compare him to john kerry and formers secretaries of state, yes. in terms of the competence of this administration that s the joke, tillerson, his heart isn t in the job. he doesn t talk to anybody in the press. he doesn t talk to anybody at foggy bottom in the building. he sits in his office, he looks depressed. he s not into it. everyone said he was going to do some state department reorganization and let the job go so all i m saying is the joke is we are all talking about the stability of the team. he probably shouldn t be on the team. but if he were to leave the team now it would look like a disaster. it might be a joke but it s not funny. when you asked donny and i, the point is with all of this, we are talking about the iran deal not recertified next week or the congress, we are talking about what s going on possibly with north korea and all, and you roll out the secretary of state to have a press conference about whether he called you a moron and he doesn t even deny it, a
speak to sort of the care and caution with which i think we all exercise when we talk about it, that is largely around the explosive nature of some of the more salacious aspects but a smart man named ken dilanian told me to follow the money. i wonder if you can speak to sort of the connection between what the dossier suggests in terms of financial ties between the trump organization, the trump orbit, and russia, and where we know some of the mueller probe to be pushing and the kinds of things that have come out. there s not a lot of leaks from the mueller probe but just based on the kinds of people we know he s interested in talking to, where do you see a potential overlay? right. i think that it s important to remember that the dossier describes a years-long project to cultivate donald trump on the part of the kremlin, that long predates his presidential candidacy. it suggests that russia saw in
insane cycle. trust me. this is what it will be like on sunday. i trust you. but i also hear the warnings not just on twitter but also from mo moms, he is the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. let s not sit here and act like it s responsible and normal. it s the most irresponsible but it is normalized behavior for him. that s the reality. of course it s disgusting and irresponsible and frightening but until you normalize it, you can t manage it. otherwise if barack obama said that or jogeorge w. bush we wou be gearing up for war. normalization is the only thing that makes you able to manage through it. i think donny s right. those of us that have had experiences with him, good and bad throughout the decades, know that s trump. what we don t need to do and i think you re right, is we don t need to act like that s normal behavior for the president of the united states and act like oh, that s just trump. we should be saying that s trump
being held in iran, of putting their bad behavior in the region in the deal is not a bad one. it simply wasn t what was agreed to. so what do you make of the fact that when donald trump gets involved, things sometimes become more popular. i m thinking of obamacare which wasn t universally popular among democrats but once donald trump came out against it, it became more popular. the iran deal was frankly controversial within the democratic caucus. you had hard liners on iran in the democratic caucus who weren t for the deal at the time. john kerry and his energy as secretary and the president had to sell it. what do you make of the fact that now the president s talking about perhaps decertifying it, it s a pretty partisan debate with democrats largely celebrating a deal that even some of them were skeptical of. the deal has been working. there have been technical violations. it s not perfect. his own secretary of state certified it, the iaea certified
national security. just add one more bead which is to say if there was this effort to cultivate trump through his businesses, maybe through russian money buying condos in trump buildings, you could have criminal charges against someone in the trump company, maybe not trump himself, who knew about this and was facilitating it, was welcoming russian money knowing it was part of some effort that had a larger motive or there was a quid pro quo involved. that would be a possibility but this of course is speculative. now we are looking at this episode around the republican national convention which like a lot of the episodes swirling around out there has never really been clearly explained. why was there apparently an effort on the part of trump allies at the republican convention to deflect language from the republican platform that would have taken a much more hawkish position on ukraine and potentially arming the ukrainian government against