The last Friday pundit roundup of the year on the PBS News Hour featured Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. She was ugly in pink, aggressively channeling the spirit of Jonathan Capehart, accusing Trump of pushing a "white Christian nationalism" and a modern-day Jim Crow complex on America.
David Brooks began with a centrist take, that Trump's appeals against establishment elitism obviously resonate "as we lament the horror of what's happened over the last year, it's much more horrible than I anticipated." Anchor William Brangham then asked the lefty for her hot take:
KIMBERLY ATKINS STOHR: Yes, two things really jumped out at me. And one is the erosion of the rule of law. And I see the Trumpification of the Department of Justice, for example, as a key role in that right alongside the White House. He came in pardoning the January 6 rioters, everyone who participated in that horrific day, but, at the same time, weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies. As an attorney, this is not how I learned in law school that the rule of law is supposed to be implemented.
It's routinely shameless for the Left to claim there was no "Bidenization" of the DOJ, there was no partisan conspiracy to get Trump and his friends and fervent supporters from 2021 to 2025. Then, she played the Racist Card:
ATKINS STOHR: Another thing I think you see a great through line, whether it's its immigration policies or the decimation of the federal government with the purging of workers to the attacks on universities, is a throughline of race.
It is this idea that people within the country who are Black or Latino or also Muslim, the Islamophobic aspect of it, or immigrants, it's only those that are deemed the ones that are a danger to the country. We will open white South Africans -- open our arms to white South Africans, but at the same time, the denigration of other countries as Third World, as less than, as hellholes and worse.
You see this real idea that there is a white Christian nationalism that has taken over the federal government in a way that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.
PBS liberal pundit finds a "throughline of race" in Trump's policies, with "Islamophobia," and "a white Christian nationalism that has taken over the federal government in a way that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime." pic.twitter.com/bULPQTclEI
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) December 28, 2025
Brooks then uncorked another lecture on how the uneducated classes are in revolt, and so "I look at this as a moment of rupture and repair, that it's ugly to live through," but we can fix it. So Brangham teed up Atkins Stohr again with "Who do you see as the repairers that David is yearning for?" She then compared Team Trump to....Jim Crow. She's not subtle in her smears.
ATKINS STOHR: After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction. That was meant to heal some of the wounds and bring up the formerly enslaved African Americans to a place where they can participate fully in society. And what did we get? We got a vicious blowback to it with Jim Crow, a rejection of it, this idea that politically people thought it was better to say, hey, these are people taking something that belongs to you,rather than saying, hey, let's look for a way to bring up everyone and to protect everyone's rights.
That's exactly what Donald Trump is doing. He could be talking to the people that you talked about being left behind, but instead he's saying that these immigrants or these black folks or these other people are taking something that belongs to you.
And that's what's giving people the idea that this is unfair. But one thing that I think, this can't happen without institutions allowing it. And I think this year we saw the biggest institution, the Supreme Court, basically allowing Trump, before the actions that he has taken has even been deemed to be constitutional or legal, in the short term allowing them to go in place....
And so by the time the legality or the constitutionality has decided, very little has been so far, the damage has already done. And USAID is already gone. The Education Department's right next to it. You're seeing people who have been deported to countries that they don't have family, they have never been to before. How do you make them whole?
That's too late. So the fact that the Supreme Court, as the unelected independent branch of our government, has basically been more often than not a rubber stamp for him is a real problem. We need our institutions to step up.
PBS liberal pundit Kimberly Atkins Stohr equates Trump with Jim Crow: After Reconstruction, “we got a vicious blowback to it with Jim Crow, a rejection of it." The government denied minority rights. "That's exactly what Donald Trump is doing.” pic.twitter.com/GsnB4PyOIN
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) December 28, 2025
She said this as the Supreme Court has denied several Trump initiatives, most recently his legal rationale for deploying the National Guard in Chicago. Leftists expect every institution to be as biased as "PBS News."
