Trump stumps in Ohio as Republican says he's a drag on GOP

[0:00] President Trump is scrambling to save must-win Ohio now. [0:04] The president is about to speak to supporters in Youngstown. [0:07] You see the live pictures there. [0:08] This is in a county that he won by almost 10 points just two years ago. [0:13] Now he sees enough warning signs that he's spending precious time [0:18] 22 days out from the election to boost his candidates. [0:21] You think the midterms are going to turn out? [0:25] What's your role? [0:26] Well, I think the rallies, right now I'm going to Ohio. [0:28] I think the rallies have had a massive impact. [0:32] You see the numbers go up every time I have a rally. [0:37] But maybe not in the way that he's hoping. [0:39] All the trend lines of predictions coming in as they race to the finish line [0:42] show conditions are deteriorating still for Republicans. [0:46] Definitely not music to the ears of Ohio Republican Senator John Husted, [0:51] who according to CNN's latest polling trails Democrat Sherrod Brown. [0:54] Husted was tapped to serve out Vice President J.D. Vance's Senate term. [0:57] He's someone who just recently broke from Trump on his war with Iran. [1:02] Husted telling Politico this. [1:04] The war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible [1:07] so that we can lower gas prices. [1:10] The president is also in Ohio to boost Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, [1:14] who is running for governor. [1:15] And CNN polling data shows him trailing his Democratic opponent, [1:20] Amy Acton, by eight points. [1:22] This is Trump's second visit to the state in 10 days. [1:25] It comes as new early voting numbers in Ohio show Democrats make up a larger share [1:30] of people voting early there than they did two years ago, [1:33] including in the most Republican parts of the state. [1:35] Not necessarily predictive, of course, of an outcome, but indicative of something. [1:40] Which may explain why President Trump just fired off another video [1:44] promising Americans cash if they vote for Republicans. [1:47] I'm going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000. [1:57] Oh, and then there is the head spinning, head scratching, [2:01] and what some lawmakers see as the absurd move of Trump now trying to make a diesel deal with Russia. [2:06] A last ditch move to try and bring down fuel prices. [2:10] Only this deal is going over like a lead balloon with his own party. [2:13] Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, who is in a tight race in Pennsylvania, [2:16] is tonight vowing to force a House vote to block, quote, [2:21] any and all purchases of Russian oil. [2:24] And more and more Republicans are publicly slamming this idea of a deal. [2:29] Congressman Don Bacon fired off more than a dozen tweets about it, including this. [2:33] The president's policies towards Russia and Ukraine are failures. [2:37] Let's be honest. [2:38] Trump is and always has been weak on Putin. [2:41] Buying Russian diesel violates U.S. law. [2:43] We are mad that our president is siding with a war criminal who is invading its free and independent neighbor. [2:50] And tonight, here's the president's response to the criticism. [2:56] Why do you respond to Republican criticism of your diesel deal with Russia? [3:01] Well, I think these are Republicans that can't really be serious. [3:07] Only they are serious, with a seriously close eye on the midterm calendar. [3:11] Does anyone really believe this $5,000 thing? [3:14] And it seems a little desperate to be trying this, like, three weeks before the end of the election. [3:19] It does seem a little bit desperate. [3:21] I can't argue with that. [3:23] Right after he proposed this, Reuters put out a poll, said 63%, including 4 in 10 Republicans, opposed this thing. [3:30] And it didn't surprise me. [3:31] Social media lit up with, oh, Trump is so unpopular. [3:34] He's even making free money unpopular. [3:37] No, we've been living with the consequences of free money in this country for the better part of six years. [3:41] Everybody understands what happens now when you flood an overheated economy with government cash. [3:46] It reduces your purchasing power. [3:48] Americans have experienced that. [3:50] All of us in living memory experience that. [3:52] So, yeah, to say that they'll do that again doesn't really ring a lot of bells for, I suppose, voters who are unenthusiastic. [3:58] However, I don't know why Donald Trump would think that Democrats wouldn't do this. [4:00] The last time he had suggested that we should do this was in 2020, and then he lost. [4:04] And subsequently, $2,000 went out the door to every American. [4:07] So who knows what could happen in the future? [4:09] It might be a little bit of a miscalculation. [4:12] I think that's probably fair to say. [4:13] Yeah, but he could send them $5,000 today, right? [4:16] There's nothing to stop him. [4:18] He's like, if we get elected, but he could send him that money today. [4:22] It's thirsty. [4:23] I mean, that's the best way to put it. [4:25] It's like he knows what's coming down the pike. [4:27] He's historically unpopular. [4:28] And to try to bribe people to vote for you or vote for your party, it makes it seem as if you really don't have a strong position because you're supposed to be selling policy. [4:39] You're supposed to be selling a better vision, and he cannot sell either. [4:43] The thing is, the Republicans are