Trump News

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Wednesday, Democratic campaign strategist Jim Messina claimed Donald Trump likely knew his 90-minute debate confrontation was a disaster for his campaign the moment he stepped off the stage if not sooner.

Speaking with hosts Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist, Messina singled out what he called Trump's "moment of panic."

Unsurprisingly, Messina began by praising the performance of Harris, telling the hosts, "She did two other things last night that I think were more crucial. The first is she passed the commander-in-chief test, she had to pass that test. After Barack Obama had his first debate with John McCain, people saw him as president and the race was over after that."

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"The second thing was she [Harris] was able to frame this race in future versus the past and where voters want to go," he continued. "When I was running Obama, Bill Clinton would call me up in the middle of the night and say all elections are in the future; win the future and you win the election and he played into that. He played into the past and anger, continuing to litigate the 2020 election — voters hate that!"

"It's not about them, that's about him," he elaborated. "He just continued to double down on it over and over and doing himself damage that even he couldn't get out."

"You know you're in trouble on the campaign when you have to put the candidate in the spin room just being himself," he pointed out. "That is a panic moment."

Watch below or at the link here.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale swiftly ran through a list of Donald Trump's false claims during the former president's debate Tuesday night against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Dale conceded Harris offered a couple of falsehoods and made some questionable claims, but he counted nearly three dozen blatantly false claims from the former president.

Reporting from Philadelphia where he attended the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, MSNBC contributor John Heilemann told the hosts of "Morning Joe" that it was a funereal scene in the so-called "spin room" for Trump advocates trying to dismiss what one Fox News personality called a "trainwreck."

Speaking with hosts Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist, Heilemann seemed bemused at how poorly Trump performed and explained, "Joe talked to me before about how you watch something and an old political consultants' trick is to watch the debate with the sound off and you can get a lot on the visuals there and that is true and definitely the case watching this debate."

CNN's Kasie Hunt pressed Donald Trump's senior campaign adviser Jason Miller to commit to another debate with Kamala Harris.

The candidates wrangled over the conditions for Tuesday night's debate for weeks, with Trump proposing alternate debates instead, although Harris never agreed to those invitations, and Miller insisted the former president was prepared to go ahead for one of those proposed dates Sept. 25 on NBC.

The morning after Donald Trump's first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, MSNBC "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski pounced all over his performance and, at times, appeared speechless at how bad he appeared.

After sharing clips of the former president ranting about immigrants stealing and eating pets, which also showed his Democratic opponent looking on incredulously, Scarborough took his first shot of the morning at the embattled Trump.

With the two hosts noting Harris landed the endorsement of superstar Taylor Swift, calling that "the beginning of the end" for Trump, Scarborough continued, "You had one candidate that was completely unhinged, just completely off his rocker. He looked badly, he looked old. he looked disconnected from reality, he looked enraged."

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"He kept repeating the same things over and over again and made no sense," he continued. "There was no preparation on his side and he resorts to internet rumors already debunked just because he has nothing to say. One of the most ill-prepared — well, the most ill-prepared presidential candidates we have ever seen in one of these debates, one the of the angriest."

"And I got to say hunched over," he added as the "Morning Joe" producers ran more clips without sound. "Look at him; his eyes squinting. The split-screen was extraordinary. So this morning, for people on any network, even those who get paid to lie about Donald Trump every day, there is no sane-washing this and there is no normalizing there and there is no pretending that that was any other candidate, this is any other election or that was any other debate."

Veteran political strategist Mark McKinnon, a Republican, was blown away by Kamala Harris' "dominant" performance in her debate against Donald Trump.

The vice president appeared to trigger the former president by claiming Trump fans walked out of his rallies "out of exhaustion and boredom," and the GOP nominee made baseless and bizarre claims about Jan. 6, Hunter Biden, migrants eating pets and gender reassignment surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison.