SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2026
The gentleman gets it right: It reminded us of one of our favorite passages from literature—although, in fairness, there are surely many excellent passages we have never read.
(It reminded us of Willa Cather's treasured words in My Antonia. "I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own," Cather's narrator says. For reasons we'll try to explain, we'll post the fuller passage below.)
For now, we're referring to what David Brooks said and did on last night's PBS NewsHour. The background here is simple:
The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote, had struck down a substantial portion of President Trump's treasured tariffs. In response, the president had call them (almost) every name in the book.
There he went again! The president said he was "ashamed of certain members of the Court, absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what's right for our country."
He said they were "a disgrace to our nation, those justices." He said they were "just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats."
"They're very unpatriotic," the president said, "and disloyal to our Constitution. It's my opinion that the Court has been swayed by foreign interests," he said, with les Chinois specifically mentioned at one point.
Before he was done, he even said that the six disloyal jurists were "an embarrassment to their families." Little was left unsaid.
Last evening, on the NewsHour, Geoff Bennett mentioned this reaction. When he did, David Brooks said this:
BENNETT (2/20/26): "Disloyal to our Constitution." Is there a point at which the president's rhetoric—maybe we're already there—becomes corrosive to the institution itself?
BROOKS: Well, Donald Trump has never had an honest disagreement with somebody. And where you say, "Oh, I disagree with you," and without him going ad hominem.
And that is just his nature. It is the nature of somebody with a narcissistic personality disorder to think, "I am the center, and everything that's an assault on me cannot be anything but a shameful attack on all that is right and good."
Brooks went on from there—but he had used some technical medical language. We're hoping that's a badly needed first step down a long and winding road.
Is the sitting president caught in the grip of a narcissistic personality disorder?" And if so, what exactly does some such assessment actually mean?
Brooks was using technical diagnostic language—language from the prevailing DSM-5. Assuming he meant what he said, he was saying that the president is afflicted with what is still often described as a "mental illness"—but what does some medical diagnosis actually mean?
Obviously, David Brooks is not a doctorate-holding clinical therapist. The president's niece, Mary L. Trump, actually is.
In her best-selling 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough, she had offered a diagnosis which Brooks was now advancing—but she'd also moved beyond that one assessment. "A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy," she had also said.
Dating back to the 1960s, the mainstream press has agreed that medical assessments of that type must never be a part of this nation's political discourse. In our view, that was always an excellent rule—until the time came when it suddenly wasn't.
In our view, Brooks did the right thing last night. He did the right thing when he walked away from that long-standing prohibition. Having said that, we'll also say this:
If we as a people ever move on to a productive discussion of such medical topics, we must learn to offer such diagnoses in sorrow rather than anger. Such provisional assessments must be offered as statements of concern, not as apparent insults.
Cather's narrator "always knew" that the disregarded immigrant girls he admired so deeply would go on to preside over the finest farms in the state of Nebraska. We ourselves had perhaps always suspected that David Brooks might be the person who would start to walk across a border line which was keeping the American nation, such as it is, from a mature discussion of the sitting president's impulses and behaviors.
We admire Brooks for apparently choosing to take that first step last night. That said—borrowing (in translation) from Chekhov's widely admired story, The Lady With the Lapdog, we'll also suggest this:
"The end is still a long way away and the most complicated and difficult part [of this undertaking] is only just beginning."
What does it actually mean when some such medical diagnosis is advanced? What is actually being said about the person in question? Brooks broke through a barrier last night. He dropped the familiar colloquial turns of phrase and employed the specific medical language.
Had we always suspected that he might be the one to go first? Last night, the analysts stared slack-jawed at their TV screens as they saw him actually do it.
We were thunderstruck, as they were. Also, we thought of that treasured passage from Cather, whose narrator knew all along.
We'll return to this general topic next week. Last night, for all to see as he took a first step, David Brooks got it right.
Starting Monday: What do medical diagnoses of that type actually mean? How should they be advanced?
Cather (and her narrator) speak: For whatever reason, we thought of one of our favorite passages when we saw Brooks cross that line.
At present, we Americans are confronted with a highly unusual political situation. We should perhaps find our frameworks of understanding off somewhere in the realm of high literature, thereby escaping our debilitating fixation on whatever it is that President Trump said ten seconds ago.
With respect to Cather's book, has anyone else ever advocated with such ardor?
The situation Cather described had little to do with our current difficult state of affairs. But Cather's protagonist, Jim Burden, had always known that the immigrant girls he so deeply admired were going to prevail in the end.
Had we ourselves perhaps suspected that David Brooks would one day walk across a prevailing line?
We love the ardor Cather's narrator expresses in support of the "immigrant girls." This is not our struggling nation's specific situation today, but it's a wonderful form of escape from the latest fusillade of insults from that one usual source:
My Antonia: Book Two, Chapter IX
There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had ‘advantages,’ never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.
I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.
[...]
The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had no alternative but to go into service....but every one of them did what she had set out to do, and sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.
One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors—usually of like nationality—and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.
I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid. If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Ántonia’s father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all ‘hired girls.’
I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses...
Cather's narrator goes on from there to a much more striking (and tragic) assessment of the social lives of the young people in this Nebraska town. We love the ardor of his advocacy on behalf of these hard-working "country girls"—Spoiler alert!—whose physical —beauty and physical vibrancy "shone out too boldly against a conventional background."
We love the ardor Jim Burden displays. He says he "always knew."
The situation we're facing is different. We hope Brooks took a first step.
