dual message is supposed to but i think it s an important one. it s an effort right now to almost spook the freedom caucus back into line as they try and attack what is a very ambitious agenda going forward, kate. phil, great reporting. thank you so much. let s get some reaction to this. joining me now is republican congressman from virginia, dave brat, a member of the house freedom caucus. congressman, thank you so much for joining me. you bet, kate. great to be on. thank you so much. you ve seen the tweet. you heard phil mattingly s reporting. are you spooked by the president? no, i think whoever s advising him, has his ear right now we all ran in the freedom caucus on exactly what president trump ran on, right? cleaning the swamp, repealing obamacare. the bill in front of us doesn t fully repeal, so we can have that debate, but the polling for the bill right now is at 17% of the american people, right? we can do better than that, and we are all getting to yes for president
it s not necessarily because his view of vladimir putin has changed, but because he just feels that the climate is not favorable to actually accomplishing a good deal. he files like there is too much media scrutiny surrounding russia right now, combined with the house probe, the senate probe, the fbi looking into russia s meddling in the election, and also the trump campaign contacts with suspected russian officials. and so, that sort of takes them back to the drawing board. it doesn t mean it s off the table, that there won t ever be any kind of negotiations with russia, but we re told that s kind of on the back burner for now. it s also worth noting the president has not yet met face-to-face with vladimir putin. putin said today that he hoped maybe they could do that on the sidelines of the arctic conference coming up later this summer, but a senior administration official says they haven t even determined whether the president will attend that. and as of right now, there are no firm
republican agenda if they don t get on the team and fast. we must fight them and democrats in 2018. asked to respond to it, paul ryan says it s very understandable that the president is frustrated. he didn t really speak about the primary challenge element of it, but he did not contradict the president. nia, your take? yeah, i mean, this is where we are now. the president has moved from blaming democrats, calling chuck schumer losers. at some point, he also said he wanted to reach out to democrats. so here he is now fighting with his own party, especially saying that come 2018, some of the house freedom caucus folks can expect a primary challenge. i think the problem here is a lot of these sort of energy, conservative ideas about health care, money now, if you think about the koch brothers wanting to support a lot of these folks who stood up against this bill, i don t know how trump takes them on and also tries to get to a situation where they have enough votes to make this work in
says in an interview that he s worried if you don t get oh faux republicans don t get their act together that this may then push the president to work with democrats to fix obamacare. what do you say what do you say to the speaker on that one? do you think there is any chance that you will work with the president to fix obamacare? well, what i would say to the president and the speaker is listen to your constituents. listen to what the public said. they spoke very loud last week. they spoke clearly. no repeal. we do not want them to sabotage or undermine the accordable care act. to the speaker needs to understand that before we go any further, we have to come to agree that they will not repeal the affordable care act because the public knows the republicans want to take away their health care. that s a fact. congresswoman, i do remember you boycotted president trump s
caucus, it s also moderate republicans. it s also that that bill had a 17% approval rating. so, again, i mean, i think we re seeing this sort of hardball, dealmaking sort of strategy, but it seems like a lot of it is just, you know, kind of spinning their wheels and it s not sure there s going to really be any movement, more just like motion. yeah. i mean, doug, part of it we can talk about the math, but i also want to talk about so, i asked one of the members of the freedom caucus about this tweet, if he sees it i mean, i don t know of another way to read it, other than it is a threat. but according to dave brat of virginia, he does not see what the president is saying as a primary threat in any way. what is the play here? is the freedom caucus respond well to threats? if you look at any recent history? yeah, i ve heard of dave brett. i worked to eric cantor, so dave brat is somebody i m familiar with. we didn t need to go there, doug, but i did want to come to you with th