Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: But first to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome to both of you.

Where to begin? I guess we start with, David, how much the president, over the last few days, seems to be trying to roll back the legacy of his predecessor, President Obama.

Today and yesterday, the moves of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, the Iran nuclear deal. We have just been listening to that. The Power Plan, which he has said he’s not going to support those regulations. He’s going to completely undo them.

Can he undo the Obama legacy?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Well, a lot of it — these are all campaign promises. This is what he was elected on.

I’m struck by a couple of things. First, he’s more aggressive than just about anybody else in the administration. Whenever you hear about what’s happening in the administration, it’s always other people trying to restrain him. The Republican Party has no great clamoring to reverse the Iran deal.

A lot of them opposed them at the time, but most of them, even very hawkish people, have said there is no use in going backwards, let’s go forwards. And so on that, he’s pushing harder. On North Korea, he’s more aggressive than just about anybody else in the administration.

So if you’re looking to see a chastened Donald Trump, you’re seeing quite the reverse in the last couple of weeks.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you think, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: What do I think, Judy?

I think that the results of the Alabama primary, where Donald Trump was on the losing side with Luther Strange, and Steve Bannon was on the winning side with Roy Moore, are still coming in.

Donald Trump since then has returned to the promises he made, to the applause lines he got, and the health care being a perfect example of it. You know, there is no replace. I mean, so, the fantasy that there was a Republican health plan has been totally exposed and exploded, and Donald Trump gave the final lie to that.

All he wants to do now is to destroy and dismantle that which was what he can’t — Sam Rayburn once said, any jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a good carpenter to build one.

And so they’re just about — that’s what they’re about, is dismantling.

When Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, a decorated Marine combat veteran, said that the Iranian deal, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, is in the national security interests of the United States of America, and Donald Trump, you know, gives some cockamamie explanation, is going to change it to — you know, he’s going to be playing right into the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I would just say, it’s not like — we hear dismantle, dismantle, dismantle, and you think it’s just an act of destruction.

That was my first impulse, but then, when you actually begin to look more into actually what they’re doing, it’s a little more complicated than that. So, the Iranian deal, there are two pieces of it. And the last discussion just reflected it very well, that the Iranians are keeping the nuclear piece, but there was a hope which President Obama expressed often that it would welcome Iran into the community of nations.

On the contrary, they are behaving worse and using the money we gave them to arm terrorists around the world. So Donald Trump and his policy are completely right to recognize that second piece takes a looking at.

On health care, they are dismantling it. There will be a period of disruption. But what was interesting to me about the CBO analysis of what they’re doing, after this period of disruption, there will be more people insured, not less. So it won’t look like Obamacare, but as the markets respond, there is a possibility that more people will be insured.

And so it’s not a simple, oh, we’re just tearing everything apart.

JUDY WOODRUFF: At a higher cost.

DAVID BROOKS: At a higher cost.

MARK SHIELDS: I could not disagree more.

More people will be insured on a cheaper plan. It’s a great plan if you’re healthy and young. Just don’t get sick and need medical treatment.

Donald Trump promised repeatedly during the campaign, including on “60 Minutes,” it would be better, cheaper, wider for everybody. You could keep your doctor. It was going to be better. It was going to happen immediately.

That is untrue. You know, we have been in open collaboration with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Syria, against ISIS. And, you know, when we talk about their money, giving us their — it’s their money that we unfroze.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Iran’s money.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

It wasn’t — we don’t — because I just think you left the impression that we’re somehow writing a check to Iran. Those were the frozen assets of Iran that belong to them.

I’m not defending Iranian policy, but this agreement on nuclear was in the interest of the United States that Iran…

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: Only on PBS do you get ISIS and health care exchanges in the same paragraphs as we talk to each other.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: But, again, I agree — a lot of Donald Trump — let’s start with the health care thing.

Donald Trump oversold what he’s doing. And I don’t agree with that. I think the exchanges were basically a moderate way to expand insurance coverage.

But he does have — I’m just saying he has a philosophical position here. The philosophical position is that a lot of the cross-subsidization involved in these big insurance pools is unfair to a certain set of people who are subsidizing the sicker and the poorer.

And maybe, as a society, we should be doing that as matter of social solidarity. Donald Trump doesn’t think so. And so he’s giving more people, especially small employers, a chance to pool their resources, and create associations, and give people insurance that way.

So it is a vision. It’s not just some nihilistic policy here. There is some sort of vision here, more than one would expect.

JUDY WOODRUFF: There’s a philosophy? You’re saying there’s a governing philosophy behind…

DAVID BROOKS: There’s a governing philosophy.

MARK SHIELDS: David has just done the impossible. He has detected a coherent philosophy in Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has never explained that. Donald Trump has never been able to go before the American people, before the Congress of the United States and say, this is why I’m doing it.

And, David, I give him great credit, the power of perception.

(CROSSTALK)

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, you’re giving David the credit over President Trump.

MARK SHIELDS: David has found in Donald Trump what Donald Trump hadn’t even…

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: I am the Trump whisperer.

MARK SHIELDS: You are. You are it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Let’s talk for a moment about Puerto Rico.

Still a lot of conversation, David, over the last few days about whether the president is singling out Puerto Rico. There were some polls done asking people whether they think the administration, the government has done enough for Puerto Rico, compared to what the government’s done for Texas after Hurricane Harvey, for Florida after Hurricane Irma.

And then we’re showing the numbers, done enough, 36, not done enough, 55 percent.

The message coming through, based on several tweets and comments by the president, is, basically, you know, you, Puerto Rico, you have made this mess. We will do a bit for you, but we’re not going to be around forever.

DAVID BROOKS: Be around forever.

No, there has been a lack of — there was total graciousness toward Texas and graciousness toward Florida, but he’s incapable of showing any compassion and graciousness toward people who are just trying to find drinking water in Puerto Rico.

And so the lesson is the lesson that we’re all going to draw from that, that the people in Puerto Rico don’t look like a lot of people in Texas. And I think that’s probably a pretty fair judgment.

MARK SHIELDS: It’s a harsh judgment, but an accurate judgment.

The difference is 67 electoral votes, 38 electoral votes in Texas, 29 in Florida, none in Puerto Rico.

When Donald Trump went down to Puerto Rico, what was he looking for? To understand what the people are going through, the health and public safety hazard? No. He was fishing for compliments. Did they say we did a good job? Do they say we’re doing a good job?

Thank goodness we have a three-star general now there who is saying, we are here. We are here to help. And we are here for the duration, basically saying that we do have a responsibility to each other, as Americans, as fellow human beings, and the United States government recognizes it.

DAVID BROOKS: A bit a sign that his default position is never compassion and friendship. His default position is attack if you attack me.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And that’s just characterological. And he brings it into the situations where compassion would be 99.9 percent of humanity’s normal response.

MARK SHIELDS: That’s right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of attacks, we haven’t heard as much in the last few days about his back and forth with Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee.

They were going at hammer and tong there for a few days, Mark. But what we are hearing, though — and we don’t know where that is going to end up. But what we are hearing is that Steve Bannon, who was the president’s chief strategist, has now said that it’s his mission to go after virtually every Republican in the Senate to make sure they don’t get reelected.

MARK SHIELDS: Except Ted Cruz.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, except for Ted Cruz, sorry, of Texas.

MARK SHIELDS: Who is…

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that smart for the president to have his good friend Steve Bannon trying to do this? Is it realistic?

MARK SHIELDS: It may very well be realistic, based upon the Alabama returns.

But it’s certainly not helpful if you’re trying to retain a majority to have a divisive and bitter primary for your party’s candidate. But I don’t think it’s any question — and I mentioned Ted Cruz, because the Mercer family, who are funding Steve Bannon, their original presidential candidate was Ted Cruz. So Ted Cruz is exempt from this purge.

But, Judy, Steve Bannon doesn’t have a party. He’s not a Republican. Donald Trump is increasingly a man without a party. So, he has no loyalty to the Republicans. And he’s depending upon them.

As of last night, the Republicans didn’t have the 51 votes needed to adopt a budget next week. If they don’t have the votes for that budget, you can say goodbye to any tax plan, you can say goodbye to any legislative program. The Republicans are going into 2018 without — because they need to pass a budget to meet the Senate rules to pass the Senate tax bill with 51 votes.

And so they are in terrible, terrible shape.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, is the answer, David, to elect more populist Republicans on the Republican line to get the Senate in shape?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, well, I had a chance to talk to Bannon last week.

And he’s thinking on a different time frame than Donald Trump is. He’s thinking in terms of centuries. It’s like talking to Lenin in 1905 or something like that. He is thinking, well, we had the Buchanan moment, the Palin moment. Trump, that’s a moment, but we’re going to have a lot more moments.

And he is thinking 50 years ahead. And it is to take over the Republican Party with populists, and to scare John Barrasso in Wyoming, because he’s like the most normal, safest conservative Republican. And if you can scare even a Barrasso, then you can scare them all.

And so he has got this world historical view stretching out 50 years. I hope he’s wrong, but he might be — he might be right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But what does that mean for right now? Is that a good move for the Republican Party to have this kind of turmoil?

DAVID BROOKS: No, not for Donald Trump in the short term. Bannon is playing a long game, where he thinks, if I can just — he already picked off one. If he can pick of one or two more Republicans that are sitting Republicans, then he will effectively control them all.

MARK SHIELDS: They’re terrified, Judy.

If you’re sitting in a district where the Republican primary voters are 45, 50, 60 percent Trump partisans and zealots, you are scared stiff of alienating in any way Steve Bannon or Donald Trump.

So there’s a paralysis of fear that grips Republicans, especially in the House. You have got a safe Republican district, that means that the majority of voters in your district in the primary are overwhelmingly supporters of President Trump.

DAVID BROOKS: In that way, it sort of is effective for him, because nobody likes — nobody in Congress likes Trump. There is no relationship there.

MARK SHIELDS: None.

DAVID BROOKS: So he governs by fear, and it’s not necessarily fear of Trump, but it’s fear of his base. And that’s how he’s governing.

And maybe the more Roy Moores there are, the more fear that will be, and he will have some party discipline that way.

MARK SHIELDS: I think he’s right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, so we have — wait a minute. You said he’s right? Earlier, you said…

(CROSSTALK)

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: Better than the Nationals.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: We’re in mourning.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you both.

SUBSCRIBE: Get the analysis of Mark Shields and David Brooks delivered to your inbox every week.

The post Shields and Brooks on Trump dismantling Obama’s achievements, Puerto Rico in need appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Gentlemen, welcome.

I was going to go straight to Las Vegas, but, Mark, I am again struck by these moving stories, this last one by William, about people struggling with addiction.

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: No, every one of them, Judy, William tonight, Paul Solman last night, it just — putting a human face on it, not simply the affliction and the problem, but — and the recovery.

The gravity of the problem is driven home to you, but the hope for recovery is presented.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We have a lot of emergencies, I guess, David, to deal with, but this is clearly one.

DAVID BROOKS, New York Times: Yes.

Well, the scene of Roxanne Newman with her date, on the first date, A, the spirit with which she told that story, and then her husband’s grace, her now husband’s grace, it’s remarkable.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And she — her point, which is the one you hear over and over again, is, it’s just a slow-motion form of suicide.

And you have got to see it, first, the heroism of the people who are trying to deal with the recovery, but the social chasm that causes it. Suicide is just a symptom of isolation. And the tearing of the social fabric has created so many problems for society, but this is the one that is the most lethal.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of lethal and social fabric, Mark, Las Vegas has been on all of our minds this week, the worst mass shooting in American history.

What does it say about our country, about the American people?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, it says, again, that we have a problem that the rest off the world doesn’t face, has dealt with in a different way.

And it, quite frankly, Judy, is beyond my comprehension at this point. I mean, we, as a people, if you think about it, over the last generation have made such enormous strides in the changes we have made. For example, alcohol-related driving deaths are down by 85 percent. A generation ago, people took for granted smoking in hospitals, in schools, in offices, in stores.

And we have done — and put seat belts on children; 90 percent of Americans drive with seat belts. And half of those who die are of the 10 percent who don’t wear seat belts.

And we have done it. We have made these changes. We have taken on major economic interests. And this is the one that’s stumped us. And to organize social action and social movement around it, because there are majorities, not intense majorities, but majorities of people who favor measures that have broad backing on registration, on background check.

We do it with automobiles. We do it with every other kind of device. But, somehow, again, we have been stumped. And David has a theory on it, which he wrote about today quite persuasively, which, you know, may very well explain it.

DAVID BROOKS: I always have a theory.

You know, one of the things that struck me about the polling on people’s gun rights or gun control, is that, in 2000, not that long ago, two-thirds of Americans supported gun control, and only 29 percent supported gun rights. Now it’s about 50/50.

And so the gun rights people have just had a massive shift in their direction. And that’s because the issue has now — perfectly mirrors the political divide in this country and the cultural divide between coastal and rural, between more — higher education and lower education, the divide we see on issue after issue.

And it’s become sort of a proxy for the big cultural dispute. And a lot of the people who are trying to resist the post-industrial takeover of the country have seized on guns and immigration and the flag and a few other issues as the issues on which they are going to rally their people.

And there are a lot of those people. One in four households has a gun in this country. And so it’s become a symptom of a larger culture war between some people who thinks it’s horrific, guns, and some people who think it’s a symbol of families being responsible and taking care of themselves, of freedom, and of Americans.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s a reminder of something Barack Obama said.

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: I wouldn’t say cling bitterly, though. No, I think I disagree with that.

They see it as a way that America should be what it should be.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, the debate or the discussion this week, so much of it has turned to guns. Is that the conversation we should be having right now?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, it’s a conversation we have to have, because this man was a one-man artillery.

I mean, he had 12 rifles in his possession in the hotel, in the suite that was comped to him, let it be noted, because he was a major gambler. And that’s what Las Vegas does. If you are going to bet enough at the tables, at video poker, you are going to get a free suite, and then nobody is going to ask questions about you.

But they were fitted out with bump stocks, Judy, which are a little device that turns it essentially into a lethal killing weapon. And that’s all it is, to kill human beings. It’s not for hunting. It’s not for sportsmanship or anything else.

There seems to be an emerging consensus on that that we have to limit those, that they can limit sales. Even the NRA and Republicans have done it.

I hate to sound like a cynic, but these are made in Moran, Texas, by a man who started the company six years ago. They don’t have a political action committee. They don’t have millions of dollars in contributions. And I think it’s a good idea, a positive public policy that they are limited, but he’s not a — you’re not dealing with a political powerhouse when you outlaw his product.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But does it look like — you wrote today, David, the prospects are dim for figuring this gun issue out. But is there any hope?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think they are dim.

We’re in the middle of a renaissance of gun laws in this country — 24 — more than 24 states have passed it, and almost all of them have loosened gun restrictions, not tightened gun restrictions. They have conceal carry and all those kinds of laws.

My own view on the issue is that we should probably pass all the gun control measures that are talked about, whether it’s the gun shows, whether it’s limiting the number you can buy. And, I mean, there’s a list of about 15 programs, smart guns and all that, and most of them would be good.

And I think they would be good because I think they would reduce suicides, which is the really main form of gun death.

Whether they’d prevent these kinds of killings, I guess I’m dubious. Marco Rubio made a statement in the presidential campaign that none of the proposed laws would have prevented any of the recent mass killings. The Washington Post did a big fact-check on that claim, and they said what he said was accurate.

And so I’m for supporting these things. I’m not sure we should get our hopes up they will prevent things. One of the things I have been thinking about if we in the media just stopped talking about these people — this guy seemed to be a — we don’t know what he is.

But a lot of the people who do this, they just want to become famous. They want to prove to the world they exist. And if we anonymize them — and it’s hard to do, because you’re always curious about the people.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Right.

DAVID BROOKS: But if we anonymize them, I think that would — I’m not saying this is a replacement of gun rules, but I’m saying this, to me, is a thing that we can do.

MARK SHIELDS: Judy, two-thirds of all the veterans who commit suicide do so by firearms.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Military veterans.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, military veterans.

And I just think one of the things we have to face is that this is going to require a social movement, just as tobacco did, just as drunk driving has. I mean, it’s going to require a social movement. And it’s going to require the face of people like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, former generals, who have come out for limiting these weapons.

It’s going to require that sort of — that it is a patriotic, that it is a fully red-blooded thing to limit and control.

DAVID BROOKS: I think that’s a crucial point.

Too often, the people who have been the spokesperson for gun control have been Michael Bloomberg and, frankly, Jimmy Kimmel. And I like Michael Bloomberg. I like Jimmy Kimmel’s show. But they shouldn’t be the face, because everybody’s cultural awarenesses get up when it’s a New York mayor or a Hollywood star.

And it has to come from people who own guns in this country.

MARK SHIELDS: That’s right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And you are starting to see some conservatives, some Republicans saying, we need to at least look at this bump fire stocks.

The president, Mark, was out, went to Las Vegas, but also went to Puerto Rico, where we continue to watch very slow progress. Only, what is it, one out of every 10 households has power.

MARK SHIELDS: Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Only half the island has water.

He got into another verbal back-and-forth with the mayor of San Juan.

Separately, we know he’s now very unhappy with his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. There is conflict here and conflict there. What do we make of all this at this point?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, Puerto Rico was a disaster. I mean, what you’re looking for at a time like this is a consoler in chief, a comforter in chief, someone who provides encouragement and hope to people, who rises above, who delivers empathy.

Donald Trump is just not naturally an empathetic person. He just isn’t. He cannot abide criticism. He went after personally the mayor of San Juan, who was sleeping in a cot, while he was sleeping in a country club, and enduring all of the hardship.

And he treated Puerto Ricans, Judy — and I just point out, who are Americans, nine of whom have won the Congressional Medal of Honor in service, 223,000 of whom have served in American wars as American citizens — and he treated them as sort of a foreign soil, that they were not deserving.

And I thought that.

The Tillerson thing is — I don’t think there is any question. I mean, he scolded publicly the chief diplomat of the United States, the secretary of state, for practicing diplomacy, for dealing and trying to defuse a potential nuclear conflagration in Asia and said that you’re wasting your time by doing it.

I don’t know that — this marriage cannot be saved.

JUDY WOODRUFF: This is the third — that’s my question, David. This is a third, I guess, member of his Cabinet he’s been unhappy with. He went ahead and — Tom Price left Health and Human Services.

But we know…

DAVID BROOKS: Friday afternoon…

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: … time for these guys.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s 6:30.

DAVID BROOKS: We’re doing OK so far.

You know, this is totally serious to me. What Donald Trump said today about the calm before the storm, not saying what it’s about, but one has to think North Korea, that’s a chilling statement to make.

And so you’re really looking who — as Bob Corker the senator from Tennessee said this week, who can prevent chaos? And Mattis and Tillerson are the two big ones right now, and John Kelly.

And Tillerson has gotten, to put it kindly, mixed reviews as secretary of state, even if you take Donald Trump away, but he seems to be someone who at least can keep us out of nuclear war.

And so, to me, him resigning, if they could get a John Kelly in there, that might be — that would be good, another protector against chaos. But if Trump picks someone who is an inciter of chaos, of his worst instincts, then it will be worse.

And so, to me, this is sort of a life-or-death issue for — of whether we can surround Trump with enough people who can resist his — whatever is going through his brain on this subject.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And then questions about whoever would replace him if he were to leave. All of this is in the realm of speculation, though, Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: No, it is.

