Trump staffers DEFEATED, ready to GIVE UP after debate

Speaker 1: Welcome, everybody. It is. It's it's  almost going to be false. You. I've got some   upstate apple picking planned for this weekend.  I'll tell you how that goes. Maybe on the Monday   bonus show. Listen, one of the you know, after a  debate, the candidates are always going to insist   that they won. And the campaign is mostly going  to, in public, insist that their candidate won.   Although Robert f Kennedy Jr. Now a surrogate  of Trump's may be one of his most prominent   surrogates, did admit on Fox News two days ago  that Trump did not win. But if you really want to   get a sense of how the debate went, what you want  to hear about are the behind the scenes comments   from the staffers. And we now have a couple of  different bits of insight into that that I want   to present to you. And it all paints the same  picture of Trump staffers that are defeated and   devastated are troubled that Trump wasn't able to  do what they told him to do, which is do not start   screaming and take the bait from Kamala Harris.  Control yourself, stay on message. Wasn't able to   do it and that many Trump staffers are ready  to just give up altogether and are privately   conceding that Donald Trump completely blew it.  Let's look at a couple of examples of this. Here   is a report from MSNBC. I believe that this is  John Heilemann talking about the behind the scenes   from staffers. Take a listen to this. Speaker 2: Completely set him off.   And as many people noted last night, that  became then a rally version of Donald Trump,   which is to say, talking about these obscure  subjects that the average Normie voter,   as we like to call them here, who has a life  and isn't tuned into this everyday, says,   what is he talking about? I don't even know.  I don't understand what he's what he's getting   at here. So, John Heilemann, you're there in  Philadelphia. You were in the spin room last   night. What was the sense of things from both the  Trump campaign and the Harris campaign afterward?   Well, good morning. And I you know, Joe talked  before about how you watch something you old   political consultants track, which is to watch  the base with the sound off and and you can get   a lot of the visual there that's been that's a  true that's true and it definitely was the case   watching this debate. I'll tell you what else you  can watch with the sound off and have a good sense   of how things went last night. The activity in the  spin room where the Trump forces were dejected,   defeated, deflated, dispirited. Speaker 1: I picked dilapidated,   I would add, for alliterative purposes. Speaker 2: This is a photo last night of Matt   Gates and Steve Miller coming out a few minutes  before Donald Trump came into the the spin room   that went wildly viral on Twitter because it  looked like sort of sort of saggy road. It was   like a shot of kind of the this is what this is  what defeat looks like. Folks, these people have   been talking about Donald Trump before the debate  like he's Muhammad Ali. He's the greatest debater   in the history of presidential debates. He's done  it more than anybody else ever. He's going to wipe   the floor with or there will be surprises. Jason  Miller said she won't know what hit her and they   won't away like they had had their dogs and cats  even over the course of that debate. It's also   it's it's also it's also the case, I will tell  you that I can report definitively that there is   one point of agreement inside the Trump White and  the Harris War Room and where both of those worms,   we're looking at their dial groups in  real time last night, the dial groups   that the campaigns are looking at last night  showed the same thing, that in real time,   the undecided voters that they were looking at.  Harris crushed Trump throughout the night. I mean,   David Plouffe and David Binder are not champagne  corks popping kind of guys. I'm not suggesting   they're actually popping champagne corks last  night, but their attitude was that of metaphorical   champagne poppers last night. And the people  in the Trump war room last night were popping   something different, which I think might have been  caught up in, or Maalox, one of the two. Right.  Speaker 1: So, listen, the kind of zoom out  on what happened here is if you're a Trump   staffer and you watch what's happening, you  know, I'm sure you don't like Kamala Harris.   I'm sure on some level you really do believe that  Kamala Harris policies are the bad policies. And   Trump's policies, to the extent that he has them,  understands them or that you understand them,   are better policies. Okay. I'll concede that on  some level, you really do believe that Trump is   better than Harris, but it would be impossible  to be a clear thinking, rational individual sit   through that debate and not come away terrified by  how easily Kamala Harris was able to elicit this   triggered reaction from Trump, where he starts  sweating and gripping the lectern and yelling   cats and dogs. She set. Such obvious traps when  she brings up out of nowhere. I would like you   to go to a Trump rally and you'll see people  bored and people leaving. That is so obvious.   