west wing about all of these developments. and it s left his aides and friends very worried about him. they, in our reporting over the weekend, they say they re not sure what could come next. there s a feeling inside the white house that they haven t yet bottomed out, which means it could get worse. but hallie is exactly right, spot-on, when she said it hasn t felt this tense, this volatile since those early months of the presidency. peter, how much does the mueller investigation, the process of it, the relentlessness of it, how much is that affecting the president s mood, public ly. outward outwa outwardly, he s defiant, he s tweeting about it. he seems angry. but is this affecting his daily decision making? i think you have to look at the gyrations of the last week through that prism, basically. in other words, we had this meeting on gun control, where suddenly he s defying the nra and meeting the nra and softening his position again and we have this trade tariff announcement, wh
dreamers. was it a good idea to end up copuch lac capitulating, to shut down the government and end up capitulating so far without a deal for dreamers? so far, we haven t seen any movement on that. the courts have extended it, but there s been no muchlt ovement congress. no concrete movement within congress to legislate for dreamers. right. and you know, it was as many of us feared and predicted. if you re going to make a threat. if you re going to say, we are willing to hold this hostage in order to ensure that our dreamers get access to what was promised to them, and promised to them even by candidate donald trump. then we should have kept that promise to them. i do think that there was capitulation. i think that we should be holding our dreamers hostage. these are young men and women who are of incredible value to our country, to our communities, to our state. and we have to stand by them.
matters the most is what donald trump seems to surprise more than anything else is personal loyalty. but certainly with hope hicks, or the stories we saw last week, is that the personal loyalty wasn t being totally reciprocated. i saw that he berated her after she said what she said about little white lies while testifying in front of the house intelligence committee. so the problem for the president, is that these people with are out there, and all were participants in some way in conversations. and that seems to be why most of those people would be on that list. that they have some information about contacts that may have taken place during the campaign or later about interaction with russians. we don t know if this is a focus of the mueller investigation or if they re asking questions about it, but michael cohen has been in the news in regard to stormy daniels and that $130,000 payoff. the wall street journal is just now reporting that the payment was flagged by his bank
gyrations that clearly have their roots in a president who is, in fact, you know, angry, as phil has said and as hallie has said, who is isolated. and i think these things are not unrelated. the president s mood in this particular white house matters probably more than most in terms of determining sort of a policy direction and creating what we now see to be some pretty important fights and fissures within his own republican coalition on issues like guns and trade. hallie, let s talk about voters. is the president, are his advisers still confident that his base of voters is still solid? i ve heard from a couple of folks who did vote for him, who were really excited about voting for him, and who are now, frankly, regretting it, saying it s just been a little too chaotic for their taste. is that an outlying opinion or, what are you hearing? i think anecdotally, you will get mixed opinions. i think there are a lot of folks like the ones that you talk to who say, hey, man, this is not
something different, okay? so i want to straighten that out. cheeky. reporter: look, there is tremendous disagreement within the white house on these tariffs. the only people who believed that these tariffs are a good idea are fringe economists on the left and some on the right, as well. mainstream economists do not believe that this is a good idea. that it will hurt more americans than it helps and gary cohn, inside the white house, is arguing on behalf of that side. paul ryan is also arguing on behalf of that side. however, i think that the only chance for republicans to block this is by persuading the president not to go forward in the first place, because i don t see any appetite among republicans in the house or senate to stand up in a direct conflict with the president on something he has bent on doing. just fyi, we re watching the white house, where benjamin