Former presidential speechwriter Jon Lovett on Thursday compared electing Donald Trump to a plane crash.
Lovett was asked to evaluate Trump and Hillary Clinton as candidates while appearing on Bloomberg's With All Due Respect with a colleague, fellow former speechwriter Jon Favreau. Both Favreau and Lovett worked as speechwriters for President Obama.
"Leave their issue positions aside for a moment—I'm not minimizing that—but just in terms of political skill, in terms of performance day in and day out and all things candidates do, are they equal? Is one better than the other?" co-host Mark Halperin asked.
"I just—" Lovett began.
"Don't say you object to the premise," Halperin said.
"I don't, no," Lovett said.
"Candidate performance matters," Halperin said.
"Well, sure it does. But it's like, we're in the middle of like, a national crisis. Like, I don't want to treat him like a normal guy, he's not a normal candidate. This is, it's like when a plane crashes, okay, a bunch of things have to go wrong, right," Lovett said. "We have all these safeties and back ups and a hydraulic thing and a pilot has to make a mistake, we're one mistake away from the plane crashing into the mountain. Like, I don't, is Trump a good politician? I don't know, he's a ... it's a nightmare."