john: i am john heilemann. mark: i am mark halperin. with all due respect, if you let donald trump picks the chair, he has options. trump: you originally come from ohio, right? paul o'neill of the yankees. mark: on the show tonight, a

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. i'll 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 won't 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 anti-establishment, 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 don't 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 pile-on. >> this is the most risky and reckless tax proposal ever put forward by a major presidential 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 don't 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 doesn't 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 voice-only 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 clinton's 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, "i'm 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 clinton's 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 trump's 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 post's" 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 built-in 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 anti-trump? >> i'm 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 anti-trump 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 off-balance 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 full-throated 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 can't 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 african-americans, 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 clinton's 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 clinton's 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 we've 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 60-40. 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 top-testing 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 i think it's the same thing for donald trump to be talking about what he has been talking about. i think that it is ok for us to contrast records and tell the truth about the opponent. mark: not his divorce, for instance? his bankruptcies?

>> i think we'll look at his whole business record. his personal life is not something we are going to do and i do not think it will work. john: of the potential trump attacks on hillary clinton, where do you think she is the most vulnerable? >> i think that there is a misconception with her record on trade and i think you will see us take this on pretty directly. i think that a thing that we have learned from the primary and the last five days is that you never know what he will say. we are prepared to take him on in any particular instance and we will be on the air earlier than june 8. >> thank you for being here. always a pleasure. up next, we examine donald trump's media playbook. if you are watching us in washington, d.c., you can listen to us on the radio. we will be right back. ♪

mark: our next guest lives in a fancy glass house and his column takes the media to task for getting a lot about donald trump wrong. >> i liked the glass house analogy. mark: the times was as skeptical as trump as any other news agency. has there been soul-searching at the paper and at the stories that said, "trump in trouble?" >> there is always soul-searching at the new york

times. mark: with colleagues in the cafeteria? >> i am not allowed in the cafeteria. there is always an examining of what we do and you see it with an the way david sanger does good and driving policy pieces. we were maybe a little late, but we were in good company. john: we talked about the notion of some people, having been really wrong in the first part of the campaign, they may now overcompensate and, not necessarily "sucking up," but second guessing themselves so much that they now overrate his chances and say that he must be brilliant. >> definitely. we react to what we screwed up on the last time around.

there is real peril. with that said, this campaign is hard to surf. how could you not? mark: what are the tough aspects of covering donald trump going forward and the particular challenges? >> checking assumptions. we talk about the map and what to expect. i am in a great position where i get to judge the coverage. it is not comfortable for me to do. i know it is hard. you cannot assume that what has been is what will be. secondarily, donald trump knows how to fill airtime with his agenda. he is compelling. he knows how to make all of us sit at the end of the seat. how do you balance that in the race? i do not see hillary clinton

being the same kind of candidate and i assume that she will have to push herself out there. that will be really hard. mark: what about donald trump's lack of specificity? is it a challenge for the press ? >> once you get past this race and that race, it is time to say, "the plan to deport immigrants, what does that look like?" and, "hillary clinton, isis, foreign policy, you are hawkish."

john: here's an opportunity to exercise one of the great prerogatives of your job. who has covered donald trump well? >> reporters at every organization have covered him well. i am not saying that as a copout. i think that the washington post has done a nice job and there was a story -- and the by-line i remembering -- the byline i'm remembering is costas -- i think they have been vindicated nicely. mark: i would say that we have had bright spots. there were people who did not want to cover him when it looked like it was getting in the race. everyone had bright spots and less bright. >> in 2011, i wrote, donald trump, give me a break. i was skeptical. how could you not be? we were talking to people in the tea party and they said that they were not going along with what the establishment was telling them.

there was a predicate set that some of us were missing. >> do you have a sense of trump's relationship with fox? >> i gather the relationship is >> i gather the relationship is among the most complicated. >> mother daughter, tenent landlord, and trump and fox? >> it has improved from when he had a sick up session. -- a sick obsession. i know that he will be on with megyn kelly a week from today. that would tell you that the rift as been taking care of -- the rift has been taken care of. john: trump live events, good, bad? >> there has to be more discretion. mark: thank you.

