He has not been doing it and that is why he has been slumping. Time does he have enough to turn things around . Guest he has enough time, especially given what your previous guest talked about, the lack of serious, indepth knowledge about his opponent, joe biden, but he has to change his game he cannot be the same, divisive, tweeting person that he has been in the next few months that he has been the last few years. He has to be able to roll with the punches and go with the flow. If you cant do that, he might bounce back a little bit, but he is not going to win this election host . In a recent Washington Post oped you wrote the following, he tweets versus something objectionable, his numbers drop, then bounce back where they were before the event. In theppened three times 2016 race, most notably after the release of the excess Hollywood Tape that many thought ruined his candidacy. It has also happened numerous notedsince 2018 when he pardoning his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort are in the government shutdown, during the summer months of 2019, as he took on the squat, and then later in the fall as impeachment became a reality. Trump weathered each storm and bounce back a strong or stronger than he previously been. What is different about this time . Nott the president has stepped back. What typifies some of these times is a moment of some contrition, like after access where he, or a period is not the person making news with his attacks. The other times or more normal politics. What we are looking at now is two National Crises and an thetity crises, and president has not provided the sort of decisive leadership and often uses those as examples or platforms of which to launch into a petulance and grievancebased assault on the media. That is not what americans wanted when he stops doing that, i will i think he will start to see his numbers come back. There is a story that a number of senior aides and cabinet members of the george w. Bush administration are prepared to publicly support joe biden. What is that tell you about the state of the Republican Party . Guest two things. The 43 for joe Biden Campaign, which is what you are referring to, there is nobody that is significant that has yet to put the name on it, they are minor officials in the w. Administration. I think what it does tell us is there is a minority of people in the Republican Party that want the people to move. In a different direction the bulk of the party voters might might but they want people to move on. People involved in the administration disagree and they would rather choose to switch parties and said with democrats than work with fellow republicans. Of thes us an example possibility of a small realignment going on with respect to republicans who really were not that into seriously challenging the democraticled establishment. Host in the story that broke journale wall street website, peter thiel shying away from the 2020 trump campaign. He is a venture capitalist, the cofinder of paypal, but is telling friends and supporters that he plans to sit out the election because he thinks real action is increasingly a long shot for the president. When you hear that, your reaction . Guest peter is a very idiosyncratic individual, so i think this is in keeping with his past performance and past pattern, but he is right. It is very difficult to see a path for reelection for the president. It requires the president to change his game, changes style very quickly in a way that he is do. Proven able to if i were peter thiel and i were making an investment based on the odds, i would be making the same beds that he makes bets that he makes. Host and we are talking about those republicans are aligned with democrats george conway, conway,and of kellyanne part of the Lincoln Project, and this latest ad after the revelation from the New York Times that there may have been evidence of russians pain taliban troops. Navy graduate, x navy seal, and the founder of veterans for responsible leadership. Months ago, donald learned russians were paying bounties for dead american soldiers in afghanistan. It. Hose to do nothing about any commander in chief with a spine would be stopping the of theshit out russians right now. Mr. Trump, you are either a coward who cannot stand up to an x kgb goon, or you are complicit. Ake the left, doneowning gunowning veteran. I see trump for what he is, a coward. We need to send this coward back to this draft dodger back to his golf courses. Adt your reaction to that in the larger issue of this effort by the Lincoln Project. Guest it strikes me as a demagogue word salad. Strains belief to think that President Joe Biden would be asymmetrically engaging russia in warfare over this when, in fact, that is not what large nationstates do. Did duringhat obama the Obama Administration, or as he likes to say during the obamabiden administration. It is another attempt to throw mud at the wall and see what sticks. I think the Lincoln Project is not very effective. I think there are no serious republicans, people who are still republicans that would be moved by ads like this. What it is doing, mainly, is providing air cover in the media for joe biden, but it is not going to have any effect on the ground, which is to say if you are basically a prolife conservative republican, you are very likely to be backing trump, even reluctantly, and the Lincoln Project is not making an impact. Host brad pascal, the manager, incampaign an oped published in the Washington Post, and available online, taking aim at the Biden Campaign and trying to frame the election this way. He wrote the following s bush ratings file to the lowest point, that red a headline in the New York Times. A fraughtdescribed atmosphere among the electorate with growing angst over the iraq war and concerns over domestic security. 