and congress during the trump administration this is from the annual political summit in colorado springs earlier this month, with bill kristol and fred barnes. >> thanks, steve, it's great to be with you again here. the weather has been wonderful so far. trump,nel is on donald washington, the swamp, chaos, kind of an easy way into a more weighty of policy matters later on. these are reporters who can give you an idea of what it's like to cover donald trump's washington. steve set up this panel mostly to make fred and me feel old. [laughter]

it is bad enough that some of them haven't been born yet when i came to washington. [laughter] it would be wrong to feel sorry for myself or for fred. one of the great things about the standard over the years is that we really worked hard to help in young people and them get going and i think it has kept the magazine fresh with new voices. and a new perspectives. kaylee, john,have and mike on this panel. they don't really know anything, they are so young, but nonetheless they will have something important to say. [laughter] like, coveringt

-- i think it would be interesting to people, the way i would frank -- frame the macro question, trump's white house is different from a traditional one. how much difference does that know above the feature? is it tied to the surface? things that juggle on and get done? does the chaos overwhelmed things? the truth is probably some of each. congress, haley and john particular have covered it a lot in the week in the half. republican congress, republican president, first time in over a decade. how's that working? upn mccormack has a piece this morning, a really terrific piece breaking news on a trumped decision to partly defund planned parenthood. you catch that story? tell us about the trump administration.

can't reveal my confidential sources, but a trusted source confirmed for me yesterday that this was going to happen, the president was going to make it a high priority for the pro-life movement. not defunding planned parenthood entirely, but that set up last year, what it shows along with ae embassy move is legislative agenda for the republican congress and president trump, that's pretty much done. and they revealed the individual mandate, opening up energy drilling. to defund obamacare, that's for a few different reasons. stillin the senate are the rules, you have to get 60 votes to pass most angst. they've got these arcane processes to pass legislation with a simple majority of 50 failed to reach consensus on stuff like obamacare, but this is still an important move by the president.

it is somewhat symbolic and the fact that it is only targeting a certain percentage of funding that you can get through executive action. but i think that the symbolism is important. if you keep telling people on campaigning a defunding planned parenthood and remove -- removing obamacare, you tell people that for years and years and you don't do it at all? it brings a lot of cynicism. representativec of a win for conservatives. from the whiteen house or in hhs regulation? it is in hhs regulation. there was debate inside of the white house. you won't be surprised to hear that the ivanka trump, the president's more liberal advisor and daughter was skeptical in worried about this move, but ultimately the other day the other voices surrounding the president and the president

himself made the decision to take this move. bill: we were talking about this before, how much it is interesting, everyone is focused much on trump personally in the white house, there's a huge administration out there with cabinet secretaries and agencies and a lock it's done there that we don't pay much attention to. ahead on taxas way reform. paul ryan, i forget when his bill was initially drawn up, but it has been several years. they were ahead there. is differentse because trump is different and because he is the first genuine outsider to be elected president and the result was that when he arrived in the white house, he didn't know anybody. he didn't know republicans all around the country, people who had worked in earlier administrations. the othersh or any of 60 or 70 republican candidates

who had one the election and who new people. they knew who they wanted. trump didn't. it's diminishing somewhat now, but this created chaos in the white house. who trump picked initially for the big four jobs in the cabinet. the defense, treasury, attorney , how could i forget? trump picked steve mnuchin to be the treasury secretary because he knew him and at work on the campaign. picked jeff sessions, who he is somewhat satisfied with now, but he was the first senator to endorse him and didn't know him well. he picked the first guy he like for the state department.

that didn't work for a well. >> what's his name. [laughter] rex what's his name. [laughter] and trump didn't know what to instruct him how to do. he picked his defense secretary , he didn't know anybody for the job except someone he had seen on television a lot and liked. he would have been a good defense secretary. jack king, excellently. trump you wouldn't take a job and instead, he recommended his friend, jim mattis, another general. jim mattis one of getting the job. that was in the beginning.

now he has gotten to know people better. or some. so that he can pick people for the top job. for state, now, he has picked a guy he didn't know before. pompeo. when he got to know them as the head of the cia, he would come in often to give him a daily report on what was going on around the world. so, he knows him and trust him now, he put him in the state department. so, there's not much chaos in the cabinet. there was much chaos in the white house. because trump had -- i don't think that he -- might warrant can answer this, but i bet most of the people, a high percentage of the people that work in the trump dide for trump, not know them beforehand and still might not know that now.

hase is chaos there, which led to what is in his eyes, i'm not trying to dump on trump, i think he's done a very good job policy wise and getting things past that are important, but on the other hand leaking to the degree that goes on in the white greaterday is so much than i've ever seen before, and i've covered the white house back to gerald ford. a very nice man, by the way. bush 41. worked in there were some leaking, but nothing like this. when there is this much leaking, it is poison. trump says he's going to stop it. other presidents when there was less leaking so that they would stop it. they all failed and i am afraid that trump will, too.

