On Monday's Andrea Mitchell Reports show on MSNBC, PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor sounded more like an advocate than a reporter. She dismissed Trump's focus on violence caused by Antifa and urged him that "in reality," he should be focused on "overwhelmingly peaceful people" at the protests.
Alcindor drew a vigorous Twitter rebuttal from conservatives after tweeting this nugget on Sunday about Antifa’s role in the unrest:
“These people are anarchists,” President Trump says without providing any evidence.
On Monday, Mitchell relayed with disdain that apparently the president talked to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and invited him to the G-7 summit postponed to later this year. “Clearly not the top focus, uh, is a response to this and is a response to reaching out, Yamiche, to, empathetically, to people of color who have been so aggrieved by the death of George Floyd.”
YAMICHE ALCINDOR: President Trump has really signaled in and focused in on this idea that it's Antifa. It's this professionally organized crowd that we're now looking at domestic terrorism. Of course, there are aggressors. There are looters. There are people who are rioting. But there are also overwhelmingly peaceful people.
I was out over the weekend on the White House lawn, just steps away from the president's residence. And I talked to so many people who said they were there to send a message to the government that black people and white people should be treated equally in this country, and that police should not be able to kill people in the way that they saw George Floyd being killed when that officer kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. I'm thinking today of a young boy, 18 years old, named Jaden, who told me he was eight years old when Trayvon Martin was killed and that he realized then as a young kid in an elementary school, that racism could literally kill him.
So when the president talks about Antifa and all these things, he's literally ignoring the people who are on his front lawn. All he has to do is walk down and see, right in front of the White House, that there are Americans, everyday Americans, asking for change.
Literally, they're not on his "front lawn," they're across the street in Lafayette Park.
The PBS reporter recounted that Trump “went off the rails” and told governors that their response to violence and looting needs to be more forceful, they need to “dominate” the streets. Like a Democrat, she offered a rebuttal: “When in reality, what people need a lot of times and what they told me on the White House lawn is that they want someone who's empathetic, who understands that Americans are crying out, saying they're fed up and they want leadership in this moment.”
Mitchell could guess who that Someone is: “I should just point out that former Vice President Joe Biden has emerged for the first time in public,” or in this case, an actual event with an audience at a church.
Curtis Houck pointed out the Twitter rebuttals continued as I was writing:
