'Very telling indicators': Nicolle Wallace guest says GOP running out of excuses for Trump

Even the most loyal members of President Donald Trump's base are having more difficulty in justifying his self-dealing, according to one journalist and author.

During a Tuesday segment on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," host Nicolle Wallace interviewed New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos about Trump's increasingly brazen attempts to use the presidency for his own personal benefit. Wallace opined that there was a silence among the right about Trump's actions, compared to their vociferous campaign to prove allegations about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private charity and the private business activities of former President Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

"The book 'Clinton Cash' [was] such a forceful indictment of the Clintons and their all-around corruption. The obsession on the right with Burisma is all about a sort of fabricated financial relationship," she said. "And there was no there there! I mean, there are no criminal prosecutions. There's no there's no factual predicate for what became tidal waves of Republican rage and anger at two of the leading Democrats of the last decade. Why is there — maybe you answered it already with the word 'shameless' — but why is there no rejection of it on the right?"

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Osnos pushed back, pointing to recent examples of pro-Trump influencers and pundits beginning to publicly admit to having discomfort with Trump's behavior, like his acceptance of a $400 million jet from the Qatari royal family. And he argued that the more examples there are to point to, the more Trump will lose the confidence of the MAGA faithful.

"You're beginning to see some very telling indicators," Osnos said. "When the Qatar jet became such an absolutely inescapable emblem of grotesque abuses of presidential power, there began to be rumblings from the most unlikely of people."

"The reality is, though — and I think this is an essential takeaway for people — is that it takes time to accumulate the public recognition and outrage," he continued. "And we've seen this in our own history. In the 19th century, Nicolle, it took between the time that Mark Twain named the Gilded Age in 1873, it took years of building public awareness and public outrage and ultimately a movement building in order to organize the kinds of changes to law and politics that brought those kinds of abuses to an end."

"And so the in a way, the lesson is it is about sustained response from civil society, because you're not gonna get it from the people in the president's camp," Osnos added.

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Watch the segment below, or by clicking this link.

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