? white house watch? >> it's why i look so tired and exhausted. >> how much did they stab each other in the back? why is there so little discipline? >> that's sort of the big question for the trump white house. not the administration and the way that it works. there is something that i heard a lot, particularly in the beginning of the white house when i first started covering in january and march. for a lot of people, this sentiment that i heard from one , i've beensource asking the question of what the policy will be on this or where we will move or go on this particular policy move. this person would say -- well, we are planning on doing this. we talked about this in this meeting and with this president, quoting "you never know."

this is a senior official at the time at the white house. working closely with the president. this was a common refrain and something that you still here. nobody now really knows what the president is really thinking. partnk that that is in what has sort of engendered a sense of chaos within the white house. without that clear sense among the staff and the advisors of whose job it is to provide the president with options to move forward on the president's has createdat that an environment that allows for people to jockey for position to get there preferred policy goal to the president. how do you do that? you do it by working through the media.

the president is, unlike his amediate two predecessors, is voracious consumer of media, obviously television but he obviously the -- he also gets printouts of articles, most of which are favorable to him, brought to him, and he is of course on twitter. media is the way that the president sort of consumes information and that is sort of the way that people try to reach him. that is a problem, i think, it has created, or exacerbated what has already there, a lot of divisions within the white house. that he had nobody to staff is white house. reince priebus, his first chief of staff rnc chairman, so a lot of rnc people were brought in very early on to the white house . a lot of rnc people who were not really fans of trump.

including there was one particular press secretary who was i think let go from the trump campaign who had been farmed out from the rnc during the campaign because he had been disparaging trump during the general election and suddenly people were surprised to see that he had a spot there but there was no one us to fill them. he's had a problem with personnel and he has had a problem with people having a peoplent idea of what think that trumpism or the trump agenda should be. at the beginning it was the reince previous versus state steve bannon versus jared , but then reince previous and steve bannon had a pact, supposedly, trying to stop jerrod and ivanka. all the stuff the sort of here about, it's all true. that's what makes it so unusual and hard to cover, because you are never quite sure, if i'm

talking to sources or whatever, you may not be accurately reflecting what is actually happening, what the president is actually thinking. the other thing i will say about this, you and i talked about this when i first started covering the white house, you i said when you covered the white house that your job was to figure out what the president was thinking and what the president was saying in these important decision-making .eetings one of the best things that you wrote was about reagan coming back on the plane from reykjavik , having left gorbachev and sort of getting inside what was going on on air force one, what people were talking about. with president trump there is no mystery about what he is thinking or saying, he says it all the time. does anyone here think they don't know what he's thinking at

any given moment? just log onto your computer. turn on the cable news. that has presented a lot of challenges. with the white house getting out of its own way to get something done. what isnk that striking, again, this is probably my more traditional view with three national security adviser's and two chiefs of staff, it's probably with abandon, the top strategist getting fired and leaving, it is sort of unusual, but sometimes the white house can have a real shakedown in the first year or two, but i'm not a fan of trump and maybe you can make the case , empirically, the chaos it doesn't matter that much. then he makes the right decisions to mobilize the public through twitter after fox news and through different nontraditional media, i spoke with someone the other day about

the iran deal, when trump got 50 of it, it it must've been articles against the deal and those defending it were prominent in the opposition and i remember several people at big think tanks, foreign policy tanks, pretty prominent kinds of people who would get on tv and write an op-ed -- did you get a heads up or a briefing? beforeng the day explaining what they would do? which is totally typical, routine white house stuff, no, no one knew what trump was going to do to get out of it or what the strategy going forward for dealing with the europeans was. i'm not sure that people fully know now. maybe it's not that much, honestly. maybe they will just kind of blow through these traditional kinds of people in at 10 a.m. for the meeting in the roosevelt room with 15 foreign policy big shots. at 11 a.m., all of that struck

-- that stuff that they are used to, maybe it doesn't matter much or maybe it does. that's the big question, i suppose. >> i'm always trying to figure out when trump does something, trump is the only president who would do this and the others wouldn't do it? i think other republican presidents, if they were in the white house would -- would on the paris accords, that's ridiculous, the environmental tong that obama promised spend an inordinate amount of american dollars on while the other countries didn't? in any case, what other presidents have gotten out of the paris accord, i'm not so sure of that, but others had declare that they would get out of the iran deal. ted cruz, he was going to rivet up on the first day. but there are a lot of things that trump has done that i think only he would do.

