President Donald Trump blurted out that his military operations around the world were cutting into domestic spending, and panelists on "CNN This Morning" agreed those candid remarks would likely be used against Republicans this fall.
The 79-year-old president told attendees at an Easter lunch at the White House on Wednesday that the federal government couldn't afford to pay for daycare, Medicaid or Medicare because "we're fighting wars," calling those congressionally mandated entitlement programs "little scams," and host Erica Hill wondered how that would play with voters.
"No money for issues that Americans are really concerned about right now, the cost of their health care, health care, how do they pay for daycare, and yet we're going to need more money for wars," Hill said. "Is that going to come back to haunt the president?"
CNN's Aaron Blake agreed the remarks probably weren't helpful to GOP candidates.
"I was going to say it's going to be in some campaign ads this fall, undoubtedly," Blake said. "I don't think that was necessarily meant for publication right there. That was kind of more candid comments that got leaked in a video that was in a closed-door session. But I think what's really interesting, you mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene. She's obviously been a very prominent critic of the war, increasingly critical of Trump in a lot of different arenas, but I think she signifies something in the Republican base, and if you look a little bit more closely at the numbers, there is this narrative that MAGA is behind this war, and if you look at the polls, that's what it strictly says. You know, people [who] describe themselves as MAGA, they support the war. The rest of Trump's base is not united behind this war."
"Our CNN poll is a case in point of that," he added. "We asked an interesting question, which was do you think this war has been worth it so far? Not just do you approve of it or disapprove, but is it worth it, [and] 70 percent of Americans said it's not worth it, 35 percent of Republicans said the war so far is not worth it. That points to real reservations that we've seen in other polls, but are starting to poke their head out a little bit more in some of these surveys."
- YouTube youtu.be
