The PBS journalist roundtable Washington Week would never put on a Fox News correspondent or a Washington Times reporter -- they're too opinionated? But on July 21, as they obsessed over a potential third Trump indictment, they brought on Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, whose partisanship knows no bounds.
In 2020, his magazine endorsed Biden because "Donald Trump is the worst president this country has seen since Andrew Johnson, or perhaps James Buchanan, or perhaps ever."
Host Laura Barron-Lopez presented Trump and democracy as opposites, right from the introduction:
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Donald Trump's growing legal challenges test American democracy.
DONALD TRUMP: The DOJ has become a weapon for the Democrats, an absolute weapon.
Nowhere in this half-hour program was there the slightest hint of the House Republicans holding hearings into Biden scandals. They simply do not exist in the liberal pundit's paradise of PBS.
A little later, the host asked Goldberg: "When Congress certified the 2020 election results after the insurrection and when a number of election deniers lost in 2022, there was talk of the democracy held. Do you think that we`re going to look back on this week as another example of democracy holding?"
To them, democracy is when Democrats win elections, and apparently when a former president gets indicted. Viewers are instructed that you need to vote Democrat, or you may never vote again.
Goldberg expressed amazement at how they've just had to discuss the possibility of Trump being president from jail, because leftists are absolutely lusting to lock him up. He talked about the erosion of democratic norms without the slightest consideration that indicting a former president is itself an erosion:
GOLDBERG: The answer that I`ve been getting so far is, yes, maybe you could run the country from jail. But what it means is that we`re facing one novel situation after another. And what it shows to me, obviously this is about the law, this is about enforcement of the law, but what it shows to me is that there's no respect for norms. It's very, very hard to maintain a democracy. The law is incredibly important, obviously adhering to the law.
But if you have people who are willing to step outside the norms of democratic restraint that have governed most everyone who has ever participated in government, that puts you in another zone entirely. So, I mean, obviously, this country has been a going concern for quite a while. I don't want to be overdramatic and say that, well, that's proof that it's finished. All I would say about this week is that it's only July of 2023. I mean, God knows what August is going to bring us at this point.
Goldberg clearly loves this idea of Trump in jail. Later, he added: "it's fair to say that there's a very, very good chance that the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States in May or June of next year will be a convicted felon."
But what about Ron DeSantis? Goldberg proclaimed "the Ron DeSantis playbook is to exploit cultural division. Obviously, it doesn`t seem to be the harder he goes at it, he goes at it hard, and it doesn't seem to pay dividends for him. But there are many, many, many reasons why he's not very popular."
Goldberg would love a third term for Barack Obama, since in 2016, he wrote a 20,000-word opus celebrating "The Obama Doctrine" and told NPR Obama was "the greatest terrorist hunter in the history of the American presidency."
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