the woug post reports that a group of senior staffers in the white house have been sidelined by president trump himself. the president is reportedly calling all of the shots. joining us to discuss, cnn political analyst john avlon and david gregory. john avlon, he s the president, obviously he can call all the shots. yes. the point is there s the white house communications director position that was vacated by hope hicks when she left has now been empty for two months, so he s running the communications shop and he has filled his staff with people who are more in lock step with him philosophically. so what s the upshot? what could possibly go wrong? the whole point of having advisers is so you have perspective from people beyond your own mellon. and this president seems to just double down wanting a self-re-enforcing strategy. the president should pay attention to the country, not his communications shop. for him, the two are really
scott pruitt and john kelly going on for a couple weeks now. this week the focus is on john kelly so i m curious to get your thoughts on what type of role he ease playing now. has this impacted the west wing and are we likely to see john kelly s departure from the white house any time soon given some of the reporting that we ve been referencing about his, you know, decrease in stature in the white house. you know, i m convinced that john kelly has been sidelined. but this depends a lot depends on how good the woug post sources are. one of the authors on that story amusingly. there was a book that came out last week that said he and two other journalists, president trump calls them up and feeds them stories and has it attributed to a senior administration official. i don t know if this is true or not, but who knows? it s it s an interesting little angle there. who knows what s really behind this kelly story. yeah, anything responsible out of this white house.
call him and read him the riot act about the poisoning. that s a big deal. chemical weapons against a nato ally, that crosses every red line you want to think about. and we know because it s splashed on the front page of the woug post that his national security team did tell him to confront him about the poisoning. you know a lot of the players involved here. what does it say to you that within a couple of hours it was posted to the front of the washington post, details, very specific details of what was inside those notes? two reactions, willie, and in the course of my long misspent youth in the navy i spent plenty of time preparing those kind of talking points for very civilian leaders. those are the closest held of intelligence activities. this is what you want your president to be communicating at the very highest level, so the fact that somebody would leak
for president trump primary donald trump we re not going to see any real discussion. the woug post this morning, this is a quote. i believe this is george h.w. bush. john meacham, and this is what he said. the interview, i was going back to the interview this past week of the republican mayor who said a really, really good piece. who said i m going to vote for conor lamb because we need to send a good man to washington. make america good again. make america good again which is the most compelling campaign slogan. trademark it. america is great because america is good and when america stops being good, america will no longer be great. this is what john meacham said.
were five people that knew about my identity and the more people you involved and this kind of operation you have to have more people involved. the more likely it is that a real leak will come out and we don t have one. we have people saying we think. it s speculation and i don t think we ll ever prove a collusion kind of thing. and the collusion investigation is a possibility there and still continuing, but i want to narrow in on something you talked about keeping the srk l small. what we learned kind of fleshed out in this woug post article was about the lengths that putin goes to keep things secret. and tell us a little bit more about that. it s a very secretive society. it has always been and it s still the same, because you know, what what you re trying to do if you re in a