President Donald Trump's visits to Ohio and Texas following mass shootings "exposed" him for lacking the qualifications to be president of the United States, a conservative commentator explained on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House" on Thursday.
"How bad was it? Apparently, the president’s stops in El Paso and Dayton -- two communities he vowed to help heal -- were so off-key, the attacks so jarring, the barrage of angry Tweets at local media so startling, that even Trump’s own White House acknowledged the trip was a debacle," anchor Nicolle Wallace reported.
She played a clip of New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman on CNN.
"Most people, while I suspect they would not say that publicly, but will privately admit yesterday was something of a debacle. That these are not the headlines they wanted to see. They wanted him to go in and behave differently, the goal was for him to go in and get out without little waves as possible," Haberman reported. "Yesterday he couldn’t stop watching television news, where Democratic candidates were attacking him."
For analysis, Wallace interviewed conservative pundit Charlie Sykes, the editor-in-chief of The Bulwark.
"There have been presidents who have really risen to the occasion. And then there are presidents who were exposed by the occasion and this was an exposed moment," Sykes said.
"Again, this is Donald Trump. We’ve gotten to know him and even though it seemed familiar, he wants to be the bride at every wedding, wants to be the corpse at every funeral, wants to be the baby at every christening and apparently wants to be the rock star at every trauma center as well," he continued.
"The fact they would put out this promotional video, the fact they would tweet out how he was this rock star -- how totally vulgar and inappropriate the entire thing was, but once again, it was Donald Trump, the essence of this man, that was really on display and exposed by this national tragedy.
Watch:
