President Donald Trump is still clinging to his bully pulpit, MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace said on Wednesday, noting that he's in a battle to refocus blame for his own mistakes responding to the coronavirus.
But news commentator John Heilemann predicted it wouldn't work, certainly not as more and more people die.
"It's an unusual circumstance -- an unprecedented circumstance and it does give Donald Trump a certain kind of advantage in the sense that he's central to this story," said Heilemann. "You could argue that he's saying things and doing things that will seal his defeat in November or he's saying things or seeing things that will seal his election."
Heilemann said that for an incumbent president, the election is almost always a referendum on leadership and performance.
"Incumbents who are unpopular try to change that dynamic and turn the race into a choice and then try to paint their opponent as unacceptable," he explained. "That's what Donald Trump was planning to try to do in 2020. The problem he now has is, this such a big disaster, a crisis, whatever you want to call it, it overwhelms everything else and I can't imagine a world where Trump is not ultimately going to be judge by the country on how he handles this crisis, how he handled it so far and the months in end. He'll try to do a number of things. He'll try to discredit Joe Biden for one. But In the end, this is too big a story and too big a challenge, for it not to be the central defining issue of the election in November."
Watch his comments below:
