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Questions about the 2024 election had Chris Cuomo talking “legacy” with the former president’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort.

(Video Credit: Chris Cuomo)

With a week remaining before the ballot-counting is set to begin, the long-time Republican Party consultant joined the NewsNation host on his eponymous show for analysis on the state of the race. In addition to addressing recent remarks from former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Manafort assured that the divisive contest wouldn’t prevent bipartisan leadership.

Bringing up the large sampling of Independent voters in his audience, Cuomo asked, “What do you have to say to them that will reassure them that if [former President Donald] Trump were to be elected, he could work with the other side, that it will not just be ‘American Carnage, Part Two?’”

“This next term is the legacy term for Donald Trump, and for those who think he only cares about himself, well, there’s a good reason to think he’ll reach out to the other side, because he knows that this term is important for his legacy,” expressed Manafort. “But more important than that, he’s running to change — to get back to where he had the country pre-COVID in his first term.”

Knocking down unfounded concerns over the peaceful transfer of power, he went on, “[Trump] gave up power. He may have objected to the election, but on January 20, at 12 o’clock, he walked off the stage and got on a plane and flew to Florida, and so he’s proven already that he will leave office when his term is up. He doesn’t have to agree with the results of an election to prove he’s a Democrat.”

Leading up to the point, Cuomo brought up differences between the current race and past elections as he said in part, “…you look at Reagan and how he blew out Carter in ’80 and then, of course, Mondale again there. You look at H.W. Bush on the ascendant. You look at George W. Bush. Those campaigns bear no resemblance to what you and I are witnessing in real time with Trump and [Vice President Kamala] Harris. Even though a lot of the issues were the same, and some of them were worse.”

“Certainly, in the 1980s we had stagflation, we had the hostage crisis in Iran, but the tone and the language and the promise was so different. How do you account for that, Paul?” asked the host.

To that, he pointed out the pivotal moment of the Reagan-Carter debate where the Republican nominee deemed “a loose cannon” and a “cowboy” had posed the question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

“We’re seeing the same thing here,” Manafort contended. “I mean, in many respects, I’ve been comparing this to 1980 because you’ve got an unpopular president, the president who’s not viewed as having succeeded on some of the major issues…of the time, like inflation, like the border, like the two wars going on overseas and, and you have a candidate now, which is the unique part of history that actually has been president before, with a record that can be measured up against the current administration of Biden-Harris.”

He also called out Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) for not answering if he’d work across the aisle, “He didn’t answer it. You said, ‘Will you work with the other side?’ And he said, ‘Well, let me answer the first question first,’ and started defending the way in which Harris became the candidate.”

Meanwhile, the consultant had some thoughts on Haley who appeared on Fox News with a critical look at Trump’s campaign and matters that women voters could take umbrage with while she had been kept off the trail with the Republican nominee.

“I know there have been conversations going on with her, whether they’ve gotten schedules worked out or not, I’m not sure, but there have been conversations,” said Manafort when Cuomo asked why she hadn’t been enlisted, noting the prominence of abortion as an issue to the left.

“She endorsed him again tonight when on an interview she did on another network when she said that she doesn’t have to agree with Donald Trump all the time to know that he’s the best one to be president, and she and her family are four solid behind Donald Trump,” he offered.

Kevin Haggerty
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