Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” during a discussion on President Donald Trump support for GOP U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, network political analyst John Heilemann said Trump “didn’t seem to find a problem to be on the side of neo-Nazis” and “accused child predators either.”
Heilemann said, “Trump sees himself in Roy Moore, he does. He sees the politics of it too. The momentum was for Hillary Clinton, all of the polls said Hillary Clinton was going to win and there’s all these people in the Trump base standing up saying, ‘fake news, fake news, fake news.’ He listens to these press conferences. He recognizes the dynamic in Alabama where he hears Roy Moore’s defenders attacking the Washington Post, saying that the women made it all up. He thinks the woman who attacked him made it all up. ”
He continued, “I believe he believes that, I’m not crediting it. But he sees this as a microcosm of his victory in 2016. ‘Everyone said I can’t win, everybody says this guy can’t win, people said I was a predator, people say he’s a predator,’ Steve Bannon sees the parallel. I’m going to go with the parallel.”
He added, “The best analogy to me for this, trying to loop all this together, is Charlottesville. Was there no one who could go into the Oval Office and say to Donald Trump it’s bad to be on the side of neo-Nazis? The answer was ‘no’ then, and the answer is ‘no’ now. Because they got him for one day back on Charlottesville to get on the right side of history and go out and read a prepared statement that kind of edged toward something reasonable, then he went out at a press conference the next and let his true feeling fly and said there are ‘good people’ on both sides. What’s worse, a child predator or a neo-Nazi? I’m not going to make a call on that, but Donald Trump didn’t seem to find a problem to be on the side of neo-Nazis and apparently he doesn’t see a problem being on the side of the accused child predators either.”
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