In just a little over two minutes, Chuck Todd demolished Donald Trump’s lame excuse for lying to Americans about the dangerousness of COVID-19.
September 11, 2020

Trump has been pathetically trying to defend himself from the shocking revelations from Bob Woodward. But the best he can seem to come up with, as far his lying to the public about the dangers of coronavirus, is his ridiculous claim that he didn’t want to panic anybody.

Todd made quick work of that one:

TODD: I’m going to pick up on the panic point because this is where I think the president's really off-key here. He says he didn't want to panic the public. The problem is, he has a history of actually - panic is his go-to move. Panic is his political sort of -- it's his, sort of how he drives to the hoop, if he were a basketball player. It’s the only way he knows how to go: fear of the caravans, fear [for] the police, fear in the suburbs, fear of Joe Biden. I mean, his entire campaign is fear and panic. So it is hard -- I think that excuse ends up looking even more ridiculous considering his tactics on every other issue he touches.

New York Times reporter Peter Baker agreed. And he predicts more bombshells to drop and wound.

BAKER: The tweets just this morning about how - you know, people are going to -- if Biden wins, they'll come invading your suburbs and everything will be chaos on the planet. And the dichotomy between the "nothing to see here" approach to the coronavirus and the almost -- and the exaggerated discussion of violence in the streets, it is a powerful contrast. …

It’s the drip, drip, drip effect, right? Bob's book will not be the end of this. There will be more. There's going to be a whole series of books this fall. And who knows what - as you say, people are waiting in the wings.

If you are somebody who found Donald Trump to be dangerous and you were working for him and you haven't said anything up until this point, and you plan to, you presumably are waiting until October when it will have the most maximum damage. That's what the White House is worried about. And they should be because there is a real danger … that they never get back on their own message, they're constantly reacting to other people's.

But it wouldn't be Chuck Todd without bothsidesism. Here he is equating Trump's lies about a deadly pandemic, among other misdeeds, to the fake scandals ginned up by the media about Hillary Clinton.

TODD: In some ways, he's a victim of the same campaign he was successful with four years ago. Hillary Clinton was a magnet for this stuff and couldn't get away from it. And now Trump is the magnet. And I think he's now seeing the shoe is on the other foot.

Greg Greene has a good response:

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