Trump White House 'flailing' because they see election slipping away: AP reporter

On Monday morning, MSNBC "Morning Joe" regular Jonathan Lemire claimed that Donald Trump's manic spree of ugly tweets aimed at his critics -- combined with White House attacks on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden -- shows that the president and his campaign are "flailing" because they know the election is likely lost.

With host Joe Scarborough asking, "What is going through the president's mind? What is his state of mind? Why does he seem even more unbalanced and unmoored today than he has over the past three and a half turbulent years?" Lemire stated the combination of the coronavirus pandemic with its mounting death toll and the collapsing economy is more than the president can handle.

"These are the things the president knows are going to very much damage his re-election chances," Lemire reported. "Obviously, he's never been one to show much in the way of empathy. He struggled with previous tragedies. a hurricane or forest fire but he's rarely talked about that in terms of this pandemic. He's rarely offered sympathy to those gone."

Continuing in that vein, while discussing the president's ugly Twitter smears over the weekend, he offered, "What we're seeing here is a frustration from a president who is not overseeing the country that he wanted."

"More than that, [he] is unable to run the campaign he wanted," he added. "He thought, as of a couple months ago, he'd be running a campaign on the back of a robust economy, he'd be able to talk about Obamagate and deep state. He'd be able to dwell on Joe Biden's latest gaffe and none of that is in the cards right now."

"We're seeing him desperate, he and his allies trying to revive that over the weekend with seizing upon the Biden joke.," he continued. "There is this frustration here, this flailing from the White House, from his campaign team, knowing that right now, his own internal polls say if the election were held today, he would lose."

"That has led to, more than anything, a sort of unmoored, unhinged Twitter spree that we saw this weekend, instead of a focus on those who have died in the pandemic," he concluded.

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