♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: president donald trump marked his first 100 days in office this weekend. p thiseriod is historically the time when the president uses their momentum in popularity to set the agenda for the next four years. it's a common benchmark for evaluating their performance in office. according to the latest polls, president trump has the lowest job approval rating of any president in history after the first 100 days. he has failed to achieve core campaign promises, including the repeal and replacement of the affordable care act and the construction of a mexican border wall.

today president trump released a campaign advertisement declaring his time in office in the first 100 days a success. >> donald trump, sworn in as president 100 days ago. america has rarely seen such success. a respected supreme court justice confirmed. companies investing in american jobs again. america becoming more energy independent. regulations that kill american jobs, eliminated. the biggest tax cut plan in history. you wouldn't know it from watching the news. america is winning, and president trump is making america great again. president trump: i'm donald trump and i approve this message. charlie: the president spoke with cbs's chief washington correspondent john dickerson in a wide-ranging interview saturday. among topics discussed were health care and the guarantee that pre-existing conditions may be covered in the next bill. john: i hear you say pre-existing will be in there for everybody. president trump: it will be in

there and we will also create pools. john: but it will not be left up to the states, everybody gets pre-existing? president trump: the states have a lot to do with it. we ultimately want to get it back down. look, if you hurt your knee, i would rather have the federal government focused on north korea, focused on other things than your knee. or than your back, as important as your back is. i would much rather see the federal government focused on other things. bigger things. now the state is going to be in , a much better position to take care of it because it's smaller. , john: people with pre-existing conditions are worried if they would have the guarantee of coverage if they have pre-existing conditions, or if they live in a state where the governor decides that is not a part of the health care or if , the price goes up. the american medical association says this could make coverage completely unaffordable for people. president trump: forget about unaffordable. what's unaffordable is obamacare. john: i'm not hearing you say there's a guarantee of

pre-existing -- president trump: we had a clause that guarantees. john: ok. excellent. charlie: john dickerson joins me now. it was a great interview, i know you are hearing from many people who were clearly prepared for this. john: yes. we spent -- the entire team at "face the nation," has been preparing this. you carry the questions around in your head, and you ask smaller versions to people who are not the president, then you get him. we have been collecting them. in this last week we wanted to try to get at the core issues. wouldhich specific topic get you there. with this president, perhaps like no source i have ever interviewed, you never know where to go or what claim he is going to make, so you have to prepare for eventualities that span a wide swath. charlie: he is contradictory

within his answers. john: the answer it doesn't even seem to be in the realm of anything you were expecting. it is such a challenge. you have to listen to make sure you're getting it right and build on that for an answer. sometimes it is fragmentary, what is -- what he is saying. charlie: and most of the time he speaks in generalities rather than specifics. john: that's one of the things we are trying to do. not to play a quiz game, but how, by the likes of his own administration, his own objectives does he talk about , policy? for example, he said about his health care act it's got to help , supporters or i'm not going to sign it. he said that six weeks ago. what has he done in the interim to make sure that is the case? that is a policy question. it's also a negotiating question. he's a great negotiator, he says. how have you used those skills to advocate for supporters? the story of this election, he is fighting for the forgotten man. how are you making sure to fight

for forgotten man in key specific terms in the administration? to try and bundled a larger questions into a specific thing to get a sense of what kind of a president he is. charlie: things like medicare? john: that's right. in talking to him about that, that is also connected to taxes. in congress, the tax plan will have a big deficit effect. even if you have 3% growth, he still creates $5.5 trillion in new debt over 10 years. congress cannot pass something with that deficit number. what kind of savings might they get? paul ryan might look to medicare and his premium support plan. as he called it. as some people call it vouchers. donald trump campaigned against that. we have seen him changing on a number of fronts. will he change in on this? the key idea when asked was to

get a new benchmark. you want to get new benchmarks with the president because he is changing and shifting. he said he won't touch medicare today. that's different from when he said it six months ago. that's his position now. it is interesting because if he rolls that off from possible savings, it will be awfully hard for congress to do the things he wants and keep the budget close to anywhere on track. charlie: back to the discussion yesterday in terms of pre-existing conditions. what is the final -- and your understanding of where he is? john: i'm not quite sure. the original question was, how have you changed the bill in order to help supporters? that is about the subsidies they would get under obamacare. those would go away. older voters, you can charge more for them. those are things that needed to be fixed. he said the fix was pre-existing conditions, which is not really the case. there are some changes they are trying to make to pre-existing conditions. part of it is negotiations with the conservative freedom caucus, because they think the mandates

