Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart and New York Times columnist David Brooks assembled for their weekly airing of grievances on Friday night’s PBS News Hour as they discussed the news that the Trump Administration has reached deals with five top law firms to provide $600 million in pro bono work. Capehart ignored vital details of the deals to claim Trump was going after his enemies, while Brooks claimed we no longer live in a democracy, and both men accused Trump of acting like the Mafia.
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As for Brooks, he claimed, “I benefited a lot from a piece Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic a couple — maybe a month ago a couple weeks ago, saying there are certain systems — people say Donald Trump is quite verging on authoritarianism, but the real thing he's verging on is patrimonialism.”
According to Brooks, patrimonialism is a “sort of a premodern form of government, if you go back before democracy, before the Treaty of Westphalia and all that kind of stuff. It was — it was run by families. And the family enriched itself. And they took after anybody who threatened the family. It's a little like mafioso.”
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