Tom Price appeared on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd and attempted to blame the media for covering Trump’s childish tweets. Todd would have none of it and gave a sharp response seldom seen from him.
Chuck Todd gets a temporary spine and challenges Tom Price
Chuck Todd displayed some spine as he raised his voice and questioned Trump’s HHS director Tom Price for criticizing TV News Trump tweet coverage.
“I am asking you as a father,” Chuck Todd said. “If your son tweeted about a woman like that, what would you say to him?”
Tom Price went into deflection mode.
“Chuck, you know, this is very remarkable,” Tom Price said. “You’ve got incredible challenges across this nation, incredible challenges around the world. The challenge that I have been given is to address the healthcare issues. And your program, a program with the incredible history of Meet the Press, and that’s what you want to talk about? ”
“Mr. Secretary, I don’t,” Todd interjected.
“The people want to talk about the challenges …” Price continued speaking over Todd.
A stern Todd then raised his voice and hit back.
“Mr. Secretary, with all due respect,” Todd said exasperatedly. “You’re blaming me for what the president of the United States has spent his entire week focused on?”
Price then dialed back some.
“Listen to me,” Price continued. “With all due respect. The American people are concerned about a health care system that is not providing choices, where premiums are going up, where their insurance companies are vacating markets all across this land, and that is what they want us to concentrate on. That is what they want us to fix. And that is what I and the president are working on.”
“Why isn’t the president as devoted to this as you are,” Todd asked.
Price claimed that the president is just as devoted and can do more than one thing at a time. He then spewed off a litany of things the president is supposedly directing him to do. Of course, most know the president is incapable of thinking them through.
What is noteworthy in the dialogue between Tom Price and Chuck Todd is that Republicans, unlike Democrats, never lose any opportunity to talk down Obamacare as a program that is on life support or collapsing. As I said in a recent video and wrote in a recent piece, Democrats need to lay the groundwork for the shock Americans will see when they get their new Obamacare rates in October and start laying the blame at the doorstep of Republicans creating uncertainty and sabotage of the ACA. Otherwise, the Republicans will get their bill and much more with fairly no electoral consequences.