But first, so John, we were already on Good Morning America.

You were talking about messaging.

And then afterwards you spoke with the former president.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, yeah.

He was, well, first the headliners, he was watching Weekend Good Morning America, which is good.

Sounds like a great headline to me.

That's a good thing.

That's a good thing.

Look, what I had said on the show was that, you know, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign actually has a very coherent and very clear closing message.

And that is, they argue, and you can dispute this, but they argue life was much better when Donald Trump was president.

Inflation was lower.

The economy was better.

We weren't at war.

There weren't wars raging in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

Things were better than they are now.

It's like, are you better off now than you were four years ago is the closing argument.

Trump says that at the beginning of every rally, but then he goes off into, you know, totally different directions, whether it's talking about Liz Cheney should be staring down the barrel, you know, nine rifles.

Just one of those things that when not a lot can surprise you and shock you.

That was truly shocking to me.

That was like beyond.

That was beyond.

And, you know, it's a dark, ominous, divisive message coming from Trump himself that isn't so much what the campaign is trying to do.

Yeah.

So I said that.

And then I talked to him on the phone and he took it.

So I have a message.

I have a great message.

And I kind of pushed back a little bit with him and said, well, there's the weave.

You know, he talks about the weave.

Yeah.

About his speech kind of goes like this and it goes like this.

And he said something interesting.

I hadn't heard him say.

He says, well, the weave is what got me elected president.

That's interesting.

You know, and part of it, you know, but but look, it's he's engaged.

There was no one other interesting thing.

I said, is there any way you could lose?

Because he talks about how I'm up in all the battleground states, et cetera, et cetera.

And he was kind of he said, yeah, yeah, I guess so.

No bad things can happen.

I was fascinated by that when you put your reporting out internally, obviously, the Harris campaign says that Trump appears to be unraveling.

They highlighted moments from his North Carolina rally where he said, you know, he's in trouble if he loses some of the other concerning things that we talked about.

So he wants to him.

How are him and his allies responding to that, though?

You know, look, I talked to a very close ally, longtime ally of Donald Trump just yesterday who said Trump has never gone into a general election with a lead and that he seems it almost seems to this person as if he's trying to lose.

So there's a real frustration that he hasn't you know, that he's done so many things that seems so blatantly self-destructive.

You're trying to close the deal.

You're trying to reach out to the last remaining persuadable voters.

And there are persuadable voters.

And they're more intense and more numerically significant at the end because the people that have made up their mind have voted a lot of them.

And you have to get voters not just to persuade them if they're trying to decide between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, but to persuade them to vote or not to vote.

And a Madison Square rally like we saw with all that, some of it absolutely blatant, hateful, racist rhetoric that we heard there or the kind of violent rhetoric that we heard with his comments on Liz Cheney.

This is not the way you're going to reach those final voters.

Yeah.

And to that point, there is actually a poll out of Iowa.

And I'm sorry to put you on the spot.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely.

It's making headlines.

And people are talking about it because it shows Kamala Harris leapfrogging over Trump and being up maybe three points.

I mean, obviously, Iowa is not one of those battleground states, but they specifically pointed to older women.

Yep.

Yep.

Hey, hey, look, Trump won Iowa by eight points last time, won by even bigger margin before.

Nobody expects that Kamala Harris is going to win in Iowa.

And then this poll hits.

And a little bit of background on this poll, because I've been following the Des Moines Register's poll for as long as I've been covering politics, pretty much.

And I remember very vividly when they were polling on the Iowa caucuses in 2008.

You remember when Hillary Clinton was the de facto Democratic nominee.

And I remember it.

I think it came out on a Sunday night.

It might have been.

So don't quote me.

It was it was over the weekend.

And I remember the particularly the Obama people who thought they felt something happening in Iowa.

They were refreshing their their pages, waiting for that poll to clear.

And it cleared and it showed Obama beating Hillary Clinton.

And Obama did beat Hillary Clinton, obviously, in 2008 in Iowa.

And then last time around, by the way, that poll, which also came out the weekend before the election in 2020, it had Trump winning by seven points, ended up winning by eight.

So it's got a very good track record.

Is it accurate?

I mean, even among pollsters, this is like, yeah, I mean, I mean, look, who knows?

Who knows?

I like I said, I don't hear too many people who seriously think that Trump is going to win in Iowa.

But the question is, does the poll, remember, polls have a margin of error, obviously.

And if Trump is going to narrowly win Iowa, if it's reflecting something like that, that is a that is a potentially an earthquake, because that means he's doing well with the kind of Midwestern voters that could well drive the races in Wisconsin and in Michigan, perhaps Pennsylvania.

It is fascinating to watch.

That's why the producers have been telling me to wrap up.

But, John, this is so fascinating.

Well, that's why I took my earpiece out so they couldn't hear me.

I appreciate that, John.

All right.

Thank you so much.

And make sure to watch this week on ABC News Live right here.