64 democrats signed a letter calling on the president to fire pruitt. do you think the letter will get any traction? reporter: no. no. the president does not usually cave to pressure from democrats. i mean, that s something that he s digging in his heels on issues. pruitt s job may become tenuous again. look, if another story drops, if another wave of headlines hits, the president a certain point may grow frustrated and say the distractions are not worth it. remember, he has a number of confirmation hearings that have to happen on capitol hill in the coming weeks. and adding pruitt to that list is already seems untenable for a lot of the republicans here. peter, let me bring you in here. chief of staff john kelly urged the president to fire pruitt, according to the new york times, with that suggestion falling on deaf ears. what do the past few weeks tell you about kelly s status in the west wing? well, kelly s status is seems precarious to some degree. it doesn t seem like
campaign. therefore you owe me. attorney for stormy daniels back at it after the president denied knowing about the $130,000 hush payment. michael avenatti is also promising a major announcement in the coming days about the identity of a man who reportedly talented miss clifford. a story that won t go away. howard dean, former vermont governor and contributor, and evan mcmiller, cia operative and former presidential candidate. howard, i ll start with you. in a lot of ways, trump has a way of getting past negative stories. this seems to have taken hold. this has nine lives, if you will. what do you make of why that is? there s three reasons. stormy daniels, incredible person. her appearance on cbs was really credible. thirdly, trump can t get out of his own way. he should not be mentioning this at all. he did fine for two weeks. then he said, all he said was one word, no. now he now avenatti has a
to stormy daniels this week. do you expect him to open up more about this in the coming days and weeks? any of you can jump in there. i think he wants to stay away from it. what we re told is that it s a very sensitive subject. it s something that his first lady melania trump doesn t want to hear about. it was surprising to me they discussed it on air force on the flight home air force one on the flight home from west virgin virginia. i don t think there s any upside in it for him to continue to try to add fuel this to this story. president trump has ordered national guard troops deployed to the u.s.-mexico border. derek, what will a military presence along the border accomplish? i think it s really important to look at the historical context here. border arrests have fallen to their lowest point in 46 or 47 years. we are at the lowest point of border arrests in this country since 1971, the year that a new sitcom called all in the family became the number-one show on tv.
i don t think so. i think this is not a story that s going away. another one. we talked about the daniels one. now another layer here. i want to get your reaction, howard, to this tweet on china from the president. this was just a short time ago, he said, trade surplus with china in 40 years, they must end unfair trade, take down barriers, and charge only reciprocal tariffs. the u.s. social security althoughing $5 the u.s. is losing $500 billion a year and has been losing billions for decades. cannot continue. can you give me your thoughts on this tweet, howard? look, there s some sympathy, i think, among americans about the chinese abusive trade practices specifically in international in intellectual property. the problem sheer thhere is tha has no idea what he s doing. he basically is disrupting the biggest trade relationship that we have which is essentially, as a conservative put to me, a tax on everybody. the chinese know as much if not american about american politics
attractive option for the president is, one, process-oriented reason. another of substance. the first is that the president would be able to move pruitt over because he s already been confirmed by the senate. there s a lot that allows that to happen. he could move pruitt over a temporary basis. two, the department of justice. pruitt if he so wanted, he could exert control over the mueller investigation in a way that would be pleasing to the president. that s something that there have been credible reports of that. there have been rumors for the past month. it certainly seems to me that there s some reason why pruitt continues to hang on. that s as good a reason i could think of for the president. howard, what s your reaction to pruitt? i think the guy is corrupt as can be, as we ve seen many, many appointees in the trump administration, including the president himself. i think if that were to happen,