he believes doesn t give the american president a fair shake. i ask this because a lot watching the president attack germany and kind of obliquely attack russia at the same time wondered where those talking points came from. well, i don t know that they came, you know, directly from steve bannon, but it s an interesting coincidence that he is there and to sort of parse his motives. on the one hand he s doing what he did throughout the entire campaign and early into the white house which is to try to take president trump as sort of a convenient vessel or vehicle and use that to stoke his own aims which is, you know, kind of populism sweeping the globe and on the other hand you have to remember that bannon is someone who was cast out of this white house and he committed sort of the original sin of criticizing the president s family and criticizing the president over russia and so you sort of have to imagine that when bannon gloshow
it s not that the issues that president trump are raising are not issues that have been out there before. in fact, they have, president obama, president bush, certainly pushed the nato allies to spend more on their own defense. if it was under president obama they came up with the target of 2% and supposed to meet it by 2024 but neath of them ever sort of did it in your face kind of way that president trump does it. neither one of them went into a nato summit clearly intending to sort of go on the attack the way president trump did today. and the way president trump did today literally in advance of a meeting that he will have with russia s president in just a few days, a meeting he has promised will be friendly and perhaps easier, he says than his meeting with the allies and i think that you can t find an exact parallel of this or even a close parallel to this. i ve been doing a lot of reading about 1989 and unification of germany and striking how close america and germany were at tha
point but without casting the other side as if they were somehow an enemy as if they were somehow, you know, anti-american in their approach. and ashley to the point you were making i saw bannon on fox news with sean hannity. he was talking about how tough on putin trump was being and, yes, a lightbulb went off when bannon went on to say that putin no doubt looks at trump after a day like today thinking, there is the leader of the western world. well, it turns out mr. bannon is in london having kind of a salon with members of the right including some of the hard brexit folks and we have this from this reporting from politico tonight, bannon s goal, he said in a previous interview between meetings, was to help conte context allize for a european audience that hates him and a fiery tabloid media culture that
this was a classic, i ll read it. theta is the most successful appliance in history. weakness provokes strength and cohesion protects, this remains our bedrock belief. peter, that s the kind of thing we used to hear from u.s. presidents. yeah, i know, exactly right. it s not that these issues aren t there, they re not perceived trump s tenure and office. what s different the way he approaches it. he treat these allies as if they were enemies and adversaries and that s what s really striking about it. it s not that we don t have concerns about this. there are concerns about this pipeline. it s not that we don t have concerns about this military spending. we do historically bipartisan, that s not new but pompeo is doing what others as you say other administrations did and acknowledge the issues and pressed in a gentle, you know, and friendly way to make the
incredibly honorable and solid and i talked to him a little bit about his career because i was sort of starting mine and having children and he had had his children and they were grown and in college and i really looked up to him and i had a chance to talk to him and i found him to be very honorable. i remember one time we went down into the basement, he had to do an interview of a witness and, you know, can you tell a lot about a person the way they do an interview of a witness who s hostile to you and this witness it was in a murder case and this witness was hostile to him and he treated him with respect and demanded the truth from him. he wasn t kind of a bullying prosecutor. he wasn t somebody you would be afraid to take notes on what was happening in the room and i just have always found and always thought that he was one of the most honorable people i encountered in my time at the united states attorneys office