Republicans despair as tanking Trump takes them down with him

All right. So as I just mentioned, Senator Jon Ossoff is going to join me here in just a second. And I want to start tonight with something he said to reporters earlier today. What do you say to your Republican colleagues who may agree with the president on this? I don't know of Republican colleagues who agree with the president on this. Privately, most elected Republicans in this building think the president has lost it and is dooming them to dismal losses this fall. Thank you all so much for your time. So Republicans don't agree with the president on this. Privately, they think the president has lost it and is dooming them to fail. That is that's quite a thing to say. Now, I'm going to tell you exactly what Senator Ossoff was talking about in just a second. But just to give you a little itty bitty hint here, and I'm sure you're already picking up on this. It is definitely related to all the conspiracy theory pushing and the completely unhinged speech we are probably going to hear Trump deliver on Thursday. Frankly, that statement could actually apply to a whole lot of things because there's no shortage of issues right now where the president is screwing things up in ways that are disastrous for his own party. I mean, takes, for instance, his unpopular on again, off again war with Iran that he, of course, started after he spent weeks playing up peace talks with Iran weeks. Trump abruptly reversed himself last week and started bombing the country all over again. Iran then reasserted its control over the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices spiking. I'm sure you're all experiencing that now. And so yesterday, Trump came up with his latest genius idea for how to deal with it all. We're going to keep the straight and we'll probably run it. We'll become the guardian of the straight. Maybe you'll call it the guardian angel of the straight. And we should be reimbursed for that. When we do that, we're going to be reimbursed. I want to be reimbursed because we're protecting a very rich portion of the world. We're spending money. And so what we've done is we are going to be reimbursed for protection. We're going to be reimbursed apparently through a 20 percent toll on all cargo shipped through the straight. Are you now? Never mind. There is no basis for that declaration and no way the United States could implement that without a significant military presence in the straight, which nobody wants. But that was Trump yesterday. Then today he reversed himself again. Just 24 hours later, he walked back all of those proposed plans, deciding, never mind, the U.S. will not put any tolls on ships coming through the straight, which, by the way, they wouldn't be able to implement anyway. But if you're a Republican running for reelection, how do you defend not just that kind of whiplash decision making in the middle of a war, a war that had no clear end, that is already deeply unpopular with the American people? How do you defend that? Everybody's experiencing the impacts of that. And that's also hardly the only area where Trump's erratic decisions are becoming even harder for Republicans to defend. I mean, at the beginning of this year, the Trump administration sparked nationwide backlash when ICE officials shot and killed two people in the streets of Minneapolis. We covered this quite a bit on this show. And in response, Trump administration officials insisted that they were shifting immigration enforcement away from the roving street patrols that resulted in those deaths. But Trump refused to back away from his goal of carrying out mass deportations across the country, the fever dream, of course, of Stephen Miller. And so senior ICE officials tell The Atlantic that ICE's tactics have simply shifted to trying to arrest more people in their vehicles. How comforting. Now, those tactics have now led to the death of at least two more individuals in Texas and in Maine. And those killings have sparked huge protests in those two states, two states where I would note Republicans are desperately trying to hold on to their Senate seats. Dozens of protesters gathered outside of Senator Susan Collins' office chanting, you can hear that they're saying, vote her out, vote her out. And so today we got yet another Trump reversal. His administration has now ordered ICE to halt most motor vehicle stops while carrying out operations. But Trump still has not abandoned his demands for sweeping mass deportations, and that's pretty important. And so Republicans are just left to wonder how and when Trump's deadly mass deportation force will spark the next outrage and where. We see this story over and over again. Trump pursues an unpopular policy, then he carries it out in such a haphazard and chaotic way that the resulting collateral damage only makes it more unpopular. And then his party struggles to justify it after it's blown up in their face. We saw it again today, in this week, I should say, with Trump's deeply unpopular decision to try and settle a lawsuit with himself to create a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies while giving himself and his family broad immunity from tax odds. And any wonder that is hugely unpopular. Not to me. Anyway, Republicans have been desperate to put that whole disaster behind them. Of course they are. But Trump refused to give up on the part of that settlement that benefited him personally, keeping the issue alive. And now this week, a judge has ruled that Trump's lawyers acted in bad faith while negotiating that so-called settlement. No kidding. And has ordered sanctions against several people involved in the scheme, including, I would note, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is set to appear before Congress tomorrow for his confirmation hearing. That's going to be a fun one to watch, which means Republicans will once again be put in a position to defend the indefensible. No matter the damage it is doing to the political party he leads, he can't bring himself to abandon his most unpopular policies. No matter how toxic they may be for his own party, people running for re-election from his own party. Which brings me to his latest harebrained gambit. The thing John Ossoff says is dooming the president's party to dismal losses, in part. There's probably more. We'll talk to him about it in a second. The thing he says has convinced Republicans that Trump has, quote, lost it. Trump has announced that this Thursday he will give a prime time address about our nation's elections. MS Now has learned that the speech will focus on the security of voting machines and foreign influence in elections. And the president is expected to release declassified intelligence documents on both subjects. As MS Now reports, the address follows a year of internal disagreement between different administration factions over how to satisfy the president's demands for information, bolstering his false claim that he won the 2020 election, which, as we all know, he is completely obsessed with. And this notably comes as, quote, as Trump has increasingly leaned on aides and senior officials willing to spread conspiracy theories about 2020. That's according to one administration official who says, quote, it's that network of people that is the real effing problem. They try to put bits and pieces together and then make these conclusions. Look, if there's one thing that is clear, it's that Donald Trump is incapable of letting anything go. He does not care that his pursuits are unpopular with the American people and a drag on his party's reelection chances. And in many parts of the country, he doesn't care that his efforts have failed over and over again. He'll just keep improvising new ways to push his agenda. And some of the documents under consideration for release Thursday relate to Georgia's 2020 results in the Senate runoffs that followed, according to two people familiar with the plans that suggest Trump may use his address to call into question the elections of Georgia's Democratic Senators John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ahead of a crucial midterm election in that state. How insane is that?