i'm michael smerkonish in philadelphia, we welcome viewers in the united states and around the world. a big week is just winding down. one in which i think we moved from the political to the legal realm. but my first guest, "dilbert" cartoonist scott adams who famously predicted a trump victory says facts are overrated. plus the president on a

12-day trip to asia. refusing to tone down his nuclear rhetoric. what could possibly go wrong? i'll ask "new york times" thrice-winning pulitzer prize-winning columnist thomas friedman. as well as two veteran advance men who have their own tales from travels with clinton and bush. and is trump running the u.s. government like it's his own private company? "moneyball" author michael lewis investigated and found many unqualified friends of trump with positions in the administration. he, too, is here. it's a primetime line-up on a saturday. first what we learned this week and why it matters. monday was a huge day. paul manafort and his associate rick gates surrendered to federal authorities to face charges for tax fraud and money laundering and we learned of the guilty plea of former trump foreign adviser george papadopoulos of lying to authorities. that day the president spoke to former adviser steve bannon who

reportedly encouraged trump to take a harder public line with special counsel robert mueller that might have been good political advice, a means of salving the president's base, but this is the week the story became more legal than political. and while the new, the noise will certainly continue, the outcome of the special counsel's probe will now be determined by critical thinking and the rules of evidence. not the nightly exchange of competing cable tv narratives. much has come into focus. we know that george papadopoulos had conversations about the emails of clinton two months before there had been any wikileaks release of john podesta's emall and long before any report of the dnc having been hacked. here's the timeline. podes podesta's email was hacked on march 19. april 26, papadopoulos met with a professor of international relation who is claimed to have substantial connections with the russian government officials. at which time he was told the russian government had collected dirt on hillary clinton, in

thousands of emails. on june 3rd, donald junior was similarly told in an email that russian representatives wished to provide dirt on hillary. he then took a meeting on june 9 along with manafort and jared kushner. on june 14, crowdsource detected the dnc hack. on july 22nd, wikileaks dumped 20,000 dnc emails. then came october 7, when within hours of trump's "access hollywood" tape being exposed, wikileaks dropped the podesta hacked emails. carter page in contradiction of many previous statements told the house intel committee that he met with a russian government official during a july 2016 trip to moscow and sent an email to the campaign. altogether, that timeline substantiates lots of interaction between trump campaign representatives and russians, just as the hacking was taking place. and its results rolled out to

the benefit of the trump campaign. the unanswered question is whether anybody from the trump campaign aided the hacking. whether there was actual coordination within the chronology. recent development do call into question the president's assertion made on february 16, that he knew of nobody from his campaign who had had contacts with the russians. attorney general jeff sessions said likewise, in a january hearing before the senate judiciary committee. what exactly the president was told at a march 31st meeting where pap tpapadopoulos was present with trump and sessions. the president's tweet storm as he left for asia yesterday. the only way it matters is if the prosecution is derailed or if the congress ignores it. throughout the campaign and in the first nine months of president trump's administration, his base has

supported him regardless of what he says or does. with the russian probe it seems there will again be no impact of his words or actions. but for the opposite reason. because no matter the president's bluster or tweets or capital letters, or threats, mueller is not listening to any of that. now it's all about the rule of law. that's how i see it. but what about a soothsayer who claims that facts are overrated. in march 2016 when they was happening, experts like nate silver were giving trump a 2% chance, but my next guest was one of the earl yebl public figures to predict that donald trump would win. scott adams, creator of "dillbert" saw what others, including myself, couldn't see. trump's remarkable talent for persuasion. he's written a book about it called "win bigly."

scott adams, how were my persuasion skills? i guess not quite master persuader level. >> well, i won't judge your master persuasion skills. but if you're looking at president trump's skills, i have a background as a trained hypnotist. i've been studying the ways of persuasion for decades as part of what i do. i noticed early on that he had the full arsenal of persuasion. like i've never seen. probably the strongest talent stack i would call it, a grouping of talents that put together are extra strong. it really was something that i thought was extraordinary and for me it was easy to predict that someone with that much firepower would win over 18 months when all you're trying to do is move maybe 2% of the public during that entire time. >> and you make a very compelling case in the book. but aren't we now entering a new

