'His team knows': White House reporter reveals how staffers try to hide Trump's decline

MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire revealed that Donald Trump's campaign team is aware of his mental decline and takes steps to prevent voters from noticing.

"Morning Joe" panelists reacted throughout Monday's episode to the former president slurring and bumbling his way through a pair of campaign speeches over the weekend, saying he clearly seems to be mentally diminished, and Lemire discussed the change he's seen in Trump over the years he has spent covering him and his campaigns.

"He's surrounded entirely by enablers during this campaign and would be again if he'd be in the White House a second time," Lemire said. "There would be no guardrails or adults in the room, it'd be people doing what he wants. To your point, he is not the same guy. You can watch video footage of the 2016 campaign, some of his time in the White House. We played last week a clip from the debate between Trump and [president Joe] Biden back in 2020. It was striking even then how much Trump has changed, how he's aged. He is in his late 70s, he is only a couple years younger than President Biden. We're seeing with more and more frequency, even as the media -- and we talked about it earlier, how the weekend was full of polls and obsession about President Biden's age -- it is this, Trump, who day after day is showing the signs of age but also pressure."

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"Indeed, pressure because he is not getting as much of the share of the Republican vote as he'd like," Lemire added. "Nikki Haley posting a win over the weekend. Pressure because of the money he now owes, nearly half a billion dollars in a couple cases in New York City, and pressure that his first criminal case, a case that could theoretically put him in prison, starts in just three weeks. We are seeing it night after night on the rally stage, where he seems to even just lose control of the English language. Mika [Brzezinski] cringes, I can't help it either at the end of that clip. His team knows, but they're just forging forward."

"They're trying to keep him off the stage as much as possible," added host Joe Scarborough. "Obviously, they don't want that out there. They don't want him on Truth Social. Again, he only hurts himself politically."

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