AMNA NAWAZ: With the White House surveying the food situation in Gaza today and Vice President Harris making her first television appearance since losing the election, we now turn to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart.
That is New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC.
Welcome to you both.
So, David, I want to start with the president's approach to the economy and really more to his power.
We did see him unveil a whole new slate of tariffs on a number of nations, including Canada.
And, today, as we reported earlier, he chose to fire the labor official who's responsible for the jobs numbers after a lower-than-expected jobs report, accusing her of political manipulations.
The White House has cited those numbers before when they're in their favor, but what do you make of this move?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, it's not true.
I mean, we have used these data.
I would say some of the most trusted arbiters of information are the BLS and the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office.
And there are professionals.
And I have met some of them who do this work, and that's all they care about, is getting the numbers right.
I don't think it can cross Donald Trump's mind that there are neutral arbiters who are objective and are not politicized.
But this is the weakness of authoritarian or pseudo-authoritarian regimes, is, they create an atmosphere in which it's not possible to be honest with the executive.
And so you walk around there filled with distorted information.
And the perverse thing about this is that the news is not terrible.
I mean, we had 70-some-odd thousand jobs, new jobs.
That's not like -- it's going to get worse, by the way, if the business cycle goes up and down as normal.
Second, the economy is suffering because of the Trump tariffs.
Jason Furman, who was on earlier this week, said it's like you took 1,000 bucks out of every family's household, and then you did that for the rest of their lives.
And so there's cuts in growth and there's hints of stagflation.
But it's not the recession that a lot of economists were expecting because the tariffs were not as bad as a lot of economists were expecting.
So the news is not bad, and Donald Trump's firing of this person is symptomatic of the way information and honesty are being distorted up and down.
And when Speaker Johnson tried to discredit the CBO numbers on how much debt would be caused by the Big Beautiful Bill, that was part of this process of getting rid of the umpires.
When you have no umpires or referees, you don't have a fair game.
AMNA NAWAZ: Jonathan, what do you make of this?
JONATHAN CAPEHART: Well, I agree with everything that David says.
As he was talking, I was thinking about this song from the 1970s musical "The Wiz," where you have the bad witch, Evillene, singing, don't nobody bring me no bad news.
Donald Trump famously said a few months ago, if the economic news is bad, it's Biden's fault, and if it's good, I should get the praise.
And no one likes it.
No executive likes it when bad news comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics or if the CBO scores a bill that they want poorly.
But what no president has done until today was, as David said, fire the referee.
I mean, I think from this point going forward, I wonder if we as journalists can trust the information coming out of BLS in the months ahead, simply because the president is demanding that they mold and shift economic data to please him.
And that does no one any good.
AMNA NAWAZ: Let's shift our focus overseas now, David, because this week we saw a bit of a shift in how President Trump at least talks about what's happening in Gaza right now.
He talked about the suffering of Palestinians in a new way, saying you can't fake it when you have seen images of the starvation.
We saw special envoy Steve Witkoff and Ambassador Mike Huckabee on the ground there to see it for themselves.
We also saw the very first Republican member of Congress to say that she believes Israel's conduct in Gaza is genocide.
And that was Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump and MAGA loyalist.
Is this a bigger shift or is this about this moment in time?
DAVID BROOKS: I think it's about this moment in time.
I think what's happened, and this is true in Israel, too, is a lot of people who thought that Hamas need to be defeated are taking a look what happened in the last six months, eight months, a year or even before and saying, what the heck?
Like, this is callous, cruel.
It's -- so many people are dying.
And then, as we just saw in Nick's report, it's marked by incompetence on all levels.
It's marked by IDF incompetence.
It's marked by the American contractors and the American government.
Remember when Joe Biden tried to put a port into Gaza, which was a total failure?
And so there's just been a level of incompetence on top of what you could call cruelty.
And a lot of Israelis are now saying, this can't stand.
And we even have Israeli human rights groups, or at least one calling it genocide, which I don't think it's accurate.
I think it's more accurate to say it's ruthless warfare.
It's more like the Battle of Dresden in the middle of a war situation of being callously disregarding to civilian casualties.
I think that's more accurate than genocide.
But there has been a shift.
And the good - - if I can find a silver lining here, the Arab League today or this week, a unanimous vote, said that Hamas needs to step down, free the hostages and get out of Gaza.
And somehow this shift is, a lot of -- some people, at least in the Arab League, are seeing this as an opportunity.
