Center for Strategic and International Studies

Bob Schieffer’s “About the News” with H. Andrew Schwartz Podcast

Subject: “NYT’s Glenn Thrush: What’s Going On?”

Speakers: Glenn Thrush, White House Correspondent, The Times

Hosts: H. Andrew Schwartz, Senior Vice President for External Relations, CSIS

Bob Schieffer, CBS Political News Contributor; Former Host, “Face the Nation,” CBS News

Date: Friday, September 8, 2017

Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com

(Music plays.)

BOB SCHIEFFER: I’m Bob Schieffer.

H. ANDREW SCHWARTZ: And I’m Andrew Schwartz.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And these are conversations about the news. We’re in the midst of a communications revolution. We have access to more information than any people in history. But are we more informed, or just overwhelmed by so much information we can’t process it?

MR. SCHWARTZ: Our podcast is a collaboration of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at TCU and CSIS in Washington.

MR. SCHIEFFER: In this first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, we’re talking to the reporters who are covering the president the closest, the .

(Music plays.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: Today we welcome to the podcast for the second time Glenn Thrush, the White House correspondent for . And most recently he is a new MSNBC contributor. Previously Glenn worked for Newsday and Bloomberg, and he covered the 2016 presidential election as the chief political correspondent at .

We last spoke to you, Glenn, back in April, so I guess we have a little catching up to do. Anything happen over at the White House since then?

GLENN THRUSH: (Laughs.) I was a younger man then, Bob. (Laughs.) And I – and I had this expectation that we were going to do this thing called resting on the weekend and not checking our iPhones every 15 seconds for presidential tweets. But, alas, my expectations and dreams have been shattered. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.

MR. SCHIEFFER: (Laughs.) Let me ask you something. How do you talk to Trump? I mean, does he never text you? Or what kind of communications do you have with him?

MR. THRUSH: Well, I don’t want to – I don’t want to seem coy on that stuff, but I – as you know, Mr. Schieffer, tradecraft is tradecraft. (Laughter.) I would say we have probably less interaction – direct interaction with him than we did previously. I think under John Kelly – John Kelly is cracking down on that. It’s funny, because I’ve seen a lot of – there’s been a lot of traffic, presupposing that – my close collaborator and best friend – and I have all this backdoor contact with Trump. I think people would be surprised to know, generally speaking, how little direct contact we have with him. That’s not to say we don’t talk to a lot of people around him.

MR. SCHIEFFER: That takes me right into the next question. So, in fact, General Kelly has rearranged things at the White House?

MR. THRUSH: Yeah, this has been, I think, a more significant and stabilizing circumstance than I would have initially anticipated. I think the first rash of stories that I wrote and other people wrote were quite skeptical about his capacity to change things internally. But it turns out that when you get somebody who understands how to run a large organization and create, hello, a memo articulating chains of command, duh, that that has a – that has a tremendous impact on things.

And I think the thing that we didn’t realize is Trump is in such extremis – he’s at 30 – between – I think we have a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll out yesterday that has him at 36 percent, which is a low. At the very most, we see him at 41 and 42 percent. That seems to be his ceiling. There are members of his administration who are on the verge of abandoning him because of het Charlottesville stuff. This is a guy I think, more than anything else, is attuned to his sense – he has an acute sense of self-preservation. And I think the reason why Kelly has been empowered – albeit temporarily – is because Trump realizes that without these changes he’s a dead man.

MR. SCHIEFFER: What do you mean, temporarily on Kelly?

MR. THRUSH: Well, you know, it’s funny. Over the last week, I’ve spoken to probably a dozen administration officials. And I canvassed each one of them and asked them: How long will Kelly ask? And the answers come the range from October to March. I didn’t have anybody who thought he’d be there – I had one person who suggested he’d be there for the long term. And then I went through the White House Press Office and I said: Give me a sense as to why you think he’s going to stay a long time? What’s he doing? And they said, well, he’s engaged in medium-term planning. He’s working on the Asia trip in November and he’s thinking about early 2018 legislative stuff that would move beyond that.

So I think John Kelly is somebody who the president has out of necessity. He is annoying the president by sort of clamping down on various things. But we’re also told the president is happy to have some structure. The question – and, again, Maggie and I wrote about this I think last Friday in a pretty lengthy discussion of that relationship. I think the question really is not whether or not Trump gets tired of Kelly, but when does Kelly get tired of Trump. This is the first grownup relationship that the president has had with an aide in the White House, where the aide needs – where Trump needs Kelly or Trump needs the aide more than the aide needs Trump.

