David Brooks:
Well, of course, it’s normal for presidents on the way to have to do a big warning, so George Washington, entangling alliances, Dwight Eisenhower, the military-industrial complex. So he did oligarchy.
I think he’s right. There is an oligarchy, but it’s completely bipartisan. Most billionaires in this country are Democrats. You go to — I speak at Aspen every year. I think I know something about billionaires. And there used to be one Republican, one Republican, this guy named Fred Malek, who unfortunately has left us.
But, like, the Hollywood, New York, San Francisco, these are Democratic places. The Democratic Party has half the country, but about 75 percent of the GDP of this country. So there is a Democratic oligarchy and a Republican oligarchy. And so to say it’s all because of Elon Musk, well, that’s part of it, but there are a lot of billionaires on the Democratic side.
-The thing about Biden is, we go around the country, we have followed him for decades now. He’s done a wonderful job over the course of his career, just a wonderful job. And I go around the country in New York state or Ohio and there are manufacturing jobs coming back.
But as Frank Foer wrote in “The Atlantic” today, his job was to end — to fight authoritarianism. The whole thing was to preserve democracy. And the election of Donald Trump suggested to some large degree he failed at that large mission.
And so, at some sense, a wonderful guy, he’s been a great public service, but there’s a sadness and a tragedy at the end of it.