in a bad spot. [4:46] They have no accomplishments to sell. [4:48] And I know some of y'all at the table are going to probably try to sell me that they do have some accomplishments to sell. [4:53] They don't have any. [4:54] The people are voting based off what their wallet and their bills say. [5:00] The bills say gas is too high, groceries are too high, this country is affordable, and he is not going to be able to come up out of that. [5:08] And then every time they hear him talk, he says, oh, this is just a price you have to pay. [5:12] He's unsympathetic. [5:14] He's un—you know, he sort of has no at all self-awareness about what most people are going through, and that's why they're tuning him out. [5:23] All these normal tricks that they like to pull that worked in the last election, that stuff is not working anymore because people see their bank balances. [5:31] That's why it doesn't work. [5:32] So, Peter, in your home state, here's what Jason Rowe, a GOP strategist, says. [5:38] We were all hoping that the war was going to be over by now, but it's not. [5:43] This is a one-Trump advisor. [5:45] We shouldn't have to fight in places like Texas, and we obviously do. [5:48] And then Jason Rowe says, I don't know that the environment could possibly get worse than it is. [5:54] He's advising Representative Tom Barrett, who is in a tight race with a Democratic challenger. [5:59] And he says, if we lose this, it couldn't have been won. [6:05] The war is actually at the crux of so many things. [6:08] And, you know, people point out that the two promises that Trump made to Americans was that they were going to—he was going to take on inflation and lower inflation, and he was not going to start any new wars. [6:19] And he's failed on both accounts. [6:21] Yeah. [6:22] I think, to Noah's point, you know, you want inflation? [6:25] Send everybody $5,000 checks. [6:27] There's no way that doesn't happen. [6:28] I think the frustration on the no new wars—and, again, I kind of—I bristle a little bit at that because the idea of the no new wars is we're not going to get into these intractable quagmires like Iraq and Afghanistan that are going to take decades, and how do we extricate ourselves from it? [6:44] That's not Iran. [6:45] Iran, you know, has been not only a very long-standing thorn in the side of the United States. [6:53] I think some people would beg to do that. [6:54] But we are not in a position where we have hundreds of thousands of Europeans who are in there. [6:58] But how do we know? [6:59] We're still in the middle of it. [7:00] How do we know it's wrong? [7:01] And I think— [7:01] Well, there's no withdrawing. [7:03] I mean, our forces are just—they're in the same base as they've been in. [7:06] It's not a nation building. [7:07] It's not a nation building. [7:08] I mean, actually— [7:09] We're not dependent on some— [7:09] But aren't you just acknowledging that we're still there in pretty much full force posture? [7:15] We have to— [7:16] And similar force posture has been for the better part of 30 years. [7:18] We have to expend an enormous amount of energy to, quote-unquote, open the Strait of Hormuz to allow oil and gas to go through. [7:27] That's not happening because things are at peace. [7:30] It's happening because we are still at war. [7:32] Our bases are still getting hit. [7:34] The Iranians are still attacking their neighbors. [7:37] We pulled resources out of the Pacific in order to cover— [7:40] I mean, you can call it what you want to call it, but we're not at peace. [7:44] My point is, it's not an endless war in the vein that he was saying. [7:47] But to your point, and this is where I'm agreeing with you, it has led to higher inflation in the form of higher energy costs for Americans. [7:54] So there's frustration both from the folks who care about the pocketbook and, you know, for some kind of more disgruntled elements of the MAGA coalition. [8:01] I do think you have a lot of campaigns who are just looking at polling, and the polling is bad, and they're having to make decisions, and they want to make data-driven decisions, and the only data they have is polling. [8:10] Is that accurate? [8:11] Is that reflective of what an election day will look like? [8:13] We don't know. [8:14] And so, yes, you're going to have a lot of folks on the Republican side who are running like they're 15 points behind, but I would rather they're running like they're 15 points behind than 15 points ahead. [8:22] Well, Abby, one thing we know is that the Republicans, like you're saying, are scared. [8:27] You know, I'm helping to run the independent expenditure in Kansas, and we're seeing money pouring in from states like North Carolina. [8:32] Republicans have held the Senate seats, both of them, in Kansas since Babe Ruth led the major leagues in home runs. [8:40] This is a historic wipeout that's about to happen in this election, and the through line between the $5,000 checks and what we're talking about here is voters don't trust Trump. [8:49] We had Doge dividends, that promise. [8:51] We had the tariff rebates. [8:52] We have this. [8:52] We have the end of inflation. [8:54] Remember that promise? [8:55] Remember when he said that gas prices would be cut in half in the first year? [8:58] Nobody trusts Trump. [8:59] So if he says, I'm going to give you $5,000 checks, it just reminds them of this very unpopular war that he promised we wouldn't have. [9:05] But here's the, can I just, just because