ABC's Transcript Page Skips the Emmer Exchange That Made News

ABC's own transcript page for Sunday's This Week sums up House Majority Whip Tom Emmer's segment with one line: he dismisses Republican concerns going into the midterms. Host Jon Karl introduced him as Republicans fight to keep control of the House. The network's summary skips the sharpest moment of the interview.

The transcript shows Karl opened the program by noting 23 days remain until the midterm elections and saying Republicans are on defense. He said President Trump has made the midterms a referendum on his job and that Republican candidates face voters uneasy about high prices and an unpopular war. ABC's Rachel Scott reported that the network's race ratings moved the Kansas Senate race from lean Republican to a toss-up and shifted North Carolina toward likely Democrat.

Karl set up the Emmer interview with a clip of President Trump at the United Nations almost a year ago criticizing Europe for buying Russian oil, then said the president announced Friday that the U.S. now plans to do the same thing. Emmer called that the president thinking out of the box and said Americans are hurting from the world market for diesel and fuel in general. He said $4 gas and $6 diesel are unacceptable and Republicans agree on that, but that it is not enough reason to vote for communists.

Fox News reports that Karl insisted there are not a lot of communists on the ballot, and that Emmer pushed back. According to the transcript, Karl said most Democrats would say they are not communists. Fox reports Karl conceded there are some Democratic socialists on the ballot and tried to move to a new topic. The Minnesota Republican rejected the term democratic socialists for the Democratic candidates in question and said they are communists.

In the transcript, Emmer told Karl he had just called them what they want to be called, said there is nothing democratic about socialism, and said that for 100 years they wanted to be called progressives when they were socialists. He said they are now communists and Marxists and pointed to the DSA platform. Fox News reports Emmer made similar remarks to Fox News Digital last week, and that dozens of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America are running in the midterms.

The exchange plainly registered with Karl. Later in the show he told the panel that Emmer had said Democrats are a bunch of communists, then pointed to Adam Hamilton, the Kansas Democrat and pastor he had just interviewed, as a lifelong Republican turned Democrat. You will not find that exchange in ABC's framing of its own segment. The rush transcript is public, and ABC notes it may still be updated. Read it and decide which part was the news.