MR. SCHIEFFER: So this is not the relationship that had with the president.

MR. THRUSH: No. (Laughs.) I refer – look, I took a lot of crap a couple of months ago for referring to Priebus as the stalking butler of the Trump administration. (Laughter.) But I think it is no – and this is screwing me up in terms of cultivating – you know, you guys know this. The best reporting you can do with anyone is you catch someone fresh right out of the White House and they are mad and they want to tell you everything, right? Well, this is going to screw me with Priebus, but he’s the weakest chief of staff in the history of that position, by a long shot.

He had no fundamental understanding of it. He had no interest or capacity in terms of policy, nor did he have the intellectual curiosity to develop it while he was chief of staff. Moreover, he put himself in positions that established him as a subordinate in this White House, which is very much a testosterone-fueled place. He did things – you know, I’ll give you an anecdote, I don’t think we’ve really written about it. He was so obsessed with the notion that Steve Bannon, who was talking to reporting behind Reince’s back, that he would check what is known as the WAVES system, the computer system that logs people coming in and out of the building. And he would crash – crash – meetings between reporters and Bannon.

So can you imagine this? And what we’re – I covered Rahm Emanuel. I covered, towards the end, Josh Bolten. Real chiefs of staff. And, you know, there’s a – they’re a mixed bunch. Mack McLarty, as you know, Clinton’s first chief of staff, was a – was a weak person. Bill Daley, who I like very much personally, turned out not to be a great chief of staff for Obama. But the notion of a chief of staff kind of, you know, being like your mom coming down the basement to see if you’re smoking pot, you know, is a pretty humbling thing. And Kelly, I think, has enough of a sense of himself as a Marine, and a sense of duty that’s independent of Trump.

The other thing that makes Kelly really interesting is doesn’t have to do this for the money. He can make money in the corporate sector. Is not doing this necessarily for the glory, I’m sure he’s got ego. And isn’t doing this personally out of loyalty for Trump. My sense is he’s taking one for the team. And I think, in general, there is, at the moment, a sense of gratitude in the White House that he’s willing to do this.

MR. SCHIEFFER: So, was it Kelly that got rid of Bannon?

MR. THRUSH: Mmm, absolutely. Oh, yeah. No, and it was a cascade, really. So the way we can – you know, there has been a sort of a velvet coup – military coup – (laughs) – facilitated by Donald Trump and effectuated by sort of the three generals. Jim Mattis over at the Pentagon – who, by the way, if you can tell me if anyone has really detailed profile of him since he’s been defense secretary, I’d like to see it. Because that is a guy who keeps that operation locked down. And Mattis is extremely influential with the president. You don’t see him popping up in a lot of stories that I write, or other people who do sort of the inside story reporting.

Then you had, you know, H.R. McMaster, the national security advisor, who was very much embattled for a while. Trump does not like him very much. Who was very much on the bubble. Then Kelly comes in. And the first thing that he does is establish McMaster’s primacy on national security. He chucks these two – these two dudes who are writing crazy, crazy memos internally – I mean, you’ve got to read them. Ezra – what’s Ezra’s last name? You know –

MR. SCHWARTZ: I know Gorka’s –

MR. THRUSH: No, there were two national security aides – no, Gorka was wandering the halls still at this – feral, wandering the halls of the EEOB.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Right, with no specific responsibility.

MR. THRUSH: With not specific – and an iffy national security clearance, but very – but omnipresent on television, right? So essentially what Kelly did is he acted initially as McMaster’s wingman and took out three, four, five, six people who were direct threats. And Bannon – I think what people don’t understand is Bannon’s populism, his controversially, his tendency to work the press against his people inside – people inside the White House, those were not the things that got him – got him taken out.

The two things he did – the first thing that he did was to put himself on that committee of the National Security Council, which was a massive overreach and seen as entirely inappropriate by the national security establishment. So that act of overreach put him on a collision course with who – with whatever grownups were really going to run the national security establishment. So that targeted Bannon as being someone who was not going to last. And then the ultimate thing that he did – of course, the ultimate sin around Donald Trump is to get yourself on television or on the cover of a magazine, where you are being compared in terms of power, puissance, and influence with the president himself.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Now Bannon comes back and gives his first interview to Charlie Rose, where he allows as how – that the Catholic Church and Cardinal Dolan –

MR. THRUSH: Right. No flame-throwing liberal, Cardinal Dolan, by the way.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Yeah. (Laughs.) Are behind illegal and pushing illegal immigration because the Catholic Church needs them sitting in the pews. And Bannon says he’s doing this for economic reasons.

