ROBERT COSTA: Hello, I'm Robert Costa.
Welcome to the Washington Week Extra, live tonight across many platforms.
We certainly had a rich conversation on the show, and we're continuing it now with Bob
Woodward, author and associate editor at The Washington Post; Margaret Brennan, moderator
of Face the Nation and senior foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News; Susan Davis,
congressional reporter for NPR; and Jake Sherman, senior writer for POLITICO and
co-editor of Playbook. We're two and a half months into divided government.
The president has challenges abroad and at home. But what do we make of it all so far?
What have we learned? Where are we going? Let's open our notebooks. Bob, I'll start with you.
Divided government. You wrote the book, "Fear: Inside the Trump White House." The
initial part of the Trump presidency. Now the president appears to
have hit some stumbling blocks with his own party on foreign affairs.
BOB WOODWARD: Yes, and the really interesting question now is, has Trump grown or
changed at all, or is it just he has different advisors?
And he certainly has a different crop of advisors and Cabinet officers.
And I thought it was very important when he said he liked the title "acting" for people
like chief of staff and defense secretary. It gives him more power.
So he's doing it his way again. And I'm - you look at it and you say: What's going to
be the tall pole in the tent? What's going to be the event? Is it in foreign
affairs, North Korea, the Middle East somewhere, the economy, China? I don't know.
ROBERT COSTA: Margaret, he now - you mentioned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the
broadcast. How is the president working with Pompeo? Is that relationship an enduring
one on foreign policy, even as the talks with North Korea seem to fall apart?
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, it's clear coming out of Hanoi that the National Security
Adviser John Bolton kind of won the argument. And Secretary Pompeo would argue he did too in
terms of setting some real parameters for the president to say what is and is not enough.
Let's be clear here, North Korea is still making enough fissile material and has, between
Singapore and Hanoi, to make about six to eight nuclear weapons. They're just not testing.
They are a growing threat. But the idea that diplomacy remains alive in any way is to
the credit of Mike Pompeo, because he has kept envoys on the ground continuing to engage.
And really, it's one of the few things that Democrats will give the president even some
credit for on the foreign policy front, that he's even going this route at all.
But I think there are so many huge things that we could and should be talking about as a
country, including what's happening in Afghanistan right now. You know, the president
campaigned on the same thing President Obama did: We're out of Afghanistan.
Right now you're having a huge argument about this draft agreement to withdraw troops
that the United States is cutting with the Taliban. There are so many things being argued about.
And as Bob just brought up, it's interesting to see who the president has started to
listen to. It was surprising he listened to Bolton coming out of those North Korea
talks because many people really focused on the fact he wasn't in the room for a lot
of the conversation going into it. Really interesting on Afghanistan too, and on Syria,
that Lindsey Graham, who is not the secretary of defense, seems to be making really
persuasive arguments from the outside on what the president should be doing with U.S.
troop presence in Syria and in the battlefields of Afghanistan. So it's still
kind of hard to come up with what the Trump doctrine actually is going to be here.
ROBERT COSTA: Sue, when you look at the House of Representatives, Speaker Pelosi, and we
talked about it on the show, it's a power struggle between her and President Trump.
She's had a lot on her plate. Some success in pushing back the Republican agenda.
But also debates over Israel within her caucus. She's dealing
with tensions about how to handle the investigations on Capitol Hill. What's
your reporting reveal about her inner circle and how she's been handling it so far?
SUSAN DAVIS: You know, I think the next two years Nancy Pelosi's going to be one of the
most fascinating figures. I mean, she has been, but in some ways how the next two
years play out really will define her legacy in Washington. I mean, she's the first
speaker since Sam Rayburn to have the speakership, lose it, and get it back. And I think
she is kind of seen in that caliber of speakership. So what she does with that power.
Being able to get the speaker's gavel when a lot of people campaigned saying they
wouldn't vote for her. And a lot of those people ended up voting for her. The way she
held the caucus together during the shutdown. I mean, she's had a lot of early successes.
The thing that I think that is always important to remember about Pelosi she's one of
the most seasoned pros at the table right now. And I think she has been - maybe undercut
a lot of her career, but she's one of the smartest tactical politicians that I've
ever covered. She knows where - almost all the time where the votes are in her caucus.
She knows where her party is. And I think a lot of the story is, oh, they're divided
on this, they're divided on this. I think the difference between Republicans and Democrats
is that Republicans are divided, and they derailed their legislation a lot of times. Democrats
are divided and at the end most of them still want to be a yes. So the fundamental
push of the Democratic Caucus is generally to move the ball forward versus blow it all up.
ROBERT COSTA: When you think about Speaker Pelosi, yes, the Muller report hovers out
there as something that's probably coming soon.
We'll see when the exact release of that is when it goes to the Justice Department.
But when she says she's not moving right now toward impeachment, does that say to the
country she's willing to work with President Trump in a serious way on infrastructure,
prescription drug reform, prescription drug pricing?
Or is that stuff really off the table when you talk to top Democrats?
JAKE SHERMAN: Very difficult to say. President Trump has said his top legislative
priority is passing the new NAFTA, the USMCA as he calls it. The White House is
actually acting quite good on that, to get it done. And they are working with Pelosi.
I will agree with everything Sue said, and add one more point here. Pelosi has an
amazing ability to burn the candle at both ends. She knows where she's going to end up.
