Jeff daniels acts, a super pac, and the love that donald trump lacks. He will meet with his not yet bff, paul ryan. Paul ryan, again, said that he was not ready to back donald trump. Adding, i never said never, but i wish he had more time to get to know him before this happened. Trump asked him to step down as the chair in cleveland. He said, he is the nominee. Ill do whatever he wants with respect to the convention. Over the weekend, the presumptive nominee continued to add more names to the trump train manifest without doing much to get people on board. Trump it is a mistake not to do this. We have to bring the party together. Does it have to be together . I think that i am different than anybody else who has ever run from office and i do not think so. I think it would be better to be unified and there would be something good about that. I do not think it has to be unified, in a traditional sense. Mark does the party not need to be unified in a traditional sense or does he need the paul ryan and other wavering republicans . John i will remind you of electoral fact, the Republican Party starts way behind and donald trump needs all the unity he can get to overcome the Electoral College and other advantages that Hillary Clinton has. You need unity. Mark he is not going to have full unity. He wont get the bushes, or mitt romney. John he will not have full unity. He needs to make virtue of the fact that he is supporting stuff they do not like and they are not going to support him. I think that he can get by with less than full unity. In the end, paul ryan will be for him. John there is an advantage to being antiestablishment, rhetorically speaking. A lot of the other people, it is not like the endorsement matters, in terms of the votes. This person signals whether this guy is a legitimate contender or not. When people are backing away from trump, it does not help. He needs everything. Mark the campaign will reveal how far behind they were in the mechanical things. We know that they are far behind and they are even further behind than people realize. If you dont have support of paul ryan, you have to build networks and fundraising. Donald trump needs help and the campaign cannot build this on their own. John they do not come in with a general election campaign. Mark symbolically, it is not that bad. Substantively john practically, on the ground, i agree with that. Donald trump has been cashing in his two cents on the economy. After saying the low minimum wage is not bad, he says that he wants to see it raised or leave it to the states. On taxes, he says that rich people will still see lower taxes and will end up paying more than he originally proposed. Donald has drawn Harsh Criticism for his comments on borrowing habits. He said that he was opening to the idea of renegotiating the debt and that they will never have to default because you print money. A former National Economic adviser, and another person from the Clinton Campaign added warnings to the trump economic pileon. This is the most risky and reckless tax proposal ever put forward by a major president ial candidate. The plan hands trillions in tax breaks to millionaires and corporations and blows a massive hole in the federal budget and puts Social Security and medicare at risk. John as trump shifts around and engages in rhetoric that is loose, is he on with economic and Business Issues . Mark i said that he could take positions that are not in strict orthodoxy. He can on some issues. He cannot on the economy. I dont think he can win unless more americans need to think that he would be a good steward with the economy. He is alienating left and right and the business community. They will look at clinton and say, i may think she is too liberal, but she is, at least, more stable. She is, at least, more stable. John this is the romneyization of donald trump and it gives the democrats the ability to paint him as another mitt romney, who doesnt care about people. That could be, on its own, enough to cost him the election. Mark he tried to move to the left on the tax plan and that is fine. He has to explain these. Not in tweets or voiceonly interviews. People are worried about the economy and they want change. They want somebody who will not make it up on the fly. John i agree with you that business is a problem and that you have to have some stability. This is why i think that donald trump is wrong about unpredictability being a virtue. Mark the country could take it with foreign affairs, sometimes. Not with the economy. Over the past few days, there is news that clinton is ready to battle. Donald trump upped the ante. Take a look at the collection that our friends at morning joe put together. Trump Hillary Clinton ordered hit ads on donald trump. In the history of politics, Hillary Clintons husband of views women more than any man that we know of in the history of politics. I mean, have you ever read what Hillary Clinton did to women that bill clinton had affairs with . Remember, i did not have sex with that woman . Months later, im guilty. Mark the Clinton Campaign has not engaged directly. If clinton continues turns the other cheek, what will it take for donald trump to break through with these attacks . John i believe it is virtually impossible. Clinton could get rattled by them in ways that create more openings. To most americans, bill clintons behavior, as deplorable as it was, is priced into the stock. Mark i think it will take the Trump Campaign doing a stunt, something unorthodox and new, having women at a press conference or something, that it is so out there that they asked the clintons about it, i do not think they will ask, unless they are forced to. Eventually, i think one or both of the clintons could be asked and that would be a game changer. I think the clintons would have to be asked about it directly. John it would be a