MR. THRUSH: Well, OK. Well, this hearkens back to the – (laughs) – to the – to what I thought – there’s so many things that happened in 2016 that we forget. How about the president’s feud with the pope? You know, I mean, like, I had totally forgotten about his feud with Pope Francis, right? First of all, we were talking about this before I came on. I don’t want to bore you with my take on sort of history. But I don’t know which county the Bannons come from in Ireland or when they – exactly they came over.

But I would make this one point: At that point in time, when the majority of Irish immigrants – and, you know, a fair number of people who were pushing fairly harsh immigration policy are of Irish descent. I don’t think that that is necessarily an accident. There are certain cultural – I come from New York City. We view things in terms of ethnicity. There are – there are certain – I mean, there are certain positions associated with various ethnicities. Again, you cannot telescope it out too broadly, but I’d like to make a point about sort of the Irish in this country because Steve Bannon is, as far as I can tell, Irish and very proud of it – as well he should be. I’m a quarter Irish.

The Irish in New York City, many of them came in to the country in the mid-19th century, in period of time when there were not the formal immigration laws enforced in the way that we do them now. Many of them you would call, quote/unquote, “illegal,” or came in informally, right? The Catholic Church in New York City – I know this because I wrote about education in New York for years – the Catholic Church, the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral is located in SoHo just south of Houston Street, in a very hip neighborhood, by the way, very expensive neighborhood.

The St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I forgot the name of the archbishop at that point in time, but those people – those poor, Irish immigrants who were treated like dirt by the Protestant establishment in New York City, who were treated like animals – the terms that you would hear in reading the historical record about the Irish in New York City are very similar to what you would hear racist Southerners refer to African-Americans in the Jim Crow era as. In any event, it was the Catholic Church that created the New York City Public School System, agitated. The church agitated to create the New York City Public School System so that penniless Irish immigrants could be educated and brought up the economic ladder in this country. And that pattern was replicated in cities around the country.

The Catholic Church exists – exists – in this country as – it’s proudest moments in this country were as an intake, an integrating, an education and acculturation mechanism for immigrants that have replenished and replenished and replenished this country. So Steve Bannon, I can’t speak to his politics. I’m not having a political argument with him. But his knowledge of history – to say the very least – is flawed.

MR. SCHIEFFER: So I want to bring in Andrew Schwartz here, but let’s shift here from Bannon. The reason he said this is because of DACA. And so what do you make of the president’s new alliance with his new best friends Nancy and Chuck on the other side?

MR. SCHWARTZ: It’s not crying Chuck anymore. It’s dealing Chuck.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And I, myself, am glad to see this happen, because I think human suffering is the lede of this story.

MR. THRUSH: Oh, you mean – you mean having to hang out with Chuck?

MR. SCHIEFFER: No, I mean – no. (Laughter.)

MR. THRUSH: Because I’ve been doing that for 25 years, Bob.

MR. SCHWARTZ: And you’ve suffered your fair share. (Laughter.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: Point taken. But what I’m talking about is Harvey – Hurricane Harvey.

MR. THRUSH: Right, of course, absolutely.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And the money that needs to – that Congress needs to get together and approve this thing and get this over with, because you’ve got more problems coming in Florida now. And to me, the quicker you can get that done and taken care of, the better it is. And whether he made an agreement with Chuck and Nancy or whoever, I’m good with that. I have no problem with that. They can work out the debt ceiling and all that later. But what do you think is going on here?

MR. THRUSH: Well, you know, there’s a great Stephen Stills song, “Love the One You’re With,” right? (Laughs.)

MR. SCHWARTZ: Absolutely.

MR. THRUSH: And it’s – this is the Donald Trump, frankly, that we thought we were going to be seeing months and months ago.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Right.

