believes it s our plot to unseat him as the leader of north korea. that s his biggest fear and why you ve seen president xi and president putin, both of whom mr. trump will be seeing later this week, both make the case for a freeze on missile and nuclear activity in return for the u.s. pulling back on all military exercises on the korean peninsula. shannon, we can see how complicated this is in the spectrum of responses, the secretary of state rex tillerson has had about north korea. so yesterday he released that long statement that you may have just seen in the piece talking about how north korea is a global threat. back in april, he tried a different tact, very different, in fact the opposite, where he put this out, this official statement, north korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. the united states has spoken enough about north korea. we have no further comment. so, that didn t work. i mean i understand trying that. that sounded good at the time,
between the tweets about mika brzezinski and joe scarborough and the closed line tweet for lack of a better word about cnn. those have impact stateside, but it s not as impactful as, frankly, if you do it on the international stage. so i think he is a man divided. he likes to provoke, he likes to be tough, right, the era of strategic patience is over, at the same time there are no good options, no simple solution here, and words do matter. a lot of trump natural instincts sort of colliding with one another and i don t know candidly what that produces. chris, david, shannon, thank you all very much. thanks. i like his shorthand there, the clothes line tweet referring to the wrestling move i was wondering what the clothes line was. how you used to hang out the clothes and run into my arm, that s the clothes line. your legs go out.
president trump s voter fraud commission is engaging hurdles. a suit to block the request to turn over registered voters as 44 states refuse to comply with some of the commission s requests. back with us the panel, chris, errol, and bring in bloomberg news white house reporter shannon. great to see all of you. shannon, what s going on here? why does the white house seem to set up these things that then immediately there are lawsuits launched against? it seems that they could have done some research to figure out how they could ask questions, for some voter information that is public, that wouldn t run
discuss it all, cnn politics reporter and editor at large chris sa liz za, bloomberg news white house reporter shannon, and cnn political and national security analyst david sanger. david, i want to start with you a piece in the new york times this morning, what can trump do about north korea? what s the answer to that? well, alisyn, his options are not good, and he has discovered over the past six months, i think in a pretty abrupt, some might say brutal way, that it s a lot easier to make ultimatums about what the north koreans will not do than to actually stop them. he s got four major steps he could take. he could try the incre mental increase in sanctions that secretary tillerson referred to in that statement last night, in which the united states admitted that this was, in fact, an ibcm. no one i know believes that s likely to work. the north koreans aren t especially sensitive to this. they re not going to give up their missile and nuclear