Dear Commons Community,

The press and media such as The National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Daily News have begun to ratchet up their anti-Donald Trump rhetoric.  Fox News issued a statement yesterday blasting Trump for his ““vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and that his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land.”  New York Times columnist, David Brooks delivered perhaps the most stinging take-down of Trump:

“Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

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.

He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants.”

As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.

Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.”

It remains to be seen whether any of this will effect Trump’s march to the Republican nomination.  Nothing else has yet.

Tony