MR. THRUSH: First of all, let’s just get a couple of things straight. This Kabuki of Trump and Chuck hating each other is nonsense. These two guys – if there’s one person in Washington who Trump is temperamentally and kind of culturally capable of cutting a deal with, it’s Chuck Schumer. And that picture – your listeners got to Google this, if they have not seen this wonderful picture taken by Al Drago and a bunch of these other White House reporters of Chuck and Trump in a private moment laughing with each other. And that illustrates their relationship.

So the other thing about it is Trump kind of likes Nancy Pelosi too. Trump does not like – not like Mitch McConnell. And the feeling is, by a factor of a million, mutual. And Paul Ryan ain’t exactly cut from the Trumpian jib either. So weirdly, culturally, Trump has much more in common in terms of being able to sit and talk with these folks than he does with his own leadership. So there’s that.

And then the other thing about it is, he’s a political neophyte. And he’s somebody who is a state of perpetual self-inflicted crisis. So one of the ways – (laughs) – this might be overly charitable. But one of the ways that I have started to view this administration from not even the 40,000-foot level, but from the outer space level, is maybe – just maybe they are reinventing the wheel at every single turn. Maybe because there’s a certain arrogance that they came in with and a certain arrogance that they came in with, and a certain outsider sense, and a willful detachment from the establishment, it is entirely possible – and if you look at the way that they set up the NSC and the way that a lot of these programs are going – maybe we’re just watching trial and error in public until they come to the resolution of stuff.

On DACA, for instance, it’s been nuts. In a 36-hour period – we wrote a story, Maggie and I, I think, on Sunday or Monday saying that this DACA compromise was kicking the can down the road. And then the next morning we saw Jeff Sessions come out there and present us with a policy that really seemed a lot harsher. And we were, like, wow, man, did we get this wrong? And then by the evening, Trump – as he has always done when poor Jeff Sessions crawls out onto that shaky limb – Trump goes right behind him and cuts it out, right? And by that night, Trump is saying we’re going to revisit this. And this morning – we’re talking on Thursday morning – Trump tweets that he wants to cut a deal on DACA. So what this guy – I mean, what we’re seeing here is like the improvisational presidency.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, I think you are exactly right. I think that – the best word I can think of, the most charitable word I can think of – is unfamiliarity. He is totally unfamiliar with the way government works and the way it operates. And that’s not – that doesn’t qualify as original sin or anything – any dispersion on his character. He simply has never been in government. He hasn’t been in the military. He has no idea how these things work. And sometimes I think, even when he’s trying to do good things – which I would consider taking care of these Dreamers a good thing – he’s so unfamiliar with how government works that, I think, you’re right. It’s just trial and error. He just goes along until he kind of either figures it out or doesn’t.

MR. THRUSH: Well, the defects of character comes – the defect of character comes in not admitting that up front, or not admitting that privately. Look, the president can’t come out – it’s not the nature of the presidency to come out and say: I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Andrew.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Thank you, Bob. The one thing, you know, that occurs to me with this is, so he made a deal with Chuck and Nancy. It’s no longer crying Chuck. It’s no longer whatever he’s calling Nancy Pelosi. And the town is giddy because this might be the moment that we’ve all been waiting for, where is he actually pivoting to working across the aisle. Is he actually pivoting to saying, hey, this is a deal we need? Same with DACA. You know, are we – are we being duped again?

MR. THRUSH: No. I mean, you know, a person very close to the president has said – and this is – I think if you’re going to use a litmus on this guy, it is this. He lives in 15-minute increments. And if you look at his business career, he goes from well, what do I need to do at this moment in time to get me through the next 15 minutes. How do I get through the news cycle? He responds to his own anger. So the key is to create an environment – and it’s tricky, and Kelly is trying to do this – is to create an environment – or as Stephen Miller – to their credit, Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions with the DACA thing essentially presented the president with a manufactured crisis to spur him to do something. So that’s what’s interesting now, as you’re to see people understand, that the way to get this guy to do things is to create crises that kicks in his sense of self-preservation so that he will respond in that moment.

And that is why – look, I joked about Chuck. You know, I grew up two blocks from where Chuck Schumer grew up. I’ve known him since I’m 15-years-old. But the way, that also means I’ve known Anthony Weiner since I’m 15-years-old. That’s another story.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Totally different story. (Laughter.)

MR. THRUSH: Right. There is nobody smarter at this kind of thing than Charles Ellis Schumer. He was put in this planet for this kind of stuff. And he was waiting in the weeds for months for this moment to happen. And what the Republican leadership knew, and it’s why Mitch McConnell looked like somebody had, you know, suffocated his hamster yesterday – (laughs) –

MR. SCHWARTZ: That’s exactly what he looked like.

