natasha bertrand, business insider. this meeting, it really does feel like trains headed toward each other, all the reporting we ve gotten is the white house is being told ty cobb s telling the president, don t worry, it s going to be done, that does not appear to be the case from the mueller side. not at all. people i speak to say there s no chance this investigation is going to be over before the end of 2018, it s not looking that way at all. i think what trump s lawyers are trying to do is keep him calm, keep him not only from tweeting something that he ll regret later that could be used against him, but trying to prevent him from firing mueller. which would of course have really dramatic consequences. they ve pushed back the date repeatedly, ty cobb at first said it s going to be thanksgiving, then christmas that s right, i remember thanksgiving. that hadn t happened. you really are left wondering what s going to happen next year when trump is not exonerated by the date h
think it will be longer is based on the nature of the investigation, from what s publicly viewable? right. the trials for manafort and rick gates that are they haven t been set yet. michael flynn, who s cooperating in ongoing way with mueller. george papadopoulos, cooperating. you have a ton of witnesses that have yet to be interviewed by mueller. and these are all going to help him build a case not only for collusion but also obstruction. trump doesn t seem to realize how serious the obstruction aspect of this actually is. and that kind of arrogance is really going to backfire as it already has in some way with that tweet we saw with michael flynn. when after michael flynn pleaded guilty to the fbi, you saw trump come out and tweet, i fired him because he lied to the fbi. that actually would have been an admission of obstruction of justice the way many people read it because the original explanation he gave was that he fired him for lying to mike pence, not the fbi. right. so
and president will focus on what we can do to help. as long as people are losing in the economy, america itself is not doing as well as it could be, and we hope republicans can join the president instead of trying to block him every step of the way. hold on. we re going to come back to you. wns again, waiting for the president of the united states. he ll be walking into the briefing room. running obviously a few minutes late. we ll hear from the president momentarily. jake tapper has been watching together with me. this new cnn poll has interesting numbers comparing where president obama is right now in the end of the fifth year of his presidency in his second term to where other two-term presidents recently were. the president now is at 41%, job approval number. that s the same number george w. bush was in, december of 200200. 41%. bill clinton at the same time was at 56% job approval. ronald regan in 1985 was at 63%. i m sure when the president sees that he s in the same boat right
despite the mesnjing problems, despite all that, it s working. and again, you don t have to take my word for it. we ve got a couple million people who are going to have health insurance just in the first three months, despite the fact that probably the first month and a half was lost because of problems with the website and about as bad of a bunch of publicity as you could imagine. and yet you still got 2 million people who signed up. or more. and so what that means then is that the demand is there, and as i said before, the product is good. now, in putting something like this together, there are going to be all kinds of problems that crop up. some of which may have been unanticipated and what we have been trying to do is respond to them in a commonsense way, and
that upper the progress at the upper end has not trickled down to what s happening at the lower end. so we do have a record amount of poverty. we have people that we have not seen now before, among working class and middle class families on food stamps. those issues need to be addressed. and they have to be addressed in a sensible way with more reasonable, long-term strategies. as we await the president at the news conference, let s bring back maria cardona and ben ferguson. ben, how much credit does the president deserve for the emorms rise in the markets, from 7,000 five years ago to 16,000 right now. the growth in the third quarter above 4%. pretty impressive. unemployment numbers going down. housing markets going up. how much credit do you give the president? i don t give him a lot, mainly because i haven t seen policies this white house has pushed forward that have helped