Welcome to the program, im Alison Stewart still filling in for charlie rose. We begin this evening with politics and analysis is is of President Trumps address to congress, we talk to ed okeefe, david rennie and megan murphy. I think we have to be honest that this was a good moment for him. He had two objectives last night. He wanted to reset his image with the American People and he wanted to reset his image with his own party. He has some incredly difficult fights ahead to get his legislative agenda ahead. While david is is viet, while we dont know details we do know getting a comprehensive tax tact i think in terms of the omission, in terms of where he could have and should have done more, was number one on fleshing out the details of the things that could have been a very easy win for him in i think a bipartisan win. We begin with natasha, pierre and the great come et of 1812. The core, the thing that brings tears to all of our eyes every night and hopefully audience members as well is i think the essence of what makes people happy and satisfied in their life, is told through these characters in very, very different ways but they ultimately i think by the end of it come to the same conclusion about what it is is that gives people vy tal et and happiness in their life. And for me, the thing that is the most powerful is for pierre and natashas ending is is that they are both at their absolute lowest when they finally connect after all these scenes of frif oldity. Stewart we conclude with the director and cast of the newly crowned Academy Award win of for best picture moonlight. People can see themselves in these characters who they assume are nothing like them, and its been pie experience that people are finding a way to genuinely empathize with the store story were telling and the characters were showing. Politics, the great come et and another look at moonlight when we continue. Funding for charlie rose is provided by the following and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Stewart good evening, im Alison Stewart filling in for charlie rose. We begin this evening with politics. President trump delivered a highly anticipated address to a joint session of Congress Last night. He defended his administrations first five weeks in office and vowed to Reach Across Party Lines to achieve legislative goals including rebuilding the nations highways and roads. If we are guided by the wellbeing of american citizens, than i believe republicans and democrats can Work Together to achieve an outcome that has eluded our country for decades. applause another republican president , Dwight D Eisenhower initiated the last truly Great National infrastructure program, the building of the interstate highway system. The time has come for a new program of national rebuilding. applause . Stewart the tone and content of last nights speech marked a reversal from the dire landscape that the president articulated during his inaugural address in january. A new chapter applause of american greatness is now beginning. A new National Pride is sweeping across our nation. And a new surge of optimism is placing impossible dpreems firmly dreams firmly within our grasp. What we are witnessing today is the renewal of the american spirit. Stewart the question for many is which President Trump should we expect moving forward. Joining me now from washington is david rennie, is he Washington Bureau chief and lexington columnist for the economist, also in washington is ed okeefe, a congressional reporter for the Washington Post and here with me in new york in megan murphy, editor in chief of Bloomberg Business week, the latest issue of the magazine profiles top trump advisor stephen miller. Welcome to all of you. We have had 24 hours to digest the speech. David, i want to throw to you first. Obviously the president was physically speaking in front of congress but he was spiritually and sort of psychologically reaching out to his base. What did he say that made them happy, made them know they supported the right candidate . Well, thats exactly the right question to ask. And i found myself watching the speech last night waiting to hear details finally filled in on how is is he going to sort of fund that infrastructure he talks about, you know, what will be his tax plan. When those details didnt come, and i realized that i guess People Like Us who were trying to work out what is Donald Trumps agenda is, are still disappointed. We dont know. I then was asking how come his supporters who i meet out when i go to rallies and political meetings, how come they are so absolutely certain that he is keeping his promises and theyre so happy that he is doing what he said he would do. And it occurred to me that whats really going on, i think, is that we in washington are you in new york, were very focused on what politicians do. Donald trumps genius is to be the guy who can tell you who he is doing it for. Hes standing for his people. Last night he broadened the frame of it to be the guy who september represents a champion for all american citizens who will put american citizens ahead of foreigners, ahead of illegal immigrants, ahead of kind of global rivals who are trying to do america down. He will tell you who he is for. Were still wanting to know what hes for. And i think that explains the gap. Stewart megan, lets talk about what wasnt covered in the speech last night. We didnt hear about climate change. We didnt hear about economic inequality. What was a glaring omission for you and why. We did have a quick shoutout to clean air and clean water. Stewart im talking about the epa. I think we have to be honest in that this was a good moment for him. He had two objectives last night. He wanted to reset his image with the American People and reset his image with his own party. Hes got some incredibly