FLASHBACK: Heilemann Says There’s ‘No Imaginable World’ in Which Trump Wins the Popular Vote

TRANSCRIPT:

HEILEMANN: "We now know where Trump can perform and where he can’t perform, what he can and can’t do, what his ceiling and floor are as a presidential candidate. And Joe, this is the thing. There’s no Republican who’s paid attention to his run in ’16, his run in ’20, and the Republican performance in the midterms around those years that doesn’t know what baggage Donald Trump has and what the baggage is, as you just said, that he can’t shed. There are voters he’ll never get. There are places he will never be competitive. There’s so many of them now that there’s no imaginable world in which Donald Trump could ever win a popular majority in America, in the American electorate, and the needle that he needs to thread in the Electoral College has gotten narrower and narrower, to the point where Trump is — he is a powerhouse within the Republican Party still, and yet on the national level, running head-to-head presidential contest, a general election, he’s getting close to — not unelectable yet, but the deficits he carries into that race are huge and so well-known and specified that if the Republican Party were a rational body with a single mind, there’s no world in which he would be the nominee. But that of course is not the way our politics work, and there are still tens of millions of people in the Republican Party who don’t see this and would vote for Donald Trump to be the nominee and vote for him to be president again, and that’s the conundrum that the party faces.”