in washington, d.c., senate majority leader mitch mcconnell. nen there s his war of word with the democrats and. what a day yesterday. good morning. it friday, august 11th. mika has the morning off. with us we have vet van columnist, mike barnicle, woor still trying to find a title for him. send is in with two proof of purchase jeremy peters. john, you were on the air yesterday when these press avails happened. they were really bizarre in many ways. yes, we re all focusing on this new cold war between us and north korea and like austin powers, there s only two things that care me, of course nuclear power and the other carney. i think this the long run, this war that thhe s raised with mit mcconnell, mitch mcconnell runs capitol hill. and it just ongoing to anybody who knows how the big ban works. this is a little improvised. comparing the administration right now. but on the no republican president would wage war on the majority leader of the united states senate. at the same time he s waging war on mitch mcconnell. he getting involved trying to beat jeff flake in arizona. he getting involved directly or incorrectly, trying to defeat dean heller in nevada. of course he doesn t understand that all blows up in your face. but i wonder if frjs. it does raise an important question, right? it sounds romantic and brash and iconoclastic to say i m not a member of the independent party. but you need to get some votes somewhere. and donald trump is definitely getting the democratic vote. if he s going to alienate the republicans and republicans saying i have in parksbrnl what are going out on twitter, attacking paul ryan with haurkt fire. drpt and the two most important places on capitol hill hill. you have the sentiment right when you say this is trump being more independent. there is no pure embodiment of the washington machine, washington establishment that he ran against than mitch mcconnell and paul ryan. and if you talk to the white house, some people inside the white house see a very dicey september coming up. you re going to have debts over the debt ceiling, and there s concern that could somehow sign a resolution that does not contain finding with the wall, which is already dicey. in a has not gone well for him on the right. also mike barnicle, you look at the support among republicans and among his base, it seems to be relining. i want to look the yesterday s press avails from 30,000 feet and not just look i know everybody s looking about north korea right now. i m telling people what he does know what to do if he s vlg the longest impact but he did sam soy extraordinary i recall frightening things. pee did see some strange things about paul mann forp. it s a good thing. you saw the president of the united states literally trying to goad an unstable machine no do willing is completely game. the president of the united states clearly does not understand the concept of legislating in b.c., you do need some friend to help you, l it s mish mcconnell, paul ryan, whoever it is. we saw the president alienate huge parts of his father, if he does have an party. you saw the levelness of urn porched in history. that said, something that the person said, that the leader of north korea said. so this is schoolyard stuff from the president of the united states. now, there may have been an ulterior motive, maybe within the context, reading between the lines he said certainly that was suggested by his national security adviser or the a second. we don t know that. we don t know how it s going to play out. but yesterday was truly beyond bizarre. now for a light touch, let s go to donnie deutsche. what did you think about yesterday? it was a very interesting thing. the clip you guys were just running of trump. this is the first time since he s come on the political scene that i ve seen his arms like this. it s just interesting how you really feel that he is almost afraid, that the more he bluserbluser blusters, the more you feel his pathos, his neuroses. i obviously agree the north korea is the most frightening thing from an existential point of view but waging war on mitch mcconnell shows a complete, complete ignorance on how to govern. when you are campaigning, you go after any politician. that was very successful for him when he ran to office. anybody who has anything to do with washington sucks and i m great and i m going to clean out the swamp. that doesn t work in the real world. as i always said to my office in washington and said we need to go after so and so, i said one war at a time. we only fight one-front wars here. don t tell me we need to start a war somewhere else unless we ve won the first one peacefully. you do not want to be fight it would go front wars, let alone the 10 or 20 that donald trump is fighting right now. we ve talked about all these topics, but the one we haven t yet, the one that probably is making donald trump by drawn up like that and off balanced and nervous and if donnie s right, frightened, is bob mueller. bob mueller is moving forward while donald trump golfs for 17 days straight. bob mueller is not golfing. bob mueller is working. he s getting to the bottom of the facts, he getting to the truth and he s going to apply the law to the truth and that may be something that has donald trump very nervous as he goes out and golfs every day, even while he tells people he does not. yesterday he was attacking mitch mcconnell telling mitch to get back to work when of course he was on a 17-day vacation where he occasionally get a little work in. this is what he said about mitch mcconnell yesterday. i just want him to get repeal and replace done. i ve been hearing repeal and replace for seven years but i ve own been doing this for two years but i ve really own been do this but i ve been iraning and then i get there and i said where s the bill, i want to sign it first day and they don t have it. they passed repeal and replace but they never had a president, frankly or a senate that was going to do it. i said, mitch, get to work and let s get it done. they should have had this last one done. they lost by one vote. for a thing like that to happen is a disgrace and it shouldn t have happened. reporter: some conservatives say it s time for him to retire. i ll tell you what, if he doesn t get repeal and replace down and doesn t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform and if he doesn t get an easy within to get done, infrastructure, if he doesn t get that done, then you can ask me that question. it s unbelievable. he s blaming the republicans for not passing a health care bill when he was getting in the house, saying no kasie hunt changed his position three or four times. my gosh must be steamed right now at donald trump. what s the reaction? mitch mcconnell and donald trump smoke not yesterday but the day before. in between these tweet and before donald trump made all those remarks. i think that tells you a lot about how that phone call went. the sense among mitch mcconnell s cramp is that the president does not understand how things get done in washington, that this is counterproduct of, he should they only needed those 50 votes this they wouldn t get 50 republicans and health care. you re right, he s changed his position back and forth. he was never clear, this is what i want the policy to be. he had things saying have your there s a feeling among mcconnell s team that he need mitch mcconnell and other republicans if he s ever going to pull off the things that voters ultimately are going to judge him for. is he actually able to get anything done? i think that s the feeling on capitol hill. there have also been some call being layingses that republican have made on capitol hill. i do think there are some democrats who are going to be peacekeeper, thankly republicans are in a tougher position going into 2018, the senate. you mentioned jeff flake and heller at the end of the show, if the president goes after those people, he s going to lose mitch mcconnell. he s already started doing that, elease jordan. if bob that s donald trump going in had certain senator denied if a thoin you know, it s something that to this day if i were in congress and the guy asked me for something, i d smile and say let me get back to you. they don t understand. and, by the way, if they did it to my friend, as you know, it would be worse. members come together. and so for donald trump to be clumsy enough to, first of all, attack mitch mcconnell and then to threaten lisa murkowski because when you threaten a member, especially a senator, you just told them they have to fight back and she did. now to do this to heller and jeff flake, he doesn t even have 49 votes now. i mean, good luck. i man getting 46, 47. it seems, elease, every day he s making his job harder. el, he s just had this attitude of being a wrecking ball, coming in through washington and, you know, nothing is going to be left standing in wake of this and he wants to have any hope of having any legislative success, he s setting himself up for disaster. it s delusional the idea that he can forge some agreement with democrats. it s astonishing to me the lack of political leverage this white house exhibits on a game-basis. hey, listen, we re going to keep insulting? is there any gam plan eight all? i don t think on the. i was almost giving up on the possibility of getting a lot done. this is purely political strategy. no one issing issing this, police italy but i think there s already an eye toward what does trum need to do and what s going to as a man who is a party, that is what was appealing for him in 2016 and what president trump thinks is the enduring source of his appeal. . if you had this very narrow view and only taking your race 2016. and 2016 is not the only thing that should good but what he s actually accomplished own the course of his first time. he s goes to frngs on election day or 38%. it s2, 33, 34% now. he s got things flishd o mmm dib mats are reacting and, no, they re not happy. plus the latest on paul mann for the. and donald trump throws himnd the but. bus. we ll be right back. and live tv. the channels you love. your favorite shows and movies. makingour iphone into more of a. oh my tv is ringing. hey.i m in the middle of a.a second iphone from at&t? okay! right now when you buy a new iphone 7 from at&t you ll get a second iphone 7 on us. and power both with unlimited data and live tv. except when it comes to retirement. at fidelity, you get a retirement score in just 60 seconds. and we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. it s your retirement. know where you stand. to keep you on track. looking for a hotel that fits. whoooo. .your budget? tripadvisor now searches over. .200 sites to find you the. .hotel you want at the lowest price. grazi, gino! find a price that fits. tripadvisor. is everything ok?adt, i could hear crackling in the walls, and my mind went totally blank. all i 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reliable than ever. like technology that can update itself. an advanced fiber-network infrustructure. new, more reliable equipment for your home. and a new culture built around customer service. it all adds up to our most reliable network ever. one that keeps you connected to what matters most. a new report telling the pressure on former trump campaign manager paul manafort. bloomberg reports. bloomberg citing a single source says mueller has reportedly also reached out to business associates including manafort s son-in-law and a ukrainian oligarch, kaurcharacterized as information that could be used to squeeze manafort. reports say though he is not a cooperating witness, he has been helping. he alerted authorities to the june 9th 2016 meeting involving don jr. and other campaign representatives. and may 22nd, it was reported he turned over documents in response to a senate committee request and yahoo! lawyers this is what he said. reporter: mr. president, was it appropriate for the fbi to raid the home of paul manafort predawn i thought it was a very, very strong signal or whatever. i know mr. manafort, i haven t spoken to him in a long time but i do know him. he was with the campaign for a short period. have you spoken to the fbi director about it? no, i have not. have i have not. but to do that early in the morning, whether it was appropriate, you d have to ask them. i ve always found him to be a decent man. he s like a lot of other people, probably makes consultant fees all over the place, who knows. i thought that was pretty tough stuff. who? this guy, i knew him for you know, i think i was walking down fifth avenue last summer and i think i was running for r president and i walked by him. acting like he doesn t know him and what should be most concerning to paul manafort is that he s on the cover of the national enkiquirerenquirer t. people thought i was joking when abrought it up the first time but michael flynn was called a russian spy, i think, on the cover of the national enquirer three days before. and i have to straight. these are incredible things unfolding here. he ll say thins never met him, hardly know him, that s what he s doing to manafort now. it seems strange the way he s treating mitch mcconnell because what s happening on the other side here is that bob mule are and his team are starting to turn the screws to whom trump is so trump throwing manafort under the bus may not be in his long-term interest. mark, there s a lot to talk about here but one of the things that joe did not mention that seems really consequential is that now we he was raided by the fbi. rafrd is come plbs financial crimes. do you think is going on in tr it were who s going after you, which agency, which individual and the fact that he s been stacking his team with lawyer like frommin ron, and that is incredibly key. this may urn but there are so many issue with respect to financial matters where this can come up and man fort is probably one of the post blow the trump s lawyer wrote this is a fatal law in the process and would call for a motion to suppress the fruits of the search. fbi agents received privileged and kwout racial with his ser, from. in addition, given the obvious unlawful deficiencies, this extraordinary, invasive tool is employed for its shock value to pi to did frshlg. mark, john dew prng is this not kind of odd that someone else s lawyer is speaking on dehalf of look at who s been brought in, dye cop, kroufs brought into these cases to do who have had their noz radded who worked at the cia and airs force intelligence. it not that uncommon and it happens. and we were kwop raeting prng sfwlrchl and it doesn t have to be from the individual or his lawyers and her do it, they re true be and and they re most run valuable on documents and anything with the witness prpgs may be off be insurance nrnl where s it going to need from a financial standpoint? mark, have really been watching mike flynn and paul manafort for any signs of pee sngs if. i tell you have i had client cooperate with congressional leaders and the government. we had made sure to innrng and at some point in time it s going to become every man and every woman for themselves and they re going to to figure out who is most vulnerable to protect themselves. when you go back to section a, north korea. based on mo if bob mueller will eventually get to his financial record, that this is all about money, he knows it. it started as whitewater started. the blue dress is going to be donald trump s finances. it s one thing to volley with mitch mcconnell and jeff flake but to vow with south korea when you feel every exposed, maybe if i m so presidential here, they won t look over here except it s obviously game of human lives he s playing with each. so thaet, it very interesting. he s been restrained throughout the entire process. his suggest millioner been playing between the lienson i ve you ll actual will opinion heart fobd impressive things about was that statement for mann for the for it for the judge, however the way be twrrks it could be a little bit of efficiency, of course. when we do things like that, we re trying to stend am prng there s some major story every day and we re definitely more in the beginnings of this rather than towards even the middle, much less the end. right. so jong there s in metal necessaricy to judge. we only nrnl flip, people have now gone outside of the inner circle. that s certainly the case. i presume if it were me i would be doing it, doing joan defense agreements with each of these parties so i presume that john toud and the others are talking to lawyer to. what could be be, if snrnl. but you re telling us based on your experience there wasn t anything shocking or unusual about the raid on mann fore . it s a matter of course in some cas cases. oh, absolutely. it happens, ecan t tell you the frequency the one this f it was a front post washington post story. we were cooperating with the fbi fully in providing them information. then all of a sudden nfrmt no criminal charges have ever occurred. the fact that ieb nshlt especially with a dogs and the babbing and stuff but it doesn t mean it going to go anywhere. f nfrmt what was the perfect of the raid to your client? were they trying to send a message to your client or were ethis just trying to ensure your client was being truthful? i assume they were trying to look for records and they found absolutely nothing. in another case they were looking for classified materials the cloont was writing a book about his life in iraq. so it is done and it is sometimes done even when you think you re being fully cooperative. i was surprised the president i guess i m not surprise, with anything that the president does. he should have as any normal and reasonable president would have said let the lawyers comment on that obviously, he can t help himself. can t help himself. there. mark vain. a and, we ll hear from his column ahead on morning joe. do you realize i m. i m so in love with you. whatever you want to do. .is alright with me. ooo baby let s. .let s stay together. my advice for looking get your beauty sleep. and use aveeno® absolutely ageless® night cream with active naturals® blackberry complex. younger looking skin can start today. absolutely ageless® from aveeno®. except when it comes to retirement. at fidelity, you get a retirement score in just 60 seconds. and we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. it s your retirement. know where you stand. to keep you on track. going somewhere? whoooo. here s some advice. tripadvisor now searches more. .than 200 booking sites - to find the hotel you want and save you up to 30%. trust this bird s words. tripadvisor. frankly the people who were questioning that statement was it too tough, maybe it wasn t tough enough. they ve been doing this to our country for a long time, many years. it s about time that somebody stuck up for this country and and for the people of other countries. maybe that statement wasn t tough enough. we re backed 100% by our military and we re backed by many other leaders. i noticed many senators and others today came out very much in favor of what i said. if anything, that statement may not be tough enough. reporter: what would be tougher and fire and fury? you ll see. actualsu actually. and i ll tell you this, north korea better get its act together or they re going to be in trouble like no one has ever been in trouble. wow. mike barnicle, one day he threatens nuclear annihilation of next and the next day he goes, actually, that threat want tough enough. you understand why david ignatius said it s the art of the deal meets dr. strange dlot love. the washington post said president trump has decided to confront what is probably the most reckless, risk-taking regime on the planet. his hope for a diplomatic solution defends on convincing north korea and china that he s ready for the fire and fury of nuclear war should negotiations fail. the united states can t go it alone in war or peace. the danger is trump s rhetoric could destabilize partners more than adversaries. the danger is that trump s rhetoric warned north korea of things they never thought possible. incredibly danger. this is not happening in a vacuum with north korea. president trump has upped the games in iraq, in syria. he s nearly doubled the amount of bombs that we ve dropped and some independent monitors are saying civilian casualties are up by ten times the amounts they were in previous administrations. we ve become detached from a policy that is so over. well, there s this undeniable chaotic aspect that s going on, everything coming out of trump s mouth and the you re you re getting the of the state, the white house. the first i think is less likely to succeed and a lotteries being year. that is to try to dau but second point which is o a little likely to let seed er i have great refr resolution in. we saw lindsey graham talking to on nobody north korea. . they re the ones that take all of their exports. they re the ones that have been sitting by quietly as this crisis has gotten more and more significant. so where are the republicans on capitol hill with trump here? are they at the end of the day going to line up behind him on this, outside of, of course, john mccain. joe, i think there s a will the of deference with republicans and democrats. this is a aggressive and a situation that union foo evening chuck schumer s initial statement said, look, we have to be deliberate and strng i think now there is a significant level of fear, quite frankly, coming from both we ve talked about this over and over again, the weather, the republicans this is the crisis that has most threatened to set the entire ship potentially sinking. they may not say it publicly but there as a lot of fear ind the obama administration kicked the can down the road. it s fascinating, you have republicans and democrats alike from the bush administration, the clinton administration and the obama administration all saying quietly behind the scenes, yeah, we could have done a better job on that and the. donald trump may be able to deliver a nuclear weapon to seattle, portland, san francisco and all points in between. p pshdecisions are ahead. and one of the tough decisions in the immediate future right now is if north korea decide to have a missile test any time within the next week. defense are going too say that could be nuclear requested that s the word s problem. just very quickly. eye nobody s been more critical than trump. i don t have a huge problem with it, it parkand i actually think that rhetoric was kind of needed at this point because nobody s been more critical of this poin. i and a lot of people i talk to, and this is not going to do well for me in the hamptons, saying maybe that needed to be said. i have to say, of course, i never go to places like the hamptons. i m a man of the people right now in middle america, but i have been shocked in middle america hearing people saying the same thing. behind the scenes. yes, they re frightened by the rhetor rhetoric, but at the same time they say you know what, though? what the hell did bill clinton, george bush, and barack obama do? we haven t been standing up to the chinese for 30 years. but quickly, this is just thousand snowball effect starts. wars are easy to get into, and it gets nasty really quickly. that s why we should be having a debate about what it means if we have military strikes against north korea. well, this would be the nastiest of debates. people are saying we rolled over iraq in a couple of weeks. north korea is not iraq. it would be extraordinarily ugly. not only for american troops and north koreans but south koreans, possibly japan. this would be as ugly as it gets. we ll talk more about that. also still ahead, the president shocks members of his administration once again with another free-willing response to a serious foreign policy matter. this time he actually thanks vladimir putin for expelling u.s. diplomats. we ll dig into that straight ahead. whoooo. finding the best hotel price is now a safe bet. because tripadvisor searches. .over 200 booking sites - so you save up to 30% on the. .hotelock it in. tripadvisor. what s the story behind green mountain coffee and fair trade? let s take a flight to colombia. this is boris calvo. boris grows mind-blowing coffee. and because we pay him a fair price, he improves his farm and invest in his community to make even better coffee. all for a smoother tasting cup. green mountain coffee. except when it comes to retirement. at fidelity, you get a retirement score in just 60 seconds. and we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. it s your retirement. know where you stand. to keep you on track. how to win at business. step one. point decisively with your glasses. abracadabra! the stage is yours. step two. choose laquinta. where you ll feel like the king of the road. check out our summer rates now at lq.com. do you have any response to the russian president expelling 755 workers from our embassy? no. i want to thank him because we re trying to cut down on payroll. as far as i m concerned, i m thankful that he let go of a large nur number of people because now we have a smaller payroll. we ll save a lot of money. coming up, instead of criticizing vladimir putin for cutting u.s. embassy staff, president trump offers up his thanks. he may have been doing it just to take a swipe at putin. if that s the case, it wasn t appreciated by a lot of top diplomats. plus donald trump is vacationing at his new jersey golf resort, but while he s golfing and tweeting, he actually takes time tweeting while he s golfing to tell mitch mcconnell to get back to work. will the president spend a third straight day publicly fighting his most important ally on capitol hill? it s still early. we shall see and morning joe 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for stelara®. looking for a hotel that fits. whoooo. .your budget? tripadvisor now searches over. .200 sites to find you the. .hotel you want at the lowest price. grazi, gino! find a price that fits. tripadvisor. hey. hi. hi. you guys going to the company picnic this weekend? picnics are delightful. oh, wish we could. but we re stuck here catching up on claims. but we just compared historical claims to coverages. but we have those new audits. my natural language api can help us score those by noon. great. see you guys there. we would not miss it. watson, you gotta learn how to take a hint. i love to learn. i just want them to get repeal and replace tone. i ve been hearing repeal and replace for years and i ve only been doing for this six months. now it s almost two years, and all i hear is repeal and replace. and then i get there and i said where s the bill? i want to sign it. first day. and they don t have it. they passed repeal and replace but never had a president or senate that was going to do it. i said mitch, get to work and let s get it done. they should have had this last one done. they lost by one vote for a thing like that to happen is a disgrace, and frankly, it shouldn t have happened. should senator mcconnell consider stepping down? well, i ll tell you what. if he doesn t get repeal and replace done and if he doesn t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn t get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure, if he doesn t get them done, then you can ask me that question. you know, it s interesting. donald trump is the first president from new york state since a guy named fdr. i was just sitting there listening to him thinking what in the world if fdr were alive and could hear a president whining like that? acting as if he had absolutely no power with the entire executive branch at his fingertips. acting like he was incapable of drafting legislation himself. fdr, what he did in the first 100 days with legislation drafted in the first 100 days actually changed this country and changed the world. he didn t sit around waiting for the senate majority leader or the speaker of the house to draft his legislation for him. he did it himself. and for donald trump to sit there and act helpless at his golf club, like he s some little kid waiting for somebody to hold his hand and walk him safely across the street would absolutely make fdr shutter. anyway, welcome back to morning joe. by the way, kids, there are no rules against presidents who have been running for office for two years actually having an idea in their head about how they would like a health care system to look. donald trump never really got into the details. he told us he d never cut medicaid or medicare, but he never really told us what his health care plan would be like. he said maybe like the canadian health care plan at the beginning. but outside of that, he s right. he has been running for two years and he still has no idea how to reform health care in the united states of america. anyway, we re going to be talking about this and a lot of other things that happened at those pressers yesterday that were just disquieting for many people. we have mike barnicle, john hylman, kasie hunt, alise jordan, jeremy peters, and joining the conversation eugene robinson. john, i wanted to get to you and talk about the bizarre vladimir putin comments in a minute. first, can you imagine a president, any president sitting there acting helpless saying i can t do anything by myself. help, i ve fallen and i can t get up. i can t draft legislation despite the fact that i ve got the entire executive branch at my disposal, and people that would be flooding in to my office 24 hours a day to help me draft health care legislation. well, right, and of course, he has the entire executive branch, and he s got allies to the extent that he s a republican for convenience purposes. he has sensible allies in the senate and the house. all of whom who have made common cause because they share the same policy objectives. he has everything at his dispos disposal, and yet the fact that things have not gone his way has put him in a mode of kind of helpless, impotent, kind of whining about his fate. the whoa is me presidency, we talked a lot about trump s political connection to the grievances of a lot of disenfranchised voters. as the head of the government and the commander in chief to hear him in a constant state of whine about how he just can t people aren t helping him enough, doing his bidding, it makes him look terribly weak domestically. i know you want to talk about putin in a second, but the things he said about putin make him look incredibly weak on the foreign stage. and it s like he has a hammer in his hand, and he keeps banging his hand. doing one thing after another, and then he holds up az hand and goes why does my hand hurt so much? like on health care. he has done everything possible to lose one health care vote after another. pressuring republicans, having steve bannon, my god, what a stupid thing to do. having steve bannon going up insulting house members, threatening house members. they finally pass legislation. he then calls that legislation mean. then it goes to the senate. he keeps insulting the mean house legislation. then he insults lisa murkowski. then he insults other members. then he is shocked at the very end that a man who gave his life in service of this country in vietnam and came back physically broken wonders why that guy is not willing to put his political neck on the line after a couple of years ago he said that he wasn t even a war hero because he got captured. donald trump is his own worst political enemy. if you want to go from domestic to foreign policy, donald trump obviously has been acting like his own worst enemy on foreign policy. and when he started talking about vladimir putin and russia, it was just another example of how he really is now other than picking a fight with a majority leader, picking a fight with a state department and diplomats who should be doing his bidding right now in the negotiations with the north koreans. take a look at what he said yesterday about vladimir putin. do you have any response to the russian president telling 755 workers out of the embassy? no. i want to thank him. we re trying to cut down on payroll, as far as i m concerned, i m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people, because now we have a smaller payroll. we ll save a lot of money. it is an extraordinary thing to say. think about this. first of all, just on the facts. vladimir putin is not like the truth operating officer of some company where he s now let go some american workers here. that s the way trump phrased it. as if putin reduced the work force of the u.s. federal government. none of these people have been let go. they were kicked out of russia as a response to the sanctions that were passed and signed reluctantly by president trump. there s that. it s out to lunch. then secondly, it s maybe the most flagrant demonstration of the fact that donald trump cannot under any circumstance kind it in his heart or head to say anything critical of vladimir putin. in this case, there is not a president in the history of the country who would not have sternly reprimanded or attacked vladimir putin or another russian president for, peling 755 american diplomats from moscow. not a single one, and yet donald trump was at war with everybody else in the world from mitch mcconnell to the democrats and the press to bob mueller. the one person he s not at war with, apparently is vladimir putin, and he s saying, hey, thank you for doing this thing that s averse to american interest. thank you very much. joe, yesterday in that 20-minute long tour deforce with a tsunami of information on various topics, afghanistan, paul manafort, vladimir putin, state department, north korea, it s a theme that he has perfected. it s not the art of the deal. it s the president of the united states outlining the art of victimization, and he is always the victim. he s always the victim in everything that occurs that s negative about his presidency, everything that can t get done. everything that he doesn t participate in in the way a president ought to participate in like a health care legislation. it s victimization. it s whoa is me. why did they do this to sne. can i flip the conversation a second? would we be responding differently if u.s. soldiers had been expelled from a country? i don t think we re giving the diplomats that trump is disregarding their security, their families, what they go through to serve in a hardship post like moscow and other places in russia where they re monitored and surveilled. he doesn t care at all about protecting his people and about the people who put their lives on the line for the american interest. donny deutsche, we both have known donald trump for some time. somebody noted yesterday, and i know you ve seen it firsthand, that donald trump at some point in his life has insulted everybody around him in the harshest of terms, including his own children. the only person that any of us that have followed him for some time, the only person that i certainly can think of that he has never insulted, that he has never attacked is vladimir putin. which, again, raises the question, and i will ask the question again on tv. what does vladimir putin have on donald trump? because whatever it is, it must be extraordinary. joe, i m a businessman. i will tell you with certain certainty you are? i used to be until i until the was shamed? what diz wbuzz was that? seriously. he owns him somewhere along the access, at the very least. i m going to say this with 100% certainty. all kinds of business shenaniga shenanigans, inappropriate money launders, whatever you name it, money coming to the enterprise all the way to tapes. he owns them. there s no other explanation. if you look at trump s. o., he would be the guy that would stick his chest out at the toughest guy to seem tough. even going to passing the buck. he s the opposite of a leader. every great leader i ve come in contact with, they say it s my responsibility. i used to hate, we used to lose a piece of business, i d say i fail youd guys. we ll get it right. that s what leaders do. it s the opposite of leadership. it is also, mike, the opposite of what we try to teach our children. it is the opposite of what they teach in the armed forces. there is a reason why the highest ranking marines at the end of the day feed the privates first. there s a reason we tell our children that when they come home from a sporting event to not complain, to not whine, to not blame somebody else. i always told my kids when they complained about losing a game because of a ref or a decision from a ref or an umpire, i always said listen, if it s so close that one call could make a difference, then obviously you have to work harder so the next time one call can t make the difference. stop blaming other people and look at yourself. that s what we teach our children. that s what character is built on. looking inward when there are failures and figures out what did i do wrong? how could i do better next time? how can i help people more? that instinct just isn t in this president. yeah. well, that instinct is not within the binders of the art of victimization that the president lives seemingly every day. donny continuing with the inside hour, we re going to talk about gene robinson writing in the washington post that someone needs to distract trump with a shi shiny object. we can only hope the mature adults surrounding him are able to cool things down. trump probably thought it was clever to answer kim jong-un s provocations with his own language threatening fire and fury like the world has never seen. dealing with this crisis will require patience and realism, both of which trump lacks. there is no quick solution. if there were presidents bill clinton, george w. bush or barack obama would be implemented it. we need to be patient and realistic. someone please distract the president with a shiny object for the next few years. one of the things you continually hear when you talk to people in washington, the one thing that concerns them most above all else is the erratic behavior of the president of the united states. something they have no gauge for. can t control, and can t predict. right. the erratic nature of a man who now is commander in chief of the greatest military force the world has ever seen. and who is engaging in this sort of ridiculous chest thumping against kim jong-un, the crazy north korean leader who happens to have nuclear weapons of his own. i mean, this is serious business. normally you would say this is rhetoric. this is it s going to be okay. but you don t know. you don t know if this is going to be okay. because the potential for miscalculation is huge. and, again, you have to this a situation in which if you re going to play nuclear breaksmanship. choose your words carefully. donald trump doesn t do that. all the stuff about fire and fury, and yeah, i think he must have thought, let s try something different, try giving him his own rhetoric. in a sense he s given kim jong-un what he wanted which is direct dialogue with the united states that elevates kim to being a great world leader which is how he fancies himself. but it doesn t do anything to solve this really critical problem. gene, you talked about the mature adults in the room who could potentially talk to the president. one thing that stuck out to me yesterday in that 20-minute news conference was that the president referenced the defense department s jim mattis s statement about north korea and said jim mattis may have gone farther than he did, and mats did talk about potential regime change in north korea, which as we know, would potentially involve all of the things we re talking about. if trump is listening to those mature adults, he s picked a lot of generals to run the country. that s your sense of how the decision making will change, then? my sense is that what the generals and we got a bunch of them now, have been saying and what rex tillerson has been saying are really sort of variations of what the u.s. position has been all along. and mattis talked about regime change in the context of what north korea might do to provoke the united states into that sort of action. that is a red line for the north korean regime. that is a red line also for china. which has made it clear as recently as this morning in an editorial in a sort of semi official chinese newspaper in which it said look, north korea, you do something toward guam or whatever, you re on your own. but if the united states were to invade or to take action for regime change, then china could back north korea. you know, when you get dhchina making statements like that, this is a serious situation, and we have a deeply unserious man serving as commander in chief. that should worry all of us. eugene robinson, thank you so much. still ahead on morning joe, the president says he was shocked by the raid on his former campaign chair paul manafort s home, but by the way, he barely knew the guy. plus a top aide to the president says don t pay attention to what the secretary of state says when it comes to the military. but then he blames the press for fake news. by the way, one thing these people in the white house don t understand. the tape is always rolling. we ve got you on camera saying it. you re watching morning joe. we ll be right back. if you re told you have cancer, explore your treatment options with specialists who treat only cancer. every stage. every day.. at cancer treatment centers of america. learn more at cancercenter.com/experts you re searching for something. whoooo. like the perfect deal. .on the perfect hotel. so wouldn t it be perfect if. ..there was a single site. .where you could find the. .right hotel for you at the 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allergic reactions to your doctor right away. in patients with sickle cell disorders, serious, sometimes fatal crises can occur. the