>> besides the jerusalem embassy, that's a pretty obvious one. what else besides that? i think that most of trump's victory's have been generic republican victories. credit for being there, but he got victories based on what congressional republicans brought. >> certainly there is saber rattling towards north korea, something that no other president has done. they have worked up to where we are now. i'm not sure that's where we are now. outsider in that thing. all of those presidential candidates and president said that they would move the embassy . trump did, too, he actually did it. >> haley, so quiet here, she covers congress mostly and is a well-known figure stalking these congressmen, senators raeburn, longworth, all the house and

senate office buildings, what's it like to cover it? what have you learned? haley: it was a lot more chaotic in the first year. now that they are not doing as much trying to pass major pieces of legislation, it's not as chaotic. mike mentioned something that was especially relevant went trump interacts with congress. if trump doesn't know his own policy positions on a lot of issues -- there are key issues like he's determined to do, like butborder wall and trade, obamacare repeal, things like that, he didn't really know the policy details well enough to command a republican conference in the house and sometimes he would just sort of tweet out his ideas and thoughts and it would be completely contrary to what republican leadership was telling members. recently they tried to past a short-term spending bill that included chip funding in it and trump did a tweet like -- i

guess he was watching cable news. bill: say what chip is. children's health insurance program and republicans allowed the funding for it to collapse in the fall and they were using it as a bargaining thing to get support when they were passing the short-term spending bill. they were passing a six-year reauthorization of that bill and trump had seen on television a democrat arguing against this strategy because democrats wanted it cannot be connected to the cr and the president we did something completely incorrect about what the bill was, saying that we shouldn't reauthorize this for a short-term thing, it should be separate. was that incorrect, but it differed with what the republican party was doing in congress. he did the same thing with fisa reauthorization. he caused a lot of chaos and confusion when he does these things. been a lot of contention

within the republican conference trying to figure out where the president stands and how we align with that and how we link his values and incorporate those into legislation. >> what about the numbers? >> they do say. it depends on the member. they are frustrated with the lack of policy coherence from the white house. the meeting that they have on a similar one on gun control, where the president would sit there with a group of lawmakers and just sort of go from end to end of the policy spectrum. throwing republicans into a panic. endorsing taking away guns before endorsing due process. it's just a situation in which republicans are uncertain of what he's going to say and what he's going to do. they don't enjoy that.

on the record they say that they like him. some of them do. like kevin mccarthy, you know, has fostered that relationship with president trump. others agree with him on a lot of issues, like the populist section of the republican party agrees with him . but maybe not on trade or immigration. they see issues there in the white house for sure. like something where trump is consistent on his policy views, ,n example bringing that chaos it was last summer or last fall, it happened last summer regarding the iran deal. we know that president trump said during the campaign that he was going to get rid of the iran deal. he did fulfill that promise. that is only kind of where he

has been very consistent with that being his view. there was a problem in getting rid of the iran deal. it was sort of a mechanism that they brought up in which president obama got the iran deal through whereby president obama basically had a review of it every 90 days or so. the president has to make a decision every 90 days about whether to recertify the compliance. he did it sort of for real in .is first step then the next 90 days rolled around and the president was of the position that he should not recertify that, that iran might be in technical compliance with this terrible deal but they were

a bad actor and causing all sorts of chaos in the middle and it is iran and the nuclear deal was a terrible deal and we should just get rid of it. they were very consistent on that. advisors like the secretary of jime, rex tillerson, mattis, urged them to keep recertify in. i think that what they were trying to do was keep them from giving out on the deal. but the president was unwilling to do this and was convinced, i think, in june of 2017 to do it again, to stave off another deadline. this is what steve and i were that he hadorting made the decision and was going to recertify against his gut instinct. so, we got that. email on a monday morning and the decision was the day of the deadline that said we were going to get a briefing

