Brooks and Capehart on the aftermath of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Amna Nawaz:

The fallout from President Trump’s third alleged assassination attempt, another indictment of the former FBI director, and a subsequent Supreme Court ruling have made this a politically charged week.

To discuss all this, we now turn to Brooks and Capehart’s analysis. These are The Atlantic’s David Brooks and MS NOW’s Jonathan Capehart.

Great to see you both.

Jonathan Capehart:

Hey, safe.

David Brooks:

It’s good to see you.

Amna Nawaz:

Let’s start with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because we know a lot more now than we did a week ago, when this first happened. We know about the suspect and his alleged plans. We’ve seen the video being examined from multiple angles.

We’ve also seen many conspiracy theories that it was an event organized to distract from President Trump’s low approval ratings or help him fuel this argument to build a dance floor.

But, David, about a week after the event, how do you look at what happened, what it means, and what, if anything, has changed?

David Brooks:

I look at it as part of a climate of increasing violence, both against – obviously against Donald Trump, but against all of us, against a climate of verbal violence that seems to be omnipresent.

There are certain moments in history when you witness these heightened climates of violence. I’m thinking about the period surrounding the French Revolution. I’m thinking about reconstruction. I’m thinking of the 1970s. Older viewers, if we have any, may remember Baader-Meinhof’s gang, the Red Guards.

When I was a little boy at Grace Church School in New York, I heard the weathermen accidentally blow themselves up at the cottage. That was a period. You have these moments when there is a low sense of legitimacy of governing institutions and a high feeling that we have no shared values. Then people resort to violence.

Clearly we are in one of those periods. I look at the 2028 elections with a great sense of pessimism. And if you look at who thinks violence is justified, it tends to be very young. Most progressives and most conservatives oppose violence, but you get 2.5 times as many progressives saying it’s justified than not.

But what strikes me about this guy, about the guy who shot Butler, about the guy who shot Charlie Cook-Kirk, they didn’t seem to think about it much. It’s not like they did that, they’re radicals with a big statement and ideology.

The way they deal with these things seems almost rude, almost like half-thought and half-joking. And I can’t quite understand what it is – this kind of mild nihilism that drives people, almost on a whim, to do something horrific and life-altering.

Amna Nawaz:

Jonathan, how do you look at it?

Jonathan Capehart:

Well, excuse me, I’m not going to allow the comment that progressives more than people on the far right believe that violence is justified.

It’s something that the American people feel, they feel a little more comfortable than they did, say, five or ten years ago. Amna, you and I were in that room. We walked through the magnetometers together. We stopped at that spot.

Amna Nawaz:

Yes.

Jonathan Capehart:

The thing that I’ve been thinking about now a week later, and I keep coming back to it, is that when I heard the five bangs, I remember hearing five very loud bangs, and my immediate action was very instinctive, drop to the floor under the table and be quiet.

I have never been in such a situation. But as an American and certainly as a journalist, having to cover all this stuff and listening to recordings and films, you kind of learn by osmosis what to do.

To me, the biggest issue here is gun violence, so why am I not surprised that this happened? And I’ve been to that dinner at least a dozen times since 2000. And so, yes, there’s a problem with people feeling that political violence is the way to go and that we live in a very charged atmosphere.

But what has been a specter over us all for much longer is the scourge of gun violence.

Amna Nawaz:

Interestingly, he was not part of the conversation that publicized this event. There’s a lot to talk about in the coming weeks.

But I want to ask you about the other big headline this week, which was, of course, former FBI Director Jim Comey being indicted for the second time over this post from a year ago, and the seashells on the beach that prosecutors allege threatened the president with this “8647” message, and also a parallel headline, and the common thread here is – I’ll show you in a moment – but the FCC is going after ABC for its licenses.

That was one day after the First Lady and the President publicly said ABC should get rid of Jimmy Kimmel after he made a joke about Melania Trump becoming a widow.

David, President Trump has repeatedly said that ABC needs to get rid of Jimmy Kimmel. He has repeatedly said the Justice Department needs to go after Comey. Are these just government agencies now carrying out the president’s orders?

David Brooks:

Yes, more or less.

