well, my hope is that i will see in 2018 a focus on substance, a focus on policy, i like to see a lot of this noise behind us. i m glad to see inspector mueller, it appears he will be wrapping up his investigation. he has made arrests. he s made indictments. and these are all good things to hold people accountable for actions that were happening either after the campaign or happened before affiliation with trump. so i think that that s part of why the president feels very confident when he gave that interview with the new york times to say, you know, the people who are in my orbit have been held accountable. i would like to see this wrapped up. ied with like to focus on issues like welfare reform, like criminal justice reform. that s my hope for 2018. matt, your predictions? what are you watching, would expect to see? i would like to see more bipartisanship, but my expectation is it s going to be worse than 2017. i think the mueller investigation may wrap up in 2018, but it s c
substantive policies like great action the president has taken on issues like tax reform, internet freedom, you know, defeating isis. so i would rather focus on policy and substance, and i think that the president is able to do that by using social media very effectively. all right. matt, when you hear i know there s a chuckle right there in using social media effectively in saying that 2017 was great in the view of carrie. there s a little chuckle there. yeah, look, i think peter baker is right about one thing. that trump is having an enormous effect on the presidency. i think it s very negative. some things aren t going to be repeated with our next president, god willing. we re not going to have the grifting of, you know, enriching himself and his family. we re not going to have the path logical need for affirmation from everyone, including foreign leaders. and you know, i don t know whether we ll have the indiscipline we have seen in every aspect of his life,
he s again, unemployment, 17-year low. i understand jack, we get all that. but the president doesn t understand the confines and the limitations of the presidency and how to utilize those things to get his message out and focus on policy. he s so uninterested in actually governing. that s why this is a problem. so what if he s you know what, the fact that he s 21% he s doing great. the economy is doing great. if obama had this economy, he would have just hillary would be president. if the president was disciplined in understanding that and stopped worrying about his own personal brand every day, then you would get that positive. you would get that positive. i don t think it s the diet cokes, honestly. i don t think it s the diet cokes. i think you have a serious russia investigation going on in this country about the russians hacking into an american election and you have a president who says that it is a witch-hunt and that the democrats are only doing it because t
his sexual abuse scandal rocked hollywood. i m not trying. i got to get help. we are watching for that interview with the ceo of facebook to get underway. we re going to start with the president. trying to focus on some hugely significant issues. taxes, health care, iran, and he s taking shots at the media, but no mention of the fires in california. he s going so far to threaten to pull networks off the air if he doesn t like what they have to say. we have lots to unpack this morning. i want to start at the white house for kristen welker. president trump trying to 230ex on policy, but is he steps on his own message? some extent, yes, he s trying to focus on policy. in particular, the iran nuclear
back to the waste of taxpayer money, not unconstitutional but i m a partisan republican. i think it s going to destroy the republican party to have this type of waste of taxpayer money. we pay the taxes. we re tired of high tax and we re not paying taxes to support the trump family. that s not appropriate. when he says this is a working vacation, do you think he means doing work as president or working on behalf of promoting the trump organization? promoting the trump organization. i think he needs a vacation. he needs a vacation from twitter. he doesn t seem to be taking enough vacation from twitter. he needs to calm down and think about what the priorities are for this administration and focus on policy. there s ray of hope here and his lawyers have reached out to bob mueller maybe in a conciliatory tone. maybe we can get back to a situation where the president is