Trump’s convention spirals as aides give up and crowd leaves

[rock music] Trump has aides at the White House who are giving up.

Axios is reporting that top White House officials and elected Republicans are privately saying they've stopped trying to persuade Donald Trump about anything, to do something, not to do something, to say something, not to say something.

And that's a pretty serious change from what we saw during Donald Trump's first administration.

You might remember that back then, there was almost an entire genre of reporting about people who were around Trump.

They were trying to manage him.

They were trying to influence him, trying to change his views.

And an advisor might try to talk him into doing something or out of doing something.

Somebody would convince him, "Hey, wait on this," or, "Move more quickly on this other thing." Officials would say, "Oh, you know, this isn't legally possible," or, "That's not politically practical," or, "It'll create some other problem." And sometimes Trump would listen, and sometimes he wouldn't.

But the new reporting from Axios is that people around Trump now are behaving completely differently.

They've reached a totally different conclusion, which is it's not even worth trying.

One longtime advisor used the phrase, "Why bother?" to kind of summarize the perspective of the people around Donald Trump.

And the, the reasoning is very simple, and I think we all know it.

Of course, Trump is the president.

Trump is going to do what Trump is going to do.

But the people around him don't believe that arguing with him accomplishes anything, and in fact, it puts them at risk of Donald Trump going, "It doesn't really sound like you're being loyal to me.

I think it's time for you to go." Axios also reports that some Republicans don't, don't have any confidence that Trump's political instincts are still what they once were.

And in fact, I mean, I think that's an interesting 180.

If you think back to Donald Trump's first term, there was surprise and sort of a, a fear even then, trepidation we might say, when Donald Trump had one of his wacky ideas.

But then he would execute it, and sometimes, at least by Republican standards, like Democrats would be aghast, but by Republican standards, it turned out Trump's instincts weren't terrible.

Like, he kinda did seem to understand his base, even if he didn't give a damn about them, and he would do some of this wacky stuff.

And it would sort of work out okay.

Now Republicans think Trump's instincts have been flushed, for lack of a better term.

And, uh, the reaction from the people around Trump is sort of like, "Let's just not even bother.

Let's get out of the way.

Let's try to get him not to notice that we don't agree." And I think the timing here is critical, because Republicans are going into these midterms where they are very concerned about at least losing control of the House, if not the House and Senate.