But I don’t think there is any question, Judy, that his time is limited. I mean, certainly his effectiveness…

JUDY WOODRUFF: Tillerson.

MARK SHIELDS: Tillerson’s.

Sadly, he gets very bad reviews inside the building. I mean, the morale at the State Department…

JUDY WOODRUFF: A lot of jobs not filled.

MARK SHIELDS: Not filled, and just people feeling that he has not stood up for the department and its mission, in addition.

But there is no question, he and General Mattis, the secretary of defense, have a very close — and General Kelly — have a very close working relationship. And I would hate to see General Kelly leave as White House chief of staff.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We are — no shortage of things to look at this week. We are looking for something uplifting.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you both. Thank you.

SUBSCRIBE: Get the analysis of Mark Shields and David Brooks delivered to your inbox every week.

The post Shields and Brooks on Las Vegas tragedy, Trump-Tillerson tensions appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: And now to the analysis of Brooks and Klein. That is New York Times columnist David Brooks and Ezra Klein of Vox.com. Mark Shields is off this week.

Gentlemen, it’s good to have you both.

We — our lead story tonight, David, is the resignation of the secretary of health and human services, Tom Price. We were going to talk about the flights several Trump Cabinet officials seem to have been taking. But now he’s gone, the first Cabinet member to step down. Big deal.

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Yes, I don’t think he should have to go.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You don’t?

DAVID BROOKS: If Donald Trump thought he was a good secretary of defense — of health and human services, and he knew his policies, which he did — he knew the policies — and he was generally supportive, which, as far as I could see, he was, then this scandal doesn’t merit a firing/resignation.

He made Trump look bad. And Trump’s only loyalty is to himself. So, I get that. He had to go.

But, personally, I think the government should have a fleet of planes to take around Cabinet secretaries. It would just be more efficient. Any company of any size has this sort of thing. And so this scandal makes Trump look bad, but it certainly doesn’t merit firing, I would say.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Didn’t have to be fired?

EZRA KLEIN, Vox: No, I think he probably did have to be fired. But I have different views on what’s a decent health and services secretary than Donald Trump.

I think there are two things here that are interesting. One is, Donald Trump has not been running an administration of very high ethical standards.

When Tom Price was nominated, there was quite a lot of ethical smoke around him. There were allegations of insider trading. These were things the Senate decided not to dig into. There were things that he misstated. They didn’t hold a secondary hearing to look into them.

Donald Trump himself has had a lot of conflict of interests and quasi-dealing things that he’s been trying to get around and certainly not address in any serious way. Nobody knows the tax returns.

But the other thing that I actually think is a bigger scandal here — it’s not at all why Tom Price was forced to step down — but he’s been fundamentally sabotaging Obamacare, which is the law of the land. They’re just making it worse in an effort to weaken it.

It’s going to make a lot of people’s lives a lot worse, and feels to me like it should be a bigger scandal than whatever planes he did or didn’t take.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, David, in fact, we are told the president was unhappy with Tom Price because he didn’t get Obamacare repealed.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I understand that, but that really wasn’t Tom Price’s fault.

If Donald Trump wants to fire somebody for not getting Obamacare repealed, he should fire himself.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: He was the one primarily who messed up the investigation, who had no clear agenda, who was ignorant when he entered into the negotiations with the Congress, messed everything up even worse.

And so, if that’s the standard, then there is a lot of people to be fired.

Donald Trump has a problem with loyalty and a problem with his administration. How many people has he gone through already?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Exactly.

DAVID BROOKS: We’re only a country of 320 million people. He’s going to run through all of us.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: He’s going to start hiring labor from Mexico.

So there has to be — if you’re running a successful administration, then you’re loyal to people who are basically good who make a mistake. And that seems to be essential for any organization. And it should be essential if this were a normal administration, rather than a fiefdom, where everybody simply tries to give Donald Trump a good headline every day.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And if he holds to this standard, Ezra, these other four Cabinet secretaries could be in trouble. But it’s hard to believe that four more would go.

EZRA KLEIN: Is it that hard to believe?

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: I don’t know. I don’t know.

EZRA KLEIN: This has been a very unusual administration so far.

I do think that there is a very unclear level of conduct in the Trump administration. That’s one reason you’re seeing this among so many different secretaries. Again, Trump himself has been bending ethics rules left and right.

But the problem is, Donald Trump is loyal to himself. He’s not loyal to them. The rules are different for them in ways that they don’t understand. It’s creating a lot — a real lack of clarity.

This is something, though, that I think Senate Republicans deserve a fair amount of blame for. They should have been much harder in terms of the confirmation hearings in insisting on a fairly high level of ethics and a fairly high level of competence in the folks they let through.

You do that and you have those standards to protect yourself, so these things don’t happen down the road and make you look bad and imperil your agenda.

There is a lot that they didn’t do at the front end that is going to come back to bite them in these coming months.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of Senate Republicans, they have got other headaches right now.

The leader of the Senate Republicans, David, Mitch McConnell, was backing a particular candidate, Luther Strange, in the Alabama Republican Senate runoff, the same candidate President Trump was backing.

But folks like Steve Bannon were backing Roy Moore. We have talked about Roy Moore here, very, very conservative Republican from Alabama.

How much of a rebuke is this to the Republican majority in the Congress and the president?

DAVID BROOKS: Pretty strong. And they’re rebuking themselves.

The thing I think we learned this week is that Roy Moore and Steve Bannon, what we will call the nationalists, they have a story to tell. They have a story about the country and why it’s going astray. They have a story about what is wrong with Washington and the swamp and why it needs to be drained.

The regular Republicans, the Mitch McConnell Republicans, have no story. And they thought they could hold off the nationalists with money, and with logistics and with party organization.

And I think one of the things we have learned is they can’t do that, that if you want to hold off Steve Bannon, you actually have to have an argument, you have to have a story about why his kind of Republican is the wrong kind.

And they don’t have that. And if they don’t have it in Alabama, they are probably not going to have it in Tennessee, and they may not have it in Wyoming, and they may not have it in Arizona and all the other states where Republicans are up for grabs, at least in the Senate, in 2018.

EZRA KLEIN: There is one place I would push on that a little bit, which is that I think David’s right, except that what’s strange about it is, this is a story that the establishment Republicans have also been telling.

The hard thing that they have been doing in the past couple of years, a thing that I think has given them a lot of trouble, giving them to some degree Donald Trump, is, they have bought into, have helped along, have at the very least indulged a story about what a swamp Washington is, about how the establishment needs to be torn down, about how government has become completely dysfunctional, about what Barack Obama was or wasn’t doing, about how corrupt he was, about birth certificates.

And then the voters believe them. They believed that they were going to repeal and replace Obamacare. They believed a lot of what the Republicans were saying. And then, when you get to election time, they try to run these more establishment candidates, and it’s at odds with their own story.

And then folks like Bannon come in and hijack it and become more authentic than the party itself. That’s worked for Trump, worked for Bannon. But it’s not good long-term for the Republican Party. And, at some point, they have to tell a story that they can actually fulfill.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, in the short-term, this is a headache.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, and I do think Republicans — right now, the establishment Republicans are frozen in fear and they’re just trying not to be the next target.

But I think, if I were them, I would say, how do we get out in front of this thing? Maybe Mitch McConnell is not the face of establishment Republican Party. Maybe we do have to have a new leader, somebody who can actually speak to the country.

And maybe we do have to have a story to tell. And maybe Mitch McConnell’s job shouldn’t be secure, because the hatred toward Mitch McConnell, while I think 50 percent unearned, is vituperative and not going anywhere. And so if every Republican has to really run as Mitch McConnell’s partner, that’s going to be a problem for a lot of Republicans in the primaries.

JUDY WOODRUFF: True. If he stays, and they have to figure out a way to work around that, they have got a complication in so many of these races coming up.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s right.

It’s been true for a couple of years. One of the things that’s going to be a real big question here for Mitch McConnell, the things that can really imperil you as a Senate leader is if you put your Senate majority at risk.

So, we just saw a poll come out — I believe it was today — that said Roy Moore’s only leading the Democrat in Alabama, who is a strong candidate actually, 50-44. That is not the margin you would expect to see for a Republican in Alabama.

Now, it’s early. Special elections have unusual dynamics. I would still certainly put Moore as a favorite. But if you begin to see an upset in Alabama or Tennessee, then maybe Democrats take something in Arizona, particularly if Flake loses his primary to another — to Kelli Ward, to another sort of nationalist more Tea Party-like challenger.

The thing that will really put McConnell’s job in danger in if, in what should be a very good year for Republicans — the Senate map looks very good for them — they lose more than expected or, even worse, lose the Senate. And it seems more possible than it did, say, two months ago.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I want to turn to the NFL story.

The president’s really gone to war with the National Football League, David.

I’m just learning from our producer that the White House has announced that the White House chief of staff is going to have to approve, going forward, all charter travel on the part of senior Cabinet official — I guess any Cabinet official or Cabinet at any level.

But what about — David, what about this story that has — confrontation that’s just blown up before our eyes over the last week-and-a-half, between the president openly criticizing professional football players and the league standing up for them?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, well, I don’t approve of what Colin Kaepernick did. I don’t think you kneel before the national anthem.

I think, if you are going to protest, you protest in a way that doesn’t undermine our common nationality. And so I didn’t think — he did what he did.

But Donald Trump reacted in his typical way, which was to find a wound in the American body politic, in this case, a wound about race, and then to stick a red-hot poker in it and to rip it open. And to me, that is what is most troubling about what we’re seeing over the last year, maybe two years, is that the fabric of society is being destroyed by someone who’s really good at finding out where we’re weakest, and exploiting those differences in order to launch really a cultural agenda.

And so the fragmentation we saw last Sunday, and we will probably see again, is something that he is exacerbating. And somehow we have to find a way to reverse that cycle.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It doesn’t get a more serious indictment than that.

EZRA KLEIN: No. And I think that part of it — and I think that’s right.

I think that Donald Trump — Donald Trump didn’t need to wade into this fight. There was plenty going on that he could have focused on, Puerto Rico, tax reform, his own administration and how it’s running.

He looks for these points of cultural conflict. The one thing that he is doing still that is responsive to his base, right, in a moment when they’re bringing a tax reform bill that doesn’t look good for that base, in a moment when the health care effort was incredibly unpopular among his own voters, as well as everyone else, he looks for these points of cultural conflict, because that at least is one place where he’s able to deliver.

He’s able to deliver on leading one side of a tribal war. And it’s not a good thing for the country. And it’s not a good thing for any of the folks involved. It’s probably not even long-term a very good thing for Donald Trump, but it is the one place where he can stand on firm ground and be assured of keeping his side coalesced.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, cultural conflict is right.

We can quickly show our audience this news “NewsHour”/Marist poll that shows — people were asked about their views on athletes kneeling or locking arms. Overall, very divided between respectful, disrespectful. Among Democrats, 82 percent say it’s OK, Republicans, 88 percent disrespectful.

David, you’re — the president’s going right at a sore place in the American psyche.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I wrote a column this week trying to argue that he’s sort of the Abbie Hoffman of our era.

Abbie Hoffman was a prankster in the 1960s who just was great at political theater, great at pulling at the weaknesses in that — the establishment of that era. And his only job was to destroy, so something could replace.

And that’s more or less what Donald Trump was hired to do. He doesn’t have to build anything. He just has to pick apart at the cultural fabric and destroy the consensus of that we had. And that’s sort of what he’s been running on and what he’s been doing, with some effectiveness, culturally for two years.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which begins to raise the question, how do Democrats and other Republicans counter this?

EZRA KLEIN: I’m not sure there’s a way to counter it.

The thing that Donald Trump does control — doesn’t control votes in the Senate, not control them in the House, does not even really control the legislative agenda. He controls his Twitter feed, and, to some degree, he controls the media.

There is a question here, why are we even talking about this, right? What happened here? Was there a policy put in place towards the NFL? Did he do something?

He said some stuff at a rally. He sent out some tweets. His ability to pull the media to whatever zone of conflict he wants us in, that is Donald Trump’s one real great power. He doesn’t use it judicially. He doesn’t use it wisely. He doesn’t always use it always in ways that benefit himself.

I’m not sure that pulling apart our cultural consensus is even good for him, again, in the long run. But there isn’t a lot that other actors in politics can do, so long as Trump’s ability to move the media is as complete as it currently is.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s hard to see how others compete with that, isn’t it?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, we have to find — if we solved the underlying problems of the country, a large number of people who are financially disenfranchised, then that will make the culture wars a lot less fierce.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we are — but you’re right, Ezra. There is a lot that we’re talking about, and Donald Trump is behind it.

We didn’t get to tax reform. We got — I think we may have a few weeks to talk about that.

EZRA KLEIN: That’s the Trump administration in a nutshell right there.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, that’s for sure.

Ezra Klein, thank you for joining us.

David Brooks, have a great weekend.

DAVID BROOKS: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Thank you.

SUBSCRIBE: Get the analysis of Mark Shields and David Brooks delivered to your inbox every week.

The post Brooks and Klein on Tom Price’s plane scandal, Trump taking aim at the NFL appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: But let’s go right now to Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields, as you just saw, and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

The only thing better than seeing you guys once is seeing you guys twice, three times.

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Just a great…

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, the health care story.

David, the Senate Republicans have been trying to so hard to once again resurrect an effort to repeal Obamacare. They thought they were getting — or at least they sounded like they were getting somewhere.

But, today, John McCain throws down the red flag, says he’s not voting for it. Where does this leave all this?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: It’s pretty grim. Francisco Franco is still dead, to quote that old “Saturday Night Live” joke.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: It’s — I should say, first of all, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with having state flexibility and sending the health care thing back to the states. We’re a diverse country. We might profit from different systems.

And there is nothing wrong with reducing the rate of increase in the cost, the amount we spend on health care. We would spend a lot more than other countries. Personally, I would be happy if we spend a little less on health care and a little more on education.

But the way the Republicans have done this yet again is without a deliberate process in a way that seems to have magically offended every single person outside the U.S. Capitol Building, no matter what party, and in a way that raises anxiety on every single level.

And so, it’s very easy for John McCain to say, you haven’t followed regular order, you haven’t worked with Democrats, you haven’t held hearings, and so I’m going to be against this thing.

And that’s him being very consistent with the way he’s been over the past several months. And one would have to suspect that Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski will follow suit. And, therefore, it’s down the tubes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What does it look like to you?

MARK SHIELDS: I hate to say that I agree with David, but I agree with David.

And I would just add this. It’s no accident, Judy, that the Republicans find themselves in this position. It’s really since the retirement of John Chafee of Rhode Island in 1999 or David Durenberger from Minnesota in 1995 that there’s been any Republican senator who has any earned credentials or any deserved reputation for working on health care.

They have just been an against party. That’s all. So, who’s the sponsor of this? Lindsey Graham. I happen to like Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham’s credentials, military, national defense. He’s worked bipartisan on global warming, campaign finance.

Is there a — Lindsey Graham on health care? And Bill Cassidy, who got to the Senate a year ago, not exactly a long-toothed, long-term legislator.

I mean, all they have succeeded in doing this year is taking the Affordable, which had always been controversial and never had majority support, and now has majority support in the country. And they have convinced voters that Democrats care much more about health care than they do.

And Democrats had an advantage. They believe in Medicare and Medicaid. They believe in federal action. There is no coherent Republican organizing principle or philosophy about health care. Everybody should have it, and it should be private.

It’s an abstraction. It doesn’t work in the real world. And voters have concluded it doesn’t. And Pat Roberts, to his credit, the senior senator from Kansas, said, this is not the best bill possible. It’s the best possible bill. And this is the last stage out of Dodge. Because of the quirky rules of the Senate, they need 50 votes until the 30th of September, when the fiscal year ends.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes.

MARK SHIELDS: After that, it’s 60. So, they’re trying to pass something. And they won’t.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s a tough moment for Republicans.

DAVID BROOKS: They’re caught with a divide.

I do think there is a defensible case that an intelligent market-based system could reduce — cause efficiencies. There’s models around the world that Republicans and conservative policy wonks can get to, to point to that.

But if you are going to get people to entertain the idea of some sort of reform, you have to give them universal coverage. We’re at the point where even a lot of conservative health care economists think, if we give them universal coverage, if your get your preexisting, you’re going to have coverage, then we can work on the reforms.

But the Republican Party and the Republican Congress — congressional party is basically out of touch with their voters. Their voters are not libertarians. Their voters are insecure economically and want some security. And Medicaid and Medicare and even now Obamacare offers some of them security. And they will not support their own Republican Party when it takes that away.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, while we’re talking about Senate Republicans, President Trump, Mark, is headed to Alabama tonight to campaign for the man he endorsed in that runoff Senate election down there, Luther Strange. He’s the appointed senator.

What’s made this race so interesting is, the man he’s running against is Roy Moore, the state chief justice, who made a name for himself by trying to get the Ten Commandments publicly displayed in the state capitol building.

This is a race that probably otherwise wouldn’t be getting a lot of attention, but Roy Moore is now ahead in the polls. And, last night, I want to show everybody just a clip from the debate that Moore and Strange had last night, because Trump’s name was front and center.

Let’s listen.

SEN. LUTHER STRANGE, R-Ala.: I know you may get tired of hearing this, and you may resent that the president is my friend and is supporting me in this race.

But I think it’s a good thing that the president of the United States has a personal relationship with the junior senator from Alabama.

ROY MOORE, Republican Senate Candidate: The problem is, President Trump’s being cut off in his office. He’s being redirected by people like McConnell, who do not support his agenda, who will not support his agenda in the future.

SEN. LUTHER STRANGE: And to suggest that the president of the United States, the head of the free world, a man who is changing the world, is being manipulated by Mitch McConnell is insulting to the president. That’s why he’s chosen me.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, what does this tell us about the Republican — the state of play among Republicans in the Senate right now?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, first of all, Judy, we must understand this.

Alabama, Donald Trump’s sixth best state in public polling. He’s the most popular there. A leading Republican campaign manager who’s deeply involved in this race on behalf of Strange, or at least on the side supporting Luther Strange, told me they will spend, they being Mitch McConnell’s Senate leadership fund, political action committee, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States and the National Rifle Association, over $12 million on behalf of Strange against Roy Moore.

What it tells me is, Luther Strange is presenting himself as Donald Trump’s new best friend, and that Roy Moore is running as: I am the real Trump candidate. I’m going to go to Washington and let Donald Trump be Donald Trump.

He’s trying to make it a referendum on Mitch McConnell, who this week in The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll was at his all-time low, 11 percent favorable. And so I think what Strange’s side is counting on is Donald Trump, the president, going there to Alabama and convincing Trump voters, who are more comfortable with Roy Moore, to vote for Luther Strange.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Meanwhile, the president’s poll numbers, David, have ticked up a few points in the last week or two.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, because he’s done something with the Democrats, and bipartisanship is popular. So, he gets ticked up on there.

But, in Alabama, the revolution devours its own. He ran as the anti-Washington candidate, Trump, Donald Trump did, got to Washington, and has to play a little by some Washington rules, which is supporting guys in the Senate who are supporting you. So, he’s supporting Strange.

Roy Moore is a Trumpian before — of the letter, as they say, before Trump, and a guy who made his name on the Ten Commandments, on some gay marriage issues. It’s Alabama. And so he’s saying: I’m actually the Trumpian.

