Fox News host Jesse Watters argued Thursday on "Jesse Watters Primetime" that former President Trump is campaigning with a "swagger" reminiscent of his historic rise to the White House in 2016 – and that has Democrats terrified.
JESSE WATTERS: We're one week from the CNN presidential debate, and Joe Biden is officially off the grid. The president's taking the entire week off so he can cram at Camp David. "Primetime" expects Biden to sling the same corny lines and hoaxes Democrats have been pushing for years, but sources tell CBS that Biden has a surprise up his sleeve:
CBS NEWS 24/7, WEDNESDAY: We should expect some surprises as well, because this is such a critical performance for President Biden, not only on the content but on his physical performance as well.
Surprise? Physical performance? What does that even mean? Is he going to rip his shirt off and do push-ups like RFK? What does CBS know?
SPECIAL REPORT: Republicans should control their high hopes here, because I think Biden has performed at big events like States of the Union. They give him his debate Viagra, and he's good for, you know, a good 30-minutes. If he's still debating after four hours, we'll have to call the doctors.
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Trump, on the other hand, isn't taking the week off from campaigning. He's doing a rally in Philly Saturday, taking a big bite out of the Biden base. The former president says rallies are the way he does debate prep.
FORMER PRESIDENT TRUMP, TUESDAY: Is anybody going to watch the debate? He's going to be so pumped up. He's going to be pumped up. You know, all that stuff that was missing about a month ago from the White House? What happened? Who who left it? Somebody left it there. I wonder, let's see, somebody left a laptop in an office of a gentleman who was supposed to fix the laptop from hell. He never picked it up, and somebody didn't pick up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine. I wonder who that could have been. I don't know, actually, I think it was Joe.
And now we know it wasn't Joe's coke. But it's funny, Trump knows that, the crowd knows that the only one who doesn't know it is the media.
CNN, WEDNESDAY: I can't even believe I have to fact check that one, I guess, if that's what you're calling it, but, it was not President Biden's.
CNN, WEDNESDAY: What's happened in the last few months is convicted felon, more extreme statements even than ever before, I mean this cocaine example, this is normal now for Donald Trump to throw anything out there.
MSNBC: Donald Trump on stage suggesting that President Biden will be on cocaine. To back up the point I'll make here, this individual, this candidate, this convicted felon, plays dirty. He plays ugly. He's done it many times in the past. We could spend the next 3.5 hours listing his lies. We wouldn't get through them. He lies like a rug.
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I mean, they're fact-checking his jokes. The media doesn't see anything funny about cocaine found in the White House. Nothing funny? Or Joe's dog, Cujo, nothing funny at all? Or the president's scared to dance at a Juneteenth party – that's not funny? When Trump's riffing and making the media fact check jokes and has a positive message, that's a dangerous Donald. When's the last time we saw that kind of swagger?
CHUCK TODD, MSNBC, WEDNESDAY: Donald Trump's rhetoric, even, and even his sort of swagger, looks more like 2016... The Donald Trump of Detroit and those events he did, he was oddly loose. He was trying to be funny and all of this where from about 2017 to 2022, we had and even 2023 through the primaries, it's been nothing but angry grievance Trump, right? Angry. Angry. Angry. It's interesting if he somehow drops the grievance, but he could end up looking more like that 2016 candidate, where he's the outside disrupter.
Trump's happy disruptor strategy is powerful. It's genuine. It's how we beat the establishment in 2016. In 2020, it was tough for him to be the fun outsider. He was the incumbent dealing with the pandemic, riots, FBI cover-ups. This year, Trump's got his swagger back, and it could be his secret to winning the swing states and even picking off a surprise.
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Voters don't have Trump amnesia. They have Biden regret. And nobody's thinking about the pandemic anymore. We're thinking about groceries, gas, a tight border, but Democrats can't debate the issues, so they're going to ride out the dictator hoax.
