‘Donald Trump Will Try To Run On Message They Lost On’

If Donald Trump announces a third run for the White House today, he’ll be running on a platform that fell flat for Republican candidates in last week’s mid-term elections—including Kari Lake, the Trump-backed candidate for Arizona governor who came up short to Democrat Katie Hobbs. “When you look at the slate of election deniers,” said NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard, “(Lake) was the latest one to fall, making it a clean sweep of those election-denier candidates. And now Donald Trump will try to run on the message that they lost on.”

Hillyard said the Lake campaign looked and felt like a blueprint for the next Trump presidential run. “I’ve been covering Kari Lake for the better part of the last year and a half here, and I felt like it was covering Donald Trump’s campaign of 2024,” he said.

Hillyard, who covered the Lake campaign for NBC, delivered a scathing autopsy on the Lake campaign in a live appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday. “In the final week of the campaign, who did she campaign alongside,” Hillyard asked. “She campaigned alongside Steve Bannon. She campaigned alongside one of the chief promoters of ‘pizzagate.’”

“She campaigned alongside an individual who promoted the notion of a war on white people,” Hillyard said. “She campaigned alongside state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who just earlier this year was here in Florida speaking at a white nationalist conference, somebody who frequently spews antisemitism.”

“She called the media the right hand of the devil, the scourge of the earth. If that doesn’t sound like Donald Trump, I don’t know what does,” Hillyard said on Morning Joe. “Ultimately, the question was, was she able to make that sell here? And the answer is no according to Arizona voters.”

In addition to Lake, many of the high profile candidates backed by Trump lost their elections, including Mehmet Oz, Adam Laxalt and Blake Masters. Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker failed to get 50 percent of the vote, and will go to a run-off against incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock.

At the same time, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was criticized by Trump (the former president referred to him as “DeSanctimonious” in the days before Election Day), sailed to an easy re-election—setting the stage for a potential 2024 presidential run that could pit DeSantis against Trump for the Republican nomination.

DeSantis, asked about the critical remarks made about him by Trump, pointed directly to what happened last week—and what might happen in 2024: “check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday.”