"Swing voters, Trump/Biden voters, they seem to buy the idea that Putin wouldn’t have done this if Trump was president. How does the Democratic Party answer for that? I don’t buy that, I don’t think that matches logic, but voters do."

That was NBC's Chuck Todd on a recent edition of "Meet the Press Daily," sharing his disbelief that Russia would have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump were still president. Todd's comments came in reaction to recent polls showing that a solid majority of Americans believe exactly that.

This isn't exactly a hypothetical, of course, considering that Trump was president for four years, not too long ago, while Vladimir Putin was president of Russia........