from reporters on the president's decision and we knew what it was going to be. and then all of a sudden a briefing got pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. finally we got the briefing like two hours later the confirmed what we knew he was going to say in the deal and recertify. what we later found out from a reporter was that for about three hours, trump had changed his mind and had read an article by john bolton that someone had given to him that said -- mr. president, we have got to get out of this deal and he said -- you know, to help with the plans, we are not going to recertify. the white house had scramble, change the talking points, rewrite the talking points, saying that they weren't going to recertify, everyone scrambling in the aids eventually prevailed on him on that and got him to reverse the reversal of his decision. it's kind of an example of how the president's sort of gut

feeling on these things, he eventually wins out and has been aetty consistent, it's just matter of his staff and sometimes his advisers pushing him and they direction that they want him to go rather than where he really ends up going. the press close to write stories about how trump is going to do something that his aides don't want him to do. the washington post is indignant about that. how dare he defy his aides? washington doesn't like trump. they have never seen anything like him before. they particularly don't like that he has turned out to be a lot more conservative than at least i had any reason to believe beforehand. bill: one last question for fred and then we can come to .uestions from you mitch mcconnell, you are pretty close to him and have been over

the years. you could make the case, given the margins in the senate, given the chaos in the white house to some degree that mcconnell has, given that trump doesn't like mcconnell much and attacks him occasionally and trump supporters spend a lot of time dumping on mcconnell as part of the washington establishment, he has gotten a lot done as majority leader the senate on things that matter a lot, the tax bill, after all of these judicial nominations, it seems to me that people might not like an unheralded success story of the last year and a half? really think so. there have been some important things that have been done and one of them was, of course, the employment of what was it, 20 some federal appeals court judges. the ones in the second-tier, a lot of them audition in for the supreme court, or at least they

hope they are and he has done an incredible job in alliance with the white house to get them all past and has said that everyone who has reported out by the judiciary committee will make sure that they get confirmed. judges have court been flipped to become a more republican oriented now and it has been remarkable how he has a very fine touch. he generally ignores the tweets of trump. i do give trump credit on judges. he has to appoint them in the first place. trump has not tweeted on judges at all, a think. when he tweets it causes trouble and dissent, anger and so on. is.p knows how important he it was also true, john, and you can correct me on this on tax

reform. i don't think that he tweeted much on that, did he? i think that trump's inclination to tweet and when he doesn't, that's significant. and helpful. >> republicans like to credit president trump for helping them pass the tax bill and what they mean by that is that he didn't tweet during the legislation. [laughter] bill: let me ask some of these questions, there are a couple of that one's right off the top. everyone says that there wouldn't be much legislation this year, i guess that's probably true. there could be a supreme court appointment. what could happen for the rest of the critique important? lacks some moderate republicans and democrats are trying to force a debate in the house. speaker ryan has told them they might get a vote and they have a

lot of signatures on the discharge position. i need to check the news on this but right now they are trying to negotiate a deal where maybe they can get some folks on different pieces of legislation in exchange for support on the arm bill, which is supposed to come up for a vote soon. it's really up in the air right now. a lot of republicans would like to do something on immigration before the midterm election. >> retirement would be the biggest news of the year. call around washington, the ec to plugged in legal types who have talked to his former clerks about how it's all speculating and how it's all 6040. but at the end of the day you are speculating. ruth bader ginsburg, a left-wing ideologue, chose to stay on the bench at 83, even though she could have had obama and a democratic senator replacer because she liked the job. you never know.

>> you could have an interesting fight on immigration reform. especially daca. or obamacare if you are in the house. that's one of the things i wouldn't have predicted. they got a pretty big tax reform but almost nothing on obamacare, right? that's interesting. >> well, they got the individual mandate kicked out, but that happened in the senate. that was tom cotton's idea. he sold it to mitch mcconnell and it was gone. it was something that could not possibly happen and it did. putink that that has really obamacare on a pretty short road to collapse. >> no progress on entitlement reform. i saw that senator corker was reported today to have asked about the debt and it was a big republican talking point after

obama, going up safed -- faster now. are at the top of the business cycle, presumably. sort of legitimizing spending. no one cares about that at all. he said that beyond that, there's no entitlement reform at all. >> the individual mandate was an important part of obamacare but when it collapsed that meant the people that don't have insurance paid for by employers see premiums go up. if you tell someone in the individual market the you got a tax cut and they reply but yeah, my premium just want up $3000, you can blame obama for passing the law in the first placement at the end of the day bearlicans and congress responsibility for failing to fix things. >> that could be hard going into the election. >> there will also be no infrastructure bill.