I thought the Comey picture was tasteless. I thought Kimmel’s joke was very tasteless. But there must be social penalties when people do this. There have to be social norms, for example – anyone on any network that Jimmy Kimmel is on has to say, hey, we have norms here. We don’t tell jokes about the president dying and his wife becoming a widow. We don’t do that.

But there’s a big difference between the kind of social enforcement that should be there, and a president using the force of the law to prosecute people for that kind of behavior, which is clearly not illegal. It is not terrorism. It’s nothing like that.

And so the president once again neglects to understand that his job must come with some limits. And being president doesn’t give you permission to use the federal government to do whatever the hell you want. He never admitted it. And he uses that.

And I — you see signs of some resistance within the Department of Justice. But they saw what happened to others. If they want to keep their jobs, they probably won’t be able to resist too hard.

Jonathan Capehart:

Well, another example when it comes to Kimmel, where the president is so thin-skinned, he can’t take the joke or doesn’t want to be the butt of the joke. However, a few months ago, we were talking about him posting pictures of the Obama family as apes. So I’ll leave that there.

But when it came to the Comey accusation, I mean, yeah, the president was all about revenge. He campaigned on it. He ruled this way. But there’s another dynamic here that’s even more troubling: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to be actively campaigning for the position.

And what we know about the president is that – when you know he cares about you, you do everything you can to please him. Everything – anyone testifying before Congress, or, in the case of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, trying to get approved for the top job, it’s all about what can I do to make them happy?

And so, going after James Comey, who the president has hated since his first term in the White House, is – in my opinion, a surefire way for Todd Blanche to get a notch, a point in his favor in the president’s mind for this big job.

Amna Nawaz:

And I’ll ask you about another big story this week that deserves more timely attention that we can give it right now, but the Supreme Court decision that sparked headlines like this, USA Today says, “Supreme Court sides with black voters in blow to landmark civil rights law.” “The Voting Rights Act is now a dead letter,” Politico said.

Reuters said, “The US Supreme Court under Roberts deals a devastating blow to the Voting Rights Act.”

David, as you know, this is a 6-3 decision along party lines. It’s about the Louisiana map, right, which created a majority black second congressional district. There are now a series of provisions that have weakened the VRA over time. What does all this mean?

David Brooks:

I wasn’t a fan of the original cheat rules which were mostly created in the early 90’s. They did the noble thing of increasing black representation in the House, but they did it by cramming all the Democrats into one small district so there would be more Republicans.

And what happened is that there was a rise of black members. But you also see the Republican majority. That was the deal they made with each other. And I thought it wasn’t a good deal for democracy, because it created fewer swing districts.

That era seems like the heyday of Berkeley democracy compared to where we are today. Now we’ve all seen what happened in Texas and California and places like that. But over the next few years this will turn that into a super engine.

And so we look at 2030, when the census comes back, we’ll have barely any swing districts in America. This means that voters have almost no chance of ousting one party or another for its bad behaviour.

It also means that we will be stuck for the foreseeable future with an evenly divided House. All of these things are terrible for democracy. It will be up to a post-Trump president to say this is a national problem. It is clear that we will solve the whole problem at once through a coalition of states. We will redraw these maps.

Jonathan Capehart:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is what killed Jim Crow. The VRA is only 61 years old.

When it passed and became law, it was the first time that America became a truly democratic nation, meaning that the words in the Constitution applied equally to all of its citizens, including African Americans, by giving them the right to vote, for 61 years. I am 58 years old. My mother 84.

So my mother is older than real American democracy. And so for these justices who are in the majority to say, well, racism in voting is over and we don’t need this anymore, I keep thinking about what Justice Ginsburg said in her dissent in Shelby v. Holder, which invalidated Section 5, the preclearance part.

“Getting rid of prior authorization, after it has worked and continues to work to stop discriminatory changes, is like throwing your umbrella into a rainstorm because you don’t get wet,” she wrote.

So for Justice Alito to focus on the 2008 and 2012 elections, when there was a black man on the ballot, and say that racial disparities are no longer an issue, and then ignore that Shelby in 2013 led to just a dash of changes in state voting laws, is to ignore reality and ignore history and takes us back to a time when America was not America.

Amna Nawaz:

As I say, he deserves a lot more time than we can give him here.

But I thank you, Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks. Always nice to talk to you.

Jonathan Capehart:

Thanks, Amna.