Then Chuck immediately gives him his exit: “I know you think this is the Democrats’ problem.” When Trump starts to respond, Chuck hits him back with the ultimate Washingtonian question: “Why aren’t you doing something?”

This is a gift-wrapped frame for the president. It suggests that the detention of tens of thousands of people he has spent his entire political career demonizing—without trial, behind electrified fences and armed guards, in conditions rife with parasites, death, and disease—is some sort of natural condition that exists apart from him; a situation that is just out there, like the sea and the wind, that he is choosing not to “do something about.”

—Jonathan M. Katz, in “Chuck Todd sold out for nothing”