President Donald Trump has lost his ability to do one of the most important parts of his political formula, Vanity Fair's Molly Jong-Fast argued to MS NOW's Ari Melber on Tuesday's edition of "The Beat" — and it's causing his base to fall to pieces.
"So when he runs on, hey, one thing I'm going to do is lower prices or have no forever wars or release the Epstein files — every last big promise, with the exception, perhaps, of hardline immigration, has been contradicted," said Melber.
Jong-Fast concurred.
"And where we've seen Trump, I think, really lose a step is, if you look at like 2018 coming into the midterms, even though he didn't do well in the midterms and his party lost a lot of seats, including in Iowa, where they lost three seats to Democrats, which I think could happen again," said Jong-Fast. "If you look at these polls, then he was still able to sort of stay on message. It was different messages, but it was he was able to do it."
By contrast, she said, "now what you really see, and I think the thing that's really upsetting Republicans and really scary for them, is that he gets out there and he starts talking about the ballroom, or he gets out there and he starts talking about painting ... the fountain in the Washington Monument. Like these are things that are just unforced errors. Like if he were with it, he could go out there and say, look at what we're doing. We're taking down the gas tax. Now the gas tax happens to only be 18 cents and gas is up like a dollar a gallon. But he could at least point to something that was a talking point."
"And what you see with MAGA is when MAGA starts to get in trouble, they can't message succinctly, like when they are when they're in their sweet spot," Jong-Fast added. "They have, like, messaging discipline like you can't believe. And what happens when they start to get into trouble is that they're messaging all different things, right?"
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