16 years later President Trump faces the same headlines. His Reelection Campaign is wellpositioned to spread his progrowth economic agenda and contrast to the president to a 47year career politician joe biden. Your reaction. Guest i think that its a nice way to frame the election, but there are two issues. The president s job Approval Rating is at 41 . George w. Bushs job Approval Rating was nowhere close to as low as that in june or july of 2004. The president needs to change himself noted to move up, then he becomes credible talking about things like the economy, talking about things like the biden record, talking about things like if you still want washington shaken up, why should you trust someone who has spent his entire adult life in washington. If the president doesnt establish his own credibility, all of those contrasts will not wash with the undecided voter that will decide the election. Host the me go back to brad pascal and what he wrote in Washington Post, biden, like Hillary Clinton in 2016, is been a central part of the washington system that voters opposed in 20 and are doing so again. Is near halfcenturylong medical career is littered with terrible decisions that have had disastrous effects on the american middle class over the past four decades. The campaign, writes brad pascoe, has only just did has begun to define biden, a 47 year politician whose actions have decimated american working families and betrayed black americans. Guest President Trump needs make this a choice President Biden needs to make this a choice selection. If it would have been a referendum on obama, it could have been much closer we couldve seen a romney victory, but by look my saying it is about a choice, which direction do you want, people voted for obama. The thing is the president needs to do this himself. He needs to be disciplined. He needs to be focused, and he needs to present an alternative that is acceptable, and that alternative has to be somebody that isnt snark tweeting his 24 7, three headed 65, and actually acts like the president. If he does that and shows people that he has grown in office, he is the credibility to make this attack, otherwise it will not be seen as credible by the key voters who are going to decide the election. Those key voters, the book you wrote in 2017, the workingclass republicans, ronald reagan, and the return of bluecollar conservatives, where were those voters . Guest they are still largely behind trump, but not in large enough numbers to provide him the victory. He needs to get his numbers up among those and his numbers among what i call the reluctant trump voters, the college educated, suburban, moderate, conservative voter decided in late october even though they had misgivings about trump they would vote for him over Hillary Clinton because they preferred his policies. Inse voters voted democrat 2018, and those voters remain uncomfortable with the president. If he cant win those voters back and increases numbers among his blue collar conservative base, the we are just talking about the margin of victory for biden then we are talking about the margin of victory for biden. Host we are talking with henry olsen. Calls. Et to your phone republican line, new york. Good morning. Caller good morning. I know a number of people have been calling in and saying President Trump is incompetent handling the coronavirus. I wanted to refute that. Back in february, the house was notified about the coronavirus, and they chose to it nor it because they to ignore it because they were in the impeachment hearings and and beforey oh, that, tom cotton, republican senator, is the one who told us first about the virus. He was plagiarized for that. Subsequently, a number of , through insider trading, sold their family and ends and sold off all of their possibly its to downfall, and i remember Dianne Feinstein said, its not my fault. My husband did it. Could you comment on these two things . Host thank you. Henry olsen . Guest i think a lot of the criticism of the president s handling of coronavirus is partisanship. He would have been distracting the country from the important questions of impeachment and ukrainegate. Win with a large segment of the national media. I watched every democratic debate, particularly for 2020, and i do not recall any of those people talking about the coronavirus coming. It was so obvious, as it is being reported now, why werent they talking about it . It was not obvious. It was a difficult decision. I think the president has got the response pretty reasonably well. Host does the president have selfdiscipline selfdiscipline . Not shown it. He likes to spew his messages. He likes to think in terms of 24hour, 40 a eighthour media cycle, rather 48hour media cycle, rather than a large effort to bring a point home and he has not shown signs of changing his stripes. Host the article linking russia kill a troops,o yourounty story, what is thought . Examplehis is another of a moderately reported or moderately sourced story blown up to bring problems for President Trump. This is a pattern throughout his administration. Why should we expected to change . Do you do . Ue, what what would President Biden do . I do not think President Biden would do more than deliver a stern rebuke to putin and minor sanctions because, quite likely, that is not something president s that is what president s do. I dont think President Biden would have used this to bring the intact break the entire structure of the