you were getting primaried within the next year or two, to protect your job, it s what these people do for a living. there just aren t that many heroes in the world, are not the same way they will not speak out when he gives false equivalencies or not. basic 101. how could they not? they re not. two ways trump goes. criminally. not politically, criminally or through an election and that s the game. he s not going politically because senators are going to want to keep their jobs and they know where the fringe voters are in fry ma in primaries, period. peter bake e is it your understanding at this point, the mueller probe was described to me not at all like an iceberg, you think you know what s underneath it, at least the iceberg, the top and bottom are both made of ice, but an underground village, you have no idea. he s add access to intercepts. seen what the allies have seen and heard about this president, other suspects. he s add access to all the witnesses we named and most likel
baiting that trump engages in, and the kind of, you know, routine serial lying that he engages in, bleeds down into his administration. and so you have a nice churchgoing man like mike pence who s comfortable sitting there lying. what we re seeing there also is a continuation of a pattern where trump will say something without basis and fact, and the rest of the administration, rest of the white house scrambles to try to make it so. the lie comes first then they try to justify it. we ve seen that with small things like sarah sanders at the podium and bigger things when donald trump the size of the inauguration crowd. totally. donald trump lost the popular vote by 5 million, 3 million people. suddenly, it s the same number that was of illegal voters, therefore, we have to put up a whole commission to study it and, of course, there no sign of i want to get to a piece peter s colleague wrote today on this topic. the things grown men do in response to a tweet from donald trump.
appears to have inspired at least in part by a report on fox news. included attacks on democrats, immigrants and foreign countries. that s the media-run state for you once again. peter, there are so many examples of this and julie s piece today is fantastic at diagramming where this started, where it went when donald trump started tweeting about it and just to pick up on jonathan s point, how the government, how the state, tried to make this fox-inspired conspiracy theory true. well, that s exactly right. look, we ve known now, almost two years in ausoffice, the president does not get information the way his predecessors did. the predecessors looked at the morning intelligence briefing, consulted with agents of government which are experts on these things. they collected as visors around them who were knowledgeable about these things. in this case, we have a president who tends to pop off depending on what he saw on television, whether he did anything to verify it or not.
agenda. it s to break down america s critical thinking capabilities. it is the annihilation of truth. and this what we are watching is extraordinary. and i know we ve talked about this before, and there s kind of a numbing effect, and so people go, oh, my goodness, you know, the president seems to be lying at an even faster rate because the president realizes that if he floods the zone, if he just follows one lie up after another, we don t know how to handle it. we don t know how to keep pace with it. neither the media nor his political opponents. well, we do. we do, charlie. come on. we do. we do a pretty good job. let me ask peter and jonathan lemire to prespond to this, joh bolton in moscow today speaking of the annihilation of truth and russia s to-do list for donald trump. president putin said in the opening of the meeting today when press was there that in his words now, it would be useful to continue a direct dialogue with the president of the united states.
peter bake e do you think he knows some of the great nationalists of all-time included hitler, every dictator pleaded for their constituents, if you can call them that, their subjects in the case, and others, to sort of harken to their nationalist impulses. well, you know, i think what he there s a reason other presidents don t use the phrase, nationalists, to describe themselves. they use a safer term, patriot. patriotism is something mostly people can agree on is safe politically, a more unifying word than nationalist. nationalist, obviously, as you say, is through history. we ve seen with the president before, he doesn t care what history says. does he not care, peter baker, or not no? dou do you think he has any idea the history of world war ii or naziism? let s look at the phrase, america first. the america first he might not have known at first was associated with the pre-world war ii isolationists and nazi