potent and destabilizing combination. They would have to relitigate. Mark trump thinks he knows some new facts. John when we come back, Donald Trumps strengths and weaknesses and who is saying what about those. John if you are watching the trump train barreling down, there are two tracks of thoughts about how he will fare as a general election candidate. On the one side, the Washington Posts editorial editor says that democrats should fear donald trump, saying they do not want to hear about certainty in his november defeat or how happy the clinton camp is. They need to be running smart and scared for the next six months. When two thirds of the country is unhappy, irrational outcomes cannot be taken for granted. In a role reversal, the wall street Journal Editorial Board took the other side of the argument, saying that the Trump Campaign will implode, unless he changes his act quickly. Writing today, if he wants to be a president , he has to build a broader coalition and time is more fleeting than he thinks if he does not, he may find that his candidacy has imploded before the nomination. This is interesting, right . You have diverse opinions with smart people. People on the left are scared of trump and people on the right are castigating. Talk about the assessments across ideological lines. Mark look at the snapshot of where we are with the Electoral College and demographics, you would think that trump cannot win. It seems to me that people, like fred hiatt, are making to judgments. One that trump has magic and he will build a coalition nobody currently sees and that Hillary Clinton is such a fundamentally flawed candidate that he will win. John it seems like this argument is a different way of saying what you just said, that it is art versus science. A scientist believes in demographics, the Electoral College, democrats having a builtin advantage and donald trump facing an uphill fight and the art folks, who are informed by having been wildly wrong about trump for a year. Many of the people who are now saying that trump, you should look out because he could be a strong general election candidate, are a little burned about being wrong. Mark you cannot imagine the gap between the number of employees in brooklyn for clinton and trump. They are so far ahead, the opposition research, they are so far ahead. Trump has a whole different layer of disadvantage. John and, the money. Coming up, paul ryan, donald trump, and the battle for the hearts and minds. We will be right back with that. Mark we have been talking about the donald trump gop unification challenge and his pickup. Here is an episode that aired in early march. Everybody is buying into that he is inevitable and that he cannot be stopped. I think that he can. What are you doing . We are working on it. Mark that was a couple of months ago. Here is what he said this weekend. Are you still antitrump . Im going to support the nominee. Are you going to support trump . I am going to support the nominee. Are you saying there is a possibility trump will not be the nominee . Not at all. Mark our colleague, al hunt, is in our Washington Bureau and Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post is in her newsroom. He went from an employee to antitrump and now he is pro trump. Is this symbolism here . Al hunt it is a train that left the station. Mark karen, did you look at that as significant . Karen we are hearing it from him and other republicans, i will support the nominee. It is like voldemort in harry potter, he who must not be named. They will have some weeks to get used to the idea and try it on with donald trump as the standardbearer. Then, we had this turn of events between tuesday and thursday and, for a lot of them, it has hit quickly and they have not gotten their heads around it. John last week, donald trump started to put together his national announced he will not fully self fund and he was going to raise money and there would be super pac money. The question was, who is going to do this . You have a billionaire who says he will raise money for trump. Will he be able to make the nut . Or, will this be the biggest obstacle . Al hunt it will be a hurdle. He will make most of it. Let me turn to his tax comments. I hate to correct john heilemann. Donald trump did not change a little. It was a massive overhaul and he said that the rich would pay more. His proposal, 35 of his tax cuts go to the top 1 . Now, in a 4 trillion change, he says they will not. That is because donald trump has no idea and does not care what is in his tax plan. Why does that matter . People like paul ryan, who does have principles, agree or disagree, say he does not believe in a thing. I think what he did this weekend was rather stunning. Mark is there anything that donald trump has done since he become the presumptive nominee that worries the Clinton Campaign . Karen the attacks on bill clinton and Hillary Clinton coming relentlessly from every conceivable direction, when you talk to democrats, they say that is what worries them the most about donald trump. Most of them do not think that he can win. They think that they are looking forward to a bunch of months of constantly being offbalance and never knowing what direction the attacks are going to come from. John let me stay with you and ask you the question about the paul ryan meeting. There seems to be two schools of thought. One is that it is sound and fury signifying nothing and they will end up on the same page. Others think that it is a deep rift that will never be healed. On the basis of your reporting, which is closer to the truth . Karen my predictions have been worth nothing. I think they will feel a lot of motivation to move to the same spot. This is a struggle, not over a political calculation, it is a battle over what it is to be a republican and who speaks for the Republican Party. Paul ryan is