excommunicated from the president s circle. people come and go, but right now it s not a great day for steve bannon. and jeremy peters, could you pick up on that thread? do you have any sense what motivated and it s important to point out that the white house defense today was to release visitor logs, which simply in my mind bolstered much of what was in here, at least the quantity of it. in 17, what sounded like in many occasions, day long trips to the west wing of the white house, you could certainly paint an accurate picture of the atmosphere. and in a lot of these books oftentimes it s the scene that s depicted more than any individual antidote that s the most devastating. but i wonder, jeremy, did you pick up any sense of what motivated steve bannon to put so much of had to have been at one point off-the-record conversations on the record in
do they belong to steve bannon or do they belong to donald trump, if this continues to be a messy breakup? well, some of them will stay with steve bannon. this was always a marriage of convenience. you know, look. the president has the lowest approval numbers of any president this early in his term. some of the lowest numbers in the history of polling for any president. as we move into a 2020 election cycle, you know, if he s at 32%, 33% of the support, and 6% goes with steve bannon, it pulls donald trump potentially into the 20s, which is absolutely disabling for any conceivable chance of re-election. not to mention, when you look at the terrain for 2018, you know, there are very, very ominous warnings for the republican majority in washington, d.c., because, you know, upwards of about 70% of the country is just unalterably opposed to what
fiction. but it is convenient for the white house. by udismissing the entire book, they re not forced to grab well the russia allegations which are the most problematic parts for this president and this administration. and we should point out that we have not as a news organization verified everything in this book either. but jeremy peters, if you could pick up on this idea, though, that the things that are described in here are being commented on tonight by reporters who like all of your news organizations, have covered this white house in realtime. and the suggestion is that they by and large corroborate or are consistent with much of the russia reporting. and there is i want to read another excerpt. this is wolff on the increasing involvement of the white house staff in dealing with russia and the air force one statement on the trump tower meeting. because this goes directly to the second track. everyone believes robert mueller to be investigating not just
i wonder if you put the roots of that in sort of this game of thrones nature of this theme, team, or if you think there are also people who are worried about whether or not there are new threads, new strands of a potential investigation revealed in this book. and even if half of the political dysfunction accounted in this book is true and accurate, it s very disturbing. it paints a very disturbing concerning portrait for the country. because after all, these are people who are not just part of a political operation. they re charged with enforcing the laws and defending the country during crises. and if they can t even organize themselves into a publicity formation for a book, god help us when they actually have to defend the country when we re under attack. it is remarkable revelation. matthew miller and jeremy bash, thank you so much. thanks. coming up jared kushner, ivanka trump, and steve bannon. the 11th hour back after this.
of the president of the united states by this president, by his staff with the consistency of the lying, the misinformation, the nonsense that s spooned out to the american people. but what we see in this book, did tom barak say this or that, we ll figure that out in the next couple of days. but certainly the larger issue is it paints a portrait of dysfunction and chaos that just beggars the imagination. these people work in proximity to an office where life and death decisions are made. and the portrait that s painted in this book, and we know. we know from a president whose inventing conspiracy sis, attacking the intelligence community and the justice department with his deep state talk or whether it s attacking the spirit of the first amendment or blustering about nuclear weapons and nuclear war