With an outgoing Trump administration, NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd spent Sunday dreaming up new commission to judge all the Team Trump failures. In reply, PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor dragged out the usual lines about Trump and "truth" never matching.
Todd began the program by pushing a 9/11-style commission for Trump's coronavirus failures (as opposed to say, Andrew Cuomo's failures).
"As we've noted, we're now experiencing a 9/11 every day, and it’s worse than a 9/11 on some days," he announced. "After September 11th, the government created a commission to study what went wrong. How did we miss the clues? Our question this morning: Is it time to establish a 9/11-like commission to study how significant parts of our government missed this -- chose to dismiss the obvious danger making it impossible for health officials to do their jobs."
By "significant parts," Chuck Todd (D-D.C.) really means Republican parts. NBC celebrated Andrew Cuomo for stirring speeches and blunt and sobering assessments. No need to look at the casualty counts in his state.
Then, near the end, he turned to the New York Times editorial board proclaiming the need for some kind of bipartisan investigative commission on Trump's, Todd asked about a reckoning for Trump:
CHUCK TODD: You know, Yamiche, what kind of appetite do you think the Biden administration's going to have? You know, I talked about a Covid commission. I think that's likely to happen, something like that. But I noticed the New York Times today called for something -- they didn't call it this, but it almost felt like a truth and reconciliation commission. Is that something that our current politics could allow to happen?
YAMICHE ALCINDOR: I think because of this thing that former President Obama called truth decay, it's very hard to have a truth and reconciliation commission when Americans can't agree on the truth. Hallie Jackson's talking about Kellyanne Conway talking to you about alternative facts. I remember being on Meet The Press when Rudy Giuliani told you, "Truth isn't truth." It is the thing that defined the Trump administration and this era, that they wanted to completely create a new version of the truth. And so many Americans, more than 75 million of them, went along with that for President Trump. I'm not sure if we can get to a place where Americans can sit down and say, "Let's talk about our differences," when we can't even agree on the facts.
The funny part is the Times editorial board suggesting that Biden is somehow the opposite of Trump, that the Biden family is not accused of making foreign policy a part of the family business, and that somehow Hunter Biden isn't under investigation for his taxes:
Even if he is not prosecuted by federal authorities, Mr. Trump and his businesses face at least two separate tax-fraud investigations in New York. Many of Mr. Trump’s associates have already been convicted of various crimes.
Yet there are still many lingering questions, foremost among them: Did the president’s business interests influence his conduct of foreign and domestic policy? The American people have a right to know if that was so.
When it comes to the Bidens, insisting on a "right to know" what the Bidens did is dismissed as echoing a Russian disinformation campaign. Check out NBC and Chuck Todd on that!
