The PBS News Hour crew is clearly heartsick that the Democrats are in a crisis over Joe Biden's mental decline, and they know their liberal audience wants to change the subject back to Horrible Trump. Sounding like a taxpayer-funded MSNBC host, PBS anchor Amna Nawaz described the former president as an authoritarian full of lies in the Friday pundit roundtable with liberal David Brooks and more liberal Kimberly Atkins Stohr.
Can anyone imagine how Nawaz might explode in rage if anyone actually was allowed to voice a Republican view on PBS? Mock Democrats for not being democratic? For being incompetent at governing? After a few minutes of talking about the Biden crisis, Nawaz uncorked it:
NAWAZ: Biden backers have told me, look, they're worried that the focus on this conversation takes the focus off of Trump, who is an antidemocratic candidate with authoritarian tendencies, who is now newly empowered by that Supreme Court immunity ruling.
The head of The Heritage Foundation, we should point out, that's running this Project 2025 policy planning for a potential second Trump term, said this, this week. He said the country is in what he called the second American revolution-, and it could be — quote — "bloodless if the Left allows it to be." There's kind of this alarming language around a potential Trump presidency. Are we losing sight of the stakes here?
The Democrats seized on the comments of Kevin Roberts, who was describing the tendency of the Left to riot. In reaction, the Heritage Foundation tweeted a video full of Democrat talk of violence and support of the rioting in 2020. Like an MSNBC host, Nawaz can't imagine she is using "alarming language" about the "antidemocratic candidate with authoritarian tendencies," or that her friends relentlessly comparing Trump to Hitler is alarming or inflammatory.
But naturally, David Brooks agreed. He only made the ladies on set uncomfortable by citing bad poll numbers.
BROOKS: Yes, I think so. I mean, I — before he went to prison, I went over to see Steve Bannon and interviewed him. And I was scared out of my mind. Like, I just asked him, what's going to happen if you guys win? And he said: It'll be nothing like 2017. In 2017, we didn't have staff. We had nothing. But now we have got people who have been vetted. We have got people who are trained and we're just going to go after the deep state.
It looked like a dismantling of the civil service, basically. And that's just the beginning. So I do think people are losing some focus on that. And I have been a broken record on this for, whatever, seven years.
But it is also true that every American pretty much has seen an elderly relative in decline. And they sort of know what that looks like. And if I could just do one bit just random polling, as I mentioned, 72 percent of Americans don't think he should run again.
Brooks noted that Trump is leading by six points in several polls from "mainstream" outlets. Then Nawaz returned to another Democrat Party line of the week, of "asymmetry," that somehow Democrats are having a debate about replacing Biden, while Republicans don't budge on Trump. But Republicans had an actual primary race. Democrats suppressed primaries, and allowed no primary debates.
NAWAZ: I want to get back to this issue of how we're talking about President Trump as well here, which is to say there seems to be sort of an asymmetry of expectations as well in terms of Trump's performance in the debate, which was filled with misleading statements and lies.
He's only three years younger than President Biden, often veers off-script when he's not on prompter. Is — do you see that asymmetry? Is that affecting the conversation right now, Kim?
KIMBERLY ATKINS STOHR: I 100 percent see that asymmetry. Look, we can talk about mental cognitive tests that people might want the president to take, but we already know that Donald Trump has failed the moral test. He's failed the democracy test. He's failed the insurrection test.
And if we balance those things, it seems really clear. And I think one thing that this conversation makes us lose sight of is the fact the work of the Biden administration and other Democrats being already dismantled ever since the Supreme Court overturned Chevron just earlier this week.
We already have two federal judges, Republican-appointed federal judges, one that knocked down a rule that kept people from being bound by non-compete clauses that would prevent them from practicing their livelihoods, another rule that prevented federal coverage of transgender health care.
This is happening right now. This is happening this week. The dominoes are already falling, and we haven't even gotten to Project 2025.