realm where no amount of persuasion on his part through the twitter feed or the public statements, the speeches, all of the social media efforts on his behalf, they're just not going to matter to bob mueller? >> well, it depends. you know if your lawyer is johnny cochran and you're saying that you know if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit which by the way, if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit is pure hypnosis and it worked. well assuming that o.j. was guilty it worked. you also noticed that during the judge curiel episode, candidate trump was roundly criticized for saying hey there might be some bias from his heritage. he worded it wrong, of course. but there might be some bias there. what happened when judge curiel needed to rule on when the trial would be held. either before the election, which would have been terrible, or after the election. once candidate trump had raised the issue of bias, it became kind of hard for judge curiel to

say let's do it before the election and change the result. so i think that persuasion is very much a role in the legal system. >> you identified what you regard as a persuasion gem in your twitter feed. let's put it up. it's actually from president trump. here's what it says, the real story on collusion is in donna b.'s new book "crooked hillary" bought the dnc and then stole the democratic primary from crazy bernie. why is that a persuasion gem? >> the first thing you want to do if you want to persuade. you want to move people's attention and energy to where you want it. that may be also because you're moving it away from something you don't want them to be talking about. his linguistic kill shots or nicknames for the characters he's mocking, are so incredibly wrong in the context of things a president shouldn't be saying, but they're just wrong enough that you, you can't look away. but they're not so wrong that

you want to impeach him for that or it doesn't start a nuclear war. so he has the technique of having just enough wrongness to grab your energy and put it where he wants it. >> here's another of what you regard as a linguistic kill shot. the pocahontas reference he's prone to make relative to elizabeth warren. why is that so effective in your mind? >> i would say that's the weakest of his various nicknames. but it does, it gives you a silly image of someone who is a sitting senator. so if you said senator blah blah says this, you're thinking well that's a senator. i'm going to give that a lot of credibility. but if you say pocahontas said something, just automatically your brain goes to well how seriously can i take that? >> here's the question -- is he vulnerable to what you regard as a linguistic kill shot? and if so, what is it? >> i've thought about what you could do in this case. the trouble is that he's so good

at this, this persuasion game, that i think he could get out of almost anything. do you remember when somebody tried to call him dangerous donald. and it was the worst attempt ever. because danger is actually why he was elected. they wanted him to be a little dangerous to isis. maybe be a little dangerous to the swamp as they say. so if you have a nickname that can be turned into a positive, that's a fail so it's really hard, i think, there was also cheeto jesus. that they used against him. which was hilarious and that part was good but people like cheetos and they like their jesus. so it didn't work on that level. >> it was your blog on august 13, 2015 when you said at a time when nate silver and others were saying he's got a 2% shot. you were saying it's a 98% shot. i should also point out in terms of your abilities to see his, his skills of persuasion, as far back as 1990.

via "dilbert." were you drawing about the persuasive powers of donald trump. what's the skill set he brings to the table? >> well a lot of people don't know that his pastor was norman vincent peale when he was a kid. who wrote "the power of positive thinking." you see that mindset in everything he does. when he was talking about the economy recently, the gdp, he said well it was 3%, but i think it could have been 4%, except for the hurricanes. probably would be 4% later. in other words he's thinking the economy into that state. because the economy if you don't have a resource constraint is really driven entirely by psychology. if you think next year is better, you say well i better invest this year. that makes next year better. he's using persuasion from you know, all the way back to his church days as a kid. now we see him as a brander, a salesperson, we see him you know, as someone who wrote a

book and negotiated. but these are all in the same field of persuasion. >> scott, i thoroughly enjoyed "win bigly." thank you for being here. >> thank you. >> tweet me at smerkonish or go to my facebook page. i'll read some during -- i know, i know, i'm a dope. look at this, i can't say it. papadopoul papadopoulos. papadopoulos. if you watch my facebook live this morning you know that i was fearful of my ability to not be able to say it correctly and i blew it. and i knew it as soon as it left my lips, papadopoulos, papadopoulos. smerkonish, you practiced yesterday. i know it. i know. on sirius xm, i said i just can can't say this guy's name. no more tweets, all right, enough. up ahead. president trump is visiting five

countries in asia, including china and south korea. if he follows the advice of h.r. mcmaster, will not tone down his rhetoric. i'm about to ask thomas l. friedman of the "new york times," what could possibly go wrong. and, is trump running the government like his private company? i'll ask "moneyball" author michael lewis what he found when he looked inside the departments of energy and agriculture. copd makes it hard to breathe.