And so what — I think what we see for the Republican Party is that this populist tide is not ebbing. If Moore wins, then there are some signs — Alabama is unique, Moore is unique — but there are some signs the party is still getting more populist.

And that’s caused by two things. First, as Mark said, McConnell is still the enemy for a lot of Republicans. The Washington Republican establishment is still more than ever. And the things that fueled the populist rise, rise of the opioid crisis, the decimation of the economy, the white identity issues, all those things are still rising, not ebbing.

And so the populism that Trump tapped into might be getting more extreme.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, turning quickly from populism to foreign policy, Mark, the president made his debut, first big speech before the United Nations General Assembly this week, and notable because he came out and said, basically, we will destroy North Korea if they make a wrong move.

Does he come away looking more like a statesman? He’s followed that with days of squabbling, in effect, with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. How do we — how do we now look upon President Trump as somebody who’s leading foreign policy?

MARK SHIELDS: An embarrassment.

I mean, you compare the words of presidents in the past, measured, you know, John Kennedy in Berlin, wherever free men live, to come to Berlin, they are citizens of Berlin, ich bin ein Berliner.

Or Donald — Ronald Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate, tear down this wall.

They were expressing principle. They were expressing coherently and lucidly and compellingly. And there was a sense of pride in the national direction.

That was totally missing. I gave him a B for bombast and bullying and belligerence. You know, it was a — it wasn’t a speech in which Americans could take pride or direction or comfort.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I don’t mind a little tough talk. When Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire, he was telling the truth, and that’s fine.

The problem with Donald Trump’s — with the rhetoric there is that it’s self-destructive. First of all, it may put the North Koreans in a corner, where they can’t back down because of their own psychic needs. And it creates a context in which North Korea can test whatever they want to do apparently in the atmosphere, where — and then, weirdly, against North Korea, somehow, suddenly, we look like the bad guys.

And that’s the interesting thing about the speech, was so nationalistic.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: If you’re the country who is the top dog in the world, which we are, you need international organizations and alliances as a way to extend your power. And if you take that away, you are diminishing your own self.

And so his nationalistic pose makes sense if you’re Vladimir Putin, if you’re a second-rate power. But if you’re a top-rate power, it’s a self-destructive thing. And we see it here, where we actually end up having less leverage, rather than more.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Mark, what do we look for in the weeks to come, because, right now, it’s just a war — it is literally a war of words.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: A lot of people are out there listening to this, thinking, are we going to go to war?

MARK SHIELDS: I certainly pray not. I hope not.

I take some comfort, quite frankly, as a citizen, in your interview with Tim Kaine, the senator from Virginia, who said that he, who had been — not hesitated to criticize President Trump’s policies, had great confidence in the defense team of chief of staff…

JUDY WOODRUFF: Defense secretary.

MARK SHIELDS: General — chief — I’m sorry — of Secretary Mattis, General Mattis, and General McMaster and General Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I mean, they are — they provide him direct — confidence and direction and maturity. And that’s our best hope.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, he’s surrounded by people who are getting some high marks, some of them, David.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, he’s got very good people.

But I have been watching the Vietnam series on PBS. And countries can do really stupid things. And the veneer of civilization sometimes gets slender.

World War I, there were a lot of very talented diplomats and world leaders at that time, but events just spun out of control. So I don’t think we’re going to go to war. I still think there’s some reason on both sides.

But you look at the realm of history and you have a little cause for concern.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes, and watching the Vietnam series, which is a superb series — for any of us who haven’t started watching, you can do that.

All right, David Brooks, Mark Shields, thank you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, Judy.

SUBSCRIBE: Get the analysis of Mark Shields and David Brooks delivered to your inbox every week.

The post Shields and Brooks on GOP’s health care uncertainty, Trump’s UN nationalism appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

HARI SREENIVASAN: And now it’s time now for the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

First off, your reactions to the interview so far?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: What I find interesting is, I don’t pay any attention to books from politicians.

And the only time I listen to any politician waxing semi-candid is when they are either over 70 or given up all hopes of the White House.

And I think Mrs. Clinton is not 70, or close to it, I guess, but she’s obviously given up all hopes to the White House. And, in that sense, there’s a lot more candor, than I think I have certainly seen in past books, an admission that every candidate is ultimately responsible for his or her campaign, victory or defeat.

And every campaign is inevitably a mirror reflection of the candidate. And she does accept responsibility, but she doesn’t do it exclusively. She wants to share it with some in the press, with other forces in our society.

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Well, as for the book, it’s tough to be reflective and a good storyteller and be in the public sphere.

You’re so active that you don’t have time for reflection. And I read the book. And I thought it was interesting, by political standards, way more interesting. I think she’s right, as she said in the interview, that it was just not her year. She’s not going to the anger, outsider politician.

I think she’s pushed up too much emphasis on Comey and all that other stuff and the Russians in blaming this. But she has cusps of thoughts throughout the book.

For example, at one point, she says she really loves the parable of the prodigal son. And she says, I’m so much like the older brother, who is the rule follower. And, of course, then you think, well, Bill Clinton is the ultimate younger brother, the prodigal son. And she’s on the cusp of a really interesting insight about her relationship with him.

But she can’t — she never, never takes the next step. And I think that’s just because active people — I remember I once interviewed Margaret Thatcher, and she was the same way — so much active, not a writer, not reflective, not getting the analysis you actually want.

But that’s just a product of being in the public sphere. I think the book with is far more interesting than most political books of that sort.

MARK SHIELDS: Obama wrote a very book, but he wasn’t a presidential candidate at the time.

HARI SREENIVASAN: There’s a section in there about foreign policy where she kind of slips back into secretary of state mode.

Almost you could see she’s excited to weigh in on this. And she also takes Secretary Tillerson to task. Well, he has never called me. I don’t necessarily know what their foreign policy is.

MARK SHIELDS: No. That was. It was really a memorable passage in her interview with Judy.

What’s interesting is, Donald Trump — Rex Tillerson, of course, serves at the pleasure or displeasure of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, unlike anybody else in American history after winning the presidency, made no attempt to reach out.

In fact, he’s continued to berate her and beat her up at his rallies and continued to have rallies and run against her. So, it’s almost made her toxic to his administration.

But I’m surprised that Tillerson, once he got the job, didn’t call her and have a sit-down. And I think — I just think it’s part of it.

But, if you think about it, Donald Trump, once he won, never reached across. He never met with Jimmy Carter. He never talked to George H.W. Bush.

There was not a — so, I guess Tillerson doesn’t surprise me. But there’s no question she’s totally disappointed and disenchanted with his stewardship at State, and very frank about the National Security Council, and the disarray, the Michael Flynn period, and that McMaster has spent the last seven months trying to get rid of the people that Flynn brought in, and he’s had to wait for General Kelly to get there to complete the…

HARI SREENIVASAN: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, she’s an institutionalist.

When she was in the Senate, she respected the rules and the standards of the Senate. When she was secretary of state, she was very much of the building and of the body and going around the world interviewing people.

And I generally like institutionalists. I think organizations are really what change history, rarely a random person. But let’s face it. This election was about anti-institutionalism.

It was about, we don’t like the way those things are working in Washington. Let’s burn the place town. And so it’s not surprising the Trump administration is bad at institutions, and they’re hollowing out all our institutions. They were sort of hired to do that.

I happen to think that was a mistake, a bad way to run government, but that sort is what they were hired to do.

HARI SREENIVASAN: There’s also a section on race where she weighed in on the divisiveness that she says Trump exacerbates.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

I — there’s a mixture here. Trump clearly plays identity politics, and white identity politics. And race has been a strong factor in this election. There’s no question about that.

I think it’s always necessary to be careful and not say Trump won because of race. I think a lot of the people who voted for Trump voted for him on a million different reasons, a lot of them quite legitimate reasons.

And so I think she sometimes, in this interview with Judy, gets a little close to saying, he’s the KKK candidate.

I think that’s overly simplistic. Is there a white identity stream running through his thought which is deeply disturbing? Well, after Charlottesville, we saw that to be the case.

But I don’t think you want to play this election as, well, white racism won this election. I don’t think that’s fair.

MARK SHIELDS: I disagree, to this extent.

I thought she put it — she couched it. She said, he gives rhetorical encouragement to white supremacists.

And I don’t think anybody can argue with that. And his revised position number nine on Charlottesville, that there’s bad dues on both sides, he just — his — didn’t know who David Duke was.

There’s no question that he is — the great original sin of America, which has been so prominent in American politics and so central to our presidential experience of the past 60 years, that Donald Trump is an outlier, and remains an outlier.

He doesn’t see the duty or the responsibility of a president to bring together the country racially. And I think she’s legitimate with that. And certainly his language has been loose.

HARI SREENIVASAN: There’s a pivot we will make in the conversation where she actually gives credit to Donald Trump on sort of the DACA conversation, the immigration conversation that is now happening with Democrats.

For what to be the second time in a month now, Trump has sided with Democrats, much to the chagrin of Republicans.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

So, all my life, I have been waiting for a president who would go with the Democrats when the merits of the argument are on their side, and go with the Republicans when the merits are on their side, and now finally it turns out to be Donald Trump who is doing this.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: So, oh, well.

I guess I think two things. I think that, one, this particular deal, if it is a deal, is a good deal. And I think most of the country — only 12 percent of the country thinks the DACA people should be sent out of the country. It’s a pretty popular position to want to some way codify their position in this country.

And the wall is a stupid idea. I don’t think Donald Trump actually believes that we should build a wall with Mexico. And so, if that is the deal, that’s a good deal on the merits.

Can Donald Trump continue to be a bipartisan president? Well, I wish we had a skilled political operator who could do that. I don’t think Donald Trump is that skilled political operator.

It takes great skill to go with one party and then go with another. And I fear what he’s going to end up doing is isolating himself, the distrust with both parties, isolating himself from his administration, which is pretty down-the-line conservative, and discrediting bipartisanship along the way.

So, if we are going to have an independent president, which is something I think we need, I wish it was somebody a little more politically skilled.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Does the president deserve credit, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, he does deserve credit.

Talk about motives, but if, in fact, 700,000 Americans can come out from the shadows, and not be at the whim or the cruel caprice of a brutal employer who wants to expose them, or some personal enemy, or some sheriff who is looking for headlines, yes, I mean, that is good.

That is good for America. I agree with David, the numbers. Americans are overwhelmingly in favor. You’re talking about misanthropes in the single percentage numbers of people who really want to punish and send back kids who were brought here at the age of 3 and have grown up and are working here.

But I think what I find most fascinating, to me, is, is the Cleveland Indians have been on a 22-game winning streak, and Donald Trump has been on an uninterrupted losing streak since January.

And when you’re in a losing streak, you change the lineup, you change the batting order. He changed teams. He just said, no, no, this Republican team isn’t working. I’m going to work with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

It will last about the extent of — most of his relationships have a very short shelf life, and political relationships anyway.

And I think — but, yes, if this does achieve that — we’re a long way from getting there. And the Republican leadership and the Republican membership in the House, in the Senate have their feelings hurt, have more than that. They have had their prestige undermined, their power sabotaged by the president doing this.

DAVID BROOKS: Trump is going to go so far left, he’s going to be filling in for Mark on his weeks off. We’re going to go all the way up the other side.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The seat is open here any time he wants.

(LAUGHTER)

HARI SREENIVASAN: But speaking of — continuing with that sort of sports analogy, but what does this do to his die-hard fans, the ones that show up in the middle of winter?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

I think the evidence so far is that it doesn’t really hurt him. There are some of the die-hard fans, like Ann Coulter, who are upset. And there are a lot of people who are burning their MAGA hats, the make America great again hats, because they’re upset.

But if you look at the Sean Hannitys and those people, and a lot of the people who are calling into the Rush Limbaugh show, they want to drain the swamp. And they don’t like Mitch McConnell very much.

And if he goes against Mitch McConnell and he changes things up in Washington, so far, the evidence is, they are willing to stick with Trump and not really walk away from him.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

No, I mean, among the Republican voters who supported him in the primaries in 2016, three out of five of them thought that immigration has been — has weakened the country.

But among Republicans at large, those who didn’t support him, three out of five believe that immigration has strengthened the country. And, overwhelmingly, that is the case.

And I do think that he probably — he has great political insights. And he said, when I stood at Fifth Avenue and shot somebody at high noon, people wouldn’t leave me.

And he does. He has a very loyal constituency. And I don’t think it hinges on this issue by any means.

He’s going to have to come away with something. And what could kill this in the House is the Republicans in the House have never passed immigration reform at any time, because they could not get a majority of the majority.

So, they’re going to have to come up with something that’s tough, whether it’s a wall or it’s bamboo shoots under the fingernails of people who come in illegally or something, which may be a deal-killer for the Democrats.

So, that has been the case in the past. And I fear that we’re a long way from this being signed into law.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

The post Shields and Brooks on Hillary Clinton’s election candor, Trump’s dealing with Democrats appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JOHN YANG: From hurricanes to wildfires, natural disasters have drawn the country’s attention away from the political storms in Washington this week.

But rest assured, we will bring you up to speed now with the analysis of Shields and Gerson. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson. David Brooks is away.

Gentlemen, welcome to you both.

We had the unusual scene this week of a bipartisan leadership meeting in the Oval Office, and the president cuts off his own treasury secretary as he’s making a recommendation and agrees with the opposition party on this debt ceiling, on a short-term C.R. and Harvey aid.

Michael, what do you make of all this?

MICHAEL GERSON, The Washington Post: Well, it’s just a massive shift.

It wasn’t that long ago they were talking about putting the wall on the debt relief. And so it’s a huge change. I think that, you know, the art of the deal is easy when you surrender. That book wouldn’t sell very well, but it’s true.

And he signaled surrender, not just on this issue, but somewhat on DACA and somewhat on the whole issue of debt, the debt ceiling, trying to get that out of American politics. So it was a firestorm for Republicans. They’re wondering, is this the new world?

JOHN YANG: Mark?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: I’m not sure it’s the new world, but I am sure that, if I were Mitch McConnell, I would be seething with anger, the Republican Senate leader, because what Donald Trump did to him and to Paul Ryan , the speaker, was cut them off at the knees.

They had to go back to their respective caucuses and tell them, no, they weren’t going to take the position that they in fact had endorsed and told them they were going to take on the debt ceiling and the continuing spending resolution, but, in fact, they were going to follow the advice embraced by the president of Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic Well, .

So, if you’re McConnell, just taking it from his perspective, he’s trying to hold on to a Senate majority going into headwinds of 2018, which doesn’t look like a good Republican year, and he’s got a president who is not helping him in that sense. He’s got to have something he can point to that the Senate has accomplished.

The last, best hope, or only hope, actually, is probably tax cuts for their supporters and their admirers. And without the president, he can’t do that. And so he has to bite his tongue, bite his lip, and any other part of his facial extremity that he can and swallow hard, because he just — he was really diminished by this.

MICHAEL GERSON: Yes, I think we Republican leaders look pathetic, though, in a certain way.

They were livid, according to the reporting, on that three-month debt increase. They weren’t livid on nativism. They weren’t livid on misogyny. They were not livid on serial lying.

I think that it makes them look like they have kind of a moral center problem, that this is what the final straw is, is a difficulty. Also, they have given a lot. They have given their standing. They have given their — almost their political character for nothing so far.

MARK SHIELDS: I agree.

MICHAEL GERSON: I mean, they have literally gotten nothing. And tax reform may not even happen, and if it happens, it might be a scaled-back version.

So they have give an whole lot for very little in return.

MARK SHIELDS: You’re absolutely right, Michael.

But I would just add that that one picture that came out of that meeting of Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer each with their hands on the other’s lapels and shoulder, you could almost see them — kind of Trump was in his element, trash-talking to Schumer. And I knew you. You were from James Madison High School in Brooklyn, and Schumer to him saying something like, Donald, you’re from Jamaica, Queens. Who are you kidding?

And it’s not a continuing relationship, but there’s a chemistry there that isn’t present with either McConnell or Ryan. Ryan is a choir boy to Donald Trump. He’s a darling of The Wall Street Journal editorial page. He’s never had a relationship with McConnell.

I agree, but — I agree with what Michael’s point is. What were the words of Charlie Sykes, the Republican talk show host from Wisconsin who’s a friend of Paul Ryan’s? He said, quoting “A Man for All Seasons,” Paul, you know, for whales, you have traded your soul, but for a tax cut, you have traded your soul.

And I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

MICHAEL GERSON: He’s a diminished figure.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. Yes.

JOHN YANG: Chuck Schumer, who he called the chief clown, and is now…

(CROSSTALK)

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, exactly, exactly.

JOHN YANG: And Mitch McConnell — the president invited the Cabinet and their spouses up to Camp David this weekend. One Cabinet spouse who declined, Mitch McConnell.

And how much was a shot across the bow at the Democratic — at the Republican leader — sorry — and was it his intent to diminish them? And how much of this was situational? He saw a deal he could take with the Democrats, and so he took it?

MARK SHIELDS: I think it’s always the latter with him.

And what was really remarkable was, he was delighted, was the president, in getting favorable reviews in the press that he hates, that he diminishes, that he denigrates on a regular basis, The New York Times, The Washington Post.

And so thrilled was he, he actually called Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to bask in it and tell them the good reviews they were getting.

I mean, no, this is not a matter of strategy or conviction. It’s a matter of…

MICHAEL GERSON: It’s not a violation of his convictions. I’m not sure he has any.

He has a set of instincts, which are nativist and nationalist. But I don’t think he has a set of economic and political philosophic conventions on spending or a lot of other issues. So, when he makes this kind of turn, I think it’s relatively easy for him.

JOHN YANG: Do you think we are going to see more of it?

MICHAEL GERSON: I think that he likes basking in this success.

But you can’t underestimate these Democratic leaders would impeach him with the drop of a hat. They’re not allies. They want higher taxes, not lower taxes. So I think that there are some fundamental conflicts of interest here that emerge very quickly.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, they don’t want — Democrats are not on record favoring tax cuts to Steve Schwarzman and other sort of billionaires who back Donald Trump or Wilbur Ross.

But, no, I think both Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are pretty clear-eyed people, and they know that there are no permanent alliances here. I mean, it’s a matter of temporary interest, and plus the fact they can’t get too cozy with him for a simple reason. He is the energizer for 2018 for the Democrats if they hope to win back the House and maybe even make a dent in the Senate.

JOHN YANG: Well, one of the issues that he appears to be talking to the Democrats, or talking about working with the Democrats on, is what to do about the dreamers.

He rescinded DACA earlier in the week. But, by the end of the week, he seemed to be arguing with himself about whether this was a good thing to do.

MARK SHIELDS: No, I agree.

I mean, the strength of Donald Trump as a candidate — and I’m not in any way defending moral convictions or anything of the sort — was that he says what he means, you know where he stands.

Well, on DACA, you have no idea where he stands. He has a great heart, as he tells us, and then he turns to give the bad news to Jeff Sessions. He wants them to stay. And he says — gives the Congress that hasn’t voted for 16 years to give justice to these folks who were brought here as children six months to do it, and then adds, the fill-up at the end, well, if they don’t do it, then maybe I will have to act myself.

So, I don’t know where he stands. And it must be terrible to live in that suspense.

MICHAEL GERSON: There’s a pretty obvious legislative deal here that they could do.

