The "Week In Politics" segment on the PBS News Hour once pretended to match a liberal pundit and a conservative pundit, as it did with Mark Shields and Paul Gigot early in this century. But when David Brooks came along, he often agreed with everything Shields and then Jonathan Capehart had to say. "Balance," PBS style.
On Friday, former Reagan and Bush aide Peter Wehner sounded like a Capehart clone as they teamed up to trash President Trump after two West Virginia National Guard members were shot in the nation's capital by an Afghan refugee.
It’s a little weird to say it’s ghoulish to turn the shooting victims into political pawns, and then launch into using them in your anti-Trump jeremiad.
JOHN YANG: Pete, I wonder how you — what you make of the way the president responded. He immediately sent in 500 more troops. He immediately blamed the Biden administration for admitting the alleged shooter, and then cut off — essentially cut off a lot of immigration.
PETER WEHNER, The Atlantic: Yes, I'd say he reacted predictably and awfully. He predicted — as he is. This was sort of the Trump DNA kicking in.
I should say first that I just find a kind of ghoulishness that happens, when people die, tragedies in life, and the way that the people who die and the victims are turned into political pawns. That's always left me kind of disquieted. That's particularly the case here and now.
But, look, Trump is taking advantage. This is going back to the fever swamp from which he came. His first announcement when he — for president in 2015, when he came down the golden escalator, was what? It was an attack on Mexicans, where he said they were drug dealers and criminals and rapists.
Then, during the campaign, he said that he was going to ban Muslims from coming into the country. And that united his base. So I think he's returning to form, but I think it's broader now. And in this case, with the Afghans that he's attacking, these are people who either helped the United States during the war or were targeted by the Taliban themselves.
And this was an act of American decency and compassion. And to take that and turn it around and to go after these — this weak and vulnerable people and then broaden it to a wider attack on immigrants is a really ugly thing to see.
Excuse us: the "weak and vulnerable people" right now are the shooting victims, not Afghan immigrants.
PBS and its partners at PolitiFact won’t check on Trump wanted to “ban Muslims” from entering the country (instead of from seven Muslim countries with terrorism problems) and “united his base” behind it. PBS sees “Islamophobia” in any concern about violent Islamists, as does NPR.
John Yang then asked for the actual Capehart to speak: “Jonathan?”
JONATHAN CAPEHART: Well, this is not a surprise. Anyone who's been paying attention to President Trump would have expected this reaction.
To Peter's point, he's been saying these things, these anti-immigrant, xenophobic things since he started his — since he entered the political arena. Go all the way back to the birther controversy with President Obama.
So the idea that he now, in a second term where he feels unleashed, unfettered, is surrounded by an administration that is enabling him to do all the things he wants to do, the fact that he used a tragedy to sort of amp up what he was already trying to do, not shocking at all.
When it comes to bringing 500 more National Guard troops here to Washington, for what purpose? I mean, originally, he said it's about crime. Well, if you're really serious about crime, I think a functioning White House, a functioning Justice Department would work with local officials from the mayor and certainly the police chiefs to talk about, how can we help you with crime?
Even though, in a city like Washington and other large cities around the country, crime has been falling. And so I think what we see is that the National Guard, to Peter's point, they have been — it's sad when people who lose their lives are instantly used as political pawns.
But the National Guard, they have been used as pawns from the very beginning, brought in under the guise of crime, and then used for other things, the National Guard here used to beautify the parks. That's not what they're for.
And so what the president is doing is, it's shameful, it's xenophobic, and in the end, it is going to hurt America's national security. This perpetrator worked with the CIA in Afghanistan with the United States. And we all know what he was doing. He was helping us, furthering our national security interests.
So let that sink in: Capehart is being more complimentary to THE SHOOTER than he is to Trump.
Since that pile of insults somehow wasn’t enough, Yang went back for another heaping scoop: “Pete, do you want to add to that?” Capehart Two replied by again smearing all Trump voters as “morally deformed” haters:
WEHNER: No, I just underscore what Jonathan said. This — it's so central to understand about Donald Trump and I think his psychological makeup, which is that he seems to draw energy from hatred, from generating hatred toward other people.
And this capacity to unleash the dark passions and the dark emotions, we have never seen anything like it, certainly in modern American history, maybe in all of American history. And the way he — the capacity that he has to amplify that is extraordinary.
And the one other thing I would add to it is, he does know what he's doing in this sense. His base responds to this. This is a base that has been morally deformed, and that was at the beginning of the Trump administration. But 10 years of this has turned it into an even worse manifestation.
At the end of the segment, Yang bizarrely asked these Trump haters how they deal with "uncomfortable conversations" in our "polarized" country over the holidays, and Wehner dared to say the goal is "to try and connect with people on a human level, and then to remind ourselves not to dehumanize, and politics is not defining to who we are. It matters. We're in politics because we think it does matter, but, in the end, it's not the most important thing, and we have to have civility in that approach."
Capehart, as expected from an MS NOW host, did not agree with that.
