himself. as long as he s calling people names like a child and having temper tantrums like a child, then we re going to make fun of the president all day long. that s our job. oh, gosh. well, alec baldwin, he returned as president trump poking fun at the president s relationship with speaker paul ryan. just look. i ve got the republicans in the palm of my hand. look at this. you called for ice cream, sir? here s two scoops. paul ryan? yes, sir. oh, gosh. is this getting harder, you know, to do? or is the material just easy, easy plucking? i wish it were hard, fred. i do. i wish there were different circumstances. but, no, every week there is a wealth of material. comey doesn t have to speak truth to power but when it does, we talk about power. in this case, paul ryan s not challenging the president, even though he just dekt tirector of
we ll take 2! [ laughing ] xfinity x1 gives you exclusive access to the best of the billboard music awards just by using your voice. the billboard music awards. sunday, may 21st eight seven central only on abc. but regardless of recommendation, i was going to fire comey, knowing there was no good time to do it. and in fact, when i decided to just do t i said to myself, i said you know, this russia thing with trump and russia is a made up story, it s an excuse by the democrats for having lost an election, that they should have won. a stunning admission by president trump that the fbi s investigation into possible collusion with russia by the trump team was on his mind when he decided to fire the man heading up the fbi which was
i deferred to the fbi director, both director muller, and then director comey, as to whether, when and what to it el me about any counterintelligence investigations that they might have under way. so it was kind of standard practice. so my statement was premised on first the context of our intelligence community assessment on russian interference with the election. we did not there was no reporting in that intelligence committee assessment about political collusion. i did not have any evidence. i did not know about the investigation. you didn t even know that the fbi was conducting an investigation. i did not. even more importantly, the content or the status of that investigation i did not know. there s all kinds of reasons why that s so, but this these are sensitive. we try to keep them as compartmental as possible, and these very likely involve u.s.
could the president make it think it would look good morning. when it would only look negative to fire your fbi director in the middle 6 an investigation and came to a surprise to everyone. it insulted the file fbi people, it insulted people in the white house who thought they should have been given a head s autopsy a up, including the letter that was used to fire director comey which included the comment about president trump wanting to include about him being cleared in the investigations. optically, it was as bad as it can get and what s more disturbing than that is that the trump team didn t think or president trump more specifically thought it would come out well and so his judgment is just so off. that s reflective of a president living a bubble within a bubble.
isolation and if that is indeed the case, if that how much more problematic that makes it for his leadership of the white house, leaderhip of the republican party. at least in the case of this week, it s self-inflicted. i mean everything that rolled out this week was this unique combination in the trump administration of uberous and inexperience or even if you want to say amateur hour. even if you were going to fire director comey which no matter what would cast a cloud of suspicion, why go out there and hang everything one day on the rod rosenstein memo and then the next day directly contradict that and suggest all but say to lester holt that president trump wanted to do this related to what he feels is a bogus russia investigation. but here is the catch. to your question in terms of the politics, he s still at 41% in the gallup daily tracking which is not much different from where he started on inauguration day. he s always been between 45% and