NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Susan Glasser of The New Yorker and David Brooks of the The New York Times, about Michael Cohen’s testimony and the U.S.-North Korea summit.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Two years and nearly two months into Donald Trump’s tenure as president, this week proved once again his ability both to dominate a news cycle and to be buffeted by it. The president landed just after 8 o’clock last night fresh from Vietnam and a summit that yielded no winds. He stepped back into the night air of the capital city consumed by investigations, riveted by testimony from a man who once promised to take a bullet for him who now calls the president a racist, a con man and a cheat. Here’s a taste of the week the president and all of us just lived through.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: The joint resolution has passed without…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: The House has just voted to reject President Trump’s declaration of a…
MICHAEL COHEN: My name is Michael Dean Cohen. I am here under oath to correct the record.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Would cooperate or collude with a foreign power…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: He’s going to prison for lying to Congress, and he’s the start witness to Congress.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: We have got to get back to normal.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: President Trump pulls the plug on his summit with Kim Jong Un.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Some really bad things happened to Otto, some really, really bad things.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Why are you…
TRUMP: But he tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.
KELLY: With me in the studio for our Friday week in politics conversation are Susan Glasser of The New Yorker and David Brooks of The New York Times. Welcome back, both of you.
DAVID BROOKS, BYLINE: Good to be here.
SUSAN GLASSER: Thanks so much.
KELLY: Start where that tape ended, the president being asked if he had pushed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un about the death of American college student Otto Warmbier. Trump said he did push, that Kim denied knowing about it and that he takes him at his word. David, I’m going to start with you because this speaks to the one-on-one relationship that the president prides himself on forging with other leaders, a one-on-one relationship that – is it fair to say – did not yield results this week.
BROOKS: Well, the Warmbier part is appalling. It’s basically walking away for – our ideals, who we are as a country, for the sake of some realpolitik gambit. But I have to say, on the whole, on the North Korea deal, I take sort of a sunny side. Two years ago, we were in a very scary place with North Korea. Now we’re in a sort of rotten place but not totally scary. So if you’ve got a horrible regime, at least we’re talking to them.
At least the administration is pressuring the more reactionary parts of the regime versus the less reactionary. There are some parts of the regime that apparently want to make some sort of deal. So at least we’re kicking the can down the road, at least jaw-jaw being better than war-war. And so I think Trump is right to engage, and frankly he was right to walk away. And so I can’t give him too low marks on this. I think it’s better than where we were.
KELLY: Susan, Trump did seem to manage the seemingly impossible – bipartisan consensus that, A, the summit flopped and, B, that might not be a bad thing.
GLASSER: Right, that sound of relief here in the Beltway was palpable. And it really was pretty bipartisan. I think…
KELLY: Relief that no bad deal was cut…
GLASSER: Correct, that no deal…
KELLY: …That that would be worse than…
GLASSER: …Is better than bad…
