Brooks’ final year at AEI was a breeze, at least compared with his first. He traveled around the world for an AEI-produced documentary highlighting capitalism’s salutary influence on marginalized populations. He started a new book exploring the origins of America’s “culture of contempt,” published in April 2019 as Love Your Enemy. (“My life’s work,” he told me.) In July 2019, after formally leaving AEI, he joined Harvard as a professor of practice at the Kennedy School and senior fellow at the Harvard Business School.

But if Brooks’ departure from AEI was in part an effort to escape the political fervor that was overtaking Washington, it didn’t provide much relief. In February 2020 — the day after the Senate acquitted Trump of his first impeachment charges — Brooks delivered a speech at National Prayer Breakfast, speaking in front of an audience that included Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. During his remarks, Brooks drew on the material from Love Your Enemy and exhorted the crowd to reject America’s culture of contempt by following the example of Jesus Christ: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

After Brooks took his seat on the dais, Trump stepped up to the mic.

“Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you — and I don’t know if Arthur is going to like what I’m going to say,” Trump said, before ripping into the “very dishonest and corrupt people” who had “done everything possible to destroy us, and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation.” 

“They know what they are doing is wrong,” Trump bellowed, “but they put themselves far ahead of our great country.”

In the media firestorm that ensued, observers quickly pointed out that Trump had not just repudiated Brooks’ advice; he had questioned the teachings of Jesus Christ himself. When I asked him about Trump’s remarks, though, Brooks put a positive spin on it. “It was awesome, actually,” he said. “I stood up there and told the president to love his enemies, and he stood up after me and said, ‘No, I’m not gonna’ — and I didn’t lose my house, and I didn’t lose my job, and I didn’t get arrested. That’s why I love America.” 

For anyone else watching the exchange, though, the message was clear enough: In Trump’s GOP, you’re either a friend or an enemy — and Brooks was certainly not a friend.

But if the public dust-up with Trump marked the end of Brooks’ career in Washington, it also offered a preview of his next role: the learned sage who speaks not to America’s body politic but to its immortal soul.

Two months later, in April 2020, Brooks published his first column in the Atlantic, promising to give readers “the tools … to construct a life that is balanced and full of meaning.” Three years and more than 160 editions later, the column serves as the perfect embodiment of the new Arthur Brooks. If you read between the lines, you can catch glimpses of Brooks’ conservatism: In one recent column, he argued that the uptick in political protests and activism among young people may be contributing to Gen Z’s mental health crisis, echoing his early work on “the happiness gap.” But for the most part, the column assiduously avoids political issues, focusing instead on the genre of emotional challenges that, presumably, confront someone with the time, money and temperament to read an advice column in the Atlantic: how to manage an endless stream of Zoom calls at work, for instance, or strategies to combat “workaholism.” On the Atlantic’s website, Brooks’ bylines often appear beside articles from another of the magazine’s marquee writers: David Frum.

The column, though, is only one small part of Brooks’ ballooning professional portfolio, which has come to include a never-ending cycle of speaking engagements, writing projects, conference appearances, corporate training sessions and podcast tapings. To help manage this list of professional obligations, Brooks employs a team of six full-time support staff through a company called ACB Ideas, which is funded by revenues from his book sales — his 2022 release, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, flew to the top of the New York Times’ nonfiction charts — as well as his speaking fees, which top out around $100,000 per appearance. After the symposium at Harvard, Brooks was scheduled to hop on a private chartered flight to Washington, where he was scheduled to give another talk.

“Arthur’s a really great popularizer of this stuff,” said Laurie Santos, the Yale professor, when I asked her about Brooks’ role in the emerging field of happiness studies. “He understands what leaders can do by sharing their happiness and how leaders can scale this stuff up.”