On today’s edition of The Editors, Rich asks Charlie about Trump’s questioning of Kamala Harris’s racial identity during a recent interview. The sit-down didn’t start off well, Rich notes, as one of the journalists “opened up with the greatest hits of his offensive comments he’s made at various times,” and Trump “immediately started bristling and calling her ‘nasty’ and said it was a terrible question.”
Charlie says Trump’s initial reaction “was a profound mistake,” and what “we saw yesterday was in a sense a distillation of everything that has been bad about the Trump years — that being American life since 2015.”
He agrees that the introduction was rude, “but that is not the most important part of the story. . . . Donald Trump is running to be president of the United States, and he should be able to cope with that sort of introduction.
“How many times,” Charlie asks, “has one of us as a conservative done an event where the moderator is either hostile toward conservatives or just doesn’t actually know what it is that we think, and asks questions in a way that is annoying, or implies that we believe things that we don’t?
“You have a choice. . . . And the choice should be to rise above it.”
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