And say we ll have your back on something. our credibility with the rest of the world is completely diminished. mitch mcconnell is trying to band-aid a gaping wound right now by standing up and saying we should have gone further than what the house resolution did disapproving of the president s conduct. i think it s also very, very telling that president trump said he wants out of the middle east. we don t want any forever wars. we don t need american troops in the middle east. yet in the last two weeks he sent 3,000 more troops to saudi arabia. it s completely nonsensical. and there really isn t any sort of ideology governing this foreign policy, it s all knee-jerk seat of the pants. maria, after the debate this week we saw democrats condemn the president s choice in how he pulled u.s. troops out of syria, but cnn contributor peter bienharbie bienhart has a piece calling democrats hypocrites for
we have done a lot of bad things in this move, okay? not only have we empowered turkey to treat the united states like a third world country, we have brought russia and iran deeper into the syrian situation. is president trump making america safer right now with these moves? no, i would rather these moves have not been made, and i think there s a lot of things going on right now that are not making america safer. now, this is not the first time republicans have broken ranks with the president over syria. last year when he threatened to abandon the kurds the first time, republican lawmakers came out instant tly and forcefully against the president. lindsey graham called him weak and dangerous at the time. he and tom cotton, marco rubio e joni ernst and others signed a letter to trump warning him to reconsider. jim mattis and brett mcgurk resigned over trump s syria policy. you have to take notice when one
Syria/turkey decisions. yaureah, a lot of criticism. you saw him today saying, no, no, the u.s. did get something. we got the oil or something. i have no idea what that means. it will be very revealing next week. we did some exclusive reporting this week where we learned a lot more about what kurt volker, the former envoy, had told lawmakers in his quite long interview. a lot of it had to do with bill taylor, about bill taylor s serious, serious and deep reservations about joining the administration to begin with, about whether the president might throw him under the bus about rudy giuliani s employment. so it was an interesting week in the rearview mirror and you re suggesting it s an interesting week to come. strap in. thanks for joining us on inside politics. hope to see you sunday as well.
Pro quo. testimony not very helpful to joe biden on the impeachment inquiry, then the president going on to defend remember, republicans in the united states are weak when it comes to what happened in syria, by pulling u.s. troops and allowing the milita military to leave. we ll try to get clarification of what the president meant by this, that the united states had taken control of oil in the middle east. not sure what he meant by that. the white house said this was turkey s decision, and the president did not green-light it, but he said the operation i started is going very well and it s a strong positive response. defensive. it s to what we were talking about earlier, it s the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of the situation. the president s strategy in so many cases is to just try to
Fill the void with words and with over the top words often because he knows that a lot of his supporters will take what he says over the reality. i think to what carl has been saying, are we in a moment where some of this is going to start changing, where the reality starts trumping the rhetoric, even in subtle ways. yeah, the whole idea of taking the oil. this is one of the things he talked about repeatedly when he was running for president of what he s talking about now in the context of this conflict in syria. again, i think it goes to your point. he s always talking to your folks at the rally. we saw him do that last night. we saw him do that as he was heading to dallas, too. i don t know that republicans who have been fiercely critical of him prior to this deal, did they have a bigger platform to kind of counter this, did they