David Brooks on PBS: Adam Schiff will 'Just walk all over' Ken Starr, Dershowitz

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On Friday's PBS NewsHour, New York Times columnist David Brooks energetically sought to agree that President Trump should be removed from office, but the polling isn't so good. The percentage of people who think Trump should be removed has gone down, and the opposition to removal has gone up, "it's pretty much 50-50 basically, and so, if you're looking for it political pressure on Republican senators, you certainly don't see it so far out there."

But Brooks and liberal analyst Mark Shields agreed that the case against Trump has only gotten stronger, and that somehow, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right to delay transmitting the articles to the Senate, even though she changed nothing about the Senate trial. Shields said "the political graveyard of dead ambitions is littered with the corpses of those who underestimated the speaker." Brooks said Trump looks even guiltier:

I have learned to never underestimate the ability of Trump to self-sabotage. So, I assume that he did more, and there's probably more — even within hours, there might be more [Lev] Parnas evidence and elsewhere. And so that will continue to come out. In my view, frankly, when we saw the phone call transcript of day one on this whole deal, to me, he was 99 percent guilty at that moment. And now he's risen to 99.9 percent guilty.

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DAVID BROOKS: I'm, frankly, struck by the number of people who have joined his defense team, Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr. I wouldn't do this.

I mean, there's not — like, whatever you think of Trump or not, there's like not a lot of good arguments on your side. Like, why would you want to go to a movie where you got nothing but bad lines? And so I think they're all going to hurt them. I mean, I think they will get through this. But I wouldn't say it's a career enhancer for anybody. I don't know why they're all signing up for this.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You mean because you think they will say things that will hurt the case?

DAVID BROOKS: Schiff will just — he will just walk all over them, because he has the evidence on his side. So, it's not a debate you want to have when you're on a losing side. And this is basically a political game to get through it.

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