Good catch by Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller, who stuck with this insanity long enough to watch Thomas Roberts pose the question a second time. He didn’t “misspeak” or brain-fart in the course of ad-libbing on live TV. He found this point thoughtful enough to raise it with more than one guest.

Here’s his inspiration:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/871325606901895168

What’s the “provocation”?

What you’re seeing here is a guy breaking the embargo on prefab left-wing reaction for when/if there’s a major attack on the U.S. during Trump’s term. Democratic politicians like Kasim Reed and Howard Dean, Roberts’s guests, will focus on incompetence when that happens: The “strong man” Trump wasn’t strong enough to protect the country, he failed to staff up quickly enough to fill key counterterror positions, and so forth. Liberals like Roberts and MSNBC who don’t need to worry about swing voters will go a step further. Trump wanted the attack to happen for his own sinister authoritarian purposes, just as tinpot autocrats abroad happily seize on terrorism as a reason to tighten their grip over their own states. Trump floated the temporary Muslim ban two years ago in hopes of making ISIS mad or whatever; now, when they attack, he’ll I-told-you-so the world and try to consolidate power. It’s all (sort of) his fault! Then, even further left, you’ll inevitably have the kooks who’ll grasp for ways to connect the administration to the attack itself. It’ll turn out that one of the jihadis had dinner at a Trump hotel somewhere five years ago, or he knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Trump, and thus do the dots begin to connect. (Russiagate obsessives will add dots at the Kremlin and try to connect those too.) All of these hot takes are inevitable. Roberts simply got out over his skis in using an anodyne tweet and an attack that didn’t happen here to get going on them. The guy can’t wait to start calling Trump the terrorist-in-chief.