part of obamacare drive-up prices. they have been asking for more flexibility at the state level. included in some of the things governors can be more flexible about other rules for pre-existing conditions. there is a lot of debate about whether the suggestions they made about how to reform pre-existing coverage and actually removing that guarantee. i was trying to find out once he , went down that road -- i wasn't expecting him to -- in an answer to the question about his supporters, i was trying to say, are you saying no matter what , people can be assured that they will have coverage for their pre-existing condition and that it will not be so expensive that it costs what a rolls-royce would? charlie: where did it end up? john: he said there is a guarantee for coverage of pre-existing conditions, but

what still was not clear is, you can guarantee it, but can you guarantee it in a way that the price is not through the roof, therefore the guarantee doesn't mean anything? i'm not quite sure we ended up there. charlie: what else did you want to see coming out of health care? was it where you thought were you needed clarification and a new benchmark? john: i wanted to find out how involved he has been. his argument is, he is the one fighting for the forgotten man. what does that look like in practice? i know what it looks like on the rally stump. we went with him to harrisburg, and it was as electric as it has ever been. they believed. it was just like it was up the campaign. what is different is he wasn't relying on beating up his opponent, which he did often. he was relying on beating up the press and other things. he still uses that tactic. without the campaign, does he still have the connection? he absolutely does. charlie: and you suggested it's almost like they just wanted to touch him. john: absolutely. he was amazing when he was in

the plant, the workers were his fans and who had been corralled into a special area because they were, they just wanted to touch him. in talking to them, they just love that he is in there fighting for them. charlie: and you corrected me this morning, it is not about leadership, it is about, what? john: it's about understanding them and where they come from. charlie: that he's listening and -- listening to them and will take their case. john: exactly. he will take their case against washington. when he's bedeviled by the press, congress, or court, they see that as him in this titanic struggle against stupid forces that are elite who don't understand the many cultural level who have created policies , that hurt them, and they see him as their champion in the middle of the ring. the more bloodied and scuffed up he is, it is more proof of how strong his fight is for them. charlie: i'm jumping all over, but it's clear he's already thinking about 2020.

john: he's absolutely thinking about 2020. i think that's part of what he keeps talking about, his big victory. i think he was to keep reasserting that because it gives him leverage over politicians, but i think he's absolutely thinking about the next sort of judgment, real judgment, is the election. 2018 can get in the way, but the next ratification comes four years from now. charlie: 2018 could be a terrible year for republicans. john: it could be. and based on his approval ratings and some of the fibrillations we have seen from republicans like joni ernst, saying he should not go to mar-a-lago so often, he should if thathis tax returns, continues, you start to see what those republicans are acting on as a political dynamic that could suggest trouble for republicans.

it is such a good landscape for republicans in 10 democrats who 2018. won, the public is tilted -- the playing field is tilted against democrats. charlie: you can see how much he likes to go to mar-a-lago. he says that the prime minister of japan wanted to go to mar-a-lago because he wants to go play golf. he also said the president of china wanted to come there rather than washington for their conversations. john: it has only been with presidents they liked to go to , crawford when george w. bush took them there as well. it's a sign when we see presidents visit other heads of state at their vacation villa. it suggests symbolically a relationship that is closer. of course, the trick with mar-a-lago is that it is not just his house. it is a club that has upped its entrance fee by a good amount. you run into those conflict of interest issues where as a marketer, the value of the property and a membership in the club goes up every time he visited because it is associated

with him. while he may not have broad public support, his supporters are quite supportive and therefore they would love to be a member of a club or go to a place associated with him because of the way they see him in their support for him. ♪ ♪

charlie: everybody talks about changes in his positions more so than he does.

