also mary kcatherine and jackie. so, jackie, the president says this meeting between his son and a russian lawyer, along with jared kushner, paul manafort, was all very standard. i want to get your take. well, if it was very standard, why didn t they just come out and say that with the first explanation that donald trump jr. gave. they didn t. they said a couple different things, and then finally, he released his e-mails once the new york times was going to publish their story. so that s problematic. not only that, this isn t happening in a vacuum. this is the latest, the closest trump adviser to, it turns out, have contact with the russians during the campaign when they said that when trump himself said that didn t happen. so, because of that, it just continues to erode the credibility of the white house and the president when it comes to this issue, and him dismissing this as something
zakaria. does it sound like to you there could be some wiggle room from when he pulled out of paris? you know, it s one more of president trump s statements that are perplexing and frankly mystifying. it is not clear what it means. the paris accords, of course, were voluntary targets set by countries and was an agreement that countries would follow their own targets. there was no penalty. there was nothing. so, you know, it s not even clear what it would mean to rejoin it. i can t imagine he would. i suspect that perhaps he was just being polite because president macron was right there. clearly disagrees with him on the paris climate accords. you know, with president trump, it s impossible to predict. it could mean something. it strikes me as just some kind of polite way of kind of not rubbing that disagreement in, because as i say, it does if that was his if his view was this was a flexible thing and we
vote away from this bill going down. rand paul has said he is no. susan collins said she s no. one more senator coming out and saying no, this bill could not even get through the motion to proceed next week. keep us posted. thank you. moments from now, president trump and macron will have dinner together in paris at the eiffel tower. we will bring it to you live. plus melania trump getting a very warm reception until tin t. hear what she s been up to. whoooo.
trump s decision to pull out of the paris agreement on climate change, for mocking trump s make america great again slogan, for that white-knuckle handshake macron later called a moment of truth between him and president trump. jeff zeleny, cnn senior white house correspondent is traveling with the president. joins us now. jeff, what stuck out to you the most about the president s response when he was asked about that meeting between his son and the russian lawyer? reporter: well, good afternoon. i think one thing that stuck out was in tnot surprising, of cour that the president defended his oldest son. we know that it s a very tight family and that he does much appreciate and is close to donald trump jr. that s not surprising. what is simply not quite accurate is the statement that most people would have accepted that meeting. really across the board, democrats, republicans, and even the president s new incoming nominee to lead the fbi says this is not standard practice when someo
that was just who trump pointed at but it definitely didn t go to a typical american journalist like it does at these press conferences where they each get two questions to their respective reporters. mary katherine, was that a missed opportunity. i m not sure if he s sending a message or what here. i don t mind him messing with the rtraditional way of doing things but i think going with an american reporter over a chinese reporter would have been good. i think macron recognizes an opening. i think he recognizes that trump is open to new ideas or impressionable and that you can have a conversation with him about the accords and get him to move quite a bit when he s in front of this audience and perhaps he s playing a longer game, welcoming him to his country, and then maybe down the road they actually come together on some things that perhaps people in his base are not excited about. a great point. macron seemed to have evolved as well in thamerms of how he trea