>> i believe that they did think that. probably with no new nafta deal. >> entree do you think that trump will ultimately, anyone here, approach? will we have serious changes in trade policy? with the structure that we had? >> i don't know. nobody knows. closely, follow this they follow the minutia of what mexico wants, what canada wants. that trump is staying firm. senate,arly in the trump has threatened pullout of nafta unilaterally. there would be a lot of outcry from republicans in the senate. much more pro-trade.

i find it hard to believe that hewould do that, because would get so much pushback from republicans in the senate. >> it could be that the next six months will be very foreign policy heavy. north korea, there will or won't or won't be we will excessively credulous, but kim jong-un or trump's friend's may produce something good. the iran deal, it's unclear how that plays out with the europeans. isis, iraq syria, there are a million issues there, something that we will talk about later, it is not in great shape, i'm afraid. you could have a pretty foreign policy heavy 2000 18. but that is more of a white house run. steve hayes and i know this quite well, a congressman from campus -- kansas, very thoughtful, graduated first in his class in the mid 80's and

then was a successful businessman, very, very impressive guy. i saw him at the agency, the cia , mid summer of 2018, i went there for breakfast, he went in -- let me in, they didn't waterboard me or anything. trump's security is falling apart at the cia. pompeo is a thoughtful guy. more than anyone else, i would say, he figured out how to get along with trump, to work on things for trump in ways that he appreciated, didn't test his patients and so forth. mcmaster is a wonderful man, in my opinion, and i'm worry that his departure from the national security adviser job, we will pay more of a price for that than we think. whatever, trump didn't like the things, he presented fairly lengthy, kind of detailed, almost scholarly, memos and briefings. pompeo without dumbing stuff down was able to convey this

stuff to trump in the way that trump like. this has been true of all white houses, the president's daily intelligence briefing comes first. the vice president gets the same briefing. the chief of staff asks security advisers to step in. at the cia comes over to simply give it a team of people who give that presidential daily brief. occasionally the deputy director comes over if there is some big news. having the director himself come over, briefing the president on what was going on around the world. that was the day when i worked for vice president oil. we had the senior staff meeting and then i went to destroy the withnt to discuss that what was going on in the world. trump gets up and i think he gets up pretty early. he tweets, but he likes to watch fox and friends, so he doesn't

like to have his cia briefing, so he has his cia briefing at 11:30 in the morning. which is fine, the world is not running on american eastern standard time, it probably doesn't change things. record, a bay of comey that his whole day was like -- he has to go over to the white house and there is a lot of traffic around 10:30 from langley to the white house. trump only likes to have pompeo or gina haspel, now confirmed as cia director, he only likes the director or the deputy director to brief him. he didn't think it was appropriate that some staff are he had never heard of brief the president. the whole schedule that they worked on, kind of a classic washington thing, they had been on a certain schedule for decades and some people got in very early to do the president's daily brief at 4 a.m., there was a whole kind of system set up that got overturned.

but it doesn't mean it's not working perfectly well. pompeo will be an important figure, i think. up trade.a huge bolton for mcmaster, more complicated. contributed to "the weekly standard many times, but national security adviser is a tough job, i would say, especially managing the relationships of the defense department. that will be an important job for the next few months. anything else we're not thinking of, coming up in the next few months? >> are you asking me? .> at a no, i'm just thinking >> i think that john was basically right. they have got their big things more quickly and easily than it looked like it was going to happen. look at the obama administration. obama was there for eight years and have these great democratic

majorities in the first two years and then you have the 2010 republicans had 63 he seats in the house and so on. years, obamae faced the republican house and ultimately gave up on doing anything with republicans in congress. he didn't want to compromise. he didn't want to see him much. as little as possible. remember, he was going to do everything unpadded paper and so on and he did. of these things by executive order and i give the trump administration credit for nullifying those things. you can nullify an executive order and it was a huge mistake by obama, and he admits to know mistakes, but it has allowed a

republican administration to wipe out so much of what obama did. >> i have got a couple of questions that have been put together in this way, but how much has the character of the republican party been changed by trump? how much is trump in normalized by the republican party? debt and government spending does not need to be a big part of trump's thoughts. it was never popular and never going anywhere. they kind of left that aside but it is kind of unbelievable that was made, whose name with entitlement reform, courageously beating republicans to embrace something politically different -- but if a difficult is just gone. and how much is the america first replaced by traditional

