before, this idea of how often hee he s doing these briefings. at one point it seemed like mike pence was getting more briefings than him. i will say donald trump, inasmuch as people might be upset about how he s handling these things and how he s kind of freewheeling it, he s in some ways acting as though he really wants to be able to kind of bask in this and really wants to be able to do what he feels like he can do as a president and set a new tone. case in point, the call with taiw taiwan, the call with the taiwanese leader, donald trump can say i can pick um the phone for whoever wants to give me ghagss. this is my moment. i m going to take this call. i don t think we should jump to conclusion and say we re realigning u.s. policy. 1979 was the last time a u.s. president spoke to a taiwanese leader. so i think what donald trump is doing is carbon monoxide of pushing buttons and seeing how far he can go because he ran in some ways a freewheeling campaign and that worked for him. w
important thing for everybody there, and then it will slow down a little bit and take about a week to get in and get all that stuff out to see if they can determine the cause, the origin of the fire. jim kavanagh, thanks so much. thanks, richard. up next, the latest fallout from president-elect trump s controversial phone call with the leader of taiwan and his search for secretary of state. when you find something worth waiting for, we ll help you invest to protect it for the future. financial guidance while you re mastering life. from chase, so you can. what s going on? oh hey! that s it? yeah.
with taiwan s newly elected leader. kelly o donnell joins us. mike pence saying today this is a courtesy call, a manner of process. mike pence is often in the role of defending donald trump and he s done that throughout the campaign and now in this phase. so he knew those questions were coming and is trying to tone down the outside criticism that this was a breach of protocol, this was a dayway to provoke china, to be unsettling to the diplomatic community. mike pence tried to say, hey, nothing to see here. let s watch that clip from meet the press. chuck, this was a courtesy call. the democratically elected president of taiwan called to congratulate the president-elect and as a gracious man nothing new should be read into it? well, i i i don t think so. one of the things that makes this interesting, richard, is typically when a new president is in this phase of preparing a government, the current state department which is filled with career employees, not political e
taiwan. since the early 1980s there s been efforts to either lend support to taiwan or even sell arms in this way. so we have basically had a two-tract policy but have maintained that policy. i had ambassador christopher hill on who obviously was in charge of the diplomatic relations between the countries under george w. bush. why is that the policy believed to work? others have come out in the wake of all of this including michael pillsbury who worked under reagan and george w. bush and obama and said it s not a zero sum game anymore. the goal of china has been to normalize relations and hopefully to integrate both countries rather than create an adversarial situation. couldn t this be the first step? not this way. i don t think people are disputing having different relations with taiwan but doing
these things have happened but if you want to change this you ought to have some consultation, bring the senate, the congress involved in this. you ought to talk to the state department. there are a lot of things you want to do besides make a phone call. so i think what i worry about more than the actual issue of what happened yesterday is the process. the president is the leader obviously, but he also is presiding over a large government of institutions and professionals who know a lot about how to do these things. i think we have a real process problem here and i hope that when president-elect becomes president, he will have a staff to make sure we don t have problems like this in the future. a guest on my show earlier tonight said that essentially they believe that the taiwan president is playing donald trump knowing that the president-elect would take her phone call and she could ruffle feathers and rattle the chinese. do you see it that way? i think there s an element of