most common side effect is bone and muscle ache. so why go back there? if you d rather be home, ask your doctor about neulasta onpro. whyou re not thinking clearly, so they called the fire department for us. i could hear crackling in the walls. my mind went totally blank. all i remember saying was, my boyfriend s beating me and she took it from there. and all of this occurred in four minutes or less. i am grateful we all made it out safely. people you don t know care about you. it s kind of one of those things where you can t even thank somebody. to protect what you love, call 1-800-adt-cares hey you ve gotta see this. cno.n. alright, see you down there. mmm, fine. okay, what do we got? okay, watch this. do the thing we talked about. what do we say? it s going to be great. watch. remember what we were just saying? go irish! see that? yes! i m gonna just go back to doing what i was doing. find your awesome with the xfinity x1 voice remote. oh, it s anthony scaramucci. are you serious? i guess we should take it. when i hear my name three times, i appear like a beetle juice. you know how you miss me. i m like human cocaine. you got a bump of me. i made you feel excited but i was out of your system too quick, but now that i m gone you re depressed and edgy and you re trying to figure out how to score some more scaramucci. we did hope you d stick around a little longer. me too, but the mooch has no regrets. all i did was sell my country, miss the birth of my child and ruin my reputation all to be king of idiot mountain for 11 days. okay. well, the mooch being played on snl also going to be on colbert. that s going to be fascinating. we have peter alexander in new jersey, and not on a golfing and tweet get away but actually covering the man who is golfing and tweeting. i understand we have a few tweets this morning. that s right. the president appears gets a briefing from fox and friends. already retweeting three stories from fox and friends. he was happy with his performance yesterday. two focussed on his comments about mitch mcconnell, on one tweeting how trump fires new warning shot at mcconnell basically leaving open the door whether or not he should step down. what was striking to me yesterday here is after that news conference wrapped up i got a note from one of the president s top aides who said it was great. they clearly felt good about the president. he was obviously a little bit restless after almost a week of this working vacation to get out in front of the cameras and address the news. most notably, north korea, but also the exchange that s going to affect his ability to deal when he gets back to washington, those critical comments again about mitch mcconnell saying of the senate republican s failure to repeal and replace obama care, that it was disgraceful, saying that he was very disappointed in mcconnell, even as he praised mcconnell s wife. she would be a fun person to talk to right about now. this followed mcconnell s comments a couple days ago at home saying he believed this president had excessive expectations about the way things get done in the democratic process going forward. and it followed just a couple days earlier on the golf course a conversation the president had. it got to be tense at times with mcconnell as those two men get ready to see each other again when the recess ends. it underscores this is a president trying again to really play to the core supporters who believe he s best when he is untethered from one party. they re the ones who embrace the drain the swamp mentality. those are the folks he believed they re with him before anybody else. all right. peter, thank you. we greatly appreciate it. we appreciate the update. mike barnicle, i want to throw it around the table. fox news when they came on to the scene in 1996, roger ailes and rue pert murdoch had a winning formula. that was conservatives against the world. conservatives weren t getting their voices heard on mainstream networks, so they could go to fox news. and it was a uniting it was really a network that united the entire conservative moment and for the most part the republican party. donald trump changed that formula. and we saw some real splits down the middle there. what i find fascinating about what donald trump s retweeting on fox and friends and the makeup of fox now is that this has ceased to be a network that follows conservatism or follows the republican party. it seems now to be oh subsidiary of trunk inc. i m fascinating by the media and always have been, but they ve gone all in on donald trump to such a degree that they re being critical of jeff flake and other republicans for not being loyal to donald trump. it s not about being loyal to conservatives. in the past you would have debates about what s conservatism and the most conservative way to go, but it doesn t seem to be that way anymore. it seems to be more of a channel that s in defense of donald trump. you re either on donald trump s side, or you are you are against what fox newsstands for. yeah. joe, i mean, 20 years is a snap of a finger in terms of history. but the accelerant of the last three or four years has changed both the nature of conservatism, i think in this country, the definition of conservatism and many of the principals of conservatism. and now it seems that conservatism is defined, actually, by the presence and the voice and the thoughts if there are some, of donald trump. or of grievance. and nobody understood that better than roger ailes and donald trump. the problem is when roger ailes formed fox news, there wasn t this massive conservative media complex. and they were much more united around the sense that they were on the outside and had to get on the inside in order to blow up this media accomplishment that was oppressing their thoughts. and their beliefs. now, donald trump may speak for some conservatives, but he isn t a unifying a movement or the party. how far he can ride it to reelection, i don t know. listen, donald trump is not conservative in the least, and john hylman, you see it in the twitter feed, in your twitter feed every day. that conservative thought leaders that have always been conservative thought leaders now actually more than ever are rising up and pointing out day in and day out how donald trump is not a conservative. so there isn t really a changing face of conservatism. if you see what jonah gold berg says or david frercnch or rich lowry, or you see what bill crystal says. you can go down the list. charles drought hammer. you look at what they say, they still are sounding, thinking, writing conservative. and there is a growing divide. of course, john padoritz, all the people we have in and are tweeting, there s a growing divide between conservatism and donald trump. many of these people didn t like him from the very beginning but decided to give him a chance. again, fox news, i only bring up fox news. i m not knocking them. i m not. it s just fascinating how donald trump has not only broken up the republican party, broken it in two or three pieces. he s done the same to fox news, and testifies doing it in realtime when he and roger ailes would be having fights. i saw a tweet yesterday two years old. it was donald trump attacking fox news for being so negative toward him. right. well, i think you re pointing to an important thing. when trump decided to run for president, he did something that no other republican candidates in our recent hft have been willing to do. basically to say i m not going to be beholden to fox news. i m going to play to the breitbart wing of the conservative media, if you want to call it conservative. he was appealing to a different sphere. there s a whole range of people out in america who vote republican, who consider themselves conservative even if conservatives don t see them that way in a traditional sense. they look at fox news as part of establishment media, and they have gravitated toward breitbart and other sites on the alt-right and made those play power houses. with those media outlets, he came the breitbart candidate. he got himself nominated and eventually elected president without kowtowing to fox trump. i think fox news realizes it s disassociated from what makes up the current republican base. the people at fox news are scrambling to try to get themselves back in the good graces of where the energy is in the republican party even if those people are not traditional conservatives. yeah. it is absolutely fascinating what s happening there. and what s happening in the entire media landscape. and you re right. donald trump, the first republican candidate at least since fox news began in 96 to take on that network head on, and we saw it time and time again. and it changed the dynamics of what fox news was, and how fox news had been the unifying force for all republicans and all conservatives that were running for office on the national level over 25 years. anyway, coming up, we re going to take you through the time line of how more scrutiny has been piled on paul manafort. from whispers of ukraine connections to ledgers of payments. from campaign chairman to an fbi raid, to donald trump saying paul who? morning joe coming back right after this. award winning interface. award winning design. award winning engine. the volvo xc90. the most awarded luxury suv of the century. this august visit your local volvo dealer to receive sommar savings of up to $4,500. this august visit your local volvo dealer when this guy got a flat tire in the middle of the night, so he got home safe. yeah, my dad says our insurance doesn t have that. what?! you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. how to win at business. step one: point decisively with the arm of your glasses. abracadabra. the stage is 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we have a new tweet from the 45th president of the united states currently on a two and a half week golf vacation where he jammed some tweeting in between the 18 holes. this posted at 7:29 a.m. this morning. military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should north korea act unwisely. hopefully kim jong-un will find path. john? a lot of e lit ration from anxious presidents in powerful posts. first fire and fury and then locked and loaded. we ll talk about that later. to move on, we want to give a trip down the manafort memory lane and explain what s going on with manafort and what it might mean. let s look at the time line when manafort was the campaign chairman. on the 14th the new york types reported that handwritten ledgered indicated he received more than $12 million in undisclosed payments from a prorussian political indicator in ukraine. three days later manafort denies an a.p. report that he helped to secretly rout $2 million to lobbying firms. that same day steve bannon was named the chief executive. two days after that manafort was pushed out of the campaign. now, jump ahead to april of this year. the a.p. obtaining financial records that showed two wire transfers to paul manafort s firm. this led manafort to register as a foreign agent on june 27th disclosing $17 million in payments from ukraine. on july 19th, one week before the raid of his home, just the other day, the new york times reported that manafort had been no debt to prorussian interests by as much as $7 million. the job for which the times had earlier reported manafort offered to do for no way. manafort did not address whether the debts might have existed at one time, but he said the cyprus records are steale. two days later robert mueller was investigating manafort for possible money launders and researching his financial records to gain leverage for his cooperation in their probe of russian collusion. one day before the raid, manafort spoke with the senate committees after they said manafort would work in good faith. hours later came the fbi raid. manafort s apartment in the washington suburbs around 6:00 a.m. his spokesman said he cooperated with it along with other requests. his spokesperson said he s in the process of maintaining formal counsel. big legal shift for paul manafort. and finally yesterday president trump asked about the early morning raid on manafort s apartment. here he is. mr. president, was it appropriate for the fbi to raid the home of paul manafort predawn? i thought it was a very, very strong signal or whatever. i know mr. manafort, i haven t spoken to him in a long time. i know him. he was with the campaign for a relatively short period of time. i thought it was a very they do that very seldom. so i was surprised to see it. i was very, very surprised to see it. we haven t really been involved. have you spoken to the foik director about it? i have not. but to do that early in the morning, whether or not it was appropriate, you d have to ask them. i ve always found paul manafort to be a decent man. he s like a lot of people, probably makes consultant fees from all over the place. who knows? i don t know. but i thought that was a pretty tough stuff. just as a point of fact, paul manafort and donald trump have known each other for 30 years and paul manafort has an apartment in trump tower. to hear donald trump saying hardly knew him, what the heck is a little strange. let s bring in law professor from george washington university, jonathan turly. talk about where we are now with respect to the thread that relates to paul manafort and what jeopardy he s in and how that kind of jeopardy might produce a certain kind of jeopardy for donald trump. he s clearly the person most at risk at this stage in the investigation. largely because he has credible criminal allegations against him that are concrete, specific, things like money laundering, failure to register as a foreign agent. a possible tax and banking issues. many of those are not normally prosecuted but that doesn t mean they cannot be prosecuted. prosecutors tend to look for people they can get leverage through these types of criminal charges, and paul manafort may be a target rich environment for them. jonathan, what s your instinct as a lawyer and observer of this case that bob mueller and the special prosecutor s office, they are basically going down the al capone trail on manafort. they could hang him on tax charges. i think clearly they wanted to send a message. i actually think people are a little too thrilled to see a trump associate subject of a known warrant. i ve been a critic of no knock warrants for years. it s troubling. i think it was gratuitous and excessive. there are about 20,000 of these a year that occur. it s not the norm to have a no knock warrant in a white collar case. the supreme court has expressed its concern and lower courts. but federal judges have entirely refused to carry out their duty to try to restrict this. what did they think he was going to do? meet them at the door with a glock or flush his laptop down the toilet? it seemed to me to be rather excessive. you say it s gratuitous, but you don t we don t know what mueller, what information mueller had. that s right. we don t know where he s going. we don t know whether it s gratuitous or not in the first case. we had an attorney on early that said that happened to his clients before when the fbi wanted to confirm that they did not have classified materials. what makes it gratuitous in this case? are you just talking generally about fbi raids of this kind? no, most of us on the criminal defense have had no knock warrants occur with their clients, but in a white collar crime setting, no, it is not the norm. no knocks are supposed to be used in dangerous situations. it is certainly true that they re used now more than they should be. the point is not that the warrant was unlawful or suggested this evidence could somehow be suppressed. i think the warrant is valid. it s likely to be upheld. the point is there was no basis where t excessive to do the no knock to come barging into the house predawn as if he s a physical danger or destroy evidence. but what about the preservation of evidence? what about a laptop? what about a computer, computers throughout the what about external drives? do you think he s going to start swallowing thumb drives? all they do is knock on the door. if he doesn t open it, they take the door down. this seemed to be a bit gratuitous in showing up at his bedroom door on a no knock. this might be a small point, but many of us on the civil liberty side have been fighting against the rise of no knocks for years. but jonathan, the process of getting a no knock subpoena entails having to go to a judge, a neutral judge, and pointing out to the judge that they are looking for specific items that were not included in the information handout that manafort and his lawyers had provided earlier. it s not as if they get it on a whim. you know this. it s not a grand jury subpoena. it s a no knock warrant that requires extensive proof to a neutral judge, and then the warrant is sealed as to what they were going after. i have no question that they were going after valid evidence. the question is the means of the no knock. not the search itself. they clearly made out the case that there was evidence there that they thought they would find. but groups for years have been saying judges are blindably signing no knocks when in the past judges would say you don t need to do a no knock. just do a warrant. do a search. knock on the door. if they don t open it, take the door down, but these no knocks have resulted in a great deal of abuse, and whether it s paul manafort or not, it should concern people. i don t think there was any justification to do a no knock as opposed to a normal warrant. the context is a capitol hill investigation. this came the day after he had gone to the committees with some information, but there was a big chuck grassley was angry with now manafort was or wasn t being forthcoming. there was a real sense he was not giving them everything available to him. they subpoenaed him. they said we ll drop the subpoena if you come this far on our evidence. that s when the fbi went in and say we clearly need access to this information because you re not giving it up. we re hearing different things. manafort s attorney aid this information was never demanded by the fbi before the warrant and they were peeved about that. but i think you re right. clearly it has not been as forthcoming of an exchange of information as it should be. the point of fact is this stuff is going to get released. they re going to get everything they want. and so in my view, they should have turned it over earlier. jonathan, alise here. with all of this news about the raid, the predawn raid on paul manafort s home, another block buster story has been forgotten just that last friday the new york times reported that mike flynn had failed to report about $400,000 that possibly had been funneled through a turkish business but was from the turkish government. how much of a problem is this for mike flynn? i think it s a big problem. flynn and manafort are the obvious targets for the prosecutors. mueller has brought on prosecutors who are known to flip witnesses. you do it by pressuring them. any crime they find, they can use as leverage. that s why there s been a lot of talk about the tactical use of pardons to pardon them and remove the leverage. but stuff like this is very, very serious. when you have a special counsel in the field, these things can be criminalized. it could be weaponized by a special counsel. all right. thank you so much, jonathan turly, as always. we appreciate you being on. still ahead over the past weekend, president trump first referred to the majority leader as senator mitch mcsen tall. now it s just mitch. is the kentucky man about to earn himself a new 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[ laughing ] so all you pay for is data. see how much you can save. choose by the gig or unlimited. call or go to xfinitymobile.com introducing xfinity mobile. a new kind of network designed to save you money. isis is on the ropes. the border has never been more secure and the story of the summer the russians? no one cares about my meeting with the russians anymore. that s week you got some peanuts. it s a subpoena, not some peanuts. some peanuts. my father said son, go out there and tell the truth. and then he winked. okay. want to play with your fidget spinner, buddy? yeah. what is the big deal? you have to spin it, buddy. all right. snl having some fun in the summer. still ahead, we ll try to figure out the president s logic in attacking the most powerful republican on capitol hill. actually probably the most powerful person on capitol hill. first it was fire and fury now the president is talking about being locked and loaded in a new threat he just issued to north korea on his twitter account. we will be talking to adam k kinzinger coming up on morning joe. so it has the bad breath germ-killing power of this. 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(flourish spray noise) share the joy. isaac hou has mastered gravity defying moves to amaze his audience. great show. here you go. now he s added a new routine. making depositing a check seem so effortless. easy to use chase technology, for whatever you re trying to master. isaac, are you ready? yeah. chase. so you can. i am very disappointed in mitch. i will be very happy. have you spoken about differences you have had? i haven t spoken to them in a long time. he was with a campaign with a very short period of time. if you look at the number of wars he has going on right now. he is threatening north korea with nuclear war. there is a war of words and his ongoing cold war and now it seems like he fired the opening shots in a preventive war against his former campaign manager paul manafort. what a day yesterday. good morning. it is friday, august 11th. we have mike barnicle, kasie hunt, donnie with us as well. we are trying to find a title for him. send it in with two proof of purchase and you too can name our guest titles. former aid to the george w. bush white house and new york times reporter jeremy peters. let s start with you though. you were on the air when these happened. they were really bizarre in many ways. we are all focusing on the new cold war between us and north korea. only two things scare me, nuclear war and carnies. this war he is waging, if you know how washington works mitch mcconnell runs capitol hill. it is baffling for anyone who knows how washington works. yeah. there is so much to say about the kind of stream of consciousness. you know, he made news on basically every story. i mean i think the thing that takes people aback is the notion of a republican president at war with the leader of his party in the senate. as the point has been made on 100 occasions it illustrates that donald trump is not in fact a republican. no republican president would wage war on the republican leader of the united states senate. well and at the same time, yeah. he is waging war on mitch mcconnell. he is getting involved directly or indirectly trying to defeat dean in nevada. of course i was going to say he doesn t understand that that all blows up in your face. of course he doesn t understand it. i wonder if this is steve bannon s dream we have heard of that maybe donald trump moves towards being an independent president. that s the only thing that makes sense here. in a sense it does. it does raise an important question. it sounds kind of attractive and romantic and brash to say i m not a member of the republican party. i m an independent force. in order to get things done in washington on your legislative agenda you need to get some votes somewhere. he is never going to get a democratic vote. if he will alienate the republicans she essentially saying i have no hope of ever getting anything passed. i can t imagine that s what he wants. you have them with they are declaring war on the two most important people on capitol hill. right. i think you have the sentiment right when you say this is frufrp moving more towards being the independent can washington establishment he ran against. if you talk to the white house some people see a very dicey september coming up. you ll have fights over the debt celling, over the continuing revolution. there are concerns those legislative fights will not have funding for donald trump s wall. the idea that donald trump could some how sign a resolution that does not contain funding for his wall would totally blow up his relationship with the base. i want us to look at yesterday and not just look i know everybody is thinking about north korea right now. i m telling our viewers in the long run what he is doing attacking mitch mcconnell and the one guy that knows how to get they thinks done under the worst of circumstances. he did say some extraordinarily frightening things about north korea. he did say unsettling things about some of the other topics. what did he say when we were watching them talk to the press for the first time in a long time. you saw a level of chaos that s been unmatched. you saw a president of the united states literally trying to go into doing something completely crazy that would change our world forever. you saw a president of the united states that doesn t understand the concept of legislating in washington, d.c. that you do need at some level a friend. some friend to help you. you saw a level of self-absorption. he indicating he was speaking the way he was speaking because king jo kim jong un said. there may have been an wall tier y ier motive. now far light touch let s go to donnie. what did you make of yesterday? you know, you opened up on his war. who has he not declared war on? it was a very interesting thing. the clip you guys were just running of trump, this is the first time since he has come on the political scene i have seen his arms like this. it is interesting how you really feel that he is almost afraid. the more you feel his insecuriti insecurities. i also agree with the north korea issue is something that is the most frightening thing. waging war on mitch mcconnell shows complete ignorance and his old way to go back to campaigning. you go after any politician. it doesn t work in the real world. we are seeing that right now. we are seeing that right now. again, he has picked fights the everybody. as i always said to my office in washington, when they came at me i said one war at a time. we only fight one front wars here and don t even come and tell me to start a wage of war somewhere else unless we resolved the first one peacefully. you can t fight everybody in washington d.c. because they all fight bachlkt back. the one that the probably making donald trump be drawn up like that and off balanced and nervous is bob mueller. he is moving forward while donald trump golfs for 17 days straight. bob mueller is working and getting to the bottom of the facts and he will apply the law to the truth. very interesting, yesterday he was attacking mitch mcconnell. this is what he said about mitch mcconnell yesterday. i have been hearing repeal and replace for seven years. i have only been doing this for two years and i have only been doing this for six months. now it s almost two years and all i hear is repeal and replace. then aget thei get there and sa is the bill? i want to say it. they don t have it. they passed repeal and replace but they never had a president or a senate that was going to do it. i said mitch, get to work and let s get it done. they should have had this last one done. they lost by one vote. far thing like that to happen is a disgrace. it shouldn t have happened. if he doesn t get repeal and replace done and if he doesn t get taxes done meaning cuts and reform and if he doesn t get an easy one to get them done then you can ask me that question. he is unbelievable. he was doing absolutely nothing. sti still ahead, how are the voters who helped flip it for donald trump feeling about that choice? we ll go to the ground right there to find out. first the president reacts to the early morning raid on paul manafort. you re watching morning joe . we ll be right back. or, you can take advantage of our best offer ever on an xt5. don t wait. our 2017 models will be moving fast. you can drive a car. or you can drive a cadillac. come in now before the end of our made to move 2017 clearance event and leave with the perfect cadillac xt5 for your next adventure. choose a low mileage lease on this xt5 for around $339 per month. when i was too busy with the kids to get a repair estimate. i just snapped a photo and got an estimate in 24 hours. my insurance company definitely doesn t have that. you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™ liberty mutual insurance. even if you re trying your best.be a daily struggle, along with diet and exercise, once-daily toujeo® may help you control your blood sugar. get into a daily groove. let s groove tonight. share the spice of life. baby, slice it right. from the makers of lantus®, we re gonna groove tonight. toujeo® provides blood sugar-lowering activity for 24 hours and beyond, proven blood sugar control all day and all night, and significant a1c reduction. toujeo® is used to control high blood sugar in adults with diabetes. it contains 3 times as much insulin in 1 milliliter as standard insulin. don t use toujeo® to treat diabetic ketoacidosis, during episodes of low blood sugar or if you re allergic to insulin. get medical help right away if you have a serious allergic reaction such as body rash or trouble breathing. don t reuse needles or share insulin pens. the most common side effect is low blood sugar, which can be life threatening. it may cause shaking, sweating, fast heartbeat, and blurred vision. check your blood sugar levels daily. injection site reactions may occur. don t change your dose of insulin without talking to your doctor. tell your doctor about all your medicines and medical conditions. check insulin label each time you inject. taking tzds with insulins, like toujeo®, may cause heart failure that can lead to death. find your rhythm and keep on grooving. let s groove tonight. ask your doctor about toujeo®. share the spice of life. knowing where you stand. it s never been easier. except when it comes to your retirement plan. but at fidelity, we re making retirement planning clearer. and it all starts with getting your fidelity retirement score. in 60 seconds, you ll know where you stand. and together, we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. time to think of your future it s your retirement. know where you stand. frankly the people that were questioning that statement was it too tough? was it tough enough? that have been doing this to our country for many years. it is about time people stick up for the people of this country and for other countries. maybe that statement wasn t tough enough. we are backed 100% by our military and backed by everybody and backed by many of the leaders. i noticed that many senators and others today came out very much in fay very of what i said. if anything that statement may not be tough enough. reporter: what would be tougher than fire and fury. we ll see. they will be in trouble like few nations have ever been in trouble in this world. wow. so mike, one day he threatens nuclear annihilation of north korea, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before and then he goes well actually that threat wasn t tough enough. you understand why he said this is the art of the deal meeting dr. strange love. that s right. the president of the united states saying bring it on again. david said that in dealing with north korea trump needs allies, not bomb baths. his hope far diplomatic collusion depends on convincing north korea and china he is ready should negotiations fail. if hollywood were pitching the story it would be the art of the deal meets dr. strange love t. united states can t go it alone in korea in either war or piece. the danger is trump s rhetoric could destabilize partners at a moment that requires subtlety trump amped up his once more warning of things they never thought possible. he talks like the promoter of the wwe wrestling match. this is real. this is real but it s also reading between the lines and reading the lines themselves, incredibly dangerous. this is not happening just in north korea. you look at how he upped the bombing campaigns in afghanistan where in the first six months he has dropped nearly he nearly doubled the amount of bombs we have dropped. some are saying civilian casualties are up by ten times the amount they were in the previous administrations. this is disturbing. we have become really immune and detached from a foreign policy that is so militarized. right now we should be having more public outcry about what does this idea of preventive war mean. there is this undeniable chaotic aspect to everything that s coming out of trump s mouth. the second point, which i think is more likely to succeed and a bit more rational is that russia and china have to take ownership of this problem as well. coming up, a time when a little diplomacy could go a long way. s we ll be back after this. what s the story behind green mountain coffee and fair trade? 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i have not. to do that early in the morning, whether or not it was appropriate you would have to ask him. i have found paul manafort a decent man. i thought it was a very tough stuff. so john, this guy, i knew him for you know what, i think i was walking down fifth avenue and i walked past this guy for a second. i mean acting like he doesn t know him and then possibly the most concerning to paul manafort is that he is ton cover of the national inquirer this week. it doesn t usually end well for associates of donald trump. people thought i was joking when i brought it up the first time but michael flynn was called a russian spy i think on the cover of national inquirer three days before donald trump fired him. now the national inquirer is going after paul manafort like the national inquirer does with everybody that s on the enemy s list of the white house. yeah. this is incredible. things are unfolding here. he ll say things, never met him, hardly know him. that s what he is doing to manafort now. it is strange the way he is treating mitch mcconnell. of all of the people in the world to whom trump is most vulnerable in terms of flipping in this case paul manafort are the ones he wants to have them turn against donald trump. so trump kind of throwing him under the bus may not be in his long-term self-interest. when fire and fury don t seem like they are enough president trump actually turns occupy tup rhetoric on north korea even more. we ll play some of those incredible comments when morning joe continues. barry, the c.i.a. needs a guy like you. that sounds made up barry. based on a true story. we re sending you to columbia. of the c.i.a. s biggest secret. i have helped build the biggest drug cartel this world has ever seen. tom cruise. all this is legal? 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[ laughter ] [ gun shot ] we recognize the dangers involved here. no you don t. shoot the gringo. american made. rated r. another anti-wrinkle cream in no hurry to make anything happen. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair works in just one week. with the fastest retinol formula to visibly reduce wrinkles. neutrogena®. well, actually perhaps right. the dangerous war of words continues with the president tweeting military solutions are now fully in place locked and loaded should north korea act unwisely. hopefully kim jong un should find another path. north korea threatened to reduce the mainland into a field of nuclear war. at the slightest sign of a preemptive strike. zbli would not have done what he did in terms of those exact words. i think inskreesed rhetoric got us a basically nuclear north korea. where my issue is right now, this is a serious moment. i was in an event yesterday. i was talking to a couple that cancelled their trip to hawaii because they are afraid they will get nuked by north korea. this is a moment where the president needs to be very serious to outweigh the issue that s going on with in k incno korea. i would say look, you don t have to lose sleep at night because we can defend ourselves against this. the problem is where we could be in six months or a year. the process or the past in acting like the chinese isn t going to happen. the words i don t take huge issue with, although i wouldn t have used fire and fiery and things like this, instead of going after mcconnell stick to this one message and unite the american people. and we have had three presidents, three administrations that have done very little to stop us from where we are right now. this certainly isn t a problem that we can lay at the feet of donald trump. barack obama famously said this is going to be the big issue you ll be worried about the most. at the same time the inflammatory rhetoric is not helpful. i m wondering, what do you say to your constituents when they ask you what the best way for it is in north korea? i say we have to prepare for three things. we have to step up pressure against china. we have to change their calculus that have been a buffer state on their border is more of an anchor than going after north korea, actually putting pressure on them. we have to boost our missile defense. short and medium range is pretty go good. third is we have to have a credible mel tear option. it stings to hear it. we know that a military option would lead to a lot of bloodshed. when you a lot of we would put them on and it gets to a point where you almost have to assume they are nuclear. i think strong preparation for those three fronts can make war less likely. we have to remember that it is the doomsday scenario we can t allow to happen. what would the human cost be of a war with north korea? it would be massive. we are more up until the last 25 years have had it and what technology is changing is human tolls. war is something they always have to avoid is compared to what people think going in. what s more horrific is north korea with a nuclear weapon. it is where you could have the north koreans selling it to other enemies. so the attack in the united states doesn t come to the west coast. perhaps it comes somewhere else there. north korea is really like a 51st state. it is is also focused on showing the chinese we are serious and a war would massively be against their interest. we are try to go change that calculus. they have millions of troops. they can shut down the border. say you re not getting one more good through our border. the human tragedy but north korea is a human tragedy. this might compel and take away the financial stability to build their weapons. sit is a human tragedy right now. they could stop them at the border if they chose. mike, to you. if it goes up tomorrow, this afternoon, monday, whatever the reaction with the united states is going to have to be to do something about it because of a nuclear tip missile. that is the mulultimate danger trip into something by accident that would inevitably would change the world forever. right. and you have got a genuinely a madman. you an ir rational actor. donald trump you a some what minimally some what rir rationa. you two volatile characters who are not behaving in the most rational way. if you throw those into a jar what happens if things get out of control? how afraid should we be? i think we should be very afraid. i also think we should look at kim jong un s actions as highly rational. this is what has him to the international stage. he managed to keep his power. he doesn t want to have that strip aid way. basically it is his safety net for power. it is a great simple math. it s coke and pepsi. we coexist in the world. what is the deal? what is the deal for china? how do you make it worth their while? is it a new trade agreement? what do you to do to make it worth their while to step in? that s the only nonmilitary solution, period. what is that deal? you know, the leverage is all with china. it s not north korea. we shouldn t even be negotiating with north korea because this all starts and ends with china. if china wanted to take out kim jong un tomorrow they could. they have people that could wipe out anybody they want. nobody in china is allowing north korea to act on their own. they are not acting as ir rational actors as it concerns china. china would never allow that to happen. and jeremy peters, again, north korea is almost like the 51st state to china. and for north korea they saw what happened in libya when he gave up his nuclear weapons after he did what we told him to do. we then turned around and invaded the country and killed him. i m not so sure that kim jong un and china are ir rational act s actors. they are rational in two senses. they understand the dangers in giving up nuclear weapons and how it could delegitimize them as tha state. they have always been about preservation of their regime. in that sense you can sort of the understand, if you squint hard enough, why trump is doing what he is doing in try to go dr trying to draw them in and put their legitimacy as a state. if you don t want us to wipe you off the face of the earth you to come to the table. and the president of the united states used the phrase locked and loaded is not a rational act but that s what s happening coming out of the white house. an aid says that the secretary of state should not be listened to when it comes to military matters, when asked to explain the different messages members of the trump administration have made. deputy assistant to the president to a radio no one should listen to secretary rex tiller son after he saw no likelihood and urged americans to sleep soundly. you should listen to the president. the idea that tillerson is going to discuss military matters is simply nonens kasensicanonsensi. it is to talk about the military options and he has done so unequivocally today. he said woe betide anyone who challenges the united states. that s his portfolio. that is his mandate. secretary tillerson is the chief diplomat of the united states. he attempted to clear up comments placing the comments on jous journalists. i never said the secretary of state. that s fake news 101. there is audio of you. i have the audio. i have the audio as well thank you. i said for reporters to force our chief diplomat, the amazing rex tillerson to give details of military options is nonsensical. i was admonishing the journ journalists of the fake news industrial complex. if a journalist doesn t know the difference between te secretary of state and department of defense they should hand in their credentials. let s bring in josh. josh, let s start right out of the box with who is this guy? this is sebastian gorka. he fashioned himself as a national security expert and someone who takes a very tough like on extremism. he is not on the naksal security council. she not actually part of the national security team. he continue today weigh in over the last several weighs. we have seen a tiff increasingly growing between him and rex tillerson. i want to ask you about the state of the state department, if you will, under the trump administration. there is no ambassador to south korea. tillerson focused on cutting a third of the department having essentially not communicated with counterparts or people in the administration and now he has been thrown under the bus. where is the state department at all in the context of this administration? those criticisms about whether the state department is firing on all cylinders right now is not a new one. the fact is until now we have been relatively lucky. there haven t been major crises where this has really come to a head. now we are there and you re seeing the fact that we don t have a lot of bandwidth, doing the diplomacy that could avaert military conflict. and to follow up, how we have no ambassador to south korea, who is running point? do you have any sense of who is really leading the charge when it comes to a nonmilitary option with regards to north korea? sq he has been very involved. he was in asia last week meeting with a lot of other countries and then we know that ambassa r ambassador un who helped the college student is the point person for north korea and the administration. he has always been work this pretty hard. all right. thank you so much. coming up next, president trump s polling hovers historic low. comes up next we ll hear from people who helped propel him into the white house about the state of the administration so far. keep it right here on morning joe . you all hear me very frauchb this room when you ask me about u.s. military assets or plan. i refer you to d.o.d. i think everybody has heard what tillerson s comments continue to be on other countries. and it should be paid attention to? i think so as well. he carries a bik big stick. a big stick. right. but you want to fix it. right. so who sent you? 