On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks slammed President Trump’s tweets about MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough and stated the claim that the administration offered to spike a negative story from the National Enquirer if “Morning Joe” apologized for its coverage of Trump is potential mafia behavior.
Brooks stated, “Well, one of the nice things, if we can find a silver lining here, is, it’s possible for everybody to be freshly appalled, that we are not inured to savage, misogynistic behavior of this sort.”
He further stated, “[T]he issue here is the corruption of our public sphere. And that’s what Donald Trump does with these things. And it makes it harder for us, our country, to ever get back to normal when these things are corrosive to just the way people talk to each other.”
Brooks later added, “I do think if it — one of the things that may begin to offend people is potential mafioso behavior. One of the things we heard this morning in the op-ed piece in the Washington Post by the two hosts was that the White House sort of threatened sort of extortion, that if, the show becomes more Trump-friendly, then a National Enquirer investigation into their relationship will be spiked. And that’s sort of mafioso, extortion behavior. That’s beyond normal White House behavior. It’s beyond political hardball. It’s sort of using your media allies, the National Enquirer and the Trump administration, to take down enemies. And that’s not something we’ve seen in the — in America since maybe Nixon, or maybe never.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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