De Blasio: ‘What Has Donald Trump Done for People?’

‘You want a candidate that has actually done something for people’

[excerpt]

SCARBOROUGH: “John Heilemann, explain why — who you were talking to a couple weeks ago. I actually saw you guys tweeted about this as well.”
HEILEMANN: “Yeah. You know, I was talking to David Plouffe, who was a kind of as you said Joe, the mastermind behind both of Barack Obama’s election victories and [indecipherable] Nevada at the caucuses. And Plouffe was saying to me, look you know, I would never be complacent about facing Donald Trump in a general election. No premature victory laps with Democrats and no licking your chops. His attitude is, as a presidential campaign manager, what you want in an opponent is a predictable opponent. In two ways — one, in the way the that the map is predictable, you want to know where your opponent is strong, where he’s weak, define the battlegrounds and then go win those battlegrounds. Trump scrambles the map. It might be you can beat him easily in a lot of places with a lot of Hispanic voters but in the industrial northeast, in the industrial midwest which were hugely important for Democrats and for Barack Obama the last two elections, maybe Trump is more competitive in those places. So, he scrambles the map and then there’s the predictability thing like today. You want a candidate, a rival, an opponent who you basically know what they’re going to do every day and how they’re going to react in any situation. Trump not like that. So in a really volatile year, what you don’t want is a really volatile opponent and Trump is the ultimate in unpredictable and volatile opponents.”
DE BLASIO: “I was a campaign manager myself, I have great respect for David Plouffe, but I would — I would look at this a little differently. You want a candidate that has actually done something for people, Hillary Clinton can talk about, the Children’s Defense Fund, she can talk about, taking on the health insurance companies during the debate of 1993/’94. She can talk about a lot of actual focus on children, family, et cetera. What has Donald Trump done for people? What is Donald Trump going to say? He’s a billionaire with a very questionable business history who can’t disavow the KKK, and he’s insulted women, Mexican Americans, Muslims. What is he going to say — because when people are actually hiring a president they want to know what are you going to do for them.”

Video files
Full
Compact
Audio files
Full
Compact
Similar stories
Bill de Blasio: Of Course Trump Is a Racist