way, too. jeremy is right. never came out and said, you know, charlottesville, okay. i screwed up. here s my attempt to make good on that. he talk and the military, makes sense in this audience, you point out, wolf, the subject matter, used the military as indicative of the need for a broader unity. very well integrated. and going to combat it s not democrats and republicans, not liberals, black and white, it s one unit. nicely delivered by him, i thought. the problem is, or the potential problem is, that donald trump seems to always take one step forward, two steps back. one step forward, two steps back in that, as you heard paul ryan say. i like what he said on monday. didn t like what he said on tuesday. liked what he said an hour ago. see about what he says ten hours from now. that s always the problem. the way you get to the white
in charlottesville, virginia. bring back our panel to discuss. chris cillizza and jeremy diamond. he acknowledged he messed up. not often you hear the speaker of the house acknowledging that that president messed up. right. the comments speak to the degree to which donald trump messed um to use the speaker s words in this instance. yesterday we heard the president, again, return to his scriptive remarks and make unifying remarks about not directly charlottesville but essentially the state of affairs in the country right now, and but the problem is we ve already heard from donald trump. heard him speak from his heart, offer prompter, frustrated with the state of affairs in the media at the moment, and i hate too say it. i ve seen this movie before and we re looking at it again potentially tonight as the president heads to phoenix to
the response he s gotten in his remarks on charlottesville and heard from the chief of phoenix police who says her officers are ready for anything, wolf. all right, boris. thanks very much. boris sanchez getting ready for the president s first stop in arizona in yuma. bringing in our political panel. chris cillizza, cnn politics reporter, abby phillips, white house reporter for the washington post and cnn white house reporter jeremy diamond is with us as well. chris, it looks like that speech last night, very disciplined, very organized. you can criticize it, praise it, but it does seem to have the influence of his new white house chief of staff, general john kelly? well, john kelly has been in the job for about three weeks now. we ve seen a lot of undisciplined donald trump between then and now. including his comments about charlottesville. but the speech was
disciplined? it was. he stayed on message, on prompter. odd if he went way off prompter. usually off prompter when interacting with folks as oppose to just giving a speech. what we ve seen, though, with donald trump is a series of false starts. a series of theoretical reset buttons pushed only to have a day later, two days later, a week later, either via twitter or a rally, him return back to sort of who we know him to be as a candidate, which is he likes to play with the crowd. he likes to throw red meat to his base. this is an interesting test, given the back-to-back. if he is able to do this in arizona, if he is aible to avoid relitigating charlottesville in some way, shape or form. able to stay away from controversial topics, i would be somewhat impressened and frankly surprised, because we ve not seen his capacity to do that in the two-plus years he s been both a candidate and now president.
things to remember. first, we know how the president loves to bash the media at these rallies, and the media has been largely carrying a lot of this coverage of the criticism of the president s remarks and response to charlottesville. there s the mine field number one. the second thing, we know that despite the outrage in washington, we know that a lot of his comments, his initial resposr response to charlottesville resonated with the president s base, or a portion of the base. president doesn t see the need for a knee-jerk reaction against these white supremacists or against anyone who support confederate monuments and actually supports them without supporting white supremacists and neo-nazis. society president, what steve bannon tried to convey to the president in his last week at the white house, is, listen, you can t forget about this base. can t forget about these people. don t listen to jared and ivanka and all of those people urging you to moderate on this issue.