On Tuesday’s “All In,” Chris Hayes talked at length about how Republicans are essentially begging Donald Trump to drop the racist and sexist attacks against Kamala Harris, and the extremely weird, equally incoherent conspiracy theories that have dragged his poll numbers down since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee in July.
But the MSNBC had some bad news for those Republicans: It’s not happening.
“He’s been doing the same schtick since 2015,” and is “very obviously deteriorating in terms of his capacity, his abilities and his energy level,” Hayes said.
As evidence, Hayes first noted the “glitchy, rambling, difficult to understand” interview on Monday with Elon Musk on X, running a clip demonstrating the accuracy of those adjectives.
Hayes then drew attention to Trump’s “downright ludicrous and comical” conspiracy theory that the huge crowds at rallies for Harris and her running Tim Walz are actually fabrications created, somehow, by “AI.” And finally he noted Trump’s racist attacks on Harris. This is all, Hayes said, “the product of a brain that’s been scrambled like eggs.”
“Donald Trump is the same guy he’s always been,” Hayes declared. “And yet Republicans, I mean, God bless them, still think he’s capable of being someone else entirely.”
Hayes noted how he has “personally covered hundreds of ‘new tone for Donald Trump’ news cycles over all these years,” most recently the stories claiming such a pivot would surely come as a result of his surviving an attempted assassination. Hayes quoted a delegate to the RNC who gushed about how Trump is a changed man, including the comment, “I think he’s seen god.”
“We’ve been hearing this stuff for a better part of a decade,” Hayes said, playing several examples of these kinds of statements since 2017. “We’ve been doing this for seven years. At this point, it’s like Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner. There’s not a lot of narrative suspense about what’s going to happen,” he explained.
“Yet if you listen to what Republican insiders are still telling reporters, they want Trump to do a pivot. They want him to be more disciplined. They want him to be more presidential. This time, this time, it will be for real,” Hayes said before cutting to clips of conservative reporters essentially calling on Trump to behave as anyone other than himself.
Watch the clip below:
The problem, of course, is Trump himself. “[I’ll] Say this for the guy, he has more self-awareness, more awareness about himself than a shocking number of people in Republican politics,” Hays admitted. “He won’t change. You know who else understands this? The voters do.”
Hayes also spoke to Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter and co-host of “Pod Saves America,” and Jamelle Bouie, columnist for the New York Times. “It’s really bizarre to see people just consistently refuse to take Trump as he presents himself,” Bouie agreed. “I honestly find it so troubling almost that these ostensibly intelligent people would be surprised by the fact that Trump doesn’t have any secret plan to get positive.”
“It’s almost as if they are doing the exact same thing that I think a lot of voters did in 2016, which is assume that because Trump is rich and because he’s on television and because people listen to him, therefore there must be something else there when there just really isn’t,” he added.
You can watch the segment from Chris Hayes in the video above.