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start here. or here. even here. and definitely here. at fidelity, we re available 24/7 to make retirement planning simpler. we let you know where you stand, so when it comes to your retirement plan, you ll always be absolutely.clear. time to think of your future it s your retirement. know where you stand. president trump s victory last year was sealed in both republican districts and also areas that swung from supporting president obama just four years earlier. last week we had sent lewis bergdorf to deep red west virginia to speak with the trump faithful. this week we sent him to parts of swing state pennsylvania and he filed this report. i m in north hampton county, pennsylvania in the town of easton. it went for trump in the last election cycle. i want to know if the voters here still approve of the job that the president is doing. i think he ll be okay. just got to get some stuff sorted out. i think he needs to address a few issues that need to be addressed. if this is something you want the grow into, okay. at least show you re looking to have a grasp of the issues for which you re responsible. it s a scare, are we going to be in war in a month or two or three. i think he s doing a terrific job. first of all, he s kept his promises. you know, he s done as much as he s been able to do. he doesn t affect me but he does awe fekt tffect the childre elder. i m not happy about that. scary. not quite sure where he s going to go especially with the north korea job. i think he s doing a great job. reporter: what do you like the most about what he s done. don t take any crap. trying to get her done. not every single choice has been terrible but it s kind of getting in his own way. i do not approve of the job our president is doing so far. i think he s doing a hell of a job. i wish people would leaf him alone. reporter: you would vote for him again tomorrow if you had to. i don t know about that. you better believe it. got to give the guy a chance. he ain t been in there that long. it would depend on who he was running against. i would not vote for him. no. yes, i would. 100%. 100%. i voted for trump actually. reporter: you did? yes. i believed in what e was saying. reporter: and now you re disappointed. i m very disappointed like a lot of people were disappointed. he was going to change everything and he hasn t. reporter: if you had to vote tomorrow, would you vote for the president again? yes. you know, donnie deutsch, it s very interesting. people jumped out in supporting donald trump when they heard everyone on tv saying it was a stupid thing to do, a mistake of a lifetime, et cetera. but if you re donald trump you want to hear people saying is the guy in the pickup truck saying he s going to get the job done. they need to get out of his way. he doesn t put up with any gar dama ba garbage, just get er done. to them that s truth. you know there s something in advertising called buyer s remorse. it s hard for people after they ve made a decision to admit i made a wrong decision or that wasn t the right thing to do. not only is there the basic core who they are as people. it s a process before any human being can say i was wrong. you see on some of those faces not the locked and loaded to use the words of the day. you know they want to say this is not the right thing but there s a process to get there. john heilman is a binary choice. i commented three weeks after i started knocking on doors in 1949, somebody asked me what it s like out there. it s amazing. every door i knock on, it s still a war raging from the 1960s and you re either on jane fonda s side or john wayne s side. very little in between. the cultural wars that were shaped in the 1960s still exist today and it s a binary choice. if you re against donald trump, that means you re for nancy pelosi, hillary clinton and the mainstream media. the cultural piece you re talking about is super important. the reality is when you say what you just said, it s not even like a lot of voters are thinking of what the policy proposals are of the democratic party or the republican party. it s a cultural thing now. there are two countries. if you re for donald trump you re for one set of values and if you re for the democratic party, you re for another set of parties, liberal, elitist and cosmopolitan in the view of those who reject them. there s a political divide, a deep cultural divide. is that enough for donald trump? well, look. i mean how is that translated to legislation. i would take issue with one of your basic assumptions, which is that the democrating party has its own cultural struggle going on. the people who showed up at bernie sander s meetings, there were a lot of millennials but a lot of white collar people. the hillary clinton and the jeb bushes in the world are in a different category than bernie sanders and donald trump. i think the bumper sticker sentiment that we can take with us and judge donald trump s presidency and his chances for reelection by get er done. there s a reason he travels the country with banners behind him that say promises made, promises kept. they need to know he s holding up to his word. you re from the south, i m from the south. so many of your friends and my friends, i m sure, see donald trump as somebody who doesn t look down to them. fer years, for decades people in middle america have sean not only the news media but also hall by wood, academia elites look down at them at the end of their noses and be condescending. they don t get that from donald trump. and the fact that so many in media were so opposed to donald trump makes the supporters dig in. what i hear from my friends and family in mississippi is just to give him a little more time. he hasn t had enough time for everyone to be making these sweeping judgments on his presidency. joe, it s a big big country and human nature is endlessly fascinating. and the guy in the tickup truck says donald trump doesn t take any crap. and that resonates in pennsylvania, summerville, massachusetts and spots in between. and the big thing, joe, is that the democratic party, unfortunately in a lot of people s minds in the past few years, people any that they care more about silicon valley than they do about the ma nonga hill valley. they got to get that back. no doubt about it. donald trump doesn t put up with crap. you know who else doesn t? taylor swift. we didn t get a chance to talk about it. let s hit this. i ve got to read one quote for stephanie ruhle here. so taylor swift testifying on why the front of her skirt looked normal if a photo taken when she says a radio deejay was groping her. taylor swift s answer to that deejay s lawyer, quote, because my ass is located on the back of my body. taylorwi
wounds. it s a very dishonest media, right there. i really believe they don t like our country. when one part of mamerica hurt, we all. when one citizens suffers an injustice, we all suffer. i went to better schools than they did. i was a better student than they were. we are one home with one flag. i hit everything, the white supremacists and neo-nazi, i got them all. kkk, i got them all. there is no challenge too great for us to conquer. the on people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself. wow. welcome to morning joe. you know, for over a year now there have been people that have been saying you should not try to figure out the president s mental state and if he has any issues, don t try to be a pop psychiatrist or psychologist but i can say safely, willie that he at least has in its most advanced form plet call schizophrenia. that s just from three days. and the back and for the is insane. i think what we need to try to dig into today is, first of all, how much does it degrade his effectiveness because word do matter and at some point even his own followers may say enough. but, secondly, why did he do what he did yesterday? because he always now last tuesday s horrid press conference where he equated a fascist with anti-fascists, the rest of the week everybody was rushing out going we had nothing to do with that , the staff. right after the speech in phoenix, they all started immediately leaking, we had nothing to do with this. i got the sense that general kelly i think at this point is pretty fed up with it. i wonder if general kelly and there s no way he will. even if general kelly got him in that nobody believes that the yesterday s version of donald trump is the real donald trump. the message of healing and unity is the one that he actually believes, because when he s not on the teleprompt when he totally undid his words and talked about both sides. why does he keep going back and for the and back and forth, though? pick a side. it doesn t even mack sense for donald trump. pick a side. well, i think in the case of charlottesville, he didn t like that he was personally felt that he was railroaded into making the speech that he made so he came out at trump tower and said i got pushed these these word and apologies and the arrest of it, i think it personal grievance, which donny deutsch speaking. these are fraction times. you know, willie geist, things must have prngs it s kind of sad when you have a veteran who has had a storied career in the field and that s not going to get you any dates these days. you called when i said the trump rhetoric in north korea was okay, be not with that morning. kprp and carol lee joining us in washington. of so why didn t he give a contrite speech and gaver in part of this during the campaign. it just depends whether they can get her to be on the teleprompt b. from this show doesn t have very much teleprompter and you see the personalities of the people, like a willie geist, a donnie deutsche. there s no way the trump presidency will succeed unless he s himself and he s just not himself on teleprompter. so yesterday didn t solve a thing. it just creates people wondering why he can t be like that more often without the teleprompter. so, donnie, you have obsessed, it been your job to obsess over brand management for corporations, public fings are and he s cutting against and you re going to continue narrow casting, which keeps you at 33, 34, 35%, i mean, he will not get re-elected. if he continues narrow casting, he will lose badly. there were a couple of polls out yesterday showing both biden and bernie sanders just absolutely destroying him like 51, 5 % to 35, 36%. but if you re going to narrow cast, nair other cast. if you re going do expand your audience, expand your audience and have the guts to do that knowing that your base is going to stay with you. but he s in a dead zone here. what do you you tell why are client if i would tell my client they need help. you know, i watched the speech the other night and we ve been at this for two years now. we all try as intellectuals to and no, no, no, donnie, owe we put out this ad that says we re sporty, we sexy and the new gm and the next day they put out an ad that said, hey, ear why father s frpgs that s what i m talking about. what would you say to that gm ceo that changed his image radically every day? would i say what any third grader would say to them, you stant for something. a brand is a set of you re going to stand for nothing. you within i would say people are going to turn you o flchlt nothing matters anymore. that s what happens. yours sffrpgs richard haas and we ve all seen this through the years. at what point does his grace pull on to this and at what point does the stop trying to ul f the media is evil, the media is bad, the take news, fake media, fake news. after a while there were reports that the crowd started to dipercent and fade away in the middle of this speech in phoenix and that it wasn t as big of a crowd. independe independent. for frmt nobody was listening by in can be krk if you re going to feed the best, you have to keep it most and more and for me it impossible to sustain. and is this attempt from dies buyon ands will fchls it raises at least foreign policy concerns overseas because these things are heard around the world. it s not just an person echo came bers. it raises whether other countries can rely on her bus brngs whatever the domestic political upside, there s not easy to know it works against anything you might want to accomplish in the world fwrmt 59% disapprove of the job he s doing. 61% feel president trump is doing more to unite the pack and. 60% said he s doing more to divide the country. and 30% feel trump is bringing the right type of change. 23% say there s been little change at all. voters are against the way that trump talks about the media by a nearly 2-1 margin. 40% approve of the media s coverage trump while disappoint ma. i think they care about the numbers for the base, that s what i m told. and they feel like the basis is holding steady. among republicans in a hole, you see some drop in raspberry but it s still pretty good. oo frrnlt sffrmt. that s some of the up and down. but if you hook it. he feels like from what. that s right. and we ve talked about over and over again. he feels like what worked for him during the campaign would work for him frnl he had a script at that rally and it takes him become to campaign and fmt it was military members where he s announcing a policy for afghanistan. they f they had n and in his private time mistaken. he s clearly someone who sits and and thinks about who s given him, in ands that when he feels free to unleash. marc n right now again, it just the base. and it so interesting, we re talking about the white house and we re just focused about the base, we re just focused about the way, we ve al about it prch has been so lowered, the expecks for drft. other than behavior and pen. i think we need to ask following for fshlg atlas and you a pollster bragging about a poll that show that 42% of republicans pr prrks only 42% of the republican party sure they would vote for donald trump in a re-elect. f because of this steve bannon focus. the people in the white house think they ve convinced the president that he needs to chang course. he switched chiefs of star, prks there s not a fundamental as soon as zprfrm academics, many people who work in the white house, cabinet prnfrrjts would suggest he just want to do more of the same. i m sofr, go ahead, sir. go ahead, donnie. sfchlt kol jis. we have to stop looking for lodge being,ly say that and start looking to federal budget instead i will use the word illogical. i was watching you yesterday morning and you looked tired. i m not saying that just because you are a handsome man and always will be a handsome man. thank you very much. but it gets to a point where you can t put your arms around it anymore. there are no chess move to go, ah. . . and a particular state of mine ands that ands thattin. chip: well, it may not be that he has predementia. it may just be that. i will go crazy and i will be so inappropriate and i will tay nusk i will be abusive to her. i don t know who else did or didn t, i didn t follow it that closely, if somebodies in fshl. when people do work for me, instead of paying them, i will hire lawyers and i will make them drag me to court and i will show absolutely no class, i will show no dignity, i will try to take advantage of every person i can. and then you start running for president, you attack war heros, you attack meggin kelly. just go down the line. you call beauty queens fat. you attack mothers whose sons gave their lives in iraq, gold star mothers. please don t foe get the pope. you attack all of these people and you still you attack the hope and you win. they will never repeat themselves again, okay? that is neff, ever going to happen again. you could have run the election a hundred times in a hundred defer so, donnie, the mistake his makes is by the way, he even said that. if the lebss were held a week before, i pro have sfwrernl that s why you guys beating him by 15, 20 points. that s why mitch mcconnell is going i don t need this guy. he s a loser. yeah, i may be at 18% kentucky but i can take care of kentucky, he can t. fix this. and tease what donald trump doesn t understand. so they continue narrow casting and that are riding it off a cliff. kim jong un, now they ll boo hav haven. to me that s a about why were zbrrjs but our frmt that often would help him in the rough and tum p that s still his mindthis the. he s a previous mine to change yet, it s foolish. let just say what we all know. tuesday night in phoenix was drft. yesterday night and yesterday. listening to general kelly or whoever the rizer was who got no f when you re president and go after mitch mcconnell and you call up tom tillis and i do all these things that politico is reporting this morning. those are the people you need to become a great president. he need all these people and he shouldn t be firing indiscrip nantly at them. that s what we were talking about yesterday, what didn t make sense. and what i don t understand why trump supporters don t even get this is that everything he is doing is hurting his agenda. pass tax reform. to pass regulatory reform all of these people, he s just hooting himself in the foot politically. it makes absolutely no sense and yet he still keeps dpog it dlajt there s a famous story where but eisenhower succeeded as prz because he apfrm won t help him uk sed n he had fail as president. . ffrm or have they given up on that snm this as the white house permanent come him really try to oug pufrpgs sure there s the paper flow. in the idea he can control the president is just he can t. he knows that to a certain, tent. and so the focus seems to have been on the staff and how to create an apparatus around him that is at least functioning in a way that can try to move the president s agenda forward. the president is heading into this fall where there s a number of very serious legislative issues and funding the government in this rift with congress, see republican kind of tuning him out. how that plis out is going to depend on how he engages with them this fall. think think there is some hope, at least on the hill, johnson kelly will make that process go a parkmorningen yrn the tez drengs contender joins us ped. also, testifying for ten hour on capitol hill hill. senator dick blume that winthal up. we ll be right back. uh. yes, erin, it is great time to score a deal. we need to make room for the 2018 models. relive the thrill of beating the clock. the volkswagen model year end event. hurry in for a $1,500 in available bonuses and 0% apr for 60 months on a new 2017 jetta or passat. looking for clear answers for your retirement plan? start here. or here. even here. and definitely here. at fidelity, we re available 24/7 to make retirement planning simpler. we let you know where you stand, so when it comes to your retirement plan, you ll always be absolutely.clear. time to think of your future it s your retirement. know where you stand. time to think of your future looking for a hotel that fits. whoooo. .your budget? tripadvisor now searches over. .200 sites to find you the. .hotel you want at the lowest price. grazi, gino! find a price that fits. tripadvisor. that s why at comcast we re continuing to make4/7. our services more reliable than ever. like technology that can update itself. an advanced fiber-network infrustructure. new, more reliable equipment for your home. and a new culture built around customer service. it all adds up to our most reliable network ever. one that keeps you connected to what matters most. welcome back to morning joe. glen simpson, whose firm spent more than ten hours being questioned by the senate judiciary last week. chuck grassley said he will order the minutes released. i would like to know what they discovered in that meeting and i would like the transcript released. will you do that? the answer is it will take a vote of the committee to do it. but will you do that? of course we will put it to a vote of the committee. will you personally vote for the release of the transcripts? i don t know why i wouldn t. senator grassley also said simpson and his attorney would have to receive a copy of the transcript to look over before it was made public. an attorney for simpson said the transcript reveals all of the testimony based on the hours of staff. he said we appreciate the opportunity to review the transcript. joining us, democratic senator richard blumenthal of connecticut. senator, will these transcripts be made public? i believe they will be. i certainly will vote for them to be made public. glen simpson should testify in the committee in the open, under oath, and so should the others as well, donald trump jr. and the person anyone involved in that meeting in early june that involved apparently jared kushner and others. remind us why glen simpson is significant to the investigation here. because he compiled a dossier that implicated donald trump in the russian meddling and other potential wrong doing but also he is apparently a close associate of those who attended, includi includi including paul manafort. we want to make sure whether it s the release of the transcript or anything else we in no way conflict with the special counsel s role. he should be protected by legislation that i ve offered and others, that s bipartisan. was he a compelling witness? did he become more interesting to you after ten hours of testimony? every witness is going to be interesting to me. every witness potentially has facts that are relevant to the investigation and those facts may be more interesting the more we learn. mark? senator, one of the issues that seems to be coming to a head are who are glen simpson s new customers? his firm seems to be claiming they re not a law firm, there s some sort of attorney or client privilege here. should the government be able to compel an investigative firm who its clients were? an investigative firm unless they are working for an attorney and somehow that kind of investigative result is an work product and certainly is unprotected. did he refuse to say who his clients were in his temperature? i can t go into what the subject of the testimony was but my hope is there would be no objection to him testifying fully and frankly before our committee. you mentioned donald trump jr., you want to hear him testify. has he been cooperating with your investigation? when are you going to testify they have very important information about the substance of that meeting which directly implicates potentially the trump campaign. and the question is what did the president know and when did he know it. and protecting the special counsel through legislation what we ve offered is more and more important. it s bipartisan legislation because the closer we come to those kinds of facts, the greatest the threat will be of political interference. it s always great to to you have on the show. obviously a will the of distraction, so much attention has been turned from north korea, to that your committee s investigation is going? do you think there s still good, bipartisan cooperation? are you confident that you all are pew suing to give robert mueller the time and the space and the freedom that he needs to do his job without being fired by the president of the united states or people that the president of the united states orders to fire? i am pleased so far with the bipartisan approach to the investigation and i m satisfied that chairman grassley is committed to uncovering all of the truths surrounding potential obstruction of justice in the firing of jim comey and other actions and threats that the president has taken. this obstruction of justice goes directly to the oversight responsibility for the i think that the legislation we ve offered to protect the special counsel against political interference has growing bipartisan support. it was introduced by myself and lindsey graham, along as with three democrats i think because of the apparent boom ranging we re seeing veering and some f of. and at the end of the day, in our investigation, as well as in the special counsel s investigation, i they ll become the bulwarks of our kpascy. senator, thank you for coming in. politico has reporting on two frent front, inside the president s increasing effort o take down jeff flake and his clashes over russia. we ll have that and more reporting just ahead. i m. i m so in love with you. whatever you want to do. .is alright with me. ooo baby let s. .let s stay together. theso when i need to book tant to mea hotel room,tion. i want someone that makes it easy. booking.com gets it. and with their price match, i know i m getting the best price every time. visit booking.com. booking.yeah! what s the story behind green mountain coffee and fair trade? let s take a flight to colombia. this is boris calvo. boris grows mind-blowing coffee. and because we pay him a fair price, he improves his farm and invest in his community to make even better coffee. all for a smoother tasting cup. green mountain coffee. i think it s important that we all stay unified as republicans to complete our agenda. those go gentlemen are people i respect, know, like and are friends with. we disagree on certain issues. i can think of a couple with those gentlemen, but nevertheless we have a very good working relationship. it s important for us to be unified and i think the president is employing a strategy that he thinks is effective for him. well, it s not of course effective for him and we all know it s not effective for him. it s a strategy that paul ryan has never ememployed ployed in s years. the apologizing for donald trump at some point has to stop, from paul ryan especially. paul ryan and mike pence both, the two guys that i know and like very much, but at some point you just have to call a spade a spade and say that is not helpful. it not only hurts the president s agenda, it hurts the country s agenda and that needs to be said by the speaker of the house. the speaker of the house has mitch mcconnell and other people coming out and speaking out against some of the rhetoric from the president. mitch mcconnell came out in support of jeff flake really quickly when donald trump attacked him, rallying around his fellow republicans. for whatever reason, paul ryan seems to hem and haw. mike pence i understand a little more but you d like to see aly mo a little more from the speaker. and say his name when david duke takes great comfort from the words of the president of the united states. paul ryan needs to step up and start doing that. not just for the take of this country but for his own sake. let s bring in the co-author of political playbook. if it s a strategy, it s the stupid strategy on capitol hill. you guys are reporting that he s called quite a few people and done quite a few destructive things, destructive for his own efforts in trying to build a governing coalition. yeah, it befuddling. eye find myself saying that more and more recently. there s simple math here. you need 50 votes to pass anything. so if he angers two people, he s not going to get it done. he called bob corker and complained about russia sanctions in an angry phone call, called thom tillis about legislation that senator blumenthal was just talking about, about protecting bob mueller. i want to touch on the paul ryan piece for one second. this occupies an unhealthy mind set. the way ryan sees it, he s spent a lot of the campaign. i m just trying to illuminate the thinking here. he spent a lot of campaign dumping on donald trump. he didn t endorse him initially, as you ll recall. he was disgusting by him in many ways and said so. i think he feels like the guy won the election, a lot of people argue he s taken it too far and given him too much rope and it is one of the continuing story lines on capitol hill, his unwillingness to really, really go after donald trump. but it s what everybody s talking about all the time on capitol hill. so it s an accurate reflection of kind of the conversation in d.c. paul ryan is seen by a lot of conservatives like me as a very gifted guy who may still have a very bright future in the republican party. even beyond the speakership. and when he remains silent, when we re in the middle of national crises, when the president of the united states provides aid and comfort to white supremacists and neo-nazis and klansmen are coming out and thanking the president of the united states and white nationalists are coming out and thanking the president for the coverage he is providing them, it s what i said back in 2011 was calling barack obama a racist who hated all white people. if you want to assume the mantle for the head of your country, paul ryan has to stop worrying about his district in janesville. he has to stop worrying about the next piece of legislation he wants to pass. he has to worry about something bigger and that is the health of our constitutional republic. at what point does he speak out? if you re not going to speak out when the president provides comfort to nazis and white supremacists, when the hell are you going to start speaking out and showing courage? there s two ways to look at it. one is he s been as outspoken as any national republican leader, save mitt romney, in criticizing the president and taking him to task in things like when he criticized a federal judge after access hollywood, et cetera. on the other hand, he s been as big an enabler of donald trump because he is speaker and he has tried to compartmentalize and focus on the agenda. real quickly, ben sass has been more aggressive, bob corker has been more aggressive. i can name ten republican senators who have been more aggressive in calling out what is clearly wrong. paul ryan hasn t. well, sass may rival what ryan has done. the other people you named i don t think have been as outspoken at times as paul ryan and paul ryan has done it as speaker of the house. in a couple of weeks what paul ryan is going to have to do is keep the government from defoughting on its debt and keep there from being a government shutdown. he still has things about the president that he doesn t like will not stand in the way of solving those. i have talked to the most powerful donors in the republican party and the top exact adviseds. they re like we can t change him, we re just going to be quiet because he s not going to do what we tell him to do anyway. actually, the only thing donald trump respond to is blunt force rhetorically rhetorically or politically. that s all he responds to, and paul ryan since donald trump has won the nomination has been silent and meek. i completely agree with what mark said. i think the way ryan looks at it for better or worse is he leads 246 other house republicans, many of whom are not bothered by a lot of this stuff. for better or worse. i m not passing judgment one way or the other, and it s kind of plit cll internal political survival in some sense. but i agree with mark. there s been really nobody as outspoken, and even mcconnell, mcconnell tried blunt force, and it didn t really work on the legislative front. so it s a really tricky position for all these guys. i think they re grappling with it. what mcconnell said it s funny what mcconnell said about trump legislatively, he s inexperienced, too high expectations, those are facts. he s never been in government before and trump just laced into him. well, and willie, at some point they re either going to keep pushing back at him and get him to start bending a little bit to the will of what they need to get legislation passed or nothing will ever get done. but doing it the way they ve been doing it is not going to work. as far as jake said he didn t want to pass judgment on a lot of the republicans that deal with what donald trump is doing, i ll be glad to. he s providing aid and comfort to neo-nazis. it will lead to the end of the republican party, and paul ryan has a really difficult job, probably one of the toughest jobs in washington d.c., but he also is the third-ranking person of the united states of america. at some point, willie, you ve not to worry about your country more than you worry about your home district or the next piece of legislation. what is your red line has been asked if you re a republican, the red line the president could step over at which you would confront him. for many people, unfortunately it wasn t charlottesville. people hanging in with him. jake, you have an extraordinary story about the president calling senators corker and tillis both on questions over russia and asked them to reverse the positions. they stood up to him and pushed ahead. ahead, we ll bring in bob costa with his latest reporting. we ll be right back on morning joe. david. what s going on? oh hey! that s it? yeah. everybody two seconds! dear sebastian, after careful consideration of your application, it is with great pleasure that we offer our congratulations on your acceptance. through the tuition assistance program, every day mcdonald s helps more people go to college. it s part of our commitment to being america s best first job. are made with smarttrack®igners material to precisely move your teeth to your best smile. see how invisalign® treatment can shape your smile up to 50% faster today at invisalign.com when you think of saving money, what comes to mind? your next getaway? connecting with family and friends? a big night out? or maybe your everyday shopping. whatever it is, aarp member advantages can help save you time and money along the way. so when you get there, you can enjoy it all the more. for less. surround yourself with savings at aarpadvantages.com welcome back to morning joe. donny yrvei want to ask you abo this robert lee situation that s going on with espn. what in the world? if we all make terrible mistakes. right? we all have somebody that says hey, that sounds like good idea. or we get a hair-brained idea ourselves. but at some point you realize that you screwed up and you re like i really need to walk this back. espn still not walking it back. will you please talk to them? yeah. and say this robert lee should be announcing at the we should apologize to him. we should apologize to our fans, and we should apologize to all the new trump converts because of our stupidity over the past week. robert lee is an asian announcer on espn. he was about to cover a virginia football game preseason game. and they pulled him off because they were concerned particularly because it was virginia, because his name was robert lee. i always believe that consumers are relatively intelligent and they would know that was not the deceased general calling games and talking. i would assume the consuming public could understand that. so to your point, that is an overreaction, and it actually, unfortunately, feeds donald trump red meat to say you see what s happening now? it s actually i would love to have been in the meeting with that brain trust when they said we got to put lee on the sidelines. let s bring in ulysses grant to cover this game. he calls a good game. they re saying they re doing this to help the guy, willie. now, to protect the guy. again, that is such an overreaction. it s lunacy. it s political correctness just it s just stupid. i can t imagine why espn is still holding the line and not backing down and saying we really screwed up. he s going to be there. the guy can get a standing ovation at the beginning of the game, and espn would get higher ratings than for any virginia game for years? . the part of the initial statement that got me is at the end they said we re sorry this became an issue. it wasn t an issue. nobody knew about it. they made it an issue by creating this. the other side was they were worried about his safety, i guess. i don t know who was threatening robert lee. from whom? but the game and with all due respect to the two teams, uva against william and mary, i don t think a lot of people were going to be watching that. it wasn t going to become an international meme to have robert lee. if it was, someone would have put that out and people would have laughed given the irony of it being in charlottesville. with due respect to my family and friends at espn, they stepped in it at this one. it shows what s happening with the president on down how the country is on edge to the point where you get this insane overreaction. yeah. i actually it was we re at the top of the hour. thanks so much for tuning in to morning joe. willie, we have seen a tale of actually two presidents over three days. donald trump trying to be presidential in an afghanistan speech that i think most people were comforted by, even if they didn t agree with a policy. and then, of course, the next day in phoenix he did just what everybody thought he was going to do, and then yesterday it was peace and sunshine and the biggest little city in the world as you said in reno. let s take a look. we cannot remain a force for peace in the world if we are not at peace with each other. believe me we have plenty of anarchists. a wound inflicked problem a singl single member of our community. a wound inflicted upon us all. it is time to heal the wounds that divide us. it s a very dishonest media, those people right up there. a new unity based on the common values that unite us. i really think they don t like our country. when one part of america hurts, we all hurt. these are sick people. when one citizen suffers an injustice, we all suffer together. i went to better schools than they did. i was a petter student than they were. we are one people with one home and one great flag. i hit them with everything. i got the white supremacist, the neo-nazi. i got them all. we have no division too deep for us to heal. kkk. we have kkk. i got them all. there is no challenge too great for us to conquer. the only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself. loyalty to our nation demands loyalty to one another. one vote away. i will not mention any names. decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the oval office. very presidential. isn t it? love for america requires love for all of its people. how dishonest these people are. we are people who love. i didn t say i love you because you re black. we are people with heart. or i love you because you re from japan. we are people who adore or you re from china or you re from kenya or you re from scotland or sweden. in america we never lose faith. this is me speaking. that s the same man over the course of three days this week. with us we have senior political analysts mark hallparen, donny deutsche, shannon petty piece, and mark lebovich, catty k, and robert costa. mark, it s dizzying. what s your take away from the past three days? i think one of the things we often think about is how to explain to future generations what happened during the trump administration. and i think the last three days is going to be one of the hardest to explain because of not just the discrepancy but the stakes involved and the fact that at