You could do stronger border security, not the wall, but stronger border security, and take care of the status of the dreamers. That would be obvious. But I’m not sure whether he preemptively conceded that this week or not, whether that is now even an option. Does he have the leverage to engage in that kind of deal?

I’m not sure because of the confusion here.

JOHN YANG: You wrote in a column earlier this week about this — on this topic that he felt that executive action was wrong on the dreamers, but he didn’t feel that way when he put in the travel ban on people from mostly Muslim nations.

MICHAEL GERSON: Yes. Yes, this is not a consistent belief in the limits on executive authority. That’s not a Trump-like belief.

It’s a consistent belief that he wants to get the outcomes that he wishes. But that was deeply inconsistent. He wasn’t deferring to the Congress or to others when it came to the travel ban, the early version of the travel ban, which the courts struck down, like some elements of DACA, the extension of DACA, was struck down during the Obama administration.

MARK SHIELDS: The votes are not there in the House to do it. Let’s be very blunt about it, unless Paul Ryan wants to violate the great Republican rule, which is to pass it with Democratic votes. There is not.

Donald Trump wreaked a whirlwind in 2016 by his anti-immigrant rhetoric. So, the Republican Party is far more polarized on this issue than it ever was before. And the Democrats lost a number of people, From Jay Rockefeller, to Max Baucus, to David Pryor — to Mark Pryor, to Mary Landrieu, who voted for it, and have been replaced by people who are opposed.

So I’m not sure that the votes are there to even act, if Paul Ryan decided it was the right thing do.

JOHN YANG: You talk about members of Congress who were turned out by the voters. We’re seeing some members of Congress voluntarily retiring themselves.

Yesterday, Charles Dent of Pennsylvania, moderate Republican, said he’s not going to run for reelection. You have had two others, I think you can fairly say centrist Republicans, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Dave Reichert of Washington.

We’re getting into that season where retirements come, because the party’s got to get other candidates to run.

Why do you think — or do you think we’re going to see more moderates, more centrists like these people, centrist Republicans, saying that they just don’t — they’re going to go home?

MICHAEL GERSON: The fundamental reality here is that you have had the ideological sorting of the parties.

The Republican Party has become more conservative. The Democratic Party has become marginally more liberal. There’s almost no overlap in the middle, ideological overlap, in either house of Congress.

That leaves moderates homeless. We have had a hollowing out of the middle in the U.S. Congress. There’s less opportunity for compromise. Dent said that they have taken it to a new level of dysfunction, was his statement, and that he wasn’t having fun anymore.

He also faced a primary challenge, likely primary challenge, which would have been nasty. So I think you make a decision, you know, do I want to go through all this for essentially, you know, a useless outcome?

MARK SHIELDS: So, every member of Congress has at least 250 people in his or her district who wants that seat. To be a member of Congress, obviously, you have to get elected. You have to be good at that business.

And they have an extra olfactory nerve. They can smell the political winds that are blowing. In 2006, when the Democrats did won back the House from the Republicans, twice as many Republicans retired that year as did Democrats. And I think what you’re going to see is a number of Republicans. You have already seen some who are trying to run for governor or statewide office or the Senate, because, you know, it just — it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a great year, and not that they themselves — but it is no fun, believe me, to be in the House with the minority.

All the power is with the majority. All the power is with the speaker and the committee chairs. And I think that does affect — I think Michael’s points are valid, but I think it does affect whether you do want to stay.

JOHN YANG: So, you think they’re smelling that the House could be in play?

MARK SHIELDS: I don’t think there is any question that that is part — what has to be part of the equation, yes.

And, no, right now, you would have to bet that, if it’s going to be a referendum on Donald Trump, if he’s sitting at 33 percent, at 34 percent favorable…

MICHAEL GERSON: If he has a 35 percent base going into this midterm election, I think it’s pretty disastrous.

JOHN YANG: Michael Gerson, Mark Shields, thank you very much.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, John.

SUBSCRIBE: Get the analysis of Mark Shields and David Brooks delivered to your inbox every week.

The post Shields and Gerson on Trump’s deal with Democrats, DACA’s demise appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

MILES O’BRIEN: In addition to the grueling work of rescue and recovery on the ground, Hurricane Harvey has stirred up political challenges and marked the first natural disaster on President Trump’s watch.

For what’s at stake, we get the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Gentlemen, good to have you with us.

To what extent has the storm on Friday and what has ensued changed what’s going to happen in Washington in September? Do you think this is a reset in a sense, David?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: I have decided to take the most willfully confident or least optimistic point of view just maybe post-flood, that the dove comes bearing the olive branch.

And I do think there’s potential for things to get better. The Republicans were headed toward dysfunction this fall with the budget showdowns, with this fight over the wall, possible government shutdown.

And now they at least have a pretext, all the while knowing they look dysfunctional and they have to get something done. Now they have a pretext to change the subject, to put some budget relief in there for the flood, without doing offsets, without trying to rip the money out from other programs.

And they could say, hey, we can’t do the wall right now. We got to rebuild Texas. And, by the way, on the background, a lot of people are going to need a lot of construction workers in Texas. And this is a construction with a construction worker flourish.

So, maybe this isn’t the time to crack down on immigration. And so I think there’s a possibility, if they want to look functional, to seize this moment, whether they will or not. But I’m going for maximal optimistic unrealism.

MILES O’BRIEN: So, Mark, would you agree that the storm has given Republicans some cover for a kumbaya moment?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Not necessarily kumbaya moment, because I think that’s impossible with Donald Trump, because he’s so mercurial, so volatile and so self-obsessed.

But I think it’s great political opportunity for Republicans, partly for the reasons that David said. The old maxim in combat in World War II was, there are no atheists in a foxhole. There no libertarian, conservative, small-government people at a time when they’re in the wake of a hurricane.

People turn — what’s the government going to do? I want it done. Even the much ridiculed — and legitimately so — Ted Cruz, who ran for president proclaiming he was the most unpopular man in the Senate, earned that epithet, sobriquet by opposing any hurricane aid to the citizens of New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy.

And 22 of the 23 Republican members of Congress from Texas, including John Cornyn, the senator and Cruz, opposed it. Now, of course, they are the biggest exhorters for federal aid, federal involvement, national government rushing in.

But I do think it’s an opportunity for Republicans to unite and to get away from the wall and president’s empty threat to close the government if it weren’t funded.

MILES O’BRIEN: I want to talk a little bit about what is going on in Washington in just a moment.

But let’s — a couple of things about the actual, the response on the ground. We didn’t have a Brownie moment this go-round, as we did in Katrina. Is your sense that, politically, the Trump administration did well in the way things happened on the ground as far as the immediate response in Texas and Louisiana, David?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I would say the range of government programs seemed to go well.

The people on this program and all the ones we have seen and interviewed, I think they have generally been impressive. They had tough calls to make, the mayor of Houston, on whether to evacuate or not. That was a tough call. You could argue it either way. The people seem to be responding.

To me, the two biggest things that happened was, first, Houston came together. And that is significant, because Houston is the most ethnically diverse city in this country. And there’s an argument that is sometimes made, oh, we will never have solidarity as a nation if we’re so ethnically diverse.

Well, Houston does it. And so if they can do it, I think that argument against making our country diverse or opening up more immigration falls down. The second thing is that I think, as Washington becomes more dysfunctional, power is going to the cities and states.

And I thought the basic efficacy of the Houston government this week is further sign that that may have to happen even more.

MILES O’BRIEN: So, Mark, would you agree that maybe the lessons of Katrina, for example, bore out and perhaps not only were the localities better equipped, but people themselves were better prepared? Is that possible? Or is this something the Trump administration can take credit for?

MARK SHIELDS: I don’t know if there’s credit.

I think that, certainly, early returns are encouraging. I think the public sector, I think the private sector, I think the voluntary sector, I think citizens, whether it’s the Cajun navy, whether it’s corporate involvement, and citizens helping citizens, I think has been impressive.

It’s been encouraging. At a time of dysfunction, of almost malaise in the country, in the midst of this national tragedy and personal tragedy, it’s been a source of some inspiration, of some elevation at least. So I think, in that sense, it’s good.

I think the president, not to belabor it, but I think he made a mistake by trying to lift the morale of folks by saying, it’s going to be quick.

It’s not going to be quick. It’s going to be long and arduous and difficult and painful and dislocating. But I think we got a good start.

MILES O’BRIEN: Yes, these are — it’s a much longer road than I think people fully appreciate.

Once we in the media and the nation kind of moves on to the next thing, it gets very difficult for these people on the ground. They still have a huge problem.

Quick. The administration wants to move as quickly as possible, it says, to get a relief package under way. How realistic is that, David? Do you think that there’s — given all that happened post-Hurricane Sandy and the efforts that you mentioned of Senator Cruz and others to try to block that aid package, will there be obstacles?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think the first tranche of this package, they will get.

The second issue is whether they have what I talked about before, the offsets. And this is what Republicans have traditionally demanded. If we’re going to pay for Sandy relief, if we’re going to pay for Katrina relief, we got to rip the money from some other program.

And that seems to me an insane way to do government. You have got these permanent domestic policy programs. Then we have a pretty steady slate of disasters that we have to pay for. Every we have a disaster, to rip money from the permanent programs just seems, like, crazy.

Will they insist on the offsets this time? I think, in the first tranche, probably no, but the second tranche, $15 billion maybe in the first, but they’re talking about a $150 billion need. And so that’s just a gigantic budget lift.

MILES O’BRIEN: Well, and the proposal was to take money away from FEMA to help fund the border wall, right?

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. That’s right.

MILES O’BRIEN: I guess that’s probably a dead issue at the moment.

MARK SHIELDS: I don’t think that’s going to be revitalized, or run back up the flagpole.

I do think that Republicans are flirting, of course, with their tax cut, which has always been the narcotic of Republicans, that they in fact have to at some point, with any remote pretense of candor, abandon any pretense of a balanced budget.

I mean, they talk about — because they are going to finance the tax cut by tax cuts. That’s how they’re going to do it. And I do think — I do think that the will is there right now in the Congress to act. There will not be a Ted Cruz from the Northeast opposing aid to help people in Texas and Louisiana.

I think they will be as close to unity as you will see on Capitol Hill this year.

MILES O’BRIEN: All right, so what about the talk of government shutdown, which was in play before the storm came in? Is that gone now, you think?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, if this were a normal country with a normal government, you would think there’s no way. I think we’re…

(LAUGHTER)

MILES O’BRIEN: But that is not the case.

DAVID BROOKS: That is not the case.

So, I think there is still some chance. I have trouble. I do think this was a moment where they was some unification. Republicans know they can’t be total disasters as the governing party.

And I just wish there was some more forward-looking enthusiasm. The Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, these were moments of revitalization for those cities, a chance to take the disaster and really build something.

So far, I haven’t seen much of a chance. What are we going to do with this and how are we going to make Houston a different city and a better city than even it was?

MILES O’BRIEN: Well, I suppose you could make an argument that, instead of talking, we should be talking about seawalls, right? Why not?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, the problem is that every study I’m aware of, which is probably not that many, has indicated that a dollar spent in preparation and avoidance of natural disasters is worth $15 that is spent in relief.

But there’s no political payoff for preparation. So, who benefits? I mean, the governor or senator or the president? Bill Clinton at Oklahoma City, his performance there helped him enormously.

John Lindsay almost ended his career on a snowstorm in New York City. And so — and, certainly, George Bush in Katrina. So, there doesn’t seem to be any political reward for making the preparation, doing the hard work, of building seawalls and taking — and part of Houston’s charm has been that there has been no zoning.

And so there really hasn’t been any regulation that would, in fact, interfere with environmental disaster. So, it’s a tradeoff that they have made in Houston that has led to the fact that there is affordable housing, even though it might be next to a machine shop and a junkyard.

MILES O’BRIEN: It seems we prefer to fund the fire department, rather than buying fire insurance. It’s kind of the way we roll in this country in some ways.

So, all right, so I got to ask this because it has come into play a lot this week. Is there any chance that there will be some sort of sea change, if you will, in political discussions about climate change, in the wake of this? How many of these storms do we have to go through before politicians come around on this one, David?

DAVID BROOKS: I would be stunned.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Climate change, in the way it wasn’t 20 years ago, it’s a total partisan issue now.

MILES O’BRIEN: Is that because Al Gore ran for…

(CROSSTALK)

MILES O’BRIEN: That’s the moment, isn’t it? Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: I happen to think he had some positive effects with the movement. I think he had a very negative effect.

You used to have John McCain and a lot of Republicans with climate change legislation.

MILES O’BRIEN: Right.

DAVID BROOKS: And once it became a Democratic issue, the Republicans had to go on the other side. And there was perverse effect of what Al Gore did.

MILES O’BRIEN: What do you think? Any chance of this?

(CROSSTALK)

MARK SHIELDS: Denial is more than a river in Egypt.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, Eddie Bernice Johnson, the Republican — Democratic congresswoman from Texas, pointed out to her Republican colleagues, she said, this is the third once-in-500 storm that we have had in the past three years.

At some point, you have to say, what’s going on here? Is there something that I’m not considering?

But I agree with David that they will not — they’re not going to move on it. There’s — certainly, I don’t see the leadership anywhere.

MILES O’BRIEN: Well, you don’t have to be a math guy to realize that’s not working out very well. Right?

So, as far as the funding issues, they got to fund the government. They’re going to have to take care of the debt ceiling. All that is going to happen, do you think, now? What’s your thoughts on that? That’s a lot of work to do right now.

DAVID BROOKS: An inglorious trudge-through.

I think what’s happening — what has happened on Capitol Hill is, they have divorced the Trump administration. They have said, he’s — this guy is an independent. We’re going to have to do this thing ourselves.

And if they can’t do this, then the whole Republican Party is in big trouble.

MILES O’BRIEN: What about tax reform? That was something that, in the midst of this storm, President Trump was talking about. Is there any chance there will be any traction on that?

MARK SHIELDS: There is no tax reform.

What it is, is a tax cut. And they have concluded that there’s a real problem in this country when it comes to money distribution, that the poor have too much and the rich don’t have enough. And this is the solution.

DAVID BROOKS: Just to make Mark feel good, I don’t think anything is going to pass.

I was thinking, who was in office, who was in power in 1986? You had Dan Rostenkowski in the House, a guy named Bob Packwood in the Senate, James Baker,

MARK SHIELDS: Patrick Moynihan.

DAVID BROOKS: Patrick Moynihan, Bill Bradley.

MARK SHIELDS: Bill Bradley. Dick Gephardt. Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: This was like the dream team of legislative skill.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And there’s just nobody like that, because they don’t — people do not have the experience to pass complicated legislation, let alone a White House.

Tax reform is incredibly hard, because every time you cut a loophole, there’s an army that wants to preserve it. And it’s just hard to…

MARK SHIELDS: Dick Darman.

DAVID BROOKS: Dick Darman is another figure.

(CROSSTALK)

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. Yes.

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: We have sort of lost human capital in Washington of people who know how to do complicated stuff.

MARK SHIELDS: It’s a good point. We have devalued it.

When you run against Washington long enough, and deprecate public service, I mean, after a while, you stop attracting or making it appealing for talented people to come and to stay. And then public service was an honorable and important…

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: The talent is a side, but the experience is low.

Those people had put through, over the previous 20 or 30 years, lots of complicated legislation, especially under Johnson, and even under Nixon.

And the people now, they just don’t have the experience of doing that.

MILES O’BRIEN: Experience counts, said the gray-haired guys sitting at the table, right?

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I have always been a big fan of term limits, especially in surgeons, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

MILES O’BRIEN: Absolutely.

All right, just quickly, just as the White House staff turns. The piece that came out today indicating that the president has become disenchanted with his new chief of staff, John Kelly.

Basically, the 15 people anonymously sourced in this story said, Donald Trump doesn’t like to be handled.

Any news here? Is this any surprise to either of you? And is John Kelly on his way out, you think?

MARK SHIELDS: There’s an old aphorism that is, someone who is always finding everyone else to be a horse’s ass, when you meet three horse’s asses in one day, the horse’s ass is you.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: The problem is the guy who is still there.

It’s not — he was going to get the best people, because he knew the best people. He was going to bring them to Washington and going to just get everything done and get everything passed.

He brought the best people to Washington. They have all left. And now we’re working on, what, the second, third round? I mean, at some point, you have got to conclude, it is — the problem is the person who is there.

MILES O’BRIEN: All right, button it up quickly for us.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

Well, we — actually, it was the B-team that went out first.

MARK SHIELDS: OK.

DAVID BROOKS: So, now, if he starts firing people, he’s really firing what to him is the A-team.

MARK SHIELDS: I never thought of Mike Flynn as the A-team.

DAVID BROOKS: I don’t think he’s going to end up doing it.

But the guy is always fuming about something. And the fuming doesn’t often lead to anything. And I suspect that’s the case here.

MILES O’BRIEN: David Brooks, Mark Shields, have a great holiday weekend. Thank you.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you. Thanks, Miles.

The post Shields and Brooks on Hurricane Harvey unity, climate change politics appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: The week began with the president’s scripted speech on Afghanistan, followed by a raucous rally in Phoenix that helped widen a rift between Mr. Trump and top Republicans in Congress. That’s the backdrop as we turn to the regular Friday analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields, and “New York Times” columnist David Brooks.

Gentlemen, it’s so good to see you both together. Welcome.

So, Charlottesville, it’s been almost two weeks since the tragedy there. It has risen in the headlines again this week, David. The president’s in Phoenix, he makes this passionate speech unscripted, defending the way he handled Charlottesville, bringing on even more criticism.

Are we in the clear now on what this president believes about racism, about white supremacy and all of it?

DAVID BROOKS,  The New York Times: I think we’re a little clearer on where the Republican Party is. You know, the Trump campaign began really seriously with the Muslim ban. It continued with a series of racial things about the wall. It continued Charlottesville and the reactions. And what’s happened is the racial winking and content, the identity politics has become a rising motif in the Trump administration, especially as everything else including economic policy and economic populism has fallen away.

And that’s meant the Republican Party or at least some portion of it, and I don’t know how big, has become more of a white ethnic party, ethnic nationalist party. That has made life impossible for a lot of people who signed up as Republicans but didn’t sign up for this. And we’ve had fights within Republicans on a lot of different issues on taxes, on wars and things like that.

But this is upon which parties break apart because you can’t Republican — if the Republican Party becomes a party aligned with bigotry in some overt way or in any way, you can’t be a Republican and try to be a decent person and be a part of it. And I’ve watched within my friends here in Washington, friendships ending in a way I never really seen before. And friendship ending I think in the evangelical world, friendships are ending.

And Senator Danforth had an op-ed today and Gary Cohn is put in this position. And so, what you’re seeing is a hint of a rupture the likes of which I really haven’t seen before.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And I was going to ask you both and David brought it up, Mark, this column and today an interview by the former Republican senator from the state of Missouri, John Danforth, saying if the Republican Party doesn’t disassociate itself from Donald Trump over his handling most recently of Charlottesville and the race question, but he lists other issues as well, he said the party sunk,.

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Yes. Jack Danforth comes with credentials as a senator, as the Senate sponsor, personal endorser of the only African-American ever nominated to the Supreme Court by any Republican president, Clarence Thomas, who had worked for him. So, he is — he is someone who has certainly street cred on this issue.

