The media’s desire to make themselves the main character in the story reached the Platonic level on Wednesday as CBS correspondent Scott MacFarlane joined former moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd, on his appropriately named podcast: The Chuck Toddcast. According to MacFarlane, he was diagnosed with PTSD after the first assassination attempt against President Trump, not because of the shooting, but because of the reaction of Trump supporters. Meanwhile, Todd thought this was a completely reasonable thing to claim.
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Todd also claimed, “I share that, that Saturday, and what you just described being on the ground was my first thing I thought of was my team down there. I think it was Vaughn Hillyard, if I'm not mistaken— Dasha Burns, right? And, look, let's be honest. We've been fearing this for about a decade. That all of this heightened rhetoric, that what all this crap online, what happened on January 6, those of us that experienced that as well, you're like, we're a tinderbox, right? You know what? There's a fear that this moment is coming. And it's interesting that you—the fact that we dodged that. You know, you're right. I mean, it's, it is—I don't know what would have happened had the outcome been different.”
MacFarlane then repeated his earlier claims about attendees wanting to kill journalists, “We are all—many of us on press row, as we talked about this on our text chains for weeks after, we're quite confident we'd be dead if he didn't get back up. There was a subset, not everybody, there's dozens of people in the crowd who started coming for us, saying, ‘You did this. This is your fault. You caused this. You killed him.’ And they're going to beat us with their hands. I mean, they were going to kill us.
