Brooks: Trump’s and Kelly’s Responses to Porter Reek of ‘Archaic’ 40s and 50s Idea that Personal Conduct Doesn’t Matter

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that President Trump’s and Chief of Staff John Kelly’s responses to former White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter smell of “an archaic 1940s, 1950s idea that we have the world of men,” and what you do in your private life is “not our business.”

Brooks stated, “I think what’s — what most people do, they see the evidence, which is pretty strong, against him, and they have a moral abhorrence, and they react with an instinctive abhorrence. This is a man who, allegedly, and with a lot of evidence, punched his wives in the face. And, normally, you just recoil. And yet, in the — either with Kelly or Trump, we don’t see a recoil. We just see an, there’s an honorable man.”

He continued, “And what it reeks of is sort of an archaic 1940s, 1950s idea that we have the world of men, and we play in the world of men, and whatever you do off in that other world back at home, outside the workplace, that’s sort of not our business. And that was, I think, an ethos that existed decades ago, but it shouldn’t exist now. And I don’t think it exists in most workplaces now, that if you behave morally abhorrent in your private life, it should reflect extremely poorly on you in your professional life. And Trump and Kelly don’t seem to have felt that, just as an instinctual moral disgust.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett