Chuck Todd holds Donald Trump personally responsible for directing death threats and vandalism against him — but he doesn't hold it against him.
The former host of NBC News' "Meet the Press" told British news station Times Radio over the weekend that the president's personal insults seemed to activate his supporters into attack mode, and he told host Maddie Hale that his social media posts "100 percent" created security risks for his targets, reported The Independent.
"I dealt with it in the first term with him,” Todd said. “There was direct correlation, right? He’d call your name out, you’d get weird phone calls, you’d get weird death threats. I got my tires slashed in front of my house.”
Todd told the host that he had addressed the topic with Trump, telling the president that individuals he calls out could be publicly harassed or worse, but he said Trump blew off his concerns and suggested his attacks actually benefited the targets.
“He views it as, ‘Oh, it’s good publicity,’” Todd said, adding that he doesn't believe that Trump thinks he's acting maliciously.
Trump regularly smeared the longtime NBC News anchor and political analyst as "sleepy eyes," which some have speculated could be an antisemitic slur, although Todd disagrees.
“I don’t think he’s doing it to create a security problem for these people, but what he wants to do is deflect blame,” Todd said. “But the reality is that it creates a security problem.”
Trump also called him a "sleeping son of a b---h" from the stage at a 2018 campaign rally, where he raged about "fake news," and the president called for him to be "prosecuted" over a 2020 interview with then-attorney general William Barr that later required a correction.
Todd left NBC News last year after 17 years with the network and now hosts "The Chuck Toddcast," which he launched in 2016 and now operates as an independent production.