reagan-bush mccain internationalism. do you all have a sense of that a few years out? are we looking at a very different republican party and conservative movement because of trump? or less different than we would have thought? >> the 2020 election will determine a lot of that. if trump wins reelection. and depending on what he really pursues on trade and foreign policy. in some ways he has been brought to heel to a more traditional foreign policy. take afghanistan, for instance. this is something that he was adamantly opposed to keeping troops there. here had been convinced otherwise by more traditional republican foreign-policy national security figures. that on trade, for instance, on thermly sort of

extreme side from where the republican party has been for a long time. there is still a real group in the senate, mostly, a pro-free-trade republicans. you cannot get anything done on trade, i think that probably stays the same and the party. that i think it will be determined by trump's successes on pushing actual sort of -- i gets a problem, i think, with some of his efforts, say, on immigration, which have been done through executive order and .ot codified into law it's a lot more difficult to codify into law. just as we have seen trump undo a lot of what president obama did, it's very likely that there will be a democratic president sometime in the future that could well undo all of that if you cannot get it through congress. of course, if he wins reelection

, it's a lot harder to undo those things, as we are finding, say with obama care. bill: republicans on the hill, traditional or republican trump? really weally he has shaped things. allegations of affairs and foreign stars who have slept with the present. i have had memories of congress say -- i don't care, who cares about this. any unimaginable under other administration. if it were a democrat republicans would be up in arms about this. on that level especially i have seen a lot of changes in the values of the republican party. >> if they hadn't endorsed adultery. i think that that is peculiar to trump. we haven't had other republican who have specialized in such moral hijinks as trump of four and i suspect we won't again.

i don't think it changes the republican party. trump has adopted the republican domestic agenda, except for smaller government, but other republicans are talking about that -- are not talking about that either. trade,ference is, particularly with nafta, nafta was a good treaty. they are trying to get a new one. i'm afraid they could screw that up. china is the one thing that steve bannon was right about. really -- they had so many different trade barriers, the u.s. does get a bad deal on it, but the chinese are not going to -- they are not going to give away anything easily. but trump is right. read these things about

foreign policy, about the europeans, them really standing up to trump. no they aren't. they are not going to stand up to trump. they will find a way to deal with him. a --uropeans have done what have they done? i don't want to get them too much credit. >> john? >> in terms of policy i think the republican party has changed trump more than trump has changed the party. look to theto future, immigration, seeing it how that is set aside by someone heterodoxy, i think the long-term question is -- is there a coalition of voters? you are need to read this issue of the weekly standard. typically, trump, his supporters over 65 say that we lost that

character fight with bill clinton, focus on policy and voters under the age of 40 are pretty appalled by the erratic temperament and moral character and are fleeing the party. going to happen in 2018 and 2020? because wenapback are so polarized over policy and eventually people, the parties will reshape? i don't know, we don't know how it's going to go. is not really were most voters decide where to go or how to vote. something they took a good look at in the piece, the party that ,ou affiliate yourself with stating their values, on policy, i think that for young people, this is certainly true and maybe we will address it on the next anil, these moral questions about trump and about lying as

well, they have an impact on the sorthat young people were of coming up into politics and society sort of fresh and looking for direction, it turns them away, it turns them off. that has sort of implications beyond whatever the tax policy is today. they could always change that with the new president, a new congress. the longer-term product -- problems are something that are not necessarily -- i do think the republican party has internalized that, the effects that trump will have on them in that regard. on theill discuss that next panel. immigration would be a very good one for the generation gap to appear. that is why i think that trump on daca and the kids could go

liberal and cut a deal. >> the democrats, the democratic resistance is about not cutting any deals with trump. >> they are foolish and we will talk about that in the next anil. the democrats get a say to, here, how crazy do they go and other a clever in triangulating or do they just go? >> triangulation, that's one place were trump would have made a deal. he would have given anything for the wall. clean amnesty for kids who came here as kids, democrats would have given them that. then he said no. >> chain migration. >> we had to curtail chain migration. this is a bigger immigration hawk priority. a closer advisor to trump convinced him on trump policy that it was a poison pill. i'm not to pass judgment. >> i'm willing to. [laughter] on that note, it's 9:45.

let's stop here. this will segue nicely into the future of the conservative movement on our next panel. thanks. [applause] >> i don't think there's ever going to be a wall that this -- that -- is part of a bath forum today on the role of social media in dimock see. live coverage begins at noon eastern, here on c-span on her website and on the c-span radio app. commencement speeches all this at 8 p.m.ime time eastern, the apple ceo, tim cook, the governor john kasich, kate brown, and luis gutierrez. friday at 8 p.m. eastern, jimmy carter, betsy devos, mark meadows, and atlanta mayor keisha bottoms.