and that the presidency has changed him, but also he has changed the presidency. it is clear he has changed the presidency because we've never seen anybody act like he does. clearly it has changed him, because he changes positions based on what i assume is advice from people he respects within his own administration. john: yes. and trade-offs, once he comes into the fuller grasp of the issues, and the trade-offs, it becomes quite clear for him. on china he says, of course we will not declare china a currency manipulator because they are helping us with north korea. i will not do anything to china that will slow them down. charlie: and says we will go easy on trade or less tough on trade, because we want them to help us with north korea, and at the end of the day that's more important. he says, be realistic. john: when people would raise this issue during the campaign, he was not going to entertain that. it was full speed ahead on china, china is horrible in all

these different ways. he is coming to the realization or he was being coy in the first place -- by the way, there is a tradition of beating up on china and turning around after the campaign -- president clinton did it. but this is one of the great questions of president trump. were his first bombastic statements on nato, china, nafta, were they an opening gambit in the negotiation where you make an outrageous claim with full knowledge knowing you will need to back down, and give them something you always knew you were going to give away anyway, or he makes the claim out of ignorance, and then learns more with the issues and changes his mind? that's the great question to ask. charlie: one of the interesting things about him, as you pointed out in the interview, is that in -- and we will see a dramatic moment that reflects that. in the beginning of the campaign, he seemed to be on china's case and friendly and open to possibilities with russia, and saying nothing negative to putin.

he has now flipped it over. he now speaks often about his friendship with xi jinping, and has not yet begun to criticize russia, but a lot of the people around him have begun to criticize russia. john: absolutely. this is the model of russia. syria launches the chemical weapons attack and the president retaliates. the secretary of state's tough on russia, saying russia allowed this to happen, maybe not fully cognitively, but they did not behave themselves. they had to have known. and the russians are doing other things, supplying weapons to the taliban in afghanistan, and pressing on the u.s. in other ways. the president is still maintaining that favor of russia posture, but his u.n. ambassador and secretary of state, and even the secretary of defense, has said much tougher things, and

the president's support of nato is a bank shot. russia doesn't like having a strong nato. the extent that the president has changed his mind, that is the harshest thing he has said about russia, the support for nato. charlie: after all that's been said and done, he refuses to say russia was responsible for hacking and trying to influence the american election. john: what is it? favoritism for vladimir putin? that is a curiosity. or the fact that if you accept for a moment that the russians were trying to hack into the election, it puts a cloud over his victory? i think the answer is that if any hacking in the election put a cloud over his victory, it doesn't matter if they are the russians or the chinese. he says, it could be china.

in that case, it does seem to be a special protection for russia. charlie: it goes against the grain of every intelligence source in the u.s. as far as i know. john: intelligence sources, the fbi, the republican chairman of the investigative committees, everybody. this is a simple question of whether russians tried to meddle in the election not collusion. , charlie: it also comes up in -- up, which he has denied. it also comes up in this clip, which i want the audience to see, where he still seems to live with the idea that he's not prepared to change what he has said about whether president obama was trying to wiretap in at trump tower. here it is. president trump: you saw what happened with surveillance. everybody saw what happened with surveillance. you saw what happened with surveillance. i think that was inappropriate. john: what does that mean? president trump: you can figure

that out yourself. john: the reason i say is because you called him sick and bad. president trump: look at, you can figure it out yourself. he was very nice with words, as have i been with him. but there is no relationship. john: you stand by that claim? president trump: i don't stand by anything. you can take it the way you want. i think our side has been proven strongly. everyone's talking about it. frankly it should be discussed. , that is a very big surveillance of our citizens. i think that is a very big topic and a topic that should be number one, and we should find out what the hell is going on. john: i just wanted to find out. you are the president of the united states. you said he was sick and bad. president trump: you can take it anyway you want. john: but i am asking you. you do not want to to be fake news. president trump: you do not want to ask me, i have my opinions and you have yours. john: i want to know your opinions. you're the president of the united states. president trump: that's enough. thank you. thank you very much. charlie: tell me what you were

thinking. what were you feeling? did you feel the temperature rising? john: not particularly. we were in the oval office, talking about the weight of the job. what better room than the oval office? he said that people come into the room and they are overwhelmed. we talked about the weight of the job and what it is like to take orders that might kill people, and might kill people that are innocent. he called around he likes to , seek opinion. who do you seek opinion for on that? there are not a lot of people on the planet who have made those decisions. i asked if he spoke with president obama. he said no. then basically -- charlie: but we stopped. john: right. he not only stopped talking to him, but he said the president was sick and bad, and compared him to nixon. the fbi director said the

