jon meacham, i want to start with you for the historical framing of this particular oval office address. i ve already reported that it was used as a fund-raising event both before and after for the trump campaign. but also, this is the first time i ve seen an address from the oval office requesting the preemption of entertainment programming on the broadcast networks for a president to simply announce his negotiationing position in a legislative struggle with congress in which there is a bipartisan support for the opposite president frosition fr president s position. this is both a campaign event and simply an announcement of normal kind of legislative interaction that the president used this time for. how many times, lawrence, has something been the first time you ve seen something in the past two years or so? there are a couple of thoughts here. one is, basically, it seems to
at this point, we simply don t know the answer. what did a russian-affiliated intelligence person, at least in the view of the special counsel, want with trump polling data? and one explanation may be, look, they re in the midst of a social media campaign to help donald trump win the presidency. and it s useful to have some of the campaign s information on their polling numbers and where they re polling well and who they re polling well among and who they need to make up ground. it also could be something very different, it could be an effort by the trump campaign to show that the president or the candidate then was doing better than the other polls suggested. we just don t know, but we certainly need to find out. it goes, i think, to the very issue of whether and to what degree and how trump campaign personnel may have been either colluding or conspireing with the russians. and what do you see today in the indictment of natalia veselnitskaya that happened today and this was outside
since you ve been such a strong supporter and one of our greatest advocates for thean wat we have decided to extend your deadline to get on the list. and that, that is what the president s request for network broadcast time tonight was all about. heas used it to raise money for his re-election campaign, pretending to his supporters that the money they would contribute wouldey be used to secure the border and he did not say one new thing in that speech thatin he read from that teleprompter in the oval office tonight. here s the essence of the president s speech. my fellow americans, tonight, i am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southernse border. as part of an overall approach
or is he staying silent on that? and his members understand it immediately. if they don t hear from unhim, they knowif that they are set fe in terms of his perspective, anyway, any of them who want to go out and turn against this trumpur shutdown, it seems to m are being allowed to do that and it could even get to the point where theyve are secretly being encouraged to do it. mitch mcconnell never wants to be perceived as the person who turned against president trump in a situation like this. but if a dozen of his members move that way, what can he do, rachel, what can he do? it s just that he has to overtly do something at that h point. he does have to let something come up for a vote. i mean, he can go on invacation he can pretend it s not him but ultimately, everybody knows that he controls what comes up for a vote. well, there is a parliamentary hole in that so if you get enoughme momentum on th other side, there is a parliamentary hole that could
portions of the border where some kind of barrier can be built that has not been built? h. there s some areas where we need to replace existing walls. places in nogales, arizona, they use old crafts from aircraft landing, things from world war ii. generally speaking the areas where we need the walls, the walls exist and if they don t exist, it s because simply the terrain doesn t lend itself to it. what we really, really need are the immigration judges and got to give them credit for requesting 75 new immigration judges, but what we don t knee need is $5.7 billion dedicated to a wall that s going to. be ineffective. if you could correct the president on one thing you know he thinks, if you had one minute with him, what would you tell him? i don t know if a minute would be enough. terrorists are not coming across between the ports of entry. quite frankly what concerns me is all the talk about criminal aliens. it s not just that the immigrant population tends to commit crimes at a