a time when everyone is looking at him, congress is away. north korea, the debt ceiling, what happened in charlottesville, under incredible scrutiny, this is the way the president performed. it s hard to explain now let alone 30 years from now. and the stakes that you speak of, of course, tasty trump steaks. let s go to bob in washington. bob, do you have any reporting of the last three days? is this general kelly versus donald trump or is this donald trump versus himself? general kelly when he came in always said he was going to be more focussed on managing the staff as chief of staff than managing the chief. my sources in the legislative office and around the legislative teams in congress say they re just trying to get the budget passed and the debt ceiling done, trying to co-ral president trump is probably too tall an order, especially as he fumes about news coverage. yeah. catty k, what in the world was the world say about us after the last three days? charlottesville, obviously, was a shock to the system, but they see a president who is struggling to act presidential. and just ping-ponging back and forth. what in the world could our allies across europe and the world be saying right now? it s interesting listening to the two speeches back to back, every time it gets to the reno speech, i find myself nodding off because his cadence is flat and bored. this is not donald trump struggling with his better angels and his more evil angels. this is just trump is the person speaking in phoenix. the only person that was speaking in reno is the person who didn t believe in the way she was speaking and had been pushed into that by his advisors. the world looks at this as it has done for the last six months and allies trying to figure out what can they work with america on now or not. and they don t trust what comes out of the president s mouth to reflect what s going to happen in a week s time. just as we don t. what he says on monday to germany or britain or france might not be what he says next wednesday to britain and france. that s the problem allies are dealing with. there no longevity in the message out of the white house. the substance monday night was deadly serious. sending more troops to afghanistan. north korea is still in the background. he threw out in phoenix just sort of an off the cuff remark, we ll probably terminate nafta. that sent a lot of people saying wait? whether or not he meant that or that was prepared is unclear. how do you manage if you re looking from the world and that s what the perspective you have, how do you manage this president? well, the answer is the rest of the world goes about its business without us. the rest of the world also increasingly they all have files. it s called how we look after ourselves because we can no longer count on the united states. we re setting in motion a world where u.s. influence is down and countries take matters into their own hands. it s a more dangerous world. that s going to be the structural result. if this continues for another three and a half years. one thing about the speeches. the one good moment of the last three days was in the afghanistan speech. i thought the basic policy was right. we re going to stay there. our goal is not to change afghanistan. it s essentially not the lose, not to see it become a terrorist haven. what the president said i ve changed my mind. unless i m missing something, that was the first time as president where he s basically said i ve learned something. i ve now come to a position i wasn t comfortable with during the campaign. but here s where i am now and here s why. if that became a template, i m not saying it will. i know it probably won t, but if that became a template for his presidency, that would be the best news of my week. that was the first time i ve seen him as president actually act presidential. and shannon, it appears in that case he went through the more conventional review process. deliberated, spoke to advisors before the speech. right. and that lasted about 24 hours, maybe less than 24 hours. when he was at the rally the next day and back to his old self. that afghan process, i was traveling last week with the vice president who was incredibly involved in this decision, spent the summer meeting with military leaders, national security leaders, reviewing data on the plane back from panama. before this camp david meeting he was continuing to review informati information, that, a very thought out well-laid out process. but so to dr. jekl and mr. hide, you see it on one issue, and on another issue like transgender military service members, it comes out of nowhere on a tweet. there s a lot of grading on a curve when donald trump makes one decent speech on monday about afghanistan, you have people online and people on television saying well, that was presidential. that was a good speech. he kind of did what presidents are supposed to do and then dips back to who he is on tuesday night in phoenix. it s not unprecedented for presidents to have different speeds. there are presidents who have conversational speeds and teleprompter speeds. what s striking is how you don t know what you re going to get on a given day. it s a whirlwind. the other thing is just the volume of trump. we are in a recess period. congress is not back until next week. this is a time to sort of take stock, especially after what s been a traumatic two weeks for the country. and yet he remains in our faces every single day, and this is what he sort of wants. he wants the attention. he wants to be talked about. at the same time this is a very sensitive as we talked about, time, and it s also coming on the heals of what s going on a very consequential month in which substantive things are going to be resolved. again, it s exhausting, first of all and confusing. you have to wonder how long this is sustainable for. bob costa, one group of people watching this closely are people at the wall street journal editorial board. a piece reads donald trump is sore at mitch mcconnell for saying the president has excessive expectations for congress sometimes. mr. trump told a rally in phoenix he s going to shut down the federal government this autumn to get funding for his border wall with mexico. the crowd loved it, but this is the political equivalent of holding a gun to his own head and saying if congress doesn t do what he wants, mr. trump will shoot himself. don t expect chuck schumer to try to talk trump out of it. it s never true how much of the rhetoric is real or bluster. the shutdown over the wall is one threat he d be wise to abandon. democrats are going to end up voting to help not shut the government down, give votes to avoid a debt default. how will conservatives react with nancy pelosi partners with president trump to deal with those two issues? as much as the president is recalibrating rhetoric on foreign policy for his afghanistan on capitol hill and in the financial community, there s rrn about this whole showdown over the budget and the border wall proposal. there s a few things on capitol hill. the freedom caucus wants the border wall funded. at the same time you could see the budget push forward into december, have a short-term bill to keep the government funded and just push off the fight over the border wall. there s also talk of just trying to water down what it means to have a border wall. you have some kind of technology provision that would win some democratic votes because it wasn t an actual physical wall that was being funded. just as a way to kick the can down the road and try to keep president trump happy at least to some extent. i want to ask about the perception of the u.s. brand overseas right now. the average citizen in your country and the pundits, are they able to separate donald trump from the united states, or is it somehow getting, you know what? the u.s. has lost their way a little bit and maybe they re not what we think they stand for, or can they delineate between the two? there s an enormous amount of fascination in donald trump and why america voted for him, what he does and what he says, people are intrigued by it and report on it endlessly. there is also i think for the first time, and i go back to the anti-americanism of 2003 and 200 will, now there s nothing else going on. it s in european countries, a dismissiveness. a feeling america has lost its global leadership. people are starting to look to other countries. angela merkel was speaking in berlin and make a point about america. she said america can t be great if it pulls back from the world and isn t interested in things beyond it own borders. she said you can t have a feeling for yourself to be big others have to be smaller. it was a criticism of donald trump. people are looking beyond the united states at a time of shifting power balances around the world, they re starting to think maybe this is not going to be a century dominated by america and by american values. it s going to be dominated perhaps by china, perhaps by russia even. and we have to figure out how to deal with that. i ve never come back to a united states that has seemed so dismissed by european allies as i did this summer. and, of course, america can t be great if america recedes, but america can t be great if america isn t good throughout the cold war the soviets would always when we would talk about their enslavement of hundreds of millions of people behind the iron curtain, they would talk about how badly we treated american indians and how badly we treated black americans and how badly our leaders were on race issues. well, the past week has actually played into all our enemy s hands with charlottesville. they can point to their people on donald trump providing aid and comfort to white supremacists, and it really the moral standing of this country actually is one of the strengths of this country despite all the mistakes we ve made. and despite all the criticisms that, well, we even heap upon ourselves. that really has been undermined over the past several weeks, and it s going to take more than a couple teleprompter speeches for donald trump to earn some of that credibility back for this country. and there are a lot of people in the government who feel exactly what you feel. that s why you saw separate statements from the branches of the military over which donald trump as commander in chief denouncing racism and bigotry and doing things donald trump didn t do. that s why republicans and democrats were coming out to remind the country who we are. the other side of this, i would suggest is that the world and americans have to be able to trust and to take the word of what the president says. when he says offhand to go back, he says i think we ll end up terminating nafta. you believe it s going to happen or you say he says stuff like that all the time and start ignoring the united states of america and the president. it would be a tough day to be the american negotiator in the talks. there s a story in the wall street journal, the world now is growing at over 3.5%. the united states is not growing close to that. and again, it feeds into what we ve been talking about. the world is learning to get along without us. we ve opted out of tpp. we may opt out of nafta. i don t know if it s a bluff. if we don t set an example, we lose influence. if we don t start passing things like tax reform and infrastructure building, we re shutting down trade and immigration. we re losing the engines of economic growth. we re not going to have the resources to play the sort of role we ve historically played. we re going to end up with the america not so much america first. we re going to end up with america only. it s going to be a much diminished country. and you can see that also in our foreign policy, and with the funding cuts that we ve had, the fact that the state department is completely gutted. it is just a crisis of the first order, and here we are in august, almost into september, and still nothing being done in rex tillerson s state department to fill vital roles. bob, as we go into september, obviously it s a final push for the republicans to try to get something done. is there any hope that with republicans on capitol hill that they re going to do anything other than avert major disaster by the government shutting down? i mean, any hope that they re going to pass health care reform? any hope that they ll pass some version of tax reform? or are they playing not to completely lose the legislative year by shutting down the government? joe, i was calling some major republican donors and saying what are they telling you behind the scenes. they said republicans on capitol hill are promising some kind of tax cut plan by thanksgiving. by the end of the year they think they ll have a tax cut plan. they know and they re telling to their donors the american people in many respects don t want to go after a lot of these tax deductions, might as well try to lower the individual rates. i think there is a difference, the whole discussion we re having about american leadership abroad. republicans on capitol hill are very much separating the question of moral authority in charlottesville and the question of tpp and nafta and how the international community sees us. they always expected the international community to turn away from the nationalist outsider president. it s more of the moral authority question that concerns them, not just all that together in one pot. all right. bob, thank you very much. mark, we re going to have you come on down the hall and join us at the grownup table after the break. still ahead on morning joe, congressman tim ryan far from sherman-esque when it comes to running for president. in the words of the ohio democrat, we ll see. he joins us straight ahead. first a live report from the white house. how the military is sorting out a presidential directive issued on social media. those new details are next on morning joe. during our made to move 2017 clearance event, you can do endless online research. or, you can take advantage of our best offer ever on an xt5. don t wait. our 2017 models will be moving fast. you can drive a car. or you can drive a cadillac. come in now before the end of our made to move 2017 clearance event and leave with the perfect cadillac xt5 for your next adventure. choose a low mileage lease on this xt5 for around $339 per month. my bladder leakage was making me feel like i couldn t spend time with my grandson. now depend fit-flex has their fastest absorbing material inside, so it keeps me dry and protected. go to depend.com - get a coupon and try them for yourself. go to depend.com - it s our back to school beeone cent evente. at office depot office max. 10 pack pens, one cent. composition notebooks,scissors, and plastic folders all one cent each! hurry to office depot office max. taking care of business. if they knew just howers rich they were.ed the average american home value has increased $40,000 over the last 5 years. but many don t know you can access that money without refinancing or selling your home. with a home equity loan, you can pull cash out of your house for anything you need- home improvement, college tuition, even finally getting out of credit card debt. come to lendingtree.com to shop and compare home equity loans right now. because at lendingtree, when banks compete, you win. welcome back to morning joe. mark, i want to bring you in here. obviously you wrote this town, you did the follow up with a piece about the age of trump. that s dated now with all the firings and the people who have left. but is there still a sense, because and i m curious if you agree with me. i ve always said washington always wins, and it always does. we have institutions that have been here for over two centuries, and they usually grind down would be tyrants. is there a quiet feeling in washington d.c. that, okay, this guy s chaotic. he s all over the place but at the end of the day, he s going to be run out of town like everybody else that thought they could do it their own way? yes and no. i think on one hand people are wondering if this is, in fact, sustainable. i think the larger question is people tend to frame this as a question of will washington win or will he be tamed or will the establishment win out over the populists? this increasingly is not what this is about. this is something that seems to be deeply troubling a lot of people. not just on a level of what can get done, especially at a time when you are playing defense if you re the republicans. but also, what is the nature of the republican party going forward? who is going to get elected in the republican party going forward? who are they speaking to? and i think wee are going, especially on a republican side to a larger existential set of issues that i think will define the country going forward. and i think also will define the trump presidency to see when he crosses a line or lines that will incite some kind of collection action from within the republican party. those are bigger questions. the reason i was asking you the question i was is because mika, obviously, a product of washington d.c., has been around the white house since she was nine, ten years old. i ve been there for a while. we have two completely different views. mika is extraordinarily concerned and doesn t know what that this ends well at all. i have more confidence in the institutions, that they will hold, that the courts will hold, that the constitution will hold. we went to an event a few nights ago. you had people washington insiders who said this is ugly. it s horrifying. but at the end of the day, our founders gave us pretty strong institutions. it s interesting that even washington people right now are trying to figure out how this will end, and just aren t sure. i do think you bring up a great point about the republican party. i think it s the republican party and not the constitutional republic itself that faces the biggest post trump existential crisis. i don t know how they survive it. i think also the question is not so much about establishment of inside washington but also the nature of what the republican party is if you consider what the president spoke to in phoenix two nights ago. this is a question of there s just a lot of disconnect between who still trying to understand who the trump voters are, what they re listening to, what they re hearing that in a large portion of the nation, it s not hearing, and, again, what is what is the template? what are they looking for and what is trump continuing to give them? and who are the trump voters? the trump voters are one out of every three americans. that s who the trump voters are. sometimes we have to remember that. donald trump is in power. the guy lost the popular vote by over 3 million votes. he ran against somebody that many people consider to be the least effective general election candidate in our lifetime. there were people that were warning as early as the convention. you had people like joe biden and ed rendell saying the democrats could lose this election. i think sometimes we overstate the trump voters impact on america because it s one out of three americans. we ll see that impact next year, but when you re outnumbered two to one, it s usually not a very good indication for how strong your political movement is. yeah. i mean, there was an analysis i retweeted. i sent it out again it s an interesting way to think about trump voters. they re willing to overlook so much of what donald trump says and does, because they voted not so much for that guy but for a vessel to push forward their frustrations with us in the prez and the popular culture putting them into corners and calling then big them bigots. we have to be careful, the backlash is probably greater than a lot of us maybe anticipated among trump voters. let s go to tim ryan of ohio. congressman, good to see you this morning. you made a comment over the weekend in new hampshire that had some people talking. you were asked if you d pursue the presidency in 2020. you said i have no idea at this point but we ll see. i like being out in the country. you said maybe the country needs somebody from a place like youngstown, ohio. are you considering a run for president based on everything you ve seen over not just the last seven months but the last couple of years in this country? i think a lot of people woke up after november, willie, asking can i do more, and that led to originally the race against the leader pelosi. right now i am and i think a lot of other people are solely focussed on 2018. we have a lot of opportunities to win the house of representatives back. but i do want to be a part of that national dialogue that s happening out there of what democrats should stand for, why we re against what president trump is doing, but how we get our arms around everything that s going on with the economy to get the trump voters back. you were out before november talking about why people in places where you come from, the states that flipped and went to donald trump, why they might be leaning away from a democratic like hillary clinton. do you feel we re going on ten months since the election. do you feel that the democratic party has learned the lessons of november? i feel like we re taking steps in the right direction. i think having a major push on the jobs focus is really important, and i think that s a good first step. but we ve got to really come strong with saying we re the party to be able to handle the economy in the 21st century. we have the convergence of so many elements happening right now. globalization, automation, artificial intelligence. right now i don t think either political party has gotten their hands around it. what i want the democratic party to be is a party that can set an agenda to deal with issues that drive up wages and help people be able to afford college and health care. i don t think we can be hostile to business. i think while we can be for a progressive tax code and increase in dividends and corporate other kind of business taxes, i think we need to simplify the tax code. i think we need to lower the corporate tax rate. we can t just be the party of redistribution of wealth. we have to be the party of creation of wealth, and not just in silicon valley in wall street. in youngstown and the south, we have to create new wealth in this economy. i want the democrats to be the party that s going to get their arms around this big issue. congressman, i m going to sneak in a yes, no question. when you look in the mirror, do you see a president? not right now i don t, no. okay. do you talk to yourself? when you look in the mirror and you re talking to yourself, does anything else pop into your head? he does a stuart smally thing. quarterback of the cleveland browns was good for me. what price would you ask the president and paul ryan to pay to get your vote to raise the debt ceiling? what should the white house and the republicans give the democrats in negotiations to provide a vote to raise the debt ceiling? well, i think if they re going to be talking about taxes, that s what the republicans are talking about. i would ask for a trillion dollar expansion of the earned income tax credit. that would put about $6,000 per family in their pockets. so something like that that s really big, really bold, going to help working class families, but we need as you said, have big issues that we want them to agree with for our vote on something that s really going to help save the economy that clearly i don t think they re going to have the votes on their side. let s get something big out of it and put $5,000 in the working class family s pocketbook would be big and bold. congressman, your district split pretty evanly between trump and clinton. that used to be a solid blue county. given your demographic, are their issues you feel like you could work with the president on? have you reached out to the president? are there areas where you think you, other democrats and the sort of trump country districts could work together on? that s a good question. when i was on the show after november, i said absolutely. i want to try to solve problems, but this problem with his deep insecurities makes it to difficult. he doesn t keep his word. he s not a look you in the eye shake your hand and you can take that deal and move on with it. he s not that kind of guy, i hate to say. any deal you make with him, you re not sure if it s going to end up being what you originally agreed to. that makes it very tough. we have to lay broad band and get a new energy grid and have a big infrastructure bill to get people back to work and drive up wages. right now it s hard to deal with this president. he s chaotic. you re not sitting in a room. you don t know when he s going to turn on you. ask john mccain and jeff flake, the guys who are tried to work with him. jeff flake even votes with the guy, and he s embarrassing him in his home state. he makes it very tough. you mentioned jeff flake, republicans in the house, do you feel them drifting from donald trump even if they supported him publicly? are they frustrated with the way he s conducted himself? well, i think they re very frustrated, and from our vantage point, it s embarrassing that no one will stand up to the guy. but i think the republican party right now, and joe has articulate third down many mornings on the show. they really have the tiger by the ears here. they re screw first down they let go and screwed if they hold on. i m not sure if the tiger is the tea party, and now it s donald trump. if he gets out and he supports other candidates in primaries against republicans, that s going to be a very expensive, bloody, costly civil war within the republican party. and so i think they re all hesitant to take them on, so they kind of soft step him and try to work with them to the best they can, even though i think not to be too judgmental about it, they re embarrassing themselves when they try to deal with this guy because he can t be dealt with. do you think the speaker of the house should speak out more forcefully against donald trump? no question about it. the speaker, mitch mcconnell, they re silent on some of the deepest moral issues that are facing our country. the president is consistently demeaning the office of the presidency of the united states. and i think that blowback is going to effect the republicans. i mean, president trump pretty much won as an independent candidate. he was a republican in name, but he was an independent candidate which is why he drew so many democrats who were willing to take a risk on donald trump. but having said that, the republican party is deeply troubled right now. they have a lot of big fishers to try to deal with or just move on. i think winter is coming for the republican party. all right. congressman tim ryan of ohio. don t give up on that dream of being the cleveland browns quarterback. they could do a lot worse and they have. i got a bad back and a bad knee that s telling me it ain t going to happen. all right. well you played a little ball in college, so they might want you still. congressman, thank you. let s go to peter alexander standing by for us at the white house in the middle of a construction zone, it appears. peter, the white house expected to outline the president s transgender military ban in the coming days, the one he announced on twitter. . reporter: the white house is preparing to give jim mattis marching orders to enforce the transgender ban beginning within the next six months that would include giving them the authority to kick transgender groups out. a memo seen by u.s. officials says mattis would be allowed to remove current service members based on their, quote, deemployability, deemployability being defined here as the ability to serve in a war zone, participate in exercises or live on a ship. notably, it would bar the pentagon from recruiting transgender payments and cut off payments for sexual reassignment surgeries for those already serving. the journal says the memo is expected to be sent to the pentagon in the next several days. we reached out to sarah huckabee sanders. she said they ll share an announcement when they have one. this came to be with a series of tweets in late july announcing the ban well, they proved to be pretty divisive drawing condemnation from leaders on both sides. the president saying he consulted with generals and military leaders but it was later revealed he surprised much of the military brass with his decision. we ll let the men at work get back to what they re doing here and toss it back to you. how sad we have human beings willing to put their life on the line but the commander in chief says they re not fit because of their sexual identity choices. and there are purple heart winners who are transgender who are in the military currently. what happens? it s up to the defense secretary. what s the line? who can stay and who can go? this is a volunteer army, and you have people willing to give their life to the country. and a president who got six deferments and says a war hero like john mccain isn t a hero. senate republicans speaking out against president trump after he attacks a few of their own. plus is mike pence one of the most important vice presidents in modern history? we ll get the new reporting from bloomberg, next. [brother] any last words? [boy] karma, danny. .karma! 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[kinshocks. luckily, he s not a dog person. at midas we re always a touch better with limited lifetime guarantees on select parts, complimentary courtesy checks and more. book an appointment at midas.com wac back. shannon, you write in business week about mike pence s role in the administration. quote, amid the back fighting tum you would and controversy that defines trump s presidency, pence remains a rare pillar of calm professionalism. he s avoided west wing knife fights, managing not to make enemies. he s also staeered clear of making public contradictions of the president and wisely avoided the gravest sin in trump world, overshadowing the boss, and yet a quiet tension looms over his role as questions swirl about trump s future and what may come after. attention has returned to pence and his future. he s shot down allegations of a shadow presidency. how tortured is mike pence when he has to go out and answer for everything donald trump says and does. we saw this week with matt lauer in the white house talking act charlottesville and saying well, he came out strongly. he condemned it. does he believe everything he says or is he being a loyal side kick? i think he s embraced his role. he feels i think he feels comfortable in what he s doing. like i mentioned earlier, he s comfortable being in the position of smoothing over the rough edges of the president s foreign policy. before he went on the latin america trip, trump threatened a military action in venezuela with sirens going off there. and cooley would go in and say no, no, that s not what we mean. that s not what s happening. all this nafta talk. he s just able to seamlessly go in like nothing is going on and say we re renegotiating nafta for the 21st century and present an alternate reality of everything happening. does he believe it or is he playing the part he believes he s supposed to play? he s probably the only one who can answer that. i probably talked to two dozen people about mike pence over the past two months. no one has suggested there s some sinister plot going on here. he knows that if mike pence was president, mike pence would do things differently, but he knows mike pence is not president. mike pence would not have beat donald trump. he is the vice president and trump is the president who was elected, and he is comfortable in that role. but certainly if he was president, he would be doing a lot of things differently. president trump obviously has put the vice president in difficult situations time and time again answering for what trump said. but mike pence knew what he was signing up for when he accepted the job. yeah, and the time he seemed most disquieted by the role was after the access hollywood tapes when he said he didn t think it was appropriate. ever since then in tweets like when he returned from the g-7 meetings, he s kind of gushing tweets about how great the president is and how america is so lucky to have him. and it doesn t seem to ring false. it doesn t seem like he s playing a role. he seems happy to be the person who is constantly the president s champion when it comes to tough issues. one thing i think has been interesting and we should probably watch over the next few months is what mike pence says on the russia investigation, because he s been remarkably quiet about that, and there was some speculation around that time when people were talking a lot about bob mueller about why was mike pence being so quiet? was he protecting his own reputation? was he talking to fundraisers? and was there this secret ambition to take over should something happen to donald trump? and he shot down the reports of secret ambition. we ll see. let s bring in michael share. one of the pieces inside the new issue is titled trump tries presidential before reverting to old habits . michael, it s something we ve been talking about this morning. we played clips at the beginning of the show showing the speeches from monday on afghanistan and then to phoenix and then to reno. different tone. one was a campaign style rally. but how can you be both if you re the president of the united states? how do you pull that off? i think that s something that the white house is trying to figure out. we had a similar situation in the late summer of 2016 when the president when the then candidate trump began to start giving policy addresses reading more off a teleprompter. at one point he apologized for things he d said before. similarly at the urging of his staff saying to get back on track you re going to have to do that. i think what s happening here is that the white house, the people around the president, even the president himself realizes things are not going well, and they re trying to graft on a sort of presidential layer on top of the part of the presidency that donald trump feels most comfortable with. and doesn t want to let go of which is his gut connection to his base and his sort of wrestling narrative he s created for the country of us against them. michael, when you say the west wing knows things aren t going well. what does that mean? do they, for example, talk to the president when he attacks jeff flake or when he harasses bob corker about a russia sanctions bill. going after members of his own party he needs to work with, do they recognize it as a problem or is there still the philosophy of let trump be trump? i think there s always been a misunderstanding that no one is standing up to trump or talking to him? from early in the administration trump has been getting advice contrary to what he does. reince priebus often telling him he didn t think this was a good idea. here s why. other people saying the same thing. trump listens broadly inside the white house. he doesn t agree with them and doesn t always go along with them. but i think that advice is continuing to go to him. saw th dramatization to this, he gave a gut response to charlottesville, on monday, he has to deliver a different speech an hours later, he tweets, basically, see, i told you so it doesn t matter, the press doesn t give me any credit for it. the next day, he s back to old form. that is a conversation happening, dramatized in front of the cameras. i think you have something similar happening now t. truce that s been held here is that the president is willing on policy to move. on afghanistan, he moved away where he was in the campaign. he gave a speech praising the troops, praising patriotism, talking about the importance of diversity in the military, and then the next day, we saw what happened in arizona, so i think the operating theory rate now from the president is he can do both and he can begin to moderate some part of it, of his performance, without losing the part that he likes the best. it s tough to be credible, though wednesday, you give such a divisive speech in phoenix and the next day in reno call for unity in the country. that understand so much. the new issue of time is out tomorrow t. cover story is on how kids sports turn pro. thanks so much. still ahead, could president trump s business empire be in trouble? 