I get it. Most members of the legacy media have reached the end stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome and it takes a lot for one of them to actually surprise us anymore. But the story that CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane recounted to former MSNBC host Chuck Todd on Thursday’s edition of The Chuck ToddCast podcast was a doozy.
MacFarlane, who was covering President Donald Trump’s Butler, Pennsylvania, rally last July, told Todd he was diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours of the assassination attempt. No, MacFarlane did not fear that a second gunman would suddenly open fire on the crowd. He was terrified that the attendees — the MAGA crowd — were going to kill him and the other members of the legacy media. He could see it “in their eyes,” he said.
“For those of us there, it was such a horror, because you saw an emerging America,” MacFarlane said. “I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave. Not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you could — you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people.”
“They [MAGA supporters] were coming for us. If he [Trump] didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us,” he added. MacFarlane was referring to the moment after the shooting when Trump stood up, pumped his fist in the air and shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Shaking his head back and forth, Todd replied, “I know.”
In the extended clips from the interview below, Todd recounts being on a flight to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the time of the assassination attempt. The plane was filled with members of the media. He said “it might as well have been a press charter.” Jake Tapper and Kellyanne Conway were also on board.
Todd explained that the plane’s Wi-Fi was not working. “When we touch down and everybody’s phones come on … everybody’s just looking at each other, not saying a word, for total fear of anything being misconstrued.”
Todd said, “Look, let’s be honest, we’ve been fearing this for about a decade. That all of this heightened rhetoric, all of this crap online, what happened on Jan. 6 … we’re a tinderbox. There’s a fear that this moment is coming.”
“The fact that we dodged that, you’re right, I don’t know what would have happened had the outcome been different.”
MacFarlane interjected to say, “Many of us on press row — because we talked about this on our text chains for weeks after — were 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.'” MacFarlane and his media brethren thought the attendees were about to “beat us with their hands.”
“They were going to kill us,” MacFarlane said. “When he [Trump] jumped up triumphantly, it saved us.”
At any rate, to this day, McFarlane claimed, “I can’t eliminate from my mind’s eye the look in their faces. That’s what America is right now. It’s not rational.”
First, I find it extraordinary that such outrageous behavior from MAGA supporters went unreported for an entire year.
Second, I actually agree with Scott MacFarlane that America has become irrational. But let me be clear — it’s not the entire country. The irrationality is concentrated in the progressive half of the political spectrum. Just ten years ago, many of the positions now proudly embraced by Democrats were considered fringe or absurd. Not even Bernie Sanders was openly advocating free healthcare for illegal immigrants. Gender ideology was a niche issue—now it’s mainstreamed, enforced, and untouchable.
We’re told men can become women, and asking simple questions like “What is a woman?” is considered hateful. Voter ID laws are smeared as racist, despite overwhelming support across racial and political lines. This isn’t progress; it’s delusion masquerading as virtue.
So while MacFarlane aims his criticism at the MAGA crowd, perhaps he should take a personal inventory. Because when nearly 80 million Americans are staring back at him in disbelief, maybe the real irrationality lies a little closer to his side of the aisle.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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