A trap for Trump. And he failed on it. He started  with, well, no one goes to your rallies. But then   he goes further and he says the attendees are paid  to be there. And he starts screaming and his upper   lip is glistening and sweating. And it's hard to  look at that and say, man, if in a debate stage   format with just three people in the room, Trump  is not able to control himself and you can elicit   the exact emotional reaction you want. What's  happening when he's in the room with Putin? And   of course, we know we know what happens when he's  in the room with Putin. He comes out and he goes,   no, I don't know. I asked Putin about the hacking.  He said he didn't do it. I believe him. He said it   very, very strongly. Hillary Clinton pointed this  out in 2016. And I know it's really popular to   keep hating on Hillary. Not enough people seem  to care. When Hillary pointed it out in 2016,   he is constitutionally not with it. He is not  what it takes at a per se. He doesn't have what it   takes at a personality level to even be able to do  this and, you know, backward, not to revisit 2016,   but you had some sexism, this multi-decade  smear campaign against Hillary Clinton,   the media enamored with the ratings that Trump  was generating, and then Trump won in 2016. Now,   here we are many years later, and I'm hopeful  that the country is just way more sick of this   crap now than they were by November of  2016. I don't know. Here is another clip   about reporting about what Trump staffers are  saying, feeling and doing. This one's from CNN.  Speaker 3: I lead source tonight might be the  main reason why Trump was knocked so off his   game. We'll speak to him in a second. But I  do want to start with some new reporting for   you tonight on what happened in Philadelphia  last night. I'm told that as soon as Donald   Trump exited that debate stage, he immediately  began quizzing those waiting in his viewing   room about how the last 90 minutes had gone. Speaker 1: Now, this, of course, classic sign   of insecurity. Did I do okay? Was it okay? And how  was it? Did I was a good was it not good? And of   course, on some level, Trump knows that it was  not good. But how did I do? Was it. What is it?  Speaker 3: Well, several people praised  him to his face, telling him they did a   great job. It's not what a lot of them  are saying privately today. Instead,   those around Trump have described what happened  as a draw at best and a loss at worst. Several of   them told CNN they were stunned that the former  president failed to do a better job executing on   the talking points that he had been preparing with  his team for weeks against Vice President Harris,   her record, her policy reversals. Trump had  actually done more debate prep ahead of his   first meeting with Harris than he did for his  debate with President Biden earlier this summer.   Yet they didn't believe that he made some of the  central arguments against her, including this one,   about why she hasn't carried out the promises  that she's making now in the last three and   a half years that she has been in office. He  didn't go there until his closing argument that   surprised a lot of people in his inner circle.  Instead, they believe that Trump took the bait   every single time Harris offered it up. Yep.  Multiple Trump allies described what happened   last night as a missed opportunity for the former  president. They have since started downplaying   the debate's significance overall, arguing that  it won't shift his numbers with voters in states   like Pennsylvania. Trump himself is noncommittal  today about a potential second debate. But almost   every ally of his that I spoke with said they  do ultimately believe he will agree to one.  Speaker 1: All right. So I don't know that  he's going to ultimately agree to a debate,   but that's very interesting insight we've been  learning over the last 3 or 4 days, three days   since the debate that Donald Trump tried much  harder to actually win the debate against Kamala   Harris. He didn't really seem to think he needed  to prepare against Joe Biden and maybe he didn't.   And he didn't really seem to think that he needed  to have a strategy as such against Joe Biden. And   maybe he didn't. He just kind of told some lies  and didn't get too agitated. And next thing you   know, Joe Biden is out of the race. Trump  recognized I need to do something here. He   had Tulsi Gabbard helping him to prep, which, by  the way, that certainly seems to have backfired.   Hopefully nobody asks Tulsi Gabbard for debate  prep help anymore. And despite Trump's efforts to   actually be prepared to defeat Kamala Harris in  this debate, she she didn't even sweat. I mean,   it's not not metaphorically. She was calm,  cool and collected. And Trump was visibly   sweating from his upper lip. The entire debate  and looking pained. His eye was almost swollen   shot. He was screaming, gripping the lectern. If  there is to be a second debate. I don't know that   there's really more Trump can even do to better  prepare, but one of the things he is now alleging   is that she cheated. When you lose, you claim  the other side cheated. Let's talk about that.