Donald Trump's allies have been hinting that his vice presidential choice may be announced this week, and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough flagged that as an indicator that they're "scared" about his performance on the debate stage.
The presumptive Republican nominee told reporters over the weekend that he'd already made his decision and that individual would be in attendance Thursday at the first presidential debate, and the "Morning Joe" host speculated the Trump team was cooking up a distraction in case he flopped against president Joe Biden.
"The thing I suspect, if you're sort of reading the tea leaves this week, it sounds like they are suggesting the vice president pick may come this week, and, if so, that is one more way they are hedging against a bad debate loss," Scarborough said. "What you do if you get really bad headlines coming out of the debate on Friday morning, you make sure that throughout the weekend they are not talking about the debate. Instead, they are talking about your vice presidential pick. Even the leaking of that is a possibility shows they are scared. I mean, they are really scared Donald Trump is going to blow this thing."
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Trump and his allies have been attempting to manage expectations by complaining the rules are rigged against him and suggesting that Biden would be hopped up on performance-enhancing drugs, and conservative Matt Lewis said the vice presidential feint is part of those efforts.
"That might be a contingency plan," Lewis said. "If the debate goes well, we hold the announcement. If it goes poorly, we bracket it with the vice presidential announcement. I have to say Donald Trump, he is really good at controlling the message, there no doubt about it, and changing the subject. It used to be something like a debate would be talked about for weeks on end and it would dominant multiple news cycles. That may not be the case. Maybe he says or does something either important or just crazy, and that is what we are talking about a couple of days from now. He is really good at that. Bad in a lot of other things but good at driving the agenda and our attention."
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