u. S. Russia relationship, particularly because that is not something our european allies would have wanted. I think this story is likely overblown, but even if its not, i dont think the risk wants would have been what the media is suggesting it would be because thats not what president s do. The in this case, president did not think him is did not know about it. His written daily brief. Apparently he did not read it. Is that damaging . I would say what is the National Security adviser telling them . What is the secretary of state telling him . He is not the only one who reads these briefs. If his National Security apparatus is not coming to him and saying, this is important. We are going to elevate this from a fact in a paper to an action point that needs to be prioritized, that puts an entirely different ballpark, and the fact that you are not hearing that, youre not hearing that his nsas remaking appointed that, you are not hearing that the command in afghanistan was saying, please Pay Attention to that, suggests to me this story is overblown. Host but could it damage the president . That narrative for donald trump . Guest i think it can hurt donald trump for people who have artie convince themselves they dont what donald trump. I do not think it will scare people you have already convince themselves they dont want donald trump. I do not think it will scare people who support trump. I do not think it will sway undecided people. , this is hishiff reaction to the story, with subsequent briefings from the trump white house. [video clip] rep. Schiff as we look at these i am going to call them allegations number one, the president of the United States should not be inviting russia into the g7 or g8. We should be considering what sanctions are appropriate to further deter russias malign activities, not further ingratiating russia into the community of civilized nations. And i find it inexplicable, in light of these very public allegations, that the president has not come before the country and assured the American People he will get to the bottom of whether russians are putting a bounty on the heads of american troops and he will do everything in his power to protect american troops. I do not understand why the president is not saying this to the American People and is i dont know, i havent heard, i havent been briefed. Thats not excusable. His responsibility as commanderinchief is to protect our troops. I show the concern with the white house today, that i think many of us have, which is there may be a reluctance to brief the president on things he does not want to hear. That may be more true with respect to putin and putins russia than with respect to any other subject matter. That is adam schiff, the chair of the house intelligence committee. Henry olsen, your reaction . Guest more politics. This is a man who exaggerated every piece of fact that comes to him with respect to the president s actions with foreign policy. Who helped empower putin . ,t was the Obama Administration saying that the Bush Administration was too tough on putin. It was the Obama Administration who refuse to provide legal aid to the ukrainians. Please, dont tell me you were tough on russia unless you are criticizing your own party is present at the time for actions that enabled putin to rebuild the Russian Military and become the adventurer he is. Host good morning. Caller good morning. [indiscernible] without electing a black woman or whatever i think you should nominate mr. Goes tosomeone who putin. If we dont have a strong background with putin, we cant win. I know he goes to bed laughing. We are acting so stupid with President Trump, it seems like putin, putin, putin. If we dont have a good background with our secretary and our Vice President as regards mr. Putin, we are going to be in the same predicament we are with President Trump. Biden is nice, but still he is going to have to stand up and not let obama, al sharpton push him to elect a black woman in order to win president. I have been a democrat all my life, but i am not going to vote for him if he goes for a woman to be Vice President. Hate to be that way our country is in a bad way now. We dont have anything for our children. We have children that are coming up to run this country and if we dont get some kind of respect now, we arent going to have any more. They laugh at us going to bed and they wake up in the morning laughing at us. Palmetto,k you, from floor to. Ats is an opinion piece bloomberg news. Flood room putin able to stay in power until 2036. The headline the west consistently undermines underestimates his willingness to take extreme risks. Next project building a buffer zone around russia. Your thoughts . Guest i think the west needs to think what it was to do with russia. Russia is clearly trying to reexert power, both their near , regimesd overseas like venezuela, sending its submarines to test nato differences in the north atlantic. But china is the country that is nearly nine times as large as russia. It is building its military faster. Nuclearilding Strategic Forces and it is the country that in a decade will pose much more of a threat to us than russia. I think a smart strategy would be to think, what role are we going to assign to russia . Enemy . Y an implacable are they an untrustworthy, but still valuable ally. That is something that russia and America Needs to confront. We need to build up our military so we can fight two fronts at once. The european front against russia and the pacific front against china and that will be very difficult to sell to the American People. This is the headline from fox. Com. Russia just pave the way for putin to