joining us now to help channel what the president is thinking, anthony scaramucci, former white house communications director. what s the shrug? if i could channel what the president is thinking. you better than anyone, you ve known him for years and what he s thinking. on the shutdown, that didn t go as planned. that didn t go well. let s talk about brad. you look at voting and some swing areas like the idea of a border wall. it s too early. you have 19 months until 2020. it s distracting from the economy, costs money, $11 billion according to the scoring. it hurt 800,000 people. it hurt 800,000 people and also sends a message to the world, what are you guys doing? you can t get it together to keep the government open? did president trump get that message? here we are again. are we going to play this out? if he were mr. trump living in trump tower and watching like
how she said it lies in the fact of the district she represents, where, still, today, there are hundreds of school children unable to drink the drinking water in their schools in that s part of who she is. representing that anger and that frustration. rashida tlaib is a longtime activist. she s in a very safe democratic district. i would say she doesn t accurately represent the freshmen class that swept into washington. a lot came from trump districts and flipping swing areas. when you listen to them, some of them didn t support nancy pelosi for speaker. they say look, i ll work where the president when i can t but i will stand up to him when i can t. that was the part the issue was less the expletive she used but how that expletive ramped up
democrats. i think every one feels like maybe we don t know all the things we thought we did. the biggest question here is what does this electorate look like. the question is who are these people and what is motivating them to come out to the polls. i have to say in traveling across the heart land last week, i was feeling like i picked up on bit of a backlash against the president s focus on immigration. the republican candidates that i talked to who were in swing areas, that s not what they wanted to talk about. they tried hard to change the subject. i also found among democratic voters they were very aware of this message the president was
amendment when in reality, he can t do that. but another thing, chuck, we ve done a lot of tea leaf glancing at his schedule of trips, he s really going to hard-core trump places. he s not going to swing areas at all. not going to swing areas at all. fm myers is oddly the only place and cleveland on friday and that s where the close much gubernatorial race. instead what he s doing with the swing areas is tweeting out endorsements and he s tweeted out about two dozen since last night to all of the republicans on suburban areas. he said strong on military and strong on crime. basically the same template on one of them. that s as close as he can get because he cannot go to those places. probably not stupid because you figure the conservative voters in the swing districts do follow his twitter feeds and because they are tweets, minimizes the coverage he might get. i think he knows what his base wants. what we don t know is how large of a role his base will play in the elect
ballot, even though he has little to do with some of these contests, the more he s in the frame, the more he reminds people how much they either like or don t like him. given that the president is unpopular overall, particularly in these swing areas, the more he s in the frame, the more he s stirring up controversy, the more he s sort of hogging the spotlight, the more i think those republicans sort of cringe and wish he would find something else to do for a few weeks. molly ball, admiral kirby, thanks very much wroorb. still ahead, turkish and saudi officials meeting as the investigation into the saudi journalist jamal khashoggi ramps up. we ll have a live update on the investigation ahead. plus, hurricane michael leaves parts of florida in ruins and survivors scrambling for the basics. food and water. now some residents have resorted to looting. and a cnn exclusive. one-on-one with dr. priscilla chan. her $61 million initiative to secure what they call a future for everyone.