Transcripts For KQED Washington Week 20171125

Massive border wall, the repeal of obamacare and, so far, tax cuts. There are mounting Foreign Policy challenges, the russia probe, and the power struggle between trumps inner circle and the republican establishment. What everyone agrees on is this President Trump has thoroughly disrupted washington and his own party. We discuss the first year and look ahead with peter baker of the new york times, Andrea Mitchell of nbc news, Michael Duffy of time magazine, and ann compton, veteran of abc news. Celebrating 50 years, this is Washington Week. Funding is provided by their leadership is instinctive. They understand the challenges of today and research the technologies of tomorrow. Some call them veterans. We call them part of our team. Additional funding is provided by newmans own foundation, donating all profits from newmans own Food Products to charity and nourishing the common good. The ethics and excellence in journalism foundation. Koo and Patricia Yuen through the yuen foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities. The corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. Once again, from washington, moderator, robert costa. Robert good evening. Maybe you talked Politics Around your thanksgiving table or maybe you made sure to avoid it but here at this table im thankful its all we do and what a year it has been. So much, so fast. And tonights a little different. Weve gathered respected veteran washington reporters to talk about it all. The big picture and whats happened and whats next. Lets start at the beginning. American carnage, as you remember, was the theme of President Trumps inaugural address and executive orders soon followed. President trump mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape, and the crime and the gangs and the drugs. This american carnage stops right here, and stops right now. Robert peter, american carnage, a flurry of executive orders. How has that man on that stage, President Trump, changed since then . Has he evolved . Has the presidency shifted him . Peter thats a great question because he had a very tumultuous start. Not only did he use this dystopian vision, right off the bat hes coming out with the travel ban and canceling or withdrawing from the trade pac with asia, all these things meant to show hes going to undue a lot of what his predecessor had done and set a new tone but it wasnt smooth. It was chaotic. Should people come into the country . Not come into the country . Courts were jumping in, protests were in the streets. I dont think youve ever seen a start to a presidency quite as turbulent as that one was and no honeymoon whatsoever. Robert part of that turbulence was seen within the cabinet and the phrase that steve bannon used to use was deconstruction of the administrative state. Youve seen it close up at the state department and the entire cabinet. Andrea day one he goes to the c. I. A. And really disrespects the intelligence agencies. You can already hear what became his criticisms of the Russian Investigation to come. And also, brags about the size of the crowd, which led to all of the controversy with his press secretary. But the cabinet was the most disruptive. Bringing in rex tillerson, a nondiplomat, a businessman, looked like a great idea at the time but the wrong man arguably for the wrong time because he not only wasnt a diplomat but his mission, he feels, is to downsize and not appoint so now you have vacancies everywhere in the state department. You have an absence of real leadership on global policy, in regions around the world. That really exacerbated by what you saw with different cabinet secretaries having to step down. Tom price the lack of ethics, the lack of understanding the processes for getting a nominee to a cabinet hearing, really caused him great disruption and were still seeing it with jeff sessions. The answers that he gave at that initial hearing are haunting him to this day. Robert part of the way he rattled attorney general sessions and part of the way hes rattled secretary of state tillerson has been through twitter. You spent 40 years covering the white house. Youve seen so many president s but this ones different in how he uses social media, especially with the press, too. Absolutely. Its the attitude towards the press. At least president s before him held some respect for the idea that journalism is part of my job. Jimmy carter started having news saying its part of the job. Ronald reagan had his own version of twitter. He invented the saturday radio address. He had five minutes live from the oval office. He could say anything he wants and the networks would carry it. So every president has had kind of the technology but donald trump ran a campaign on busting up the furniture and shouting out on twitter. I dont think we can be surprised that that unconventional candidacy gave us an unconventional presidency where twitter is a policy tool and i dont think we can expect that to change. Robert its really changed the Briefing Room. The Briefing Room has changed and over the years, well, when we were first at the white house, the Briefing Room was a lobby. It was leather sofas and literally courier and ives on the wall because none the briefings were televised. Now theres such a fascination with it. They were never made to be onehour dramas with a climax and nice ending. Its not a productive time in that Briefing Room. Im struck by a couple of things in his first year. One is that he clearly didnt fully understand what the presidency was and hes learned that it has checks and balances and congress has a big say, the courts have a big say. You sometimes get the impressions and you get it often enough that you can believe it that he thought it would be like running a family business, that what he said would go and anyone whos studied the presidency knows thats not true. You get some of the calls but not all of them and not a majority of them. That seems like a surprise, so much so that last friday he went out of his way to say i dont have a lot of control or influence over the Justice Department and it was clear hed just learned that. We want that independent, thats been a way for a long time. He didnt get that. And hes learned the job is a mouse trap. If you dont follow