When the president of the United States calls you a "son of a bitch"

I asked Todd in our interview Friday why he thought the president had such an obsession with him. His nasty tweets about Todd – including calling him “sleepy” – go all the way back to 2011 (“’Sleepy’ Chuck Todd of NBC falls far short of the late great Tim Russert,” Trump tweeted on Sept. 28, 2011). Todd told me that was the year Trump was repeatedly calling him, trying to sell him on the idea of a Trump-led ticket against Barack Obama.

“For a long time, he used to call me up and be upset because I wasn’t taking the idea of him running for president seriously in 2011,” Todd said. “And we would have these half-hour conversations regularly and I would sit there and I remember one time with Savannah Guthrie and I, we, literally put him on mute, going, ‘Does he have other things to do but call?’” The future president, Todd recalled, seemed to think that because his television reality show, “The Apprentice,” was also on NBC, Todd should reflect that in his journalism. Once, Todd said, Trump called him and said, “’Come on, we’re colleagues. I make you a lot of money.’ I’m like, ‘What?’”