With former President Trump being indicted there was bound to be some cable news historian who reached for an outlandish analogy while attempting to wax poetic on the news and Douglas Brinkley delivered on Friday’s CNN Newsroom, declaring Trump’s upcoming mugshot will be like the wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth.
Host Jessica Dean wondered what history is going to think of this moment, “And Douglas Brinkley is here with me in New York, and I saw you, kind of, nodding your head while John [Miller] was walking us through just this, like, incredible image of a former president who has been covered by Secret Service. Will he be handcuffed? Will he not? How are historians like yourself and the ones that come after you going to take note of this moment? Because we are, we're making history now.”
It’s very early to be talking about how history will remember this, but that didn’t stop Brinkley from launching into a broad denunciation of the Republican Party, “I see it as the decline of the Republican Party. I mean, we think of the GOP as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and it's descending into Donald Trump, who’s being indicted. And this is the first indictment with maybe others to come. Yet the Republican Party seems to be backing him for re-election.”
Getting to Trump specifically, Brinkley claimed, “Now we're set up to see the biggest reality show that's actually real come to life and watching a the-- I can't even think of an artifact except maybe wanted John Wilkes Booth after the Lincoln assassination of a wanted poster or a mugshot that's going to be circulating around the world in the kind of way that this one of Donald Trump is.”
It says more about Brinkley and his fellow liberals that they would analogize the alleged falsification of business records with the assassination of a president. More to the point, New York doesn’t release mugshots, so those wanting that “artifact” should prepare to be disappointed.
Brinkley followed up by adding, “the finger printing the booking of him. It's really dramatic stuff, and it's never happened before in American history. We're all going to be glued, leaning forward to our television sets on Tuesday if all of this unravels as it looks like it is.”
Hopefully CNN will get better analogies before Tuesday.
This segment was sponsored by Progressive.
Here is a transcript for the March 31 show:
CNN Newsroom
3/31/2023
9:12 AM ET
JESSICA DEAN: And Douglas Brinkley is here with me in New York, and I saw you, kind of, nodding your head while John was walking us through just this, like, incredible image of a former president who has been covered by Secret Service. Will he be handcuffed? Will he not? How are historians like yourself and the ones that come after you going to take note of this moment? Because we are, we're making history now.
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: I see it as the decline of the Republican Party. I mean, we think of the GOP as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and it's descending into Donald Trump, who’s being indicted. And this is the first indictment with maybe others to come. Yet the Republican Party seems to be backing him for re-election. One would have thought January 6th, and Trump's involvement with that would have been enough to derail Trump, that would have been the end of his role in politics. Now we're set up to see the biggest reality show that's actually real come to life and watching a the-- I can't even think of an artifact except maybe wanted John Wilkes Booth after the Lincoln assassination of a wanted poster or a mugshot that's going to be circulating around the world in the kind of way that this one of Donald Trump is.
His finger, the finger printing the booking of him. It's really dramatic stuff, and it's never happened before in American history. We're all going to be glued, leaning forward to our television sets on Tuesday if all of this unravels as it looks like it is.
DEAN: Yeah, it is dramatic. It's a good word for it.
