Chuck Todd exploded as Senator Ron Johnson tried to defend President Donald Trump on Meet The Press. He did not allow Johnson to get traction with his Fox News conspiracy theories.
Chuck Todd loses it on Senator Johnson
Chuck Todd started the interview by quoting what Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) had made known last week. Vox reported it as follows.
Johnson said that the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, told him in late August that the administration was demanding Ukraine investigate “what happened in 2016,” and that if President Trump had “confidence” in the investigation, he’d “release the military spending.”
It’s been well documented by now that Trump tried to push Ukraine to launch investigations designed to serve his political needs — one into the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation, and one into the Biden family.
But perhaps the biggest question at the heart of this scandal has been whether Trump’s blocking of about $400 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine was linked to this pressure campaign.
Johnson claims he heard from Sondland that this was in fact the policy. However, Johnson adds that he became disturbed by this, and followed up with President Trump himself — who denied any such linkage. “He said—expletive deleted—‘No way. I would never do that. Who told you that?” Johnson told Journal reporters Siobhan Hughes and Rebecca Ballhaus.
Instead of answering the question, Johnson made the false claim that no president had ever been under duress from the inception of their presidency as Trump is. Of course, that is provably false. He must have forgotten that one of the first utterances from McConnell after President Obama was elected was that Republican’s ultimate goal was to make Obama a one-term president.
But from there on it was no longer an interview. It was Senator Johnson throwing out conspiracy theories I won’t mention and accusations. Finally, Chuck Todd exploded and accused Johnson of trying to appease the president on TV. But one of Chuck Todd’s closing remarks on the show was prescient.
“Senator, I don’t know why you just came out here to personally attack the press and avoid answering questions,” Chuck Todd said. “It’s pretty clear we are only dealing with the facts that we have and not the facts you’d like it to be.”
The thing is, Ron Johnson is only doing what Chuck Todd and company had allowed them to do for years. It is now a shock to them. Trump is so corrupt that even the press that they’ve played for so long is not playing as much anymore.