Nathan Phillips' Today Show Interview Wasn't a Feel-Good Story at All

A day after MAGA teen Nick Sandmann spent his TODAY Show appearance demonstrating an unfamiliarity with the concepts of "respect" and "disrespect," Nathan Phillips sat down for his own interview with Savannah Guthrie. He was gracious and thoughtful enough, but mostly came off as a man exhausted by an outrage cycle that has systematically worked to strip him of his humanity.

"I was upset I was made to sit down and watch it," he said, his voice flat, referring to Sandmann's televised refusal to apologize for anything. "I got in to about the first 30 seconds, 40 seconds of it, and I said, 'Well, that's all I needed to hear.'"

Phillips, of course, was referring to the fact that Sandmann immediately retained the services of a crisis management firm, which by interposing itself between the two parties all but eliminated the possibility that they might ever have an honest conversation, let alone a meaningful reconciliation. The statement sounded "coached" and "written up for him," said Phillips, and betrayed an "insincerity" and "lack of responsibility" for his actions. "But then I went to go pray about it," he continued, "and woke up with this forgiving heart. So, I forgive him."

More than once, Phillips tacitly acknowledged that the students' youth is a component of how their conduct should be judged. When Guthrie asked what he hopes happens next—and what he would say if the parties were to meet—he called out the Covington Catholic staff members who didn't exercise control over the situation, or advise the boys them that, say, performing the tomahawk chop at a Native person is an inappropriate course of action. Age, by itself, does not excuse disrespect or bigotry, and the "he's just a kid" defense is one rarely afforded to anyone who isn't white. But it is the job of adults, especially educators, to teach such tendencies away, or to at least step in before they manifest themselves in a scene like this, and Phillips is clearly dismayed by the authority figures' absence and/or apparent indifference to all of it.

NBC couldn't extend a TODAY Show invitation to Sandmann without doing the same for Phillips, and Guthrie's questioning is fairly straightforward throughout. Even when she brings up disputed points of fact, she does so in a way that does not treat his positions as inherently suspect: For example, she notes that no video evidence has yet emerged of students chanting "build the wall," as Phillips asserted, but acknowledges that this is not necessarily dispositive. She also invited him to clarify the details of his career in the U.S. Marines—early media reports described him as a "Vietnam veteran," when in fact he served during the Vietnam War but was not deployed there—without implying that Phillips himself had lied about it.

Even so, the network's attempt to be journalistically rigorous by showing both sides of the story is another component of the redemption infrastructure which is available to people like Sandmann more often that it is to people like Phillips. In this case, one "side" consisted of an individual reading professionally-prepared talking points in which he first carefully limited the scope of the things he did, and then asserted that he owed apologies for none of them. "I can't say that I'm sorry for listening to him and standing there" is the sort of hedge that only holds water if you ignore everything else happening around the two as they stared at one another. It is a statement, sure, but it does not actually say anything.

The whole point of offering equal time to the two parties, in theory, is to allow them to come to some sort of understanding, about which the audience at home can feel good as they watch it unfold. The problem is that there was nothing in Sandmann's interview to which Phillips could respond, and yet he was expected to do so anyway, which led to the absurd sequence in which Phillips expresses his disappointment with Sandmann's lack of an apology and then does his best to accept it. What could have been a dialogue is an empty, unsatisfying monologue instead, and no one is better off for it.