On CNN Saturday, Axios politics editor Margaret Talev said that President Donald Trump's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, is privately bracing members of Trump's circle for the president to lose re-election.
"As I understand it, their campaign manager Bill Stepien did talk to Axios," said anchor Christi Paul. "What did he say?"
"That's right," said Talev. "Bill Stepien is not out there publicly. You don't see him quoted a whole lot. But the reporting that we we're hearing was that people who were privy to private conversations with Bill Stepien walked away with the unmistakable and consistent view that he didn't think that the president could win re-election."
"Stepien's response is, absolutely not, there's still a lot of paths," added Talev. "But Jonathan [Swan]'s reporting consistently shows that's not what a lot of people around and in the campaign are hearing about this. They're hearing things like Stepien using the analogy, the idea, they just have to land the plane at this point. Using terms like optionality to describe multiple different paths. What you walk away with is a pretty consistent impression that while the campaign hasn't give up and while it's the campaign manager's job to get to 270 in the electoral college, that this is they're on defense now trying to get it back. And it's sort of like the image of, if you're in a car and you're hurtling at a tree, you don't look at the tree, you look at the ways around the tree. That's what's happening now."
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