promises on the campaign trail, it leads me to conclude this may be the most cynical person to ever occupy the white house. and we have learned that how quickly now, in fewer than a hundred days we ve learned what a cynical man he is. it s incredible. look, there is nothing wrong with having people from wall street serve in government positions in washington. they can bring a lot to the table. but to claim you re going to clean the swamp, drain the swamp and it s not about personnel. i thought personnel was policy. of course personnel is important. if jay clayton is going to run the s.e.c. and also be in charge of goldman sachs what do you expect to have happen? to ellie and then dennis. that s sort of the issue. we can put up this is not just a media talk. in the nbc poll among the public, 39% now say he is changing business as usually. down from 45% two months ago. there is a view here that donald
trump, as you know, said he was going to deal with the hedge fund and goldman guys. if personnel as policy is the issue, he did drive that. he has also brought in rex tillerson, someone from exxonmobil, to negotiate these deals. you want these people who have cut hir teeth on negotiating deals with skin in the game rather than career politicians. in the past we have seen secretaries of state like hillary clinton or john kerry, people who, if a deal goes bad for the american people, they might not personally feel it. rex tillerson would feel it and bankers at goldman sachs would feel it too. that s like saying somebody is a terrific heart surgeon but i have a dental problem, but because they re such a great heart surgeon, let them work on my teeth. it s crazy to think that skills are automatically transferrable from somebody negotiating oil fields to negotiating with north korea, china, russia or another
statement. the one thing i say is that donald trump has shown to be a master of the media and shown to pick and choose how he wants to be covered. if it s some big story about russia, all he has to do is tweet about north korea. so i think that s the thing that s also been frustrating but also is a big challenge for media. how do we learn to cover tweets and focus on policy. as someone writing about poor people and the policies about donald trump and how he s going to affect every day peop s lives, that s hard to get people to pay attention to those stories if they re interested in the latest tweet or latest angry thing he s said. it s not hurting his brand at all. his brand is i changed my mind. i m joking if i get caught in a lie. lloyd? there is no doubt that president trump can call the tune and direct coverage, but it s not a governing strategy
a fair political point, and then, floyd, the flip-side, of always being concerned if the government is getting too involved. sure. especially when this seems like a listening to your earlier panels, people said there is no policy here, there is no policy there. there is a policy here. i think the policy is to diminish the significance, the importance, and the role of the great american press institutions that have been center stage in the past, and to substitute for them institutions that the president views as more favorable to him. to that extent, that s very new. i mean, we have had a lot of clashes, as you point out, through american history between presidents and the press, but never, i think, like a policy of daily denigration that we have seen, and for a purpose of
couldn t do. lbj and bill clinton couldn t do either. the fact that president trump tough to get used to saying that the fact he needs to go it alone when he ostensibly, if he really was a unifier and could understand coalition building and all the different factions. we ve talked about factions on your show for months now. this is something the president is just now realizing, that he has to understand and bargain with people. right. he can t just bully people into policy. you can t say by friday i m going to have an infrastructure bill, a tax bill, environmental bill and a health care bill and, you know, and a wall, if not i m walking away. it doesn t work that way. i wonder if that bums out some of the republicans in the senate who have been waiting for their turn to do things. senator dorgan. i worked as a senate staffer. my observation was a lot of the senators cared about getting attention, getting reelected and getting their bills paed. that was my observation.