difficult battles to fight ahead in terms of getting his legislative agenda ahead. And david is exactly right, while we dont know details, we do know getting forward a comprehensive tax reform plan and an Affordable Care act, repeal and replace and what is going on with obamacare is going to be very difficult. I think in terms of the omission, in terms of where he could have and should have done more was, number one, on fleshing out the details of the things that could have been a very easy win for him and i think a bipartisan win. Stewart for example. One is infrastructure. He showed a little clip there but when you look at this administration, you look at some of the missteps and mistakes theyve had which is immens. One is the immigration rollout and refugees from seven predominantly muslim countries but when you look back on the early days, if he turns out to be an unsuccessful president in getting his agenda forward, one would be he missed this opportunity to really put the screws on the wheel. Everyone is calling for infrastructure reform. He would have put his own party, in terms of a new stimulus budget forward and put them in a difficult place to reject it and again not to press it harderat last night. Stewart ed, two weeks ago you and i were sitting here discussing that 77 million rollicking press conference now the speech we saw last night, it felt like to me that it was candidate trumps stump speech put through an auto tune, right . Thats the program that record producers use to sort of smooth out the edges and get people back on pitch. Did you hear anything new and different . Well, i think his general approach and the fact that he was able to come into that room, command it, and deliver a state of the union like address proves that this is somebody who at least to nervous republicans is capable of at least appearing president ial and delivering and laying out an agenda. The specifics be dam damned at this point. I did hear a little more specificity, not much but a little bit more about sort of where they want to go on obama care, where they want to go on tax reform. He did not get into discussion of Immigration Reform in ways that he has privately now twice in the last two weeks with senators and with news anchors talking about the idea of a broader immigration bill. And part of the reason we didnt hear more about Infrastructure Spending frankly is because the biggest most important audience he had to address there last night and to impress, i dont think was the american public. It was those hundreds of republicans in the room who for the last several weeks with little guidance from the white house have been squabbling amongst themselves about how exactly to do a new Healthcare System in this country, about how exactly to reform the tax system, how to pay for a board border wall and a host of other issues. So the fact that he didnt get into the issues where he might find more bipartisan accord wasnt just because democrats right now arent in the mood to work with him and dont feel that hes done anything to win them over but also because the next few months for him and for republicans are probably going to be the most critical of the last four years because this is is their one and only opportunity to prove that they can actually govern and make changes after years of threatening to do so if they ever had power. David, we did not hear about aleppo. We didnt hear about moscow. Why not . Foreign policy was kind of amazingly absent. We had some warmish words about nato. We had as you say i think the auto tune analogy is pretty good. We had a hint of the sort of nationalist suspicion of International Organizations where he talked about sovereign states. He talked about free nations being able to decide their own fate. It was interesting that when i checked the European Press today for their reactions one of the big french parties, lamond picked up on that and said that sounded to them like an attack on the your mean union. It is those kind of things that make people very jumpy among americas allies. But i think in terms of russia, its one of the many areas where its not just that donald trump has kind of controversy that he wants to wish away. I think one of the fascinating things about this 40 days of rollout is that an open question does donald trump actually enjoy the kind of hard grind of governing, the hard grind of detail, of tackling these complex subjects or is that actually not his comfort zone. I think thats one of the Unanswered Questions too. I think its pretty clear that the hard grind of govern is not something that he feels is is his strong suit. Basically last nights address was pretty much heres what i want in terms of overarching promises and lets let the detail be worked out. Complees come together please come taght in some sort of magical way and get forward these difficult agenda items. I think david is exactly right there. What he has shown over the first few weeks is that is always going to be a little bit of a mountain sith this administration in general and they frankly dont have the organization and so far the internal discipline to push through these incredibly difficult challenges they have ahead like obamacare, like tax reform, like getting anything done needing still votes from the senate from the democratic side. Stewart ed, one of the things that i heard was done ald trump is an interesting entity in to himself. He is not a traician diddal republican. You heard the tep i had applause about infrastructure and paid family leave. He is also obviously not a favor of the democrats. So at this point, is his uniqueness, is it an issue for him or is it an issue for the Congress Going forward in terms of getting anything done . I dont think we know that yet. And i know in this day and age we want answers to this stuff and we want to see