Special: Death of George Floyd spurs nationwide protests

ROBERT COSTA: Welcome to the Washington Week Extra. I’m Robert Costa.

Let’s continue where we left off on our broadcast. And joining me are four of the best journalists I know: Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour; Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Margaret Brennan, moderator of Face the Nation and CBS News’ senior foreign affairs correspondent; and Toluse Olorunnipa, White House reporter for The Washington Post.

Toluse, as we’re taping this, it’s 8:30 p.m. Eastern on a Friday night in Washington, D.C., and we are getting breaking news images from Atlanta, from Washington, D.C. protests that the Floyd case is not something that’s just going to be a week’s story; this seems to be a story that’s growing, and it’s about not only Mr. Floyd but race, politics, 2020 campaign. What’s your impression?

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA: Yeah, the nation is on edge and has been on edge not only for the past three months as the result of a pandemic that has been sweeping through the country and killing people indiscriminately, but also because of the racial tensions that have been existing and the racial inequality that has existed in this country for centuries and has been thrown onto the front pages and onto the television screens of America. Because of social media, because everyone can document it now, people are starting to see what has been happening in black and brown communities, especially when it comes to relations with police, over the past several decades, and I think that’s started to really boil over. The nation is really on edge, and the fact that we do have a president that doesn’t seek to calm a nation on edge but instead seeks to inflame a nation on edge only pushes us further, and I would not be surprised if these protests continue and spread into other parts of the country because there are so many people who are just really on edge, are fed up. The economy is in a crisis, the health-care situation is really bad, and racial tensions have not been soothed in any way; they’ve only been inflamed. So it does seem like we are a nation that is tearing at itself right now.

MR. COSTA: Yamiche, what do you see in your reporting? And I know you cover the White House now, but you’ve covered social movements, you’ve covered justice. What do you see on the horizon?

YAMICHE ALCINDOR: I see on the horizon another national debate about what kind of country we want to be and what kind of country we already are. There are a lot of people in this country – African Americans, people of color, women, and white Americans – who believe in the ideals of America, but just don’t think that she’s quite living up to the standards that she’s set for herself of freedom, of justice, of keeping everyone and treating everyone equally. So I think what I see is a lot of talk, and I’m – as a reporter, I’m really interested to see whether or not any of that talk becomes legislation or becomes some sort of sweeping change. We’ve seen police departments put into place training changes and all sorts of things, but in reality we’ve still seen these same cases over and over again where we’ve seen people – and a lot of people feel like the police brutalizing African Americans and brutalizing other people of color. So I think – in some ways I think this nation is going to reconcile with that.

I think the other thing that’s important, of course, is that we’re doing all this and living all this in the middle of a pandemic. Margaret made the point earlier – it was a good point – about the fact that the pandemic is killing black and brown people at higher rates. I think that even in that, as we – as we look at all the disparities that the virus is really working through, the ones that were already existing, we still don’t really have solutions for those. We don’t have solutions for why African Americans are more likely to work in jobs where they are – where they can’t do it at home or have access to less-healthy food. I don’t think we have answers for that. We now know what the facts are, but I’m really confused and I think really curious about what we – what happens in the – in the long run in terms of actual systemic change.

MR. COSTA: Margaret, can you weigh in on that in your reporting? I was – I’ve been following your interviews with women in particular about how the pandemic has affected them. And to Yamiche’s point, what does your reporting tell you about where this country, where Washington is going in terms of addressing that persistent inequality?

MARGARET BRENNAN: That inequality has widened. It’s exacerbated. The chairman of the Federal Reserve said that today. He actually has consistently reminded us that it is the most vulnerable in our society getting hit the hardest. He particularly singled out women within that because they’re losing their jobs at a faster rate than men just because of the industries that have been hit. But that sliver is even more severe when you look at women of color. When you look even more broadly, it’s Hispanics and black America who are bearing and carrying the burden of what we have felt, this swift economic decline of the past two-and-a-half months, and it’s that question of and what does this mean next. This entire past pandemic, two months of the pandemic, this moment we look at, is it 1968 meets 1918? What is the precedent for that? All I know is that when I look at the weakest parts of our institutions and our democracy right now, those are the areas getting pulled at. This is like pulling at the seams of our society and reminding us of where those weaknesses are. And so, you know, as Yamiche just said, so what happens next? Does this mean that we start talking about policy in a different way, or is there something we can’t fully appreciate just yet? You know, it’s a completely different moment, but I think back to trying to crawl my way into the New York Stock Exchange underneath Occupy Wall Street protesters and not appreciating in that moment that the slogans then would become normalized in political conversations now; that on the other side of that, the Tea Party movement of that moment would become part of the political establishment of our country. I don’t think we’ve appreciated yet what is to come out of the moment we are living in.

MR. COSTA: Toluse, I see you want to jump in.

MR. OLORUNNIPA: Oh, no, I just completely agree with Yamiche and Margaret. They made really excellent points about the fact that this isn’t just a conversation; this is something that people are living through. And people are crying out for the kind of legislation and action that would actually change their lives. You know, people are protesting and some people are rioting not because they are just angry, but also because they want change. They want to see things change in the country. And in addition to having leadership that understands that, they would like leadership that would actually do something about it. So I was just in fervent agreement with my two colleagues about what we should be looking for and what we may need to expect from this movement.

