what about the state department workers with sort of an atmosphere at the whougs aite h and all these people being fired or leaving unceremoniously? we have a period similar to the beginning of the administration and people don t know what direction they re supposed to be taking. we have a new secretary of state going to be coming in assuming pompeo is confirmed, has a different policy directions on the iran deal and other things. but people don t really know who s the decision maker right now. is it the secretary? is it the president? what exactly is our job and our mission at the moment? that s something people are trying to sort out. it s been reported that the president does thrive on all of this chaos and said that change is actually good. do you think do you buy it? does he thrive on this chaos? do you think he s able to get things done despite when s happening around him? no. i think he does strive on chaos but when you think about it
unclear about presidential policy. you know, the president ran more on attitude than he did on specific policy directions? we kind of that had that yesterday in the u.n. general assembly. so i think a lot of folks in there were made a bit nervous because not all the ambiguity was cleared up by the president s speech. let s get your take on what s happening with special counsel mueller and the revelation that manafort had a pfizer warrant, maybe several warrants on him. what do you make of that? yeah. obviously it s very important, chris. and kudos to the network for many kg out with that a couple of days ago. i m trying to get clarity on what is going on here. two kinds of warrants that the u.s. government can go get in order to listen to the conversations of an american. sometimes our language isn t quite precise. so i really would like to know, i d really like to ask the
ground troops, for example, to re-establish that red line in syria. who would imagine 15 years later we d be talking about dropping a massive bomb in afghanistan at this point right now? real quickly, josh, leave start with you, steve bannon, does he survive in the west wing? if he does, more dangerous on the outside? more dangerous to trump, possibly. we ve seen steve bannon s history, the way he can turn tools against you if you cross him. i don t know if he s going to survive or not. it s clear he s on the outs in the white house. i d push back on heidi saying this is a more traditional white house. a lot of people ascendant in the white house are democrats, gary cohen, jared kushner until recently a democrat. one thing i wonder with this new guard in the white house is whether they would work with a republican congress, can push donald trump in unexpected policy directions he doesn t have support for in the other
minute he gets into office. getting rid of a lot of executive orders that president obama put into place, and so i m guessing that s really going to be the first that i think we re going to see happen. it s doable. it s something that he can do on the first day or within a few days. jennifer epstein, we get all of this focus on personnel because of the personalities involved in naming the cabinet and the comings and goingings at trump tower. what s your sense of how much policy work or legislative planning there is going on? i think that that is still kind of at a kind of nascent stage. i think that this is very much still about figuring out who the people are. and some of the planning for who the people are should reflect what the general overview of policy directions is. and i think that that s probably some of what the debate is about, in terms of talking about something like the secretary of state back and forth that s been going on, i think that that speaks to donald trump s
limited response. how much is this addressed today is political? if you read through the lines, this plan would allow president obama to claim that he was the one, he was the one who ebbed the wars in both iraq and afghanistan. is this more about obama trying to define his presidency than anything else? well, yeah. go ahead, howard. i think it s partly that. i think it s in some respects it s less a foreign policy immediate foreign policy speech with all kinds of new policy directions than it is a sort of legal document like kind of an argument saying i do, in fact, have a foreign policy. what he has done is kind of looked at the last several years and put a shape on it almost retroactively and come up with his doctrine of every just because we have a big hammer,