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okay. and i think the people of your state, which i know very well, i think they re going to appreciate what you hopefully will do. ? dean heller is another republican senator there facing a tough re-election, getting no help from the president. president trump was in heller s state yesterday. we will bring in political reporter jon ralston from that emwith theled state morning joe is coming right back. a penny has never been more valuable. it s our back to school one cent event at office depot office max. 10 pack pens, one cent. composition notebooks,scissors, and plastic folders all one cent each! hurry to office depot office max. taking care of business. hey. pass please. i m here to fix the elevator. nothing s wrong with the elevator. right. but you want to fix it. right. so who sent you? new guy. what new guy? watson. my analysis of sensor and maintenance data indicates elevator 3 will malfunction in 2 days. there you go. you still need a pass. there you go. another anti-wrinkle cream in no hurry to make anything happen. neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair works in just one week. with the fastest retinol formula to visibly reduce wrinkles. neutrogena®. this is a story about mail and packages. and it s also a story about people. people who rely on us every day to deliver their dreams they re handing us more than mail they re handing us their business and while we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country, we never forget. that your business is our business the united states postal service. priority: you we cannot remain a force for peace in the world, but we are not at peace with each other. believe me, we have plenty of an ar consists. they don t want to talk about the anarchists. they got clubs and they got everything and tifa! is a wound inflicted upon us all. it is time to thael wounds that divide us. it s a very dishonest media, those people right up there. a new unity based on the common values that unite us. and i really think think don t like our country. i really believe that. when one part of america hurts, we all hurt. these are sick people. when one citizen suffers an injustice, we all suffer together. i went to better schools than they did, i was a better student than they were. we are one people with one home and one great flag. i hit him with everything. i got the white supremacists, the ne a nazis, i got them all. we have no division too deep for us to heal. kkk, we have kkk. i got tell all. there is no challenge too great for us to conquer. the only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media, itself. wow. welcome to morning joe. you know, for over a year now, there have been people that say you should not try to figure out the president s mental state and if he has any issues, don t try to be a pop psychiatrist or psychologist, but i can say safely, willie that he at least has in its most advanced form political schizophrenia. that is that s just from three days and the back and forth is insane. i think what we need to try to dig into today, first of all, how much does it degrade his effectiveness? because words do matter and at some pont even his own followers may say enough. but secondly, why did he do what he did yesterday? because he always, last tuesday s hard press conference equated a fascist with anti-fascists. the rest of the week everybody was rushing up, we had nothing to do with that the staff. right after his speech if phoenix, the same thing happened, they all started immediately leaking, we had nothing to do with this. i just got the sense the second i saw this speech unfurl yesterday, willie, general kelly i think at this point is pretty fed up with it. i wonder whether he had a talk with the president or somebody else had a talk saying this is, general kelly will not stick around if this keeps up. i think the problem is, nobody believes that yesterday s version of donald trump is the real donald trump, the message of healing and the message of unity is the one he actually believes. when he s not on the teleprompter we see what we saw tuesday night in feejs or last tuesday night when he totally undid his words and talked about many sides and both side, that s who he really is. why is he going back and forth, and back and forth, though. pick a side. he doesn t make sense for donald trump. pick a side. well, i think in the case of charlottesville he didn t like he was felt, personally felt, he was rail roaded into making a speech he made. so he came out at trump tower and said you at the what, i got pushed into these words, the apology the rest of it. i think it s a personal fwreevance which is what we saw on the stage in phoenix as well. let s spread it around here, we have political analyst mark halperin, donny deutsche with the bow tie. oh my lord. we will ask him why, generally speaking, why. these are fractious times. sometimes a little splinter can calm things a bit. willie geist things must have really really slowed down in the hamptons for donny deutsche. his game, he s pushed against the wall, it s kind of sad within you have a veteran that s had a storied career in a field, is losing it, only to achieve gimmicks. that will not give you any. you called a couple weeks ago, i said the trump rhetoric about north korea was okay. it stopped in the hamptons, it just stopped. i m working my way back. shuf him up and down main street. very sad. not with that betie you are not. also with us white house correspondent for plume berg news, and national political reporter for nbc news joining us in washington, carol lee. joe. yeah, let s go around the table quickly, mark halperin, why the back and forth? why does he give contrite speech one day, goes crazy the next and the next day gives another contrite speech. i know you saw part of this during campaign, it depends on whether they can get him to be on the teleprompter. there was in the white house yesterday, a lot of anxiety and anxiousness over what happened in phoenix. not just because of the news coverage of it. what it said the kelly era will be defined be i the president behaving in a different way. they got him to read the teleprompter speech. the show doesn t have very much teleprompter. you see the personalities of people like a willie geist for example, like a donny deutsche. because there is no teleprompter, unfortunately. you re just fought gentleman to get, there is no way the trump presidency will succeed unless he s himself and as willie said, he s not himself on the teleprompter. so yesterday doesn t solve a thing. people wonder why he can t be more like that without the teleprompter. donny, you have obsessed. it s been your job to obsess over brand management for corporations for public figures. around he s cutting against his it seems to me, you either go all in you go full on crazy, because that s what your base wants, you will continue casting, which keeps you at 33, 34, 35%. i mean he will not get re-elected. mark it down, if he continues nar ro casting, he will lose badly. there were a couple polls out showing biden and bernie sanders absolutely destroying him like 51, 52% to 35/36%. here s narrow casted. if you narrow cast, narrow cast, if you expand your audience, expand your audience, have the guts knowing your base is going to stay with us. he s in a dead zone here. what do you tell your client if your client is like trump, bouncing back and forth with image, different images every day? i m going to give you the honest answer to that when you are in the branding business, it s a personal business. i would tell my client they need help. i watched the speech the other night. we have been at this two years now. we all try as intellectuals to analyze and get our arms around it. i happened to stumble across the symptoms of a sociopath, i m not at all no, no, donny, examine, if gm came to you and one day they said, hey, we just put out this ad and said worry sporting, sexy and the next, hold on a second and the next day they put on ad a said, hey, we re your fats s general motors, trusted us then. can you trust us now t. next day they said, sporty, sexy, a new kind of gm. that s what i m talking about. we don t need a pop psychiatry here him i m saying as a branding expert, what would you sa toy that gm ceo that changed his image draft:i? i would say what any 3rd grader would say, you have to stand for something a. strand a set of values, this is our platform, these are the values you stand for. what i would also say to them, if you keep changing every single day, will you have no credibility, stand for nothing. you can t say one day, we will get you cleaner three times faster, the next day, we re going to soak your clothes this way. i would say people are going to turn you off. that s what s starting to happen. even on the extreme side of either side of the equakes, he goes, we re almost at the numbesque now. nothing matters anymore and that s what happens, your voice becomes irrelevant. and here is the question, richard haase, we ve all seen this through the years, at what point does his base go under this, at what point does the sprooek freak show stop pulling all the people in, how about if i go to the event, who is he going to insult? it s like if are you a dj, you are playing the same song. the media is bad the media is evil, fake news, fake news, fake media, after a while the crowds start to disburse, there were reports the crowds started to sort of fade away in the middle of this speech in phoenix and that it warn as big of a crowd and that s only natural. i remember and i m sure you remember, too, reagan in 1985, 86, 87 was trying to get aid for any communist rebels in central america. nobody was listening by his sixth year in. this is so much more intense. i wonder if donald trump loses his effectiveness that much earlier with his base? what you are getting at, if you have to feed the beast. you have to feed it more and more. it s impossible to sustain. joe, for me to question is whether this is impulse oracle calculation. is it something you can t discipline or is this an attempt and likely to fail of saying different things to different constituencies at different moments? you used the phrase narrow casting. sometimes you narrow cast to your buys or another constituency. i don t think it s sustainable and i also think it raises, at least in foreign policy concerns overseas, these things are we heard around the world. there is not an american echo chamber that raises questions because they don t know what us is anymore. it raises fundamentalal questions, who we are, what we are prepared to do. i don t think anyone is going to the president saying whatever is the political upside, though, it is not obvious there are any, you might want to accomplish in the world. still ahead, more on the president s speech, from jon ralston from the biggest little city in the world. first the president s polling drops again, we ll talk about why he s still solid with the people who matter the most. as we go to break, here s bill kierans with a major storm. it s brooke, as we went through the overnight hour, our storm harvey went from a depression to a tropical storm, we call this rapid intensification. this is not what you want when we are 36 hours away from a landfall anywhere. now we are looking at the possibility of south texas as the actual area to get hit the wor worst. it looks like a hurricane all of a sudden. as far as the storm surge, the higher it goes, it was four-to-six. we re up to five-to-seven feet. another storm surge warning. mansfield all the way up into the galveston area. these numbers will go up. evacuations will take place today. today and portions of tomorrow. that s it. people have to get out of the way of the storm. here s the latest. the new update, winds up to 16 miles per hour. we only have to get 15 more to make this a hurricane. the forecast has it at winds, a category 1 heading into landfall, midnight or saturday. this number will go up. now i wouldn t be surprised if they have it up at a category 2 and a category 3 is still in the cards. this looks like a little kid drew this map. this storm is going to sit here for about four days. we have a real big concern of a possible flooding. it will linger here. look at these squiggly lines. when you get a forecast like this, the first thing you have to deal with is a storm surge and wind damage. then this will be a huge prolific rain maker. this is 15 inches of rain, through san antonio, into houston, southern louisiana, through wednesday of next week. we haven t had a storm like this in a long time. this is a dangerous situation. again, 36 hours left to make their house press, storm press, evacuate, especially around that corpus christi area, it looks like you are the target zone for what will be hurricane harvey later on today. we have more throughout the day on ms nbc. you are watching morning joe. we ll be right back. 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ask your hep c specialist about harvoni. day! welcome back now to the latest polling. according to quinnipiac university the president s approval rating dropped four points since last week down to 35%. 59% disapprove of the job he s doing. 31% of voters feel president trump is doing more to unite the country, down five points from after his first 100 days in april. 62% say he s doing more to divide the country. 45% say trump is bringing the wrong type of change, up two points in april. 30% feel he s down four points. 23% say there has been little change at all. voters are against the way trump talks about the media from a nearly 2:1 margin. at the same time, 40% approve of the media coverage, 50% disapproves. does donald trump care about those numbers? no. he doesn t appear about it. i think they care about the numbers for the base. they feel the base is holding steady, along the republicans as a whole, you see some drop, it s still pretty good around that 75% mark. so if you are looking at 2018, a primary and you are trying to primary someone like jeff flake, is the base solid? is it going after our establishment opponents in congress? that s what they care about at this point. a lot can happen between now an 3.5 years from now. carol, let s go to you on this question, the president, obviously, has been back and forth with rhetoric all week, if you look at the poll number, as s shannon said, 75% of the republicans are with him. he feels he s got his people with him. that s right. we talked about this over and over again. he feels like what worked for him during the campaign would work for him now. i think if you look at some of this has to do with the different audiences that the president is in front of. he had a script at that rally and he chose to veer from it. part of that is because he s in this rally. he feeds off the crowd. it energizes him, takes him back to the campaign. he feels much freer to air these grievance, when you contrast the audience on pond, military members, he s announcing a policy for afghanistan, that s very different and yesterday it was the american legion, veterans, it s a very different audience. anyone who thinks this is a president who sits around and thinks about unity and moles over those issues in his private time is mistaken. he s clearly someone who sits around and thinks about who is against him, who is doing things that are unfair to him. when he gets into that arena, very campaign like, that s when he feels free to unleash. and you know he also obsessed with polls, he s obsessed with bringing people to his side, right now, again, it s just a base. and it s so interesting. you know, we re talking about the white house. we re focused about the base, focused about the base. you know, we ve all talked about it. everybody has been talking about how the bar has been so lowered for donald trump the expectations for donald trump. i really think, other than behavior and temperament and well being, i think we need to add polling to. that everybody looks at the polls and say the base is with him, the trump people do. he s at 35% right now and you had his own pollster going out yesterday bragging about a poll that showed that 42% of republicans would vote for him for re-election. it s astoupding, seven months in, only 42%, only 42 percent of the republicans party is sure they would vote for donald trump in a re-elect. it s never been that low for any incumbent president ever. yet, mark, they were out yesterday bragging ability that, which shows you how pa thetic their narrow standing has become. because of this steve bannon focus and donald trump focus on narrow casting and the bays. the thing that i don t have my arms around, i have been trying is, the people in the white house think they ve convinced the president he needs to change course, he switched chiefs of staff, he switched pressing is. she looking for a full time communications director. if you look at the speech yesterday with the different tone, there s not a fundamental change sense that the president has accepted the notion that things are bad, that things need to change. if you ask lobbyistssh members of congress, academics, many people who work in the white house, other cabinet members, they say things need to change. we can t no into september with the same battle plan we have for the last sempl seven months. yet people doubt the president accepted that when you have citing polls and having the rally in phoenix, which suggests he wants to do more of the same. coming up on morning joe the infamous trump dossier was never supposed to see the light of day. the member of the firm that made it told congress what he knows behind closed doors t. question is, will whatever he said make it into the public domain? we ll have senator richard blumenthal on that committee ahead on morning joe. electric light orchestra ] sailin away on the crest of a wave, it s like magic rollin and ridin and slippin and slidin it s magic introducing the all new volkswagen tiguan. higher and higher, baby the new king of the concrete jungle. intrzero alcohol™.ine® it delivers a whole mouth clean with a less intense taste. so it has the bad breath germ-killing power of this. with the lighter feel. of this. try listerine® zero alcohol™. welcome back to morning joe glen simpson compiled the infamous unverified 35-page dossier about president trump s alleged ties to russia, spent more than ten hours being questioned by the senate judiciary committee this week. chairman grassley said yesterday he will release the testimony from that hearing and he presumes they will be released. judiciary, staff member, ten hours, we d like to know what they discovered in that meeting and i would like a transcript released. will you do that? the answer is i take ahold of the committee to do that. will do you that? of course, we ll put it to a vote of the committee. will you personally vote for the release of the transcripts? i don t know why i wouldn t? senator grassley said simpson s attorney would have to receive a copy to look over before it was made public. they said, quote the transcript revolleys all of mr. timpson s testimony based on staff. the committee can release the transcript if it so chooses, we will do so at the end of the day that transcript is the committee s, it is not ours. joining us here in new york city, democratic senator richard blumenthal of connecticut. senator, good to see you, will these transcripts you made public? i will vet to make them public. even more important, simpson should testify before the committee in the open under oath so should the others as well, donald trump, jr. and the person whoian one involved in that meeting in early june that involved apparently jared kushner and others. remind people, if you can, why glen simpson s significant to the investigation here? he s significant because he compiled a dossier that implicated donald trump in the russian meddling and other potential things. he is a close associate of a member involved in that early june meeting where others attended, including the president s then campaign manager, paul manafort as well as donald trump, jr. and jared kushner. he has knowledge about matters relating to conclusion with the russian meddling as well as possible obstruction of justice and we re going to proceed with our investigation. but as you well know the special counsel is proceeding as well. we wanted to make sure, whether it s the release of the transcript or anything else, we in no way conflict with the special count sell s rule, in fact, he should be protected by legislation i offered and others, that s bipart zap that would make sure there is no political interference. can you offer insight, was he a compelling witness? did he become more interesting to you after ten hours of testimony? every witness is going to be interesting to me and every witness potentially has facts that are relevant to the investigation and those facts may be more interesting, what we learned. look, one of the issues that seems to be coming to a head is who were glen simpson s customers, the people that hired his firm to look at the president s background, one was a public, one was a trat t. claim is there is an attorney or client privilege here. should the government be able to compel an investigative firm to reveal who its clients were? an investigative firm unless they are working for an attorney and somehow that kind of of investigative result is a attorney have been client work product, certainly is unprotected. so the committee ought to be able to did he, in fact, refuse to say who his clients were in the testimony? i can t go into the substance of the testimony was. again, my hope is there will be no objection to his testifying fully and frankly before our committee. senior richard blumenthal, we appreciate you stopping if. thank you very much. coming up on morning joe, charities that take them to mar a la go for years, prepare to abandon the property. morning i don t is coming right back knowing where you stand. it s never been easier. except when it comes to your retirement plan. but at fidelity, we re making retirement planning clearer. and it all starts with getting your fidelity retirement score. in 60 seconds, you ll know where you stand. and together, we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. time to think of your future it s your retirement. know where you stand. time to think of your future it s our back to school beeone cent evente. at office depot office max. 10 pack pens, one cent. composition notebooks,scissors, and plastic folders all one cent each! hurry to office depot office max. taking care of business. are you one sneeze away from being voted out of the carpool? 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imagine what he will be able accomplish when he has america first house members and senators who are backing him up. dean heller is here, some place or will shortly be here. he s caught the first flight out. what s right for a country is embracing president trump s america first policies. welcome back to morning joe they are touting the president s america first language as they challenge incumbent republican senators with help from the president. he was in nevada and arizona, joining us from reno, nevada the editor of the nevada independent and the dean, jon ralston and ms nbc news mark halperin, chief national correspondent for new york times magazine mark leabee oviz and catty kay. a hop skip and a jump from monday s speech, he was tempered and mellow to phoenix on tuesday, he was his old campaign self and yesterday a bit more tempered. what is the temperature on donald trump right now on this day in nevada? well, it s not good. it s pretty low. his approval numbers are about the same as in a lot of other places right now t. only person who has worst numbers in nevada as donald trump is dean heller, they are now engaged in an incredible contest of one upsmanship who loves trump more attacking dean heller yesterday for being against the joe or payio proposed pardon somplt this is already starting right now in august of 2017, it s financial to be relentless, deep heller could easily lose that primary. it s a love-hate roller coaster with president trump and dean heller, president trump sort of mildly threatening him at times. is that the wise political move to hug president trump close? well, again, it s pretty early. here s the problem for heller. you mentioned that he s had kind of a hot and cold relationship. he was not exactly a member of the never trumpers, although, danny said so. he dead a lot of negative things about trump. he only admitted to one of my reporters a week ago, he actually voted for trump. he would never talk about it. he knows danny tar canian has lost five election, he s won four primaries, why? the june primary has a very, very low turnout. who will turn out in june. the trump voters will turn out. tar canian is gambling he uses the same language that trump does, he defended trump on the many sides comment on charl charlottesville and some people were marching with the nazis and white supremacists. he is running so far to the right. establishment republicans in washington are fearful he will win that primary and lose on that senate seat. interesting there, too, the governor of nevada, a critic of president trump rode with him over to the american legion event. the president tweeted this. quote, i requested that mitch m and paul r, ryan, tie the debt ceiling legislation into the bill that passed. they didn t do it so now we have a big deal with democrats holding emup as usual on debt ceiling approval. could have been so easy, now a mess says the president of the united states. mark halperin. look, they need a strategy to deal with the debt ceiling. i don t know when the president made that offer and why it was considered. they will have to figure everything out. because you cannot do this as republican votes. there is no easy model for when donald trump wins democratic votes, using the model calling out republicans to push them into doing something he wants done. in this case, keep in mind, he referred to them as mitch m and paul r. it might be a self help thing. what s interesting ability this, it s retroactive. he is saying, this went on, now we have a mess. right? it s unclear how constructive it is. what is the president s strategy? i don t think he has a strategy here. there is no way a tweet like that or a series of tweets like that is going to buy any good will whatsoever with the kind of leadership in the house and the senate ha he needs. how we re in the midst of the a multi-part three. stand by for more. have you the dreaded elip sis. cat ki kay, president trump says the fake news is now complaining about my different types of back-to-back speeches. apparently, he has been watching this morning. while there was afghanistan, somber the ramally in phoenix, he will explain why it went back and forth that way. more here about the previous tweet with paul ryan and mitch mcconnell, the way president trump views his position in the artie and the a oval office as picking up the phone, berating mimp mcconnell or calling bob corker, asking him not to vote for the rungs sanctions bill and his frustration that he s co-sponsoring legislation to protect bob mueller from being fired by president trump. this is the way he does business within his own party. it s the way he diz business in real estate. i think he calls bulling them, it s been seven month, it doesn t work so far. when he will learn this isn t the quite tacking the, particularly with senators, john, when we have been looking at the discussion of what would take for donald trump sport ertz to feel he isn t doing the job that they eelection day him to do. let s talk about that debt ceiling debate. if the government were to shut down as he suggested it might do, what impact do you think it has on nevadaens who voted for trump? well, it s very, very difficult to tell. it s all speculative, especially in august what people will be feeling, look in june the primaries or november. but the support for trump is mostly concentrated in the 19 non-urban counties, rural nevada went for trump in huge numbers, for people worn conservative in the state, like the attorney general, those folks, if they turn out in great numbers, if they stick with trump, can still be a factor. i think those are the kind of people who will attend a rally such as the ones in phoenix. they are mindly loyal to trump. they don t care about the debt ceiling. they like the fact he takes on the news media. it s much more of a personal loyalty than policy loyalty. those folks out there in rural nevada, do not like democrats or the establishment. i m afraid many don t like the news media. mr. jon ralston in nevada, a place that there always seems to be something going on. it s great to have your voice in the conversation. let s go to sarah eisen. she is live, good morning, for the first time in a decade the world s major economies are growing in sync. reporter: good morning, willie, this is quite a milestone, actually quite rare to see across the globe over the last 50 years, it s only happened a couple times t. wall street journal did peck up since the first time since the financial crisis back in 2007, all 45 countries that are tracked by the big think tanks the eocd are on track for droet this year. most of them are set to accelerate growth from last year. the last two have been defined by pumps by the europe pen debt crisis. japan, worries about china and the emerging markets. it s all coming together this year. that helps the markets reach new highs. it s good for the multi-national companies, coca-cola, general electric and the wall street journal is crediting central bankers for keeping policies super easy and letting the economies grow. we ll see what happens when they move into a new phase of tightening policy post-crisis. they will mention a bump in the housing market in this country. so the housing market has been pretty healthy. we did get a read on new home sales, which is about 10% of the market, showing a slide of 9% in the month of july, seven-month low home sales, two problems, this is widespread, got a little bump up in the mid-west, sales falling in the rest of the country. low inventory, high prices. in some markets, you are seeing shortages of new homes on the mark. that s squeezing prices very high. those housing prices rising faster than wages, we will watch this so far housing has been pretty decent. we will get an existing read later on and we ll see how healthy that looks. sarah, thanks, so much. thank you. coming up next, senator mitch mcconnell is making remarks right now, we will keep listening, let you know if he breaks news, plus, more companies are taking a pass on the most beautiful chocolate cake you have ever seen, suddenly they have vacancies, we ll explain why next on morning joe. what powers the digital world. communication. that s why a cutting edge university counts on centurylink to keep their global campus connected. and why a pro football team chose us to deliver fiber-enabled broadband to more than 65,000 fans. and why a leading car brand counts on us to keep their dealer network streamlined and nimble. businesses count on communication, and communication counts on centurylink. somewhere along of self-discovery: a breakthrough. it s in our nature to need each other. you re searching for something. whoooo. like the perfect deal. .on the perfect hotel. so wouldn t it be perfect if. ..there was a single site. .where you could find the. .right hotel for you at the best price? there is. because tripadvisor now compares. .prices from over 200 booking. .sites .to save you up to 30%. .on the hotel you want. trust this bird s words. tripadvisor. the latest reviews. the lowest prices. what s the story behind green mountain coffee and fair trade? let s take a flight to colombia. this is boris calvo. boris grows mind-blowing coffee. and because we pay him a fair price, he improves his farm and invest in his community to make even better coffee. all for a smoother tasting cup. green mountain coffee. charities that have long flocked to one of president trump s properties are increasingly backing out. gabe gutierrez explains why many are choosing a new venue instead of mar-a-lago. reporter: long known as the epitome of high society and glitzy palm beach, mar-a-lago is facing an exodus. they don t want to be associated with the president s remarks and many other actions that he s taken to be quite honest. reporter: at least 17 charities have pulled their annual fund-raising events from the so-called southern white house. many after the president s controversial comments about the violence in charlottesville. very fine people on beith sides. reporter: among the late toast leave the palm beach zoo and conservation society. others include the red cross, the american cancer society and the salvation army. the decision was made because the whole conversation had become a distraction to the mission of the salvation army. reporter: tax records show rental fees at mar-a-lago run up to $276,000 per event, so the departures could cost the trump organization more than a million dollars. profits from mar-a-lago are placed in a trust for the duration of mr. trump s presidency while his sons manage the estate. the trump organization and mar-a-lago did not return a quest for comment. at least two organizations have not yet gailed, a police foundation and palm beach county gop. tammy donnelly is the group s vice chair. i think it s a shame that organizations that are supposed to be nonpartson and not involved in politics have made a very political decision by pulling out of mar-a-lago. reporter: the board of another organization is set to vote this week on whethermar-a- joining a growing list of groups for which politics and charity no longer mix. gabe gutierrez reporting for us. joining us former director of the office of government ethics, senior director for ethics at the campaign legal center, walter schaub and the ranking mek of the house ethic committee, ted dor itch of florida. congressman, 17th charity has chance eled an event at mar-a-la mar-a-lago. the cleveland clinic, the american red cross, the gateway for cancer research among them. do you see a problem with the president still not divesting from even if it s in a trust for now, not divesting from his properties? of course i do. and the president s going to hurt by these decisions personally, but what s sad about this, willie, is that the president of the united states has become a pariah to these groups in his own home, in his own southern white house. the refusal to absolutely condemn without equivocation what happened in charlottesville continues to plague this white house. that s why these groups are pulling out. it s not about politics. it s about morality and the lack of moral leadership coming out of the white house. so mar-a-lago sits just outside your district, adjacent to the district you serve. right. what is the impact of losing events to mar-a-lago? does it affect people who live in your district, people who may work there? well, fortunately, a lot of these event have already a lot of these group have already announced they beal moving to other venues in the area so they ol continue to make the contributions. but remember, these are the groups, these charities are the groups that by their nature help to make our xhoont and our country what it is. and the message that they send, like the message from the business leaders who pulled out of the advisory councils, like the message from the military leader who is felt compelled to respond, the message is that when we looked at what happened in charlottesville we didn t see any fine people. the only group who hasn t acted who must act to reassert moral authority is the united states congress, willie. walter, let me go to you as an expert on this subject of government ethics. is there a problem? is there a conflict of interest? the money is in a trust for president trump. does that mean anything? is that a distinction without a difference? the trust is simply saying a scam. it s nothing more than a smokescreen to make you shi he s doing something, but it s a revocable trust, first of all, and second of all he s its direct beneficiary. it s no better than if he didn t simply create the trust. we re only in this situation because he decided not to divest his financial interest as every president since the enactment of the ethics in government act has done. so even the very fact that we re in this situation is the product of a conflict of interest that he decided to retain. and it s no surprise that charities are canceling because they re even more vulnerable to public perception pause they need to raise donations from the sort of people who care about causes. this is happening in the context where business leaders are resigning from his advisory committees. they re even less sense ti tif than charities so of course it s happening. congressman, sometimes this happens, the withdrawal business lasts as long as the story is front and center. do you suspect that now that charlottesville has somewhat retreated from the front pages that mar-a-lago will get its business back? no. and, mark, i know we have a tendency to move on quickly in this country, but i watched the video again yesterday and the other group that s down here not in our district is a large number of holocaust survivors. and when you watch the nazis marching in charlottesville screaming jews will not replace e us and you realize that the president looked at that and saw fine people, you also understand that this is not an issue that s just going the retroot aeat and into the background. this will be an issue when congress returns to washington next week and it needs to be an issue because congress needs to go on record just like nies charities, just like the business leaders, just like so many others expect for the republicans of congress and condemn what this moral equivalency has done to the white house and the moral authority of our country. walter, another topic on tuesday night in phoenix, ben carson introduced president trump at that campaign-style rally, carson, of course, the secretary of housing and urban development. there was some question about whether or not that was a political event, whether or not it was appropriate for a member of the cabinet to be there participating in it. what s your view? so there s no question it was a political event and cabinet officials are allowed to be at those. the problem is that they announced him using his official title, secretary of housing and urban development. and there s just simply prohibited by the hatch act. a complaint has been filed with the office of special counsel which investigates these, and i m hoping they ll take that seriously. we re at the beginning of a very long campaign, because who s ever heard of a president launching a re-election campaign in the first six months of his first term? so if they re making these kind of very fundamental mistakes at the beginning of that, we ve got a long road a head of us and if the office of special counsel or somebody doesn t do something to deter this, it will only get worse as time goes on. walter shaub, thank you. ted deutsch, thank you for your time as well. catty kay, the president has finished that tweet. the first part, he says the fake news is complaining about my different types of back-to-back speeches. well, there was afghanistan, somber, the big rally,dynamic, and the american legion va, respectful and strong. too bad the democrats have no one who can change tones. there was the tone but what we were focused on earlier in the show was the substance of what he was saying, which is that yesterday in reno he was talking about unity and bringing the country together and what we have to d to achieve that here, something far different from what he was saying on tuesday in phoenix. yeah. i think the question is, you know, do viewers and supporters and americans believe the authentic donald trump is what they saw in phoenix or what they saw in reno or can he will be all three of those thing, including the afghanistan speech. it s striking that the energy, the enthusiasm, the authenticity seemed to be in the phoenix speech far more than it did in the reno speech. if you listen to the reno speech, it s flat, he seems bored, he doesn t seem engaged in it, and i think that s what most viewers take away from that. it s the real donald trump was in phoenix. he gives himself his own reviews of one speech, enthusiastic, die namfammic and fun. not to be self-referential, he might have been reon could h that. he could have been moving in circles p. stephanie ruhle picks up our coverage. thanks, willie. good morning. i m stephanie ruhle with a lot to hit this morning starting with a shutdown. threats to screaming matches. that s where we re going. the relationship between republicans and the president seems to be disintegrating. the republicans will never get anything passed. you re wasting your time. 17 and counting. charities pull out of commitments to hold their big events at the mar-a-lago club. they don t want to be associated with the president s remarks and many other actions that he s taken, to be quite honest. and that dossier about trump and russia is back after testimony by the founder of the firm tt
