'A guy we can beat': MSNBC's Lemire says Trump's rambling speech gives Dems new hope

Republicans were underwhelmed by Donald Trump's acceptance speech for the party's nomination, according to MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire, while Democrats gained new hope they can win November's election.

The former president accepted the GOP nomination for the third time Thursday night in a record 93-minute speech that started as a call to unity following a shooting at his rally last week but quickly veered into one of his characteristic rambling monologues, and Lemire told "Morning Joe" that Republicans feel like he missed an opportunity to attract undecided voters.

"I do think we need a moratorium here in the media about Donald Trump's, praising Donald Trump's new tone," said Lemire, who's also the White House bureau chief for Politico. "That doesn't ever happen on this show, mind you. Certainly the first 20, 25 minutes of the speech, the lengthy recitation of what happened on Saturday was new, different. The room was silent, people were listening, there were some in the crowd who had tears in their eyes streaming down their cheeks as Trump talked about his brush with death, but once that moved on it was suddenly a Donald Trump rally again, maybe a little more subdued in this terms of tone, but full of false claims about things like immigration and a rambling, dark rhetoric that does seem out of place with what so many Americans do face, with reality in this country right now."

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Trump accepted his party's nomination after easily rolling over several primary challengers, in spite of four indictments, 34 felony convictions and staggering legal penalties for fraud, sexual abuse and defamation, while president Joe Biden faces increasingly public calls to step aside from Democratic leadership over concerns about his age and acuity.

"I will say and we're going to spend so much time this morning talking about it, there are Republicans who expressed it was a missed opportunity for Trump to try to for the first time ever as a political candidate to reach out beyond his base," Lemire said. "A number of Democrats say, look, this is a guy we can beat, what a flawed candidate he is, which is why there's so much scrutiny about President Biden's upcoming decisions."

Those intra-party questions about Biden's fitness, combined with Trump's survival of an apparent assassination attempt, still have Republicans feeling pretty good about their chances of taking back the White House, said host Joe Scarborough.

"Republicans at the RNC are supremely confident regardless of any misgiving there may have been from Republican consultants last night, the people in that room by all accounts believe that Donald Trump is their man, he's going to win, he's going to restore America's greatness and that he has the hand of God on him," Scarborough said. "Not anybody else that were watching but that's what Republicans feel. Oh, extremely confident, the most confident, I think, any Republican Party has ever felt going into an election in late summer."

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