Donald Trump’s personal insults against Chuck Todd during the president’s first administration resulted in someone slashing the former Meet the Press moderator’s tires, according to the veteran anchor.
Todd’s revelation about the acts of retaliation he was subjected to after drawing the media-bashing president’s ire comes as Trump continues to use his social media feed and public appearances to personally target media figures, lawmakers, and other officials who have angered him.
During an appearance on British news station Times Radio over the weekend, Todd was asked by host Maddie Hale about the president recently calling out federal judges by name as the courts have paused or reversed a number of Trump’s executive orders.
With Trump increasingly growing irate with the judicial branch, Hale noted that Trump has even taken direct shots at Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief who is largely responsible for handpicking the judges that Trump has nominated over the years. For instance, one of the judges on the U.S. Court of International Trade panel who ruled that most of Trump’s tariffs were illegal was appointed by the president.
“I wonder if it’s a bit of a security privacy risk when he does that,” Hale wondered, prompting Todd to bring up his own personal experience with being on the receiving end of Trump’s attacks.
“100 percent. I dealt with it in the first term with him,” the former NBC News star noted. “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 added that he actually addressed the problem with Trump, noting that people he name-checks could find themselves publicly harassed or worse. Meanwhile, according to Todd, the president shrugged it off and even suggested that those he was targeting were getting a net positive out of it.
“He views it as, ‘Oh, it’s good publicity,’” he declared, adding that he believes Trump doesn’t think he is doing anything malicious.
“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.”
During Trump’s first term in the White House, he regularly blasted Todd on social media and at his campaign rallies, even anointing the then-Meet the Press anchor with a Trumpian nickname.
“Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd of Fake NBC News said it’s time for the Press to stop complaining and to start fighting back,” Trump posted in a 2018 tweet. “Actually Chuck, they’ve been doing that from the day I announced for president. They’ve gone all out, and I WON, and now they’re going CRAZY!”
Railing against Todd at a Pennsylvania rally in March 2018, Trump called the journalist a “sleeping son of a b****” while fuming about the “fake news.” Two years later, after Todd conducted an interview with then-Attorney General Bill Barr that resulted in a correction afterwards, Trump repeatedly called for NBC News’ parent company Comcast to fire the host and even suggested Todd should be “prosecuted” over the editing of the broadcast.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this year, Todd left NBC News after spending 17 years at the network as an anchor and political analyst. Prior to his departure, Todd’s role at NBC had diminished significantly, especially after Kristen Welker replaced him as moderator of Meet the Press in 2023, a role he had held for six years.
After leaving NBC, Todd retained the rights to his podcast The Chuck Toddcast, which had initially launched in 2016 at the network. The podcast went on hiatus following his exit and relaunched in April as an independent production.