Judy, it’s quite I think obvious at this point that the president does not understand what the job is. I mean, the job of the president of the United States is to be the voice of compassion, is to be, to provide equanimity in spirit, is to provide magnanimity of view. He, in a scripted, teleprompted address, he can give a coherent speech as he did on Afghanistan, a colorless, energy-less but nevertheless coherent speech as he did for veterans.

But he only thrives, he’s only alive, he’s only authentic when he unleashes his indictive, when he stirs up the basest instincts of his supporters, and he responds only to cheers, cheers and jeers of those whom he opposes, whom he’s still running against some 10 months after the election he’s still running against.

So, it’s a sad, sad time. It has to be sadder for those who work in this administration to learn as the Quinnipiac University poll, a respected poll, show this week that Americans by two to one believe that Donald Trump is dividing the country rather than writing the country. That solid majority, 3-2, they believe the press, the dreaded media over Donald Trump to tell the truth. And they believe — three out of five Americans believe he is giving aid in comfort to white supremacist and encouragement.

So, it’s a truly sad — I don’t — I can only say to Republicans, I mean, it is a time you’re going to be asked about this. You’re going to be asked where you stood. And what you did on Donald Trump. And I thought Gary Cohn — it only took him two weeks to come to it and —

JUDY WOODRUFF: This is the president’s economic adviser, yes.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, and then he came to the decision of conscience that Janet Yellen made a very candid statement today, recognition statement at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she announced that she, in fact, the regulations imposed on the big banks after the collapse of 2008, the financial crisis, were necessary, were wise and should not be repealed.

So, Gary Cohn holding on, slimly, perhaps to the hope of becoming chair of the Federal Reserve swallowed his misgivings, and the odor of anti-Semitism that smacked Donald Trump’s remarks and agreed to continue as a patriotic man to serve and I guess we could only salute him.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s a zigzag course, David. I mean, as both of you said, when the president is reading from the teleprompter, the message is that we reject racism, we reject white supremacy, neo Nazis, but it’s in these speeches where there’s another message that seems to come out. I was just reading the radio address that the White House is going to put out tomorrow from the president. He’s back to the scripted lines, rejecting everything that smacks of racism.

DAVID BROOKS: To his credit, he’s incapable of insincerity and hypocrisy. He can — he can keep up for an hour, for a day, for 24 hours, he’ll say what they want him to say, but then within 24 hours, he’s got to come back to be himself and he’s going to explode beyond those barriers. We’ve seen that again and again and again.

I just think the Trump administration is going to wander into these fields more and more in the months and years ahead, simply because they don’t have an economic agenda, there’s very small chance of tax reform, they don’t have the populist thing they can bring to people. And so, what they have is this ethnic nationalism. And they are frankly going to be helped sometimes by Democrats or by radicals on the left who are going to deface the Thomas Jefferson statute or do something like that. And then that’s it for Donald Trump. He can say they’re defacing Thomas Jefferson.

So, then the identity politics of the left and identity politics play off each other and you get this war of people who think that white and black are the only two categories in life and they should have some sort of political war over this and it begins to look like the Sunnis and Shiites. And as I say, that’s a Republican Party that decent people don’t want to be a part of, frankly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Mark, the president meantime is firing tweets against fellow Republicans. I mea, today, Senator Bob Corker. It’s been the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan. You go down the list, five, or six or seven different Republicans he’s going after. What’s the strategy, the rationale?

MARK SHIELDS: I’m glad to be able to explain it.

It was deemed — prior this week, it was deemed impossible to make Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell into a sympathetic public figure. And Donald Trump has achieved that.

He — it makes no sense. Politic is a matter of addition not subtraction. And I’m sorry, Mr. President, you cannot distance yourself from your own administration. I mean, saying, oh he’s going to blame the Republican Congress for the stalled programs, the non-programs as David’s pointed out and the non-achievements is their fault. It just won’t wash.

I mean, no president has ever attempted to do that before. To say I wasn’t involved in my own administration. It’s these guys in my own party up on the Hill who have done it to me.

So, it makes absolutely no sense politically. One explanation offered by some people in the White House in “The Washington Post” today that he sees looming disaster and so, he’s going to distance himself.

You cannot distance yourself as a president from your own administration.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, but again, I’m referring to this “Washington Post” story, David, the theory is that the president’s going to be able to point the finger at those Republicans who messed this up, didn’t get the job done.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I don’t think theory or strategy would be worse (ph). I think it makes him feel good to get into a shouting match with Mitch McConnell over the investigation of Russia. There’s no strategy here.

The biggest — aside from the legislative agenda, the biggest event looming in Washington these days is the Mueller investigation. And if there’s some sort of bringing impeachment of the U.S. Senate who he’s working really hard to offend, they are the jury at the end of the day. And so, it’s just craziness to offend those people. And — but yet he’s doing it a short term. It’s a matter of not strategy but psychology.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In the meantime, his administration is moving in a conservative direction. Lisa Desjardins had a report, Mark, this week on these many steps that Jeff Sessions is taking —

MARK SHIELDS: Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: — at the Justice Department to roll back what we saw during the Obama administration. Just tonight, the president has finally signed an order telling the Pentagon not to admit anyone, any individuals who are transgender, not to pay for the surgery that some of them choose to have. So, there are steps being taken to carry out the conservative agenda.

MARK SHEILDS: Conservative agenda, Judy, I don’t — you know, among issues I haven’t heard pollsters report or volunteered by those interviewed was statutes being removed which the president greatly moved after are transgender service members. I mean, the Navy SEAL who served 20 years did 13 overseas deployments, seven combat deployments and earned one Bronze Star and one Purple Heart and is transgender, is now a woman had more deployments and more days in uniform than Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Secretary Tillerson or Secretary Mnuchin, Secretary Price, Secretary Carson, go right through it. I mean, he proved his patriotism, she proved her patriotism, that they’re 100 percent American.

I don’t understand this. I commend chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joe Dunford, for as soon as it comes out today, came out originally in his tweet that those who serve honorably in this service will be respected and continue to be so.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just 20 seconds.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. As I understand that, the important thing here was when he made the order, the generals decided that’s Trump being Trump, let’s just ignore it. And so, that was the right thing to do. What’s disturbing here is he actually followed through on his own statement. And so, a lot of people in the administration are saying let’s just let it pass, let it pass, let it pass, in a lot of ranges. If he’s going to now start following through and actually behaving, that puts them in a much tougher decision.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And this is after saying in the campaign, he was going to be supportive of those LGBTQ.

David, Mark, we thank you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

The post Shields and Brooks on Trump’s contrasting speeches, GOP ruptured relations appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

HARI SREENIVASAN: And now to the analysis of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne — he’s also co-author of the upcoming book “One Nation After Trump” — and “National Review” senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru.

Mark Shields and David Brooks are away.

Let’s start with the big news first, your reactions to the ouster of Steve Bannon.

RAMESH PONNURU, National Review: Well, it’s been rumored to be happening for several weeks now. And I think this is just another example of the volatility and turnover in this administration, much of it based on petty jealousy and resentment of people who are getting, in President Trump’s view, too much press.

HARI SREENIVASAN: E.J.?

E.J. DIONNE, The Washington Post: I think that’s all true.

I also think it’s the case a lot of this talk about Trump as populist was always phony, that Bannon was the one guy in there who on economic issues represented the kind of populism. And his being pushed out, I think means that the Trump administration becomes much more of a kind of corporate Republican place.

He was also obviously radioactive on racial questions because of the alt-right’s — Breitbart’s history of kind of ethno-nationalism. And so I think the two forces came together to force him out of there.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Does this change anything at the White House? We have already had reports tonight that he’s headed back to Breitbart, that there could be a way where he ends up forcing more change in the White House from the outside than the inside.

RAMESH PONNURU: One of the interesting things, although E.J. was talking about this corporate Republican Party, you see the corporate side of this White House, it doesn’t have much institutional Republican presence.

Of course, Trump is a fairly recent Republican himself. Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, former chief of staff, who had been chairman of the RNC, was pushed out.

And one of the really interesting things here is that how many New York Democrats are now influential in this administration? Where it goes from now, it all depends on Trump, all of this. You know, we all obsess in Washington too much about the personnel. He’s the person who sets the tone. He’s the person who sets the policies.

E.J. DIONNE: Ramesh has just come up with a brilliant Republican strategy. Blame the Democrats for Donald Trump.

(LAUGHTER)

E.J. DIONNE: I think that you will see some change, but not a lot of change.

If you really want to change the Trump administration, you have to change the guy at the top. And that’s not happening anytime soon. But, again, where I do think where you will see some movement is on this economic side, where I suspect, for example, this is a victory for China, because Trump was — I mean, Bannon was the hawk on China trade.

And as he said in that interview with Bob Kuttner — and, by the way, a Trump administration official will never again give an interview to a liberal columnist — is that he was fighting Gary Cohn, the chief economic adviser, great victory for him — he was fighting the Treasury Department.

And so I think that’s an area where you will see change. And I think, by the way, it’s obviously a victory for John Kelly, who wanted to impose order, and Bannon was clearly a threat to order in the White House.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the reactions after Charlottesville.

They have been coming from all over. It sparked another national conversation. When you look at, for example, the magazine covers “The New Yorker,” and “TIME,” and even “The Economist,” they are covers that are about President Trump’s reaction to this, not necessarily the entire conversation.

We just put those up on screen. If you were designing the cover today, your thoughts?

RAMESH PONNURU: Well, look, I think that my cover would be the incredible shrinking presidency, that the White House is smaller than it used to be.

For decades, people right, left, and center complained that the presidency is too powerful. This administration is shrinking the presidency. This president has less and less influence over Congress. This president is not fulfilling the usual role of the president in being the moral leader and the spokesman for the country. He’s just not being looked to for leadership.

HARI SREENIVASAN: E.J., speaking of leadership here, we have a rare occasion where the military leadership in unison on their private social accounts say, you know, we stand for tolerance and not for racism.

You have got entire swathes of CEOs on his different economic and business councils abandoning him completely. How isolated is the president?

E.J. DIONNE: I think in sort of this moral equivalence about the KKK and neo-Nazis and those opposed to him, he really is isolated.

But I think you’re seeing different behavior at different sectors. The U.S. military has probably done a better job than any other American institution at integrating itself racially, at guaranteeing equal opportunity.

And the American military wasn’t going to let a president’s statement get in the way of that. They needed to send a message. CEOs appeal to a very broad audience. The companies sell their products to all Americans. They were not going to alienate African-Americans and Asians, people of color of all kinds, as well as the people who are white who really hated what President Trump said.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have a very different audience that they’re thinking about. They’re thinking about their primary electorate. And with some exceptions — and a notable one this week with Senator Corker, who really went after Donald Trump — they are still too worried about losing primaries to take him on.

So, on the one side, you have the military and CEOs responding forcefully.

On the other hand, you still have Republicans very reluctant to take on Trump.

RAMESH PONNURU: One thing, though, that I think President Trump has been very shrewd about is seizing on this issue of the Confederate statues, Confederate memorials and so forth.

All the polling suggests that Robert E. Lee is more popular than Donald Trump is right now.

(CROSSTALK)

E.J. DIONNE: You and I might be more popular than Donald Trump.

RAMESH PONNURU: But he’s in a much stronger position defending those statues and saying they shouldn’t be taken down than he is appearing to defend neo-Nazis and the KKK.

E.J. DIONNE: Although it’s interesting you raise that, because I think the cause of keeping those statues up suffered a huge blow this week.

There is now more support for taking those statues down. The mayor of Baltimore arranged at nighttime to have them take all the ones that were in Baltimore taken down. And I think many more people now realize that those statues aren’t about the Civil War past. They were put up for political reasons to support Jim Crow, and so I think…

(CROSSTALK)

RAMESH PONNURU: Look, I think, in the long run, that’s right, but I think the short-term politics of this do work for President Trump, and they work for the neo-Nazis.

There is a reason why they chose this issue. They chose an issue that would have somewhat wider appeal than they themselves normally would.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, let me just interrupt here.

Even if you succeeded in taking every statue and putting it into a museum, right — I mean, we had a black nationalist and a South Carolina secessionist on the program sitting next to each other.

And one of the things that he actually said was, listen, we had that South Carolina Confederate Flag thing resolved a couple years ago. Where did that get us?

Does the conversation about the statues paper over the deeper underlying issues of race and class that still are unaddressed?

E.J. DIONNE: Well, if you’re asking does taking down a statue down solve deep inequalities in the country, of course that won’t happen, and that we need much more fundamental action on both the fronts of race and class, inequality.

On the other hand, symbols matter, symbols teach, symbols represent how we think about both our past an our future. And so, I agree, I don’t want politics to be all about symbols. I want politics to be about action, but I think the debate we’re having around these symbols can sometimes propel action in the right direction.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Speaking of action, what do Republicans do? Right now, it seems that they are very good at marking out, hey, here’s my tweet, I’m not a racist, OK? It’s on the record. I said it this day.

And this is also recess. When they come back, is there some action that they can take to show the country, this is actually where I stand, this is actually what I support?

RAMESH PONNURU: I think what you’re more likely to see is the Republicans starting more and more to ignore President Trump.

I think they have realized — it’s taken a while, but I think a lot of them have realized there isn’t going to be a change, he is who he is, there’s not going to be some pivot or some growing in office, and they have to deal with that.

I don’t think they have come together to figure out how exactly they move forward, but I think they are at least beginning to get a grip on the problem.

E.J. DIONNE: I think they could send a really powerful signal by passing the Voting Rights Act.

Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court. There was talk in the last Congress among some leading Republicans that they were going to restore the Voting Rights Act. That’s something they could do.

I think they could stop these voter suppression efforts and challenge President Trump’s commission, which I think is much more about voter suppression than voter fraud.

There are concrete steps they could take if they wanted to put real policy behind these claims that they have put out there. I welcome the fact that they’re against the KKK and the Nazis, but I think they need to do more.

HARI SREENIVASAN: One of the things that now Breitbart’s Steve Bannon has said repeatedly when he was in the White House in different interviews is that, you know what? The left in its frenzy right now to talk about identity politics and about race, that is great, that is a winning strategy for us, because we will talk about economic nationalism.

E.J. DIONNE: Right.

And I think if — I think that he is trying to encourage and Trump is trying to encourage the left to split on this, that you’re either about identity politics or you’re about economics.

The fact is, if you look at the broad, progressive movement since the 1960s, progressives have always been committed to equal rights for people of color. They can’t back away from that. They shouldn’t back away from that.

At the same time, they have been committed to greater economic equality, and we have had a long period of growing economic inequality. And I think on the progressive side you have to pursue both agendas simultaneously. You can’t just cast one against the other, but I think that’s very much what Trump and the Republicans would like to have happen.

RAMESH PONNURU: He’s not wrong, Steve Bannon, in suggesting the Democrats could well overreach on some of these symbolic questions.

The problem is with the other side of the equation. This administration is not going to be able to move toward a working-class agenda on economics, mostly because it’s underdeveloped.

They don’t really have much of a sense of what they want to do for working-class people. Their protectionism is only going to take them so far, and, as E.J. noted, it’s something that divides the administration internally.

E.J. DIONNE: And I think underscores what Dinesh — what Ramesh said is that the Republicans didn’t know what to do about health care.

Their failure on health care reflects the fact that they really weren’t willing to take the steps to help working-class people get health care. They cut away health coverage. And that proved to be very unpopular among parts of their own base.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Does this conversation delay or completely derail the agenda that is still on the docket when they come back?

RAMESH PONNURU: So, people talk about this Republican agenda. Why is it having so much trouble getting through? What’s the obstacle to it?

And the basic problem is, there isn’t an agenda. There is no consensus of the Republican Party on what the basic outlines of the policies ought to look like. They are in favor of tax reform, as long as you just call it tax reform.

When you actually spell out what it’s going to involve piece by piece, they are nowhere near where they need to be to actually pass something.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Ramesh Ponnuru from “The National Review,” E.J. Dionne from The Washington Post, thank you both.

E.J. DIONNE: Delight to be with you. Thanks.

RAMESH PONNURU: Thanks.

The post Dionne and Ponnuru on Bannon’s White House exit, Trump’s Charlottesville isolation appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Brooks and Marcus. That’s New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus. Mark Shields is away.

And we welcome both of you.

So, you just heard two very different views from our earlier expert guests on North Korea.

You heard the president again commenting, David, and now Senator Risch. How do you assess the president’s management of this North Korea situation?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Unusual, I guess.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: It will come after the war in Venezuela, apparently, we just learned. I don’t know what that was all about.

Listen, there’s been a consensus of how to deal with this extremely knotty problem. And that is, at least on the rhetorical level, the North Korean regime is extremely fiery, extremely insecure, sometimes hysterical.

And when you’re around somebody who’s screaming and unstable, the last thing you want to do is add to the instability with your own unstable, hysterical rhetoric.

And so most administrations, Republican and Democrats, when the North Koreans say they’re going to Seoul into a lake of fire, whatever their rhetoric is, have just ignored it and relied on some underlying sense that the North Koreans don’t want to commit national suicide.

Donald Trump has gone the other way. Now, I think that is still — that sense that neither party wants to go into a war is still there. But the psychological probabilities that you’re going to enter into some August 1914 miscalculation certainly go up when both people are screaming at the top of their lungs.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, Ruth, you Justice Department heard Senator Risch, who says he talks to the White House. And he said: I have talked to the president, and we think being very clear with North Korea is the best way to go.

RUTH MARCUS, The Washington Post: Yes.

Well, David used the term unusual. I think it’s just absolutely scary. And I didn’t feel calmed down listening to Senator Risch, I have to say.

But there’s a couple of positive things to say about President Trump here, just to surprise people for a second. One is that this situation with North Korea is not his fault. In other words, we were going to get to this. Some president was going to end up in the terrible situation we have with the progress that North Korea has made with nuclear weapons. He just happens to be the president.

Number two, they were doing a very good job, until this latest eruptions of kind of bullying testosterone this week, in terms of pursuing what needs to be done, which is the diplomatic sanctions. Senator Risch is right about the achievement in the Security Council.

But, all of a sudden, we saw this week these statements, and you would have thought Tuesday that maybe it was an eruption and they’d tamp it down. And, instead, day after day after day, he’s coming out saying more scary and dangerous things.

And I do not understand how that is anything but destabilizing, and with a very already unstable ally.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I mean, David, people are — we have heard from world leaders, the Russians, the Chinese. We heard from Angela Merkel today. We hear from U.S. politicians.

Not all Republicans, but some Republicans, are joining the Democrats in saying, tone this down. But the president, no sign that he’s going to do that.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

Well, it could be that he thinks the North Koreans are undeterrable, and that this is not a usual regime, maybe because they have this new leader, and that you actually do have to take action. He could be — he believes that.

It could be he just likes to blunder. It’s always dangerous to overinterpret what Donald Trump says at any one moment. And it could be he thinks the madman theory is right theory here. And the madman…

JUDY WOODRUFF: Remind everybody what the madman — because it sounds scary.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: The madman theory is that you can be a successful deterrer if you — if they think you could be crazy.

And so I think it can be very effective, so long as you’re not actually crazy. And so we have a North Korean, we’re not really sure. We have a president who has his moments.

And so the madman theory, when both people could actually be crazy, is actually a very dangerous situation.

RUTH MARCUS: Right.

There’s two problems with the madman theory. Richard Nixon was a proponent of it, but that was kind of strategic and thought out. Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. And is he going to really out-crazy — who’s going to out-crazy who here? That’s a scary thing.