not only asserting himself but instituting prerogatives with congress, where the republicans have the strongest majority since 1928. Al hunt i think that the answer is that they will come out and they will be together. The differences are profound and will not go away. They are profoundly different on trade, immigration, and tax policy. Those are not things that you can paper over. Mark if he never gives a fullthroated endoresement, if it is clear that it is not enthusiastic, what kind of price would he pay and with whom . Al hunt House Republicans need paul ryan and that is why they turned to him. The opposition to donald trump is not just coming from establishment republicans. It comes from Movement Conservatives and people who say they may go along, but he is unqualified for the office. Mark if he never gives a i cant believe he will have any kind of a primary particularly, now that sarah palin has endorsed his opponent. Karen a thing you are hearing is a sober and sensible talk of republicans losing the house as a real possibility. If it turns into that kind of cataclysm in the fall, paul ryan has a lot to lose. John let me ask you, al, you have a new Bloomberg View column that says it will be an ugly general election, talking about roger stone and david brock. What is your thesis about how this is shaping up and what it portends . Al hunt i think it is a race to the bottom and what the democrats fear is that most democrats are confident that hillary is going to win. If we have an ugly race, and i do not think they should be Kennedy School form, but if it is all invective, it will make governing impossible. They will say that she won because the other guy was a bum. Mark there are people who say they are not for trump and are not going to the convention. Who do you have your eyes the most on . Karen the place to look is the United States senate and the people who are in difficult spots in the fall and there are five seats up for reelection, where barack obama won reelection in 2012. Those are states where people will be under the most pressure. Mark thank you for coming in. Up next, a super pac that backs Hillary Clinton will talk about the general election game plan after this. John when it comes to the general election, who has two thumbs and has reserved ad time . This guy. That is, that guy. Cecil, welcome back to the show. We are going to try to speak the truth. Looking at the way that the republicans ran against donald trump, what have you learned about what works and what does not work . Ignoring him did not work. Waiting to the last minute did not work. Also, having an electorate that is only republican primary goers. I think there are a number of ads that ran which will be successful, because the audience we are talking to is different. I think the advertisements that talk about his comments on women, the comments on prisoners of war, those are powerful advertisements, among others. One of the other things they did for us was given opportunity to test a lot of advertisements in our ad testing. We are thankful for the help in the general. Mark is it true that you will run advertisements for American Workers who were hurt by the Economic Business . We will show a host of people who have either been hurt by donald trump or will be hurt by his policies. This is a guy who attacks hillary on trade and brags about hiring workers in bangladesh and china. I think you can expect us to focus on temperament and character and how he approaches National Security and foreign policy. Mark do you believe that, if the early advertisement is effective, you can eliminate any chance he has to win . We need to show that donald trump knows no boundaries and that he is not a conventional candidate. It will require us to be on our toes through election day and not just on television. We will have to be online to make sure that we are communicating to africanamericans, latinos, base democratic voters, millennial voters. Unlike previous efforts, that will be a big part of our efforts. John he is now out and reprising his attacks on clintons personal life in a loud way. What does your Research Show you about the residence of those attacks . We have not tested. History is a good guide of what happens when you attack president clintons personal life. I think that this will ultimately backfire and it will not work. To the point about this being built into the stock, that is appropriate. I think that the way hillary is handling it is the right way and the other thing that weve learned from the republican primary is that the way to defeat donald trump is to not become him and to try to lift the content of this election and the tone. Mark do you have data that suggests that Television Advertising will be effective in the campaign . There have been a number of studies and other tests of the Democratic Party that show the right combination of television and digital can Work Together to communicate with voters and i do not think that a one size fits all approach will work. Mark your ratio is going to be what . Around 6040. Mark campaigns look at the performance of the super pac at the end of the campaign and say that they do not do what they wanted and were not in the right places. Are you going to avoid that and how . I think 2012 is an example of a super pac doing great work. That the work that priorities did early on mark people complained about it, nonstop. The ad was a toptesting ad. Our job is to tell the truth about donald trump and compare him to hillary. We feel confident about the path. John a second ago, you talked about lifting the tone of the campaign. Roughly, what percentage of the 91 million will be spent on positive advertisements . About a quarter. A lot of the work that the Clinton Campaign will do will be positive. John you are not debating that three quarters of the tone will be negative. Nor do