Disingenuous

ABC News host interviews bible-thumping GOP automaton and does it quite badly.

ABC News White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl.

This is about a not particularly irresistible force colliding with an immovable object.

The immovable object is Mike Pence, former vice president and presumed candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination Mike Pence. (He hasn’t announced a run yet. He and the family are still praying on it to decide whether they hear “God’s calling” or just spam. Just in case, though, he’s been making the rounds in Iowa.)

Pence, of course, is in the impossible position of trying to distance himself from criminal sociopath Donald Trump — who you may recall stood by while his MAGA thugs tried to lynch the vice president — while blowing smoke up the asses of Trump’s other 100 million mindless supporters. Pence therefore finds himself struggling to thread a suspension-bridge cable in the eye of a surgical needle. That simply cannot be accomplished without lies, misdirection and contortions of reason as spectacular as they are futile. Enter ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

He’s the would-be irresistible force, determined on Sunday’s This Week to reconcile the candidate’s variously stated animus/fealty toward Trump.

Well, that didn’t happen. No clarity took place. What we saw was stagecraft purporting to be journalism, in which neither participant was even remotely honest with one another or the audience. It is also what passes for political journalism in America and it was pathetic. Karl was the picture of consternation, feigning confusion about the mysterious paradox, when he knew to a moral certainty that Pence is — forgive the mixed metaphors — both between a rock and a hard place and absolutely full of shit. This from the very first Q&A:

KARL: As I’m sure you’ve seen, Donald Trump is saying he’s going to be indicted. He’s calling for people to protest. Now we don’t know if that’s true. The Manhattan DA hasn’t said anything about it. But he’s calling for people to protest. … Is that irresponsible? [The question should have ended: “… just as he did on January 6, when his supporters invaded the Capitol to hang you. Will you put up with such incitement?”]

PENCE: Well, first let me say, I'm taken aback at the idea of indicting a former President of the United States, at a time when there's a crime wave in New York City, that — the fact that the Manhattan DA thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority, I think is, just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left in this country The last five years the Democrats have been dismantling tough criminal justice. Families are paying the price, and yet this is what we get. It feels like a politically charged prosecution here. And I, for my part ... I just feel it’s not what the American people want to see. We’ve got real challenges in this country today, Jon. People are facing record inflation, a crisis at our border. We have war in Eastern Europe. The American people are anxious about the future, and here we go again: another politically charged prosecution directed at the former president of the United States and I would just hope for better.

Alrighty, there are eight lies and/or sophistic misdirections there. 1) In his non sequitur of a  non-answer, Pence doesn’t even begin to address the substance of the question. His reply is a scripted campaign filibuster. 2) He isn’t at all “taken aback.” Nobody is taken aback by any Trump prosecution. 3) Crime wave, eh? Major crime was indeed up 24% in 2022 in the city of New York, but dropped sharply (with the easing of the Covid pandemic) in the last two months. There were 438 murders. In 1990, there were 2,350 murders. 4) As every DA handles many cases at once, the notion of DA Alvin Bragg ignoring more important prosecutions is not just false but absurd. 5) “Radical left.” This is the GOP’s go-to preposterous slur against Democrats. You could squint and make the argument that AOC and Bernie Sanders, who are democratic socialists, are far left. But they’re not exactly Yippies. To find radical leftists in 2023, you have to travel to Nicaragua, Cuba or Venezuela. 6) The “record” inflation rate is 6%, down 3.1 percentage points since June. In 1981, inflation was 14%. 7) “Politically charged” prosecution. The Trump-Pence Department of Justice was the Trump Court of Personal Grievance, and William Barr acted like Trump’s fixer. 8) Since when is a district attorney supposed to consider the public’s mood before filing charges? Note to law-and-order Republicans: He’s supposed to uphold the law.

And through this entire filibuster of fantasy, the polite host just lets him spin like a dervish. Karl does, to his credit, repeat the question — with something between a scowl and a frown (a frowl?) of brow-wrinkled concern.

