had. pollsters conducting the group with the pittsburgh area voters. peter hart joins me now. peter, really fascinating. i thought an interesting look at a really crucial category of voters, who are not the hard-core supporters that we don t often see. what surprised you most? what surprised me most is how embarrassed the american public is with donald trump as their president. i really did not expect that from his group of voters. as you say, those are the soft supporters. but they represent about 15% of all voters. and that s a group that he has to have behind him. and what s so important here is, i ve been doing this since richard nixon was president. and a focus group every single president, no president has ever embarrassed the american public. what s happened is they ve disagreed with them on issues, disagreed with them on moral stance, and everything else, but this person, donald trump,
the president is talking about tax reform and here s what s happening and they re going to have a huge legislative list to get relief to those folks as soon as they get back there. this is the very important point. congress comes back and the number one thing in congress is not going to be tax reform. they ll see it as important. the number one thing is going to be $100 billion. pass this thing and they certainly can t say we ll get to that. what is it going to look like for a congressman who has to run in his district next year or a senator who has to run two years past that to say on the one hand we have to come up with $100 billion for help in houston and by the way, we want to give a tax cut to anybody who makes more than $250,000 a year. really tough sell. as always, thanks for your insight. let s go to lawrence wilkerson. the president says talking is not the solution which says that military force is with a nuclear power, and mattis says what i
future pardon will likely affect man manafort s decision about whether he cooperates with investigators or not. we don t know for sure that the two of them have talked about pardon and the strategy. we do know earlier this summer that bob mueller approached eric schneiderman. the two of them have been working in concert. people close to manafort say that mueller has been pressuring him to cooperate. they showed up for a raid on his house, aggressive tactics to try to get him to cooperate. we know the president just used a presidential pardon on joe arpaio and said he would consider asserting that presidential pardon and he said no one could question that power. so a lot of it is more writing on the wall and key leaks on why the cooperation is happening now and the strategy between the two men who have totally separate investigations but in some way they may dovetail here in the
politico s michael crum literally wrote the book on it and joins me now. let s start on the first thing, the president s budget i believe called for these cuts to fema and the disaster fund. the idea now is that it was going to pay for the wall. can they really come back to congress and do that? probably not. i mean, not to defend them too hard, it s a question of values. but their budget cut just about everything except for defense and border security. so, you know, if there was another ebola crises people would be talking about their cuts to public health. if that chemical plant you mentioned explodes, people will talk about their cuts to the epa or the labor department. right now it s only natural that they re talking about cuts to fema and the coast guard because they really did try to cut just about everything. one of the things that i think has played a role here and that is going to be a huge fight that people maybe don t quite see coming is the national flood insurance prog
bloomberg this week, they re nowhere. the president was reduced to reading off a series of platitudes. we would like to bring our business tax rate down to 15% which would make our tax rate lower than most countries. we believe that ordinary americans know better than washington how to spend their own money, and we want to help them take home as much of their money as possible. when businesses compete for labor, your wages will go up. lower taxes on american business means higher wages for american workers. the white house had sought to frame the speech as seizing the populist mantle but at least one trump super fan wasn t buying it.