president claimed that president obama wiretapped trump tower, there's no evidence. also, the idea that the president himself is the one responsible for this is legally impossible and there's no evidence for that. and yet, the president, despite what the fbi director has said, and with the heads of house and senate intelligence committees said, and the former national intelligence director, he still maintains this idea that president obama was directly responsible. he is essentially cutting himself off from not a bad source in terms of guidance on the complexity of the world. charlie: and that's exactly what was talked about. he was positive when the two were talking. he said i was listening to him, and all of that. john: it is hard to figure out whether he's offended by what he thinks he believes, whether he's offended -- whether he's in a box because he made this assertion and cannot back down from it. but i think it's also possible that a president who had john mccain and lindsey graham for dinner a week ago on monday is

the guy who can be adamantly against somebody one minute, and by breakfast be having them over for breakfast. that is one of his qualities. charlie: what happened in this case, as you said, he just simply said the interview was , over. john: he said, "that's enough," and left me there stranded. charlie: nothing was exchanged after that? there was no communication? no one said you have to leave? john: no. but if there had been a neon arrow to the door -- it was clear it was over. no more asking about this. there was a great sense of finality. charlie: as part of the original understanding you flew out to pennsylvania? john: to harrisburg. we had several more conversations and ended up having dinner that night. on the plane on the way back. charlie: did he make any reference to it? john: he expressed his displeasure again with it, but

that was not the purpose -- it came up in conversation and he reminded me that he did not like it. charlie: why didn't he like it, is my question? because he thinks of what president obama did, erroneously , according to the intelligence community? john: i don't know. i was trying to figure out what he was saying. this is a serious charge. what is the charge? he made not just a charge that president obama wiretapped him, but that his character, that he was a bad and sick man. this is a character claim and a claim of evidence. what do you know about this and what are you saying happened? also when you think about it so seriously that you have cut yourself off from this person you once said was so helpful, and who could be helpful on things like north korea and other areas where it is a developing situation. presidents often want to check in with her

-- their predecessor to see what the nature of the landscape was like. charlie: do we know in what way he's trying to connect susan rice, she did what she is able to do, which is to ask for the unmasking of tapes that took place between someone they were legitimately following, and spoke to american people to find out more? john: the president made the unsubstantiated claim she did something criminal. there is no evidence of that. charlie: what was it? john: he didn't say. the speculation could be that she unmasked, which is within her rights, but the question is whether she unmasked too much. was she unmasking more than the situation warranted? and once she unmasked, did she pass it along, leak it to somebody did it get into the , public water? which she has denied in a variety of different ways. there has been one nbc report that the house and intelligence

committees in the house and senate, that on both sides, there are people saying there's no evidence she did anything wrong. that's one report. like a lot of this, there is a lot of that going on. but the president made his claim and still has no evidence, and nobody has brought up any evidence about whether she unmasked too much or whether she spread it around. charlie: what is amazing to me about this interview, it was what, 20 minutes? john: a little over 20 minutes. charlie: i thought it was an hour interview. john: [laughter] it felt like about four minutes to me. charlie: a lot of questions got in. he would talk over you, repeatedly. there was a kind of edge to the way he responded. john: i like that edge. one of the things that he understands, that good politicians understand, is that they look better if they are engaged directly with the

question. a lot of times he was running around it, but a good give-and-take is that you can cover a lot of ground. it is a kind of give and take. i interviewed him 19 times during the campaign. we have had those kinds of exchanges. but this was a little bit -- he was a little faster than he had been in previous ones in terms of interjecting. it was at times a spirited exchange. it was a really tough to nail down what the terms of the conversation was sometimes. , charlie: in your impression, does he love the job? john: it's a good question. i think he does -- when he was in that plant, and when he's in the rally, he loves it. charlie: so he loves the campaigning part.

john: he loves the idea of being reconnected with the people for whom he's fighting. i think he doesn't like to be nibbled by 1000 ducks in washington. that includes us, congress. i think that's why he has some affection is maybe the wrong word, but erdogan, even putin, i think he can find appreciation for their ability to quickly move to a result without the obstacles of democratic institutions. charlie: checks and balances. john: and this is what all presidents come into. i've been reading recently about kennedy in a book about the bureaucratic state and how kennedy had these ideas and the bureaucratic state kept getting in his way and thwarting him. it was a washington bog. that is exactly what steve