KARL: But he’s calling on people to protest, to come out and protest to “take our nation back.” We know what happened the last time he said that.

PENCE: Well, Jon, the American people have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble.

KARL: Absolutely, but to have a former president calling on people to protest a justice proceeding …”

So, at this stage, Karl has asked the same weak question three times, each time generating empty talking points, each time failing to bait Pence into excoriating Trump. Now maybe that wasn’t his goal. Sometimes the answer — or non-answer — is actually more important than the question. If the goal wasn’t actual candor, perhaps it was to expose Pence’s weaselly smarminess, or perhaps his smarmy weasellyness. If so, mission accomplished. But that has literally no news value, because it is a given. If the goal was to get Pence to admit Trump is a sociopath, let’s just say this wasn’t exactly the climax of A Few Good Men. And if the goal was to get Pence to wax poetically about the wishes of the American people, Karl might have asked Pence to therefore explain his position on abortion and taxing the wealthy.

This interview was a half-hour long, so I can’t annotate the whole thing. But it was no master class in pinning down a politician. It was, however, a textbook example of a TV  interviewer pretending to be perplexed instead of being honest about his abject skepticism over the claims and positions staked out by the interviewee, previously and in the moment. This guy wrote a book about the depravity of the Trump White House; why the silly act? Why the frowl? Why the Theater of Earnest Curiosity instead of straightforwardly challenging the bullshit?

Karl did catch Pence in Lie #9. Having talked about the unprecedented prosecution of a former president, Pence was reminded by Karl that a presidential candidate paying a pornstar hush money to shut up about a sexual liaison is also unprecedented. And when Pence said that the alleged Stormy Daniels affair preceded his joining the ticket, Karl countered immediately with, “The payoff happened just two weeks before the election.” Touché. Pence naturally changed the subject, choosing instead to frame Trump’s legal extremis as a conspiracy of the Democratic party to “get” him — as opposed to the logical and rightful consequence of a career of crime, deceit and 57 varieties of fraud. Then, in one of the more outlandish examples of projection and bald effrontery, Pence had the nerve to invoke America’s demand for equal protection under the law, a second reference to what he’d earlier called America’s “two-tiered justice system.”

Karl could have said, “Well, yes, exactly. Trump is the fucking Poster Boy for the top tier that grotesquely oppresses the bottom tier. It is his lifelong impunity that is at long last at an end.”

He didn’t. He just went back to the fourth version of question one.

KARL: Do you think they should be protesting that? Do you think they should be protesting the courthouse?

Karl’s big gotcha was to play tape he got from Trump in a “Betrayal” book interview, in which (not for the first time) Trump blamed Pence for January 6. Pence (surprise, surprise) did not budge. He allowed that “the president let me down that day; he let the country down” — but, you know, that’s water under the bridge.

PENCE: To be honest with you, the emotions of that day, the emotions since, I just haven’t had time for it. To me there’s just too many issues we’re facing as a country today, under the failed policies of this administration, I don’t have a lot of time for looking backwards. I’m looking forward.

I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on Karl. Interviewing Pence is like interviewing a bot; he’s not a man. He’s an algorithm. The next big supposed gotcha question was whether Pence still believes — as the vice president previously (and ridiculously) claimed about Trump — that “his word is his bond.” Karl might have noted that the bond market is tanking, but instead he just sat meekly while once again Pence ignored the question and prattled on about the great achievements of  the Trump-Pence administration (including, believe it or not, its Covid response.)

And here is where the only actual news broke out. One of the kept promises of the administration, he boasted, was “appointing conservative judges, including pro-life judges, to the Supreme Court to give us a new beginning for life.” He meant Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade. But, of course, the prospective Trump justices all claimed during the confirmation process to have not prejudged the abortion question and disclaimed any agenda. So the only truth that Jon Karl heard from Mike Pence confirmed the lies of three sitting members of the Supreme Court.

Frowl. He didn’t notice.