FAULTY: Why did David Brooks say what he said?

FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2026

What Yevtushenko said: Last Friday night, on the PBS NewsHour, David Brooks seemed to say that he wasn't concerned.   

One night before, the sitting president had made a self-ballyhooed national address. How had the speech been received? 

By the time the NewsHour aired, it was already clear that the Fox News Channel was ghosting the president's speech—was pretending it hadn't happened. As we noted in Monday's report, Brooks himself had this to say about the satrap's assertions:   

BENNETT (7/17/26): President Trump once again putting false claims about the 2020 election at the center of the national political debate is where we start, as we turn tonight to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. 

[...]

BENNETT: So, David, what did you hear in that speech last night? What do you think President Trump is trying to accomplish here?   

BROOKS: Oh, subtle. I couldn't figure it out.

(Chuckling)

He was— He's got to get more original in his confabulation. I mean, he's just stuck on this 2020 thing. There's never been any evidence. There's no evidence.   

Even in his role as moderator, Bennett spoke of the president's "false claims." In his reply, Brooks referred to the presidents ongoing "confabulation." 

"There's never been any evidence," he rather imprecisely said. Following which, he said this:   

BROOKS (continuing directly): I think the good news is, he doesn't have any policies to actually ruin our election system, as we heard from the secretaries of state. So we're going to have fair elections in this country.

"We're going to have fair elections," he said. The analysts screamed and tore at their hair. They had no idea why he'd said that.   

Are we going to have "fair elections" this year? The young analysts couldn't imagine why a person as smart as David Brooks would play Pollyanna that way. 

Bennett may have been puzzled too. Eventually, he returned to Brooks with a new question, generating this exchange:  

BENNETT: David, we spoke on this program last night with Ty Cobb, who was the special counsel during the first Trump administration, and he offered an extraordinary warning. He said that he believes that President Trump is laying the predicate for an emergency declaration around the elections.

Do you see the guardrails holding if President Trump tries to use the apparatus of the federal government to intervene more directly in how elections are administered?

BROOKS: I think so. A lot of people have thought that this is a predicate for some future action.

I think, if you look at the things he's tried to do, we're helped by the fact that these are mostly state-run things, so he does not have control. And what isn't state run is usually congressionally run. And so he has tried. The thing he's done successfully is the gerrymandering in Texas. He has rigged elections and Democrats have helped in California.

So that part he was successful at in degrading our elections. But pretty much everything else he's done, through executive order and other things, courts have overruled him. And so I do not believe he will have the power to actually affect our elections.   

A lot of people believe that Trump may try to interfere with the elections, Brooks now said—but the courts would overrule him. And so, in effect, there's nothing to worry about.  

That struck us as an extremely strange assessment. When Bennett turned to Capehart, he somewhat meekly voiced an obvious point of concern:  

BENNETT (continuing directly): How do you see it, Jonathan?

CAPEHART:  Although I am a little concerned about what happens on Election Day.

Congressman Jim Himes was on with my colleague Lawrence O'Donnell last night, and he warned that, yes, what the president is doing is laying the predicate for stealing the election. And he said, for instance, "What happens if they seize the ballot boxes from particular jurisdictions? What happens to the chain of custody?" 

That is when democracy will be at its most tenuous. And, sure, you can race to court and try to get them back, but the action's already done. 

And so I hope you're right that we are going to have a free and fair election this November. But I have a healthy imagination, and I hope that folks who care about free and fair elections also have a healthy imagination and are prepared for any and every scenario that could happen.  

Capehart said he was "a little" concerned about the president's possible actions. Then, he referred to what Jim Himes had said on Thursday's edition of The Last Word, a program which aired right after the president's speech.

Full disclosure! We too had seen Rep. Himes when he appeared on O'Donnell's program. 

In our view, Himes is one of the sharpest members of the House. He'd been followed on The Last Word by Senator Elissa Slotkin, who we regard as one of the sharpest members of the Senate. 

Speaking with O'Donnell, Himes and Slotkin had each voiced grave concerns about what the president might do come November:

Might the sitting president "deploy federal officers to seven states to seize ballot boxes" at midnight on election night? On Election Day itself, might he "send uniformed military or federal law enforcement to take care of alleged security threats around our polls," or to seize voting machines?

"These are things the president refuses to rule out, as does his cabinet," the very alert Senator Slotkin told O'Donnell that night. "The president has made it clear that this is not a joke to him."  

To see the full interview with Himes, you can just click here. For the interview with Slotkin, you can start by clicking here. 

Slotkin and Himes voiced deep concerns about what November might bring. Slotkin described meetings she's held with Michigan officials to gameplan the way to react to various scenarios on Election Day. And no, the courts couldn't stop a determined president from doing such things, not until Election Day was over and massive damage had been done.

Slotkin and Himes voiced specific deep concerns. One night later, Brooks was happy to report that we're going to have fair elections. We thought his presentation was extremely strange.   

David Brooks is a good, decent person. He's done a lot of excellent work. He isn't just a good, decent person, he's also perfectly sharp. 

That said, it seems to us that he may tend to hold himself back in the face of concerns like this. As our nation develops its new politics—the politics which will save us from the downward spiral we're currently in—we'll learn to be sympathetic to possible shortcoming of this and other types. 

We think of Yevtushenko's portrait of who we (all) are as people:

Who we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures...

So Yevtushenko said.