Bill McGurn On Trump/AOC/Pelosi Feud
Bill McGurn breaks down the implications of Trump/Pelosi/AOC Twitter fight.
Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn said Monday any unity achieved by Democrats after President Trump's Sunday tweetstorm will be short-lived, and he predicted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will still have to deal with deep divisions within her party.
"Trump is a distraction here," McGurn said on "America's Newsroom."
"If he hadn’t tweeted this latest thing, it would've been interesting to see that he was a defender of Nancy Pelosi -- put her in a very awkward spot. She's very comfortable now moving back to, 'well the Republicans are racist.' But she has a problem on her hands. These progressive Democrats are going to play this card because it works in their party."
McGurn was asked to respond to a clip of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y. anti-American and anti-Semitic, while telling Trump to take the high road and not address her policy statements.
"I agree with Sen. Graham," he said. "The interesting thing is before this latest series of tweets, there was this glorious period of maybe 24 hours where President Trump had defended Mrs. Pelosi against the attacks that she was picking on these women because they were women of color."
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"And I think, look, now we’re back onto familiar territory where the media and Democrats are all comfortable calling a Republican president racist," McGurn added.
He said it was ironic for Democrats to play the race card against each other, after successfully applying it to Republicans in the past, and claimed people on the right have defended those on the left from charges of racism, while the reverse has not been true.
"The more interesting thing about this story is a lot of these calls are coming from the progressive left focused at other Democrats," McGurn said.
"You saw it against Joe Biden -- basically kind of intimated that he was a segregationist for being friendly to segregationist senators in the Senate. You saw it with Mrs. Pelosi accused of picking on people for color. It's usually not considered outrageous when it's directed at a Republican, but we're going to see more of this."
He also said those hoping for a unified Democratic party will have to wait, and claimed any progress they made will soon be wiped away by the next major policy issue.
"It will be temporary. They're real criticisms. They're not going to give this up. And there's a logic to it. This is the problem with playing the race card. It consumes," McGurn said.
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"Mrs. Pelosi, right before this latest thing she said, you know, before this latest series of tweets she said the MAGA hats stood for making America white again. [She] just impugned anyone wearing a hat as a racist. And again, people hardly complain. I'll note my newspaper, the “Wall Street Journal,” we defended Mr. Biden against this (segregationist) charge. We defended Mrs. Pelosi. But did anyone stand up and defend, apart from us, did anyone on the left defend Mitt Romney when Joe Biden said (in 2012) that he was going to put African-Americans back in chains? I don’t remember it quite the same way."
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