David Brooks: Trump Doesn’t Want Reform, He Wants to Take a ‘Blowtorch to the Neutral Institutions of Justice’

NAWAZ: “David, what do you make of that?”
BROOKS: “Yeah, I think the one of the good news stories or comforting news stories for those of us who are not big fans of President Trump is that he was elected by — in the primary vote, as my colleague David French puts it, 17 million Republicans voted for him. In the general election, 70-odd-million voted for him. And David makes the point that those 17 million, the primary voters, are hardcore Trump people. Those are MAGA people. A lot of the 70 million, they just want the economy of 2019 back. They’re not supporting the whole MAGA thing. And so, there’s some hope that, as Trump does MAGA-type stuff, like appointing Matt Gaetz, then a lot of the people who are his supporters, but not really on board for the whole circus, will pull back and he will begin losing popularity. And Trump wants nothing more than to preserve his popularity, and he will hear the voices of the Republicans who are pulling back and he will do some U-turns. And that’s one sort of comforting way to think about how this administration is going to play out. The less comforting version of that is Matt Gaetz was so uniquely hated by Republicans on Capitol Hill that they were happy to walk away from that guy. But they may not feel the same way about RFK Jr. Or any of the others.”
NAWAZ: “Well, there is the point I want to ask you about with Pam Bondi, because she is known as a loyalist. The Washington Post is now reporting tonight, citing two sources close to Trump’s transition, that he plans to fire the entire team behind special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two federal prosecutions against him, and then use the Department of Justice to probe the 2020 election. Does having someone like Bondi in place mean he can use the DoJ like that?”
BROOKS: “Yes. These are anti-institutionalists. That’s the theme of the whole group of people. And so many of them have scandals because they are outside the pale of polite society. So there are not going to be a lot of the Trump appointees like Jim Mattis, who want to be liked, who want to do a responsible job for the government. When you pick somebody who has a sex scandal or a financial scandal, they are totally on your side because they have no other route to a career in their lives, so they are going to be total Trump loyalists. And their mission is to disrupt the institutions. Now, some of the — I happen to think a lot of our institutions need some disrupting. We have got a lot of, like, why can’t we make — you know, why can’t we build subways in this country? Why can’t we build fighter planes in this country? A lot of these institutions have gone creaky, and so they need reform, but they don’t need a blowtorch. And especially in the attorney general’s office, what we’re talking about is not reforming the Justice Department. That’s not cleaning out the bureaucracy. That’s taking a blowtorch to the neutral institutions of justice.”