There’s one other potential argument for what Trump is doing. And, as I say, I do not think this is the right way to go. The right way to go is quiet, determined diplomacy.

But he may not be trying to rattle the North Koreans and send a message to the North Koreans, as much as he’s trying to send a message to the Chinese, like, hey, I’m serious, you guys better get your act together here, or things are going to really escalate.

But this is way too high-stakes to be performing this way.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, the only thing I would say to that is, we have all been — and interviewed or been around people who have been in combat. They never actually raise their voice.

If they have a message to send to the Chinese of that sort, they do it in a calm, serious way: I have been through this. I know what it is. You know who I am.

The people who raise their voices and say lock and load and say fire and fury, those are the people who have never actually been in combat. And he just reminds you so much of one of those people.

RUTH MARCUS: And speaking of combat, we really need to be clear, as you asked the senator. The military option is catastrophic. It’s just a question of how catastrophic.

That’s why no president has done it previously. Others have considered it and even come close. So, there are two options, pursue — two sensible options — pursue diplomacy or learn to live with the situation. We should be pursuing diplomacy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which is what all the — quote, unquote — “experts” are saying, just calm the rhetoric down and start thinking about how we have this dialogue that’s already been started. It’s still there.

The president’s going to hold a news conference, David, they just announced, on Monday. But he’s already been talking to the press. Yesterday, he made some statements that I guess are still being dissected, one of them about President Putin of Russia, thanking him for kicking out over 700 U.S. diplomats and saying, this is going to save the United States taxpayers money.

This is something — what Putin did has been criticized by everybody else we have heard of, including Republicans. How do we read this?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

And, of course, the White House press office said it was sarcasm. Whenever Trump says something unusual, it’s always a joke.

RUTH MARCUS: And the president kind of repeated that in his last — his latest press conference.

JUDY WOODRUFF: He did.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: He did.

DAVID BROOKS: And the — I think the significant thing here is that Russians monkeyed with our election.

And a lot of people in Congress, even Republicans, are upset by this. A lot of people around the country are upset by this have done — the Russians have done a lot of things to threaten the world order. And at every step along the way, including this little comment, Donald Trump always wants to walk that back, always wants to ratchet it back.

He’s willing to tweet angrily about members of his own party, about members of his own government, about anybody around the world, except for one person. And we can all either…

JUDY WOODRUFF: And that’s Putin.

DAVID BROOKS: And that’s Putin — and psychoanalyze or maybe political analyze. But it’s a consistent pattern with this guy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s — it’s — what’s the word?

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: Well, continuing my effort to find some theory here, you could argue that perhaps President Trump was trying to show that Putin, uniquely among people, was not getting under his skin, that his little sanctions weren’t bothering him.

So, if we didn’t have — if it was just this one episode, I don’t think it would have had the kind of global response of, oh, my lord, what’s going on here that it did. It’s the broader setting of all the ways in which Trump has consistently failed to stand up to Putin, or to stand up to Russian meddling, or to even actually assert that he acknowledges that it existed in the election.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, someone who has gotten under his skin is the Senate majority leader, as we just mentioned.

I just asked Senator Risch about it, David. The president has gone out of his way three or four times in a row now to go after the majority leader, the Republican leader in the Senate, for failing to get health care reform passed.

Does he — he’s venting. He’s clearly unhappy and frustrated. But does he run the risk of jeopardizing some of the other things he wants to get done this year?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, clearly, politics is a team sport. Trump is not so much of a team player.

Politically, I think it helps him. Republicans really do not like Republican leaders in Congress. So I understand, politically, why he’s doing it. But if he wants a legislative agenda, it’s crazy.

To me, the interesting question is …

(CROSSTALK)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Wait a minute. I want to go back.

You said Republicans do not like Republican leaders, meaning Republican voters?

DAVID BROOKS: If you talk to Trump voters around the country, they’re not…

(CROSSTALK)

RUTH MARCUS: Right. Right. Certainly his base.

DAVID BROOKS: His base, yes.

RUTH MARCUS: Right. Right.

DAVID BROOKS: But the question for me is, how is McConnell going to respond? You don’t want to get in a Twitter war with this guy, clearly.

I think what you want to do is ratchet up some of the cost. Like, some of the other bad leaders around the world, Trump responds to pressure. And can McConnell say, hey, I’m not going to get in a war with you, but if you do this, we will hold up your nominees, if you do this, we will start an investigation into this or that

I think that you have got — McConnell has to defend his institution. He has to defend the Republicans in the Senate, who are extremely annoyed at Donald Trump. He’s got to defend his own standing. And he can’t let the leader of his own party walk all over him without some kind of actual response.

RUTH MARCUS: And it was clear from Senator Risch, if you ask Republican senators, who are increasingly concerned about — and I’m understanding it — President Trump, what they’re going to be — they’re on team McConnell, not team Trump, from Senator Risch to Senator Collins and everybody in between, if they had to choose sides.

This is not smart, OK? The president needs to have — first of all, he’s not taking any responsibility for the failure of his health care plan. Yes, he’s right that they voted umpty ump times to pass it, and then, when their bluff was called, they were unwilling to do it.

But Senator McConnell is working with a very slim majority. It’s not surprising that he was unable to get it across the line. He worked really hard at it.

Now he needs Senator McConnell’s help on other things. He should be sending Senator McConnell a thank you note, because he’s the one who gave him his one big legislative win, which is the Supreme Court justice.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Supreme Court, right, the justice.

RUTH MARCUS: So, I don’t understand picking this fight.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, David, you hear from Republicans that the White House wasn’t engaged in this health care — we talked about it on this program — in the health care…

DAVID BROOKS: Look at how Obama worked to pass Obamacare, what, 28 national speeches, touring around the country.

Look at 1986 tax reform, which was also a major legislative accomplishment. The Reagan White House was involved in that for two years, closely aligned.

You have got — this really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road. And from what I heard when the senators were going to the White House, they would meet with Vice President Pence, and they would be having a normal conversation. Trump would walk in the room and set them back hours, just because of — his interventions were so irrelevant or unhelpful.

So, casting aspersions to others is probably not good history of him.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Fifteen seconds.

RUTH MARCUS: Senators don’t think, even of the same party, that they work for the president.

And even though Trump’s base might enjoy this fight, I don’t think others are. They want to see something get done.

JUDY WOODRUFF: OK.

On that note, David Brooks, Ruth Marcus, thank you both.

The post Brooks and Marcus on Trump’s threats for North Korea, thanks for Putin appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: Today marks the close of week one on the job for President Trump’s new chief of staff, a week that kicked off with the firing of a outspoken communications director and ends with word of a new grand jury in the Russia investigation.

It’s a perfect time for the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome to you both.

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Thank you, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Mark, some good numbers on the economy out today, jobs numbers impressive. President Trump is saying it’s all due to him.

Does he deserve this much credit?

MARK SHIELDS: Of course he does — but because we learned from candidate Trump that these numbers are totally bogus, that we live in this big ugly bubble, that unemployment is actually 42 percent at the time of President Obama.

No, Judy, I mean, the economic news is phenomenal. It isn’t just good, setting new records in the stock market to 22000. You have got the lowest unemployment rate in 16 years. You have got economic confidence.

Today, Mazda and Toyota announced they’re building a $1.3 billion plant in the United States, Amazon 50,000 jobs hiring. And if Donald Trump would get out of the way, if he was silent Cal Coolidge and just let the good news take over, they would say, wow, isn’t that something?

But motormouth Don just has to keep changing the subject, intruding, and making unhelpful news himself. So — but, at the same time, I mean, does the president — does a president get credit? David has a very strongly, well-developed thesis that presidents really don’t shape the economy, and except over longer periods than their administrations.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that right?

DAVID BROOKS: I agree with Mark’s version of …

(CROSSTALK)

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

No, I do think that. They can have a very negative effect if they do something terrible, and maybe over the long run, the investments they make in one decade can lead to the gains next. But on a quarter-by-quarter basis, let alone month to month, no, no effect at all.

What puzzles me is, as Mark said, the economy is doing great. This is such a long recovery. And timing wise, we should be like dipping down again, and yet the public spirit is so bad. People have some faith in the economy. They do not think the country is headed in the right direction. You’re not getting any spillover in the rest oft way people view the country, the way they view politics.

And I do think the cynicism has just gotten self-perpetuating. And so, no matter what happens in the country, people still somehow are cynical and distrustful about the country.

And so my message to America is cheer up a little.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, I don’t know how much of it — and we all need to remember that, right?

But I don’t know how much of this is due to anything going on in Washington. But, Mark, this does, as we said, end the first week on the job for the president’s new Cosby, General Kelly. Does anything feel different to you?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, Judy, two weeks ago tonight, I sat here and announced that — what a breath of fresh air Anthony Scaramucci brought to the press briefing.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: So, my prophet’s credentials are severely tarnished.

I think that General Kelly had a very good first week, first by getting rid of the aforementioned Anthony Scaramucci. But the difference between a preschool center and the White House staff under Donald Trump has been that the preschool center has adult supervision.

And I think it’s fair to say that General Kelly has brought to it adult supervision. He is an adult. And he did something, I thought, very shrewd, and, at the same time, decent. He called Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, who had been cyber-bullied by the president rather openly and repeatedly, and assured him that his job was safe.

That sent a message, not simply to Jeff Sessions, but to everybody else in the White House, where anxiety and nervousness and looking over your shoulder had become endemic.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Cyber-bullied and said it directly in a couple of interviews about — so, there is the new sheriff in town, David, but is it making any difference?

DAVID BROOKS: I think you would have to say it has.

There were a number of things he did that I thought were shrewd, one, getting control of schedules, so even family members have to go through him to get to the president. Two, I like the fact that he didn’t want to take the job and that he resisted for weeks and weeks and weeks.

And that shows some realism about what he’s walking into.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: Third, he’s just — firing Scaramucci.

There’s been a purging within the National Security Council, so H.R. McMaster clearly feels a little more empowered to get the people he wants in control, establishing chain of command. So, all of those things, maybe we will have a little less day-to-day melodrama than we have had over the last six months.

And, personally, I think that would be good for all of us. There are limitations. He’s — another shrewd thing is, he said I’m not going to try to control the president. I’m just going to try to control the staff. And that’s a realistic thing to understand.

But the president will be the president, center of chaos. And let’s face it. This staff is not exactly the 1929 Yankees.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: He is not dealing with a group of people who are highly competent at their jobs. There are a lot of people, not all, but a lot, who are highly promoted from where they should be.

And so there’s still going to be a lot of self-inflected wounds.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I would like to tell you I knew about the 1929 Yankees, but I’m glad you explained.

MARK SHIELDS: He means the ’27 Yankees.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Not quite as good as the …

(CROSSTALK)

MARK SHIELDS: Kelly will be in good shape until he’s widely given credit for righting the sinking ship and saving the presidency, at which point Donald Trump will become upset with him, and he will become expendable.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But the president is still — Mark and David, he is still going after — it’s interesting — this week members of Congress, Republicans in Congress.

He’s tweeted. He’s remarked several times Republicans let him down on health care. He seems angry that they passed this Russia sanctions legislation, which he wasn’t happy to sign. They seem to be standing up a little bit more to him. Do you see that?

MARK SHIELDS: Standing up, yes, Judy. I think he blamed the — Russian-American relations at an all-time low, he blamed it on the Congress.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Right.

MARK SHIELDS: Nothing that the Russians have done, or nothing that had happened, that 17 American intelligence agencies had found they’re interfering in the American political process and presidential election.

But I think that they’re — first of all, Jeff Flake, the senator from Arizona, really broke with the president, wrote his own book. David wrote a very good column about it. And it was almost a call to conscience for Republicans.

And I think — I compare this almost to Gene McCarthy in 1967 standing up to the Democrats, Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. And one man did make a difference then. And people galvanized around him.

I think some Republicans obviously see it in their self-interest, their self-preservation. Donald Trump’s numbers are sinking badly. Republicans’ numbers in the Quinnipiac poll, Judy, are 80 to 14 negative on their handling of health care among American voters.

It’s just — they’re beyond the basement. So, I think there is some courage. But, at the same time, I think there’s a large dose of self-preservation involved.

JUDY WOODRUFF: David, I talked to Jeff Flake this week. And he — it was interesting. He said at one point there are so many things to criticize about this president, we hardly know — we hardly know where to begin.

But it does look as if the president doesn’t have the clout or the — that Republicans on the Hill don’t seem quite as afraid of him, maybe, as they once were.

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

Yes, I think Jeff Flake is still going to be relatively lonely in direct opposition. There are a few, Ben Sasse from Nebraska, Lindsey Graham, I think, Susan Collins, maybe Mike Lee, who are pretty much against Donald Trump. But the rest are just sort of going along.

But the going along used to be going along close, and now going along, let’s do it without this guy.

One, during the health care thing, they saw not only how — what a loser he was, but how destructive his presence was to try to get anything done. Second, nothing offends members of your — of the Senate Republicans, nothing would offend them more than being attacked by the president of their own party, because it does feel like an act of disloyalty.

And so incompetence and disloyalty, that suggests, let’s just go do our own thing, this guy is hopeless.

And I do think that mentality has begun to slip in to a lot of the Senate Republicans. But it doesn’t mean they are going to try to counter what I think of as cultural rock and the political rock and the institutional rock that is happening in the Trump administration. They are not going to be standing out to that degree.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, meantime, Mark, we were talking about Russia.

We learned yesterday that Bob Mueller, the special counsel, apparently, he was working with at least one grand jury already, but now there’s another one, a newer one that has been set up here in Washington, which spells, according to all the experts, a really serious investigation that isn’t going to end any time soon.

MARK SHIELDS: No, it suggests that we’re in for some duration, that don’t plan Thanksgiving or Christmas, that it’s going to be of long standing.

I would say this, that, Judy, first of all, a grand jury just is impaneled. Its purpose is to hear evidence, to make an indictment, but also to investigate. And I think it becomes quite serious.

I mean, you don’t have to be Henry Steele Commager to remember that President Bill Clinton got in trouble and faced impeachment because of lying before a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. I mean, so, that’s what people all over town are facing right now. So, there’s a sense of gravity and really a seriousness about this.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And yet the president, David, goes out on the trail, as he did last night in West Virginia, and talks — says it’s all a witch-hunt, this is the Democrats still mad about losing.

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

I think he sort of believes that. It seems to be the obsessive thing on his mind, more than probably anything else in the country today. And he seems to believe he’s just the persecuted person.

I think the grand jury, as far as we have been told, that it means there is some actual evidence of a crime, that you can’t just launch a grand jury unless you have don’t some substantive evidence. Doesn’t mean there will be indictments, but there is evidence.

Secondly, you can take hostile witnesses and put them before the grand jury, in a way you can’t with some of the other procedures, apparently. So, it’s a ratcheting up.

I still — I confess I remain bearish on the idea of the collusion thing is the meat of the thing here. But we know this from special counsels and special prosecutors. Once they get in the tax returns, once they look at the Russian investments, the — whatever the ancillary business relationships are, it seems to me that’s where the — that’s where Mueller is more likely to go than simply the campaign collusion.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Lastly …

MARK SHIELDS: And, Judy …

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes.

MARK SHIELDS: What is it? What is it that, I mean, every time the president — I mean, he really is obsessed with this.

I mean, just — he keeps — he won’t let it go in any way. I mean — so, I mean, that just raises curiosity, suspicion, whatever you want to call it, interest, in what actually is going on.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just last quick thing in only a minute.

David, these telephone conversations the president had months ago, early in the administration, with the president of Mexico, the prime minister of Australia, just fascinating that he was pushing President Pena Nieto on the wall and saying, you have got to say that Mexico is going to pay for it.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, shocking that it’s leaked. We should never admit that — that should not be leaked.

But Donald Trump is a guy we know. I think we’re full up of Donald Trump. He’s petulant. He cares about his own image. He’s not always pleasant. And he is certainly not deep in policy knowledge.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Fifteen seconds.

MARK SHIELDS: Fifteen seconds.

What you see is what you get. Donald Trump in private conversation turns out to be Donald Trump in public, I mean, concerned primarily about himself, how he’s seen, and with a large dollop of self-pity in dealing with other leaders.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, meantime, as you started out saying, the economy is doing well.

MARK SHIELDS: It is.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which is what a lot of people are focused on.

Mark Shields, great to see you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Great.

JUDY WOODRUFF: David Brooks, thank you.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you, Judy.

The post Shields and Brooks on Trump’s GOP pushback, Russia probe grand jury appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s been another head-turning week in Washington, from the Republican failure on health care, to the president’s surprising statement on transgender military members, and a flurry of profanity from the new White House communications director and then, to cap it off, today’s announcement from Mr. Trump that he is changing his chief of staff.

Here to help make sense of it all, Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

So, I thought we had a lot of things to talk about, David, before about an hour ago, when we learned that the president was changing his chief of staff.

Is this — I guess we knew that this might happen. Reince Priebus has been in trouble with this president, we think, for a while, but what do you think?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Well, he was never given the chance to do the job.

Every other chief of staff we have ever seen sort of controls the schedule. They control the tempo in the White House. They’re the alter ego of the president. They are given some clear sign of respect that they speak for the president.

And Priebus never had that. And so he was wounded and stabbed before Scaramucci came along. He was stabbed like a pinata. And so he was sort of a pathetic figure hanging out there. And so this doesn’t come as a total surprise, except for maybe the timing.

As for General Kelly taking the job, I sort of question his sanity there. He’s been a loyalist, but I really — with all due respect to the Marine Corps, I don’t see how someone who’s been trained in pretty orderly chain of command is going to survive this mess.

If he can control the schedule, it will be one thing. I just don’t think that’s going to happen, given all the independent power figures all around him.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you make of it, Priebus out and Kelly in?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Judy, I am continually amazed that it’s not simply a matter of human decency or empathy when your boss is firing anybody to make sure that that person leaves and has a soft landing, that they can leave with their self-respect, that they can leave with someplace to go to, with a plausible explanation to their family and friends that they weren’t humiliated, abused and derided.

This president treats staff and others like a used sickness bag on a bad airplane flight. There’s just absolutely no sense of respect or decency shown, so you humiliate somebody.

And for those who are left, there is just a sense of, could I be next? It certainly doesn’t inspire loyalty.

As far as Kelly is concerned, General Kelly is a four-star general. But I think David put his finger on it. He had a very distinguished and honorable military career. But he grew up in a military structure. He thrived up in a military structure.

As a chief of staff at the White House, this is a freelancing operation. There’s no chain of command. There are all sorts of people who go in and see the president any time, who are not accountable to you or responsible.

And least of all, you have a president who will even — won’t abide by any sense of a chain of command or structure. And I don’t know that General Kelly has any particular political gifts or knowledge of the legislative process or dealings with the press.

So I’m not — I know that the president admires him and the job he’s done at Homeland Security and his career, but I don’t see the fit.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we should say that Reince Priebus, just in the last few minutes, David, put out a statement saying it’s been one of the greatest honors of his life to serve this president.

I guess that’s what one expects, maybe.

DAVID BROOKS: Gracious. I’m not sure he would pass a lie-detector test.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: But one of the things that’s happening here is that the president is moving away from the Republican Party.

Priebus was a link to the Republican Party. The congressional Republicans were — had some sort of relationship. Jeff Sessions was a key to the link between congressional Republicans and Donald Trump, and he’s been under assault in the most humiliating way imaginable.