results quickly but you know, we really need to strap in for i think at least nine months of intense activity on the hill trying to sort this stuff out. Its going to take a little while. Were not going to see a lot of movement on this very quickly. Simply because these things take time and as the president learned last week, health care is a complicated thing. Well yeah, it took more than a year for democrats in the Obama Administration to put this thing together to try to kobl it together in a new way is going to take just as long most likely. And how do you do that while you also want to tackle tax reform and immigration and all this other stuff. We just dont know yet. And i think megan and david both are correct in that we havent seen much yet from trump on whether or not he really is into the art of governing. And whether his administration is capable of it. Now that you have cabinet secretaries essentially in place across the different agencies that would be feaked by these big changes, the question is how do they build out their teams and their policy and work with these committees in the next few months. But this is going to take a little time. Were not really going to be able to measure the success of him and where he fits into the twoparty dynamic, i think, for a little while longer. I think we have to really put aside though talk of lofty immigration and infrastructure work and paid parent, you know, paid leave for taking care of children or sick parents because they have to get that other stuff done first and its going to take awhile. And whether they can hold together really does remain a big unknown. There was a meeting today at the white house between Top Republican leaders and the president to talk about how they put together that healthcare plan. How they sell it not only to the country but to themselves. And then how do they work on those tricky things like paying for the border wall and where exactly that border wall would go. Much of the opposition to that on capitol hill isnt from democrats, necessarily, its from border state republicans and border district republicans, Congressional Republicans who represent 2 thousand miles of border. Theyre concerned about this, there is going to have to be modifications and it will be really difficult for this president to sort it out. I wanted to nump in, when were you talking about the fact that he sometimes stands on things like paid family leave, or you know, some of his views on not wanting tackle and title on reform, one of the things that is very striking. Ive been covering american politics this time around for five years but before that my posting was covering european politics. He doesnt sound that unusual or that unfamiliar in the european frame. That mixes of lots of spending on law and order, on the military, on the border but preserving pengses for old people, preserving welfare for your old kind of white voters, that mix is basically the far rights nationalist french mix. For example, what were going to see in the french elections, la penne, antiimmigrants willing to spend lots of machine on old people but lots of money on law and ford, that is basically the france, in the netherlands, he is very much an economic blood and soil nationalist in the european style. Stewart talking about. Stalk talking about the economics, i think it is also the one thing what that when we talk about will be maybe something that was an goal last night. David is is exactly right, saying his agenda is very much straight ot of maureen la pen but when you talk about inheriting a mess of an economy, 94 Million People out of work, that number isnt true. When he sets the standard for himself of boosting growth to say 2 under the Obama Administration up to i 3 , 4 , even some republicans talk about 5 through stripping out regulation, through tax reform, et cetera. That is also something that people are going to look back over time, overlooking back at this administration and saying did you actually keep those promises to voters . So much of his agenda is built on this nationalist economic agenda for returning manufacturing, of creating more jobs, of bringing back a traditional economic base that people think it is. So many of the issues we have economicically are due to structural displacement, automation t is incredibly aging workforce, a workforce that works in different ways that has different kinds of shift jobs where womens Labor Force Participation remains a huge challenge for us. And i think that there will be a view that he was much too blase about the challenges of taking us from say a 2 or a 4 growth. And his economic agenda is still so focused on top down. We saw do you 21,000 today and theres no question that wall street and the titans of industry viewed this speech very favorfully. The irony is those people who were most likely to back him, White Working Class voters from the rust belt, michigan, ohio, wisconsin, those are people who are yet to benefit from that huge increase in the market, from these kind of policies, if he doesnt make good for that that will be a big problem for him and the republican party. Stewart ed, the president talked about civilians and had guests in the audience. One thing that struck me is out of the four people he talked to, two were africanamericans, talked about, the young woman who had the School Choice and the gentleman whose son was killed by an undocumented person in this country. Donald trump only got eight percent of the africanamerican vote, what was that stagecraft about . Its about improving those numbers. You know, republicans for years have worked at this, believing that, you know, it was jeb bush who used d he would say he quoted ronald reagan, that most americans are conservative, they just dont realize it yet, this is is a Reince Priebus and sean spicer obsessio