On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement was due to “some sense of resentment, a sense of social inferiority, a sense of fragile ego.”
Brooks said, “I’m just struck by the fact that his administration is driven solely by resentment. He will side with the Steve Bannon side if that position alienates the people he feels resentful for. He will side with the regular Republican side and the budgetery, the more free market side if that will offend elite opinion. It seems to be all based on some sense of resentment, a sense of social inferority, a sense fragile ego. Him just wanting to stick it in the eye in the people he is resenting. And I, more than any other time, we talked about Trump not telling the truth a lot over the last year. But that global warming speech to me set new standards of just being irrelevant to the facts.”
He added,”We have had a lot of presidents with a lot of disagreements but there has been an attachment to some sort of basic research, some basic contact with reality, which it seems there is a failure of intellectual virtue here and because there is some underlying physiological issues he is working out, and whatever he needs to do that, the facts have to fit that lower reality.”
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