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since trump became president, the news cycle has accelerated beyond anything we could have imagined. except my next guest called it. the nation's explainer in chief, a three-time pulitzer prize winner. the man who told us the world is flat. and now "the new york times" columnist thomas l. friedman has his latest book in paperback.

thank you for being late, an optimist's guide to thriving in the age of accelerations. tom, i don't think that you set out to explain the rise of populism. but you did. you say the technology creates uncertainty. and donald trump clearly capitalized on that uncertainty in the election. here's my question, now we're ten months in. without him having much to show for it. so why is he still able to, to harness the angst that you wrote about? >> very good question, michael. so let's think about the accelerations we're in the middle of. there's an acceleration in the movement of people, more refugees, migrants around the world. so you go to the grocery store and the woman at the cash register may not be wearing a baseball cap that has some people unsettled. then you go, there's been a huge acceleration in the flow of ideas. ideas now flow and change, and social norms change faster than ever. you go into the rest room and there's someone of a different sex there the flow of technology

changes as we all know accelerated. so now you're at the office and your boss just rolled up a robot next to your desk and it seems to be studying your job. that means the flow of education has to change. the day when your, you can get a four-year college degree and expect to dine out on that for 30 years of your career is gone. it means that lifelong learning becomes the single-most important competitive advantage. when you put those four together, it's not surprising that a lot of people were susceptible to a guy who says i can stop the wind, i can stop the pace of change. the reason he's failed is of course you can't actually stop the pace of change. what we need to be doing is not building walls, but building floors. creating floors under people so they can actually thrive in this age of acceleration. >> the democratic party arguably in the worst state since reconstruction. is it because they have failed to seize upon what thomas friedman is writing about? >> well, my view, michael, is both our political parties are

dead. just one of them thinks it's alive because it's in power but they're actually blowing up because they were actually designed to answer questions of the new deal, the industrial revolution, the early i.t. revolution and civil rights, race and gender. i think what party has to actually respond to today is how do you enable people to get the most and cushion the worst, of these three giant accelerations in the climate in globalization and technology. and the parties have not made the shift. but because they have money, they can sort of thrive or survive on their fumes for a while. but they're all blowing up. i think our 2020 election will be unlike any election we've ever seen. >> i always take note of your dispatches around the world, globally. what stop interests you the most on the president's asia trip. >> think the china one is so interesting to me. just the contrast. my book argues we're in the

middle of a climate change. china is investing massively in clean air. the world is going from interconnected to interdependent. what's china doing? massively investing in globalization, it's project of one belt, one road. the asia development bank and lastly the climate of technology. so what is china doing? it's got a made in china 2025 project to massively invest in all the new technology in the 21st century from new materials to a.i. to all kinds of cyber, et cetera. what are we doing by contrast? our president is denying climate change. on dploeblization, he actually pulled us out of the asian free trade agreement and may pull us out of nafta and at home we have a tax bill that's based on no theory of change whatsoever. it's just based on the idea of cutting taxes for corporations without reference to where we are technologically, what do we want to invest in what don't we. that's just stupid. when you look at how they're

responding to accelerations and how we're responding, there's a shocking gap. >> i made reference earlier in the program to h.r. mcmaster saying don't expect that he's going to tone down the rhetoric. i was interested to see and i'm paraphrasing, you said recently that a little crazy, is maybe not a bad thing when you're dealing with china and north korea. what did you mean? >> what i meant is, these people do take us for granted. and so i think keeping them off-balance is fine. it's good, it can be very helpful. but you have to have an underlying strategy behind it. and that's what's been missing here. you're talking here with the "dillbert" creator what is the way to get to trump? i think trump is a chump. i think that, that's what the chinese believe. because think about it, he's going to go there and negotiate trade with them now. he's hoping to. what did he do before he went over there? he tore up the trans-pacific trade partnership which was basically an alliance of 12 nations that control 40% of

global gdp, the alliance was based on our interests and our values. he could have been sitting across from xi jinping next week saying hi mr. xi, i represent 40% of the global economy. he tore this up for nothing, actually. he got nothing from china now he's going to there, and the chinese will sell us old carpet they've sold us before. and they use north korea i believe as a shiny object to distract trump. i think xi has his number. they think trump is a chump and the reason he's a chump is because he doesn't know anything. he doesn't do his homework. he's out there tweeting. if you don't do your homework and you don't build real leverage up with the chinese who can smell your power from 100 paces. they know how much power you have, they will play you and they will play him. >> hey thomas, the book, "thank you for being late" now in paperback. a terrific read. thank you for being here. >> thank you, michael. still ahead, the president

en route to asia how do you structure a trip abroad and avoid any pitfalls for a commander-in-chief? two men with me, one who did it for bush 41 and 43 and another who served bill clinton. and is trump running government like he ran his company? is that a good thing? michael lewis, the author of "moneyball" "the big short" and so many others investigated the department of energy and agriculture. his findings are next. it's ope. time to open the laptop... ...and compare medicare health plans. why? because plans change, so can your health needs. so, be open-minded. look at everything-like prescription drug plans... and medicare advantage plans from private insurers. use the tools at medicare.gov. or call 1-800-medicare. open to something better? start today. ♪

chances are you've read a book by michael lewis or seen a movie based on one of them, his books including "liar's poker ""moneyball" "the big short" they've sold over nine million copies in the u.s. alone.