jeff daniels, the actor, joins us, when we come back. ♪

john: our next yes to is a resident of michigan, giving him street credibility of around these parts and he just got nominated for a tony on the street known as broadway. >> he is the start of the dark and complicated show play. jeff daniels, thank you for joining the show. you did this show some years ago. " it is dark, complicated, and

controversial." it nearly killed you. you're doing it again. why? mr. daniels: it is broadway and, when you are asked to star on something -- in something on broadway, you have to take it seriously. it is a controversial subject, child abuse, and it is a tough sell on broadway. i like the commercial risk. personally, i did not think that i had done it right. i did not go far enough before. i held back. and, in looking at it again with the director, he said, "let's reimagine it and go darker and deeper." it is a new attack on it. john: you play the abuser. that's one of the key elements of why it is dark and difficult for you. mr. daniels: it starts in a conference room within a business and i am dragging

michelle williams down the hallway and i throw her in the room, "what do you want and why are you here?" she is playing a woman who is 27 years old. she sits down and she says, let's talk about when you abuse me when i was 12. and she ate leaving. >> it is a feel-good play. mr. daniels: there are a couple of songs and i dance. it is unlike any other play. we start where some plays would climax. and round the room number nine of a 10 round fight. we are there already and we stay there for 90 minutes. mark: you can get a good feel of how the audiences are reacting. how do they react to this? mr. daniels: they come in bracing themselves and you can feel that. broadway, especially drama, the audience is so smart and these are some of the smartest theater-goers in the world.

to hold them and hang onto them, so that several times during the show it is dead silent. dead silent. i have had friends say that they are afraid to breathe and that it is suffocating. it just gets worse and worse. mark: is your goal to do the performance the same way every daniels:alter it? mr. it changes every time, but it starts here and you cannot ease into it. a lot of plays start nice and easy and then it starts -- we come in dramatic and at a high level. you do not want to get on top of the horse and ride the same horse. you may have to do this and this when you are doing it to keep it alive, you have to get on and gallop. john: i want to talk about something that is almost as dark as this, the presidential

election. i visited you in michigan and we talked about the presidential campaign. i want to play the sound because i want to hear what you had to say about where you thought we would end up. jeff daniels: i think it is the best that the system has allowed us to do, branding a clinton and jeb bush. hillary not jeb and come election time, i would be very surprised. maybe it won't be jeb. it doesn't seem like hillary has anybody who will challenge her. john: you kind of missed the mark. jeff daniels: i might have swung and missed. >> talk about how trump has impressed you as a performer. daniels: he has a impressed me as a performer. as someone in the entertainment business, i think he is a manipulator. someone who has done a masterful job of marketing a president, which is, you know how long that

has been going on, but it seems to be, was social media and cable news, even more so. as someone said, it is a kardashian world. mark: you do not feel great about trump. have you feel about the supporters? mr. daniels: i agree that they were betrayed by the republican party. maybe goes back further but karl rove and company grabbed them and promised them things that did not happen and they are disaffected. donald trump plays into hatred and the worst possible things we can create, fan that flame. that is why you have racism and bigotry. the hat should say, "make america white again." that is what it should say. he knows that and he is playing to that. whether he can take it to november -- you want to say no, but where has he tripped up yet?

i look at the stats and hope to hell that everybody who does not want him to be president shows up and votes. john: bernie sanders won michigan. what do you think about bernie? and the sanders movement? daniels: i love bernie. i love the ideas that he has got. it is like somebody who went to woodstock is running for president. great ideas. free health care, free college. going for all of that. great ideas but, that thing called "congress" is a problem. just -- it is not just the president of the united states. it is "the president of the world." like hillary or not, and i do, she has international street and it is a dangerous world. i liked that she has been around

it several times as secretary of state and her whole history. like him or not, bill clinton is available as a sounding board. internationally, i feel safer. john: we have four movie titles of yours, which applies better for the election. "good night and good luck." "something wild." "dumb and dumber." or "the squid and the whale." they are all very evocative. jeff daniels: if donald trump wins, it is "good night and good luck." mark: we will be right back. ♪

>> we leave you with the news that marco rubio does not want to be donald trump's running mate. he says he has reservations about donald trump's campaign and concerns about his policies that remain unchanged. >> no marco on the ticket. >> no-trump-rubio. >> trump does a lot of good things but he did not pick up this. coming up, emily chang goes to boston and dives into the startup scene. with the cofounder of smart capital. thank you for watching and until tomorrow, we say to you, sayonara. ♪ [ soft music ]

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simply by using your voice. the billboard music awards, live sunday may 22nd, 8/5 pacific, only on abc. rishaad: it's tuesday, the 10th of may. business." nding we are going to sydney this hour. this is a look at what we are watching. the miners being crushed today on the back of iron ores tumble. streak andst losing would you believe it, since 2000. takata predicting a