MSNBC's John Heilemann said President Donald Trump's re-election campaign was already running on fumes, with more than three months to go before the election.
The president delivered a political speech on the White House lawn, flanked by two pickup trucks, where he suggested that Joe Biden's housing desegregation plan was an attack on white Americans.
"The subtly of the pickup trucks, the staging, subtle messaging going on there," Heilemann told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
The racial message was hardly subtle, Heilemann said.
"Suburbs equals white, and the president's campaign is in a state of meltdown right now," he said. "I know we talked on the show the last couple days about the Brad Parscale situation, who's running the campaign right now? You know, Jared Kushner is really running the campaign, kind of has always been running the campaign."
The results of Kushner's leadership have so far been disastrous, he said.
"A few months before Election Day, the campaign, the organization that should have been, you know, as most incumbent presidents have honed their political team, the one that got them in office, they spent time then in the Oval Office, they've been building a re-election war chest, they've been getting their team [to be] a finely tuned race car so by the time you get to the last turn, which is where we are right now in this campaign, they're on fire, right, and pedal to the metal," Heilemann said. "This car is breaking down. It's requiring -- I don't want to strain the metaphor, but the whole thing is a mess."
That's why Trump is warning that Biden's housing plan will "abolish" suburbs, Heilemann said.
"The campaign's breaking down," he said. "They're showing him polling that shows he's bleeding out in the suburbs. Trump looks at that and says, understands how dire his political situation is, sees the suburban loss he's suffering and says, I have to fix my situations with the suburb, that equals white. I'm going to play the race card -- hey, white people, if you vote for Joe Biden you get black people showing up in your neighborhoods. This is standard 1970s, Wallace-Nixon affair -- we made those comparisons in the past, but nothing quite this blatant. That's the card he's playing."