And so you’re beginning to see an administration — I don’t know what party they’re joining, maybe the Bannon party, but it’s not the Republican Party. And if you want to pass legislation, you probably need your allies on Capitol Hill. If you want to survive investigative committees, you probably want some friends in your party. And this administration seems to be moving the other direction.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In fact, you look at the White House, and Vice President Mike Pence, Mark, may be the only person prominent in the White House circle who has any kind of Washington experience.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, Judy.

And presidents thrive, ideally, when they’re both loved and feared politically. And Donald Trump is neither. Nobody loves him on Capitol Hill. And he shows loyalty is a one-way street. He’s not somebody who has personal relationships of any standing.

And the loyalty or disloyalty that he shows to his people, including Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, who was just humiliated, someone who was with him early and strong, at a time when no other senator stood up for him, and remained there through all the “Access Hollywood” and the how to molest and harass and sexually bar the women tapes and so forth.

So, there isn’t that, Judy. That doesn’t exist. And David’s absolutely right. When you get in trouble, you have got to have people who, A, like you, believe in you and are willing to go to some political cost for you.

And we saw that on the health care. I mean, Donald Trump had about as much influence on health care as I had on the National League pennant race.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, which leads us to another — I mean, David, you said they have had a struggle anything passed, getting legislation passed. This was a flame-out for them.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, this was a bigger thing than Donald Trump, though.

It was only one bill that lost. It was four bills that lost. And it wasn’t only a six-months effort. It was a seven-year effort.

MARK SHIELDS: I agree.

DAVID BROOKS: And you could say you could go back to Newt Gingrich.

Think of all the ways the Republicans have tried to trim entitlements like Medicaid or cut government. Name a signal victory. There’s not a victory. They haven’t been able to trim one agency, cut back one entitlement. They failed every single time.

And that suggests isn’t an electoral failure. It’s not a failure of whether Mitch McConnell had the right strategy or not, though that was lamentable. It’s a failure of trying to take things away from people.

People are under assault from technology. They’re under assault from a breakdown in social fabric, breakdown in families. They have got wage stagnations. They just don’t want a party to come in and say, we’re going to take more away from you.

And so Republicans have to wrap their minds around the fact that the American people basically decided that health care is a right, and they figure, we should get health care. And our fellow countrymen should get health care.

It doesn’t mean you have to do it the way the Democrats want to do it with single-payer or whatever. You can do it with market mechanisms. But you have basically got to wrap your mind around universal coverage.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you see what happened here, Mark? And where do you see it going on health care?

MARK SHIELDS: Judy, the yapping dog, which was the Republican Party, after chasing the bus for seven years, caught it and had no idea what to do with the bus.

All you needed is that final vote that Lisa described so well, and that is the final argument, after seven years, after winning three national elections where that is your organizing issue, we’re going to repeal Obamacare, came down to a single promise and pledge to your fellow Republicans from the leadership, and that is, what you are voting for, we promise will not become law.

I mean, if you can imagine anything, I mean, that just said it all. I mean, it was a terrible performance. The House voted on something without even a congressional budget scoring of it. The Senate voted on something. They didn’t even have a bill when they brought it to the floor. There was no legislation.

So, I mean, it was horrendous. It was disappointing. There were no ideas. There was no will. There was no imagination. And there was certainly no courage.

I don’t blame Donald Trump, but what was Donald Trump saying? Donald Trump was saying he’s disappointed in the attorney general because he wasn’t loyal to him. That was his contribution to the debate on health care as it came to a vote in the Senate.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you think the prospects are, David, that they are going to be able to work with the Democrats, or is that just something people are saying that’s never really Going to happen?

DAVID BROOKS: I think that there is a potential there.

If the Republicans get to the point we’re going to expand coverage, let’s talk about how do it, I think you could do some pretty market-friendly reforms. President Bush did it with the prescription drug bill a number of years ago. But they’re a long way from that right now.

MARK SHIELDS: John McCain does deserve, in my judgment, a shout-out.

John McCain’s vote, flying back, kept it alive, kept the debate alive, allowing the motion to proceed. And John McCain applied the — he gave the speech once he had the whole audience there of senators, and he told them what they had done wrong, that they all stood accused, that their cheap partisanship had replaced any kind of sense of legislating.

And I really do think that his vote — we found out that the testosterone level among Republicans was limited essentially to two members whose names were Lisa and Susan.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: And John McCain joined that want trio and showed, I thought, real — distinct political courage, and for the right reasons.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And some of the Republican men in the House of Representatives went after those women, as a matter of fact.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, Blake Farenthold, a courageous Aaron Burr would-be.

(CROSSTALK)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Aaron Burr.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: It does raise the question. People are watching this, David, and they have to be asking, is anything going to get done in our nation’s capital, with the White House in some measure of chaos? Yes, there have been some changes, but where’s the — you know, what are people to look forward to now?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I don’t think much is going to get done.

I don’t think they’re going to do tax reform. Tax reform is super hard. It’s potentially as hard or harder than health care reform. And it seems very unlikely that that is going to get done.

And what hasn’t happened is, you don’t have people waking up thinking, how creatively can I come up with some piece of legislation that will do somebody some good?

When I started covering Congress in the 1980s, there were a bunch of entrepreneurs. Jack Kemp was there. Bill Bradley would have something on the gold standard. There was a guy named Jim Courter who always had defense reform ideas.

And so you had start-ups in the back rows of the House. And then they would finagle their way through the committees. Now you have very few entrepreneurs. You have few people thinking creatively. I rarely get e-mail. I rarely calls. There’s a guy named Ro Khanna from San Francisco or from Palo Alto who is a Democrat who thinks this way.

But there is not as much as entrepreneurship. And the main cause is because the leadership of the body has taken control and destroyed creativity throughout the ranks. And that’s a fault of both Nancy Pelosi probably and Mitch McConnell, who just centralized everything.

And so the committee system is broken and the start-ups are broken.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And the White House is having its own share of problems.

We have alluded to this, Mark, a lot of attention this week about this profanity-laced phone conversation that the new White House communications director — he hasn’t actually taken the job yet, but he’s been named by the president — had with a New Yorker reporter.

It seems that everywhere we look, there is conflict, there is screaming, there is discord. You know, where do we see hope and something positive?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, obviously not in Shields and Brooks.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: I’m giving you a chance.

(CROSSTALK)

MARK SHIELDS: “Mass For Shut-Ins” is on, on Sunday at 9:00, if people want to hear a good sermon.

No, I would say this, Judy, that Anthony Scaramucci is Donald Trump. Every White House staff to some degree inevitably becomes a mirror reflection of the candidate, the president. He is it.

And what he did, Donald Trump approved of, the abusing of the chief of staff, the abusing, the denigration of other leading members of the White House staff.

I mean, and did Donald Trump disapprove? If you had a 14-year-old daughter volunteering on the Hill or a 14-year-old boy, I don’t care, and this is the kind of language you get? This is blood-curdling. It’s offensive and it’s obscene.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You get to defend him, David.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, it is offensable.

I’m from New York City. Mark’s from Boston. And on behalf of eight million New Yorkers, I want to apologize for our language. Scaramucci and Trump, I just want to say that, even though they’re from Queens and Long Island, I’m pretty sure they’re Yankee fans. They’re not Mets fans.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: We don’t talk that way.

MARK SHIELDS: No, Mets fans.

DAVID BROOKS: No, it’s — I agree. Blood-curdling would be the word.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, I gave you both a chance to say something positive. You didn’t do it.

MARK SHIELDS: You’re wonderful, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Maybe we will let you come back and try again next week.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: David Brooks, Mark Shields, thank you both.

The post Shields and Brooks on Reince Priebus’ exit, GOP health bill’s defeat appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

HARI SREENIVASAN: But, first, the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

It’s good. It looks like you’re paying attention.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Yes, Hari.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right.

So, let’s start with health care. This week, we started with repeal and replace. And then it went to repeal now, replace later. Neither of those seem to be going anywhere.

MARK SHIELDS: The Republicans’ health care plan had three problems. It wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t caring, and there was no plan.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: It was just that simple.

I mean, you can’t get people to vote for something when they don’t know, A, what it is, there’s no public case for it, but, beyond that, it just — the conservatives, led by Rand Paul, objected that it didn’t root out and repeal Obamacare. That was correct.

And the moderates, embodied by Susan Collins, who we just saw in the previous piece, objected that it was going to hurt, unnecessarily and gratuitously, millions of Americans who are needy and depend on Medicaid. True.

So, the two were almost irreconcilable. And I think they can’t figure out now how to leave the field without embarrassment. Ideally, if you’re a Republican, you do not want to vote on this. You do not want to vote Tuesday, because it’s going to be used against you.

It is incredibly unpopular. It’s got 16 percent support in the country. There is not one person of the 213 in Republican — in the House of Representatives voted against it who regrets having voted against it.

And there are scores of House members in the 217 who voted for it who are nervous that they voted for it. So, that’s where it is.

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Yes, I don’t think it’s dead.

I think, from what I hear, they’re leaning on Mike Lee, the senator who has been a no vote who is the decisive no vote, to change his mind, to buy him out with something and offer him something. And then they figure, once they get him on board, there are probably another Republican 15 senators who would like to vote no, but they don’t want to be the one person who kills it.

And so the feeling, if you can get Mike Lee, you can get some of the others. And they might pass it. I wouldn’t say it’s likely, but I think — I just think it’s too early to say it’s dead now.

The second thing to say is, Mitch McConnell has two parts of his job. The one is to create a process where reasonable legislation gets promoted. And the second is to whip for that legislation.

I think he did an abysmal job on one job and a pretty good job on job two. As Mark said, you have got a plan with 16 percent approval. Nobody in the Senate likes it, including the Republicans. They all hate having to vote for it. And he still got 48 votes. That’s kind of impressive.

But the underlying problem is, you have a chance to change, to reform health care. There are a lot of conservative ideas to reform health care. And it would solve some problems. You could pick some things that a lot of people would like. You could have catastrophic coverage for the 20-odd million people that are still uninsured after Obamacare.

You could do a lot of — offer a lot of things to a lot of people and do it in a conservative way. But that’s not what this Republican Party does. They just say, we want to cut Medicaid.

And they’re unwilling to talk about anything positive, though there are some things in the bill. It’s just, what can we take away from you? And what can we take away from the poor and the needy and the children?

And it’s a publicity and a substantive disaster area that they’re just trying to live with.

HARI SREENIVASAN: What about the president’s role in this?

MARK SHIELDS: The president’s role in it is mercurial.

He said let Obama founder and burn. Then the next day, he says no, within 24 hours to the Republican senators, you have got to come up with a plan. He knows nothing about the specifics. He knows nothing about the substance. He’s made no public case for it.

I don’t — I think David makes a very compelling point. I would just say this, that Mitch McConnell had a reputation as this master strategist. And what Mitch McConnell’s greatest accomplishment as leader has been is that he denied a hearing to one of the sixth most qualified nominees to the Supreme Court in the last century. That’s it.

There’s a big difference between obstruction and construction and putting together a coalition. And it’s a lot easier to get people to vote against something than it is to vote for something and to take a chance.

And when you’re denied the individual mandate, that is you let healthy young people not pay anything, you leave as a pool of people for insurance who are older and sicker. Therefore, it’s going to be more expensive.

I mean, you know, this isn’t rocket scientists, in spite of the president saying it’s a lot more complicated than it is.

DAVID BROOKS: I thought something important happened with the Republican views with the president.

They were having all these meetings in the White House. And, apparently, they’d have these substantive meetings with Mike Pence or with somebody else, with staff. And they would talk through things. They would try to make some progress.

And then the president would dip in and do something, say something extremely stupid, extremely ill-informed. And then they would all groan and live through it and wish he would leave. And then he would go.

And so that could be a change in psychology. Everybody in the Senate has problems with the president. But if you begin to have, oh, he’s just the crazy uncle, like an attitude of contempt, then relationships between the Republicans on the Hill and the White House really do begin to change.

It’s not some guy, oh, he has some political magic. It’s some guy who really just is annoying and gets in the way.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk about the interview that he gave to, some people would call it the paper of record, and the President Trump calls it the failing New York Times.

In this conversation, which is worth reading in its entirety, it’s just fascinating, he lashes out at lots of his supporters. He undermines his own attorney general. He goes after almost a broadside to Robert Mueller. He talks about blackmail and Comey.

What did you glean out of that?

DAVID BROOKS: First, our subscription levels have been way up since the Trump era. And one of our journalists tweeted out, we even fail at failing. That’s how bad we are.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: And there are a couple things to say about the interview.

One, I was shocked by the lack of just articulateness. We all hate it when we read a transcript of ourselves. It’s always embarrassing, but not that embarrassing. These really are random — they’re not even thoughts. They’re just little word patterns, one following another, about Napoleon, about this and that. It’s a disturbing level of incoherent thinking.

Second, it is — you know, people who work for the White House work for the guy 16, 20 hours a day, And Jeff Sessions in the administration among them, and to dump over everybody.

And then what is interesting to me psychologically, usually, when someone is corrupt or — they are clever. They try to dissemble. They mask their corruption with some attempt to be dishonest.

Donald Trump, give him credit, he’s completely transparent. He basically said in that interview, my corruption can be found in my tax returns. If you look into my tax returns, I will fire you.

He transmits everything that he’s thinking out in public in an incredibly transparent way. So we’re looking at a fact where Bob Mueller will probably go to the tax returns. Donald Trump will probably fire Bob Mueller. And then we will be in some sort of constitutional crisis. And it’s all telegraphed right there out in the open.

MARK SHIELDS: I was amazed by it.

I mean, first of all, I guess just on a personal level, this is a man for whom there is no loyalty, no sense of loyalty in anybody. I mean, Jeff Sessions, whatever one thinks of him, was a Republican senator from Alabama, the first senator in the country to endorse Donald Trump, and a strong supporter.

And, as attorney general, all Donald Trump cares about, is Jeff Sessions going to protect me? And it shows I think a couple things. It shows the obsession he has with the Russian investigation. There’s no two ways about it.

I mean, again, he recycles these baseless charges about Jim Comey, that he perjured himself in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which he didn’t, that he leaked confidential information, which he didn’t.

And — but there’s absolutely no sense of loyalty that he has to anyone else, Donald Trump. And I just find that — you know, we talk about, is there smoke there or whatever? His obsession with the Russian investigation, now he’s back blaming Rod Rosenstein for firing Comey.

But he went on Lester Holt on NBC News and took credit for it, said, didn’t make any difference what Sessions and Rosenstein recommended. I was going to fire him anyway.

So, I’m just — there’s no coherence to the man, but there’s an obsession.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Well, let’s talk a little bit about somebody who has been loyal to the president, Sean Spice, who stepped down today. He resigned over the announcement that Anthony Scaramucci was going to be named communications director.

Scaramucci played it down. He and Spicer and I think Reince Priebus were all scheduled to go on FOX tonight in a sort of unified show, right?

But what do you make of it?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I mean, Sean Spicer, prior to going to work at the White House, those of us who had dealt with him over the years, he was likable, he was helpful, he was a loyal Republican, but a square shooter.

As soon as he made the bargain to go to work for Donald Trump, you know, I don’t know if he sold his soul, but he sold part certainly of his self-respect.

The very first thing Trump demanded that he do was to go out and lie about the size of the crowd on inauguration. And Sean Spicer did it. And then he lied about the orders that Barack Obama had, in fact, bugged, wiretapped, President Obama had, the headquarters of Donald Trump’s building.

And then it was that three million undocumented immigrants had voted on Election Day, and that’s why Donald Trump — I mean, so, it was tragic to watch this erosion of his own integrity.

And he’s not a bad guy or anything of sort. But everybody, I can honestly say, with rare exception, who has been associated with this administration and this president has been diminished by it.

Their reputation has been tarnished. They’re smaller people as a result of it. And that’s tragic.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Does it give you a glimpse into the state of Twitter?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, that’s the exact point I was going to make.

Yes, I can’t think of anybody whose reputation has been enhanced by going into the Trump administration. Rex Tillerson was a serious businessman, well-respected. Jeff Sessions was a serious senator, pretty conservative, quite serious. Sean Spicer was a normal communications guy in Congress — or in Washington.

So he’s like an anti-mentor. He takes everybody around him and he makes them worse. And so that’s what Spicer had to face. And he will have to live with that and live with the reputational damage that he’s incurred.

Scaramucci is a very interesting case. He’s a guy from Long Island. Trump is from Queens. They made it big financially in the big city. They have some sort of parallel careers. Scaramucci is a very friendly guy. Everybody is sort of like a fun game to him.

And I thought his performance today was quite good, actually. And so it could be that he will flourish in this White House. He’s very smart. He’s not to be intellectually underestimated. It could be he’s chief of staff before long. And we will see.

But he’s someone who has a much more deft personal manner, as well — while being kind of a wild guy, than anybody else in there right now.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Finally, John McCain, this past week, it was — the entire Senate vote was delayed because of a surgery. And it turned out what they found in that surgery was much more serious.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. I mean, I just think that John McCain stands alone. And I make no apologies for thinking that highly of him.

At a time when you look at these people on television, starting with Scaramucci, a bad guy who has a good performance, they’re flag lapel pin patriots.

John McCain never wore a flag lapel. John McCain didn’t wave the flag. He defended it. And he’s been a leader in the United States Senate on so many issues, and especially, I mean, not just simply taking on big tobacco and big money, but reaching across the aisle.

And de Gaulle said that the cemeteries of Europe are full of indispensable men. I would say John McCain is irreplaceable in our national life. And I just pray that he recovers.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Very briefly to just his position in the Senate?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. We have covered him a long time. And I think we both think more highly of him.

He’s a man with intense internal honesty. He sometimes did stuff that was political, but he always seemed to — he never, never lied to himself.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, David Brooks, Mark Shields.

The transcript of this will be very clear.

(LAUGHTER)

HARI SREENIVASAN: Thank you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

The post Shields and Brooks on Spicer stepping down, GOP health care bill fumble appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But first to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Welcome, gentlemen.

So, Mark, welcome back.

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Thank you, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We missed you last week.

The Donald Trump Jr. story. We have now learned that he had a meeting a year ago, Trump Tower, with a lawyer who had some connection to the Russian government. How does this change our understanding of the Russia collusion allegation?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think it’s fair to say, Judy, that the White House lost any benefit of the doubt that it could claim on this story.

The shoes continue to drop, like it’s a Zappos warehouse or Imelda Marcos’ closet. I mean, it just — each time, they’re amending their story, they’re appending or extending their story.

And so I just think the fact that there were such denials and accusations of a Democratic plot, all of those are gone, and they stand naked and they stand exposed as shams.

I mean, they were actively engaged, at least welcoming Russian involvement in the 2016 election, in behalf of Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton.

JUDY WOODRUFF: David, does this change your assessment of what may have been going on?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Yes.

My colleague Ross Douthat wrote that any time you give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, he always lets you down.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: And that’s true. That’s true for his business clients and it’s true for those of us who thought, they couldn’t have been some stupid, to walk right into collusion with the Russian meetings.

And yet they were not only that stupid, but I think what is striking to me is the complete amorality of it, that Donald Trump Jr. gets an e-mail saying the Russian government is offering you this, and he says, “I love it.”

And it reminded me so much of some of the e-mails that came out of the Jack Abramoff scandal, that came out of the financial crisis scandal, where they’re just — they’re like frat boys who are gleefully going against the law and are going against all morality. And they’re not even overcoming any scruples to do this.

