Video Review of Wizard of Ads - Monday Morning Memo

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And no, I don’t think America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic values.

But I do know that events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record many cases in which a power-mad leader careening toward tyranny suddenly regained his senses and became more moderate. On the contrary, the normal course of the disease is toward ever-accelerating deterioration and debauchery.

And I do understand why America’s founding fathers spent so much time reading historians like Tacitus and Sallust. Thomas Jefferson called Tacitus “the first writer in the world, without a single exception.” They understood that the lust for power is a primal human impulse and that even all the safeguards they built into the Constitution are no match for this lust when it is not restrained ethically from within.

As John Adams put it in a letter in 1798, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”

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- David Brooks The Coming Trump Crackup Jan. 23, 2026

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