Anderson Cooper often serves as the mercury for our Serious Newsman Meter. This is the patented device which monitors the point at which TV news presenters, who normally present themselves as completely neutral arbiters of The Discourse—in which Both Sides make some Good Points, and it's up to viewers to decide who won this round—drop the façade and say outright that our very normal president just did something truly disgraceful or legitimately insane. Cooper is a scrupulous non-partisan in public, but he occasionally will come out and say that Trump's claim he knew nothing about the Stormy Daniels payment was a "straight-up lie," or that something the president said was, "Not racial. Not racially charged. Racist." Those moments trigger The Meter.

Considering the latter example, however, it was strange to see Cooper's reaction when the issue of Trump's racism came up while he was interviewing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising Democratic star who drives conservatives completely off their rockers, in his other gig at 60 Minutes.

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"How can you say that?" Cooper asked, as if he has not said on air—with the same admirable directness that Ocasio-Cortez did here—that the president says racist things. What is the functional difference between "a racist" and someone who regularly says or does racist things, particularly when that person is the most powerful person in the world?

After all, it's not just that the president called all 54 countries of Africa "shitholes." He's also reportedly said immigrants from Nigeria—the continent's largest economy, and the 21st-largest in the world by nominal GDP—would never go back to their "huts" in Africa. (More than 43 percent of African immigrants hold a bachelor's degree or higher, according to Bloomberg, including almost two-thirds of Nigerians. That's well above the rate of native American citizens. Nigerian-Americans "have a median household income well above the American average.") Trump said Haitian immigrants "all have AIDS."

Chris Kleponis Getty Images

Trump launched his political career with a loud and evidence-free campaign to prove the first black president was actually from Kenya—and thus, illegitimate. He repeatedly questioned how Barack Obama could have gotten into Ivy League schools legitimately. He declared his run for the presidency with a speech in which he characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. In the '70s, Trump and his father were sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination against black New Yorkers. In 1989, he took out a full-page ad advocating the death penalty for the teenagers of the Central Park Five, and continued to advocate for it even after their wrongful convictions were overturned.

Trump spread disgusting propaganda during the 2016 campaign that drastically inflated statistics about black-on-white crime. He suggested a federal judge born in Indiana could not oversee the case against Trump University—which Trump eventually settled on the basis the enterprise was a complete scam, and agreed to pay $25 million to his victims—because the judge was of Mexican descent. Even Paul Ryan, not exactly a profile in courage over the last couple of years, called this a case of "textbook" racism.

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In office, Trump has also done things: his Justice Department has shifted its Civil Rights Division's priorities away from defending the rights of people of color and the LGBT community to people who claim religious discrimination and police officers. It has supported state voter-suppression laws that disproportionately impact people of color that have been the subject of lawsuits, and rolled back oversight of local police. He has nominated judges like Thomas Farr, who played a key role defending a North Carolina gerrymandering map that targeted black voters "with surgical precision."

There is no question anymore, to anyone who does not suffer from Fox News Poisoning, where the president is at on race. But Ocasio-Cortez really came with the receipts when she referenced Charlottesville—when the president responded to neo-Nazis marching through the streets of an American city, some chanting his name, by suggesting there were "very fine people on both sides." If you think Very Fine People march alongside Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, there should not be any doubt what you're about.

Ku Klux Klan members attend the Charlottesville rally. Not pictured: the Very Fine People who were on their side. Chet Strange Getty Images

And so it's genuinely bizarre to watch this performance from Cooper. Surely Anderson Cooper, the human being, knows Donald Trump is a racist. Cooper reports on what he's saying and doing every day. But Cooper the Neutral Newsman feels obligated to approach this obvious fact with the same skepticism he would approach, say, Trump's new claim—contradicted by his own Department of Homeland Security—that there are terrorists rushing over the southern border so we need The Wall. The impulse to doubt anything any politician says is a good one, but at some point what we definitively know about the world around us must take precedence over the desire to appear unbiased, or as an equal-opportunity interrogator. At the very least, everyone should be held to the same standard.

"No question."

AOC's young career is evidence that they most certainly are not. Her every word is relentlessly scrutinized, and any factual errors—and there have been some—are held up as proof she is a joke and should be run out of Washington. Never mind that the president averaged 15 false claims a day in 2018, and has made over 7,600 as president. Because he has no regard for reality—indeed, he does not believe in the concept of truth in the public discourse—he skates by just Saying Things. Members of the Democratic Party, who in this era are far more likely to accept the concept of empirical reality, are rightly challenged to defend their ideas in a way that is tethered to that reality.

Ocasio-Cortez alluded to this elsewhere in the interview, after Cooper challenged her on how Democrats would "pay for" things like universal healthcare through Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, an ambitious but still embryonic plan to transform the American economy to address the threat to human civilization posed by the climate crisis and the income and wealth inequality that is likely driving a lot of the extremism in western politics.

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Anderson Cooper: How are you going to pay for all of this?@AOC: Nobody asks how we're going to pay for the 'space force' pic.twitter.com/3F8iFID45a — jordan (@JordanUhl) January 7, 2019

Quite simply, Republicans use their time in power to explode the deficit through debt-financed tax cuts and unlimited military spending. (In the two years since Republicans assumed control of Congress and the White House, the national debt has grown by $2 trillion. The annual budget deficit will now rise to $1 trillion by 2020, and the debt will hit $33 trillion by 2028.) Then, when they're turfed out of office, Republicans trash any programs to expand healthcare access or improve the education system or rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure as an insane spasm of fiscal irresponsibility. Tax cuts for rich people and corporations, and the crony capitalism of the military industrial complex that funds endless war, get a blank check. Social programs to benefit the poor and middle class—or even earned benefits like Medicare and Social Security—are not just too expensive to expand. They must be cut, perhaps to pay for more tax cuts.

It's not just Trump. As AOC said during the discussion of his racism, Trump is a symptom of decades of escalating conservative ideology that eventually became completely untethered from the world as we can empirically observe it. There is no body of economic research that supports the concept that tax cuts for rich people leads to turbo-charged economic growth. But Republicans just passed yet another tax bill on that basis.

Republicans celebrate passing the tax bill. SAUL LOEB Getty Images

On the flip side, there is a body of work supporting Ocasio-Cortez's call for a 70-to-80 percent top marginal tax rate. Her proposal was characterized in many quarters as "radical"—including by Anderson Cooper. This, despite the fact that the top rate was, at various points in our history—including the great postwar economic boom—higher than that. In the scheme of modern history, the current tax scheme is radical. The closely related balanced-budget orthodoxy—adhered to by Democratic leaders and most mainstream media types for the last few decades, as well as, in bad faith, by Republicans—might actually rest on a flawed premise.

(Of course, Trump is the most garish example of all this. His shutdown over The Wall, for instance, is based on an entire architecture of false premises. The president single-handedly shut down the government, and said he'd take the blame, but now blames Democrats. He suggests we need The Wall because of a massive crisis at the border, even though net traffic into the U.S. is actually around zero or even negative. The "caravans" arriving here are mostly composed of people seeking asylum, as is their right under international law. They are refugees. The Wall will not stop many of the undocumented immigrants who come here anyway. They often arrive at airports and then overstay their visas. The Wall is a non-solution to an overblown problem, which the president is demanding in order to end a shutdown crisis he created.)

Mainstream news presenters do sometimes press their Republican guests on these issues, it just doesn't seem to have any effect because the voters those elected officials depend on primarily get their information from a closed information system of Fox News and talk radio and conservative digital outlets, where those ideas can't penetrate. That problem isn't easily solved—Fox is gonna Fox. But mainstream media types must do a better job of always prioritizing the truth, and putting claims and events in accurate context, over concerns that they'll be accused of bias. The context is not what Republicans are saying and what Democrats are saying, but what we empirically know about our world and our history.



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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