MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough predicts that Democrats’ messaging against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will be more impactful in the upcoming election than the last. It boils down to this: In 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton contended “Trump is a bad guy;” in 2020, the Democrats can say, “Trump is a bad president.”
“Let’s just strip this down to its bare essence, which I always tell people when they come to me saying they want to run,” said the former GOP representative, reacting to the new Democratic National Committee ad against Trump, released on the five-year anniversary of his candidacy announcement. “I’m like, ‘What’s your bumper sticker?’ That’s where you start and then you expand out. The bumper sticker here is, “Trump is a bad president,’ whereas in 2016, the bumper sticker for Hillary Clinton was, ‘Trump is a bad guy.’ People in 2016 said, ‘Yeah, he is a bad guy. Maybe we need a bad guy.’”
Scarborough suggested that Trump’s bumper sticker still boils down to being a “bad guy,” but the new DNC ad in favor of presumed Democratic nominee Joe Biden highlights why that isn’t ideal, which is what Clinton’s campaign “couldn’t do.”
Scarborough then went off: “What this Biden ad does is he shows how Trump being a bad president is impacting America: He’s cutting your healthcare, working-class Americans. He’s promising to cut your healthcare guarantees that you had under the Affordable Care Act. He’s giving tax cuts — not to you, not to the small business owners that employ you — but to billionaires that own yachts and he bragged about it down in Mar-a-Lago. He’s locking children in cages. Good luck explaining that to Evangelicals. He’s got a failed trade war that’s cost billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. One hundred thousand Americans are dead because he couldn’t manage the pandemic because of his magical thinking. Tens of millions of jobs are lost because he couldn’t act quickly enough on the pandemic. We now have a recession and then, of course, Donald Trump saying, ‘I bear no responsibility.’ They actually connect Donald Trump’s personality and Donald Trump’s job performance to people’s lives. This is what the Hillary Clinton campaign didn’t do.”
Watch the latest DNC ad, “Descent,” and the “Morning Joe” panel’s reaction above.