you do it. you can do whatever you want. you can do whatever you want. grab them by the pussy, do anything. donald trump and billy bush in a recording from 12 years ago. here s what the new york times maggie haberman and alex burps and jonathan martin reported on saturday in a story mainly focused on why the president is defending alabama s roy more from the sexual assault alizations that he s now face. quote in the new york times he sees the calls for mr. moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now famous access hollywood tape in which he boasted about grabbing women s genitalia and the allegations that followed soon after. he suggested that the senator earlier this year that it was not authentic and repeat that had claim to an adviser. on two times the president of the united states suggested that the tape you just saw is not authentic. on one level this may not be a bad strategy. just a small matter of timing. sure, it s a problem that seconds after you hear the words you see the two men get out of the bus and, sure, their voices off the bus sound like the voices on the bus, but i guess some people will always claim that the on-the-bus dialogue maybe was dubbed in or something, but, again, it s all about timing. denials generally work better if they come before you acknowledge them an actually do something you hardly ever do which is apologize for the words that you spoke. i ve never said i m a perfect person nor pretended to be someone that i m not. i ve said and done things i regret and words released on this decade old video are one of them. anyone who knows me knows these words don t reflect who i am. i said it. i was wrong, and i apologize. so that thing that the president reportedly has been casting doubt on was authentic enough back in october 2016 to apologize for and for mentalia trump to explain when i spoke with her last fall. it was ten days ago that access hollywood release that had tape. i m wondering when you first saw, it when you first heard, it what did you think? i i said to my husband that, you know, the language is inappropriate. it s not acceptable, and i was surprised because that is not the man that i know, and as you can see from the tape the cameras were not on. it was only a mike, and and i wonder if they even knew that the mike was on because they were kind of boy talk and he was lead on like egg on from the host to say dirty and bad stuff. the host was also fired for what he said. from conspiracy figures and other sort of fringe figures no one doubted the tape s authenticity least of all candidate trump so is the new york times reporting wrong in the three on the by-line are some of the best reporters out there. maggie haberman is someone the president trusts enough to speak with repeatedly. her reporting is deeply sourced and if you ve seen her on you know she s not given to exaggeration and understates things. here s what white house press secretary sarah sanders said about the story today. does the president still accept the authenticity of the access hollywood tape that he apologized for during the campaign. look, the president addressed this. this was litigated and certainly answered during the election by the overwhelming support for the president and the fact that he s sitting here in the oval office today, he s made his position on that clear at that time as have the american people and his support of him. it would seem to acknowledge its authenticity and that position hasn t changed? like i just said, the president hasn t changed his position. i think if anything that the president questions it s the media s reporting on that accuracy. now, new york times is standing by its reporting and keep in mind this isn t a one-off. this president does have a history of rewriting history whether that s about crowd size at the inauguration, complaining at a rally we weren t showing the crowd at the very moment we were actually showing the crowd or more recently this, tweeting on friday time magazine called to say i was probably going to be named man, person of the year like last year, but would i have to agree to an interview and major shoot and i said probably is no good and took a passion anyway. not so today a top executive. amazing. not a spec of truth here. trump tweets he took a pass at being named time s person of the year. he was, in fact, person of the year last year and he s been on plenty of time covers over the years, real ones an, of course, a fake one discovered hanging on the wall at some of his golfing clubs and at that level that s kind of comical and this revisionist history on bragging about assaulting women is not. one of the reporters in the by-line is meg haberman and sdwroi joins us now by phone. maggie, can you explain when had the president has questioned the entire authenticity and what he s done. what he s done. yes, we stand by the reporting, and what he s done in several conversations, including with yet another person close to him who i smoke to about two hours ago, he has he s not really sure that was him. what he said to this senator earlier this year, it was in january, was that he was looking into hiring people to ascertain whether it was his voice that he and his people didn t think it was his voice, and that has tended to be what he hones in on. one thing that i would i would point out that two things i would point out. one is that sarah sanders answer was not actually an answer to the question. it was it was circuitious and she has a very hard job which is to have to stand there and say things that are not true. and so, yes, this is a choice to have that job, but that is what happened. the day that the tape came out. the day that the washington post reported on it the president was adamant when they just had a transcript or personal transcript or some description of the audio on it. he was adamant that it wasn t him and it was when he heard his voice that he acknowledged it was him. i think that episode, anderson, and you ve covered him for a while, too, i think that episode is one of the very few times i can think of that this president has been truly and identifybly humiliated in a public way and made that clear in the second way with hill hill he found that to be embarrassing and tried to wash away that embarrassment however he could. parted of what he found to be similar to the roy more situation in his open situation that weekend wasn t just, you know, that allegations from access hollywood tape saying that the president had treated them poorly, but part of it was also that republicans were en masse departing his side. and that is, it is all of a piece. i hope that answers your question. so let me just be clear. you said you ve now, about two hours ago, you ve talked to somebody else. does that mean a third person has now said that the president has expressed doubts about the authenticity? yes. yes. so it s now three people? yes. okay. so and just so i m clear, and you may not know this level of detail, which is why i m asking, is it all of the comments on the tape? is he saying some of the comments on the tape might not be authentic? is it it s not clear, exactly, what he s saying, other than that he s not certain it s his voice. okay. i m not sure exactly what else he s referring to. maggie haberman, appreciate your reporting, as always. thank you very much. joining us now, two former white house insiders, former top obama adviser, ax files host, david axelrod, and cnn senior political analyst, david gergen. david gergen, let me start off with you. now there s three people who have told the new york times that the president has raised questions about the authenticity. it s interesting that maggie haberman said that to one senator, he talked about maybe hiring people to figure out the authenticity of this. that brings me back to the obama birth certificate, where then citizen trump claimed that he had hired private investigators to go to hawaii. we actually had our gary tuchman among other reporters was on the ground in hawaii, talking to pretty much anybody you would possibly talk to. and none of those people he had talked to had heard any had been questioned by any private investigators and there s no evidence that the president ever did hire private investigators like he said he did. well, anderson, we ve been here before. i mean, he said he would hire private investigators, he didn t. he said he was going to sue the women after he became president who had accused him of sexual harassment, over a dozen. he never did that. so that pattern is clear. but there s another pattern that i find troubling, in fact, disturbing. several people who were acquainted with him and have worked with him in new york have told me, in the past, you know, sometimes he changes his mind about what happens, and he actually starts believing the second version, that it becomes a reality to him. i don t know whether he forgets what the first version was or not, but i think the real issue now is, does he actually believe it s not his voice? has he changed his mind? in which case, that raises a lot of questions about just where he is in life. you know, david axelrod, maybe it s because i ve been off a week and when you re not in this on a daily basis, you suddenly look at it from a slight distance. and you realize how frigging bizarre this is. when you re doing it every sing day, after a while it seems normal but when you re away for it for a week and you come back, i i mean, we re talking about the president. outs telling people, now according to the new york times three people, that what he apologized for, what he talked about in the debate that i co-moderated, is not authentic. yeah, you know, you asked earlier whether this was some kind of strategy. i think david gergen raises a really important point. i don t know whether it s strategy or sort of a sociopathology that causes him to say these thing. i really don t know if i think it may very well be that he persuades himself that he is that this is not his voice. that he persuades himself that he s the most accomplished president in his first ten months in history. that he persuades himself of these things and really believes it. and that may be one reason why he delivers it in ways that some of his supporters find authentic. because in his mind, it s absolutely the truth. even if it s completely contradictory of what he s said before. so, no, i don t think the problem is that you that you took a week off. it was bizarre a week ago and it s bizarre still. but, you know, david gergen, the idea that the president would bring that tape back up into conversation. that s not a tape on this program that we have re-played for a long, long time. even though, you know, we ve talked about sexual assault and allegations of sexual assault against other people. the idea that it sort of defies common sense that the president would be engaging in discussions, according to the new york times, at least three people that they know about, saying that this is not authentic and that he wants to re-investigate this. well, i, you know, it s clear that this wave of allegations against others has re-raised the question about his own behavior and he must understand now that the press is very likely to re-visit the stories of these women, because, actually, sort of time was running out in the campaign to really deal with this. and i m sure he must appreciate or the people around him must appreciate that new investigations might be launched by the press. so he has reason to be concerned inside. i m just surprised and sort of i you know, the degree to which he may be occasionally living in an alternative reality is very disturbing. because it s so important when a president is there with, you know, with making decisions about war or peace, and other very significant decisions. and if he s not quite sure of his what s real and what s not, you know, that has that has serious implications for the safety and security of the country. you think it s possible that he s not sure what s real and what s not? well, i think i go ahead, david, i think we agree on this point. go ahead, david, i agreed with what you were saying earlier. david gergen, you think he may you re answering the affirmative on that? i m answering the affirmative. i think we may persuade himself of things, as david axelrod said, that aren t true. but he persuades himself and states it categorically in various ways, that it does come across as being authentic, even though it s sort of like an alternative set of facts that other people don t share. but we should, anderson he s also blazed a trail for others. we see roy moore down in alabama, even as late as tonight, once again denying all of these charges from all of these women. and he s seen the path blazed by the president, because even though the president acknowledged his language back in the summer, he never acknowledged the acts themselves. and as david said, he threatened to sue these women. he never did sue the women who made the allegations. so, you know, in the midst of this really big moment in our culture about how men treat women, you know, the president is very much thrust back in the middle of it here. and he s trying to he s trying to set the terms of the debate. david axelrod and david gergen, thank you both. next, how an event to honor native american war heros touched off an uproar about native americans and beyond. it was something the president said, as you ll see when we come back. and later, hear what david axelrod was just talking about, u.s. alabama senate candidate roy moore, what he has to say after days of silence, allegations of sexual misconduct and criticism from so many top republicans, of course, with the exception of president trump. e and no other card lets you experience it like the platinum card. backed by the service and security of american express. mopping robotthe from irobot. its precision jet spray and vibrating cleaning head loosen and scrub stains. all while navigating kitchens, bathrooms and those hard to reach places. you and braava jet from irobot. better together. the lowest price of the year. for just $59- it s the only dna test that can trace your origins to over 150 ethnic regions- and open up a world of possibilities. save 40% at ancestrydna.com. ends monday. nice man cave! man. oh! nacho? [ train whistle blows ] what?! -stop it! -mm-hmm. we ve been saving a lot of money ever since we switched to progressive. this bar is legit. and now we get an even bigger discount from bundling home and auto. i can get used to this. it might take a minute. -swing and a miss! -slam dunk! touchdown! together: sports! at t-mobile, when you holiday together, great things come in twos. like t-mobile and netflix. right now when you get an unlimited family plan, netflix is included. ho ho ho! t-mobile covers your netflix subscription. best christmas gift ever! .so you can binge watch all year long. now you re thinking christmas! and now when you buy any of this season s hot new samsung galaxy phones, you get a second one free to gift. that s one samsung for you. and one to give. t-mobile. holiday twogether. whstuff happens. old shut down cold symptoms fast with maximum strength alka seltzer plus liquid gels. if all the president did today was honor some of the last surviving world war ii navajo code talkers, it would be no controversy at all. if all he did was honor them in front of a portrait of president an true jackson who signed the indian removal act of 1930 which resulted in the deaths of thousands of native americans, it would be noted. he did do that, not knowing it might provoke comment, which it has. but the real uproar came over something he said while honoring the code talkers. and i just want to thank you, because you re very, very special people. you were here long before any of us were here. although we have a representative in congress who they say was here a long time ago. they call her pocahontas. he was talking about massachusetts democratic senator, elizabeth warren, who joins us shortly. and perhaps this was the most incendiary venue in which to use that term, it s hardly the first time he has. pocahontas, that s this elizabeth warren. i call her pocahontas. and that s an insult to pocahontas. and massachusetts is represented by pocahontas, right? pocahontas. it may be pocahontas, remember that. what an insult to pocahontas, isn t it? i was being hit by pocahontas. and pocahontas is not happy. elizabeth warren, she s one of the worst senators. who? pocahontas? well, now candidate trump has already been criticized for this. he s already been accused of using a racial slur. today, when asked about using it as an event ostensibly to honor native americans who risked their lives deploying their distinct language to help us win the second world war, press secretary sarah sanders denied it was a slur at all. here s what she said. is it appropriate for the president to use a racial slur in any context? i don t believe that it is appropriate for him to make a racial slur or anybody else. well, a lot of people feel this is a racial slur, so why is it appropriate for him to use that? like i said, i don t think that it is. ant i don t think that was certainly not the president s intent. sarah like i said, i think the more the most offensive thing racially? i m sorry? does he see political value in calling people out racially? why use that term? look, i think that senator warren was very offensive when she lied about something specifically to advance her career. i don t understand why no one s asking about that question and why that isn t constantly covered. joining us now is senator elizabeth warren. senator warren, thanks for being with us. so the president referring to you once again as pocahontas. i m wondering, what was your reaction when you heard that? i really couldn t believe it. there he was at a ceremony to honor native americans, men who have really put it all on the line, to save american lives, to save lives of people, our allies during world war two, really amazing people, and president trump couldn t even make it through a ceremony to honor these men without throwing in a racial slur. you know? he thinks that somehow he s going to shut me up with that? and it s just not going to happen. it didn t work in the past. it s not going to work in the future. i m going to keep fighting for all the issues i m fighting for. and today in particular, the consumer financial protection bureau, that s generating a lot of problems for the president. and so he d sure like to talk about something else. his tax bill. he d sure like to talk about something else. the congressional budget office score has now come out. more information about this tax bill, how it s going to be a big giveaway to billionaires, giant corporations run up the debt by $1.4 trillion and raise taxes for people making less than $75,000 here. he doesn t want to talk about any of that. i want to ask you about those in just a moment. i do want to have you address sarah sanders, as you just heard, defended the president s comments, saying, quote, what most people find offensive is senator warren lying about her heritage to advance her career. what do you say about that? look, i learned about my family the way most people learn about their families. my brothers and i learned from our mother and our daddy and our grandparents who we are. and that s it. that s how we learned it. that s what we know. and to the allegation that you were using this to advance your career? never. i never used it to get ahead, i never used it to get into school, i never used it to get a job. look, this is just a way for donald trump to be able to try to get somebody talking about something other than what he s doing. which is advancing a terrible tax plan, trying to gut the consumer financial protection bureau well, let s actually talk about the consumer financial protection bureau. because it is now this kind of bizarre drama, which is surrounding the consumer financial protection bureau. do you believe the president was within his authority to appoint mick mulvaney as director? no. because now there s two people basically saying they re the acting directors. you know, look. donald trump is trying to bring chaos to the consumer agency. but let s just start with the law. the dodd/frank law that was passed by congress provides for succession. and the way it does that, it says there s a director. if the director is unavailable, the director has resigned, then the deputy director automatically becomes the director. there s no appointment, there s nothing fancy that has to be done. it just happens automatically. that s the law that congress passed. and so donald trump claims, well, he can use something called the vacancy act that was passed a couple of decades before that. the problem with that is the vacancy act applied to all of the agencies that had been built before the time that the vacancy act was passed, but going forward, it would apply as a default unless congress set up a particular succession plan for an agency. and that s exactly what congress did. in fact, there s an amazing thing about the cfpb. in an earlier draft, the congress had thought about, well, let s just do it under the vacancy act. that would have left the president, whoever it was, to be able to name someone when the director left. but then, in the final version, the one that was voted on and signed into law, congress said, no, we really don t want to do that. what we want to do is have it happen automatically, if the director s unavailable, it goes to the acting director. the reason for that, push that agency as far away from partisan politics as humanly possible. because the republicans are saying it needs more oversight. you re saying, essentially, well, you re saying that there s a reason it was set up the way it was, so it s not beholden to anybody on either political stripe? and you know, that s been the idea behind banking regulations since the civil war. when the very first banking regulator was set up back in the 1860s, the whole idea was to say, for example, the funding should not be done through politics. it should be done separately, through fees and other mechanisms. and the reason was pretty straightforward. we didn t want a world where some giant national bank would lean on congress, and then congress would lean on the agency not to do the oversight that was necessary. senator warner, finally, i want to ask you about the reporting from the new york times that the president is now privately questioning the authenticity of that access hollywood tape. we just spoke to the times reporter who now says a third person has told her, maggie haberman, that the president has questioned the authenticity about this and even to one of the senators suggested that maybe he would hire people to look into the authenticity. does that make any sense to you, given the fact he s already apologized for what he said on it? you know, look. he s already admitted what he said. i watched him during the debates, when he talked about, well, it was just locker room talk and so on. but if this is a new age of accountability, where donald trump wants to be held accountable to the dozen or so women who came forward and said that donald trump had forced himself on them in various sexual ways and he thinks it s time to get out there and decide to put his views out, so we can have some real accountability, then, bring it on. senator elizabeth warren, appreciate your time. thank you. you bet. we ll return to what the president said today and get the view of two conservatives, next. before the break, you heard from senator elizabeth warren talking about president trump s remarks today, referring to her as pocahontas in front of native americans at an event that was supposed to honor their extraordinary contributions to victory in world war ii. here again is just what the president said earlier today. and i just want to thank you, because you re very, very special people. you were here long before any of us were here. although we have a representative in congress who they say was here a long time ago. they call her pocahontas. joining us now, two conservatives, ed martin and tara setmayer. so, ed, is it appropriate for the president to make a comment like this, particularly at this event to honor native americans? look, i think the president is a president, right? three quick observations. number one is the navajo code talkers, if he hadn t said something, we probably wouldn t be having these conversations, so the purpose was to lift them up. they re impressive, amazing stories. we lose more world war ii events every day than anything. so i think that s really great. the second observation, anderson, whatever senator warren meant in her interview just now, she has admitted or at least conceded that her ethnicity or background or characterization of it was used by her schools to an advantage. so i don t know what she means by now denying it. and the bottom line is that she s made herself out as one of the people who s going to run for president. she talks about it regularly. and the president is, you know, making one of his jabs that he that those of us that like him, we smile at. and i think it s nothing that s out of the ordinary for him and again, i don t find it offensive. i think it s more fun and effective than anything. tara, fun and effective? well, he never answered your question. yeah, i did. was it appropriate? you felt it was completely appropriate? 100%, yeah. well, that doesn t surprise me. who are you to determine what native americans find offensive and what they don t? that would be i didn t. i was asked what i thought. right, but you said let her respond. you said that you didn t find it offensive and sarah huckabee sanders said she didn t find it offensive, and you guys are not native american. maybe you don t find it offensive, but plenty of native americans find that offensive. and the fact that the president of the united states doesn t have enough respect or enough tact to even recognize that it s just inappropriate, that you don t make comments like that when you re honoring someone else. he was honoring the navajo, not you know, you don t make a racially insensitive joke in front of people like that, especially standing front of an andrew jackson painting, where the history of what andrew jackson did to the native americans in this country is atrocious and the trail of tears and everything that happened during that. perhaps someone should have thought about that before they staged it in that room! i mean, that was offensive in and of itself. i feel more than even the pocahontas comment, for goodness sakes. but it s just the unmitigated gall of the president of the united states and other people that don t have native american culture that politicize that and then have the nerve to say, well, it s not offensive. i just think it s tasteless! it s tasteless! how is this conservative? how does this advance republicanism? how is this appropriate for the president of the united states in that situation? it just doesn t! what i don t understand, what does the president get out of saying something like this? i know, obviously, you think it s funny or, you know, kind of light like his jabbing spirit it s classless. blue, you. but, you know, again, is this really the ceremony to being to that in? well, anderson, you know, many people that spend time with president trump describe him in person and in general as very charming and witty and funny. and i think that the men that were standing there i don t know if they were men and women, these navajo code talkers, they recognize that the kind of humor in it. they also recognize, by the way, that there s lots of people in their lives i m not sure that they recognize the humor. they seem to be they look shell shocked. let me say it this way. i think what he said had an effect on the room and but, okay, i don t know what s in their heart. what effect was that? there was dead silence. tara, listen, i didn t interrupt you. you stood there on national tv and said you could read my mind about who i am. all i m saying is this no, i didn t. when the president says that, and i think something that s kind of witty and funny and all of that, i agree, you don t think it s funny. here s the thing. the but the people around him, those navajo code talkers, they re not on here. we have elizabeth warren and tara claiming the aggrieved status. here s what i would say. he honored these people in front of a painting let s see how many times obama stood in front of the painting. by the way, in missouri, the democrat day for democrats is called jackson day. so we can get rid of everybody in history, but here s the point. the president honored these folks and we re talking about their great contribution. after that, i think, you know, let s move on. let s talk about the unnamed sources that maggie is claiming told her something about something else. we ll do that next. let s clear this up. it s not just me. the national congress of american indians, which is like the naacp for the american indians left wing. they have come out very clearly. they are the largest organization to represent native americans in this country. by the way, the navajo nation also issued a statement disavowing his remarks. there you go. so, again, just because you sit there and think that it s funny, a lot of people thought archie bunker was funny too, but he was also offensive to a lot of people. so we have an archie bunker in chief who is disrespecting american indians and making classless jokes from the podium, when it was supposed to be a ceremony to honor people. it s just unbecoming of the president of the united states and if president obama or hillary clinton had done something in reverse, you would be screaming bloody murder. it s that kind of intellectual dishonesty that is just terrible. anderson, i don t mind tara having a different point of view, but this idea that she s going to get on tv and lecture what i would or wouldn t have done. if you find it offensive, tara, that s fine your own actions support your hypocrisy, ed, so just go ahead. people see right through it. go ahead. a lot of people watch this president, who he was, and they voted for him for president unfortunately. and your side lost, tara. no, my side is conservatives who actually who actually believe in conservatism and believe that character let s leave it there. and respect and honor should be part of the presidency. and the american people are losing right now with president donald trump in office doing this. tara, ed, appreciate both of your perspectives. thanks. next, the latest from alabama where u.s. senate candidate roy moore spoke tonight after disappearing from the public eye for a few days. what he is saying now, plus our gary tuchman sat down with people who say that moore was a regular at the old hickory house restaurant where he allegedly met one of his accusers who allegedly sexually assaulted behind the restaurant. what else they remember, when we return. jay chooses to run every day. no matter what it brings. or where he is. and pain doesn t hold him back. thanks to dr. scholl s running insoles. the only ones proven to relieve and prevent pain from runner s knee, shin splints and plantar fasciitis. dr. scholl s. born to move. helping small businesses.ut, jamie damage your vehicle? 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eczema again? it s fine. i saw something the other day. eczema exposed. your eczema could be something called atopic dermatitis, which can be caused by inflammation under your skin. maybe you should ask your doctor? go to eczemaexposed.com to learn more. it s no secret that one of the president s favorite targets over twitter is cnn. he does it all the time and it s frankly something that we ve come to expect. it s what happens when you stand up for truth and put facts first. but this weekend was different when the president tweeted this. quote, fox news is much more important in the united states than cnn, but outside of the u.s., cnn international is still a major source of fake news and they represent our nation to the world very poorly. the outside world does not see the truth from them. now, within minutes, cnn s pr department fired back with this message for the president on twitter, saying, it s not cnn s job to represent the u.s. to the world, that s yours. our job is to report the news. #factsfirst. his assault against a free press press, a free press that stands up to him will not stop us or any other legitimate news organization. it won t stop my colleagues around the world who put their lives on the line to do their work, to report. it will not stop my friend and colleague, ben wedeman, who has spent over a decade living in cairo, going to the front lines of nearly every conflict in the middle east during that time. here he is coming under fire in libya in 2011. he was the first western journalist inside libya covering the removal of libyan leader moammar gadhafi. it won t stop my colleague arwa damon. last november, she and photo journalist brice lane were with iraqi special forces as their convoy came under attack several times. they along with the iraqi soldiers were under siege for more than 28 hours before their rescue. arwa won a peabody for that reporting. and it won t stop my friend and colleague, christiane amanpour. after the president s tweet, she took to twitter and wrote, quote, if president trump knew the facts, he would have never have sent that tweet. here is my late camerawoman, margaret moth, who took a bullet in the face covering the facts and truth in bosnia. facts first. she included this photograph of margaret that we just showed you. the shooting was in 1992. as soon as margaret recovered, she was back in conflict zones, back in the middle east, where i had the pleasure of working with her. margaret sought out those tough assignments. she demanded, in fact, she had a desire to see history unfold firsthand and share it with the world. margaret died of cancer in 2010. we have thick skin here at cnn. we can handle criticism, but we ll damned sure call it out when it s a lie. retired general michael hayden, the former director of both the cia and national security agency is also taking issue with the president s attack against cnn international, writing on twitter, quote, if this is who we are or who we are becoming, i have wasted 40 years of my life. until now, it was not possible for me to conceive of an american president capable of such an outrageous assault on truth, a free press, or the first amendment. general michael hayden joins us now. explain to you why you decided to react out, why you reacted so strongly to this. well, anderson, it was a fundamental threat, i thought to one of the core elements that keeps us a democratic and free people. anderson, you and i have compared notes about our time in sarajevo together in the 1990s where christiane was reporting. and you and i agree that the veneer of civilization is quite thin. so these blessings under which we live are not guaranteed to us. they have to be nurtured. and so i read that tweet from the president. it was an assault on truth, on the free press, on the first amendment, and frankly, these institutions, these beliefs are fragile. and i just felt, i had to say something to kind of make the point that that tweet isn t normal. it isn t something about which we should become accustomed. i mean, beyond the issue just of freedom of the press, there is the very real possibility that the president of the united states is putting american citizens who are reporting in foreign countries in danger. this isn t the president i mean, the president should, i would assume, be protected the citizens of this country. shouldn t that be at the front of his mind at all times? absolutely. and i think you re right, the suggestion there, particularly singling out cnn, which is forward, has its weight on its forward foot in many areas of the world, the perception around the world might be that those reporters enjoy less of the protection of the american government while they re out there. and anderson, there s even broader questions. i mean, it s been one of the core elements of american diplomacy since the second world war to push freedom of the press, that the press is not something that anyone should intimidate to try to coerce. and now we have the american president seeming to be doing exactly that. yeah, i mean, you wonder what message it s sending to authoritarian regimes in countries where there is no free press. the day after he tweeted about cnn international, the minister of foreign affairs in egypt tweeted using the same language, writing, quote, as usual, deplorable cnn coverage of sinai tragedy today. anchor more interested in reporters access to sinai than in those who lost their lives. yeah, you know, you see it gives license, it gives head room, it gives a sense of legitimacy to the putins of the world, the erdogans of the world, the el sisis of the world, all of whom are leaders to the world and we need to deal with. but when we send these kind of signals, we appeal to the darker angels of their nature. admiral john kirby mentioned earlier there are times that foreign reporters in other countries uncover stories and bring to light information that they used to policies. and it can be a vital resource not only to the american public, but to provide evidence and bear witness in places where, you know, government officials can t necessarily go. no, that s absolutely true. and anderson, i need to be very careful here. no one needs to think that american journalists are in some ways agents of the american intelligence enterprise. i but i ve got a lot of time. i used to fly into sarajevo during the war. and one of the things i always tried to do was sit down in the bar of the holiday inn there and talk to members of the press in order to get their impressions, as to what was going on there. they helped build wisdom inside the american intelligence community, because, frankly, they re there, they have a variety of sources, and they have a point of view that might not be naturally arrived at for people who do espionage for a living. general michael hayden, always good to talk to you. thank you very much. thank you. up next, roy moore under siege, accused of sexual misconduct, speaking out. we ll be right back. at t-mobile, when you holiday together, great things come in twos. like t-mobile and netflix. right now when you get an unlimited family plan, netflix is included. ho ho ho! t-mobile covers your netflix subscription. best christmas gift ever! .so you can binge watch all year long. now you re thinking christmas! and now when you buy any of this season s hot new samsung galaxy phones, you get a second one free to gift. that s one samsung for you. and one to give. t-mobile. holiday twogether. and i m the founder of ugmonk. before shipstation it was crazy. it s great when you see a hundred orders come in, a hundred orders come in, but then you realize i ve got a hundred orders i have to ship out. shipstation streamlined that wh the order data, the weights of , everything is seamlessly put into shipstation, so when we print the shipping ll everything s pretty much done. it s so much easier so now, we re ready, bring on t. shipstation. the number one ch of online sellers. go to shipstation.com/tv and get two months free. 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the old hickory house. that s the restaurant? the restaurant. reporter: the restaurant is now gone, replaced by an urgent care center. but it s the restaurant that beverly young nelson said she worked in the 1977, when she was 16 years old, where she says she was sexually assaulted by moore in a car behind the restaurant. at a press briefing last week, one of judge moore s spokespeople implied that his candidate did not patronize old hickory. additionally, two former waitresses and two former patrons state that they never saw judge moore in that restaurant. rhonda ledbetter, who said she was a former waitress there, told cnn affiliate, whet. i never once saw roy moore come into the restaurant. when you hear that, what do you think? that s false. i saw him in there four and five times a week. so he was a regular? he was a regular. reporter: jones says she doesn t know rhonda ledbetter or the accuser, beverly young nelson, for that matter, but used to work across the street from the restaurant. she said she came to the old hickory house several times a week for at least a year starting in 1977 to pick up her sister who worked there. you saw him four or five times a week, you said, in that restaurant? yes. so for 52 weeks, that would be 100, 125 times. do you think you saw him that many times in the restaurant? probably. reporter: this woman said she worked at the hickory house, too. she s so fearful of being shunned or verbally attacked that she doesn t want her face on camera. so you were a waitress there for a few years, starting when you were 17 years old? exactly. would you describe roy moore as a regular customer? yes. how many times would you see him in a given week? it was either three to four or three. so between three and four times a week? yes. roy moore s team implying he didn t go to the restaurant angered her and that s why she decided to talk to us. so someone says he was never there, your response to that is what? is, yes, he was. i mean, i had tips from him. he tipped me. i waited on him at the counter. reporter: both of these women say they voted for donald trump for president. both of them say that they can t be positive that the sexual abuse allegations against moore are all true. but both are deeply troubled about how he and his campaign have handled these allegations. i don t want him to tell lies and then be elected senator. once he gets to be senator, he ll just tell more lies. gary, i know you attended roy moore s speech. what else did he have to say during it? reporter: well, even before it all began, anderson, an organizer of the speech told reporters they could not answer or ask any questions. now, that s not something we re inclined to agree to, but we wouldn t have been able to, because the room behind us was packed with about 200 people. they were very loud and clapped when he walked in, were very loud and clapped when moore walked out. he could not have heard any of our questions. he spoke for about 30 minutes. and in addition to denying the allegations against him, he told us, quote, i am facing a big spiritual battle. he said he hasn t run any negative advertising but now it s time to take off the gloves. and he also said he wants to join donald trump to make america great again. arounderson. thanks. up next, a third source talks to the new york times saying that the president is now questioning the authenticity of the infamous access hollywood video when he bragged a about being able to grope women. the woman on that video, arianna zucker joins me for her tape on this, just ahead. hat i got s fu of thoughts and dreams that scatter you pull them all together and how, i can t explain oh yeah, well well well youuuu you make my dreams come true well, well, well youuuu topped steak & twisted potatoes at applebee s. now that s eatin good in the neighborhood. the lowest price of the year. for just $59- it s the only dna test that can trace your origins to over 150 ethnic regions- and open up a world of possibilities. save 40% at ancestrydna.com. ends monday. coaching means making tough choices. jim! you re in! but when you have high blood pressure and need cold medicine that works fast, the choice is simple. coricidin hbp is the #1 brand that gives powerful cold symptom relief without raising your blood pressure. coricidin hbp. -ahh. -the new guy. -whoa, he looks -he looks exactly like me. -no. -separated at birth much? we should switch name tags, and no one would know who was who. jamie, you seriously think you look like him? uh, i m pretty good with comparisons. like how progressive helps people save money by comparing rates, even if we re not the lowest. even if we re not the lowest. whoa! wow. i mean, the outfit helps, but pretty great. look at us. well, a big hour after a day that saw the battle to pass a tax plan heat up and a stinging report came out on who will pay the price for it. also, the president chooses to use a ceremony to honor native american war heros as an opportunity to make a racial remark about a native american and slamming a political opponent. and the white house responding to a report in the new york times which correspondent maggie haberman just updated that the president on at least three occasions that the new york times says they know about has told people that he doubts the authenticity of the access hollywood tape. the one in which he brags about being able to sexually assault women. and, of course, the one he s already acknowledged was real and actually apologized for. in a moment, the woman trump and billy bush were meeting just
