Donald Trump Plays Role of Mitt Romney Surrogate; Goes After Rick Santorum as Unelectable – Video 2/8/12

Last night on Greta Van Susteren’s show, “On the Record,” Donald Trump played the role of Mitt Romney surrogate and went after Rick Santorum, revealing what is likely to be a key line of attack against him – electability. Trump focused on Santorum’s loss in Pennsylvania as an incumbent U.S. Senator in 2006 – a terrible year for Republicans in general.

MEDIAITE: . . . “I have nothing against Rick Santorum, he seems like a nice guy,” Trump told Van Susteren, before noting that Santorum lost by 19 points– “a record in the Senate for the incumbent.” He then went on to compare Santorum to a “student who gets thrown out of high school for bad marks but then wants to go to the Wharton School of Finance,” a school Trump knows quite well. “He ran, he lost by a tremendous amount,” Trump continued, adding that he could see that Pennsylvania voters “obviously weren’t happy.”

Van Susteren tried to play the role of Santorum and respond that “in 2006, the year he was beaten by 19 point by Senator Casey, they lost 23 of 33 seats, but in Pennsylvania, five conservative districts” and the governorship. Trump accepted that that might be, but he did not seem convinced at all that this was a sufficient justification for his lose. “How do you lose like that?” He asked rhetorically, “maybe it’s time to get into a different business, be a lawyer.” His tone on the matter got increasingly aggressive, culminating in him saying “somebody beat him by tremendous numbers and all of the sudden he says he wants to be president? Give me a break!” Trump did conclude on a conciliatory note, however, allowing for the opportunity that “maybe, over the course of time, he would be a great candidate and a great president.” . . . Read More

Expect to hear a lot more of this from Mitt Romney and his supporters in the weeks ahead – “Rick’s a nice guy but he is not electable against Barack Obama.” I’ve raised the same concern in past months based on the size of Santorum’s loss in Pennsylvania in 2006. But Santorum is now sounding the themes of a national campaign. If he is the nominee, he won’t be running just in one state, or focused on the issues of one state alone, he will be running on those national themes. The mood of the nation is very different today than it was six years ago.