bannon would describe it as. or president trump would, as well. if you leave aside what the objectives were from the two presidents, these are these iputiansush and -- lill in washington throwing ropes around your kneecaps to keep you from making progress, that is a very familiar phenomenon. and then that is where presidents start to go wrong. they start to try and get around those prohibitions. that is where they start running afoul of the law. charlie: you talked about places where they go to the point of crossing over reality. john: or they put too much pressure on a senator. everybody has a different breaking point, but there was once a tradition in washington where senators would bristle at being lobbied by the white house. agnew got into a whole bunch of trouble when he tried on nixon's

behalf to put pressure on republican senators. i cannot remember the senator's name, but he said vice , president, if you ever do this again, i will vote in the opposite direction of what you want even if i don't believe it. there are many. lyndon johnson was on the phone to richard russell all the time, it is not a tradition, a tradition often broken. but the idea that you can press too hard and then break a relationship is not illegal, but it makes it hard to get anything done. charlie: he clearly has changed, though. it seems to me he is changed positions. but he is clearly changed, it , you cannot reach out as much as he does to ask people what they think about what he is doing, to talk about what he is doing. i think he likes that aspect of it. he is the go-to guy. he wants to see you, most people go. they talk to him on the phone. place, whereave a

he can reach out for the opinions of everybody, reach out to talk to anybody. he can solicit everybody. he did that in the transition. it has to have some cumulative impact, i would think. john: the question is, is that what he is doing? he is new at this and all kinds of different ways. he is building understanding of the world based on his interviews he is doing, or is he looking for a fixer? is he shopping for 1000 different opinions to say yes, here is what you do. you go to the toadstool and turn left, then you turn right and find the golden key to get your legislation passed. itrlie: he is looking to see as it is. a guy that you find knows a guy, he can give you the permitting and a week or a day. these people do exist. if you can get your passport, you can get a renewed very quickly, if you pay a guy.

instead of having to wait for six months or something. i wonder if that is in part what he is looking for. take thist possibly long and be this complicated. surely, there is a smarter way. in part, that is what his success in business was based around. knowing how the real world works. you knew plenty of people like wouldplenty of people never pay retail. they know a guy that can get you a thing. i wonder if there is not some of that in washington, you are always looking for that, arecially -- except there not a lot of people that can help you get there in that way. seems to be even after 100 days, the ideas about winning. secondly, there is this sense of, how does it look? a sense of vanity and optics. right, from the

campaign, and his life. we talked to those who assessed his career in business. person whoper and a thought about putting his name on the building and turning it into a brand and a tv show brand. that seems to connect with his previous life. that is what these executive orders are about. many are about orders to his administration to study a thing. use, u.s.practical steel. read the executive orders, a lot are less than delivered. their acts of marketing, as well. they send a message to your administration, hey, the boss wants this. it shows the people at the other end of the negotiation that you care about it. so it is not without import. but it also has a big, symbolic value as well. that is true of the 29 pages of legislation he signed. why do we interrogate the

question of what legislation he has signed? we want to know if he can negotiate in washington as well as in the real world. much of the legislation he has signed he has not had to negotiate for. is a result stuff of the congressional review act, which allows congress to remove regulations that were passed in the ending days of the obama administration. -- it makes passing the legislation easy. sense ofdo not have a israel negotiating skill in the legislative arena. ♪ ways wins.

especially in my business. with slow internet from the phone company, you can't keep up. you're stuck, watching spinning wheels and progress bars until someone else scoops your story. switch to comcast business. with high-speed internet up to 10 gigabits per second. you wouldn't pick a slow race car. then why settle for slow internet? comcast business. built for speed. built for business. did you know slow internet can actually hold your business back? say goodbye to slow downloads, slow backups, slow everything. comcast business offers blazing fast and reliable internet that's over 6 times faster than slow internet from the phone company. say hello to internet speeds up to 250 mbps. and add phone and tv for only $34.90 more a month. call today. comcast business. built for business. charlie: what did you not get

to that you really wanted to talk to him about? john: some of it i may save for the next time, although there might not ever be one. [laughter] i would like to talk to him about that question. he talks about fake news a lot and what it is that it's fake about it and why. the thing is, he is a norm -breaking president. he changed the presidency. what remains and why does it remain? what are the values that retain the structure of the presidency as he wants to reshape it? why is that important? he is not going to be president some day. there is a reason we have these structures in washington. the presidency, the shared power system. it is so that chaos, we built a structure so we wouldn't have

