The Daily - Thursday, Mar. 1, 2018

Episode Date: March 1, 2018

President Trump stunned lawmakers on Wednesday with calls for gun control and jabs at the National Rifle Association. “They have great power over you people,” he said of the N.R.A. “They have less power over me.” Separately, Hope Hicks, the White House communications director who testified this week that her job required telling “white lies,” is to step down. Guests: Maggie Haberman, who covers the White House for The New York Times; Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Trump stuns lawmakers with his calls for gun control and his disregard for the NRA. They have great power over you people, he said. They have less power over me. And Hope Hicks says

she's leaving the Trump administration one day after testifying that her job requires telling white lies for the president. It's Thursday, March 1st. So good afternoon. This is a very important subject and it's happening, I think, at a critical time. Mike, there's this meeting at the White House on Wednesday.

What's going on? Well, it was really remarkable. This was a discussion that the president hosted in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Wednesday. What's going on? Well, it was really remarkable. This was a discussion that the president hosted in the Roosevelt Room at the White House with a bunch of Democratic and Republican lawmakers from the House and Senate. Mike Scheer watched the meeting at the White House on Wednesday. The ostensible reason was to kind of discuss possible solutions, possible responses to the tragedy that happened down in Florida a couple weeks ago. We now have to do something. We have to act. We can't wait and play games.

Directly on his left is Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, one of the leading proponents of gun control measures. On his right is Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican leader in the Senate and, you know, a real sort of hardcore gun rights kind of senator. And then, you know, around the table, other members. We're determined to turn our grief into action. I really believe that. I think that the people at this table want it.

I mean, I see some folks that don't say nice things about me, and that's OK. Because if you turn that into this energy, I'll love you. So how does this meeting start? Well, it starts, I think, as many meetings with Trump starts, which is sort of a soliloquy by the president. And he launches into a discussion about how we have to get something done. We can't just talk and talk and talk and talk. And then he sort of ticks through his issues, the mental health.

We have to confront mental health. There's never been a case that I've ever seen, I'm sure everybody would feel the same, where mental health was so obviously, 39 different red flags. I mean, everybody was seeing them. He talks about the idea of improving the defense of schools. You've got to have defense, too. You can't just be sitting ducks. You know, as you sort of settle in to watch it at the very beginning, you don't necessarily expect it to kind of veer the direction that it did.

And then he says, but. And he goes on to describe the lunch that he had over the weekend with the leadership of the NRA, with Wayne LaPierre, the highly controversial and well-known CEO of the NRA, and also Chris Cox, who's their chief lobbyist. And, you know, the but is, it's time. We're going to stop this nonsense. It's time. And that's the hard turn that I think nobody in that room had expected. Right. I mean, it's especially striking because historically the biggest fans of the Second Amendment do not say, I'm a big fan of the NRA, but.

There's no but. There's no but. If there's one characteristic for the NRA over the last, at least the last decade or two, it's been absolutism, right? It's been this idea that you can't give an inch because if you give an inch, they're coming for your guns and government is going to take away your right to bear arms. they're coming for your guns and government is going to take away your right to bear arms. And the idea that a Republican president of the United States says, I love the NRA, but, I mean, that's a pretty remarkable moment. With that, I think I'd like to start.

Maybe I'll ask John, you can start off and then we'll go back and forth. So talk me through what happens next. Well, next, Trump throws it to the room. He essentially invites the members of Congress that are sitting around him to give him their ideas. And they do. So Senator Murphy and I and 46 Senate colleagues on a bipartisan basis have what we think is a start. strengthen the data in the background check system. You have Senators Toomey and Manchin talking about their universal background check proposal that has been on the table for a long time. Diane, do you have something? Well, I do, Mr. President.

You have Senator Feinstein talking about assault weapons. I would be most honored if you would take a look at it. I will. I will. And we will get it to you and let us know what you think of it. I will. Thank you. Thank you very much. Essentially, the president's response to all of it, Democrat or Republican, it sort of seems not to matter,

but his response to all of it is, more, yes. It would be so beautiful to have one bill that everybody could support, as opposed to, you know, 15 bills, everybody's got their own bill. But if we could have one terrific bill that everybody started by the people around this table. And how are lawmakers in the room reacting to the president kind of vacuuming all this up? Well, it depends on which party they're in. The Democrats, as it goes along, and as they see the president not swatting down their ideas, they become energized. You could just tell the energy in the room among the Democrats was palpable. The Republicans, on the other hand, were stone-faced.