MR. THRUSH: He just kind of looked like somebody had just – you know, it was a bad day for him. He knew that what Trump had done was let Chuck into the conversation. And once you let Schumer in, there’s nobody – if you want to talk about somebody who was put on this Earth to figure out how to make Trump do stuff, Charles Schumer is that guy. So I think Trump and his staff, whom he surprised by this. This was spur of the moment. Trump and his staff, I think, think that this is a short-term thing that they’ve done. But Schumer is smart enough to pull him into whatever quicksand.

MR. SCHWARTZ: So are we – are we looking at possibly this, you know, first few months of the administration – like many presidents – the president had some ups and some downs, but now – maybe now it’s evening out? Maybe now he is going to work across the aisle? Maybe this will be a bipartisan thing? Because you said a couple minutes ago, this is what we all had thought he was going to be. And it seems – certainly seems like things are normalizing. I mean, I spent yesterday with a guy who had a two-hour meeting with Trump, who said it was a normal business meeting. There was nothing strange about it. You have General Kelly normalizing the White House. You have some of the people like Gorka and others who have been stirring the pot for – to what end, we all don’t know, gone. Are things getting more presidential? Would you go that far?

MR. THRUSH: No. I mean, I think one of the things that has happened is – I view it somewhat differently. I view Trump – and, again, I’m going to use kind of epidemiological terms here, but I’m not necessarily saying – I’m not saying it’s a malignancy. What I’m saying is, Trump is like a new microbe, a new virus entering the population. And that population is the Washington establishment. And I think what has happened is the establishment, the people who he needs to move the levers of government – because, remember, he’s the most staff-dependent president probably in history because he has no knowledge of anything. So he needs these people. That’s the paradox. He claims he doesn’t want any help, but he needs people more than anyone.

It seems to me that the system – the white blood cells of Washington, D.C. have – (laughs) – have gone after what they view as the toxins, the people who are – the elements, the people, the agents who are most hostile towards the body politic – Gorka, Flynn first, and eventually Bannon. These are people who – you know, Bannon isn’t wrong when he says the deep state is out to get him. And the deep state got him. You know, this is a government by generals at the moment, right? A joke I used to make were lots of generals, few specifics. So I think what it is is it’s less about normalizing than the establishment that Trump needs to run the government normalizing around him. I think he remains an extraordinarily unpredictable figure who can – as he exhibited yesterday – change everything on a dime.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Right. And Kelly said, I think you and Maggie reported this last weekend, that he was screamed at by Trump. And that was the last time he was going to be screamed at. So he’s – so Trump’s a conversation away from losing someone who is smoothing the way forward out for him.

MR. THRUSH: Right. And the other – the other way to look at our story – I’m not talking about sources and methods here – but not a dumb thing for Kelly to get that out either.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Not dumb at all.

MR. THRUSH: Right.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Nobody wants to be screamed at. And, like you said, a four-star general like Kelly doesn’t need this. I mean, I saw sort of a Richard Lewis moment with Kelly, you know. I don’t need this, man. You know –

MR. THRUSH: (Laughs.) Bob doesn’t know what you’re talking about.

MR. SCHWARTZ: The great comedian Richard Lewis.

MR. THRUSH: (Laughs.) He’s from my neighborhood.

MR. SCHWARTZ: One of his favorite, you know, lines is, yeah, I don’t need this crap man. You know, and he uses a little bit stronger language than that.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I’m afraid Glenn knows me a better than I thought he did. (Laughter.)

MR. THRUSH: If it ain’t Texas.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Glenn, let me ask you about Charlottesville. I mean, Charlottesville threw everybody off. It threw Gary Cohn off. It threw Democrats off. It threw Republicans off. It was a bad moment for this administration. It was a bad moment for the country. I don’t think anybody walked away from that feeling particularly good about our country and about our government. But, you know, he’s got to move forward. What are you seeing now?

MR. THRUSH: Well, look, I think it was – it was comparable to the Access Hollywood moment during the campaign. That was a really interesting time to be around a newsroom, because people were really – you know, it was the heat of the campaign, remember. It just depressed the hell out of people. I remember women in the newsroom just being kind of in a – being kind of down about it. And that – it was an unexpected reaction for me. The Access Hollywood less provoked anger – it provoked a ton of anger. And it is something he will never be able to live down, right? That is on him forever as a moral taint.

