trump is poor they red as unserious and only semiliterate. and steve bannon accuses the president s son of treason. that is a ridiculous accusation. fighting back, president trump says bannon has lost his mind. plus the president s bigger button insult to kim jong-un is raising questions about mr. trump s judgment. it s a taunting tweet to say he has a larger nuclear button. but it s just a fact. and weapon of mass distraction. after the president s big button tweet we talked to about expert on the brain and language about what s really behind president trump s serial tweeting. this is mtp daily and it starts right now. good evening. i m chuck todd here in washington. real nonfiction washington, i
elections and people don t take it seriously. i want to go back to something we talked about at the top of the broadcast here. here s a president that tweets a lot. when folks in the past have gone after ivanka, he takes to twitter, but on this he s been eerily silent. why do you think that is? if you see what he s done in the past, he uses twitter as a weapon of mass distraction so people will be talking about what s going on with russia, and he will go on and tweet about something else. it has less credibility now. rick was right about talking about the lack of news
stuck with him through the course of all these, you know, so-called scandals. that s why it s a very powerful tool as we have this political discussion going forward regarding thursday s hearing. paul, what s your response? well, you know, i wear so many different hats. as a democrat who s not the biggest trump supporter, i think it s great. as a commentator who s going to cover this, i think it would be great. if i can set those two powerful urges aside, let me disagree as a former white house official. he s often look, he s great at distracting, at moving the news away from the story of the day. i m not sure you can do it on comey day, but maybe. nobody is better at this weapon of mass distraction than donald trump. the problem is he s often very, very tactical and not strategic. when jeff sessions, for example, recused himself, it was a terrible story for donald trump because it got us back to russia. that s when, on march 4th, donald trump tweeted that barack obama had wireta
shepard: to put a point on it, on that day when the fbi had the hearing, director comey did, director nunes said you ve cast a black cloud over this white house with this investigation. the black cloud that will be there until it s resolved. you need to get it resolved. the next day came this weapon of mass distraction. this under cloak of darkness meeting on the white house campus and now the semantics games are being played. these are not actions about people being transparent about their dealings. i m not going to go as far as you are on that, shep. i m pointing out facts. the facts are somewhat troubling. even today where donald trump sends out a tweet that says that flynn should get immunity and again you heard sean spicer, well, no, that s not what he said. he said he should testify and
there is no responsibility that he is taking. the risk for the white house is when everything is treated like it s a rapid response operation out of the rnc where a lot of people who work there came from, all of these so far have been. at some point they need the believe to believe them and hear what they are saying. there is a real danger in going down this road. it s possible that he will come out and say something different and that validates what the president said. this is clear cut and at a concern point it will be hard to make the argument. that are is the larger issue about a crisis of credibility really. sure. what started virtually two weeks ago and it s now a weapon of mass distraction is a web of mass distortion of the facts. when we have not just the latest report, but house and senate members as you indicated, both