I mean, you could sort of see them trying to figure out what is happening here. And Senator Cornyn was silent. You could just sort of see them not quite knowing. How do you tell the president, no, Mr. President, you're wrong on this? Because the president didn't seem to be in that mode. The president seemed to be in the mode of, give me more, I'll take all of this. And what about Senator Dianne Feinstein? I think of her as this perpetually disappointed figure fighting for gun control for years when it's seemed basically impossible to have even the smallest effect.

So, you know, I think initially when she mentioned the assault weapons ban early in the meeting when the president turned to her, I think she didn't expect much. But you could see her whole mood kind of lightened. She on it that she wanted to show him. And so she kind of leaned in her shoulder and President Trump leaned over. And the two of them were looking at this paper as she was sort of describing the sort of statistics that she wanted to show him. This is when the 10-year assault weapon ban was in. How incidents and deaths drop. When it ended, you see it going up. It was just one of these moments where, like, they looked like partners almost. If you didn't know any better, you could imagine a president and a senator who, you know, have long been friends. And, you know, because it sort of physically looked like that kind of dynamic.

Joe and Pat, you're going to have to discuss that. You'll sit down with Diane and everybody else, and you'll come up with something. And I really believe it has to be very strong. So I think the next interesting moment came on the issue of whether or not the minimum age for buying a semi-automatic weapon like the one used in the Florida shootings, whether the minimum age should be raised from 18 to 21. The president has, in the past, kind of embraced the idea. And in this

meeting, he brings it up. I'll tell you what, I'm going to give it a lot of consideration. And I'm the one bringing it up. And a lot of people don't even want to bring it up because they're afraid to bring it up. But you can't buy a handgun at 18, 19, or 20. You have to wait until you're 21, but you can buy the gun, the weapon used in this horrible shooting at 18. And he's just incredulous. He's sort of looking at this logic. He said, this just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make sense that I have to wait until I'm 21 to get a handgun,

but I can get this weapon at 18. I don't know. And he launches into a kind of political analysis of that piece of legislation, which the NRA fiercely opposes. And he sort of acknowledges that. I can say that the NRA is opposed to it. And I'm a fan of the NRA. I mean, there's no bigger fan. I'm a big fan of the NRA.

They want to do it. These are great people. These are great patriots. They love our country. But that doesn't mean we have to agree on everything. They're good patriots. They love our country. But that doesn't mean we have to agree on everything. Mike, given the extent to which the president is breaking from party orthodoxy here on guns,

what's going on with his vice president, Mike Pence, who's sitting right across from him in this room and has historically been very loyal to the NRA? Right. I mean, this actually may have been my favorite moment in the whole hour, just because it was so strikingly different from what you would ever hear from a Republican. It went viral. Yes, go ahead, Mike. Well, the category you've spoken about, Mr. President, gun violence, restraining orders. The president recognizes his vice president, Mike Pence. The vice president begins talking about, are there ways that we can identify people who are a danger to themselves or a danger to others? To literally give families and give local law enforcement additional tools if an individual is reported to be a potential danger to themselves. He's very careful, as all Republicans are, to say, but of course we would only do that with the appropriate due process.

Allow due process so no one's rights are trampled, but the ability to go to court, obtain an order, and then collect not only the firearms, but any weapons. And the president interrupts him. Or might take the firearms first and then go to court, because that's another system. Because a lot of times by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court to get the due process procedures. I like taking the guns early. Like in this crazy man's case that just took place in Florida. He had a lot of fires.

They saw everything. To go to court would have taken a long time. So you could do exactly what you're saying, but take the guns first, go through due process. would have taken a long time. So you could do exactly what you're saying, but take the guns first, go through due process. The whole idea of due process is that you go through the due process before the thing happens. So you can't have the thing happening and then go through due process. It just doesn't make any sense. But the heads exploding in conservative world on the idea that an American president would openly talk about just like identifying people who they don't think should have guns and taking them. And then like at some point in the future, we'll go through some sort of due process to make sure that that was OK.

I mean, the reaction to that was reflected most kind of dramatically on the Breitbart website, which very quickly put up a headline in bright red, caps, Trump the gun grabber. As if it's some kind of Second Amendment nightmare. Right. And from the standpoint of somebody who has long been a, you know, Second Amendment supporter, right, if you're one of those folks, that just sends a chill down your back. Mike, what we saw in this room on Wednesday with this guns meeting reminds me of a listening session that the president held with lawmakers last month about DACA and immigration. It feels quite similar.

