WTF? MSNBC Contributor NY Times Columnist Makes WILD Claim Pres. Trump Wants round Up and Kill People... And Angela Merkel Leads the Free World...

On Friday, Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times appeared on MSNBC, and made a rather shocking claim.



During a panel discussion regarding President Trump, the following conversation took place among Caitlin Huey-Burns of RealClearPolitics, John Podhoretz of Commentary, host Katy Tur, and Goldberg:



HUEY-BURNS: Again, this is the most vocal president, at least in real time, that we’ve had in recent memory, right? He’s the leader of the free world –



GOLDBERG: Oh, no he’s not. He’s not the leader of the free world – but sorry.



PODHORETZ: By default, he’s the leader of the free world.



GOLDBERG: Angela Merkel is the leader of the free world, but –



HUEY-BURNS: Well, he is the most important person in the world in politics right now, and he is very vocal, and I do agree with you that this does express a level of exasperation among his aides that they can’t have any control over –



TUR: Your argument that he’s not the leader of the free world – because he’s not standing up for democracy, because he’s not standing up for humanitarian rights?



GOLDBERG: Right, because he’s a sort of junior player in a bloc of authoritarian countries.



TUR: And people like the European Union are no longer looking at him as a leader any longer, and [they’re] thinking of doing their own thing.



GOLDBERG: Of course not, they see him as ... he’s part of a bloc that includes Vladimir Putin, Duterte. He’s kind of part of a kind of [unintelligible].



TUR: Well, hold on –



PODHORETZ: It’s worse than that in a certain way. I mean, not that that’s not the worst thing you could have said [because] that’s about the worst you could say about him.



TUR: Well he’s not rounding people up and murdering them without any, you know, due process.



GOLDBERG: He’d certainly like to.



TUR: I don’t think you can say that definitively.