“He’s going to get a lot more of these provocations the longer he goes in this race,” Axelrod told CNN host Anderson Cooper. “And if he deals with them in this way, he’s going to create other problems for himself that go to whether he has the discipline at this stage in his life to do the job.”

“I think that to a degree, that fire was there and I think people might respond positively to that if he had approached it in a different way, if he had said that’s not true,” Axelrod said. “Even calling him a damn liar, I think that was over the line, but it showed some fight. But then to get into the push-ups and how much he knows and, was just seemed a little bit off the rail.”