Trump's pitch to voters is 'a muddled mess' — and he's running out of time: analysis

With less than two months to go until the 2024 presidential election, MSNBC analyst Steve Benen thinks that former President Donald Trump is struggling to create an easily digestible pitch to voters.

In his latest column, Benen makes the case that Trump's messaging in recent weeks has been a "muddled mess," while also contending that he's running out of time to turn things around.

"For a brief period over the weekend, I genuinely wondered whether someone had hacked Donald Trump’s social media account and started publishing ridiculous messages intended to make the former president appear foolish," wrote Benen. "As best as I can tell, however, the Republican’s online missives were his own."

This tendency was best exemplified, Benen argued, by Trump's all-caps declaration that he "hated" pop star Taylor Swift, who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris last week.

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"It’s difficult to say with confidence how many voters — especially swing voters or battleground state voters who haven’t yet made up their minds — are paying attention to the Republican nominee’s day-to-day rhetoric," he wrote.

"But to the extent that the public, with 50 days remaining before Election Day, and as early voting gets underway in several states, is actually listening to Trump, he doesn’t appear to have anything worthwhile to say."

That said, Benen warned Democrats against complacency and noted that they believed they'd similarly had Trump on the rocks in 2016.

"In other words, it matters that Trump doesn’t have a coherent and substantive message, but Democrats would be mistaken to see this as an excuse for complacency," he concluded.