FAULTY: Challenged by Bennett, Brooks held firm!

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2026

The courts will protect us, he said: Why in the world did David Brooks say what he said last Friday?  

Brooks appeared with Jonathan Capehart for their usual Friday night spot on the PBS NewsHour. The night before, the sitting president had made a loudly ballyhooed national address.    

Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can read the transcript and watch the videotape of the president's self-ballyhooed speech. Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can do so by clicking here.

The president started with some familiar claims, most of which were inaccurate or misleading. (Some were hard to decipher.) After that, the sitting president stated his major thesis:   

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/16/26): For many years, I've called for bold, swift, and decisive action to protect the integrity of America's elections. Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure, one where cheating and interference are not just difficult but virtually impossible. 

Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I'm announcing the immediate declassification, and release of critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.  

The situation is catastrophic, he said—but how catastrophic is it? Quite catastrophic, he claimed: 

"There's no third-world country that has elections like we have," the president now said. 

By that, he meant there's no country whose election system is as bad as the American system. He described our system in this somewhat garbled presentation:  

PRESIDENT TRUMP (continuing directly): This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes, and really exposes like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference. [sic]

Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you, the American people—our beautiful, our great American people—but that all changes right now.   

As the president read from a teleprompter, he may have skipped part of his text in the first chunk of that presentation. But even where his words didn't parse, his overall claim was clear: 

According to the sitting president, we Americans are beautiful people and we're also great. But according to the sitting president, our election system leaves us exposed to the world:

Our systems are open to hacking by foreign entities—to exploitation and "interference." Or so the president said.

As he continued, the president attempted to defend, and to further explain, that startling representation. 

The sitting president had made a startling accusation. But one night later, as he started to speak with Geoff Bennett of PBS, David Brooks made a remarkable statement of his own.

As we noted yesterday, he started off like this:

BENNETT (7/17/26): 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.    

There's never been any evidence, he said. The president has been relentlessly pushing a confabulation over the past six years.

At one time, a statement like that, by a major journalist, would have qualified as a startling event. But in this age of endlessly weird misstatements by President Trump, Brooks' statement passed without notice—and then, he added 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. As we noted yesterday, we thought that statement—that assertion by Brooks—was just remarkably odd.   

Why did he make that confident statement? We have no idea, in part because no one directly asked.    

On the other hand, Bennett did suggest, a bit later on, that the situation wasn't as simple as Brooks had said. When Bennett offered that suggestion, this exchange occurred:   

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 [speech] 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 [elections] 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 effect our elections.  

Good grief! What a remarkable statement:

There's really nothing to worry about. The courts will overrule him!

Before the week is done, we'll revisit one particular comment by Yevtushenko. ("Who we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.") 

We'll go there by the end of the week. Tomorrow morning, we'll continue pursuing this immediate question:   

Brooks said we have nothing to worry about. Why in the world, why on earth, would he make that remarkable statement?  

Tomorrow: Jonathan Capehart's concern