everybody shooting each other in the streets. when we start pulling out the girders that hold up the system, what is left? does that leave a hole open? why are you leaving the whole open? and what are you closing it with tactics, , winning for winning's sake? all of that would be interesting to find out. what is the thing when everything goes haywire that he relies on? what is the set of beliefs he has that give him shape and purpose? is it only getting to a winning result? if that is the case, that is pretty unpredictable. what is that guiding sentiment? charlie: what you just said was an answer to my other question, but the other is what is it that , you most want to know about this president? john: well, i actually really want to know if he really likes the job because i do not -- i think -- charlie: why does that interest you? john: it does not interest me at all --

i think he likes parts of it. in all of our lives there are things that we just do not want to do. fortunately, we have people in our lives to say you have to do this because you have to do it. the second thing is, you have to do this because when you get through it, you'll be glad you have done it. the narrow parts of the presidency, it is like an itchy sweater and you have to put it on and go do it. does he have anybody saying you have to do it? that can wear on you after a while. one minute you are doing things you like, the next minute, you are having to pardon in turkey. the next minute after that, you are having to meet -- charlie: that is a small price. he may not like it. michael bloomberg did not like campaigning in the beginning. he learned to love it. john: is he learning to love the part of the job he hates now? charlie: for example, he would start off not liking praise and

end up loving parades. john: i think there is a cumulative weight of the stuff you do not like. if it gets too heavy, then every day is a flaw. -- slog. bad decisions come to the president that is the name of , the job. charlie: what politician do you know that loves attention more than donald trump? john: i do not think any. even negative attention, he does not mind. i think he likes negative attention, too. charlie: i rest my case. i rest my case. this place, this job this oval , office, has given him more attention than he could have ever dreamed of. you are saying he doesn't like it? that is what i don't understand. he does not understand either people say the other job was , tougher, he gets caught up in all that stuff. i am of the belief he thinks it is tougher because the stakes are higher, because it is a different dimension, and because it is more than about money. john: it is a fair case to make. i think that if that is the good

part of the job, there is other stuff that is not the good part and how much the adulation and attention balance it out? there are other parts of the job where you are not getting any attention, you are stuck in the routine of the job, and that can weigh on people more than others. i am not saying this is the case with him. but i want to know that. what is the accretion of the bad parts? maybe he does not like them. there is no accretion. those are the bad parts, i'm going to spend my time doing the good parts. charlie: my sense -- i do not know the answer to this. i know him reasonably well. what does he really care about? i mean, he is not a leader. -- reader. he watches a lot of television. he loves conversation, loves conversation. he likes strong people in his

judgment, he likes beautiful things, and he likes to win. john: you could imagine -- you could imagine him wanting him to -- wanting it to be said of him that he made america great again by the definition that he sees it, which is everybody in those rallies will not just love him for what he says he's going to do, but will say he did it, had done it, he was able to. charlie: contrast that to barack obama, and what he wanted. and how much he did. you know what i mean? obama is admiring of bush 41 because he thought he saw and took the country ahead of his own ambition. he was a man of great honor and a man of great integrity and someone who always put the country first. you can say that about a lot of

people, but that was who he was. i mean, and i think that probably reflected how obama felt about himself. john: it is interesting, where you would find president obama, obviously, from the beginning of his presidency to the end. there is that great line about, you know, you don't get to write whole chapters of history. you get to write about a paragraph and you want to make sure you get your paragraph right. charlie: and don't screw it up. more than once, he said don't screw it up. john: if you recognize the limitations of the presidency, that it is not an action hero presidency and congress has a role to play and foreign policy interrupts the things you're trying to do and the judiciary has its role, that you cannot do these grand things. so within the limited scope you have, you set things up to make life better for those people that you remember from your days as a community organizer. that is barack obama's sort of

touch stone group, you can imagine. i'm out of my depth. you can imagine him having in his mind those people who were struggling, he wanted to help. the same way donald trump has that view about the people who come to his rallies. you want to do better by them, in his case setting up an , economy that is doing much better than the one he inherited. on foreign policy, well, we cannot revisit the entire obama legacy, but i think if you believe what he told jeffrey goldberg about not making mistakes in foreign policy, the action you do not take in that case -- syria -- is as smart as the actions you do take, it goes back to your point about not doing stupid stuff. charlie: the idea of saying we often do not say to ourselves about decision-making. and people who oppose obama make this point. you know, he did not weigh the act of not act in, the decision not to act. that has consequences.

