Brooks: Biden ‘Should Have Called out His Own Party’ for Giving Millions to ‘MAGA Wing’ ‘If It’s Such a Threat’

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said that while he didn’t have any problem with President Joe Biden giving a speech on threats to democracy “he should have called out his own party” for spending millions of dollars “supporting the MAGA wing of the Republican Party in Republican primaries…if it’s such a threat.”

Brooks said, “I think he’s right that this is a special time in American history. This is not normal. The threat to democracy is real. And the President…should be speaking about the real threats to the country. So, I have no problem with him giving a speech. I — when I read the text, I was a little disappointed. One, he should have mentioned that his own party has spent $44 million supporting the MAGA wing of the Republican Party in Republican primaries, and he should have called out his own party for doing that, if it’s such a threat.”

He continued, “Two, 30% of Trump voters in 2020 have shown some openness to not voting for Donald Trump again. Those are the key people in this country they need to peel away. And I thought it was a little too much of a Democrat-Republican speech, and would have the effect of putting those 30% back in the Trump camp, which I think is dangerous. And then, finally, when he talked about the soul of the country in 2020, I thought it was a beautiful phrase, because it captured, not just what’s happening in our politics, it captured Charlottesville. It captured the record hate crimes. It captured the deaths of despair, the declining life expectancy in this country. It captured the social, relational, and I would say spiritual crisis which is at the heart of a lot of our problems. And MAGA is an epiphenomenon of that. It comes out of that crisis. And so, to reduce it only to the politics, I think, robs that phrase, the soul of America, of its key power, which is to capture the depth of the problem we face, which is not just politics, but deep down in our relationships and in the social fabric of the country.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett