ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos has made a career out of proving conservatives are right about the establishment media.
The former Clinton White House adviser has spent almost three decades as the walking, talking personification of liberal media bias.
But in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, he outdid even himself.
Stephanopoulos was hosting Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance, a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump who has been talked about as potential running mate material.
The entire interview was contentious, but it turned almost openly antagonistic at the end when Stephanopoulos played a segment from a podcast interview Vance gave in 2021 in which he said that if Trump becomes president again, he should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
If a court ruled against the administration, Vance said, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
“Fire everyone in the government, then defy the Supreme Court? You think it’s OK for the president to defy the Supreme Court?” Stephanopoulos asked.
When Vance attempted to explain himself, the host interrupted twice.
When the senator did manage to speak, explaining that his point was the growth of an administrative state that had become unaccountable to either the American public or the politicians elected by the American people, Stephanopoulos let him go on, only with a quick summary at the end that dismissed his entire argument.
“You’ve made it very clear you believe the president can defy the Supreme Court,” he said. “Senator, thanks for your time this morning.”
Vance’s protests were audible despite ABC’s editing.
The interview is below:
GOP Sen. JD Vance tells @GStephanopoulos that the U.S. has “a major problem here with administrators and bureaucrats in the government who don’t respond to the elected branches.” https://t.co/n4YqCd6W4C pic.twitter.com/VmUBBPxkPC
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) February 4, 2024
Basically, the anchor of a nationally watched Sunday talk show cut off a politician — a politician who is a supporter of the country’s leading opposition figure — because he didn’t like his answer.
That’s atrocious enough.
The question was actually worse.
On the scale of relevance, it was close to Stephanopoulos’ infamous stint as a GOP primary debate moderator back in January 2012 when he confronted then-GOP contender Mitt Romney with the question of whether states should be able to ban contraception.
The topic had nothing to do with the questions presidential contenders were facing in 2012 — no state was even considering such a ban — but Stephanopoulos raised it anyway, deliberately injecting a hot-button issue into the debate and creating an issue Democrats could use to attack the GOP field without any grounds at all.
The same dynamics were at play on Sunday. Vance was elected to the Senate in November 2022, meaning he was not in office when he made the comments.
No one is talking about any president disregarding the Supreme Court on any decision. (But if any president is acting regularly in defiance of the high court, it’s the Democrats’ own Joe Biden.)
Yet GOP-baiting Stephanopoulos saw fit to bring the question into play and then cut off the man he was interviewing about as abruptly as possible on civil television.
Was there more to this than ABC running out of time for the segment?
Back in 2012, political strategist Dick Morris (a man who was in the Clintons’ orbit at the same time as Stephanopoulos) told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the contraception question looked out of place only to the outside world.
Stephanopoulos, he said, did it deliberately to force Republicans onto the defensive on an issue that wasn’t even an issue. (Newsbusters has the video here.)
And now, the country is in pretty much the same spot in the election cycle as it was in 2012 when Stephanopoulos brought up contraception.
Would Vance make a good pick for Trump’s vice president?
While it would seem impossible he’d get a chance to moderate a Republican primary debate today, he’s doing his part to inject a Supreme Court question into the political sphere now — laying what amounted to a trap for a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, then cutting him off with a summary that grossly misrepresented his answer.
Don’t be surprised if some hallucinatory argument arises about the Supreme Court in the coming months — arguments raised by a Democratic Party that spent the Trump administration trying to destroy the court.
Despite the considerable gains conservatives have made when it comes to communicating with the American electorate — either through the growth of conservative media outlets or simply general suspicion of an establishment media that has squandered all trust — major media outlets such as ABC News, where Stephanopoulos enjoys his perch, are committed to spewing Democratic lies.
The Stephanopoulos interview with Vance, as outspoken a Republican as the party has to offer, proves how little things have changed.
