MSNBC's Nicole Wallace, the former communications chief of George W. Bush held out her final opinion on Trump's speech because of what crazy thing he might say in the next 24-48 hours.
June 23, 2016

MSNBC's Republican political analyst Nicolle Wallace has been very good of late and when she was called to analyze Donald Trump's Hillary Clinton attack speech on Wednesday, she correctly explained his problems and how the speech should be judged.

"He's rebuked more often than his message is echoed by members of his own party."

"By Trump's standards it was superb, but by the standards we hold most normal politicians to, it was overly ambitious."

She explained that Trump has an "immigration problem" and he tried to soften it up and then she brought up the reading material the speech was clearly based on, the discredited "Clinton Cash," and said he took it even further than the author did.

Wallace then linked his reading material to a very big problem he has - his love of conspiracy theories.

He's been mainstreaming the type of garbage that only appeared at militia meeting in North Dakota in the 90's, and in the cheapest of tabloid papers you'd find in supermarkets.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: And so, again, to take your model, that is to watch for 24 hours like a message control group, you think that fairly --

NICOLLE WALLCE: Like an experiment.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. And you think that that can be held up against as a test of the discipline of the new Manafort era?

WALLACE: I just think that is the test, right? So we will say that he read from his teleprompter and our colleague, Rachel, laughed at me last time I gave him credit for doing so. But I really -- I think the test is to look at 24 whole hours. I will pledge, in service of this network, to watch the next 24 hours and report back, because what happened the last time, when he came out and gave a foreign policy speech that was riddled with its own problems, was that he stepped on his own message by trotting out conspiracy theories on Fox & Friends in the morning.

So, this was a speech that had the definite imprint of Paul Manafort and the family, which has taken firm control of the Trump campaign. Trump, I'm told, realized by Sunday night that things weren't just bad, they were, quote, awful. And so, he is trying to make a pivot. And when you have such a small, skeletal campaign, you can pivot in two days because there's not very many people to turn around. So he has made that pivot in the last hour. But we do have to watch the next 24 hours, the next, you know, however many interviews he does and see if he veers wildly off message like he's done in the past.

(h/t media matters for the transcript)

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