PBS used to call its Friday night journalists roundtable Washington Week In Review. It's now Washington Week with The Atlantic, but it could be called Trashing Trump's Week In Review. President Trump adding his name to the Kennedy Center caused a Friday night freakout. On the PBS News Hour, David Brooks compared Trump to mass-murdering Stalin and Mao over this. On this show, it was just "tinpot dictators" in general.
The show's host, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg (D-D.C.) quoted White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeting "Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and, likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy because this will be a truly great team long into the future." He said "I don't even know what to do with that."
On PBS's "Washington Week with The Atlantic," they continued the Friday Night Freakout over Trump adding his name to the Kennedy Center. Franklin Foer fusses "the only leaders in the world who do this are in places like Turkmenistan, in Tajikistan. There's a tinpot dictator… pic.twitter.com/CG8QKmqJ9Q
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) December 21, 2025
FRANKLIN FOER: You know, I bet J.D. Vance is worried about his place in the second part of the ticket. But --
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: JFK's very charismatic.
FOER: He's very charismatic. You know, Putin doesn't name buildings after himself. Orban doesn't name buildings after himself. This is something -- you know, the only leaders in the world who do this are in places like Turkmenistan, in Tajikistan. There's a tinpot dictator quality to what he's doing and how he's in afflicting his insecurities on the world.
GOLDBERG: By the way, that's it, and that's the thing, and I don't think I'm going too far in saying this, that this is the week -- apart from the obvious tragedies, this is the week that has had it like a kind of a feeling of Boratness to it.
Goldberg then turned to another freakout of the week, over Trump putting captions under his Wall of President inside the White House. This is in an area of the White House the public wouldn't see, but they're upset anyway. Goldberg noted the caption under Andrew Jackson reads in part, "Jackson was unjustifiably treated unfairly by the press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would in the future be."
Trump-trashing journalists treat this as pure egotism, so they can't seem to figure out that this is a true statement, that Trump's coverage has been historically vicious.
But then Goldberg added this whopper: "I mean, to say that it's without precedent in American history, American presidential -- is understating the cause, presidents have always respected their predecessors and always talked about it. What is going on inside the White House when he does this?" His employee Ashley Parker affirmed the boss: "Well, first, there's a certain smallness to it, obviously."
Why would Goldberg bizarrely claimed presidents have never spoken ill of other presidents?
PS: Parker also uncorked this bizarre sentence: "There's also a central irony that Donald Trump is actually great at willing his own reality. And he can be very effective if he says, you know, we've totally fixed the border. If you're not someone -- if you're not a rancher, if you're not someone living at the border, you might plausibly believe that."
