“Donald Trump is having a rough campaign closing,” Ari Melber said Monday at the start of a special report focused entirely on a single topic: “What are people forgetting about Trump in office?”
“Talking of violence against journalists this weekend, pantomiming a sex act on his microphone and continuing the free fall since the Madison Square Garden rally put him on defense over all kinds of attacks and hateful jokes,” Melber continued, running down just a few recent events connected to the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign.
Noting that Americans “lived through the COVID failures, the ensuing economic collapse, his failed coup and these abortion bans around the nation,” Melber added that “there are many accounts that suggest Trump is not only basically tied with Harris, but that he could end this election with more support than before.”
Melber noted Trump’s historically low approval ratings during his 2017-2021 term in office, saying they were “not numbers suggesting the public approved of him or wanted him at the time, let alone again.” Yet, he went on, polling shows that many Americans remember “that very same time more fondly.”
After running down some pre-electoral history of Trump, including how he plagiarized “Make America Great Again” from Ronald Reagan, Melber said that “any chance Trump has of winning Tuesday’s votes rests on a pretty good number of people forgetting what I just mentioned, that they did not actually approve of his time in office during that time.”
From here, Melber transitioned into a lengthy look at his tenure in the White House. It began with the warnings many, many Republicans had about Trump before he won in 2016, including his own vice presidential candidate, JD Vance.
After that, the MSNBC host revisited the many disasters of 2020 during the worst of the COVID pandemic — including the infamous moment when Trump literally suggested that people drink bleach to kill the virus. This resulted in a spike in accidental poisonings.
Melber also ran down the staffing upheavals, the crimes associated with the Trump administration, the Jan. 6 insurrection, his corrupt cabinet appointments and myriad other problems people might have forgotten.
You can watch the whole thing below:
