about seven different things a day and trying to do it well. i did don t think they will be, i don t think they will be focused on it. and if trump announces next week, it is another line in a of donald trump s political malpractice. and what is clear is 37% of the people in the exit polls who voted tuesday don t approve of this guy. so if the republican party, after just getting almost an historical beat-down, based on expectations and history, in part because of the shadow of trump, if he s going to ascend to the political stage that quickly, you know, i think for democrats, that is a good thing. so i think, you know, biden and the white house, they just have to execute the foreign policy meetings and the trip they re having and not paying too much attention to what is happening back here. i m sure that though donald trump is not going to listen to anybody, and i m sure from lindsey graham on down, they are
we could be back to fire and fury. it has lowered the temperature. this has the add benefit of being a very big story at a time when the stormy daniels story was really gaining steam. and also it gives justification for the argument that the trump team has been making about why he can t testify in the russia investigation as well. that he s busy with this foreign policy meetings and endeavours. so in terms of the public piece of this, this is overall, a good thing for trump and a good thing for the team. it is a real substantive thing to talk about. if nothing else, it gives them a couple months until this meeting happens or doesn t happen to wade away from other issues. it doesn t mean stormy daniels
sisi. so how is it possible that this low-level volunteer is setting up these major foreign policy meetings? well, to your point on what stands out to you sort of stands out to me in sort of the same way. in that it shows how sort of loose the campaign was. how unprofessional it was. and how unpolished it was. it wasn t like sort of any other normal campaign that any political reporter that has done this for years and years and years has ever seen. and that s part because we he was a populist. he wasn t someone who sort of ever had political experience in terms of running. so, you know, it seems like he kept sort of piecing people together. and i shouldn t even say trump. because we don t know who started to pull all the people together to be part of the campaign. but there seems to be a loose association with a number of
and the foreign policy front. and robert, you go back a bit with donald trump and this campaign. the axe i don t mean at the time in the early days was all the best people were gone. they were spoken for. they were hired. so a lot of the outer rings of the foreign policy intelligencea weren t there. is that when the kind of russian cracks and fiz urs started appearing and this started seeping into the trump circle? that s exactly right, brian. i remember if the spring of 2016 i went to the trump hotel, still unfinished trump hotel in washington with my colleague bob woodward at the washington post to interview then candidate trump and we encountered one of these foreign policy meetings. all these different figures, sam clovis and others around the table meeting with the candidate in kind of a ram shod way. it wasn t a formal meeting that you would expect out of a presidential campaign and people
appearing and this started seeping into the trump circle? that s exactly right, brian. i remember in the spring of 2016, i went to the trump hotel, still unfinished trump hotel in washington with bob woodward to interview then candidate trump and we encountered one of these foreign policy meetings. sam clovis and others around the table meeting with the candidate, in kind of a ramshod way. it wasn t a formal meeting that you would expect out of a presidential campaign. people like carter page and sam clovis were not part of that beating heart of the foreign policy establishment in washington. that s not any excuse, this was a major presidential campaign. at the same time it was evident to me as a reporter that these were people who were operating on their own islands, sometimes in coordination with the campaign, sometimes on their own, and they were not the people you would really find as a reporter on foreign policy in washington. i just think people forget the genesis of that and