Trump's 'shockingly tone-deaf' obsession mocked on MS NOW as spin machine sputters

President Donald Trump is taking more heat than ever for his controversial White House ballroom project — and his usual deflection tactics to divide his critics are simply not working anymore, former GOP strategist Tim Miller told MS NOW's Chris Hayes on Tuesday.

This comes as a small group of Republicans tries to capitalize on the assassination attempt on Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner to argue the ballroom project, which Trump long promised would be fully privately funded, should now instead get $400 million in taxpayer funding.

"I was so struck by the optics of all of this," said Hayes. "Obviously, it was very scary and upsetting what happened. Thankfully, it was not, more people weren't hurt. No one was killed, thank goodness. But just like at this moment when people are not happy with the right track, wrong track, they're not having the economy for the entire party to be like, you must build us a ballroom, and we're going to use taxpayer money. And this is the most important thing in America right now. Struck me as shockingly tone-deaf."

"Yeah, 400 million. We need 400 million of your dollars to build this ballroom right now," said Miller. "And it's going to be very gold, very, very gold. And here's the picture of it. It looks very gold and very fancy. How are things going for you? How do your schoolrooms look? How do your hospital rooms look? The ballroom is going to look amazing. Yeah. There it is."

"I don't know, man," he continued. "I think that it's interesting because what this has shown is that there's been something that Trump and his, you know, the Republican Party and the MAGA media apparatus has been very good at for 10 years now, which is something happens in the news cycle, and Trump says 'squirrel.' And everyone goes and looks at the squirrel and talks about squirrel and talks about how important it is. And oftentimes that is, you know, something terrible that the liberals have done. You know, sometimes it's something that Trump wants to do, but everybody sings in one echo chamber about it, and they've been much better at that than the Democrats have."

This time, he said, "It just doesn't feel like it's working on this one."

"Like on this one, you know, that is something that works if you're tearing down the other side," said Miller. "If they're doing something wrong, it maybe works. If people are kind of happy with what you're doing and they're just, you know, interested in whatever the story of the day is when people are really upset about what's happening at the pump, with Epstein files, with the war in Iran — just, like, get everybody singing from the same ballroom hymn book, I just don't think is doing them any good."

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