himself the stories of him winning, whether it s declaring bankruptcy, whether it s on the apprentice in ratings, whether it s the inauguration crowd. he has spent a lifetime refusing to accept that he is ever on the losing end of things, or even on it doesn t always have to be the losing end but the less celebratory end. if there s a close election and i think 2020 could be close. but if there s a close election, let s say it comes down to florida where he loses by a point or two. given what we know about him personally, about his approach in business and politics, and about how he has handled just claiming there s fraud and they should stop the automatic recount by state law, why would we conclude that with his own personal political interests at stake, not rick scott s, not martha mcsally s, not ron desantis , that he would act in any way different. in fact, we wouldn t conclude that. a very good assessment. terrifying. let s talk about the law, okay? because it bears re
baiting that trump engages in, and the kind of, you know, routine serial lying that he engages in, bleeds down into his administration. and so you have a nice churchgoing man like mike pence who s comfortable sitting there lying. what we re seeing there also is a continuation of a pattern where trump will say something without basis and fact, and the rest of the administration, rest of the white house scrambles to try to make it so. the lie comes first then they try to justify it. we ve seen that with small things like sarah sanders at the podium and bigger things when donald trump the size of the inauguration crowd. totally. donald trump lost the popular vote by 5 million, 3 million people. suddenly, it s the same number that was of illegal voters, therefore, we have to put up a whole commission to study it and, of course, there no sign of i want to get to a piece peter s colleague wrote today on this topic. the things grown men do in response to a tweet from donald trump.
that is, and the realized the president in these rallieser for midterm candidates seems to be as excited about talking about his own re-election in 2020 as he does about these races that are 34 days away. and what really perked up my ears is the president said last night talking about his 2020 election, not the midterm elections, he said we ll do a landslide. this is a president who barely won last time electorally, lost big by the popular vote last time, out there promising a landslide. he goes into his riff about joe biden and about what a lightweight the former vice president would be, how he would look forward to running against him and the president finished up by saying who the hell is going to beat us. this is also the president who said with he had the largest inauguration crowd in the history of the united states. let me ask you this, though. is trump worried about any democratic candidate in particular? he always play these approach of
3,000, roughly at this point, the estimate is, americans died. these are americans. and that ends up not being where the focus is. puerto rico, which is, you know, a tiny island, has continued to get battered by storms. since then, we are approaching the one year. and as is often the case with donald trump, the notes that he is sounding are not empathetic. and i understand that they feel as if they take too much incoming, they feel as if they get too many attacks. you have to know if you are talking about a storm where that many people died, it is not going to people are not going to grade on a curve. and it s not the a-pluses are not coming from anyone other than himself. maggie, you and i have talked in the past about his powers of persuasion, which i think are strong, except clearly. in the occasions where people can see things with their own eyes. so the inauguration crowd, where people could actually see with their own eyes the overhead imagery. the helsinki moment,
him that the same stuff he had been doing for months and years, everyone is saying it should have been done a lot time ago. it seems a bit of contradiction there. i m asking everybody to dig back into time. the first controversy of the trump administration, remember that one, on the size of the inauguration crowd. seems like a lifetime ago. doesn t it? newly-released documents obtained by the guard wrash showed official government photographs were edited to make the crowds look larger after the president intervened. according to the documents, trump complained to the head of the national park service that the initial images showed a lot of empty areas showing his crowd size was smaller than that of president obama s first inauguration. then white house press secretary sean spicer that i remember. remember? he spent the day calling the national park service in pursuit of nmore flattering photographs.