developed a plan to force out secretary of state rex tillerson, whose relationship with president trump has been strained and replace him with mike pompeo, the cia director perhaps within the next several weeks. trump today dodged questions about tillerson s future, let s listen. do you want rex tillerson on the job, mr. president? he s here, document him to stay in his job? thank you very much, everybody. it s been widely reported tillerson, who s often disagreed with the president on policy, could leave the administration by the year s end. in october, msnbc news reported that tillerson had openly disparaged the president, referring to him as a moron. white house chief of staff john kelley was said to have put the plan in place, but both state department and white house officials publicly say tillerson isn t going anywhere yet. what i can tell you is that chief of staff kelley called our department this morning and said that the rumors are not true. that those reports are not true. when it comes to questions like this of senior staff and cabinet secretaries, when the president loses confidence in somebody, they ll no longer be here as the president said on the record and several of you were in the room in the oval today, the secretary of state is here. well, the potential shakeup on the national security team comes after trump spent the better past of the last 24 hours creating his own series of international crises. trump s retweet of a series of inflammatory anti-muslim videos posted by a leader of the far-right nationalist britain first party drew a sharp rebuke by prime minister theresa may, whose office called it wrong. trump responded, don t focus on me, focus on the destructive radical islamic terrorism taking place within the united kingdom, we re doing just fine. but may is standing her ground. but the fact that we work together does not mean that we re afraid to say when we think the united states have got it wrong. and to be very clear with them. and i m very clear that retweeting from britain first was the wrong thing to do. the wrong thing to do. the washington post asked parker, parker notes the inflammatory tweets were just the latest example of trump veering past the guardrails of presidential behavior writing, trump has internalized the belief hec largely operate with impunity. fellow republican leaders largely stand by him. his staff scrambles to explain away his misbehavior or laugh it off and the white house discipline 19, chief of staff john kelley, said it s not his job to control the president. wow. for more the author of that article, ashley parker, white house reporter for the washington post. national political reporter for the new york times. and a former state department senior adviser. thank you, all three. let s start with ashley. i thought, ashley parker, that was pretty poetic but scary. you basically ran through all the guardrails, staff, people in the leadership of the white house, the chief of staff. no one seems to have any control over the president s meandering into trouble. that s right. and no one, let s be clear, has ever really had that much control over this president. but the thing that seems new now in talking to people inside and outside the white house is that trump himself feels emboldened. he feels that he hasn t really felt the consequences of many of his comments or tweets or digs. so for instance, with the russia probe, he believes, contrary to a lot of evidence, that it will be over by the end of the year. on the access hollywood tape, he is now the high-profile man accused of sexual misconduct and has faced no ramifications. aides today told me if tax reform passions he ll feel the wind in his sails and we could see more of this sort of behavior. i guess he s counting on winning down in alabama, with roy moore. let s get back to this. it seems yamish if the word s out your foreign minister, secretary of state in our country, is on his way out and on his way out in fairly quick time, he s not much of a representative for this country. no. he s useless. part of it is that president trump has been undercutting him for months. there s this idea that rex tillerson said that he was going to try to work on north korea and then president trump tweeted that he was wasting his time and that there was no really option there. essentially always been for months his own department of state. he s always been kind of talking about state department and talking about foreign relations on twitter. that s how he does this. he governs on twitter. i think in this case we re starting to see the real ramifications where you have britain basically almost revoking this invite to president trump to come there. big-picture questions on north korea, things like that all those issues, trade, who is really setting the course for our country now? anyone? there doesn t really seem to be much of a course. he spent 12 days touring asia and we have no ambassadors there. and nobody can actually point to any one deliverable of what the united states gained, other than a military parade and some pomp is circumstance for donald trump. he clearly has a military fetish. and has surrounded himself in his leadership with people who either are in uniform or used to wear military uniform. rex tillerson does not fit that mold. so not only does he not have the direct trust of the president, he also does not have any empowerment from the rest of the staff to do the job of diplomacy. this has signaled to the rest of the world that the united states is no longer interested in being diplomatic, and in fact is going to probably use war as its first option. let me go to ashley. i don t know when you have the judgment or the ability to judge this. but it seems you ve got a big corporate ego in tillerson. rex tillerson. he s a big-shot, head of a big oil company, he came in here at the top of his game, at the top of his world, which is oil. and being a ceo of a big corporation, one of the biggest. he comes in as basically an adjutant, a deputy to a president. has he adjusted to that role? and has trump accepted him as a deputy or as a partner or what? who is rex tillerson in terms of setting u.s. foreign policy? so i think the answer to both of those questions is, no. and this is something you often find and you see this with the president a little bit, there are people who are very successful in business, in corporate america, in that skill set for whatever reason does not quite translate to managing a major complicated bureaucracy. in this case too, rex tillerson had some additional challenges in that he was the deputy working for a fairly mercurial boss who was, as we mentioned earlier in the show, making foreign policy on the fly on twitter. but it was a relationship that was never particularly warm or successful, and then just increasingly deteriorated over the months. when people my age grew up with the cuba missile crisis, thinking about how a group of 12 men, old men in those days, figured out how to deal with the threat of nuclear missiles in cuba. and how to get them out of cuba without causing a war. in berlin or somewhere else. who is that group today? who is that cohesive set of people, men and women i presume, well, i don t presume anything, let me be honest. is there anybody saying, how do we deal with kim jong-un? what if he does this, does that, drops a nuclear weapon that explodes in the middle of pacific? is that the red line and if so what do we do? i think there are career people at the state department trying to think this through. the problem is president trump at the end of the day is really the ceo of the entire u.s. government in that he doesn t want to give anyone power who puts the options on his table? a, b, c, d? i think a lot of it is the generals. i think those are probably the number one people he respects the most. you think of rex tillerson calling him a moron. i think that he s still very much angry about that. i would say that it s mainly the generals. i think that calling john kelley the disciplinarian in the white house is pretty clear. but who he actually pays attention to are all the people he calls on the phone. roger ailes, all these other people out in the world, steve bannon years ago, roger ailes. here s what happens when you devolve go ahead. when you devolve everything to generals and military options, there really isn t anybody at the table discussing what the diplomatic solutions could be. you have rex tillerson who instead of spending his time empowering the diplomats seems to be driving them out the door, giving them offers to terminate their tours early, cutting not bringing any new classes of foreign service officers, and diplomats have the experience of being in multiple different places, having that rex tillerson himself has only been in one company his entire life. and is trying to manage the state department, a sprawling bureaucracy, with multiple languages and multiple countries under its purview, as if he s running exxon. we re not worrying about exxon, we re worrying about nuclear war with north korea or a second korean war despite the blowback from the british prime minister sarah sanders defended the president s reposting of that anti-muslim tweet. let s watch. might incite violence against muslims? does he understand he s elevated a fringe political group that many people outside of britain didn t even know about? i think what he s done is elevate the conversation to talk about a real issue and a real threat, that s extreme violence and extreme terrorism, something that we know to be very real and something the president feels strongly about talking about and bringing up and making sure is an issue every single day that we re looking at the best ways to protect americans. i guess we go back to ashley again. i think that what do you make of that question? this fundamental question, who is setting our policy around the world right now? who is dooling with the kind of tactical sdilgs decisions that have to be made on a split second, if kim does something that forces to us do something, who s the one that walks into the white house, walks into the oval office, mr. president, here s your three options. who s doing that? i think again at the core, president trump is the president. he is making the final decision. as we saw with sarah sanders, the white house is sort of scrambling to sort of to stuff that they re not expecting. and ideally they wouldn t have to defend. but in terms of if you re asking who are the adults who walk into the oval office, i think there is still a sense that it is sort of the generals, it is general kelley, it is mcmaster, it is mattis. it s obviously not quite tillerson anymore. but there are sort of these adults around him who people have correctly or uncorrectly pinned their hopes on, can sort of reason with the president if that s what the situation requires. usually sometimes we teal with israelis, for example, very smart governing group, i think they re playing chess, we re playing checkers. right now i don t know if we re up to checkers. netanyahu, is he worried about jared kushner, worried about tillerson? trying to shine up the president? how do you, if you re a smart foreign leader, find the way to the brain of our country now? it ultimately we re playing a big game of sorry! when we should be playing chess as you said. and really you have diplomats in foreign countries and heads of state who are horrified at what donald trump is doing to the united states legacy. the united states has been known for promoting democracy, civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion around the world. instead with the language coming out of the white house, you have attacks on the basic fundamentals of democracy. that emboldens people like these fringe far-right groups, like people who would like to see military coups in africa and dictatorships in latin america, instead of the people we are allied with who are trying to spread the idea of democracy. well said. i also think if you re a foreign leader you re having to keel with a personality that changes, is somewhat erratic. foreign leaders trying to flatter president trump big dinner. big dinners, big rugs. you see him in the philippines, he s kind of being brought up on stage and being made to feel well. these foreign leaders understand that they have to get president trump to like them personally. that he feels as though he s being flattered. for us to be safe, essentially. this is embarrassing. white house officials expect trump to get even more outrageous in coming months saying he seems more prone to confidently indulge in wild conspiracies and fantasies more quick-triggered to fight. ashley, the president doesn t seem to be learning on the job. he doesn t seem any better today than yesterday. it s like groundhog day. it begins at 6:30 in the morning when he reads the papers and retweets something, tweets something in anger in reaction what was he just read. there doesn t seem to be in progress in terms of his sophistication, to put it lightly. i think it goes back to a couple of things. i think it goes back to what we talked about, about him feeling emboldened. as you said, there are certainly corners consequences for his behavior. he was publicly rebuked by the british prime minister, but he doesn t necessarily feel those consequences. he also views himself as a counter puncher. he thinks he s at his best when he s in a one-on-one fight. a lot of not a lot but some of these issues and fights he s picking and stances he s taking especially culture war, stuff his base loves. if there s one group he knows he can t lose because they are frankly the only group with him, it s his base. this whole thing is haywire. thank you, ashley parker. it s dangerous. coming up, attorney general jeff sessions wouldn t answer when asked by the ranking member of the house intelligence committee whether donald trump ever instructed him to hinder the russia investigation. and that probe keeps chugging along with new reports that jared kushner net with robert mueller s prosecutors. republicans are on the verge of passing the trump tower tax cut and they re selling it with lies. donald trump says he wouldn t benefit from the tax cut, wrong. they re rushing through a major give-away to the top 1% and the impact it will have on the rest of the country will be massive. how concerned should we be about the possibility of war with north korea? that s my worry. we re going to ask an expert. let me finish with a needed spirit for the season. this is hardball, where the action is. your brain changes as you get older. but prevagen helps your brain with an ingredient originally discovered. in jellyfish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. the name to remember. there are now growing calls for veteran democratic congressman john conyers of michigan to resign amid new details about his alleged misconduct. this morning a woman who settled a sexual harassment claim against the congressman saying on the today show conyers violated her body and repeatedly propositioned her for second. house minority leader nancy pelosi this afternoon called on conyers to resign. the allegations against congressman conyers, as we have learned more since sunday, are serious, disappointing, and very credible. it s very sad. the brave woman who came forward are owed justice. i pray for congressman conyers and his family, and wish them well. however, congressman conyers should resign. that s definitive. those remarks in stark contrast to pelosi s comments this past weekend when she referred to conyers as an icon. other democrats including the highest-ranking african-american in congress, u.s. congressman jim cleburne of south carolina, have also called for his resignation. representatives for conyers, however, say he s currently being hospitalized for a stress-related illness and have rejected calls for him to step down. everyone deserves attention, whether you ve saved a lot or just a little. at pnc investments, we believe you re more than just a number. so we provide personal financial advice for every retirement investor. but can also loweresterol, your body s natural coq10. qunol helps restore this heart-healthy nutrient with 3x better absorption. qunol has the #1 cardiologist recommended form of coq10 qunol, the better coq10. [burke] abstract accident. seen video-it. covered it.c we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum welcome back to hardball. some incremental but significant developments on the congressional and federal russia investigations just now. attorney general jeff sessions on capitol hill hill today for closed-door testimony for the house intelligence committee two weeks after his evasive answers in a hearing left many lawmakers questioning his credibility. big surprise, it seems the attorney general was not any more forthcoming today, however, at least according to the ranking democrat, u.s. congressman adam schiff of california. attorney general specifically did the president of the united states ever take any action that you believed instruct you to take any action that you believed would hinder the russia investigation? and he declined to answer that question. we re going to get to that in a second. nbc news also reports donald trump jr. is set to appear weave that committee next week. perhaps more significant is that jared kushner met this month with robert mueller s investigators. according to the new york times the questions focused on a meeting in december between mr. kushner, the russian ambassador, and michael flynn, michael t. flynn, rather. prosecutors asked mr. kushner about other interactions between mr. flynn and the russia government. joined by democratic congresswoman jackie speier who sits on the house intelligence committee, natasha bertrand who covers the russia investigation for wills insider, michael smith, washington correspondent for the new york times. congresswoman, let s talk about this. what do you make of the fact that sessions won t say whether he s ever observed any obstruction or has ever been given orders to an obstruct this investigation? i guess the second question is the more pertinent one. i think it suggests that, in all likelihood, he was asked to do something and he declined to answer that question. he was, as he has been in many other settings, conveniently amnesia-hit by much of what s been asked of him. and often would just respond by saying i do not recall, i do not recall. when he was asked the question by congressman schiff, he just declined to answer it altogether. what valid justification could he have for not answering that question? executive privilege? what is he talking about when he says, i can t answer that? he is just declining to answer it. he can t invoke executive privilege. he says that he wants to position himself in such a way so that if the president does invoke executive privilege, he can be supportive of that. but the president hasn t evoked executive privilege. it s a circular logic i think is constructed to evade. can you tell us whether bob mueller s headed down that path? for possible impeachment? or the other path of collusion? we don t know what mueller s going to do with what he finds in regards to the president or anything. we know he s going to charge some people. he is looking hard at the obstruction question. he s talking to white house officials. he s gotten all these documents from the white house. he s got don mcgann he s questioning. talking to all different lawyers in the counsel s office. we don t really know what mueller s going to do with it. would mueller give a report to congress? would he try and bring charges out of that? we have no idea. getting an idea of what mueller is doing has been very difficult. mueller has said very little. he s said nothing publicly since he was appointed six months ago. what s your sense of the direction now? sometimes i get the sense mueller, who s an experienced prosecutor at the federal level, might be looking at a rico charge, criminal enterprise, looking at all these tidbits put together and saying they show an effort to make money along the way to the presidency. right. right now it seems like you have two tracks that mueller s taking. the obstruction track, and the collusion track. the one that is most dangerous for the president is of course the obstruction track. but in terms of his questioning of paul manafort, rick gates, mike flynn, it seems he s using the possible penalties with rico and with money laundering, tax fraud, things like that, in order to pressure them to tell him what happened during the 2016 election, to kind of get to the bottom of whether or not there actually was collusion or whether there were more meetings that we don t know about or more communication between trump campaign officials and the russians. what s your sense of this almost bumper cars, there s so many people being interviewed now, so many people being investigated, so many people being brought before these committees, brought before mueller. is this acceleration of testimonies tell you anything? about the length of this investigation? it s certainly moving natasha, please. it s certainly moving very quickly. it s moving much quicker i think than most experts that i ve spoken to have expected, especially with the indictment of paul manafort. there s really an indication there s so much mueller needs to get to the bottom of that he has no time to waste, especially it when comes to such high-level players like paul manafort and michael flynn who played really prominent roles on the campaign, no matter what donald trump or the white house wants to convey. they were top campaign officials. they do have very valuable information. and the sooner that mueller can get them to talk, the closer hec get to wrapping up this investigation. congresswoman, you were going to say something there. while i ve got you on camera, how long s this going to go for bob mueller? would you be less surprised by the end of next year or more surprised that he s still going? i think by the end of next year he will have completed his investigation. and filled his commitment to the job. i really am concerned about the speed with which the intelligence committee on the house side is trying to wrap things up. there is a list of more people that we want to interview and the committee majority has been reluctant to agree to that. some of whom are key. and we re doubling up on these interviews day by day. and i think it s an effort to try and just wrap it up. do you think the chairman of your committee is a fifth columnist for the president? i think that the chairman of the committee is tied very closely to the president. prince, trump donor, founder of the private military firm blackwater testified today. in january prince held a meeting in the say she wills with a russian close to vladimir putin part of an apparent effort to establish a back channel line of communication between moscow and president-elect trump. prince has acknowledged a meeting but denied the proposed back channel. here he is. i was happened to be there, and i i met a russian. who did you meet? pretty thin. some fund manager, i can t even remember his name. no one was aware from the trump team that i was even there. no one was aware private business, it had nothing to do with the u.s. government, it had nothing to do with the trump team or the transition team or anything else. when people talk about a possible back channel or anybody, all of that, you re saying no off the table? these hogwash. that s a pretty strong denial there, michael? yeah. is that one of the directions we think that trump was heading trying to establish relations, back channel kind of things? it s called collusion. that s what collusion has been from the beginning. a series of curious meetings and connections. what do they mean and whatever. that s something that the house committee has said it s trying to get to the bottom of. now we hear there may be two reports to come out of the house committee. not sure that s not good. no. it would be look the at as very partisan. that investigation has had a partisan tint since the beginning. if there are two reports it s probably going to be taken less seriously by the public. congresswoman, if you have a split verdict, two verdicts on the russia investigation, can you continue to call witnesses once the republican side, the majority, says the game s up? are you finished as well as they are? i think that we are basically shut down. we can probably attempt to interview people. but they may be unlikely to cooperate because it s not coming from the majority who is in charge of this investigation. that s pretty depressing. congresswoman, thank you, jackie speier of california, for coming on. michael smith, great new york times. natasha bertrand. north korea claims its latest missiles are capable of reaching the u.s. mainland. how big a threat does the country pose? are we headed to a second korean war? this is hardball, where the action is. i feel like fire ( ) the 2018 cadillac xt5. worship me beauty, greater than the sum of its parts. come in for our season s best offers and drive out with the perfect 2018 cadillac xt5. get a low-mileage lease on this cadillac xt5 from around $379 per month. on this i m ryan awith chantix.kingxt5 everything i did circled around that cigarette. when i started taking the chantix that urge just slowly diminished and it was a great and empowering feeling. along with support, chantix (varenicline) is proven to help people quit smoking. chantix reduced my urge to smoke. when you try to quit smoking, with or without chantix, you may have nicotine withdrawal symptoms. some people had changes in behavior or thinking, aggression, hostility, agitation, depressed mood, or suicidal thoughts or actions with chantix. serious side effects may include seizures, new or worse heart or blood vessel problems, sleepwalking or allergic and skin reactions which can be life-threatening. stop chantix and get help right away if you have any of these. tell your healthcare provider if you ve had depression or other mental health problems. decrease alcohol use while taking chantix. use caution when driving or operating machinery. the most common side effect is nausea. i don t even think about cigarettes anymore. ask your doctor if chantix is right for you. many insurance plans cover chantix for a low or $0 copay. when north korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, it went higher, frankly, than any previous shot they ve taken. it s a research and development effort on their part to continue building ballistic missiles that can threaten everywhere in the world, basically. welcome back to hardball. that was secretary of defense james mattis describing the missile north korea test-fired earlier this week. the country s biggest and most controversial launch to date. despite the growing threat president trump continued his pattern of taunting north korean lead leader kim jong-un, even calling him a sick puppy. little rocket man, he s a sick puppy. north korea best not make any other threats to the united states. they will be met with fire and fury. like the world has never seen. rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself. and for his regime. meanwhile, ambassador nikki haley for the u.n. warned that north korea continues their acts of aggression, they will be as she put it utterly destroyed if they do. here she is. we have never sought war with north korea and still today we do not seek it. if war does come, it will be because of continued acts of aggression like we witnessed yesterday. and if war comes, make no mistake, the north korean regime will be utterly destroyed. wow. senator lindsey graham was blunt about the prospect of going to war as well, here he is. we re headed toward a preemptive war with north korea if things don t change. i m joined now by gordon shank, columnist for the daily beast, author of nuclear showdown, north korea takes on the world. what do you make of these what is the impact in pyongyang in north korea, of these war-like statements like we re headed to a second korean war? i think they have a great effect. for instance, we re hearing not only nikki haley, who yesterday she talked about cutting off the oil to north korea. saying if china doesn t do it, the united states will. you know, that is war talk. how do we cut off the oil from china? intercept it at sea? i think we re probably going to do it wouldn t be by sea, it comes by land. it comes by land. we re not going to hit china, we d probably hit their refinery. they have one refinery for oil so probably a tomahawk strike. clearly when kim jong-un hears that, that puts him in a defensive position. mcmaster talking about war, and lindsey graham in a number of comments this week talking about how, for instance, the united states has a viable military option. and we re going to send a strong signal that it does late this week. and so clearly that is something that is driving the north korean regime at a point where they feel threatened. are they fearing the threat that we might do the first strike, the first attack? does that scare them into a preemptive action by themselves? i don t think that they work, because they know, as nikki haley said, they would be destroyed. but there s a lot of talk in this town about totally destroying north korea. and yeah, that s one of the scenarios. but we ve got to remember that in august, the global times, a sort of semi-official newspaper, controlled by people s daily, the most authoritative source in beijing, said china would come to north korea s aid if the united states were to strike north korea first. and so this could be not just the united states versus north korea, this could be the united states versus north korea, china, and maybe even russia. before we were on you talked about the insecurity of kim jong-un. most of us in the united states, you watch people marching past him, regimental goose-stepping, people around him laughing in sen chronicity, we think this guy owns that place. is he that strong? i don t think so. the reason is, for instance, he s killed about 160 senior officials since he took over on the dead of his father. that does intimidate but the other thing it does do is blood demands blood. it s loosened the bonds of loyalty between the regime elements and the kim family. also we ve seen a number of instances over the last three or four months of real distress inside north korea. so for instance, junior officials in peyangyong are not getting their special rations. the soldier who defect, he was malnourished, he came from a good family he struggled to get across the dmz, impressive how hard he fought, guts to do that. he came from not a bad background family, all the soldiers where the defection took place are the best of the best of the army. this guy probably came from a really high family and he was malnourished, which is an indication that the regime is having problems even taking care of the soldiers it has to absolutely put in good position. toughest question in the world, how do we avoid nuclear war or any kind of war with korea, yet get the pushback, push them back on their nuclear weapons program? if you were a genius president, how would you do it? ? i were the seen yus president i d continue with the september 1 executive order which is a step forward. it says to the world, you do business with north korea, you re not doing business with the united states. the only issue is whether the united states is actually going to enforce it. trump is giving signals that he will, but you know, on tuesday when they fired that missile, trump is talking about how he spoke to mattis. what trump should have done was say, i spoke two hours with treasury secretary mnuchin, he s the guy who enforces sanctions. if president trump had done that, they would have heard that in beijing. we can squeeze them? we can certainly squeeze them. we can squeeze china, china can squeeze north korea. i m not saying 100% it will work, but nonetheless, it s much better than thinking about thermo nuclear war, the world s first nuclear exchange with perhaps china. we ve got to try everything possible short of the use of force. i hope the president s listening. i don t know if he is. gordon chang, thank you, sir. up next, president trump says the republican tax plan would help plumber, carpenters and teachers, everyone but the rich. that claim couldn t be further from the facts. now republicans are on the verge of getting this bill passed, maybe tomorrow. maybe tomorrow morning. you re watching hardball. i kept looking for ways to manage my symptoms. i thought i was doing okay. then it hit me. managing was all i was doing. when i told my doctor, i learned humira is for people who still have symptoms of moderate to severe crohn s disease even after trying other medications. in clinical studies, the majority of people on humira saw significant symptom relief and many achieved remission. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. just managing your symptoms? ask your gastroenterologist about humira. with humira, remission is possible. now what? well, after your first reaction, consider your choices. go it alone, against the irs and its massive resources. hire a law firm, where you re not a priority. call your cpa, who can be required to testify against you. or, call the tax law firm of moskowitz, llp. i went from being a cpa to a tax attorney because our clients needed more. call us, and let us put our 30 years of tax experience to work for you. we are the driven. our clients needed more. call us, and let us the dedicated. the overachievers. we know our best investment is in ourselves. we don t take no for an answer. we fight for what we want. even for the things that were once a given. going to college. buying a home. and not being in debt for it for the rest of our lives. but we re only as strong as our community. who inspires and pushes us to go further than we could ever go alone. sofi. get there sooner. the senate must pass those tax cuts. bring main street roaring back. and that s what s going to happen. in all fairness this is going to cost me a fortune, this thing, believe me, believe me. this is not good for me. me it s not so i have some very wealthy friends not so happy with me but that s okay. wait till you see what finally comes out in what i call the mixer. the beating heart of our plan is a tax cut for working families. that s what it is. i will tell you this in a nonbraggadocios way. [ laughter ] there has never been a ten-month president that has accomplished what we have accomplished, that i can tell you. that i can tell you. welcome back to hardball. president trump being modest as always, touting the republican tax bill which appears to be headed towards passage tomorrow morning, perhaps. senate. s cleared a major hurdle when arizona senator john mccain signed off on the legislation. the new york times reports the bill could wisen american inequality diminishing the relief for vulnerable people. no tax break for local property taxes. many view the legislation not as a product of genuine deliberation but a transfer of wealth to corporations and rich individuals. both generous purveyors of campaign contributions. larry kudlow, one of the president s top outside economic advisers, seems to agree. when you want to end the state and local tax deduction, for example, well, because rates are reasonably high, relatively high, that s going to hurt a lot of different people. you follow? so the internal logic was not good. this is not a true tax reform bill. a study of top economists show of the 42 top economists polled only one thought the bill would boost the economy. senate leaders announced they will hold no more votes on the tax bill tonight, will hold the next votes tomorrow morning when they think they re going to head toward passage. wear joined by former maryland democratic congresswoman by nearby here, donna ed wars. sofia nelson, nbcnews.com. sam stein, editor at the daily beast, msnbc contributor. one point of news. tomorrow, right? you have the 50? we don t know if they have the 50. it seems like they should have the 50. who s definitely off? anybody? no one s definitely johnson? no one s definitely off. there are a couple based on their concerns of the deficit, a couple of holdouts based on how the tax is passed through corporations. the latest reporting i saw was four or five holdouts. they were going to work through the night to try to figure out how to fix this thing. it s not done yet. but i do think it ultimately gets done, it s just a matter of getting it across that final yard. what strikes me is the daylight robbery aspect of this. walk into the bank without masks, give us all the money. i mean, they re keeping carried interest. it s a big corporate cut. it s a big cut for the top brackets. gets rid of the minimum tax. it s a fantastic boondoggle for inheritance. leave $22 million without any problem. it s got everything for the rich. maybe $1,000 for everybody else as the payoff. it s so obvious. i mean, look, it goes after students, teachers, working people, working families, and it gives a boatload of money to the wealthiest 1%. i mean, it s not even transparent anymore. what s the politics? i think they think they want they have to get something done. but the something they re getting done, people may not realize now, but every single person is going to go to their personal calculator, look at this thing, and realize that they re getting stuck with the bill so that millionaires can go back with $200,000. let s go back. the most people are not millionaires, most republicans are not millionaires, the average republican who voted for trump is not going to do well here. what do they get and why do they have to pay off their donors? i have a sneaky suspicion in your party, donna, doesn t mind this, because a, their contributors make a lot of money out of this tax deal, and they get to run against him, it s perfect, it s a two-fer, they get all their fat cats saying, hey, thanks for not getting in the way of the republicans, giving us a tax break. by the way, we get to run against it. well, come on, chris. i think they d much rather make sure [ cross talk ] do you think policy and the they ve done a great job stopping this bill? there s definitely more grass roots i don t think they have to they don t have to what? they don t have to do anything because the republicans, to your point, they have to get something done, so this is one of those things where they got john mccain in a room and said, look, if you don t sign on to this thing and we don t get something done, we will have gone a whole year with no ledge accomplishments he hates trump. it doesn t matter, he s a republican at the end of the day, and i don t think he wants to see the party completely crash and burn. secondly, larry kudlow who i ve known for years, i don t always agree, but he s smart, and it s dead on, this is not a tax reform bill at all. and i m the conservative person saying this. this is not a tax reform bill. it doesn t help regular people. taking away local deductions. fy buy a new home, i m a young person, $500,000, i can only write off so much of the interest. what good is that? so this bill doesn t help working people like they re saying. it hurts working people and middle class people. and that s just everybody sees that. why are they doing something that s going to put a target on their back next year for congress, when we have elections, everybody on the democrat side can say, he voted to make everybody rich, richer. why are you voting for this guy? look, you go into the states that really matter. pennsylvania. you go to those suburban areas that can flip. new york s not going to flip but suburbs are going to flip. they re the people that are tax sensitive. they make maybe $150,000, both people working, maybe. what s in it for me? i agree with you. one of the fascinating elements of this for me was how democrats aren t supporting this. if you go back to the 2001 bush tax cuts, ten senate democrats voted for that bill, including dianne feinstein, max baucus famously. i would be surprised if one senate democrat voted for this bill. we went on a report why this is the case, and basically this is the most unpopular you can make a giant tax cut. this is remarkable. tax cut bills usually poll fairly well but they ve managed to make this incredibly unpopular. trump thinks he can sell it, talking about how he gets hurt by this. when any sober analysis of the bill says he benefits incredibly by this. and certainly his children will benefit incredibly by this as well. there s no controlling of health care. health care expenditures, particularly for small businesses and individuals, through the roof. it would exacerbate that by getting rid of the individual mandate. you have this package of things that will really be politically toxic. i don t think democrats are hopeful it passes. i think they re nervous down the road republicans will say, the deficit s out of control, we need to turn our attention to social security and medicare. when you have you can t get republican democrats like from west virginia and from missouri, these conservative democrats, you can t get them on this bill? you have a problem. we ll see. looks like a pure partisan operation. it s target practice for the democrats next year. up next, we re going to get three scoops from these people. you re watching hardball. looking for balance in your digestive system? try align probiotic. for a non-stop, sweet treat goodness, hold on to your tiara kind of day. get 24/7 digestive support, with align. the #1 doctor recommended probiotic brand. also in kids chewables. discover card. i justis this for real?match, yep. we match all the cash back new cardmembers earn at the end of their first year, automatically. whoo! i got my money! hard to contain yourself, isn t it? uh huh! let it go! whoo! get a dollar-for-dollar match at the end of your first year. only from discover. a mexican immigrant who was in the country illegally has been found not guilty of the 2015 murder of kate steinle on a san francisco pier. jose serarte acquitted moments ago. the case drew national trump especially from donald trump on the campaign trail. he railed against sanctuary cities. the man had previously been convicted of seven felonies and was deported five times. we ll be right back. believe it u actually like what you do. even love it. and today, you can do things you never could before. you re working in millions of places at once with iot sensors. analyzing social data on the cloud to create new designs. and using blockchain to help prevent fraud. so get back to it and do the best work of your life. we re back with the hardball roundtable. tell me something i don t know. well, the wave of sexual harassment allegations that are coming forward, i think you re going to see the leadership doing something real on sexual harassment, making sure congress is a place that workers can work safely. should the chairman of the ranking member of the judiciary committee resign? i ve already said he absolutely should. i ll lighten it up. tonight was the national christmas tree lighting, a time when americans come out. pictures are all over the internet tonight that the seats are empty and nobody showed up really for this lighting. i mean, it was really empty. so trump of course will tweet that he had the biggest lighting ever in the history of the world. probably in about 20 minutes. you re such a wet blanket. are you waiting to get in line for the christmas handshake this year? no, i am not. maybe that s something you didn t know. i m going to make it a little heavier than that. conyers, if he stays around, expect to hear more calls for expulsion, if not that, for him to get kicked off the judiciary committee entirely. very rare, expulsion. thank you. former u.s. congresswoman donna edwards, sofia nelson, sam stein. let me finish with what i told the crowd last night at the kennedy center here in washington. you re watching hardball. 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(avo) victoza® is not for people with type 1 diabetes or diabetic ketoacidosis. do not take victoza® if you have a personal or family history of medullary thyroid cancer, multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2, or if you are allergic to victoza® or any of its ingredients. stop taking victoza® and get medical help right away if you get symptoms of a serious allergic reaction such as rash, swelling, difficulty breathing or swallowing. serious side effects may happen, including pancreatitis. so, stop taking victoza® and call your doctor right away if you have severe pain in your stomach area. tell your doctor your medical history. gallbladder problems have happened in some people. tell your doctor right away if you get symptoms. taking victoza® with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. common side effects are nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, decreased appetite, indigestion, and constipation. side effects can lead to dehydration, which may cause kidney problems. ask your doctor about victoza®. let me finish tonight with what i told the crowd last night at a party for bobby kennedy at the kennedy center in washington. my first job in washington was as a capitol cop, a capitol hill cop. i worked in the morning, evening, early afternoon in a senator s office, then put on my uniform and .38 special and worked the 3:00 to 11:00 shift as a cop. i learned one senator always made a point to say hello to the capitol police, a lot of whom were country boys, some of whom commuted in from west virginia. it hit me by surprise because bobby kennedy was known for standing up for minorities, african-americans, latinos, native americans already what made robert kennedy so unique was he felt the same empathy for white working men and women. he thought of cops, waitresses, construction workers, all of them, and firefighters, as his people. he wanted to bring people together. when campaigning he d ride in an open car. richard hatcher, the first african-american mayor of gary, indiana, with him. he wanted to say he was with both communities. he had also what he really needed in a leader, empathy. i don t know any other politician who could have stood before that african-american crowd in indianapolis, that tragic night of april 4th, 1968, and told them that martin luther king had just been killed. i ll never forget the faces and salutes of the thousands of americans, white and black, lining the route of bobby funeral train, strike witness to the belief this man could unite the purpose of the discarded factory worker and the inner-city youth. the white college students protected by deferments. the lumberjacks defending opposition to gun control. he admitted when he was wrong, like about vietnam, about wanting to bomb cuba. he was able to learn because he was willing to. i wrote a book about him because we need to believe leadership like this is doable. we had it, we might have it again someday. i m running the spirit of bobby kennedy. that s hardball for now. thanks for being with us. all in with chris hayes starts right now. tonight on all in i don t pay much attention to his tweets. he s been one of the best presidents i ve served under. the republican bargain. supporting an increasingly dangerous president to get more money for the very rich. failure is not an option. tonight the senate votes on a tax cut bill. amid new calls for the president s impeachment. i love wikileaks. the radio show host who could be the linchpin of the russia investigation. plus pressure on the longest-serving member of congress to step down. after multiple allegations of sexual harassment. congressman conyers should resign. what concerns me about the american press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook. versus lindsey graham 2016. i think he s a kook. when all in starts right now. this is kookland. good evening from new york, i m chris hails. right now at this very moment the senate is
