On Monday's New Day, after a discussion of the possibility that some Britons may have buyers' remorse after the Brexit vote to end EU membership and how the issue plays into the U.S. presidential election, CNN political commentator Errol Louis claimed that Republicans have been on a trend of candidates making "more extreme" promises that they cannot keep to their base.
Moments later, former CNN anchor Ali Velshi -- also a former Al Jazeera America host -- asserted that he hoped journalists would "press" Donald Trump on specifics, as he predicted that Hillary Clinton would "shine" in the debates.
Co-host Chris Cuomo referred back to their discussion of potential problems with Britain exiting the EU as he posed:
We have been talking, as we went to the break, about, all right, so how do we diagnose what's going on here in this election, looking at what happened? Maggie pointed out the narrative is something to look at: You're angry, you're angry, you're angry -- we'll change, we'll change, we'll change. Now, they don't deliver -- oh, what happens? This slice of "Be careful what you wish for." How do you project onto this election?
Louis -- political anchor for Time Warner Cable News -- began his analysis by taking a swipe at Republican politicians making supposedly "extreme" promises:
Well, that's right. I mean, that's been -- on one level -- the story of the Republican party for the last several cycles, is that they promise, they promise, they promise -- then they don't deliver. People get even more angry; the next group comes along and says, "Now, I'm really going to do it," or, "I've got a more extreme promise," and that has led us to Donald Trump.
And so now he says, "I'm going to do all kinds of different things. I'm going to stop Muslim immigration somehow. I'm going to find and deport 11 million people and somehow do that in a way that's constitutionally feasible," and some people have bought that. The polls are suggesting that far from a majority are buying that at this point, but that's really what the election has turned into to a great extent.
He then added:
Now, Hillary Clinton, I think, does not want to go down that rabbit hole, and she has been really trying to sort of avoid that and sort of point out that you don't want the kind of turmoil we're seeing now in Europe. You don't want to have a question in front of you like Brexit, you know. If you turn the election into that, you're going to end up with all the disappointment, all of the confusion, all of the economic dislocation we're starting to see in Britain. Now, all of those things, I think, are putting a political sort of template on top of something that's completely different.
I mean, as Ali talked about, I mean, you know, immigration and trade, these are boring things for a lot of people, so if you turn it into politics, you start turning it into images, you start making the kind of statements we've heard, especially from Donald Trump, it all turns into a very different kind of a question. And the separation between the facts and the vote really starts to widen unfortunately.
After co-host Alisyn Camerota recalled several prominent Republicans who have announced that they will not support Trump, Velshi argued that Trump would be at a disadvantage when trying to talk about specifics and made known his hope that the GOP candidate would be questioned more aggressively by people like CNN hosts Cuomo and Camerota. Velshi:
This is where Donald Trump's weakness is greatest --when he has to speak in specificity. We're a month away from both conventions having been done, after which we're going to get into debates, during which they're going to have to speak with great specificity about things. That's where Hillary Clinton, whose campaign speeches are a little tortuously dull, is going to start to shine because she'll have specific answers to things.
And Donald Trump's vague generalities about "It's going to be great," "Russia is terrific -- I had a Miss Universe there," "Scotland is ecstatic over Brexit," this is really going to start to hurt him because he's going to be pressed -- hopefully by people like you --- with very, very specific questions. And then, Errol, that distance between fact and fiction is going to start to narrow again.
