i don t believe any of those polls so if there s any lesson in the past you should be infinitely more skeptical right now. i believe trump is the prohibitive favorite. in case anybody wants to go to sleep. well, which of course jim messina, leads neatly into what i wanted to ask you as a final question. you know, i always run scared in everything. even in polls when i was up by 20 points i made everybody in my campaign headquarters think that we were down by 20. so it s i m trying to sort through where we are right now. we had dave wasserman on a couple of days ago. he was so great at what he does. i asked the question i want to ask you now which is what is what is your current take on donald trump s chances for re-election? i know generals always fight the last battle so i think sometimes people give the 42% president a little too much credit. at the same time, we can t fall
efforts to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census. trump announced the decision yesterday, two weeks after the supreme court rebuked the administration over its efforts to include that question. last week, the president told reporters he may issue an executive order to include the question. instead, donald trump ordered the federal government to compile citizenship data from existing federal records. as the new york times points out, quote, even that order appears to merely reiterate plans the commerce department announced last year. making it not a new policy but rather a way for trump to cover that he retreated from his census battle that he caved. here s the president speaking yesterday in the rose garden. i m proud to be a citizen. you re proud to be a citizen. the only people who are not proud to be citizens are the ones who are fighting us all the way about the word citizen.
very glad and very relieved that the president did back down on this issue. because if he did not back down on the issue, it would have been a constitutional crisis. if he had tried to defy a supreme court ruling which would have put us into entirely new territory. but, you know, tom, boy, i don t know where to start with you on this one. i guess let s take the easiest target and that is attorney general barr going up there and degrading himself once again. and i just want to say also, a lot of my friends, conservative friends, who will not get out and defend donald trump have seen barr as a safe harbor. someone they can defend and still, you know, play to the conservative cheap seats, but is there anything to defend with this guy?
nature and credentials and yes, he s saying all these things now. but to mika s point, they should have been said in 2016. that s what brave people do. that s what leaders do. so noah, these quotes from paul ryan in the book, which i have to tell you i got an advance copy and it s relentless and he tells of the trump presidency. this is what they wanted to hear from paul ryan, i understand he had a tricky job as speaker, he had to manage a caucus, a lot of which like donald trump, a lot of people in his own district liked donald trump. but he didn t say something when he had a chance to do something about it and to say it after the fact is frustrating. there s the imperative of governing. in the first year of the trump presidency i recall seeing a lot of on background quote from sources, people close to republicans even lakers expressing their deep
it. i think that s where the choices come in. i think what happened with the back benchers that took on newt gingrich or some even on the left that take on people is that s a real division between those of us who really believe what we say or those who say it but we really don t believe it because we when we get tested we re not willing to go all the way. well, you know, you can go back to the day that paul ryan endorsed donald trump. a couple of days after calling him a racist. and mika and i said in realtime that he was handling that relationship wrong. you never give donald trump something for nothing. and that s exactly what paul ryan did. he folded. he caved. at the beginning of the relationship, donald trump does not respect weakness. donald trump a bully politically only understands strength, and paul didn t show him that early