he did not seem to weigh that as much as he did. john: although in the case of syria and the red line, he said not acting was itself a great decision. he did not give in to the foreign policy blob that says you have to stay in the grooves of the foreign-policy consensus and to get out of those ruts hurts american credibility across the world. he said i'm not going to bind to that worldview. breaking that, as he articulated to jeffrey goldberg, was itself a success for him. in that case, he did understand the weight of not acting. maybe the critics would say that that is his spin on not acting, but there were consequences to not acting that were longer-lasting. certainly lots of people -- charlie: critics will say that the way to express that on the other side, the flipside of that is that if in fact you draw a redline, you know, and you do not act, there are consequences for that, huge consequences for that. john: secretary of defense

mattis tells a story about hearing from people when the red line was crossed. i guess america is not on the field anymore. in other words, not just about the region of syria, but it having global ramifications. charlie: that was a ramification of the redline? john: of the decision not to act, not to back up the language. when president trump told -- said in our interview that it is the north koreans test, he would not be very happy, he did not say military use. i asked him specifically and he said "we will see." pres. trump: this was a small missile, not a big missile. this was not a nuclear test which he was expected to do three days ago. we will see what happens. john: you say not happy, what does that mean? president trump: if he does a nuclear test, i will not be happy. i will not be happy. i can tell you also that i do not believe the president of china, who is a very respected man, will be happy either.

john: not happy meaning military action? president trump: i don't know, i mean, we will see. john: redlines can get drawn other than being perfectly explicit. that is one of the dangers of a presidency so oriented to action. we all expect action from our presidents. that is one of the great questions about the presidency. there are lots of times great leaders have chosen not to act and that was a smarter thing to do. when you set yourself conditions where you have to act if certain things happen, you take away part of your power as president. of course, we could go on. charlie: i want to go on just a minute or the other thing that two. intrigues me about him, and i asked him this question when i run into him, "what it is -- what is it about your story that you do not think is coming out?" his answer to me, i will tell that to you. idea of what it is he thinks we do not know about him, do not understand about him. john: i don't think he thinks he gets enough credit for what he has done.

it is not that there is some mystery, but that we are not noticing the pile of gold he has accumulated. we are noticing these other things. charlie: what should we be saying about him at 100 days? john: what you would say on his terms -- charlie: other than some legislative success. john: the problem for him by counting the 29 bills he has signed is like saying "i have got a 29 story building," but there are not stories in the first five floors of the building. some of it is important, but he did not have much of a role in that. neil gorsuch's nomination was a big deal because he managed that. it was a smart part of his presidential campaign. to tell conservatives, here is a list of people i would put on the court. they were very skeptical he would do the right thing. this is a person who has changed his mind a lot on key issues like abortion, on what party he belongs to.

he is a movable object. when he put the list out and said "i will name somebody from this list," that helps them , he was able to manage that, pick somebody good, put it through the senate. mitch mcconnell helped him by changing the rules of the senate. that is a win in both the way it was managed and done. the head of a lot of these agencies at both the department of justice and the fda, epa, the ftc, they are taking directions that are very much different than the obama administration. those are fundamental changes in the way those industries operate, and if you for example, the fda changes the way in which they evaluate new drugs, that is a big deal. those kind changes are happening based on the personnel he has put in place. he is way behind even naming the people for a lot of these agencies, which creates the most havee conditions where you ghost agencies because he is not put the names in the pipeline. the people he has named are changing things in a way that are going largely unnoticed and will make real change in things

that really affect people, and that is another big thing he has accomplished even though he may , not even cite that as the things he has accomplished. when reason magazine can give him credit for being a real deregulating president because of the people he has named, that is a surprise. reason was not a big fan of him when he was a candidate. charlie: he has made some real progress in taking down epa. john: he has named people who were opponents of the agencies that they now had, so you have got a key educational choice advocate as head of the education department. the epa headed by someone who sued the epa. you've got the texas oil guy head of the energy department, leaving aside that energy does more than just actual energy. there is a big nuclear piece. those kind of things. charlie: you said energy guide. -- energy guy. john: i meant the oil guy.

