The first week of a presidency is usually described as a “honeymoon period,” but the liberal media are still on a war footing. There is no romance. On the PBS NewsHour on Friday night, liberal analyst Mark Shields insisted Trump was already a punchline by the second day, and pseudoconservative analyst David Brooks was trying to decide if Trump was a dictator or an egotistical 5-year-old brat.
MARK SHIELDS: if I were in the White House, I would be deeply concerned about. And that was the Dallas Stars hockey team, the National Hockey League team, plays in the American Airlines Center in Dallas that has a capacity crowd of 18,562.
They had a capacity crowd last Saturday night right after Spicer, right after the CIA. And they put up on their JumboTron, on the big screen, attendance, 1.5 million. (LAUGHTER) And the whole place erupted in laughter. And that’s — when you become a punchline 30 hours into your presidency in Dallas among hockey fans, that portends a problem.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Does he run a real danger, David, of that happening? Or are people saying, OK, let’s give him — it’s only the first week, let’s see what happens?
DAVID BROOKS: No. No. People are in more panic mode than before. (LAUGHTER) He’s just picked fight after fight. This was an example.
And there are sort of two theories of he tells things that are false all the time. Is it because he’s sort of an Orwellian figure, an authoritarian figure who is twisting words in an Orwellian manner, 1984, to exercise power and control people’s minds, or is he a 5-year-old who has an ego that needs to be fed, and the universe has to warp around his ego needs so he can feel good about himself, and everybody has to produce photos to make the monarch feel like he’s made of gold?
MARK SHIELDS: Which do you vote on?
DAVID BROOKS: I vote on the 5-year-old kid.
MARK SHIELDS: King George III?
DAVID BROOKS: The madness of King George III. And so I think, when we see that distortion, it’s because he just needs the ego fed all the time.
It's kind of funny that former CNN reporter Jessica Yellin wrote in The New York Times that they should create "an independent CNN" free of an obsession over profits so it can overcome shallow "pundits on panels model." Well, PBS is government-subsidized, and is still achieving mean-spirited debate -- well, it's not a debate. Both sides are roasting the president with a hot fire.
Shields did oddly agree with Steve Bannon later in the segment, that the national media are functioning as the Opposition Party to Trump, since the Democrats are so weakened:
SHIELDS: Steve Bannon, the president’s senior counselor, chief strategist, said something this week that was absolutely true. He said that there is no opposition party.
The Democrats lost 958 legislative seats during Barack Obama’s eight years. The Democrats went into the election of 2016 holding control of seven states where they have got the governorship and both houses of the legislature. Today, as we sit here, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Oregon, California, and Hawaii are the five states that have Democratic governors and Democratic legislatures. It’s 2500 miles from Hartford to Sacramento, and there’s not a single Democratic-controlled state in between that.
So, the opposition really is — Marty Baron, the editor of The Washington Post, is the leader of the opposition, or David’s paper [The New York Times], or mainstream media, because they’re the ones that have to call them account. There are 214 committees and subcommittees on the Hill.
WOODRUFF: Well, he called — Steve Bannon called the press the opposition party,
SHIELDS: He did --
WOODRUFF: But he meant it, I think, as a --
SHIELDS: Well, he meant it, but I think he — whether he meant it or not, he spoke the truth, because accountability and facts are going to be maintained and insisted upon. It’s only going to come that way. The Democrats are — on the Hill are powerless. They couldn’t pass salt if they asked for it. They couldn’t. I’m sorry. They couldn’t pass the sugar. That’s how weak they are.