what you just said, just, it actually kind of dovetails on this. [9:12] It seems like a different topic, but it's similar. [9:14] Trump is trying to deal with the diesel prices, and he announced this weekend that he had struck a deal with Ukraine and Russia, an energy ceasefire that maybe would allow diesel prices to go down. [9:27] Turns out nobody knows about it. [9:29] Nobody knew about it. [9:30] He was asked by a reporter, where's the ceasefire? [9:34] And here's what he said. [9:41] They have not agreed to that. [9:43] Well, they agreed. [9:43] You know why? [9:44] Because I said you agreed. [9:46] That's why. [9:47] They agreed because I said they agreed. [9:52] Okay, here we go. [9:53] It's a lack of credibility, right? [9:55] When he basically admits, he just made it all up. [10:00] Yeah. [10:01] The American people, they are, they're getting this stuff. [10:05] Some of them are getting it directly because they're paying attention. [10:07] Some of them are getting it indirectly. [10:09] But the bottom line is, when the president says X, Y, and Z is going to happen, do you believe him? [10:15] Or do you not believe him? [10:16] Right. [10:16] Well, you don't believe him. [10:17] First of all, he is a prolific liar and has been his entire professional career. [10:23] We know this. [10:24] He has made up things all, I mean, he made up a persona in the 80s and early 90s to cover for himself, to call, you know, tabloids, to talk about himself. [10:34] The guy is a liar, but he's a con artist, and that's what they do. [10:37] But to Jamel's point, the con is starting to run thin now with his own people. [10:42] Yes, most of us saw through it, but it's the numbers with his own voters that I think is what, that's what has Republican strategists sounding the alarm. [10:51] Because we have seen historic swings of Trump's unpopularity from, with white, non-college educated voters. [10:59] His base, the base of his base, swings of 40 and 50 points on the issues of the economy and trustworthiness on the inflation. [11:09] They're over it because they can't live. [11:11] Now, what's happening here with Ukraine is something else, too. [11:14] I mean, maybe most people are not going to make that association, but the implications worldwide are huge. [11:21] Trump consistently sides with our enemies. [11:24] He's over here cutting deals with Putin when Ukraine is the, that's the country that's fighting for their democratic lives, that America should be on the right side of, that Europe is supposed to be on the right side of. [11:35] And they are, and they're looking to America and going, what the hell are you doing? [11:38] What are you doing cutting deals, possibly illegal deals with Putin taking sanctions away when we're supposed to be on the side of democracy? [11:47] So all of these things tied together is partially why Trump is underwater, because the downstream effect of all of this is undeniable with people's pocketbooks every single day. [11:57] And no Republicans worth their salt are going to defend all of these things and bullshit promises that he's putting out there because they're like, we can't defend this. [12:06] So have we reached, when it comes to what Republicans can do about this, we know Trump is trying to just use the sheer force of will showing up at all these different places, maybe that'll work. [12:17] But then there's also like an avalanche of money coming in, including from Elon Musk, $366 million in this cycle being spent by Musk. [12:31] Is this the limit of money? Because if spending that kind of money doesn't produce space in some of these campaigns, I don't know what will. [12:41] I just don't think money is as important as a part of an electoral calculus as those who approach it with sort of a Marxian framework think of it. [12:49] It's just like capital moves the world. No, not necessarily. Voters evaluate candidates based on their own individual merits. [12:54] Always have. And a lot of people put too much stock in money. [12:56] That said, we opened this segment with Republicans are triaging resources. They have a lot of resources that they don't necessarily have to triage. [13:02] They're pulling out of North Carolina. That state has slipped away from them. So has Georgia. [13:06] But that's smart management. That's not necessarily triaging resources. [13:10] And yeah, you're throwing money into places like Kansas and Iowa, where the polls look very soft. [13:14] But if you will listen to the pollsters who are polling these places, they're starting to hedge a little bit and say, oh, I don't know. [13:21] I don't know. There's a lot of Republicans in these states that we're not capturing. [13:23] And that always, you know, that always happens. [13:25] And it happened to Iowa. It destroyed Ann Seltzer's career. [13:29] It's the sort of thing that just happened two years ago. We should all be careful about it. [13:32] I do think that's a very common thing. Usually at this stage in elections, you got to get the pollsters being like, hey, don't hold us to it. [13:38] OK, because there is there is uncertainty. There are margins of error. [13:42] And I and I really do emphasize to people close races don't necessarily mean that your candidate is up or your candidate is definitively down. [13:53] It just means that there's uncertainty. And that uncertainty means that there will still be one person that wins on Election Day. [13:59] Close doesn't cut it at the end of the day. [14:01] Yeah.