MR. COSTA: Peter, Margaret mentioned 1968. You think back about 1968: Vietnam, protests in the streets about the war, about race and inequality, Bobby Kennedy gunned down, Dr. Martin Luther King murdered. And I was not around, but you think about 1968, such a marker in history. Is 2020 – does it have echoes of 1968?

PETER BAKER: Yeah, that’s a great question. I was around, but just barely. But to steal the metaphor that Margaret talked about and my wife used earlier on Twitter, too, we started this year thinking it was another 1998 because of impeachment, and then we moved to 1918 with the pandemic, and then we thought maybe it’s another 1929 – throw that on top of 1918 – because of the Great Depression; now we’re talking about 1968. Throw all of those in together at the same time, the polarized fight for the presidency, an epidemic of the likes we haven’t seen in our lifetime, a Depression-era economic collapse, and now this social unrest is tearing at the fabric of our society; what we’re seeing, I think, is a year unlike that we’ve seen in many, many years where we’re undergoing a great national trauma. The tensions underlying Minneapolis and Atlanta and Washington do – are related to the coronavirus and the economic unrest and the political polarization. We feel like we’re a country that is pulling further apart, in which some people are getting ahead and other people aren’t. People are frustrated being forced to stay at home. They’re frustrated they’ve lost their job. They’re frustrated that their mothers or grandparents are – or cousins have been taken down by this disease. And you throw on top of that a video like we saw in Minneapolis of George Floyd, it’s like a – it’s like a matchstick on the – on the kindling wood and it’s just – it’s just setting people off, I think. Where it goes from here I don’t know, but if you think about what a traumatic year it’s already been, just remember this: It’s still May.

MR. COSTA: Let’s finish up, Yamiche.

MS. BRENNAN: And –

MR. COSTA: Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead.

MS. BRENNAN: No, just to make the point of this is going to be a very long, very rocky, very painful road towards the recovery. The decline was swift; the recovery’s going to be slow. I was talking to a big financial investor today who said the CEO’s he’s talking to are saying, you know what, we still can cut 10 to 15 percent of our workforce, not because we have to but just because we can now, because we have seen how to change and to adapt. What does that say to me? That says to me we’re not talking double-digit unemployment through the election; we are talking about a new employment question for America, a reshaping our business life, potentially our social life. How do you turn the economy back on without providing childcare to get those women in particular back to work? There are some big questions to be asked, particularly of Congress when they get back together to try to craft this next rescue bill, including how do you handle childcare, how long do those unemployment checks continue, because there are dates on the calendar in July where that money is set to expire. And when we don’t see a better picture on the employment front, this doesn’t get to be less tense; it gets more.

MR. COSTA: Just to finish up here, Yamiche, on last week’s program we were talking about Vice President Biden and his interview with Charlamagne tha God where he used the phrase “ain’t black” if you have questions about the Biden record. Now he has a week where he is addressing in a forceful way race in America. I asked Margaret this during the show, but I’d love to hear your reporting and thoughts: What does this week mean for Biden? Does it mean he’s going to pick an African American woman for the ticket? What else is on your radar as you look at this campaign?

MS. ALCINDOR: I’m not sure it means that Joe Biden is going to pick an African American woman for the ticket. I think it means that Joe Biden is going to continue to talk about the fact that in his administration African Americans are going to be elevated. He’s already pledged that he was going to nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court if he’s elected. I think that this does put pressure on Joe Biden to think through who his nominee is going to be, to be ready to have – to answer questions if he ends up picking someone who’s not someone of color, because I think a lot of voters – Democratic voters and Democratic donors of color are wondering why the party is not reflective of them when it comes to the leadership positions. And of course, the vice president and president nominees would be the top leadership positions.

I think the other thing to note is that last week – I said it then – Joe Biden, in the fact that of course it was a – it was a misstep, a big misstep, for him to say that African Americans weren’t black if they were considering voting for President Trump, I didn’t hear from anyone that was going to say, well, now I’m going to vote for President Trump because of what Joe Biden said. Instead, Joe Biden has continued to have a lot of support among African Americans, and I think that says a lot about him and the fact that, of course, he was vice president to the first African American president, but also his opponent. President Trump just does not have a lot of credibility when it comes to African Americans, when it comes to talking about police brutality, when it comes to talking about inequalities for a host of reasons, including the fact, as Toluse noted, that he began his political career by questioning the birthplace of the first African American president. Of course, that was a baseless claim. So I think President Trump has so much work to do with the African American community that I just don’t think he’s going to really be able to dig into the African American community in any way that’s going to hurt Joe Biden. I could be wrong, but I think that based on my sources and talking to voters that there just – that there just isn’t enough space there for President Trump to really capitalize on any missteps that Joe Biden makes.

MR. COSTA: You’re so right, Yamiche. I think back to my own experience covering President Trump, then Mr. Trump. It was in 2011-2012, when he was espousing birtherism and questioning President Obama’s credentials and love of country, and here we are in 2020 and he’s in the White House.

That’s it for this edition of the Washington Week Extra. Thank you to Yamiche Alcindor, Peter Baker, Margaret Brennan, and Toluse Olorunnipa for their time. And you can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on our website. While you’re there, sign up for our Washington Week newsletter, where you’ll get an advance look at our show every week. I’m Robert Costa. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time.