top adviser is jared. [ applause ] steve, this is good-bye. take him back to hell. incredible. incredible. all right. bringing in msnbc political analyst and former obama administration diplomat and our in-house bannon specialist and columnist mike tomaski. kirk. what do you think about this evolution and what does it say about donald trump who has been willing to remove people, his campaign manager, chris christie, other big folks, that he s clearing trying to split the difference with steve rather than boot him? i think, if anything, it kind
a defense lawyer would never let his client go on television and make that type of a statement. that s what prosecutors like to call a prior inconsistent statement. if evidence comes to light that he was in fact involved in these sorts of things in a more willful or deliberate way than he acknowledges then we re looking at, i think, very good evidence that can be used whether we re talking about the congressional investigation or federal prosecutors to establish willful misconduct. mike, you ve covered more than one legally tinged political scandal in washington. what do you think of the, i guess, baffling conduct of these individuals? i mean, we are under a hundred days in and you have carter doing the repeat media tours. you have this dramatic letter from flynn s lawyer saying he has a story to tell. then you have manafort with the drip, drip, drip. where does this rank on your scandal meter? it s defitely top ten.
diplomats american diplomats go around the world one of the things we talk about are this rule of law, anti-corruption. anti-nepotism. these are countries where i mean, the president of azerbaijan named his wife as vice president recently. we are always arguing against this. our system is a system of meritocracy, experts, as a contrast to what they re doing. one of the things that this trump in-house family gathering does is undermine the arguments we make for democracies for countries to evolve. that s something i see as a problem going forward in all kinds of ways. mike, what do you think is the policy cost of that? if you say the family s rising power is not the wayo deal with bannon s failures? i think there are a lot of poteial policy costs to that. what kind of relationships does jared kushner have on capitol hill, for example? what kind of respect does he engender on capitol hill among the staffs of paul ryan and mitch mcconnell. i don t know the answer to that
the court situations, some of the executive orders put in place early by the trump administration. the racking up the failures created a necessity for trump to pivot, have someone to blame and refocus to try to build as he heads into the 100-day milestone marker. did bannon misplay this? absolutely. from when he put himself on the cover of time magazine and intimating he was the brain of donald trump. great photo. when you do that and move yourself so far up front, particularly with a boss who puts so much value on being on the covers of magazines and has such an identity based upon press coverage. when you put yourself in those positions you re doing so at the detriment of what makes your boss tick. mike, i wonder if an environment where donald trump is routinely criticized by a large segment of the population, with good reason, i wonder if there is a reflexive jolt
it wasn t true we were asking him very much so ultimately what he was doing is holding out until he got the best deal for his son andrew. he was running for governor the next year too, but the lessons that i learned from that is cuomo was actually quite a good player of it. and a devoted family man. and he didn t want to give the answer of well i m waiting to decide whether i like this candidate to see what he can do for my son. right. exactly. mike tomaski, in the fact that he didn t run for president, do you think that tarnishes his political impact or is that fine because most people who run by definition don t run anyway. yeah i think it s 15. or maybe in 1988 that would have been a better shot. when we of course can t know