Even Meet the Press host Chuck Todd defended President Donald Trump’s “animals” remarks about MS-13 illegal immigrant gangsters and criticized his fellow mainstream media journalists for blatantly and irresponsibly taking Trump’s remarks out of context.

“A lot of people have called violent anybodys animals,” Todd reportedly said on Friday during an appearance on WABC Radio’s “Bernie & Sid in the Morning” show, as The Hill noted. “Anybody who is a violent criminal in my book can get called an animal if they’re sitting there mauling, killing and raping people. I don’t care where they’re from.”

Todd agreed that Trump’s remarks were “widely misrepresented” and the media played into Trump’s go-to “fake news” narrative about them.

“This is where I think that my colleagues do us all harm,” Todd added. “You know, cover this legitimately. There is plenty of legitimate stuff to ding him on, if you think he deserves to be dinged on. Just be careful, don’t be sloppy about it.”

Todd, who also said he would not put a wager at +200 on whether Trump will be impeached, said this was a “classic case” of somebody who jumped to conclusions without watching the event and taking a quote or excerpt out of context.

As Breitbart News reported after watching all of Trump’s roundtable event earlier in the week, Trump was directly responding to “Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims’ frustrations over not being able to report certain MS-13 gang members to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if they did not meet certain thresholds.”

“We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in, we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” Trump responded. “These aren’t people. These are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a rate that’s never happened before.”

Trump made similar remarks about MS-13 gang members at a Long Island campaign event last year.

“They kidnap. They extort. They rape and they rob,” Trump said then. “They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.

But the mainstream media immediately embarrassed themselves by claiming that Trump was calling immigrants “animals,” which prompted left-wing politicians like California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who did not watch the event and just heard a soundbite, to hysterically warn that Trump’s rhetoric could lead to “genocides.”

CNN’s resident useful idiot and clown Ana Navarro, who had previously dehumanized Trump by calling him an “animal,” parroted Newsom’s remarks by comparing Trump to slave holders and Nazis. Legacy media members finally admitted that they took Trump’s remarks out of context, but still declared that Trump was “racist” nonetheless.

The legacy media that so quickly vilified Trump did not accuse Hillary Clinton of dehumanizing people when Clinton infamously referred to young black criminals as “super-predators” in the 1990s.

“We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel,” Clinton said in the 1990s.

On Friday, Trump again blasted the “Fake News’ mainstream media for “purposely” taking his remarks about MS-13 illegal immigrant gangsters out of context.