Bari Weiss is running the Trump playbook at “60 Minutes.” It goes like this: Take an institution that still commands public trust, install loyalists with no relevant experience in positions of authority, fire the people who push back, dress the whole operation in the language of reform — fairness, innovation, a new direction — and you dare anyone to prove that what you’re really doing is building a protection racket.
For years before she landed at CBS News in October, Weiss built a career criticizing ideological conformity and supposed institutional intolerance. Yet in her brief tenure atop the network’s news division, she has presided over exactly the kind of purge-and-replace operation that has become synonymous with Trumpism.