here at the white house where the briefings have been not televised or at least not televised as regularly as they used to be. so it s a huge cause of concern for the press and the journalists that my association, our association, represents. and we re working hard every day to push for that to change. matt schlap, you re the president of the american conservative union. a lot of people are wondering, if president obama during his eight years in the white house had tweeted these kinds of attacks on conservative news outlets, a lot of people would have been outraged in the conservative movement. what do you think about the way president trump is dealing with the mainstream news media thus far? president obama wasn t that kind to some of your competitors and kind of froze them out for a period of time. i think what ari fleisher and michael curry said in their letters rings very true to what my point of view is. that is that the white house administration gets to set the rules as to h
alliances between the west and the arab and muslim worlds in fighting terrorism. this is not somebody who has come to the place of what i would say is a fairly consistent at least on a rhetorical message from bush and obama. i think what i m getting at is i think absolutely you cannot fight terrorism and isis and all without having alliances. but i think that what i m really driving at here is that when a hillary clinton or barack obama did dha, he attacked them. i think a lot of the more than public needs to understand that he s doing what he attacked others for doing, and they did it, and he s doing it maybe for the right reasons, but he really took them to task for doing exactly what he appears to be inching toward doing. yeah. i think there are two things at
i don t want to get into a debate on that. i think president obama was verbal about dealing with some of the progress he wanted to see made about human rights and about challenging that that move forward. that is totally absent so far from what we re seeing in the prepared remarks of president trump. well, yes, but at the end of the day you have to look at what he did also. since you raised it, let s give the whole contrast. but give me enlighten me on mr. trump and his relationship to saudi arabia. well, i will. there is actually a zero business relationship between president trump and saudi arabia. rumors came out of companies in the campaign, but then it was shown that those companies were never established in saudi arab arabia. he has no investments or hotels or anything whatsoever in saudi
was some business interest. what can you shed light on for us about precampaign trump in saudi? okay. if you can just permit me to make a comment on the previous segment. you know, president obama visited saudi arabia four times duringis presidency. sold saudi arabia $115 million worth of arms. he would not have done that if he didn t think saudi arabia wasn t make progress in the area of human rights. president obama wasn t stupid. he could see things clearly. the big difference between saudi arabia and president obama was in his attitude to iran. because saudi arabia found president obama to be somewhat naive inover lo overlooking nef activities around the middle east in his quest to sign
overlook the fact that in many cases you behave just as badly as some of the elements, not all, but some of the elements that we are united against? isn t that really the height of hypocrisy, and setting a different standard in how we deal with international partners? it certainly is a major break from the obama administration where human rights were really part of the basket or one of the baskets of things that american diplomats talked about for years. i think it s a break from the george w. bush administration where human rights was discussed and often a priority. depending on the country that you re dealing with, and the politics on the ground. at the same time, the it s not terribly shocking. the policy regardless of the rhetoric has been pretty consistent with saudi arabia. i think donald trump on the campaign trail talked about human rights because he felt like there was an opportunity to