Well, thank you very much, everyone, for being here. I'm thrilled to be with a distinguished group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers from both the House and the Senate. He calls together all the key players into the White House. We are here today to advance bipartisan immigration reform that serves the needs of the American families, workers, and taxpayers. Promises bipartisan legislation. Says he wants to make a deal across the aisle, get something done. And I'd like to ask the question,

what about a clean DACA bill now? He shocks the Democrats in the room with what he indicates he's open to. I have no problem. I think that's basically what Dick has said. We're going to come out with DACA. But of course, days after that DACA meeting, things changed. Right.

At a news conference, the president took another whack at clarifying his position on immigration, insisting that a wall on the border with Mexico be a part of any deal to protect the roughly 800,000 undocumented DREAMers from deportation. And it didn't just change. Trump completely did a 180 over the course of the next several weeks. Reports say the headline-making remarks happened during a meeting on immigration in the Oval Office. When talk turned to Haiti and countries in Africa at that meeting, he apparently said, this is a quote, why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway.

He went from being open to all of these ideas on immigration in that meeting to becoming one of the most hardline voices that killed the sort of bipartisan immigration consensus that was forming, at least in the Senate. There had been this sort of bipartisan effort. That is burned into the minds of Democrats who have been pushing for gun control. And I think, you know, you definitely send some skepticism after the meeting that when push comes to shove and legislation is actually proposed, and the president starts tweeting again in the mornings, and his hardline advisors start whispering in his ear, and the Republican allies start calling him, you know, I think there's a fair bit of doubt that he'll actually stay the course and that this will, you know, be remembered as another one of those moments where

he kind of freelanced before being kind of drawn back into the Republican fold in the end. Is there any reason to believe this will turn out any differently than that meeting on immigration? Because we're a week from the deadline for the Dreamers, and we seem further than ever from an immigration deal. So why would this gun discussion be different? As a skeptical journalist, I think it probably won't be. I mean, I think if there's two things that I could identify that make it possible for something different to happen. It would be

the fact that the president is something of an X factor, that he's less able to be pigeonholed because he's just been less a part of this culture. And I think the kids of Stoneman Douglas, who have injected a slightly different dynamic in their sort of political activism, and, you know, we expect them to sort of keep that up over the next several weeks. And if they do, and if that contributes to a kind of a different atmosphere than we've seen in the past, I suppose those are the two things that I would suggest you could sort of see that might make this different. Though, you know, if I was a betting man, I'd say probably not. Thank you, Mike.

Sure. Happy to do it. Thank you, Mike. Sure, happy to do it. On Wednesday, two of the nation's leading gun sellers announced plans to restrict the sale of firearms. Walmart said it would stop selling guns to anyone under the age of 21. And Dick's Sporting Goods said it would stop selling assault-style weapons altogether and would no longer sell high-capacity magazines to anyone under 21. We'll be right back. She has been at Donald Trump's side going back to the beginning of the campaign.

Came from the Trump organization, a loyal spokeswoman for the president. In the White House, her job has really kind of been the Trump whisperer. She views her job to defend the Trump branch. There have been tons of firings, hirings, people resigning from Donald Trump's orbit, and she has endured. Maggie, where did Hope Hicks come from? So Hope Hicks has been working for the Trump family for about six years. She began working for Ivanka Trump. Maggie Haberman covers the White House for The Times. You know, the president knew who she was, liked her, poached her for his campaign team

when he was not really attracting a lot of people who were familiar with politics who wanted to work for him. Hope Hicks was not familiar with politics. She signed up. She was part of this core group of a handful of original aides, and she is one of the ones who has lasted the longest by his side. She had one of the least visible profiles of any White House communications director I can even think of. I think you couldn't find a television interview that she has ever given. She's been on stage, I think, maybe two or three times with the president. She's quoted in stories, but that's really it.

So what is it that has made her so powerful, exactly? What is it about her? Because she understands the president better than anybody. I mean, look, she would constantly do battle with him. She would call control rooms arguing on his behalf. She would call reporters. I have had more than my share of fights with her. She also would sort of, as much as she filtered to people,

there was a lot that she did not end up relaying. I mean, just as an example, without betraying details of things that were off the record, but on a story that I had a huge fight with the White House about last year, she and I had an argument about it, and she relayed the president's displeasure, which I considered unreasonable, his reaction, and narrowly focused. And it didn't impact our reporting, but I found out from somebody else later the full extent of what the president had said and how much had not been relayed. She spent a lot of time navigating both sides of that. So what happened on Wednesday?

