'Hapless' Trump has 'gone all 19th century on us' — and he'll fail: conservative

President Donald Trump is trying to push a very particular type of populism from a period of America's past, conservative analyst David Brooks wrote for The New York Times — and it will ultimately destroy his presidency.

Brooks, a longtime discontent within GOP politics who escalated his criticism following the rise of MAGA, believes Trump specifically thinks America was at its greatest in the latter half of the 19th century.

"Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us," wrote Brooks. "He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley. You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. 'The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,' he declared in his address."

There is a certain "appeal" to all of this, Brooks conceded. "We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money," he said. "It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its disinterest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus master P.T. Barnum more than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James."

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There's just one big issue, Brooks continued: the populism of that era was terrible for good governance.

"Between 1825 and 1901 we had 20 presidencies," wrote Brooks. "We had a bunch of one-term presidents; voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not happy with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country. The light-footprint government was unable to cope with the process of industrialization."

Ironically, he continued, what helped America evolve beyond this into a stabler kind of government was that lawmakers took the issues the populists were angry about, and throughout the 20th century built up a regulatory state to address those issues, like "the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve."

Brooks concluded that if he were heading up the Democratic Party right now, "I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent."