but, again, his audience is not any of us here. his audience are the voters that voted for barack obama and then him in wisconsin, in michigan, in pennsylvania. downed what i m saying. nothing has changed. we are not his audience but he was elected with the minority of the country. he needs the other 52% of the country to be an effective president. this is a key point, though. his party controls washington completely. democrats cannot be for him because they don t have any power. right. the media is his foil for the next four years if the media allows itself to be played that way. hold on. that is the key. the media has to figure out how to sort through this. damn if you do and damned if you don t. we used to be attacked for having him on any time he called and would be attacked if we were covering this story. you re covering too much. then i made the suggestion a couple of weeks you should just ignore the crazy tweets because you all are spending too much time. that is the s
counsel from the party, from people who have experience in all of these fields because he just hasn t been in this world. steve? well, that may well be true. i wouldn t disagree with robert on that on the foreign policy side. but when you look at the domestic policy side, he has effectively two chiefs of staff, bannon and reince priebus one who never been in the government and cohen is a very good guy but never been in washington and treasury secretary from goldman sachs never been in washington. you did pretty good as a car salesman, didn t you, rattner? never been in washington. i was one. talking about i had tim geithner and a lot of people. do you know who the glue is who holds it together from the people i ve heard? he leans heavily on reince priebus and he leans heavily on mike pence. mike pence, we have been talking a good bit about the f-35 and how its, you know, eludes radar
and if we didn t have nato, we would have to create it and that is something trump licenses to on everything. all of europe this morning is breathing a sigh of relief. joe, just talking to a few people in washington yesterday, the ripples of relief began in washington and extend around the globe, specifically to europe. you re absolutely right. with the testimony of generals mattis and general kelly and congressman pompeo, each of those three in their own way in the testimony, in the questions and answers they were provided, the answers they were providing to the committees, looked professional, responsible, not crazy. they weren t going to do anything, you know, off the cuff. and i think they gave a great degree of confidence to the people who are voting on the nomination, as well as to our allies overseas, especially mattis. mattis on the iran treaty,
also to pass a republican-controlled senate, it s controlled by republicans, not by donald trump-style republicans. even as trump is change is his own party he knows that to get confirmation for his own cabinet he has to have people who have kind of a conservative othrthod who are like mike pompeo who doesn t have a clashing of the intelligence community. any feeling inside from what you ve picked up reporting that donald trump is going to defer to his secretary of state, his secretary of defense, his cia director more than, say, barack obama did? i think defer wouldn t be the right word. based on my conversations with trump officials, trump wants to have a group around him that understands washington, that understands the world. he has privately said to many of his friends that as much as he wants to be the decider in the white house, washington is still a new town to him in many respects and he needs to have
shoulder in washington, the situation where the debtand the sunlit sunrise rises over your shoulder in washington, the situation where the debt has been horrific for conservatives like myself. i got into office because of the debt. the scenario was bleak. no cut. nobody is really talking about cutting anything. they are talking about spending more on defense and talking about spending more on infrastructure and talking more about spending on everything. they are talking about massive tax cuts. are there going to be conservatives in the republican caucus that are going to fight back on all of this spending? this is economics run amuck. joe, this isn t 1995. some of the biggest stories are not what is said in this trump era but what is unsaid. where are republicans talking about entitlements or medicare or social security what they ran on in 2012? this is the trump party right now in washington. yeah.