After hyping “campaign chaos” for Donald Trump on Thursday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie turned to Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd and freely admitted the glaring media double standard in covering the presidential race: “And what irritates so many Republicans is that if it were any other candidate running against Hillary Clinton, this would be a pretty rough patch for Hillary Clinton given some of the items in the news.”
Todd agreed: “An incredibly rough patch.” He proceeded to list all of the Clinton controversies and scandals that the press have ignored: “Whether it's the current state of the economy, anemic growth. Whether it is her insistence again that somehow [FBI] Director Comey let her off the hook on e-mails when – and she sort of reinterpreted what Comey said in a way that was misleading. Throw in the discomfort for many on this Iran deal.... never mind we just started air strikes in Libya because ISIS is there.”
He concluded: “The point is, in the last five days this could easily have been Hillary Clinton's worst five days post-convention and instead the exact opposite and it's all due to Donald Trump's lack of self discipline.”
On Tuesday, Guthrie declared that Trump’s controversies were “pushing off some otherwise negative stories about Hillary Clinton that might be leading all the headlines.”
NBC has not been alone. On Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, correspondent Nancy Cordes made the same admission: “...ordinarily this would have been a challenging week for the Clinton campaign....But the sheer number of unorthodox comments made by Trump just this week has really been a boon to the Clinton campaign. They'll admit it themselves, overshadowing some of their bad news.”
Here is a full transcript of Guthrie’s August 4 discussion with Todd:
7:08 AM ET
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: Chuck Todd is in Washington for us this morning. Chuck, good morning to you.
CHUCK TODD: Good morning.
GUTHRIE: I know you've been reporting about this feeling among some Republican officials that maybe there would be a way that Trump would actually withdraw from the race or be persuaded to do so. Is that real or is that establishment fantasy at this point?
TODD: I think it's fantasy but I can't believe the number of conversations where – that I had yesterday, where that issue was there. That somehow in a meeting with them they could somehow convince him to do this. But I think that's definitely fantasy.
But what really they’re hoping to do is in the same way that you had Republican leaders who were unhappy with Trump, they went to his children, they convinced him to change campaign managers. And it was the children that finally made that happen. They convinced him to pick Mike Pence over his own gut, which was perhaps a Newt Gingrich for a running mate or something like that. Again, the children were involved.
So I think realistically what they hope to do is say, “Good grief, can you at least put some structure in place? Can you not do 17 interviews in between rallies and get yourself off message? Can you stop attacking this person? Can you stop attacking Republicans?” So I think they’re hoping realistically that maybe with the help of the kids they’re able to say, “Hey, at least provide some structure here and tone it down.”
GUTHRIE: And what irritates so many Republicans is that if it were any other candidate running against Hillary Clinton, this would be a pretty rough patch for Hillary Clinton given some of the items in the news.
TODD: An incredibly rough patch. Whether it's the current state of the economy, anemic growth. Whether it is her insistence again that somehow [FBI] Director Comey let her off the hook on e-mails when – and she sort of reinterpreted what Comey said in a way that was misleading. Throw in the discomfort for many on this Iran deal. The point is – never mind we just started air strikes in Libya because ISIS is there. Well, Libya was a high-profile intervention that Hillary Clinton pushed. The point is, in the last five days this could easily have been Hillary Clinton's worst five days post-convention and instead the exact opposite and it's all due to Donald Trump's lack of self discipline.
GUTHRIE: Chuck, I have 30 seconds and two raw politics things. Talk to me about polls and talk to me about the fundraising game.
TODD: I can tell you right now the polls look like it could be disastrous by next week for Donald Trump. All hints are this bounce is real and you’re seeing it trickle into the states. We could see double-digit leads for Clinton in some swing states.
The money, though, you have to say Donald Trump looked like a national candidate that you would expect a Mitt Romney to have looked like four years ago with the amount of money he raised in July. July was a great month. July was the most unified the Republican Party had been in seven months.
GUTHRIE: And from small donors.
TODD: Small donors. Let's see what happens in August, though, after six incredibly bad days for him.
GUTHRIE: Chuck Todd in Washington, thank you so much.
