volatility, why would the president bring him back and then preface it with, you know, even rudy giuliani saying i m going to get to the bottom of the mueller thing and let s expedite things. that says i entrust you, you know, you are an important doing in the we ll here. i think a lot of it is what your piece said just before the break in terms of their historic friendship. the fact that rudy kind of is his own entity, has his own personality. he s the kind of person that s hard to control from a communications standpoint. as a maybe of congress, i worked on our house communication team. there were certain members you just could not stop from doing what they wanted to do and rudy giuliani is that kind of force. i think it s difficult to roll somebody out there on legal matters. theren, is this going rogue or is this i brought you on board because i trust yued you going to do the right thing, but
lawyer. and rudy has a sort of 1980s legal mindset. trump s head is in the 1980s. rudy is that, and he knows the southern district of new york. he comes out of there. he will defend trump capably on tv. trump trusts him, which i think is important in terms of having trust with your lawyer. i think it s a good hire on trump s part. i agree completely, at least from the communications standpoint. you have a known face who is a good combative on tv. i think this is a win for trump. now you have someone in the room, mueller in massachusetts, rudy in new york, rudy was obviously mayor on 9/11, mueller was the fbi director. they worked together in that crisis. they know each other, one would assume they have a professional relationship. the question is to what end? will it speed up at least the resolution of will or will not the president answer questions? i don t know.
asking a lot of follow-up questions on what needs to be done to counter that threat. that doesn t seem to be what the response was from the president. overall, when you take this bit combined with, i think, the way that james comey writes, some of the other details here, the message seems to be that james comey thinks that donald trump isn t worthy of the office of the presidency and i think that may be the message that donald trump is getting from it, based on his response this morning. what do you make, alice, of the phrase weak and unworthy slime ball? that is the president s way of getting back and in my view from a communications standpoint, he should have stayed out of it. he shouldn t have responded. he shouldn t have taken the bait when he saw comey on television this morning. because what that does, it sets him and his team and his communications staff up to a situation where they have to respond. if he s going to call james comey a liar and a leaker, they re going to th
you re seeing a communications battle being waged where there is a drip, drip, drip of new information leading up to the 60 minutes interview which he indicates will air on march 25th. this is now becoming a major event. not just, you know, politically, but also, again, communications wise. sure. and i think the problem here is that, look, as matt said, the cover-up is worse than the crime here. donald trump in a situation like this will never admit it, will never acknowledge he engaged in this activity, he will deny it and try to denigrate the women. the problem here is from a communications standpoint, if i were to offer my two cents, get it all out there, tell the whole story, get all the mess out there, let s pray there are no photos for us to have to look at. but get it out there and get it over with and let s focus on the business of running this country because as it stands now, avenatti, stormy s attorney, is going to continue to try this
for tariffs on aluminum and steel. but the fact of the matter is, if you drink soda, beer, like lacroix, some people drink it, and they re going to pay more. this is really a tax that will be passed on to consumers, and i think it is going to hurt, you know, regardless of how folks feel about whether donald trump can get to a 3% growth this year as he talked about wanting to do trade war is not good for growth. i don t see how this pans out. so, doug, it is interesting, simone said something there at the beginning, which, you know, should send chills. she never took the white house meeting seriously. the president was saying things and they just weren t being taken seriously because people were concerned that he would change his mind on that. is that fixable from a communications standpoint from inside the white house? no, what we have seen so many times is cleanup on aisle five by the white house press office. that s their job. that s what you would do in any administration. the p