-You prepared for State of the Unions
when you were working with the Bush presidency.
-Yeah. -How do you think
they're preparing for Tuesday, and how do you feel about --
It seems like people are looking back
at the Bush State of the Unions in a different way now.
[ Laughter ]
-Look, we -- we --
We didn't usually have high expectations --
You know, he was -- Bush -- I loved Bush.
[ Laughter ] He wasn't known --
He wasn't known for these, like, soaring rhetorical skills.
-Right. -But his speeches
were thoughtful, and he would consult
with his own party, and he'd try to have policies,
and there were bipartisan things
that we knew both parties would support.
This White House is a little more
fly by the seat of their pants,
and they have a guy named Stephen Miller,
who you've talked about. -Yeah.
-You cover Stephen Miller. -Yeah.
-Who isn't really known for doing anything
that unites anybody.
The unique thing about this speech
is that they are on their heels.
They are on their knees.
They're in such a position of weakness.
He's going to have to do something
to sort of shake up his own political standing.
-Isn't it terrifying?
And I know this happens all the time.
Is there nothing more -- or I would say --
I feel like the most terrifying thing in the world
is, like, Donald Trump needing to do something to shake it up.
-Yeah. Please. -Please, yeah.
-Like, just somebody going in like,
"We've got to change the game."
You're like, "No, I don't --" -No, please don't.
-Yeah.
Just, like, maybe like go back and read the rules of the game.
-Right. [ Laughs ]
-Just to, like, see, like, what's normal.
-Right. [ Applause ]
-Have Pence do it.
-Pence do it. I can't im--
I feel like he's going to do the whole State of the Union,
like, looking back at Pelosi. -Right, right.
-The fact that she's over his shoulder.
-Yeah. -I mean, she can --
-That relationship is so interesting.
I mean, she -- she became Speaker
while my old boss was still president.
And so I've been to this movie, I know how it ends --
well for her, not well for the Republican president.
And the fact that no one studied sort of her --
not just her legislative acumen,
but she can do what really no one else
in either party can do --
she can hold her party together.
And I don't know if it's all of her experience.
I don't know if they fear/respect her.
It's usually a combination of that in politics, at least.
But she can hold her party together
the way no other Democrat or Republican can.
-Well, I think in that way that there are --
I think there are Republicans who thank God right now
that there is Mitch McConnell,
because Mitch McConnell gets things done.
I mean, if you're a Republican right now --
-Or keeps them from getting done.
-Yes. -Can we boo? Can we boo?
-You can do whatever you want, you're my guest.
-All right, he said Mitch McConnell! Boo!
-All right... [ Booing ]
-Okay, all right, sorry. -But I mean, like,
it seems like Nancy Pelosi is his -- you know, that, like,
you ultimately need somebody who understands how it works.
And it seems to me that Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell
understand how things work. -Definitely.
-Whereas when you have somebody like --
Donald Trump does not fundamentally understand
how it works, and anything he's getting accomplished
is through the help of somebody like Mitch McConnell.
-Yeah, everything.
And everything that he fails to do,
it comes from -- is born from that incompetence.
And if it isn't covered on "Fox & Friends,"
he hasn't learned it yet, two years in.
-Yeah. -I mean, that is his whole
sort of going to school.
And to their credit, this week, they finally said,
"Whoa, you are not --" I think they said, "You are not a king."
I mean, he's even getting pushback
from his trusted sources of information.
-There's a lot of talk about how the media is going to cover
the 2020 election, and how --
you know, the danger of talking about it
like horse race politics and whatnot.
But isn't the person that's most likely
to be distracted by the 2020 election
the president himself? -Of course.
And it won't even be the substantive attacks on his --
sort of the cruelty and vapidness
of his policy and his tweets.
It will be the person with the biggest crowds.
So Kamala should be the person
that Democrats are most excited about.
She has the thing that scares him the most,
the biggest crowd.
-And he's probably just sitting there trying to come up
with a nickname for her right now.
-I mean, you -- definitely.
And if you go back to the first day of his presidency
where he sent his press secretary out to lie,
he went to the CIA and sort of debased the CIA
by bragging about his crowd size.
She now had the thing that we all know he values the most,
the biggest crowd. -Yeah.
Well, it's certainly going to be interesting to watch.
We'll be happy to watch you talk about it.
Thank you so much for being here. It's always a pleasure.
Thank you as well, Rosie. -My pleasure.