On Friday's edition of MSNBC's "The Beat," The Atlantic staff writer Mark Leibovich outlined how former President Donald Trump is helping to destroy the Republican Party's natural advantage in a midterm under a Democratic presidency, and put their odds of a congressional majority on the line.
This comes as Republicans are already coping with a sharp dropoff in political donations, at the very moment of the campaign cycle where having the funding to stay on the air is most important.
"The evidence is Joe Biden has not been super popular over these first two difficult years of his term," said anchor Ari Melber. "The evidence is there's a lot of concern in the country about what's going on, where we're headed, rising prices, all that talk about normalcy for most working people has not given way to normalcy. And yet you have this other evidence that it's not a gangbusters path for the Republicans right now. I'm curious, where you come down, what you see happening?"
"First of all, Joe Biden had a good first, let's say, six months of his presidency," said Leibovich. "He was quite popular. Things were going pretty well. Afghanistan, obviously, threw him into a tailspin that he didn't recover from for many months, but he's had a really good summer legislatively. But also in the mechanics of politics, you have the Dobbs decision obviously. Donald Trump has had a terrible summer."
The problem for Republicans, noted Leibovich, is that the more Trump dominates the news cycle, the less Republicans can shape their own message — and the more time they have to waste on defenses of the president they know are shallow, most notably on his hoarding of highly classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
"This is sort of an object lesson in if you don't want to talk about inflation, if you don't want to talk about crime, if you don't want to talk about the border, what's Donald Trump going to give us this week?" said Leibovich. "Between the January 6th commission and now the Mar-a-Lago search and everything that's come out of it. It not only has kept Trump in the news, which is not a place that most Republicans want to be in, in talking about him, it's made a lot of the people running in his name, like Dr. Oz or even Marco Rubio look like complete idiots, because they have to inhabit the reality distortion field about whether they voted — would have voted to certify his election in 2021 or, you know, Rubio says stuff that he clearly knows better than to say about the Mar-a-Lago search. So there's a lot of trickle-down idiocy that manages to make Joe Biden and Democrats look much better in these key weeks leading up to the election."
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