President Donald Trump's re-election campaign is floundering because he is incapable of doing anything but bragging about himself, according to MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
The president delivered an overtly political speech from the White House Rose Garden as he tries to turn the focus from the coronavirus pandemic and the related economic fallout, and NBC News political reporter Carol Lee said that goes against advice from campaign officials.
"The president's advisers, according to sources that we've spoken with, have been trying for weeks to get him to, as they said, not make the election about him, that if the election is about him, he will lose," Lee said, "and so, they've tried to shift him to pivot to a strategy of focusing on [Joe] Biden, looking at his record, and their argument is he has a very long record. There's a number of policies that the president could be attacking. He has a number of statements in his background that they could be reviving, and so they've tried to push him into focusing on his opponent and attempt to deflect, frankly, from his three and a half years in office."
However, the president's attacks come across as petty personal grievances more than policy disagreements, Lee said.
"But we've seen the president instead nursing grievances publicly," Lee said. "He's embracing old tricks that he feels worked for him well, such as applying nicknames to Joe Biden, like 'Sleepy Joe,' but as one official told us, sleepy sounds pretty good after four years of exhaustion, so they want him to move away from this, and yesterday he tried to do that, but he did it in a way that was not at all, I think, what his advisers had in mind. The setting, the Rose Garden. You don't see presidents stand in the Rose Garden and deliver the kind of speech that he did."
Trump advisers were unhappy with the speech's content, and with the president's tone, Lee said.
"Then if you look at the speech itself, it was monotoned," she said. "His heart didn't seem in it, as one adviser told us, and he really just, you know, had this muddled delivery where he went off on various tangents, and so, to the frustration of his advisers, who say that the president is acutely aware that he could win, he can't get engaged on a strategy that they feel is effective, where he had a clear attack on his opponent and the election is not about him, and it's not clear that he's going to be able to make that pivot, particularly when he doesn't have any other venue than the complex here at the White House, and what we saw yesterday, where he pretty much delivered a speech that he probably would have given on Saturday night if he had that New Hampshire rally."