leaky as it was in the beginning of the presidency? no. for the first year and a half you got the sense that every single senior official thought they were the communications director and could go out and freelance a message that they felt was on behalf of the president and as cliff points out was relatively self serving. i haven t read those two books. i will but i ve read the excerpts and reviews and interviews with the authors and one of the interesting things that comes out you alluded to it in your intro. they re not anti-trump directly. they don t question the way he leads. one of the questions i would have is if you re writing about how everyone around you in this white house was terrible, does that somehow reflect on the president s style? the president likes to pit people against each other. he said as much. to your point about the anonymous source, yeah, that confirms a lot of reporting from his new york days. there doesn t seem to be the next step which is why? why has t
i mean russia and china, two. eric: the two biggest threats? okay, you said assad. eric: one quick final thought. what is the u.s. relationship with russia going forward? it will be a complex one. look, putin has very big ambitions. putin sees you either as a panther or a poodle. he sees you as slide slave or a master. it s possible that now that he sees, hopefully sees that trump is not going to roll over for him, he will be more willing to have realistic discussions. he wants to have a war port in syria, no question about it. can he keep it, i don t know. but his support for iran, whose rallying cry is death to america, support for assad, part of the iranian empire. he needs to change on that. i think that trump is going to be touch with him. eric: david, as cliff points out, putin has he turned from poodle to panther regarding donald trump. we don t know what putin is