MSNBC's Michael Steele Blames The Media For Voters Not Understanding Trump Trial: "It's Everybody"

KATY TUR, MSNBC: This is a criminal trial. The very first criminal trial of a president, it is happening right now. You're talking about polls in May. Yeah, we're a lot of months out from the election, but Donald Trump's winning in these polls. He's beating him in five out of six battleground states all while this prosecution is painting a picture of him having sex with a porn star then lying about it, getting his lawyer to cover it up for him so that he wasn't going to affect the outcome of this election or he was going to affect it positively by keeping that story under wraps. I mean, and you talk about the family being there and all the ways this should disqualify Donald Trump to be the president again and yet his polls don't show that. Why is that, Michael?

MICHAEL STEELE, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: I think there are a lot of reasons for that. I think it's largely the way the media's covered this from the very beginning, to be quite honest about it. The way you just encapsulated it, Katy, is absolutely the way it is, but that's not how it's been portrayed largely to the public. The scenario as you laid it out with that fact pattern has not been put in front of the voters the way you just described it, to be very honest about it, number one. Because the way you described it, that's less sensational. That's less gotcha. That's less the narrative we see from the Speaker of the House.

TUR: But you've got to define your terms. You talk about media. Media, what is media? Is it people on cable news?

STEELE: Everybody.

TUR: On this network? Is it Tiktok? Is it Twitter?

STEELE: I'm not going to do this dance. Stop.

TUR: Is it newspapers?

STEELE: Everybody.

TUR: It's just people are getting information from all different sources right now. They can go where they want to get the information. So I just want you to define your terms when you say media.

STEELE: There's an inconsistent message across the board. That's all I'm saying. I'm not putting the finger on whether it's TV, or radio, or social media. It's everybody that's telling the story, number one.

Number two, the political side of this has just been one where there have been more vacuums created than information to fill those vacuums. So whether that's how the Democratic party from the political arm sort of does the political narrative of this because the Republican party has been very good and very consistent about that, right?

So they have made, they have stood by and defended their guy regardless and now they've got the message they all need to show up. So what are they doing? They're showing up. And how are we reporting that? We're reporting that as if this is something oh, very important, transfixed, transactional certainly, but a transition for Donald Trump. No. It's part of the political narrative. It's part of the fact that yeah, we're trying to create a different image here than the one of the man sitting in the courtroom by himself because his family's not there. And so we're going to put them out there and they're all starting to line up. So all I'm just saying is how all this comes together does matter in how the voters in May are looking at this. It will be a very different conversation you and I will be having in August after the conventions and after much more head-to-head engagement between the two nominees for the presidency. That's all I'm saying at this point.