certain procedures, it will bite you. There are Hidden Springs in the presidency that will trigger and suddenly you have an investigation on your hands and by agencies, you probably have never heard of. And the third thing i think hes discovered, maybe something hes gotten right, is that theres a part of being president thats a performance part of the job, you have to act it to be it. Ronald reagan was excellent at this, others not so much. And he has his own you may not like the nature of his performance but its different and hes created it for a new era. I think he does that part rather well. He does it at summits and around the world and i think he enjoys that. Thats the Celebrity Apprentice donald trump. Hes also learned he can reverse something, the fish and wildlife elephant designation which he reversed which brought him great acclaim from sectors he didnt expect. That said, i think ignoring some of the ethics rules, firing james comey just think back, if you could rerack it, look back, if he had not fired james comey, all of these other unintended consequences that flow from that decision, including an investigation that is going into whether that is obstruction of justice or pieces of it that are that was a really major event he thought was just something he could do. I think the other politicians that become president come in with an experience set that has automatic warning bells when they get too close to the stove. They are the cat who touched the stove when its hot and understand you dont touch it when its hot and hes never been a politician or Public Office holder so things that a senator, governor, congressman would know instinctively, you fire the f. B. I. Director and admit you were thinking about an investigation into your campaign when you were doing it, warning, warning, warning. Bill clinton would have loved to have fired louis freeh but knew there would be political backlash if he did. Robert hes certainly not a traditional politician and also not the kind of republican who often comes into the white house. Often we have been asking, whats guiding President Trumps decisions . An ideology, a creed or his own performance. That has impacted his relationship on capitol hill with leader mcconnell and speaker ryan, theyre not sure where he he wants to go. Alliances are something this town is built on. I dont know what its like to be a new york developer where youre always negotiating to get the best position, but to pull people together and help them work in the same direction is a real skill. And of the recent president s, most have been governors which means theyve worked with a legislature which is often under another partys control and theyve tried to build coalitions. You look at ronald reagan, first thing he did was go to the democratic conservatives in the house to get them on board for his tax cuts. Donald trump doesnt have that and hasnt surrounded himself with people who would try you look at chuck and nancy, the deal he cut on the debt ceiling, hes waded into bipartisanship but its never really worked. What to make of his experience with congress . The the ent ant can pelosi and schumer came in september and the fruit of that deal hasnt been clear yet. First years of firsttime presidencies are often rocky, avertyoureyes affairs. George w. Bushs wasnt great, bill clintons wasnt great, j. F. K. s wasnt great but as barbara bush once said of the clintons, dont worry, theyll learn. And presumably theyll get smarter at this although we cant be sure that past is prologue here. So its possible they arent going to figure this out the way other president s have in the second year. I was struck by one other human factor thing that i think is unique to this. For the first six to eight months, hes alone in that white house at night. Im not saying thats a big issue but im saying most people have a partner whos there, they can talk to and im struck by the very small universe of advisers this president has outside of the people he works with. The other thing im struck by and i think its really telling in Foreign Policy is how much he enjoys flattery. We all enjoy flattery but he goes to riyadh, his first summit, and on this most recent asian trip and all the foreign leaders know what they have to do, whether its Florida Panthers Vladimir Putin or president xi, just flatter him and the saudis are the greatest beneficiaries of this because they changed the whole policy of the region because they knew they had donald trump and Jared Kushners support for a new policy, even one that was not endorsed by defense secretary mattis or secretary tillerson but the policy against qatar, the rampup against iran is not something tillerson wanted or welcomed, but if you later in this president , he came back and talked for 25 minutes about the red carpenters. Robert have we seen the nationalism take hold, the american carnage, on inaugural day, is that the defining issue on Foreign Policy . Peter to some extent, yes. He comes to office not fully formed on a lot of issues. He doesnt have a strong ideology. One reason he doesnt get along well with Mitch Mcconnell or paul ryan is because he hasnt been in the trenches fighting for conservative policies for years but the sense that he has one consistent belief set that goes back to the 1980s, the idea that america is getting shafted somehow, by our allies taking advantage of us, shafted by our trade partners getting the better of us, shafted by our adversaries who are laughing at us. That underlies so much of what he has done this year, underlies the idea of america first, underlies the idea that hes not going to put up with nonsense from north korea the way barack obama did and the way george w. Bush did. And it defines where his trade policies are with nafta, with asia, with korea and so so forto to the extent you want to understand where he might come out through security policy, it should be seen through that lens. Robert you were with president george w. Bush on 9 11. What a way to see aresident up close and what about President Trump with the hurricanes that hit florida and texas and puerto rico. And the las vegas massacre. First year for any presidency is a vulnerable time. For a president who has never governed before, its particularly vulnerable. And when 9 11 hit, for