True, Jessica Tarlov is hardly a prize. In her single dossier item here, she weighed in on a contrived Democrat-led controversy involving Florida’s public school standards about teaching slavery. Her party had pounced on a single, ill considered line stating that some slaves learned useful skills and trades in the course of their enslavement, and cherry-picked it to claim that Republicans believed slavery was “good.” On “The Five,” Tarlov compared that one statement in the history standards to saying Jews derived some benefits from the Holocaust, a really bad analogy.

I wrote, when Biden’s ventriloquists attacked Gutfield, “It is an abuse of power for the President and those who represent him to target citizens who are exercising their First Amendment rights and attack them for political ends. Obama had a revolting habit of doing something similar, although his specialty was shooting of his mouth about controversies he didn’t know much about and had no business interfering with, as when he implied that George Zimmerman was both a murderer and a racist, or when he criticized a Cambridge, Mass. cop for how he treated one of Obama’s pals.”

When Trump does it, this is still an abuse of power, and the sad fact that Trump has been doing it with increasing frequency in his second term doesn’t make the conduct less unethical, just less shocking.

Back to Tarlov: as Michael Kinsley complained after quitting as the designated liberal on “Crossfire,” his role prevented him from agreeing with his conservative adversaries. Kinsley was a liberal columnist for Time magazine and editor of The New Republic at the time, but hardly a knee-jerk ideologue. That was the part he played on TV, however. I assume Tarlov has a similar assignment: if the lone progressive voice on “The Five” starts agreeing with the conservatives, what use is she?

Add this to the myriad things our President can’t seem to grasp, or chooses not to.