What happened on Wednesday was that Hope Hicks told the president she was leaving. And she told her colleagues, and we learned about it and reported it. The internet sort of immediately exploded when you broke this news, Maggie, because after three years of managing to keep herself out of the story, Hicks has been in the headlines in a major way these past few weeks. these past few weeks. First, when President Trump's staff secretary, Rob Porter, resigned after two ex-wives accused him of domestic abuse, it was reported that Hicks had been dating Porter. And then, just on Tuesday, the day before she says she's resigning, it's reported that in closed-door testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee, Hicks said that she tells white lies on behalf of the president.

So settle it for us. Are either or both of these stories connected to her resignation? The story about what she said to the committee had nothing to do with this. I understand that it is frustrating to people to not understand why I know that, but I do know that. And I know it definitively. In terms of the Rob Porter issue, I don't think that was a fun period for her. She has had to contend with being both the person trying to manage the news and being the news herself. So the Porter incident might have contributed to her decision, not because anyone wanted her out.

No, no, no. But because suddenly there was an attention that, as you've said, she so assiduously tries to avoid. I think if you think about the list of things that we have just talked about that her job has entailed, who would want that job? And frankly, look, I mean, there's another reason which we haven't discussed, which is her Tuesday appearance on The Hill

did not relate to this. That doesn't mean that the Russia issue doesn't relate to, you know, her thinking. Meaning the investigation is weighing on her. She has been a focus of the Russia investigations in terms of what she knew about meetings that were held, or the firing of James Comey and what took place before that, or the drafting of a statement aboard Air Force One in response to a story that we were doing about a meeting that Donald Trump Jr. took with a Russian lawyer who had claimed to have, quote unquote, dirt about

Hillary Clinton. Because of her proximity to the president quote-unquote, dirt about Hillary Clinton. Because of her proximity to the president, she was present for a lot of things. And so that has made her, you know, sort of a vulnerable target. And I think that every day that she's at the White House is a day where she's got more legal exposure. So at a certain point, why would you do that to yourself?

Why would she be more legally exposed inside the White House than outside the White House? I know neither of us are lawyers, but... Well, because she's going to, in theory, she could end up hearing more things the president might want to do about, you know, possibly, say, getting rid of Bob Mueller, the special counsel, or wanting to get rid of Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, or wanting to scream about Jeff Sessions not protecting him on Russia and so forth. So in that case, proximity to the president could become a legal liability. Proximity could become a liability. Correct. Don't we expect that Robert Mueller could be coming after Hope Hicks now that she's leaving with the idea that she's out of the White

House and thus sort of a freer figure when it comes to talking about what she saw and with fewer legal protections that you might have when you're in the West Wing? It certainly could be. And look, I mean, the risk when you leave is that the proximity buys a little bit of protection, right? I don't know that it leaves her more exposed. I mean, you know, a lot of this is theoretical because we don't know what her conversations are with Mueller. But in theory, she could set up some kind of a deal with him, some kind of an immunity discussion with him. I think there are many ways this could go once she's out. If I'm not wrong, Maggie, Hope Hicks is the fifth or sixth person

to have served in this communications role. And while you say that the white lie comment had nothing to do with her leaving, it does seem to speak to how hard it must be to be the mouthpiece for this White House and this president, because she's essentially acknowledged that she had to tell,

she calls them white lies, but lies to do her job. So is that just an impossible role, being communications director or being strategic communications director for this White House? There's no question. I mean, working for him just grinds you down. That becomes impossible after a while.

I mean, the number of people in the White House who have said to me they feel like they're losing their minds and how free they have all felt when they left is huge. And I suspect she will end up as one of them. So would you say that ultimately she left because this is an impossible job? I think she left for a lot of reasons, but I certainly think that is one of them. Thank you very much, Maggie. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Here's what else you need to know today. Here's what else you need to know today.

On Wednesday, the long-simmering tension between President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions came to a head in a public face-off between the two men. It began with a tweet from President Trump calling Sessions disgraceful for suggesting that the Justice Department's independent inspector general look into the handling of the Russia investigation in its early months, rather than ordering the Justice Department itself to do so. Sessions, who has absorbed the president's previous criticisms in silence, responded with a rare statement defending himself. responded with a rare statement defending himself. As long as I am the Attorney General,

I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, he said. And this department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner, according to the law and Constitution. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.