Brooks: Slain Soldier Call Controversy ‘Really About Nothing, Except We Want to Have a Fight’

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks weighed in on the dispute over calls to the families of slain soldiers by stating that it was an event about little more than people wanting a fight and no one came out of the feud looking well.

Brooks said that the dispute reminded him of Karl Marx’s quotation that historical events happen as tragedy and farce. He added, “And so, we had the four soldiers killed. That was the tragedy. And then Trump made the call, and one imagines he made the call and repeated, in clumsy form, what John Kelly said, that the soldier died doing what he loved to do with his best — and with the best among them, that he chose to be among the 1%, the best among us. And Donald Trump is not Oprah. He doesn’t do empathy particularly well, and I’m sure it was clumsy. And so, that happened.”

Brooks continued, “And then it’s off to the circus. And so then we get a political charge against Trump, and then Trump lies and says something about Obama, and then it’s just back and forth. And it’s — these are like the typical pseudo-events of the Trump era, where it’s really about nothing, except we want to have a fight with each other. And so they’re going to have a fight over something, and nobody, to my mind, comes out looking particularly well.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett