it s continuing to grow in terms of damage. he needs to put an end to this. wild goose chase, a wrecking ball. ron, is there anything bigger than the president s credibility that is at stake sneer. and david can probably attest to this even more than i can which is what the president the words of the president matter. i mean, the cliche is it sends armies on the march. it sends markets rising and falling. you have a president who ran for election making a series of wild and unfounded allegations on a regular basis, who felt that he did not suffer any consequence for that, and has carried that with him into the presidency. i would just point out that on election day, one quarter of the people who vote for donald trump said they weren t sure that he was qualified or he had the temperament to succeed as president. they want to change, they didn t trust hillary clinton. and they were willing to give him a chance. when you look at the approval ratings that he s facing today, under 40%
have a lot of second thoughts about whether they want this particular replacement. fred, i think this clarifies one key dynamic here. you ve had almost all of the interest groups in the health care space say they oppose the bill. the american medical association representing the doctors, the american hospital aarp aarp. and but very few are doing much of anything. in fact particularly the hospitals which have the most at stake, you know, parts of what the affordable care act did was reduce the uncompensated care that hospitals provided. the millions they provide in care for people who lack insurance. the expansion of medicaid has been extremely helpful to them on that front is it unusual that they would not will to put their fingerprints on it? it is unusual. i think they are they think it s a gamble, too? there s reluctance to cross the republican leadership and president trump. they were heavily involved in the 1993 fight over the clinton proposal and the 20
to learn too much tomorrow. there s an interesting aspect of all of this which is that all of the the claim of wiretapping, all of the indications are so far that it did not happen. if it did happen, if there was, in fact, a surveillance order granted by a fizer court, what president trump would have done was to expose and thus undermine an ongoing, existing investigation. this is a strange allegations. it is true in some ways, it was more damaging for him than if it was false. right. so if go ahead, david. i think ron is absolutely right. i think comey can be definitive on whether there was any wiretapping. yes. i think you re right, he may be limited in what he can say or wants to say about ongoing investigations. if he gave us a sense that the investigations are wrapping up quickly or alternatively that they re going to go on for some
international incident. it reached another level on thursday when white house press secretary sean spicer cited false claims that a british spying agency through the orders of president barack obama was behind the wiretaps. spicer quoted fox news analyst judge andrew napolitano. on fox news, he said, three intelligence sources informed fox news that president obama went outside the chain of command. he didn t use the nsa. he didn t use the cia. he didn t use the fbi. and he didn t use the department of justice. he used gchq. the initials for the british intelligence spying agency. a day later alongside german chancellor angela merkel, president trump said this we said nothing. all we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television. i didn t make an opinion on it. that was a statement made by a
reporter: that s right. you have house conservatives saying it doesn t go far enough. senate conservative, many have similar concerns. that s why you re seeing this process of a package of amendments. and you ve seen senator ted cruz, martin meadows, and mike lee, have come down yesterday, met with the president s key strategist, steve bannon, and with chief of staff reince priebus and others for a meeting that lasted three hours to talk about their concerns about the repeal effort. we know the meeting was described by a republican aide who told my colleague lauren fox that the meeting was intense and productive. they described steve bannon as receptive to the concerns of the house conservatives, and they describe reince priebus as one who was pushing the plan that has been championed by speaker ryan. we know some of the things that were brought up. they want to see medicaid expansion phased out sooner. that is that is an idea that