On Friday’s PBS NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff thought the police shootings were the top news story of the week, but she wasn’t pleased when both liberal Mark Shields and pseudo-conservative David Brooks reluctantly agreed that looting and disorder were going to help Donald Trump politically.
Looting? Woodruff hadn’t really wanted to get that specific. She suggested that wasn’t typical of Black Lives Matter protests.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, David, Hillary Clinton put out a statement. I guess she tweeted that the video should be made public. She’s going to Charlotte this weekend. What do we know about these candidates at a moment? This comes in the middle of the election. We’re just a couple of days away from the debate. She’s made some sympathetic comments. Donald Trump initially made a sympathetic comment about the victim in Tulsa, but then, I guess, last night made a speech and talked about we need to support the police.
DAVID BROOKS: Right. Yes. So, just politically — and this is not what I support, but what I think realistically is the effect of this. I think it helps Donald Trump. I go back to 1968. Richard Nixon was helped by riots, if you want to put it that way. And Trump’s campaign, from the convention speech on, has been really predicated on the argument that Americans are under violent threat, and that there is chaos and that our social order is being undone.
And if there’s not just the shootings, but the riots and the unrest, I think, at least for a certain segment of the population, that will undergird and support his argument, his perceptions of what America is. And I do think, if there’s any political effect of this, that air of disorder will end up helping him a little.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You agree it helps him?
MARK SHIELDS: I think it’s a pretty established principle in American politics that looting during a campaign helps the self-identified law and order candidate.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, not all the protests involve looting.
MARK SHIELDS: No. No — but when there is looting, is my point.
At the beginning of the PBS segment, viewers were only hearing about the horror of racially motivated police shootings, that they “keep happening.” There was no suggestion that protesters respond badly – or that looters are actually harming the credibility of protesters.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, we turn to the lead story tonight and for the last few nights, David, two more shootings in Tulsa and Charlotte, North Carolina, by police of black men. We’re still getting the information. We know the Tulsa policewoman was charged with manslaughter. What are we to make of this, the fact that these keep happening?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, first of all, the videos are just harrowing and have an effect on, I think, all of us and an effect on the national mood. It’s just this is a man losing his life. This is a wife losing her husband. These are cops in the middle. And you can feel the pressure building on them as they don’t know — quite know what to do. Beyond that, we don’t really know that much.
Brooks showed great sensitivity to the fear that police officers feel on the job, and talked about his discussions with them, so that offered a balance that you don’t often hear in these “Week in Review” segments, where they usually agree Trump and Ted Cruz and other Republicans are horrible people.
After disappointing Woodruff on the looting question, Shields did launch into a liberal lecture about how the poor city of Charlotte (and North Carolina in general) looks so terribly conservative now, and lost its “too busy to hate” label:
SHIELDS: I think that North Carolina is a test case in many respects. North Carolina had the reputation among Southern states for being so progressive under the governorships of — particularly of Terry Sanford and Jim Hunt, exceptional national — state leaders and national leaders. And now, since — in the last year, since the legislature and its bathroom laws and other effects, it’s seen its own reputation tarnished. It’s lost the National Basketball Association all-star game, a matter of pride in a basketball state, lost the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, which is an identifying icon of North Carolina life.
WOODRUFF: Then some voting rights controversies.
SHIELDS: It’s lost — the voting rights controversy. It’s lost jobs and business expansion. But I think this — Charlotte had the self-identified reputation of being the Atlanta, the new Atlanta, too busy to hate, and all the rest of it. And I think this is a blow. And I don’t know how it plays out politically in the national election.
So he was trying to walk back the idea that looting in Charlotte would help Trump.
