A CBS political reporter said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder following his coverage of the attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
But Scott MacFarlane didn’t blame shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, the noise of Crooks’s rifle going off eight times, or the near-death of Trump. He blamed the crowd of MAGA supporters, whom he envisioned “were going to come kill us.” He said he felt the crowd would blame the media for the shooting and that “we’d be dead” if Trump didn’t survive.
For that, he easily won as our Liberal Media Scream of the week. But he was challenged during an interview on The Chuck ToddCast when Todd offered up his own bizarre reaction to the assassination attempt that killed Trump supporter Corey Comperatore.
Todd said, “I share your concern. Just a little thing. I was — literally the first thing I was going to do after landing [in Milwaukee to cover the GOP convention] on Saturday was go to the Nats-Brewers game, and I said, ‘I’m not going. I’m not going to be seen going. I’m not, I’m not doing that. This is not the moment for this.’”
Todd went on to say he has long feared Trump supporters.
From The Chuck ToddCast:
SCOTT MACFARLANE: For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw an emerging America. And it wasn’t the shooting, Chuck. This was … 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 were coming for us. If he didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us.
CHUCK TODD: I know … Look, I share your concern. Just a little thing. I was, literally, the first thing I was going to do after landing on Saturday was go to the Nats-Brewers game, and I said, “I’m not going. I’m not going to be seen going. I’m not, I’m not doing that. This is not the moment for this.”
And I think we … none of us knew what the reaction of that Milwaukee crowd was going to be to this. Right? It turned into euphoria, right? It turned into this messiah, sort of messiah feeling. I think that, you know, that this was divine intervention.
But I share that, that Saturday, and what you just described, being on the ground, was the first thing I thought of was my team down there. I think it was Vaughn Hillyard, if I’m not mistaken.
MACFARLANE: Dasha was there as well.
TODD: And Dasha Burns, right? And, look, let’s be honest. We’ve been fearing this for about a decade. That all of this heightened rhetoric, that what all this crap online, what happened on Jan. 6, those of us that experienced that as well, you’re like, we’re a tinderbox, right? You know what? There’s a fear that this moment is coming. And it’s interesting that you … the fact that we dodged that. You know, you’re right. I mean, it’s, it is … I don’t know what would have happened had the outcome been different.
MACFARLANE: We are all … many of us on press row, as 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.”
CBS’s Scott MacFarlane claims that after Trump was shot “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 were coming for us. If he didn’t… pic.twitter.com/MfrQxN9mvh
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) July 17, 2025
And they’re going to beat us with their hands. I mean, they were going to kill us. And respectfully, the Secret Service had bigger issues than protecting us. When he jumped up triumphantly, it saved us, but that’s the thing. I can’t eliminate from my mind’s eye the look on their faces. They … that’s what America is right now. It’s not rational. It’s an irrational thought to think the media shot somebody from atop a building, but the lack of rationality is what connects Jan. 6 to this. It’s … how do we pull out of this as a country is the defining question of our time.
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Brent Baker, the Steven P.J. Wood senior fellow and vice president for research and publications at the Media Research Center, explained our pick: “Yes, the near-assassination of President Donald Trump wasn’t the real ‘horror’ of the day. The real ‘horror’ was in how, in the few seconds before Trump triumphantly raised his fists, MacFarlane somehow sensed the crowd would ‘kill’ him and other reporters? Really? If Trump supporters were on the cusp of deadly violence, why are we just hearing about it a year later? And McFarlane really got diagnosed with PTSD? We all know too many journalists are snowflakes, but you’d think MacFarlane would have the self-respect to keep such an embarrassing admission, of his fear of fellow Americans, to himself.”
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE screams.