JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): Now everybody sneers, but Mark Halperin -- no, everybody says, “Oh, there's bad news, there's bad news.” In a change election, when everybody hates Washington, D.C., is this a bad thing that senators and congressmen that have a low approval rating aren't endorsing a candidate who's running against Hillary Clinton and beat a Bush?
MARK HALPERIN: Well-handled I think it's a positive, well-handled. I'm not sure he's handling it completely positively because the fighting is dominating the headlines, but being an anti-Washington change candidate --
SCARBOROUGH: So you're saying he's fighting. So he's a fighter.
HALPERIN: George Bush did the exact same thing. George Bush went after the congressional Republicans when he was running. It is a helpful thematic in the current environment. But again, if all of the coverage of your campaign is you're fighting with other people and your own party, that's not, I don't think, a great dominant message to have.
SCARBOROUGH: It is a -- well, it is a message that you probably need to have if you were close to political death three or four or five days ago where you're going out and you're fighting everybody. There was a moment when we tried to chase Newt Gingrich out of of town in a coup and it blew up in horribly in our face and a lot of people involved were scared and ran home and I turned to a friend, Matt Salmon, and I said, Matt, in cases like this, you were either the hunter or you were the hunted. What would you like to be? And we went hunting. Politically. Because if we didn't, we would've been dead. We would've been stripped of our committees. We would have lost reelection. It would have been a nightmare. Donald Trump has no choice but to do what he's doing right now. I know the media can't see past their sheer hatred of him. Their uncontrollable sheer hatred of Donald Trump. We can all be offended by what he did. We're still supposed to report, but the sheer hatred is stopping so many analysts from realizing he's doing the only thing he can do right now to keep his campaign alive. Hold the core together and then maybe use the last two weeks to expand. I'm not so sure that right now this isn't exactly what he needs to do to survive.
