Jonathan Capehart goes further and calls him a racist:
David Brooks calls Trump a sociopath on PBS NewsHour August 9th 2019
"
Amna Nawaz:
Let me ask you about something else.
The president did, obviously, make a visit to those affected communities. And his team put out what's basically a highly produced edited video of his visit on the ground in El Paso. You're watching a clip of it right there.
There was a contrast there between some of the reports we heard on the ground from journalists and then another video. It was cell phone video that emerged after the visit. It showed the president on the ground in El Paso talking about his crowd size at a rally back in February and comparing it to Beto O'Rourke's.
Take a quick listen to what he said.
Donald Trump:
That was some crowd.
Woman:
Thank you.
Donald Trump:
And we had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto. Beto had like 400 people in a parking lot. They said his crowd was wonderful.
Amna Nawaz:
Jonathan, there is kind of a tale of two narratives there. In the moment, you don't really know which one to pay attention to.
Jonathan Capehart:
Well, the narrative here is consistent.
President Trump is at the center of that narrative, whether it's that highly produced campaign-style-like video of his visits to El Paso Dayton, or it's that cell phone video where he's talking about one of the things that is part of his greatest hits, crowd size.
He has talked about crowd size since the day of his inauguration. And, for him, that is a marker of popularity.
But, in that moment, what I would expect the people of El Paso and Dayton, the people in Ohio, the American people who are grieving — and also Texas — people who are grieving, what they want to see from a president is comfort. They want to see someone consoling them.
I was in New York on 9/11. And President George W. Bush was president of the United States, and I had lots of disagreements with the policies of President George W. Bush. But when he stood on that rubble at ground zero and talked to those workers, and talked to the city, and talked to the nation, that's exactly what we needed to hear then.
When President Obama went to Charleston and impromptu sang "Amazing Grace" at the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, a state senator who was murdered with eight other people in Mother Emanuel Church, in that moment, he channeled the grief of a church, of a city, of a community, and of a nation.
We didn't get that with President Trump.
Amna Nawaz:
David, how do you look at this, really? He's such a divisive figure anyway. There is the standard of the consoler in chief. He hasn't done it yet. It's not who he is. Right?
David Brooks:
Yes.
Well, there's a photo, a still from that visit where he's with the orphan baby and two family members, with his wife. And Melania is holding the child. And he's got this grin and the thumb up.
And when I looked at that photo, I thought, the Democrats are having a debate: Is he a racist? Is he a white supremacist?
And I look at that photo, I think, well,
he's a sociopath. He's incapable of experiencing or showing empathy.
And, politically, it's helpful for him to target that lack of empathy and fellow feeling toward people of color. But how much have we seen him show empathy for anybody?
And so I look at that as someone who is unloved and made himself unlovable and whose subject is himself, is his own competitive greatness. And so he doesn't do the consoler in chief just because he doesn't do that emotional range.
And that's a burden and a cost for any of us.
Amna Nawaz:
You mentioned the white supremacy line there. We have obviously been talking about that a lot in 2019 now.
And Lisa Desjardins was reporting earlier too on the ground in Iowa there. Candidates are being asked about that: Do you think this president is a white supremacist?
Is that sort of a litmus test now for candidates moving forward?
David Brooks:
It's an easy emotional inflation, it seems to me.
I thought Biden's answer and Kamala Harris' was pretty good, which is, I don't know, but he's certainly enabling them. And he's certainly speaking the language. He uses the language of invasion when talking about immigration.
Now, I read a lot of the manifestos this week and those who have actually killed in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso. They start with invasion. They go many more steps. They believe that racial mixing really is a cancer. And they have this deep separatism.
I don't know if Trump has that. But he has certainly set an atmosphere where it's easier to talk about human beings as an invasion.
Amna Nawaz:
What do you make of all this right now, Jonathan? It's a big topic. This is nothing new in America. And yet it's new in terms of how prevalent it is.
Jonathan Capehart:
Right, because — and it pains me to say this, but we're talking about it because
the president of the United States is a racist with a white supremacist policy agenda.
He began his political career questioning the legitimacy of the first African-American president. He started his campaign within the first two minutes saying that Mexicans were — quote — "rapists."
He called for a complete and total ban on Muslims entering the United States after the San Bernardino attack during the campaign in December 2016. He's used words on the campaign trail from the midterm elections and continued, invasion, caravans, infestation, animals, to what David was talking about.
In policy and in rhetoric, he is feeding into this environment, this atmosphere, where people such as the shooter in El Paso who has — we have seen the affidavit. He's confessed in doing what he's done, and confessed to targeting — quote — "Mexicans."
That — these things don't happen in a vacuum. Did the president order this person to do this? No. But that person heard in that rhetoric — and we have seen it from New Zealand, around the world, but particularly here, where we are dealing with a domestic terrorism problem, where the primary people committing these terrorist acts are white supremacists.
We're dealing with a situation here where the president of the United States is feeding into it with the rhetoric that's coming out of his mouth, whether it's from a podium at the White House or from a podium at a campaign rally somewhere in the country.
David Brooks:
Yes.
I hear you talking, and I think
I basically agree with it. Then I — my next question is, well, how do we then do democracy for the next 16 months? Like, there is a presumption that we're all Americans together. There's a presumption of goodwill, that we can have a conversation.
And maybe Donald Trump — but how do we address ourselves to Donald Trump supporters, many of whom are very realistic and are supporters of him for good reasons having to do with their own lives and the dissolution of their own communities.
It's going to be hard to have a conversation once
the president has been declared sort of really beneath contempt. And I'm not saying I disagree with you. I'm just saying this is a problem we have to deal with as we try to have a national conversation over this election."
Bookmarks