Chuck Todd: How Can Congress Work With a President Who’s ‘Unreliable and Often Doesn’t Tell the Truth?’

Chuck Todd opened this morning’s Meet the Press raising concern again about President Donald Trump‘s relationship with the truth.

“If a president says one thing that’s not true, it can become a very big deal,” he said. “Think of President Obama’s claim that if you like your healthcare man you can keep it. Whether that was a lie or a mistake, it’s a scar on Mr. Obama’s presidency. But what if you make more than 12,000 false or misleading statements, as the Washington Post has catalogued during Donald Trump’s presidency>?”

Todd continued, “In that case, the very scale of Mr. Trump’s feud with the truth seems to have inoculated him from being stained by any one particular falsehood.”

He said two moments in particular stand out — the infamous Sean Spicer crowd size moment and this past week of Trump’s doubling, tripling, etc. down on his Alabama hurricane tweet:

“Mr. Trump chose to present alternative maps, including a Sharpie-enhanced one that comically stretched to Alabama and seemed to give new term to the extended forecast. Is this all absurd and trivial? Of course. And no doubt Mr. Trump’s supporters will blame us in the media, as the president has, for focusing on it. But it’s the president who spent the week insisting he was right all along and used government agencies to defend his position multiple times.”

Todd tied this into his report previewing the “fall fights ahead”: “How can Congress negotiate with a president who is unreliable and often doesn’t tell the truth?”

He noted how Trump used to say Mexico will pay for the wall and is now having military funds shifted to pay instead, as well as the president taking his support of background checks back.

You can watch above, via NBC.

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