Lewis Goodall reacts to Trump's gaffes at midterm rally

We're going to be talking about Donald Trump again. We can't quite get enough of him this week, can we? But there is some Mississippi news before we do that. It's not often you get to say that, is it, on British Radio? Mississippi news. The river, the state, who knows? The spelling. The spelling, no, no, that's still the same. Still loads of S's and P's. Do you know how we used to spell it as kids, to remember it? Go on. We'd say Mrs M, Mrs I, Mrs S, there's Si, Mrs S, there's Si, Mrs P, P, I. Right. How often did Mississippi come up? All the time. Was it something that the Scouser kids back then needed to learn? We're very clever. We like to know our geography. Look, I know. And also, it's a good word to say in Scouse, isn't it? Mississippi. Mississippi. It's not as good as... You might not remember this. I don't know how much you're into your football. You're not really, are you? What do you think? I think not. You know what? As ever, you are a perceptive lady, Sheila Fogarty. The best Scouse pronunciation of a foreign place will forever be during the World Cup when it was in Germany. No? Gelsenkirchen. Gelsenkirchen Gelsenkirchen you can get some cream for that honestly I wouldn't worry about it anyway anyway how did we end up here Mrs M, Mrs S, Mrs SSI Mrs SSI, Mrs PPI is everything alright I'm fine taking your pills good okay keep going no this is we've been talking Sheila last couple of days and weeks haven't we about the midterms which are obviously coming up in well less than two weeks now in a couple of Tuesdays time and increasingly Republicans every time you sort of check the polling seems the Republicans are falling further and further back to deep ruby red territory we talked the other day about Kansas for example a state that hasn't voted for a democratic senator since the 1930s now some concerns and you always have to treat this with a bit of pinch of salt it can be a little bit of the sort of fog of war and on a campaign but increasingly it seems that republicans are devoting more and more resources and if you want to know where a party might be a bit worried follow the money to ruby red mississippi now mississippi in the deep south part the old Confederate South, of course. It has been a Republican, let's say, ruby red Republican state, more or less since the sort of Southern strategy of Richard Nixon's time. You have to go all the way to go back to 1982 for a Democrat to win a Senate race. This is a state which Trump got 60% of the vote in. That's despite the fact that it has in 2024, that's despite the fact that it has a big African-American, a big black population. 60% of the vote. In fact, quite a few Mississippi African-American voters transferred over to Trump. But the incumbent senator there increasingly it seems concerned that the president himself is a significant drag on the ticket and look as i said i can be a bit skeptical about these sorts of things um trump tends to overperform even though he's not on the ballot this time tends to be that his coalition of of voters who are do not normally vote have a lower propensity to vote can be harder to poll and it is true that pretty much every election he has either been on the ballot for or been president during, Republicans have tended to over-perform. So I would be astonished if Mississippi actually did go blue come election day. But the fact that it's even in contention and the most recent polling showed on the generic ballot, as the Americans call it, i.e. you ask an American voter, just don't think about the candidates for a second. If you had to choose between voting for a Republican and voting for a Democrat, what would you choose? The Democrats are up 11 points. Now, that would be the biggest spread in any election for decades. And it would bring into play states and congressional races that would normally never be in the picture. If we are and we are in very tumultuous political and global times, I guess that's reflected in polls ultimately, isn't it? Well, I think what you can see, Sheila, for sure. And again, you know, we have to be a little skeptical about this, not least because we were talking about yesterday. The Democratic brand itself is still pretty poor. It's not like the Dems have come up with a great set of solutions to some of the unpopularity they had during the Biden years. But Trump, I think what we can certainly say, according to all the polling, Trump is now polling at historic lows. He's roughly where George W. Bush was at the end of his second term, post-Katrina, post-Iraq, descending into hell, all of those things. Trump is now deeply unpopular. And I think one of the reasons, and we've talked about it before, why did he get elected in 24? It's because of the cost of living. Cost of living is still an enormous problem in the United States. And Trump not only seems indifferent to it, but even for Trump, again, as we've been talking about more and more over the last few days, he is seeming, even for himself, increasingly eccentric and deranged on the campaign trail. Just listen to this. This is him talking about the prospects of renaming an ocean after himself. I only like two oceans, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. I'm not going to put either Trump or America on any other ocean but these two. So we seriously looked at the Atlantic Ocean and I called Google Maps, who are really great with the lake and really great And I spoke to a brilliant guy, Sundar. He heads all of Google. He's a brilliant guy. Sergey and Sundar totally brilliant guys and you know they still rattled from the gulf and I said Sundar I'm thinking of the Atlantic Ocean can you handle it no no no this time I'm not doing it he said he said he said ocean's are different sir you know they cover they cover a lot of they cover really a lot of countries please don't ask us to do that so I'll probably pass should I pass So I think let's keep it the Atlantic Ocean, right? Well, perhaps it's not a surprise, Sheila, that he wants to rename the Atlantic after himself. I mean, it's thick, it's unpredictable, and he's convinced that Europe should be grateful for it. So, look, I don't know. I mean, this is just the latest thing that we've seen from Trump. And I think there's a serious point to all of this, which is that this is a president who seems so off the boil right now. Does anybody seriously believe? There was always, I