this first. the conservatives movement and the republican party have long been rumored to be in decline. that does not borne out by the recent election and i know you don t talk about president trump in this book, but did you have hope for the future? i do. the conservative idea has an enormously impressive pedigree and enormous momentum provided by hamilton, lincoln and all the rest. the idea that millennials have decided somehow that the american founding is not worth conserving, that is what conservatism is about and is not worth protecting from those with remarkable explicitness with remarkable success, they have gone to war against this tradition. tradition is awfully strong and it s too soon. dana: to think tactically the right needs to learn more from the left about how to push
with increasing explicitness is basically equate himself with his base and argue that any attack on him is really an attempt to suppress them and to roll back the influence that they have grabbed in national politics, as he did in west virginia last week. the problem is, you can t get collected president totally with your most ardent supporters. and if math tells you he won 46% of the vote in 2016, he s polling around 35, 37, 38% approval now, he has lost some of his base. and in fact, in the quinnipiac poll, for example, last week, his approval rating look whites without a college education, his best group, was about 25 points below his vote in 2016. and if you look at adults age 50 to 64, the percentage of those, of people who say they strongly disapprove of his performance is double what it was when he took office. it is not a coincidence that those are two of the groups that would have been the biggest losers in what he spent the first six months trying to do, which is repeal the a
russian government seeking, as the e-mail said, to meet with the trump campaign, now the russian government once you take that meeting knows that it happened. and this is in the russian playbook, which is to gather compromising information on individuals and then to use it when it can effect their agenda. that s the kompromat where they put you in the position either you work for us, help us or we expose you. it s still too early to tell if that s what they were doing. they now have the evidence and that would be embarrassing to trump campaign. did it strike you the spl explicitness of the language? it didn t say hey, i might have something useful to you. it said this is incriminating evidence about hillary clinton from the russian government, which by the way wants to help your father win. that was remarkable. and donald trump jr. s response was i love it. from the way russia operates.
know that this isn t so unusual in the first six to 1 months of an administration. i think every president comes in with a sense if they can control things, it s always going to be different. i know the obama folks came in and discovered after six to 12 months after a lot of head butting that it can t be different. what sets this administration apart is the explicitness with which they ve framed this us versus them. i would say that it would be better to sort of think about a year from now how is it going to look? we have an administration that is still stumbling a lot. a lot of that is clearly a case of them just being very new at this. they have called the press the enemy of the american people, and that s george bush was trying to say that absolute power krupts absolutely, and you can t allow that to happen in this country,
i have stood at the oven door. i know exactly what it looks like. huckabee took criticism from jeb bush today though it s important to listen closely to what mr. bush was objecting to. i think we need to tone down the rhetoric for sure. look i have been to israel not as many times as mike huckabee who i respect. but the use of that kind of language is just wrong. this is not the way we are going to win elections. that s not how we are going to solve problems. mr. bush is not so much criticizing the point mr. huckabee was making as his language and tone. that s important. while huckabee may have crossed the line with the explicitness of imagery the actual comparison is squarely within the conceptual main stream of the republican party and the conservative movement. this is the worst deal since the munich deal of 1938. this deal whatever the final details turn out to be is an american munich.