Chuck Todd may have pushed out of his job hosting Meet the Press, but it wasn’t because he was an original thinker. Todd posted a piece about “Confronting Trump” on NBCNews.com that – shocker – sprung out of a family trip Todd took to Germany, including tours of museums about the Nazi era. This, unsurprisingly, turns to comparisons of Trump and Hitler:
As many a scholar and victim of the Nazi regime has wondered aloud, how did such a civilized nation like Germany end up bringing a tyrant like Adolf Hitler to power? Why wasn’t he stopped sooner? Why did it take a global war to stop him? Why did the German people usher him in, in the first place? Why didn’t the German people rise up themselves and stop him and the Nazis?
There’s no doubt that this recent history is what has motivated so many entities in American politics to make decisions on their own to confront the perceived threat of Trump. The lesson we all have taken from history is to stand up to tyrants, not to cower.
In fact, there’s been no shortage of attempts to confront or “stop” Trump — just far more bad attempts than good ones.
Oh, they were "noble," he said, but they often backfire -- as he thinks will happen from Colorado and Maine trying to take Trump off the ballot. He lamented the Big Tech deplatforming of Trump didn't hurt him, and weirdly claimed nobody in the media pays attention to Trump's Truth Social rants. "Trump simply created his own social media ecosystem, which allowed him to communicate his crazy grievances, and his grievance-driven politics, directly to his supporters without any pushback or notice from mainstream America."
That's simply not true. We're being incessantly told about his "crazy grievances."
Todd claimed "Editing Trump or protecting the public from what Trump does and says only shields him from outrage. If anything, the media are probably under-covering Trump and what he’s promising to do. [!] Trump should be interviewed more, not less; he should be questioned confrontationally, but in different ways." Differently than Kristen Welker did? Wouldn't we like to know?
He concluded by returning to Hitler museum analogies:
Ultimately, as hard as everyone outside the GOP is trying to honestly confront Trump, it’s the Republican Party members who are either going to have to do it or lose their careers trying. Because one day, association with Trump won’t be a golden ticket to winning a GOP primary, but a mark of shame in the history books. Let’s hope we won’t need to build new museums or exhibits to prove to the American public we’ve learned a lesson.
If we could ask Todd a question, it would be this: If indicting Trump and impeaching Trump and ripping Trump off the ballot isn't working, what would happen if the media gave his Republican opponents more of a chance to communicate on their airwaves? Why does Trump receive the lion's share of attention, and obviously more attention than the current president is getting? Did that work for the media in 2016?