think, a bit of a sort of bargain with Trump. They knew he was unpredictable. They knew he was mercurial. They knew he could be a bit mad sometimes. But there's always a sort of slight sense of purpose, a sense that he'd smash stuff up to get things done, not just for himself, but potentially for the voter. I think the latter seems to be lost. Whenever we play clips like that, people either tell me we're having a sense of human failure or which could be possible sometimes. But us, I wouldn't say, you know, it could be extremely funny or that he is trying to distract us from something else. Possibly say all the time. But I think this is what I'm saying. I think this stuff was always fine. And people actually say, you know, I mean, I've said it many times myself. The guy can be very, very funny. He can be knowingly funny and unknowingly funny. He is really sharp. I mean, I always say the best debate moment that there ever was. And that was genuinely a kind of mic drop moment is when Hillary Clinton said, well, it's awfully good that Donald Trump is a sort of person like Donald Trump. Isn't in charge of our justice system as quick as a flash. Trump says, yeah, because you'd be in jail. You know, this is a funny guy. Right. He can be witty. He can be sharp. He has a sort of a he has a sort of animalistic sort of sense of humor in some ways. I do think, believe me, I have watched more Trump rallies, either in person or online, than is healthy. And I can just say that I do think a change is taking place. There's a descent. There's a descent into the utterly quixotic and eccentric all of the time. Sometimes he could be brilliantly on message and combine and fuse the humour, meld it with a political message. Now, I just don't know what the political message is anymore. I mean, to try and illustrate what I mean, Sheila, at some point, Trump isn't even using words anymore. Just listen to this. You know, he was a lieutenant governor and I'd say 90 percent of the reason I took the governor. I took the governor. I put her over at the United Nations because I wanted this guy to be. I wanted this guy to become governor. Sorry. Sorry, Mr. President. Can we just get that one more time, please? And again, again, Don. Boom. Right, I'm done. I can't do this anymore. What are you supposed to say? I've expended so much of my energy in my life trying to analyse this man. And at this point, we're just dealing with, at best, onomatopoeia. At best. The noises. I mean, were they deliberate or involuntary noises? Because we can all make an involuntary noise from time to time. Let's not get back onto that subject again with regards to Trump. We had enough of that from you last week. No, he just decided to go completely randomly in the middle of the sentence. Yeah, me. Yeah. What is there to say? I mean, you know, and I did want to introduce this programme by saying good afternoon. Welcome to Superdrug. Superdrug. I was doing a story about Superdrug much later in the programme. And for some reason it was to the front of my mind. Well, that's fine. I mean, that's all right. I mean, that's that's I mean, Superdrug's a nice place. They call that a brain fart, don't they? Again, let's not go back onto that. Look, at least, though, the vice president is showing a little bit more energy on the campaign trail and is a little bit more cogent. You do see now the strong difference between the two men in terms of cogency, and one is clearly potentially the future, whether you like it or not. Well, Vance versus Trump. I mean, he does have... I mean, he's literally half his age. I mean, he's a millennial by comparison. And you can see he's positioning himself, can't you? Yes, I mean, I think the problem for Vance, of course, is that he may be fastened and attached to a corpse, i.e. the Maga Corpse. You know, he will be what looked like a great move for him in 2024, for, which is to set himself up as the inheritor, the heir to the MAGA throne. Well, what will be left of that throne at the end of this? I mean, this is the big question. I mean, look, it's very clear what the Dems are going to run in 28. They're going to run against Trump, even if he's not on the ballot. They're going to run against his legacy. They're going to do the oldest campaign political ploy in the book, which is it's time for a change. They should do a montage of all his noises. Well, yeah, it might win him some extra votes. Who knows? But but, you know, but it's the Republican race is going to be absolutely fascinating because, of course, they are going to want to to inherit the MAGA base and they're going to want the Trump endorsement. But they're also very quickly not going to want it either. They're going to need it in order to get the nomination. But when it comes to the election, MAGA and the imprimatur of MAGA may well become a curse. They'll want to reinvent themselves. And there's a question as well as to whether even MAGA itself might have, which is now sort of starting to ever so gingerly move forward and ask itself what does MAGA look like or what does this movement look like in a post-Trump world, also asking itself the question, well, was Donald Trump MAGA enough? It's clear to see that there could be contours and you've seen people like Tucker Carlson move into this space. Well, say that Donald Trump didn't live up to the MAGA mantle. He wasn't going to invade foreign countries. that was one of the reasons this whole thing got started that it was a a revolt against George W Bush style republicanism republicanism and foreign adventurism and neo-conservatism and this was supposed to be a movement that was to some extent isolationist it was Make America Great Again Trump has betrayed those values he's also taking his eye off the ball on re-industrialization in the American economy and all of these currents that Trump not only rode but helped form so the Republican nomination and Vance's role in that will be a fascinating one and what Vance couldn't even get the other day i mean Trump again humiliated him which is one of his favorite activities which was when Trump was asked well will you be endorsing JD Vance as your successor and he said no we haven't even discussed it yet which tells you something about the relationship between the two men i think well let's see where that goes thank you very much Lewis that was fun and interesting and informative Lewis, good old funny noise sorry head of funny noises it's 246 That's it.