those are big changes that matter. and there is that message we talked about, the message he is sending to those people who feel that the government was letting them down, there was no voice for them, they do not see it in the media or the culture. they see it in him. charlie: what is it most people fear about donald trump? john: that he is erratic and impulsive and that will lead to an revocable mistake -- irrevo cable mistake. and these agencies will harm people who do not have the means to fight back. i think probably that first one, and impulse. charlie: if he does everything he wants to do, it brings, you no, it brings huge change to america. and depending on how you see what he wants to do, you either like it or do not like it, but he has -- he wants to be bold. john: that is for sure, absolutely.

and i think bold, going back to what you were saying, in terms of what he wants, i mean, he puts his name on buildings in huge gold letters. the presidency cannot end with a tiny little footnote, trump. he wants to see it in big, bold letters. he ran his presidency on fundamentally reshaping the entire american experience. he has a big goal here. make america great again is not "let us see if this sunday we can have a picnic." it is not a small goal. charlie: is this the best time to be a journalist? john: it is a great time in the sense that opponents and supporters and those who are wary of president trump and those in the press are being forced by the disruption to reevaluate why they believe what they believe, and what is the bedrock value in times of massive change that you hold

onto. do you change your standards, do you keep your standards? charlie: isn't that a great time to be a reporter? john: that is the plus column. the minus column is that it feels like people in both parties, but also in the public, are more in a mood to motive question, the sense of we are all in this together as americans is harder to find, except on greeting cards. social media exacerbates that. it elevates the hottest voices, and then it allows misunderstanding to happen. everybody can sidle off into their own self soothing news ballots that reaffirm what they believe, which is both a, a set of facts that may not be straight, and that be, the person on the other side is not just wrong, but they are evil. that leads to a acidic awfulness in the conversation. that makes it very hard if you

tried to maintain a certain set of standards and reasoning to a conclusion and your little reasoned conclusion, even if it is preliminary, and it gets doused with this acidity. charlie: ending this, i have taken you much longer than you wanted to come here. john: it is my great joy to be with you, charlie. [laughter] charlie: i have asked this of presidents. are there skills you wish you had, books you wish you had read, academic courses you wish you had taken, maybe shakespeare -- [laughter] that would enable you to do your job better? you know what i mean? john: i do. charlie: presidents often smile. john: that is what i'm going to steal because it is a great one to ask. the capacity to understand your own weaknesses is a crucial thing in any job. charlie: it is an interesting question for donald trump. does he understand his weaknesses? john: that is what i asked him about in terms of who tells you

"no." who do you put in your blind spot? charlie: that is an essential question about him. does he understand his weaknesses? john: right. charlie: go ahead. john: the one great advantage i have had and the huge weakness is that i was born in washington. now, i have worked very hard and have had the blessing of marrying somebody who was not born in washington and spent a lot of time where she is from, and connected with her family and other parts of my family that is not in washington and have spent my whole political career trying to get the heck out of washington. i spent a lot of time on the campaign trail talking to people, trying to live that life collecting names of people i touch with when i am back here. the cocooning nature of washington and the benefits of living here are a constant thing you have to keep pushing against. that is one thing. intellectually, i do not know. i had that classic liberal arts

education. charlie: you had a classic liberal arts education? john: right, although i think in science and business, i covered them, but i wish i knew a little bit more about them -- as much as i knew about literature and politics. charlie: i have a sense about you, john, as a friend of mine and a colleague of mine, that 2017, it is a little bit like -- i don't want to overdo this -- when churchill walked in and said everything i have ever ,dunn has prepared me for this moment. that is what churchill said in 1940. there are times in which you see someone and they are in their element and it seems to me those things have come together. that is why i have taken at least one hour of your time, so thank you. john: i am always better for being in your company. charlie: john dickerson. from cbs news. for all of us, the great moderator of "face the nation."

thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪ alisa: i'm alisa parenti in

washington. you are watching "bloomberg technology." president trump says the nation "needs a good shutdown," to fix the mess in the senate. he tweeted the country needs to either elect more republican senators or change the rules to 51%. suggesting more rule changes ahead in the senate. a vote is expected this week on a bipartisan budget deal. meantime, house speaker paul ryan says he understands the disappointment behind the president's tweet, and he didn't sabotage gop efforts to repeal obamacare. ryan also endorsed the potential $1 trillion spending bill, saying the budget increases