After President Donald Trump took to Twitter earlier on Thursday to suggest Democrats inflated the Hurricane Maria death toll to make him look bad, Republican congresspeople bent over backward to explain away his remarks — and MSNBC's Chuck Todd has all the receipts.
Todd rolled a supercut of GOP members of Congress responding to the tweets, and their reactions ran the gamut from defensive to chiding to outright dismissive.
"Casualties don't make a person look bad," outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan said at a press conference in a weak rebuke of the president. "That's not — I have no reason to dispute these numbers."
"I can't really comment because I don't know anything about it," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said in response to questions about the Trump tweets.
"I thought y'all wanted to talk about the Kavanaugh nomination," Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said, adding that he doesn't want to comment on the topic.
"There's a big difference between 16 and 3,000," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) noted. "I don't know who picked the number 3,000. I don't know how they arrived at the information. I'd like to know more."
Watch below, via MSNBC:
