Chuck Todd of NBC News mocked President Donald Trump’s “constant efforts to project onto others” in his “Meet the Press” monologue Friday, suggesting the commander in chief’s criticisms are really meant for himself.
“It’s one of his all-time favorite defense mechanisms, most often deployed on Twitter,” Todd said, pointing to the president’s recent posts, which include accusations of Democrats obstructing justice and complaints about their efforts to look into his past financial dealings. The president alleges that criminal behavior occurred on “the other side.”
But, as Todd pointed out, Trump’s statements don’t always target specific individuals, sometimes referring instead to “generic and nameless people.”
Reviewing several of Trump’s speeches, Todd took aim at the president’s press conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, this month in which he said “a lot of people don’t know” what denuclearization means and his White House remarks last month claiming a lot is “happening in Venezuela that people don’t know about.”
“In reality, a lot of people do know things even if the president doesn’t always know them,” Todd joked.
Trump’s tweets rebuking Democrats came just after the House Oversight Committee testimony of his former fixer Michael Cohen, who called him a racist con artist. In his statements last month, Cohen accused the president of having advance knowledge of Wikileaks’ 2016 Democratic National Committee email dump, engaging in continued talks with Russia on building one of his namesake towers in Moscow and paying off porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence on her alleged affair with Trump.