Matt Lauer Fears Trump Doesn’t Have ‘Gravitas’ to be President

Kyle Drennen | May 25, 2017
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More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.

Interviewing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday’s NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer tried to get the former Bush cabinet official to say that Donald Trump did not have the seriousness to be president: “You were here during the campaign and I asked you about Trump....And when I asked you did he have the gravitas to be commander-in-chief, you dodged it a little bit....you’ve now had 125 days to watch him. Do you feel he has the gravitas to be commander-in-chief?”

Rumsfeld pushed back: “Well, I didn’t dodge it. And I am old-fashioned, if I don’t know somebody, I'm inclined not to pretend I do.” He then praised the President for his cabinet selections, citing it as evidence of his leadership abilities: “In this case, what is a chief executive’s most important task? It’s to select good people. And I look at his Supreme Court nominee, his vice president, his secretary of state, his secretary of defense. I think his national security team is really first rate.”

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