Gov. Huckabee on Trump’s reelection strategy: 'The president has got some challenges'

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told “America’s Newsroom” on Friday that President Trump "has got some challenges” heading into the 2020 election.

He added, however, that “there’s more than enough time for him to remind people that the worst thing they can do is elect Joe Biden, who is an AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], Green New Deal, open border, raise your taxes, make the government bigger, shut your mouth if you're a religious kind of guy.”

Huckabee made the comments as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden leads Trump in the polls.

Last week, the release of a slew of national and key battleground states polls all showed Biden either outright leading or edging Trump in the national popular vote — and more importantly, in the crucial states Trump won four years ago to upset Hillary Clinton.

The release of the surveys – from Fox News, New York Times/Siena College, NPR/PBS/Marist, Quinnipiac University and Marquette Law School – appear to spell trouble for the president as he fights for another four years in the White House.

But Huckabee noted that it is still a long way from Election Day, saying poll numbers “matter only in showing maybe a snapshot or a trend.”

“It doesn't determine how the election is going to turn out because a lot of things can happen,” he continued. “Let’s roll the clock back four months, we weren't shut down with coronavirus then so, so many things can happen.”

He also noted that “the president was way behind at this point in 2016 [when] it looked like Hillary was going to cruise to victory.”

Huckabee went on to say that “there is a mood in this country. I think that mood is beginning to reemerge.”

“A lot of people are fed up with political correctness, they’re disgusted with the nonsense … [getting rid] of the statue of [Christopher] Columbus and put up one of Chef Boyardee,” he explained.

“People have lost their minds, especially with Fourth of July, we’re celebrating America, America, where people can go out and make nutty statements and make fools of themselves. If they tried this in most countries, they’d be shot or jailed for life.”

According to a Monmouth University survey released on Thursday, 52 percent of registered voters questioned said they’re at least somewhat confident that Biden has the mental and physical stamina to carry out the extremely demanding job of president. Only 45 percent said the same thing about Trump.

However, a third of those questioned said they were very confident that the president has the mental and physical fitness to carry out his job, compared with 23 percent for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Host Leland Vittert asked Huckabee if Trump “needs to change what he is talking about … and what issues he's running on.”

“It's not that he changes what he's saying, it’s changing sometimes the manner in which he says it,” Huckabee said in response. “And I don't mean that he becomes the soft-spoken genteel sort of guy that he never is going to be because that's not his style, but it is making it about the slights that the country is feeling, not the ones that he is feeling.”

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He went on to explain that “most American voters and families and single moms out there and families trying to recover from [the] coronavirus impact, they don't care that somebody has insulted the president, they don't care if somebody’s lied about it, what they care about is whether they’re going to recover and whether they’re neighborhoods are going to be safe or will they be overrun by a bunch of protesters who breakdown their doors and steal their stuff.”

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Huckabee said he thinks President Trump has “got to be the champion for the people, not the champion for his own problems that he faces because he's hated by the news media and hated by the far left.”

Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.