the embassy. now, there is a lot of republican support for continuing these obama era policies, although, for example, senator marco rubio is on the opposite side of that and has been, it s our understanding, pushing the president or involved in the decision making for the president on cuba. i think when you look atr picture, stephanie, this is a continuation of a theme we re seeing even today. president trump coming in and working to undo former president obama s signature legacy issues here. on climate, we re seeing that today with paris. on cuba, we re seeing signs that this could happen. there is an expectation that the president will deliver a speech, probably in miami, according to our reporting on this, citing human rights abuses and announcing some of these changes when it comes to the u.s. relationship with cuba. again, this is, as our nbc first read frames it, our political team, steph, it is the undoing of the obama-era policies that president trump is working toward. probab
for that. how the white house is trying to frame this, steph, because the statement is interesting, quote, no one should consider this step to be in any way a retreat from the president s strong support for israel and for the united states/israel alliance. president trump made the decision to maximize the chances of successfully negotiating a deal between israel and the palestinians. this is clearly then stating that the president sees a priority as mideast peace and understands moving the embassy would be a hurdle to that. we have to talk about cuba for a minute. yeah. cuba, that was a marquee moment for president obama. clearly something that stands a moment when you think about his legacy. now, you ve learned that president trump is considering rollbacks on the cuba policy. yeah, multiple sources are telling nbc exactly that. that the president would essentially consider major rollbacks in these initiatives put forward under former president obama. here s a couple crucial th
castro, making use of far fewer than the 140 characters allotted to him in his favor medium. quote fidel castro is dead, exclamation point. that was it. that s actually true. today he tweeted at length, if cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the cuban people, the cuban american people as a whole, i will terminate deal. this is the first thing that will have ongoing implications, how do you think he s handling this? not horribly. i think he s leaving his options open. he s not playing just to the base of the republican party or some of it, but i think he s also playing to his own instincts about kind of the style he wants to have and in particular contrasts with barack obama. but it does show he ll have just a ton of running room. one of the things they re thinking about how much they want to shake the world up in the first couple of months of the administration, by going on offense.
everyone s talking about, he s going to be tested by china or tested by isis or whatever. there s some thought within the trump camp of, on cuba, on iran, maybe some other areas, go big early and shake the world up. there is no good reason, from the standpoint of a free market republican or from the standpoint of a liberal democrat to go back and undo what has been done with respect to normalizing relations with cuba. we took a long time to get there. it s not a obama left-wing there. countless business people, fortune 500 ceos, wall street people and free market economists have been arguing for it as the best way to help the cuban people, to normalize or liberalize the economy but the republican base don t agree with you. i understand that, but donald trump is supposed to be the businessman president. let s try to rule on the merits. that s why he s leaving his option open. let s rule on the merits and stick wit. we ll be right back to talk with two reporters about donald
against military intervention in syria. there have been politically minded politically l activist popes in the past. there is a way to map them neatly on to american politics? well, you know, i think for instance, john paul and ronald reagan when they were very close had something in common. they were both shot and nearly killed in the spring of 1981. they both felt they were spared to do something important. and we ve learned in decades since then how much they really worked together to try to bring down the soviet union and end the cold war. so, you know, just guessing, given what they did, this pope and president on cuba, i would be astounded in this meeting today when they met in private they did not talk about what other ventures they would not do in foreign policy, as well. it is remarkable, talking about presidents and popes. 30% of the u.s. congress is catholic. right. 6 of the 9 members of the