They’re just having fun with it. And then, in the days since, we have had on — Donald Jr. on Sean Hannity’s show, again, I did nothing wrong, just incapable of seeing that there might have been something wrong about colluding with a foreign power who is hostile with you.

And then Donald Trump himself saying, he’s a wonderful guy, again, not seeing anything wrong, and then even last day lying about how many people were in the meeting, a completely inconsequential lie.

And so we’re trapped in the zone just beyond any ethical scruple, where it’s all about winning.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Beyond any ethical scruple, Mark, is that where we are?

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, I think it’s fair to say that Donald Trump was born without the embarrassment gene or the moral reservation gene.

He just — he doesn’t — when he says that most people would take that meeting, Judy, I mean, this is not — I have been around for a while, and been to the Dallas Fair twice, and all the rest of it. People wouldn’t do that.

In 2000, Al Gore’s campaign got ahold of, was delivered George Bush’s briefing book. They turned it over to the FBI. That’s what you do when you’re honorable in politics.

This isn’t a meeting with a foreign power. This isn’t Canada or the Swiss Family Robinson. This is Russia. This is a country that has supported, propped up the worst of anti-democratic regimes in the Middle East, that has practiced — mistreated its own press, mistreated its own civil society, and economic intimidation of its neighbors, including invasion of its neighbors.

I mean, this is the one country on the face of the earth with the capacity to obliterate the United States. This is serious stuff. And to do it so casually and, as David said, without moral reservation, is — I guess it should be stunning, but, sadly, it isn’t.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But some of the Trump team, David, in their response to this are sounding almost offended that people would even think that they were doing something wrong.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, well, they just don’t — they don’t get it.

My pal Mike Gerson had a good line in his column today. If you make losing a sin, you make cheating a sacrament. And that is true. If it’s all win-loss, then you do whatever you can to win and to make money and to beat the deal.

And so I do think you have entered the zone where they don’t quite see what they have done wrong. But cheating with a foreign company — country is — as Mark keeps saying, is a grave sin.

And then there’s just the scandal management of it, of letting it drip out, letting it drip out today and today and today. And then there is almost just a cluelessness like a color blindness about how the rest of the world is going to go react to this.

And this has been a leitmotif for the Trump administration.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It is the case, Mark, that there was one version we heard over the weekend, and then, on Monday, there was a little bit more, and then Tuesday, Wednesday, then today still another.

MARK SHIELDS: Mm-hmm. No, it is, Judy.

And I don’t know what to think. I mean, drip, drip, drip, comes a downpour at some point. How about the disparaging of the United States intelligence agencies and professionals by President Trump, candidate Trump and now President Trump, whether Russia — you know, I can’t be sure Russia was involved. Yes, probably, but not for sure.

I mean, here they are, the Trump Tower with the people, their names approved on the visitors list for the meeting in the Trump Tower, and pretending they didn’t know it.

So, no, it’s — David is right. In a management sense, it’s just been incredible, Judy. Apparently, it’s hit the president or someone has gotten to the president, because his statement about his son was so sort of homogenized, he’s a quality person.

JUDY WOODRUFF: He said he’s a good boy.

MARK SHIELDS: Good boy, and praised him for his transparency, which is a little bit like, as I’m about to be indicted for tax evasion, say, well, I want to make something clear. I failed to pay my taxes.

DAVID BROOKS: It does open up a bunch of questions, like what were the — this — as the intelligence experts keep saying, this looked like a Russian feeler operation. They just wanted to see what kind of reaction they could get from Donald Jr.

And if they — how do they respond to the signal? And so what else did they do? There must have been other things they did.

The second, was it connected? Donald Trump, as others have cited, gave a speech in which he said, we’re about to have a big set of revelations about Hillary Clinton. Did that flow out of this meeting? And what was the timing of that? Who else was in this meeting? What actually was said in the meeting?

We still really — we have some testimonies, but what documents were brought to the meeting? It means there’s another several weeks of questions. And it gives Bob Mueller a new channel to walk down. It’s just expanding.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The special counsel.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

MARK SHIELDS: I would just say one thing about Mr. Mueller.

He has an advantage and a power that nobody else, that none of us in the press has. He has the power of subpoena. And he has the power of a grand jury. And he has the alternative of indictment for perjury.

So, you just can’t keep changing these stories. I mean, Jared Kushner now has amended, as John Yang pointed out at the beginning of the show, point, his number of contacts with foreign individuals and interests, 100. Three times, he’s now had to do so.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Added names.

MARK SHIELDS: And it raises the question, who leaked these e-mails on Donald Trump — I mean, on Donald Trump Jr.?

Did they — is there mistrust? There is distrust, I know, in the White House whether it was Kushner or Kushner’s people, saying that we had to get this out.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, meantime, one thing, David, the president is saying that he wants the Senate to get done is health care reform.

So, we now — a few days ago, we saw this newest, newer version of health care reform that Leader McConnell is saying that he really, really wants his troops to come together behind. But they still aren’t there.

What does it look like?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, it’s interesting when you see the reaction to this latest bill.

Some people say, oh, it shifted to the right. Some people say, oh, no, it shifted to the left. In reality, it short of shifted both ways. It keeps some of the taxes on the rich, which some of the moderates want. It includes some deregulation of the insurance markets, which Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and some of the conservatives want.

So, it sort of moves in both direction. And I give Mitch McConnell credit. This is an incredibly unpopular bill. And it probably couldn’t survive a set of public hearings and scrutiny. And yet he’s got to the point where he’s kind of close to getting it. I don’t know if we will get there. I sort of would bet against it.

But, as an act of legislative craftsmanship, if your only goal is to pass something, then I would say Mitch McConnell has done about as well as you can do by pushing a lot of different buttons and bringing people at least within the ballpark, especially given how unpopular this is.

I still think it’s a bad bill because it does so much to punish Medicaid among a population that can afford it least. But just as a set of legislative craftsmanship, I would say McConnell is like turning all the knobs and getting people sort of close. I would say maybe 40 percent chance that he actually passes something this summer.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you think it will go over the top?

MARK SHIELDS: I don’t, Judy.

But I would just point out Affordable Care Act was being fought for 18 months in the Congress. There was always a public case you could make for it. There was much criticism of it, but the public case included that women wouldn’t be charged more than men, that nobody could be denied coverage, that the preexisting condition, people would be guaranteed insurance and access to health care.

There is — and the inside part was done by Harry Reid in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House.

This is all inside. There is no public argument.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Behind closed doors.

MARK SHIELDS: There is no public case that can — Mitch McConnell can make. There’s no public case addressing the — you have two minutes to address the American people, why is this better? Why will this Republican plan be better for Americans? Why will it be better for those who don’t have health care? Why will it be better for the elderly, for the poor, for the quality of health care in the country?

There is no case to be made. It’s all inside baseball. Can you get Dean Heller by leaning on Governor Sandoval in Nevada?

I mean, that is what it has come down to. And, to me, that is a terrible failing. If somehow they do wrangle vote, what have they got? They have got an incredibly unpopular piece of legislation.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is anybody, David, making a positive case for this?

DAVID BROOKS: Not really. They say the insurance markets are failing, the Obamacare markets are failing, which is somewhat true.

They want — they say we have to have a more market-driven system to shove down costs, which is somewhat true. And so I think there is a public case that could be made. I don’t think they’re particularly making it, which is why it’s so unpopular.

But if we had public scrutiny — say the insurance markets — this thing called the Cruz amendments gives the insurance companies a chance to charge less for some people if they give a fuller benefit for another.

And what that will do is, let’s put the insurance markets into two different systems.

MARK SHIELDS: Exactly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Right.

DAVID BROOKS: And so the people who are healthy will be paying a low fee. And then the people who are sick would be paying much more.

And so whether you agree or not with the principle, these things actually have to work. And I’m not sure that the way this is written, this will actually even just work as functioning way to run a market, as the health insurance companies have been strongly saying, like Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

MARK SHIELDS: We’re waiting to find out now whether it’s going to be 19 million or 24 million people who are going to …

JUDY WOODRUFF: Knocked off.

MARK SHIELDS: Knocked off health insurance.

I mean, what everyone says about the Affordable Care Act, 20 million Americans who didn’t have it then did have health care coverage.

And, Judy, let’s be very blunt; 12 million of them came through the extension of Medicaid. And this is the starvation of Medicaid, seven years, 2024, and the federal support on the extension of Medicaid disappears.

And so they can talk about money and everything else, but implicit in the Republican bill is there’s a difference in those who are on Medicaid. Somehow, they are takers. Somehow, they are freeloaders. They’re not our fellow Americans who are struggling to get by.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We are going to have to leave it there on that note.

Mark Shields, David Brooks, thank you both.

The post Shields and Brooks on fallout from Donald Trump Jr.’s emails, GOP health care reform appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, another look at the major news of this week, both foreign and domestic, from today’s pivotal meeting between two presidents, to new developments with the Senate GOP’s health care plan.

Here to provide analysis of all that and more is Brooks and Marcus. That’s New York Times columnist David Brooks and Ruth Marcus, deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post. Mark Shields is away this week.

Welcome to you on both.

So, the lead story today, of course, President Trump meets President Putin.

David, all eyes on this meeting, the body language, what did they say. And then we have these conflicting reports coming out afterwards. What do we make of it?

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times: Well, it was sort of normal for a Trump administration event. He did raise the meddling issue, which is a good thing.

And so it seemed a little like, from the talking points, they hit Syria, they hit all the prints a U.S. president would talk to with a Russian president. It seemed a bit like a normal meeting, which is a good thing.

The abnormal part to me is how small it was, that there are only four people and then the two translators in the room, no H.R. McMaster, no national security adviser, which is an oddity. And that gives them maximum flexibility to say whatever they want in the room and not have it reported out of the room.

And that’s what makes the point about what they were saying about the meddling or anything else totally mysterious. Apparently, there were no note-takers in the room. And so it leaves a big void in what they actually said and whether Trump really accepted the fact that Putin claims he didn’t meddle.

And so it’s just a big void that wouldn’t exist if you had the normal complement of people in the room and the normal note-takers in the room, and you had some actual look into what sort of what was happening in there.

JUDY WOODRUFF: A long meeting, Ruth, but a lot of questions.

RUTH MARCUS, The Washington Post: Long meeting, a lot of questions.

And normal is not the way I would describe it. And I think I should start by the way President Trump started with Vladimir Putin, which is, it’s an honor to be here with both of you. That is a true honor.

I thought for President Trump to say — and I understand we have diplomatic niceties — it wasn’t an honor to be with someone who has attacked and jailed dissidents and killed dissidents in his country, who has invaded other countries, and who has tried to interfere in an American election.

And I think that simply to accept that, oh, it’s great, at least he raised the question of Russian interference, but we don’t know — and never will probably — precisely what he said, is really defining the presidency down.

That should have been a given that he was going to raise that. And that it wasn’t a given, they left but on tenterhooks, and that the day before, he was still saying, well, nobody really knows for sure what happened, and seemed more eager to blame President Obama for not doing enough, to question whether the intelligence community gets it right, to tweet today about John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and say, why didn’t he turn over the server, just really underscores to me the abnormality of the situation.

DAVID BROOKS: I have successfully defined deviancy so far down …

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

RUTH MARCUS: Well, that’s the point of normalizing, right?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, that’s fair.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, David, was using the term honor going too far?

DAVID BROOKS: I think no normal person would say that.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: But, on the other hand, I’m willing to give diplomatic latitude to that. There are a lot of people in a lot of diplomatic circumstances.

And I’m sure, if we went back and looked at how other presidents speak, you’re trying to establish a relationship with a bad guy. Now, and you say things. And so I give latitude toward that.

The question is whether Donald Trump recognizes that Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. That’s the larger question here than whether he used the word honor. And I guess there’s no indication that he regards Putin as in any way a bad guy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Does it matter, Ruth, whether the president accepted Putin’s denials? Or are we just — we’re going to be left wondering about this forever.

RUTH MARCUS: Well, Secretary of State Tillerson said that they basically agreed it didn’t make sense to relitigate this, actually one of my favorite words. And maybe that’s true.

The important point is that, since before the election, Donald Trump has been denying that this happened. He has seemed entirely unconcerned with figuring out whether it happened and with expressing the outrage that any American president should be expressing that it did happen.

And now I think we’re supposed to be satisfied that there is this joint working group on cyber-security. So, I have a modest proposal.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: If we’re going to have a joint working group on cyber-security, let’s combine that with the election fraud commission, and we can really get to the bottom of everything.

DAVID BROOKS: Say we had a normal president. It’s actually an interesting political problem. What do you do with Russia?

Do you say, you interfered with our elections, you’re interfering with all these elections across Europe, we’re not dealing with you until you behave by some standards of normalcy? And that’s a morally satisfying position that, as a columnist, would be fun.

But there are actually a lot of issues you have got to deal with Russia on. And so this is perpetually the problem with rogue regimes. You have got to — you deal with them and then you don’t deal with them. And even if we had a normal administration, it would be tough to know how to treat Vladimir Putin.

RUTH MARCUS: And this is my time to now say that David has a fair point.

And so, sure, whenever you’re dealing with somebody who is an adversary — and Russia is an adversary — you are going to have to calibrate, because there are things that we need their help on. We need their help on Syria. We need their help on North Korea.

And so you don’t want to let one little attack on your democracy and your election system blow everything up.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: But you do need to assert yourself in a way that we haven’t seen him do publicly and that we’re going to still have questions about whether he did privately.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of our democracy, yesterday, in Poland, David, the president made a speech to the Polish people.

And he talked about Western civilization and how it’s under siege, and how it’s going to matter right now whether we have the will to survive the siege that we are under.

Does this ring true? Does it feel like Western civilization is under siege right now?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think — I 80 percent liked the speech.

There was this famous clash of civilization thesis from Samuel Huntington, a political theorist. And the idea was that Western civilization is at war with Islam and maybe some of the other civilizations around the world.

And I don’t agree with that. But I do think there is such a thing as Western civilization. I think it starts with the Greeks and the Romans. Then it goes through the Enlightenment — or the Reformation, the Enlightenment. It goes through the scientific age.

And it somewhat defines some of the cultures and mores of Europe and North America and some other countries. And it’s obviously absorbed a lot of immigrants and it’s absorbed a lot of ideas and had exchange with Asia and other civilizations. But it’s a thing.

And I like the fact that he appealed to that, especially when he’s trying to, I hope, reunify the Western alliance, which has been a powerful force for good in the world over the last 70 years. And, to his credit, he appealed to some of the things that are finest about Western civilization, artistic creativity, rights of minorities, equality for woman.

He ran down the list. Whether the guy actually lives by those standards is another matter, but at least he appealed to them. And I think it’s a big mistake any time anybody makes an appeal to the West or to America, to patriotism to think, oh, he’s excluding.

It’s an identity formation. And we need our identity formations. And I think he did it, in the speech at least, reasonably well.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you read that?

RUTH MARCUS: Well, I’m not at 80 percent. Surprise.

But there are things to like about the speech. One thing to like about the speech is that, unlike the last time he was in Europe, he was — and cut the words out of the speech, we learned later, he was able to at least read from the teleprompter that he supports Article 5, the fundamental provision of NATO for common self-defense.

On the other hand, last time, when he was in Saudi Arabia, he was able to not say the words radical Islamic terrorism. I will give you Article 5, but I need my radical Islamic terrorism.

I think it was very nice to hear the summoning of the importance of a free press and all those things. A little hard to take from somebody who had just tweeted out that CNN beat-up wrestling video.

And so that brings me to my fundamental concern, which is, which are we paying attention to, teleprompter Trump or off-the-cuff tweeter Trump? Both matter, right, his willingness to say things. I was a little more put off by the Western part of the invocation of common values and democratic values that we should all live by.

But teleprompter Trump is one thing. But I think, when we see the real Trump, it’s a lot more nervous-making, to say the least.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do we know which one is the real Trump?

DAVID BROOKS: No.

I take Ruth’s point. But you remember Angela Merkel had given this — made this comment about Europe has to go it alone, because we don’t about this guy. And so this appeal to a Western cohesion to me was a valuable thing.

The second thing is — and this is something Trump does better than a lot of his critics — he understands sense of belonging. And a lot of people think globalization, any time you make any particularity, you’re sort of offending some other group.

And a lot of people in this country think they belong to America anymore, and he at least appeals to some sense of belonging. I like the idea that we belong to Western traditions, so I’m glad he appeals to that sort of thing.

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right. We’re going to — we could talk about this for a long time.

But I do want to bring us back to something that we heard Lisa Desjardins reporting on, Ruth, and that is the health care, Republican health care plan. She — by her reporting, it sounds like that Republicans are having a tougher time than ever now getting the votes they need to get something through.

RUTH MARCUS: Well, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell has been talking about this as a Rubik’s Cube. But with the Rubik’s Cube, you know there’s a solution.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: With this one, not so clear.

And what I loved this week was that McConnell, who is I think absolutely dedicated to trying to find the votes, and — which wasn’t totally clear. Maybe he just wanted to get this put aside, so we can move on to tax cuts, which they really care about.

And no one discounts his ability. If anybody could do it, he can. But he brought out the big guns this week, threatening the ultimate sanction, bipartisanship.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: If you guys don’t go along, I’m going to have to work with Democrats, and then you will see how unhappy you will be with the result.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. What’s the opposite of a nuclear option?

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: It’s the talking option.

DAVID BROOKS: Like, we will do something good, right? We will do something good.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Oh, my God, we may have to work together.

What does it look like?

DAVID BROOKS: I agree with Ruth on this. It looks dead.

It just like — not only have you begun to see the burbling concerns, and then out in some of the few town halls that have been out there, you have seen those concerns. But you’re beginning to see all these members come freelancing off in different elections.

Ted Cruz is freelancing from that direction. Mike Lee is staking out a position that will be completely unacceptable to a lot of people. And then the moderates are staking out their position. So, not only is it hard to piece together this together. They’re all going further apart.

And so they’re all defending themselves. And it’s just — the party is not cohesive enough, so I think there’s no solution. It’s super hard to take away a benefit that is pretty deeply embedded now, no matter what your ideology is.

And to me — and it’s a genuine question — what do we do? McConnell made the correct point that you can’t just do nothing, because the markets, the insurance markets are struggling. And so something has to be done, some normal repair at least has to be done. How do we do that?

Can we really imagine a bipartisan solution? Frankly, I cannot.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And the conservatives can’t imagine it would go along with shoring up the current system.

RUTH MARCUS: Well, it’s going to take a long time to get to a bipartisan solution.

And I want to kind of lay out the possibility that there are ways in which you could cobble this together. You say, OK, some of these tax cuts for the rich don’t have to go. There’s all sorts of other things. But that’s going to have to fail.

There are people working, Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins. Democrats are working with them on this that — and there are ways to shore up the markets. We have had a learning curve on the Affordable Care Act, which kind of suggests two things. People like it, and it needs some tinkering that are most — that’s mostly around the edges.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we want to leave this on a positive note, so we’re going to stop right there. And by next Friday, we will know more.

Ruth Marcus, David Brooks, thank you both.

RUTH MARCUS: Thanks.

DAVID BROOKS: Thank you.

The post Brooks and Marcus on Trump meeting Putin, Republicans diverging on health care appeared first on PBS NewsHour.