What excuse does David Brooks have for publishing manifestly false Presidential history as part of the usual New York Times anti-Trump propaganda? None that I can see. He styles himself as a thoughtful public intellectual. He majored in history at Columbia. Okay, he is Canadian but he lives here and is presented by the New York Times as an authority.

I have to presume that if he writes a column with flat-out false information about U.S. political history, he is misleading the public intentionally or, just as unethically, he didn’t check his facts. Of course the New York Times editors don’t hold him to being factual, responsible or ethical. They let Charles M. Blow, Michelle Goldberg and their other biased hacks get away with worse most days. But I expect them to lie. I expect Brooks to be wrong, but at least to get his facts right.

Nope.

In the obnoxiously headlined “How Trump Will Fail,” Brooks tells us that “Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism.” At least he hasn’t embraced the version of America pushed by the Biden Administration: open borders, government censorship, racial discrimination, political prosecutions, puppet Presidencies and government cover-up journalism. The main thrust of Brooks’ analysis is that “populism” doesn’t work and has never worked in the U.S.. Brooks’ sneer at the American values of individualism, personal responsibility, exploration, confidence, exceptionalism and capitalism is palpable.

“It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was also an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Many Americans believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen people, to complete history and to bring a new heaven down to earth. (Kind of like the way God saved Trump in that Pennsylvania field so that he could complete the sacred mission of deporting more immigrants.),” Brooks writes. (Gift link to get you past the paywall and you can pat yourself on the back for not subscribing to this junk.)

Then he writes, “The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn’t work. Between 1825 and 1901 we had 20 presidencies. 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.”

That is 100% bullshit, to be appropriately blunt. As Marissa Tomei tells judge Fred Gwynne when he asks her if her expert testimony that wins the case in “My Cousin Vinnie” is opinion or fact, “It’s a fact.”

Brooks’ alleged chain of “one term Presidents” who were thrown out begins in 1825 with John Quincy Adams. He was a one-term President because he shouldn’t have been President at all. Andrew Jackson was the clear winner of the popular vote in 1824, but the split field didn’t permit an Electoral College winner, so the race was thrown into the House, where Adams bribed Henry Clay with a Cabinet position to throw his support to Adams. (Clay hated and feared Jackson, the populist.) That deal helped Jackson win in 1828, as he had spent four years talking about how the election had been stolen (sound familiar?) because, you know, it was.

Jackson was over-all a great and transformational President, eliminaing the national debt, stopping a civil war before we were ready for it, and redefining the office itself. He served two terms and could have been elected to a third. True, his successor, protege and V.P. Martin Van Buren, was a single term President, but not because of populism: every time a great President has designated his successor, that poor sap serves single term because he is compared unfavorably to his whiz-bang predecessor. This has happened three times, with Van Buren, Taft (who was anointed by Teddy Roosevelt) and Bush I, the designated successor to Ronald Reagan. This phenomenon couldn’t apply to Trump less, whose predecessor is Joe Biden. Trump is in the equivalent position of vaudeville performers following a dog act, regarded in “the biz” as a fortuitous slot. After all, you can only be better than that.

Between Jackson and the next President who served two terms, Abe Lincoln, not one of the single term Presidents even ran for a second term. Two of them, Harrison and Taylor, died. Neither had a chance to be re-elected. Their Vice-Presidents who took over (Tyler and Fillmore), who had not been put on the ticket for their likely Presidential skills, never had a mandate, and never were regraded as anything but lucky place-holders. In between them was our most unknown great President, James K. Polk. He could have been elected to a second term easily, but didn’t run because he was a workaholic and burned himself out in four years: Polk died almost immediately after leaving the White House. No, David, populism didn’t kill him.

The next two Presidents weren’t “thrown out” by the ignorant mob as Brooks claims. First, neither Pierce nor Buchanan ran for re-election, and second, it wasn’t “industrialization” that wrecked their Presidencies, it was the growing rift between North and South over slavery. They were both Democrats, and theirs was the pro-slavery party. Once Lincoln had become the first Republican President, there was only one Democrat elected from 1860 to 1912—that’s 52 years. The public was remarkably consistent in who it thought could best run the nation, not the feckless populists of Brooks’ imagination.

After Lincoln, how many of those one-term Presidents ran for re-election so the “populists” could throw them out? One. O-N-E. Numero Uno. And that one has an asterisk. It was Republican Benjamin Harrison who, like John Quincy Adams, lost the popular vote. He was never popular. Grover Cleveland, that sole popular Democrat, won the popular vote all three times he ran.

The rest? Andrew Johnson wasn’t elected President and was a Democrat inheriting the office upon a Republican President’s death. He didn’t run for reelection, but the next normal Presidency was two-terms, that of Ulysses S. Grant. His successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, was another President doomed from the start: his election really was stolen (from Democrat Samuel Tildon). He didn’t run for reelection, but his party kept the White House, and Hayes’ successor showed every sign of being strong, bold, popular and successful, until he was shot by a lunatic. Garfield died—no, David populism didn’t shoot him—and his VP, Chester A. Arthur, took over and did a surprisingly good job. But Arthur, like Polk, was dying, and probably knew it. He didn’t run for reelection, and died a little over a year after leaving office. Then we get the Cleveland-Harrison-Cleveland fluke, and it’s back to two-term Presidents again with McKinley in 1986, and also back to Presidents dying in office.

In short, the record doesn’t support Brooks’ claims. At all. He’s lying. He’s assuming that the average U.S. history dolt will glance at a list of the Presidents and say, “Wow, he’s right!” No, he’s wrong and obviously wrong. Brooks is manipulating the facts to support an analysis that the facts don’t support, and his “evidence” has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate that kind of laziness or intellectual dishonesty, whichever it is. Where are those factcheckers when you need them?