldview, but it does seem true to the jerk.  There are deals where you win, and everything else.  For him, not winning must be like death.  Why else does he so desperately deny obvious reality?

It doesn’t seem like he’s enjoying himself when he bulls his way in front of reality like it was the Montenegro Prime Minister.  It’s like watching someone disagree with gravity.  Over and over.