She knows, I would imagine, whether the trade deal will pass. There's a lot of
skepticism among Democrats that it will pass. She brought in Bob Lighthizer, the U.S.
trade representative, for a big talk in front of her caucus this week.
And the White House kept telling me: This is a great sign. Pelosi's letting our guy in.
And I just kept thinking about all the times where Pelosi has just let the string play
out for months at a time, months at a time, and everybody
ended up coming around to her position anyway.
ROBERT COSTA: You said the White House has been pretty good in dealing with Congress on
trade. Do you mean the U.S. Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer?
Has he actually been able to build a rapport with Democrats?
JAKE SHERMAN: He and C.J. Mahoney, who are the two top trade officials - United States
trade officials - they've been listening, which is good.
And they - the White House legislative affairs team on the House side is actually quite
able and has done a good job in the past of putting things together - to the extent
they've been able to with a president who changes his opinion a lot. But they haven't
messed up yet. And that's a big thing on something as complex as a trade deal.
BOB WOODWARD: But in the end, when Boehner was the speaker and they had a majority, they
always talked about themselves being a blocking majority, they stopped things.
And if Pelosi can only stop things, if everything gets stopped really in the Senate and
there's no scorecard where you can say, hey, this is what we accomplished - in the early
months you can see how let's have this combat, and so forth. Scorecards matter.
SUSAN DAVIS: I think that the presidential leadership here matters though, because we do
know we have a record with Pelosi. She was speaker - or, she was a leader under Bush.
And she worked with a Republican president, right? And they did actually pass legislation
together. I think she has proven herself to be willing to cut deals with Republicans.
I'm not as convinced that this is a White House that wants to have a legislative
accomplishment with Nancy Pelosi.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, it may be even more of a risk for the Democrats to hand that
ahead of a 2020 race too.
But I think trade is something that's undercovered and we should be talking more about
because it is hugely also uncomfortable when it comes to that USMCA vote for a lot of
progressives to be voting for some of the things in the free trade deal or, you know, the
sequencing of how these votes play out on NAFTA, then you've got to have the negotiations
with the Europeans finalized. We were fighting with our allies over that. We still
have tariffs on Canada and Mexico. And then you have the big thing President Trump
really wants, that China deal that they want to be able to finalize as soon as next month.
And Nancy Pelosi knows that the sequencing of that is important, get the deal with your
allies so you can pressure your enemies, like China.
ROBERT COSTA: Let's finish for a moment on the 2020 presidential race.
We have a lot of new voices, new figures jumping into the race. One of them is former
Texas Congressman Robert O'Rourke, also known as Beto O'Rourke. He is in.
He was in Iowa this week. You covered him in the House. I know he's gotten a lot of
attention for his Senate race last year against Senator Ted Cruz, but you've observed
him up close for a few years when he was more of a backbencher in the House.
A serious contender, someone to pay attention to, or what should we know about him after
having reported on him?
JAKE SHERMAN: I think Sue would agree - I'll let her veto this if she disagrees - I
don't think former Congressman O'Rourke made a big mark on Congress in any way.
He was, as you mentioned, a backbench member who had served for three terms.
There are perhaps thousands of backbench members who served for three terms that don't
even merit a footnote in history in many cases, I would say.
I think he has gotten a bunch of endorsements. People like him.
I understand a lot - and a lot of his colleagues intellectually understand the appeal.
It'll be interesting to see how he frames his experience as a member of Congress, which
is really his only - not his only, but one of his chief calling cards
SUSAN DAVIS: They also talk so much about - in the 2020 field about lanes, and I'm -
Beto is interesting because I'm not sure exactly what lane he fits into.
He's not the obvious electable lane. He's not the diverse lane.
He's not the progressive lane; he's actually much more of a centrist.
So I think it shows that there is a lot of room in the field, but I think - I'm curious
to see how he plays in - when he's not in Texas, when he's not running against Ted Cruz,
can he really win in Iowa? I don't know.
BOB WOODWARD: I think experience really matters, and I think it's going to matter
against Trump. And there are a number of candidates or prospective candidates like Joe
Biden who can wear the experience label with great credibility, and I think that's going
to be an issue more than how somebody's campaign rollout is. And there are just so many things.
I mean, if we had a pool and, you know, listed all these people and who's going to get
the nomination, no one's going to win that pool. (Laughter.)
ROBERT COSTA: But we do -
SUSAN DAVIS: But Americans also proved they like their last new - their last two
presidents were two of the most inexperienced candidates, right?
Donald Trump and Barack Obama were pretty inexperienced candidates.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I think the celebrity and the rhetoric, I mean, people are kind of
looking for - my interpretation of events at least - the soaring rhetoric of someone like
Beto is such a contrast to President Trump's description of the world in very dark terms,
in very stark terms, very sort of keeping you from the abyss versus the aspirational
rhetoric of Beto. It seems to me there's a lot at least that the media is focusing on in
terms of that descriptive characteristic, not what he ran on or what he legislated around.
ROBERT COSTA: And my favorite development this week in 2020, Democrats pick Milwaukee
for the site of their national convention. I love our friends over at Milwaukee PBS.
Good beer, good cheese, good people. We'll leave it there tonight.
That's it for this edition of the Washington Week Extra.
You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on our Washington Week website.
While you're online check out the Washington Week-ly News Quiz.
I'm Robert Costa. We'll see you next time.