part of the tweet that donald trump wants people to read? right. i mean, he s not putting that there to say look at the back half of the tweet. that is the part he wants read. i ve been watching your show all morning. i haven t heard you talk about president obama saying we could destroy north korea. that s because that s not the imminent situation, okay? and i don t know where you want to talk about logic hold on a second, richard. you talked plenty. the idea of bringing up what a past president said when you re dealing with an imminent and breaking situation is silly. you don t do that. you deal with what s on the table before you right now. and we both know you may choose to ignore it willfully, but we both know that president trump uses inflammatory language on purpose. he sees it as a show of strength. so to say that every part of the tweet must be weighed equally is naive at best and misleading at
so a very measured suggestion there, richard. and i think, margaret, a lot of people in the trump administration should share this, maybe you can t tell it from president trump s rhetoric, but when you have him going from fire and fury to then locked and loaded, is he taking some of that diplomatic possibilities off the table? does he either get himself into a situation where he s going to look weak, or into a situation where he feels like he has to take action that could end in something that is ultimately catastrophic? you know, brianna, this is going to sound counterintuitive because when i saw the latest tweet i thought, whoa, but there s another way to read it too which is he s still saying the u.s. is ready to act if north korea does something unwise. so the president is not talking about initiating action at this point. the president is talking about the possibility of responding to action, and that is really important. and when you talk across the administration to a spectr
here. we are where we are with a very serious situation because we ve had a failed policy. so what washington needs to focus on is policy. we need to focus less on the rhetoric. the rhetoric did not get us here. my whole point in bringing up president obama s rhetoric is to show that even tough rhetoric from a different person is absolutely not working. the policy is not working. uh-huh. understood. richard, thank you very much. chris cillizza, margaret talev, appreciate it. so a little bit of this no matter how you feel about it does come down to the central issue of approach and the president s approach is different than what we ve seen in the past. even if president obama said he could destroy it, it wasn t a constant narrative of threat in response to threat. so is this the best way to go? we have a republican senator from the foreign relations committee with his take next.
differently? maybe he s doing all three, but helps you to understand what the risk and reward calculus is. and because north korea s so unpredictable, it s that in addition to the president s unpredictability that s making the world very uncomfortable. but i think underlying all of this you have got now a serious and very engaged set of discussions involving not just the president up at bedminster, you have the secretary of state, u.n. security advisor, ambassador nikki haley coming to meet with the president today, probably a lot of people wish it were earlier today, but she is talking to u.s. allies and not always allies but partners in this all over the world. there is a real concerted effort underneath the rhetoric to try to get a handle on the situation and to try to exercise all of those diplomatic and military kind of considerations that we re talking about. also, richard, what s your take on this, the president is using different language than
i guess i disagree obviously. but i do think you have to look at the fact that not every person is going to read every word of that particularly given what donald trump has said fire and fury and that sort of thing. don t disagree with you about rhetoric and donald trump wanting to being elected to talk differently, as i said. but i do think that you to assume that everyone around the world is going to read that entire thing, we just showed it again, to assume everyone around the world is going to read the entire thing doesn t have to do with me. i think misunderstands the way in which rhetoric and words matter. look, what i hear you saying is people are only reading half a tweet. and i find that to be crazy. i find that to be what politics and political people in washington, d.c. try to do when they re partisan. this is a serious policy. wait, richard, isn t that the