President Trump’s use of emergency powers to deploy the National Guard to America’s disgracefully crime-ridden capital city was greeted with racially charged animus by the (for the moment) taxpayer-funded pundits on PBS’s Washington Week in Review on Friday evening.
Show moderator and Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg brought up what he “a domestic military situation, the National Guard on the streets of Washington.”
Scott MacFarlane of CBS News admitted some locals supported the “extra law enforcement,” but quickly pivoted to worries Trump’s federalization would last forever and went on to suggest documented suspicions of the crime figures being cooked were conspiratorial.
Scott MacFarlane: He's alleging a crime emergency is underway in the District of Columbia. When pressed on the crime numbers and shown with the D.C. government has released, that there's a 26 percent drop in violent crime from this time last year, he alleges the numbers are rigged or the numbers are cooked, much like he did after the 2020 election or with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So, he's alleging there's a crime emergency that this is there to combat. But for the people of the District of Columbia, who do not mind extra law enforcement, they're concerned, this is heavy-handed and this is pernicious and this is not the right response to it.
Host Goldberg dwelled on race.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right? I mean, Zolan, we -- people who know that long history of home rule in D.C. understand that this is a very, very fraught racial issue as well. This is about giving the people of D.C. the right to self-government. This seems to be a kind of an old -- coming from an old playbook. Is that fair to say?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, New York Times: Yes it is....These are comments that the president has made about American cities, mostly cities that are led by Democrats, mostly cities that are diverse, multiracial.
The Atlantic's Vivian Salama took the hypocrisy angle, predictably bringing up January 6:
Vivian Salama: Jeff, if this was, you know, something that was rampant or that was really kind of rose to the level in the eyes of D.C. as an emergency, then it would be one thing. But it is not lost on D.C. that the very crimes and a accusations that the president is lobbing against people in D.C. were also what happened during January 6th with regard to the assaults against police officers and other things that were happening that day. And yet the president pardoned so many of those people who were charged by the Justice Department of those crimes, and yet here we are.
Goldberg: Are you suggesting that there's a bit of racially tinged hypocrisy going on here?
Salama didn't take Goldberg's smarmy interjection that far but hinted “there might be a double standard at play.”
Goldberg and MacFarlane lamented Trump’s hypocrisy given how many rioters were convicted guilty of assaulting police, while David Ignatius of the Washington Post claimed D.C.’s district government “in this dreadful moment, did a pretty good job.”
Goldberg waited until the very last question, to Kanno-Youngs, to suggest a political bright side for Trump, something glaringly obvious to most Americans who favor law and order and fear violent crime: "Could this be a winning issue, the deployment of military resources into the cities?"
New York Times reporter Luke Broadwater made the same “hypocrisy” argument in Thursday’s paper: “Trump Deploys National Guard for Local Crime After Calling Jan. 6 Rioters ‘Very Special’.”
Both outlets ignored a crucial difference in the comparison. The Capitol Hill riot, awful as it was, was an isolated violent incident that lasted several hours and was never to be repeated. D.C. residents have been living with high rates of violent crime, and the ongoing fear that goes with it, for decades, with no end in sight until perhaps now.