president george w. Bush, he had had nine months to figure out who the real enemies were, what he ordered a report asking what could al qaeda do in the united states. Every president has had kind of a fundamental working understanding of the fact that i think history judges president s not by that laundry list of ideas that they bring in with them, but what they do in the face of terrible, terrible crisis and that nobody saw coming and i think the president , the mixed reaction to, do you go to the site of a natural disaster, do you stay back because theyre still pulling bodies out of the rubble . What do you do in terms of some of the foreign threats . He didnt have a structure and understanding of exactly how that governing could be. When you think of his best and worst moments, its hard for me to put my finger on the best. The question of whats the worst is a richer buffet and so i think charlottesville is a moment that was particularly tough where he didnt quite know how to respond and when he did, he was all wrong. And im struck by, though, he talks about america getting the shaft. He spends a lot of time relitigating that past. And it always comes he spent a lot of time overturning and repudiating the previous president. An unusual amount of time for a sitting president to be so obsessed with his predecessor, and relitigating the election, particularly with respect to Hillary Clinton who is for him a powerful, unifying symbol for his base. Getting to what you discussed on the trade issues in particular, hes not fact based. And that is so galling to allies and adversaries, alike. When he talks about trade deals, hes really hurting america with some of the things hes retreated from. When he talks about negotiating 27 bilateral trade deals instead of one deal we would get preferential tariffs under, so the fact that he doesnt study and make up for what he didnt know coming in is glaring on some of the policy issues and he doesnt seem to be studying or trying to take in the briefings in any kind of meaningful way. Its interesting, the question is, has he evolved . In some ways hes always going to be the same. Hes 71 years old, people tend not to change after a successful career, why would they change . You people want me to change because you dont agree with me. Understood. But there is some differences. For instance, he did fire james comey in may. And while he may want to fire jeff sessions, he may want to fire bob mueller, he hasnt. Hes been talked out of it repeatedly. He may want to take on bob mueller. His instincts have been to attack bob mueller but his lawyers have said dont do that and hes abided by that so its not that he cant restrain himself but he chooses to do so in some cases and not in others. That Mueller Probe is the asterisk on the first year. Were not sure where the grand jury investigations will go, where the special counsel will go. They take years. They are living, dynamic creatures that can consume and overshadow just about anything else a president wants to do. When you look at alabama, coming up, the special election december 12, its a microcosm of the republican civil war that continues to erupt day by day. Right, this is a party that is literally cracking open in the president s first year over everything from trade to taxes to spending to Foreign Policy, and who should be in the Republican Party and who should lead it. Theyre fighting about all of that and for President Trump, who used to be a democrat, he didnt start this war but he stoked it and stoked it in the campaign and that just constantly is a reduces the influence of all the republican institutions while they fight about this so thats just a weight on his ankles. And i dont think that goes away any time soon and will probably get worse. Its corrosive in any white house, too. I talk to white house people and they say im afraid the guy sitting next to me at the table is wearing a wire. How do you have a meeting in which youre sitting its that tense . Its that tense. People in the same room with you, who has a lawyer, whos been talking to bob mueller, who hasnt, what have they say . George papadopoulos who pleaded guilty to lying with the f. B. I. Had been a cooperating witness for the special counsel for two months without anyone in the white house knowing about it. Thats a scary thing to any white house. And that hovers over you at all times. I do think that twitter is another really defining difference. You touched on it earlier but the fact that he can strike out at the ucla basketball players father and say we should have left them in china, these four Young Players those kinds of responses when we talk to trump voters in red states, all of our polling is that, that is the one thing they might still vote for him but they dont think hes president ial, they dont like him on twitter, they dont like the attitude and lashing out at people. Robert it comes down to questions of norms and what is president ial when people talk about President Trump and youve seen president s up close. And every president has a sense of respect for opponents, for challengers, for political but and for the press. Robert were going to have to leave it there. I could talk with you all night. I appreciate you all coming here. Thanks for this conversation. We leave you a few minutes early to give you the chance to support your local pbs station which, in turn, supports us. Our conversation about the president s first year will continue on the Washington Week extra. We will talk more about the culture of power and social changes in the time of President Trump. You can find that later tonight and all weekend at our website, pbs. Org washingtonweek. Im robert costa. Have a wonderful weekend. Funding for Washington Week is provided by their leadership is instinctive. They understand the challenges of today and research the technologies of tomorrow. Some call them veterans. We call them part of our team. Additional funding is provided by newmans own foundation, donating all profits from newmans own Food Products to charity and nourishing the common good. The ethics and excellence in journalism foundation. Koo and Patricia Yuen through the yuen foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities. 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