at every single stop now, reporters are looking, is he interacting with the crowd? is he take shaking hands, tae staying long enough? if you re advanced staff, you have to stay at least an extra 30 minutes to show, hey, he likes people. i saw tweets, what pizza is he having? is he talking to voters? do we have a timetable as to when other candidates will jump in? rumors about tim scott, mike pence and others. i think tim scott will come in. may 22nd is the date where they re circling. you ll see his super pac get bolstered. mike pence also in the next month. those are the two main candidates. national political correspondent for axios, alex thompson covering a lot of ground. thank you for being here. thank you for all of you for getting up way too early on this monday morning. morning joe starts right now. we must reject the culture of losing that has infected our party in recent year. the time for excuses is over. if we get distracted, focus the election on
he is poison for the republican party. ron desantis, again, may be because they don t know everything he s done, maybe because he s a new face in some of these states. ron desantis does so much petter than donald trump in the swing states, that you ve got to believe at some point that republicans are going to start focusing on winning instead of just the shock offer that donald trump has been performing for eight years now. it seems like every step trump makes become more extreme, which might help him in the republican primary, at least so far. it s hurting him in the general election. we talk about that on a daily basis here, joe. this is what so many republicans have been fearful of. a message that was driven home in 2022 when trump candidates faired so poorly in the midterms. that he and his message can t win. he has too much baggage. this is only with one indictment under his belt and more potentially coming. for desantis, this is his theory
answer on ukraine, by the way. it s a reminder of what the stakes are potentially if trump gets the nomination in 2024. we re not just talking about the future of american democracy. we are talking about the fundamentals of american foreign policy, between donald trump, michael flynn. you are talking about people who are essentially sympathetic to russia. i think this would mean the undoing of nato, the undoing of our security partnerships in europe and in asia, and i just think that would you want to see a change in the trajectory of history in the wrong direction, this will get it. the combination of donald trump and michael flynn is toxic to american national security. i don t know any other way to put it. yeah, toxic, dangerous. jen psaki, i mean, i don t even know where we begin. michael flynn back in the white house. yeah. donald trump refusing to support ukraine. actually winning a war that vladimir putin started with his
using people from capitol hill or people that are in the beltway who they don t really know. i think they have a story to tell, but it s who tells the story that i, therefore, will believe the story. you couldn t have more to work with than donald trump and desantis, what he is doing be with banning books and all. you have the things to work with, you just have to have the right people and right vehicles to deliver your message. i think they re trying to bring that together. i see who they just appointed as head of the campaign. i think they re starting to see that the messengers is always as important as the message. you know that. you and i as baptists, the preacher is as good as the text. a bad preacher can mess up a text. exactly. you get a bad preacher, people start slipping out the back halfway through the sermon and start lock inglooking for anoth
iowa. helped trump wasn t there. give us a sense as to where you think things stand for the florida governor, who may be a couple weeks from announcing a run. he wanted to do this legislative session where he signed a bunch of bills, conservative priorities. i think his team saw this as a way to contrast himself with donald trump. look, i m getting stuff done. what actually happened, he was half in as a candidate, half out, and that enabled donald trump to pummel him day after day without really an infrastructure to beat back. going to iowa, having this super pac go out and defend him on the airwaves and online, you re seeing them steady ship a little bit. with all the races, his expectations are much lower than they were six months. i bet there s going to be a comeback narrative in two, three weeks. the other interesting thing i d point out is there is this narrative that desantis is awkward.