Transcript: Trump Unraveling as Aides Feed Him Crackpot Poll Hopium

Mona, that’s funny. I mean, maybe the border is a fair one, but stock market highs and manufacturing jobs have declined. Your reaction to all this?

Charen: Yeah, I was just going to mention that. So a little sleight of hand there. The fact is that manufacturing output is up, but manufacturing employment has lagged. And for a while it was in steep decline. Now it’s ticked up a little bit, but it’s nothing like a boom. And that’s because this has been going on for decades, where we’ve been getting more and more automated ways of manufacturing things. That’s just a fact of life. And Trump sold people on a fairy tale of returning the kind of manufacturing jobs that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, and that world is gone.

But so, yeah, they’re trying to say, you know—this reminds me of, like, a medieval king, you know, who’s a mad king, and all the courtiers are forced to sort of tiptoe around, and nobody can ever say the truth, which is the king is mad. So they try to placate him, and they say, yes, yes, Your Majesty, it’s true, the reason that the polls are looking the way they are is because people just aren’t aware of all the wonderful things you’ve done. And the stock market—I mean, this is Mr. Populism, right? Mr. I’m for the working guy. And so he expects them to be thrilled about stock market gains. No, no, I don’t think so.