But what it really did is it – I think it made women in particular, but a lot of Americans, feel like, damnit, didn’t we move beyond this 40 years ago? Are we being dragged back into this stuff? Charlottesville did exactly the same thing. The reaction to Charlottesville – you know, I was covering – I think I was in Bedminster for one of the weekends? Well, anyway –

MR. SCHWARTZ: Yeah, that’s right.

MR. THRUSH: He – the feeling among the press, and even his own staff, was just – it was like a pall descended on everybody. We just felt like we had, as a county and as a people had gone through this, and Trump was pulling us backwards.

MR. SCHIEFFER: But you say the staff had the same –

MR. THRUSH: The staff had this – oh, absolutely. I think there was practical unanimity on this, with the exception of Bannon and Steve Miller and guys like that. I think that the problem with Charlottesville is rekindled moral – the fundamental moral questions about the president. And I will share with you, I probably fielded a half-dozen phone calls at all hours from members of the administration who basically asked me, candidly, how long they could afford to stay and still have their reputations intact.

DACA connects with that. I feel the near-unanimity internally for him to extend that program had that same feeling. And it felt like a through-line, an extension of the Charlottesville question. And I do think, guys, that one of the reasons he has stepped back from the precipice on that is because he knows internally how many people objected to it.

MR. SCHWARTZ: I have to ask you, what did you tell these administration staff when they asked you if they should – you know, how long could they stay without being permanently damaged? Because that was certainly a question that went through my mind about a lot of the staff.

MR. THRUSH: I said it depends on what you want to accomplish. I mean, the question that that question evokes is, why did you come in the first place and why are you staying? And in a lot of cases, these people have specific policy things that they want to accomplish. And a couple of them say that they believe that if they weren’t in the White House worse things would happen.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Do you think Cohn will stay?

MR. THRUSH: I think it’s going to be hard. We’re hearing – I have yet to put this into a story, so I’ll give it to you first but it’s widely known – Trump has been snubbing him in meetings. Trump hasn’t – Trump is not making eye contact with him, which is a classic Trump maneuver. He just doesn’t like the confrontation. He’s been interrupting him. We now – there’s a Wall Street Journal story out that says Cohn is likely not to be named Fed chairman, whatever. I think Cohn is fed up with the president, but Cohn is on a one-man mission to get this tax reform done.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Do you in some way, Glenn, think that – you said this is what a lot of us thought we would see here. Do you see Trump moving, though, to becoming more of an independent and less of a Republican? Do you think this is some sort of a three-way – I mean –

MR. THRUSH: Yes. I think that – I think, yes.

MR. SCHIEFFER: -- new way, third way, Bill Clinton kind of thing?

MR. THRUSH: You know, no, I think it’s much more – it’s much more convulsive than that. I mean, the big question is where do we all wind up with this? The one thing I would say is we’ve got to remember. So Trump has done kind of a Republican – I think you are 100 percent right on this, and I think this is where the game is headed. Trump – it almost seems like Trump has been portraying a Republican for eight months, or trying on the coat and he doesn’t like it. It’s like – or a hair shirt would be, like, a better way to look at it, right? And what I always view Trump’s – and I’m not novel in this opinion – Trump is an independent who took over a major party. He borrowed it. Remember, he refused to sign the loyalty pledge, he just kicked out the former RNC chairman as his chief of staff. I just think – I think the only way that this guy succeeds is to triangulate and make deals with the Dems.

And the – and I wrote about this about a month and a half ago. I think the infrastructure package – which now – I just – I think they are incredibly foolish if they don’t jump on infrastructure right now and use the hurricane reconstruction as a spur, because they could get, right now, 150 votes in the House from Democrats, a bunch of Republican votes levered from the storms. And they could get 60 or 70 votes in the Senate for some form of infrastructure package. And by the way, for a builder president, a developer president, that would be a massive win and would change the nature of the administration.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Glenn Thrush, not only one of the most informative podcasts, you always – you bring a lot to the table when you come. But, you know, I got to say, one of the most entertaining interviews that I’ve done in a long, long time. And you know, in the interview business that’s not a bad thing. So we thank you for being here. For Andrew Schwartz, this is Bob Schieffer. Thanks for listening.

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