PBS’s coverage of Night Four of the Republican National Convention again featured the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart holding up the liberal end of the political analysis. (David Brooks of the New York Times was the ostensible conservative on the panel, but as usual they often agreed with each other.)
Capehart spent most of the four nights of the convention whining that the speakers weren’t displaying the promised “unity,” and on Night Four declared Donald Trump’s 90-minute acceptance speech “hateful.”
After all the distress seeping out of the Democratic camp regarding President Biden’s fitness to run again, Capehart still carried a torch for the president, saying at 9:06 p.m. “We’re in July. This is not September, there is time to pull things back, but it seems like the party has made up its mind. They want him out.”
At 10:08 p.m., pre-Trump speech, after insisting crime rates were falling “in record numbers” under Biden, Capehart went on a rather insulting rant about Trump’s supporters in the hall.
Capehart: “And one other thing. All week, I’ve been hearing references to God and divine intervention and guardian angel. This is not the Republican Party and I’ve seen stories about this being a coronation of Donald Trump. I think for the people in this room it goes beyond a coronation. He’s being deified. He is being deified. And I noted when the crowd started chanting ‘We Love Trump,” I understand where it comes from, it comes from a good place. But there’s a part of me that’s terrified by that chant, given everything that I heard from Eric Trump and a bunch of other speakers we’ve been listening to since Monday.”
Capehart defended Biden after Trump's speech.
Capehart: “I think it should make Democrats reconsider what’s going on. Because I don’t understand and I have not heard from anyone what happens if they succeed in getting President Biden to step away from the ticket.’
Co-host Geoff Bennett, sounding exasperated with the GOP, made a silly comparison of Biden’s disturbing debate performance to Trump’s long acceptance speech.
Bennett: When I used to cover the Trump White House we had a running joke that being his teleprompter operator was the hardest job in all of Washington. And Jonathan, what do you make of this asymmetry, where Joe Biden has his disastrous debate performance and there are calls for him to exit the race. Donald Trump gives a, I think it’s fair in many ways rambling, more than 90-minute speech, and that’s accepted, that’s accepted by this Republican base.
Capehart: It’s accepted by the Republican base, but it’s also accepted by us in the media. Quite frankly, I would love it if folks in our profession would treat this speech the way they treated Joe Biden’s debate. This speech was not presidential, this speech was not unity. This speech was hateful, it was not unifying, and quite honestly, if Democrats don’t get their act together, they’re going to prove David [Brooks] right, both campaigns are out to lose the campaign.
That was the final word of PBS’s analysis before saying farewell until the Democratic National Convention in August (whoever may be on the Democratic ticket by then).
