relationship with steve bannon. the owners are debating potentially ousting him. losing rebecca mercer and robert mercer, what does that say about the status quo in washington for all this big game talk about changing things and getting rid of the swamp, and taking the power away from the money, elite, the folks that have always run washington? robert mercer and rebecca mercer are exactly that. right now they re flexing their muscle. sure. look, trump has always peddled false narratives to his base that turnout to be not true. conservatives trying to choose between president trump and steve bannon, they re bad for the party, bad for the country. to your earlier question, will they ever have a chance to make up, yes, we will. we have seen this sick of fancy among republicans that abide to this cult of personality that is donald trump. and pretty soon there will be candidates, bannon recruited candidates in the 2018 cycle
michael wolff s book fire and fury which refers to president trump s august threat to north korea has pulled questions about the president s mental fitness back into the national conversation. but the truth is the discussion was already starting again after president trump tweeted on tuesday, quote, north korean leader kim jong-un just stated that the nuclear button is on his desk at all times. well, someone from his depleted and starved regime please inform him that i, too, have a nuclear button but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my button works. at the white house briefing wednesday, nbc s peter alexander asked the question of all questions, whether that tweet should be cause for alarm? should americans be concerned about the president s mental fitness that he appears to be speaking so lightly about threats regarding nuclear button? i think the president and the people of this country should be concerned about the mental
level to this ongoing flirtation that the president has had, like a bromance, especially before the inauguration with vladimir putin that does not in any way make him or anyone else in his circle look better as this investigation goes forward. michael, where do we go next? oh, boy. well, look, we re waiting for the next shoe to drop. is mueller going to bring more indictments, those papers are filed with the grand jury meets on fridays. something could happen tomorrow. everyone is speculating about who the next target of a mueller indictment could be. and then house and senate committees, of course, are receiving to wind down their investigations. they will be issuing reports. the house maybe a little sooner than the senate, you re going to see partisan division. we re a few weeks away. katie, if you ll allow me to tack on one quick point. i read that story very carefully. i don t see any information in that times story that could only have come from mueller s office. i think that
sloppy steve bannon certainly has, one would say this is the most perriless position he s been in as the head of breitbart and chief strategist for the president s campaign last year and the early months of his white house. it s not just that he has been blasted publicly. sort of unprecedentedly by the president to go after former advisor like this, you know, doing it from the white house yesterday. but also his long-time ben factors, the mercer family who fund conservative causes, who aren t ones to call much attention publicly to themselves, spoke out in sort of pretty scathing statement today to say they have severed all ties with steve bannon. we have that statement and let s just read it for our viewers. i support president trump and the platform upon which he was elected, says rebecca mercer. my family and i have not communicated with steve bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda. nor do we support his recent actions and statements
thing is that because of the president of the united states, i am not supposed to be involved with the justice department. i m not supposed to be involved with the fbi. i m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that i would love to be doing. and i m very frustrated by that. later in that interview, peter, he seemed to imply that he could change paths and he could end up controlling or influencing the d.o.j. well, that s exactly right. and in his interview last week with the same michael schmidt that wrote that article down in florida, president trump said he had the, quote, absolute right, unquote, to tell the justice department what to do about this investigation or opening an investigation, say, into his defeated rival hillary clinton. his understanding of his role in terms of what it should be overseeing the fbi and justice department is at odds with what most presidents in the post watergate era have believed. is that is not to say that in the history of the country there