I don't know if it is, but there is a shift in the way people are thinking about this conflict.
AMNA NAWAZ: Jonathan, what do you make both of what we have heard from President Trump and also the fact that more Senate Democrats than ever before this week voted to block weapon sales to Israel?
How are you looking at this?
JONATHAN CAPEHART: Oh, I'm looking at it as the ground is shifting in the perceptions and the long-held views of United States' support for Israel, for the Israeli government.
2 But the thing that I find most galling about what President Trump said about what we're seeing coming out of Gaza, this is a man who is the leader of the free world, who gets an intelligence briefing every morning.
He has more access to information than anyone else on the planet.
And his diagnosis of what's going on is, the television pictures look really bad?
To me, that says the president of the United States is not active behind the scenes using American power and muscle to bring forth a resolution to the war between Israel and Hamas, and instead is worried about the optics, the public relations disaster that this is, as he said before, for Israel.
What needs to happen in that region is for true, real American leadership, and it's not happening.
AMNA NAWAZ: Meanwhile, last night, as I'm sure you both saw, in her very first interview since the 2024 election, former Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to Stephen Colbert and explained her decision not to run for California governor or any other office right now.
Take a listen.
KAMALA HARRIS, Former Vice President of the United States: I believe and I always believed that, as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles.
And I think right now that they're not as strong as they need to be.
And I just don't want to -- for now, I don't want to go back in the system.
AMNA NAWAZ: David, it's a system she described as broken.
What do you make of that response?
DAVID BROOKS: First, I give people who've lost a presidential race a lot of grace.
It's apparently brutal.
Bob Dole used to joke, what's it like to lose?
He says, oh, I sleep just like a baby.
I wake up every three hours screaming.
And so it's super hard to be in that position.
One thing I really like what she said, and one thing I didn't like what she said.
The system is broken.
Running for governor -- the gubernatorial system is not broken.
Governors all around the country are doing wonderful work.
And Washington is a little broken, but running for governor, I think, would be a nice way to serve the country.
But that's totally up to her, obviously.
The part where I totally agreed with her was, she made a point about capitulation.
And this has shocked me too, that, in Israel, when Bibi tried to do these judicial reforms before October 7, hundreds of thousands of people got to the street and they did it for month after month after month.
And now we have a similar situation.
And this happens all across the world.
When somebody tries to centralize power, the people rise up.
And why have the people not risen up?
And everybody's cutting separate deals.
And I see business leaders, university presidents, other people laying low and not trying to rise up.
And, therefore, there's strength in numbers, and we're not using that strength.
Trump can pick people off one and another.
And so I think that civic capitulation that she mentioned, that is a real thing.
AMNA NAWAZ: Jonathan, what did you make of the interview?
JONATHAN CAPEHART: I watched all 20-something minutes of it.
And I think what we saw was a former vice president who ran for president, lost and is still coming to terms with that loss, and deciding not to run for governor is, basically just to boil it down, possibly just a form of self-care.
But she also said in that interview that she's going to spend this time going around the country and listening to people without having the baggage of being seen as someone running for office and only talking to people because she wants their votes.
And I think that's a good thing.
And that matches up to what she said later on in the interview, which she -- when Colbert asked her who's the leader of the Democratic Party, and she said, look, we make a mistake when we look for that one person.
It's up to all of us to jump in and push back on what's happening in the country and do the kind of leadership that we are pining for.
Get out there and do it.
AMNA NAWAZ: Jonathan, before we go, folks will have noticed that we introduced you slightly differently tonight than we usually do.
We should point out, after nearly two decades at The Washington Post, you recently made the decision to leave.
I just wanted to give you a chance to speak directly to our audience to tell them why.
JONATHAN CAPEHART: Well, the direction of the opinion section changed.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, as is his right, decided that he wanted the section to focus on the twin pillars of personal liberties and free markets.
And it became clear, as time went along, and especially when he chose a new leader for the section, that there was just not going to be any room for a voice like mine, especially when we were told that we would have to be unapologetically patriotic in talking about the positive things happening in the country.
How can you talk about the positive things happening in the country when the rest of the house is engulfed in flames and the foundation is flooding?
I wanted to go someplace where my voice would be heard.
AMNA NAWAZ: Jonathan Capehart, we're so glad your voice is heard right here at our table, David Brooks, yours as well.
JONATHAN CAPEHART: Thank you.
AMNA NAWAZ: My thanks to you both.