David Brooks, "No, Not Trump, Not Ever": Compare Charles Krauthammer's "Menace in the political air: Donald Trump and the intolerant left are a toxic combination"

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It seems that David Brooks is not partial to Donald Trump.

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "No, Not Trump, Not Ever," Brooks informs us of Trump's predisposition toward prevarication:

"Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.

. . . .

Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship."

Ouch.

But is Hillary a paragon of honesty, virtue and citizenship? Hardly. Consider what she told the nation concerning Bosnia, Benghazi and her home email server. Ugh!

Moreover, Hillary is also a self-serving narcissist, yet they do differ in one important respect. As Charles Krauthammer writes in a Daily News opinion piece entitled "Menace in the political air: Donald Trump and the intolerant left are a toxic combination":

"[T]here’s a second, quite separate form of thuggery threatening the 2016 campaign — a leading candidate who, with a wink and a nod (and sometimes less subtlety), is stoking anger and encouraging violence."

Krauthammer refers us to several of Trump's recent pronouncements:

• "I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that . . .? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks."
• "knock the crap out of them . . . I promise you I will pay for the legal fees."
• "maybe he should have been roughed up."
• "I’d like to punch him in the face."
• "I think you’d have riots" . . . "I wouldn’t lead it but I think bad things would happen."

Krauthammer concludes, "What is so disturbing today is that suffusing our politics is not just an air of division but an air of menace." Indeed.

As I observed yesterday, Trump's reference to riots if he falls short of the mandatory delegate count and is not nominated reminds me of how Hitler threatened to let his Brownshirts run amok in August 1932 when, after the Nazis won 230 seats in the Reichstag and became the dominant political party in Germany, he was denied the chancellorship.

Trump cannot win against Hillary - if she is not indicted. On the other hand, he can certainly drag the United States into a gutter of divisiveness and politically inspired violence from which it might never emerge.