more red meat to his base in light of steven bannon s departure. there was such an ill-defined notion to the phoenix rally versus the veterans rally. which i think kirsten hit the nail on the head. it is a problem for republicans. because at the end of the day, this is the commander in chief, and he s unifier and he wants to win. you want to you want wins in congress and thus far, there really aren t any. and the fact that he hasn t spoken to the senate majority leader and will not do so until labor day, that he s thrown multiple republicans under the bus, you know, i was talking to rich galen, who s been around washington for a long time and i said, rich, does he understand how washington works and he said, no. no. do you agree. yes, absolutely. i mean, let s just look at it very logically. he s a 70-year-old man and he s been in show business. that s not an excuse. absolutely not but as you get older and set in your ways, that s a normal thing in life. it s harder to sh
because you haven t paid attention to them, doesn t mean they re not real and they re not a threat. that s not what i said. i said the mainstream media is now talking about them. we re now talking about neo-nazis so i want to stay focused on what s happening in this country with the right wing hate that we saw last week in charlottesville. somebody died. antifa did not kill anyone. neo-nazis did. that s what s happening here and the president essentially put them on the same footing and they re not. we have to be very clear about that. so, on the president, though, just staying on the president, what are you views on that. how do you see it? because a lot of people, unlike, you know, jeff, but a lot of people see it as very different speeches and very different trumps. right. and it was. and this rally was, you know, look, he came off a very, very difficult week, obviously. there were lots of reports that he was very upset coming back or the way that the coverage turned out from
we try crack the code on the president s pavbehavior. he is playing to the base but also engaging in that art of distraction. jim, thank you so much for white house. let me bring in kristen, a conservative commentator. rich benjamin, a liberal commentator, the director of progressive programming for siri sirius xm and a former member of the trump for president advisory board. so welcome to all of you. jeff, just to you first. nice to meet you. you know, the contrasting the various speeches, right, the throwing the gasoline on multiple issues at a rally and then the unifier, you know, teleprompter trump. with the speech last night in phoenix, how did that do him favors? you know, i know i watch cnn s coverage of the speech last night as well as the speech itself, and i have to say, whether intentionally or just
publishing a book for him to continue to invoke her. he does that on twitter all the time. i think we as a party have to be capable of doing two things at once. that is to say, we have to be reflective and look back on the 2016 campaign in order to learn from the mistakes we made, and we made mistakes, but if we re going to grow as a party, we need to look back and realize the failures and part of that soul-searching involves hillary clinton doing that soul-searching and imparting to us what she learned about the failures that happened in that campaign because there s so much attention on donald trump s rally in arizona last night but that rally was just like all the rallies of his campaign and he still won. so, we can t just run the same type of campaign we did in 2016. we have to learn from those lessons. i think that this book will be a part of that process, but the reality is, that the future of the party does rest with young up and coming groups like indivisible and color of chang
vulcanization has to be rooted out. that s the root of it and the truth is, every time i hear the president address that, i agree with that and i believe in that. but there s this is bad, this is okay. that s wrong. another tactic is to say this is a media talking point so that doesn t excuse the more than 13 republican senators who have came out against it, the business people, i suppose we re all in this media conspiracy to download the president. it s been very successful at hurting him litt politically. one was for a defined audience, the veterans, and then the other speech, i watched it and i was scratching my head and wondering, what s the purpose of this rally? what does it serve? why are taxpayers paying for this man to go to phoenix with an ill-defined message, with an ill-defined purpose and then spew this stuff. it was a rally. and so that difference of audience, that difference of tone, that difference of message, no wonder people are wondering, is trump throwin