and remember, i was at the first vice president pence s speech at this conference in 2017. back then there was cautious optimism that there were grown-ups around. they were going take care of this transatlantic alliance. that was absent at this meeting. and they ve kind of moved on. and i think that s really scary for american national security interests, because we have real challengers out there. russia first and foremost, china for the rest of the century. we cannot go it alone in dealing with these kinds of competitors. that s the first thing. the second thing, however, yes. the vice president biden s speech got tremendous applause. by the way, speaker pelosi was in the room too. when she stood up to wave, everybody thunderous applause for her. and there was a good news message too. there were, as you already said, 50 members of congress there, democrats, republicans from the senate, from the u.s. congress. and i heard lots of positive
anything to build a nuclear weapon. yet trump pulled us out of the nuclear deal. look, forget jason borne. forget all the spy movies you ve seen. the main job of these intelligence agencies is to go out, find out what s going on in the world, tell policymakers so they can make decisions, give them the information they need. so if the president and his policymakers aren t listening to this information, what information are they listening to? is it all just their beliefs or what they want to believe? i think those are questions they need to consider here. what kind of message does a disconnect between the president and the intelligence community send to adversaries like putin? well, it s a good news message for guys like putin. it s a really bad news message for our allies. that was alluded to in the introduction to the written statements that were made today by the leadership of the intelligence community. the concern that, you know, this
house wants the story to be today, this weekend, next week. distract. it s important to talk about. he didn t take a single question there about the other relevant stories. he didn t take a question. let s be fair, no president would if they didn t want to step on their good news message, which this certainly was. this is good news and it s economic news and it s substantive news. it takes some of the heat off the president for some of the drama that is relentless and never ending over this michael cohen and the audiotapes. those are very real issues. they cut to the president s credibility and they go to the underpinnings of wide ranging federal investigation that exists for legitimate reasons. the question on the economics of this is how long is this going to last. from a political perspective, it may not matter if it lasts past november, it s good for the president and it s good for his party. that s what he is counting on right now. you cover economic as well.