announcer: this is cnn breaking news. this is cnn tonight. i m don lemon. it is 11:00 p.m. here on the east coast. live with all the breaking news for you, the latest mass shooting in america. we re going to discuss. this time in the newsroom of the capital gazette in annapolis, maryland. five people are dead, two injured, the suspect in custody tonight. law enforcement sources identify him as jared warren ramose, a white man in his 30s who filed a defamation claim in 2012 against the paper. the case was dismissed. this was a targeted attack on the capital gazette that is located at 888 cascade road on the first floor. he entered the building with a shotgun, and he looked for his victims as he walked through the lower level. this person was prepared today to come in. this person was prepared to shoot people. his intent was to cause harm. and as i stated before the investigative part of this is going to be thorough and take some time. we ve also got the latest on the president s continuing attempts to cast doubt on the russia investigation as he prepares for the summit with vladimir putin in just a few weeks. a lot to get to. i want to get right to the latest on the shooting today in the capital gazette, at the capital gazette in annapolis, maryland. and i want to bring in shimon. bring us up to speed on what happened. reporter: yeah, that news conference, don, they named the victims, the five people who were working inside this newsroom here at the capital gazette that is now a crime scene. and they continue to say, police, that they re interviewing the suspect. they re not telling us if he s cooperating. but since the shooting happened a lot has been learned concerning the suspect. his social media. police at this moment are at his home in laura, maryland, which is about 25 miles from here where they re waiting to search it. they re waiting for a search warrant. and they re looking for more evidence as exactly perhaps what caused him to come here today, open fire on these employees, these reporters, editors inside the capital gazette killing five of them, don, and now police are just really trying to focus on exactly what perhaps may have been the motive here, don. shimon, thank you very much. i appreciate tat. i want to bring in now cnn s brian todd for more information. police released the victims names tonight. just a short time ago the police did release the names in this attack. the first name is wendy winters who had been there for 15 to 20 years, a long time writer for the paper. another person kill said, rebecca smith, identifieda as a salesperson for the newspaper, gerald fishman, and john mcnumara as a writer for the paper. we re told he covered sports with reporting this gunman did issue threats, there were threats issued via social media. not necessarily against any one person in the newspaper but the newspaper in general. we also have an account here from a woman name anne lipinski, a journalism saying, quote, a birthday package from her husband still awaited her. and said rob had asked her if she wanted to open her gift thursday morning, but told him she s rather wait until he got home from work. a really heart breaking story. also we re getting riveting accounts from survivors, what it was like in that newsroom as the gunman opened fire. described him shooting through the windows as people cowered under the desks. this gentleman, mr. davis, heard the gunman reload. and we re also told the gunman himself, ramos, tried to evade officers when they interrupted this attack. he was found hiding under a desk himself elsewhere in the building. ms. lipinski s account, the wife, he was accounting and all these accounts just horrific. i want to bring in phil mudd and a former fbi agent. good evening to both of you. you heard shimon talk about the latest on the investigation. where do you think this is going? i m sitting here thinking it s 7:15 a.m., but we would be sitting back talking with robert mueller, a couple different elements we would be talking about. the media is talking about motive. i don t think that would be primary in the investigation right now. it s a key question, but there s a couple of other questions. number one, are we sure we have pattern of life on this individual himself, now we know who he is. facebook, travel, credit cards, he has a vehicle. for a couple of reasons. did anybody participate with him? that s a criminal investigation. did anyone assist him, for example, even providing motivation, what you re doing is appropriate? did anyone even know were they cognizant of the faskt he was going to go out and conduct an attack? before i sort of proved the negative, i proved that nobody else was involved. i m not going to focus that much on motive. i want to focus on people. and i think overnight with interviews, for example, family, i want to know if anyone else knew. he went in stewart, there s no doubt of his intent because he went there with a shotgun and smoke grenades. no question about it, don. this was a guy who had an intent to go in and create as much havoc as possible. i have to tell you what s interesting, don, the fbi recently released a study on preattack behaviors. in 2017 there was 30 active shooting scenarios here in the united states. and quite interesting the majority of those active shooters took at least a week or longer to prepare before they actually engaged in their mass killings. the interesting thing with respect to this study was when they went out and reinterviewed or interviewed people that had associated themselves with the shooter most of the people if not all identified certain odd behaviorals. notwithstanding that none of them, or a majority of them did not bring it to the attention of law enforcement. i think it s going to be interesting in the coming days to see what interaction this individual had and why it is there was nothing done to intercept him before he actually did what he did today. between the time he had a lawsuit with the paper, he filed a defamation lawsuit in 2012 against the paper but that case was dismissed. but what happened in that time that caused him to go to these extremes? time out. let me throw a penalty flag out here in what i ve seen in the past six hours or eight hours since the shooting. let me think about how i would think in this environment. what would motivate me to go into a newspaper and shoot somebody up? a lot of these cases you re talking about people who are emotionally disturbed. a fair number of cases in new york city, chicago, los angeles, in washington at the federal and state level and saying how do i understand the motive of somebody who is so emotionally disturbed that they themselves can t even articulate why they conduct an attack. my point is let s not assume that somebody in this state has a rational reason for doing this. it took us forever to even figure out the beginnings of why the las vegas shooter did this. let s not assume the reason for this shooting was rational in the way that we would think about it. of course, what s rational about what he did? but he had a connection to the paper. if he didn t have a connection to the paper i would say, okay it was but sure. we would sit there and say why would it take someone three years to do this, why wouldn t he have acted earlier and why wouldn t his family know? we re suggesting there s a thought process here, a path of thinking that s comprehensible to you and i who are rational. and i m going to say i don t think it will be. okay, but isn t that part of figuring out what happened? it is. i think the most critical question is not what his motive was, not what happened at the newspaper, but a question what s happening in all the states of america. remember in florida, with the school shooting, there were so many interactions with the school shooter. the key question is whether interactions with the shooter that should have led somebody to say forget about gun control but on emotional stability this is someone where we should have laws that make it easier to say you shouldn t have weapons. when we come back, much more on the deadly attack on the capital gazette newspaper including initial reactions from shawn hannity. who did he blame before any of the facts were known? that s next. this is important for people with asthma. yes. it s a targeted medicine proven to help prevent severe asthma attacks, and lower oral steroid use. about 50% of people with severe asthma have too many cells called eosinophils in their lungs. fasenra™ is designed to work with the body to target and remove eosinophils. fasenra™ is an add-on injection for people 12 and up with severe eosinophilic asthma. don t use fasenra™ for sudden breathing problems or other problems caused by eosinophils. fasenra™ may cause headache, sore throat, and allergic reactions. get help right away if you have swelling of your face, mouth, and tongue, or trouble breathing. don t stop your asthma treatments unless your doctor tells you to. tell your doctor if your asthma worsens or if you have a parasitic infection. fasenra™ is a targeted treatment for eosinophilic asthma. that s important. ask an asthma specialist about fasenra™. who s already won three cars, two motorcycles, a boat, and an r.v. i would not want to pay that insurance bill. 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[ ding ] -not today, ron. though rare, it can take your teen s life in just 24 hours. even if they had the first dose of mcv4 vaccine at 11 or 12 years, they need the second-dose at 16. call their doctor today. they need the second-dose at 16. we test all of our paints and or even years.ths. because you deserve paint that s done right. that s proudly particular. benjamin moore. the standard for paint professionals. only at local paint and hardware stores. attack on the capital gazette. a hometown newspaper in annapolis, maryland. i want to bring in carl bernstein, mr. frank bruney and max boot, the author of the road not taken. five people are dead, multiple people wounded in another shooting. this time in a newsroom. what do you think? i mean, obviously it s heart breaking, it s tragic. and i can t get out of my mind the words i heard on this news network earlier. one of the survivors was being interviewed, and who had mentioned also she covered the pulse shooting. and she said these words, a week from now no one s going to remember this or a week from now no one s going to be talking about this. and you hear that and you think that s impossible. but, no, she has every reason to be that skeptical and that pest mystic because we ve become so accustomed to these and i think among the many questions we have to ask ourselves is why that is how we keep this in our conversations, in our minds in constructive ways so that maybe somehow we move beyond these incidents because they re way too frequent. what struck me as well she said i don t want to make this partisan, but we need she said we need way more than that because they were praying. they were praying at the time the shooting was happening. she mentioned that. but where s that going to get the next group of people the next time a shooter enters. fox news shawn hannity drew a line from comments made by democratic congresswoman maxine waters. take a look at this clip from his radio show. we have multiple deaths also being report asked the sheriff is saying multiple fatalities in a newsroom shooting. good grief. so scaring. i m not turning this into a gun debate. i know that s where where the media will be 30 seconds from now. that s not it. honestly, i ve been saying for days that something horrible is going to happen because of the rhetoric. really, maxine, you want people to create all your friends get in their faces, call your friends, get protesters, follow them into restaurants and shopping malls and whatever else she said. so this was this afternoon. this was right after we found out the shootings, before any facts came out. how does a tragedy how does this have anything to do with maxine waters? first of all, she didn t say anyone should be violent, right, first of all. and that was another bait and switch talking point. come on, shawn can do better. this is this kind of insanely partisan perspective that shawn hannity and a lot of people in this country have today where it doesn t matter what the facts are, they re going to shoe horn them into some existing position. trying to blame democrats for everything, which is nuts. to be nar i think there are also some democrats that are rushing to say this shooting has something to do with the fact trump is calling the press, the enemy of the american people, which is certainly abhorrent rhetoric. he clearly had a beef with this newspaper, unfortunately, a long running history and right now what we know today appears to be what motivated him. i think there s a tendency on both sides to jump in and use these tragedies as fodder for these partisan debates. we are not in this case but just in general i think we are being deeply hurt by this partisanship, this finger pointing. i think everybody needs to step back, but especially i think people like shawn hannity and donald trump who are just deeminizing the opposition in ways that interest deeply gross off our democracy. shawn should take a step back and say i jumped the gun and apologizing. shawn, be a big man and say i jumped the gun and i m sorry. this is an awful tragedy to have information like that. this is not isolated. we can t isolate this. this is part of this greater phenomenon of a cold civil war that is going on in this country, in which there is an instinctive and reactive move by so many people who are determined to put everything into a cultural warfare context instead of being willing to look at complexity. instead of being willing to look at fact and having a fact based argument about the conditions of our country. and rather we resort, and it s particularly true of what we see in hannity there, very often in what hannity says, that everything fits into this neat little fox of venom that he expresses. and there s venom going on from the president of the united states. there s venom going on from fox, and yes, there is venom going on also on the other side. but i think a lot of if it disproportionate. and what we saw from hannity is indicative of it. a violent attack on innocent journalists, doing their jobs and is an attack on every american. our prayers are with the victims and their friends and families. so she did condemn the violent attack, and that s a quote. but journalists come on this program all the time. we hear them say they feel they re under attack, not a physical attack. they might be they feel from the president s rhetoric, right, and some of the supporters who say nasty things the president is saying the intimae of the people. but journalists feel they re under attack from the podium and from the president every day. and they are. they re under attack from her verbally, all the time. she s constantly digressing in her nonanswers and in her evasions to take swipes at journalists and take verbal shots at them. so that statement from her rings sort of hollow given how fond she is at deeminizing journalists. and everything that carl said is completely right. we were trending in this hyper-partisan direction before donald trump came along. but he has gleefully thrown fuel on this fire. and now it s at this point, and again we re stepping away from the shooter and talking about the general climate. it s at a point where you have a poll, usa today, the fact they re even asking the poll question could you see a civil war in this country, and something like 33% of people saying yes, i could, how did we get here? one of the ways we got here is donald trump is the most inflammatory president at exactly the wrong time. carl believes we re in the midst of a cold civil war. i m going to bring you all back. when we come back, does president trump have fewer checks on him than any other president in recent history, and how will he use his power to reshape america? my car smells good. it s these new fresh-fx car air fresheners from armor all. each scent can create a different mood in my car. like tranquil skies. armor all, it s easy to smell good. and we re committed to improving every ride.t to you starting with features designed to make it easy for your driver to find you. taking the stress out of pickups. and we re putting safety at the heart of everything we do. with a single tap, we re giving you new ways to let loved ones know you re on your way. uber has new leadership, a new vision and is moving in a new direction. forward. does your business internet provider promise a lot? let s see who delivers more. comcast business gives you gig-speed in more places. the others don t. we offer up to 6 hours of 4g wireless network backup. everyone else, no way. we let calls from any of your devices come from your business number. them, not so much. we let you keep an eye on your business from anywhere. the others? nope! get internet on our gig-speed network and add voice and tv for $34.90 more per month. call or go on line today. president trump met tonight at the white house with key senators to discuss his pick to fill the latest supreme court vacancy. those senators including three democrats who were up for re-election in red states. back with me now carl bernstein, frank bruni and max boot. so, max, the president in this country reaching a new level. he said trump will have fewer checks on his power than any president in his lifetime. what does that mean for our country? that s a pretty frightening situation. do you agree with that? i agree with that. you already see trump has accumulated vast power. thir not standing up to him. they re not fighting back in the way they should be even when he is doing great violence to their purported believes, for example, these tariffs which most republicans on capitol hill purport to oppose. many of them are actually enabli enabling his attacks on the justice department and fbi. after rosenstein and chris ray. and now appointing a justice to fill justice kennedy s seat, in some ways trump is apointing his own jury because this is supreme court that could very well rule if mueller issues a subpoena, to get trump to testify, there could be further legal matters that come to the supreme court as this investigation unfolds, and there s no question trump is going to be looking for somebody who s going to be deferential to his power. i think the press is doing a great job trying to hold him accountable and some of the lower courts as well. but congress has done a horrible job, the supreme court has not done a great job unless the house changes over in november. i think that s a very big story i ve been discussing with my team. what trump is doing to the judiciary at the appellate level and on and on and a lot of people don t know about that. and here we go. they re finally finding out about it. to your point you thought the media is doing a good job. we ve often talked about the media now and then when you covered watergate. allen also writes the media, the last check on a president with total control of a government has lost trust of most republicans and many democrats after two years of trump pummeling. is that how you see it, mr. bernstein? well, i think that s very true that what the president has done in his unconsciousnable attacks on the press, because they undermine the role of a society and a free press that make it possible for our system to work. and donald trump and the cold civil war he presides over is to make sure our system does not work. he is undoing the last 75 years of america s policies in the world and leading the world and the world order that was established after world war ii. and similarly at home, turning back the clock in terms of civil liberties, in terms of women s rights, in terms of abortion, right to abortion as we re seeing in his pronouncements in the last few days. and for what? to build his base? as frank bruni pointed out in his column today, he used to be a supporter of a woman s right to choose. i m not sure he gives a damn about the abortion issue except as a means to hold onto power. and if you talk to the people that know him the best, they say that so much of this cold civil war that he is bringing to the point of ignition is to stay in office because of the mueller investigation. because underneath all is his fear and knowledge that mueller is onto what has gone on both in obstruction of justice, and if nauticaluti nauticaluti not collusion by the president himself, those in term of doing the bidding of some of what president putin wants done and his interference in the campaign. that s what this is about. that s the bottom line. and he is willing to preside over a cold civil war and bring it to a fire storm for his own ends. not to mention whatever his business practice is. whatever. just finding out how it goes. i m not saying it s good or bad, but mueller knows. that figures in this investigation. and this investigation includes his business practices in russia. okay,o listen, frank, your new column is entitled the cosmic joke of donald trump s power. and you write donald trump barely won the white house under circumstances a tainted opponent, 3 million fewer votes than she received, james comey s moral vanity and russia s a moral exertions that raise serious questions about how many america americans yearned to see him there. and could reshape american s lives even more significantly. it s the craziest dissonance and cruellest, too. how do you think donald trump is going to reshape this country? he s doing it with a tax overhaul, as max mentioned with tariffs before. issue after issue. what s so interesting as you step back and why i wrote that column, is he s doing all of this when he has such a tenuous claim to a mandate. when you look at the way he was elected, if he was a normal person he would govern with some humility and partisanship because he would look at some of those numbers and that was in the climate i mentioned in the column. he had a very flawed opponent. we know he had help from russia. we don t know whether it was consequential in terms of the outcome. we know from most analyses that comey did toward the end probably lepped him. nothing about the way he s governed reflects that, and i think that s what makes his opponents so incredibly crazy and what makes this feel so surreal to so many americans. very interesting. he said in the coming decades or in a generation or two this country may be run by a minority of people, right, meaning demographically people who are in power holding on just because what donald trump is doing in the judaiciary. the minority of the country will be controlling that. donald trump is basically a majority president and yet he s ruling in a very underhanded fashion. and i blame the republicans on the hill for letting him get away with it. republicans are afraid to press back on him against anything, even though he s doing great damage and violence to what they have stood for tidecades. all these things he s trashing and they re letting him get away with it. they have a chance now with this supreme court nominee who s coming up. it s a very thin majority in the senate. if you just had two or three republicans who said we re not going to give you a bill until you agree with a law that supports robert mueller, if you abuse tariffs, they can do that. are they going to do that? i think the odds are against them. i was going to say good luck. when we come back, almost 600 people arrested on capitol hill today. one of those arrested, a congresswoman. she joins me next. my digestive system used to make me feel sluggish. but those days are over. now, i take metamucil every day. it naturally traps and removes the waste that weighs me down. so i feel. lighter. try metamucil and begin to feel what lighter feels like. and try new metamucil fiber thins, made with 100% natural psyllium fiber. a great-tasting and easy way to start your day. let s fly, let s fly away just say the words and we ll beat the birds down to acapulco bay it s perfect for a flying honeymoon they say come fly with me let s fly, let s fly away come fly with me let s fly, let s fly away no one thought much of itm at all.l people said it just made a mess until exxonmobil scientists put it to the test. they thought someday it could become fuel and power our cars wouldn t that be cool? and that s why exxonmobil scientists think it s not small at all. energy lives here. more than 1,000 people mostly women marching on capitol hill today protesting the president s administration s zero-tolerance policy that s led to the separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents. 575 people were arrested for unlawfully demonstrating including congresswoman a democrat from washington and she joins me now. thank you for joining us. how are you doing? i m doing well. i m doing well. it was an incredibly inspiring protest, incredibly inspiring civil disobedience, as representative john lewis like to say, it s good trouble. and i think that s what people were doing today is drawing attention to the fact we ve got kids in cages on the borders, people in prisons when they re trying to seek asylum. it s not politics. it s about right and wrong, and it was incredible to see all those women out there today. courageous, strong and fighting for women who are in prison, mothers who are in prison and trying to be reunited with their mothers. just to be clear, i want our viewers to know again, you were arrested for protesting for these immigrant families. i know that you would you know, there s a lot to be done here, but do you feel your voices are being heard? you know, i do, don. i ll tell you that obviously a lot of things have happened in the last few days, but i think the last two weeks have been really consumed by this issue. and americans across the country, democrats, republicans and independents say this is wrong. they cannot believe this is happening. and outrage has been real. the idea that this president would pass a zero-tolerance, zero humanity policy and separate children from their parents, put these kids in cages, i think it s got everybody across the country outraged. and so those voices, i think, where being heard. obviously the last few days we ve had a lot of things going on. but on saturday there will be a massive round of protests across it country. there are 400,000 people who have signed up, people who are going to be wearing white at rallies across the country. every single state across the country, i think it s 650 events including a big one here in d.c. at lafayette scare at 11:00 a.m., and that s because people believe this has to be changed. and you know what? the president put this policy into place. he can pick up his phone and tweet at secretary nielsen and jeff sessions and tell them to reverse this policy. that s all it takes. and then we ve got to reunite these kids because right now hhs and dhs have no idea let me ask you about that. immigrant children as young as 3 being ordered to appear in court alone without their parents or any representation, how can a 3-year-old be expected to advocate for themselves? they can t. and that s just the point. it is horrendous, and i ve worked on immigration issues for long time. so i really know this area, and there are lots of things that are wrong with this system. but when i went and met with the 174 women held in a federal prison who had been transferred from the texas border and i heard their stories of children being ripped from them, forcibly separated, no chance to say good-bye, did not know where they were, had been held in some cases more than a month, had no idea where they children were. and, you know, don, i m a mother and i honestly don t even have words for how i would feel if that happened. and i think that s what s happening across the country is people are looking at this and saying how could this be on u.s. soil. and then you see the pictures of the kids in cages and yowl hear the audio of these kids weeping for their children. we had two shadow hearings on the hill last week. the representative and i cochaired and we had two shadow hearings. and we had the president of the american association of pediatrics come and speak with us you said it s child abuse, right? i want to get this in before we run out of time because i think it s important. because today the deputy attorney general rod rosenstein claims the federal government knows where every child is. you took issue with that. listen to this. asylum seekers who are being imprisoned, mothers who told me their children have been stripped from them, one them as as young as 1 years old, and attorney general i don t believe that the administration knows even where these children are, who they belong to. congresswoman, i appreciate you raising that. i met just the other day with secretary azar, and he was quite emphatic that is false story. attorney general, let me just stop you for one second to tell you of my personal experience, i i was surrounded by the warden of the prison as well as a number of employees who can corroborate exactly what i m saying to you. he said it was a false story. your response? i told him it wasn t. i saw a slip of paper of a woman s name and children s names, and she told me those are not my children. they were the wrong children assigned to those parents. it s absolutely outrageous. congresswoman, thank you so much. i appreciate it. when we come back, the protests on capitol hill hill, just the latest example of women galvanized by the trump presidency. are they leading the opposition to the president? many people have their crystal balls out there predicting upcoming mid-term elections will make 2018 the year of the woman. so i want to bring in alice stuart, angela rye and joe trippy. i just spoke with representative pramila jayapal, this is an issue where women on both sides of the aisle no matter where you stand can relate to politically, correct? yes, absolutely. i hope we re not at it point, don, whether it s just women, whether mothers or not, i hope this is an issue that unites all the american people. people who have children in their family, sit next to children at church, teach children in schools. this shouldn t just be about women and mothers. this should be an issue where we look at kids and say no matter who you are, where you are, how old you are, you shouldn t be separated from your parent. you were talking to the congresswoman about a kid as young as 1 years old, we all read about the child who was 3 years old and a judge asked the kid what his name was and he replied in spanish oh, a plane. s these a these are heart wrenching stories. just for a moment i can t imagine what these kids are going through. and it shouldn t be something that s partisan at all. it should be something about just decent humanity. there are some real concerns from folks out there that roe v. wade could be overturned. what is the likelihood of that happening, and if so that may have some unintended consequences for an election. sure, the likelihood of that happening is extremely high. and i say that because the president has made it quite clear that one of the things that he intends to do and he did with neil gorsuch was to appoint attorney scalia-like justices. and he s done that more than once and now has the opportunity to do that once again. as you mentioned in the program the president spent this evening meeting with senators across the aisle and getting their input when and how and who but i have no doubt whatsoever that he will appoint a conservative leaning justice to fill that spot, and i have no doubt that we will have many issues not just roe v. wade the abortion issue but same-sex marriage, gun control, voting issues, all of these will be important issues coming before the court. one thing is this will motivate voters this will get voters out. the idea of conservative justice is comfort food to evangelical we re talking about women. i have to get joe in. president trump loves to say that he won the support of women in the general election but that is not correct. it s incorrect. he won with white women, right? so what role are women going to play in the midterms? well, look, you ve seen already, it s women in the democratic party that are the most energized and the ones that have been volunteering, really carrying the party on their backs literally in a lot of these victories that have happened, the doug jones in alabama, connor lamb and others. the more significant thing is the number of suburban republican women and younger republican women that are moving away, actually thinking for the first time about voting for a democrat. that again happened in alabama and in connor lamb s race in pennsylvania and northham s race in virginia for governor. so what i think is happening is yes, all this was before separating children from their families, you know, when they re picked up on the border. or roe v. wade being in tremendous jeopardy now with a second appointment for the supreme court by trump. i actually think it s people may be reading this all wrong. that it ll be women that are both energized among democrats but also exhausted by what this president is doing on the republican side. yeah. it s those women, the republican women that leave that are going to be the problem. it could be big in november. angela in recent days we have seen the president continue to attack hillary clinton, nancy pelosi, maxine water on twitter. he thinks it s good for him i m not sure why i want to ask this question because he attacked republican women during the primary during the arena and he s president, so do you think that s a good strategy for him to continue doing it? i think it depends on what his strategy is. if it s to continue to gin up his base, to encourage death threats of women in congress, if it is to, you know, further divide the nation and lean into hatred and violence, then yeah it s a great strategy. unfortunately it s not a good long term strategy for moving the country forward, uniting people making sure we can walk off into the sunset happily ever after. it s going to further the divide. the supreme court the opportunity to pick a supreme court justice, nominate a supreme court justice gins up voters maybe evangelical voters but on the other hand you re seeing progressive women all over capitol hill, all over twitter because they are energized as well. people are tired of donald trump s rhetoric and the results actions coming out of it. i have 30 seconds here, alice. i want to say democratic women kept winning in tuesday s primary, including in new york city, defeating the incumbent. you heard what joe said, democratic women are energized and republican women are energized as well, is that concerning? i think the damage that was done with regard to the separations of the families at the border and the support from women that the president lost on the republican side, anyway, he s going to make up a lot of ground on the supreme court side, because the pro-life issue or women s issues are so important for conservative women and they re going to come out in full force from that standpoint. that being said, it s encouraging to see more women get involved. it s encouraging to see women on both sides of the aisle get involved in politics. on the democrat side i think women on the democrat side are going to be key. we re seeing the political report saying they re outdoing men by 15 points. it s good to see fresh blood in politics, even if it comes at the hurt of president trump. it s good to see them. thank you all, appreciate it. we ll be right back. if you have moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, little things can be a big deal. that s why there s otezla. otezla is not an injection or a cream. it s a pill that treats psoriasis differently. with otezla, 75% clearer skin is achievable after just 4 months, . with reduced redness, thickness, and scaliness of plaques. and the otezla prescribing information has no requirement for routine lab monitoring. don t use if you re allergic to otezla. otezla may cause severe diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting. tell your doctor if these occur. otezla is associated with an increased risk of depression. tell your doctor if you have a history of depression or suicidal thoughts, or if these feelings develop. some people taking otezla reported weight loss. your doctor should monitor your weight and may stop treatment. other side effects include upper respiratory tract infection and headache. tell your doctor about all the medicines you take and if you re pregnant or planning to be. otezla. show more of you. does your business internet provider promise a lot? let s see who delivers more. comcast business gives you gig-speed in more places. the others don t. we offer up to 6 hours of 4g wireless network backup. everyone else, no way. we let calls from any of your devices come from your business number. them, not so much. we let you keep an eye on your business from anywhere. the others? nope! get internet on our gig-speed network and add voice and tv for $34.90 more per month. call or go on line today. doespeninsula trail?he you won t find that on a map. i ll take you there. take this left. if you listen real hard you can hear the whales. oop. you hear that? (vo) our subaru outback lets us see the world. sometimes in ways we never imagined. learned kids in his community were sleeping on the floor, he went from business man to bed maker. what started as a single good deed helping one family in idaho soon spread to helping 3,000 children across america, help them get a good night sleep. meet luke nickelson. i m just a farm kid from idaho i grew up here. what i didn t know was there s kids next door who are struggling. they had kids sleeping on the floor. i was making six figure salary but i fell into this need that i discovered wasn t being fulfilled by anybody. i quit my job because i wanted to do this full time. the need i have isn t financial. the need i have is seeing the joy on kids faces knowing i can make a difference. you can watch what happens when luke s team gives one family of kids their very own beds at cnn heroes.com where you can nominate someone you think should be a cnn hero. that s it for us tonight. thanks for watching. good evening, thanks for joining us. the breaking news tonight in america is once again heartbreaking. at least five people dead.