news today, it is criminal justice reform passing in the senate. it is a shutdown perhaps being averted with the president caving on his demand for $5 billion right now for a border wall. but when you talk to people inside the white house and close to the president, they say he s in siege mentality, war fare mentality. he s not focused on capitol hill as much. that s why he s trying to avert a shutdown because the russia investigation on two major fronts, not just with robert mueller s special counsel investigation, but with capitol hill preparing to issue subpoenas if necessary to pull up every trump adviser, if possible, to trace this whole investigation back because house democrats have power. two of the very best at that newspaper in washington, greg miller, robert costa, gentlemen, thank you so much for making the time to come on our broadcast on this tuesday night. coming up for us, trump called it a charity. today the new york attorney general called it a little more than a
the scrutiny from federal officials and from federal law enforcement. this coming days after michael cohen being sentenced to prison. of course, the ump himself denies that. so it adds to the siege mentality here in the building behind me. you have all these investigations going on. you have the staff shake-up that was detailed including in the last 24r hours, both mulvaney switches jobs and zinke heading out. and we have signs of perhaps a economic slowdown, which is perilous for this president s reelection chances. as of january, the democrats will take control of the house and will wield the power of subpoena and plenty of talk like impeachment. this white house is now girding
you should know that. we could have been greece, right? sorry. go on. everybody got together and made some very hard decisions. right. but i would say at a certain point start giving the guy credit. but i think max calling it a sugar high. you could also call it day trading on debt and deficit numbers. donald trump says i love debt, and he does. at a certain point, is there going to be a price to pay for the short-term benefits? let s talk about that because jelani, you write here you said the country has been fixating on trump for over two years. you read in the new yorker about trump has both promoted and profited from the racial siege mentality. what happens if there is no reckoning for that? yeah. i mean that s the real kind of terrible scenario because what s happened is let s say donald trump decides in 2020 that he won t run again. let s say he runs and loses. the inescapable difficulty is the fact that he has already
the short term benefits? let s talk about that because jelani, you write here you said the country has been fixating on trump for over two years. you read in the new yorker about trump has both remoted and profited from the racial siege mentality. what happens if there is no reckoning for that? yeah. i mean that s the real kind of terrible scenario because what s happened is let s say donald trump decides in 2020 that he won t run again. let s say he runs and loses. the inescapable difficulty is the fact that he has already created a template for the ideas that were once on the margin, these ideas that were once beyond the pale through a lot of work, a lot of effort through the 20th century, people trying to push these ideas out of mainstream acceptable political thought and rhetoric. he s still created a temp lat to make those things work. trumpism can exist outside the
sounding familiar with the political warfare. david brock has been working for years on the other side. you saw lindsey graham today, he went on a tear when the affidavit was released today, the extremely troubling allegations made in them, lindsey graham just went off and basically said this is all basically saying what the president is saying, this is a con job. they ve convinced themselves this is a conspiracy. they are now in a siege mentality. you could see it when the second accusation came out. it s counterintuitive to people because the worse it gets the more they dig in. they re in a siege mentality, so they re very defensive, paranoid style, and of course michael avenatti is sort of the perfect character to put into this mix because they really didn t have very much to work with.