these three became hit move advice. his latest just out in paperbook is "the undoing project" analyses into two israeli psychologists. his latest writing project a series of articles for "vanity fair" about how departments in the frg aederal government are faring. in the latest issue he develops into the department of agriculture for a piece called "made in the usda." the timing could not be better this week trump's nominee to usda chief scientist sam clovis withdrew his nomination amidst news that during the campaign he was aware that campaign adviser george papadopoulos, i got it write, was talking to russians. i recently spoke to michael lewis. michael, sam clovis was always an odd choice for not the least of which reasons, he wasn't a scientist. >> well you know, as i've

wandered around the trump administration, they're like two categories of appointees. they're the people like rick perry at the department of energy and sam clovis, who when they were offered the job, should have said no. because i'm not qualified for it. and the idea that you're putting in charge of a $3 billion a year science budget, that is trying to figure out you know, how to direct money so we can grow things in a changing climate, 50 years from now, a guy who has absolutely no science background at all. his chief, his chief job qualification was he was a right-wing radio talk show host in iowa who helped trump. you put that guy in charge of that office, is insane. and you just look at, the thing i've written, profiles the person he replaced. who, a woman named kathy wotecki, who 50 years devoted

herself to agricultural science and knows everything about it. so it's quixotic and it makes you wonder, you have to give your political friends jobs in the administration. put them somewhere with you you don't need to know something. and this is place where you needed to know something. ? not an outlier, here's what you write in "vanity fair," into usda jobs, the trump team inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at at&t, a gas company meter-reader, a country club cabana attendant. a republican national committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company with skills like pleasant demeanor listed on their resumés. >> this was a politico scoop. a reporter at politico got her hands on the resumés and the people who piled in to the department of agriculture on the day of the inauguration. after the administration had basically skipped the transition

period. they sent in, made a very half-hearted attempt to send in one or two people between the election day and the day of the inauguration, to learn how this place functioned. and they basically had, on top of it, they seemed to think it was a place to stuff people they owe favors to. and in addition to that, failed to even nominate people from most of the senate confirmed jobs of running the place. so you know, i think that like one of the things that gets neglected in the day-to-day discussion of trump is that underneath the noise of what he does, he's supposed to be running a two million-person operation called the federal government and we take for granted what this government doesings we demonize it. but if he disables it, it's going to be very hard to get it back and the things it does are critical. we take them for granted.

>> the big-picture view of what you wrote about the department of agriculture, much like what you wrote about the department of energy in september is there never was a transition. is the reason there never was a transition is because perhaps the trump campaign never expected to win. >> i'm sure that's part of it. but it's a little more odd than that. in that he did have a transition team. it was run by chris christie and he, he fired him the minute he was elected. so it just seems, you know it's so funny that we have this situation where a business guy has been elected president. and presumably underneath that, is a sort of subliminal message that i know how to run things. finally we have someone who knows how to run things here and the degree of management ineptitude is like nothing the federal government has ever seen. >> are you telling me that if i'm an employee of the department of agriculture, i'm not permitted to utter or print the words "climate change"? and if so, why not?

>> they never explained why not. i will offer a guess why not. the first person a month after the election, who rolls into the department of agriculture, he has apparently one real interest -- i was told by people inside the department of agriculture. rooting out people who have worked on climate change. and the same thing happened in the department of energy. the one guy who rolled in there asked for a list of anybody associated with climate change. so why and then they sent out a memo saying don't use the phrase "climate change." you've got to use other things. and now why are they, why are they so obsessed about this one thin thing? cy think it's that they were behind fossil fuel economic businesses that don't want the climate change agenda to be messing with their business. but i'm guessing about that.

>> i would be derelict in my duty if i didn't ask a "moneyball" question. the houston astros, victory for analytics or instinct? >> either team that won, the dodgers or the astros were well beyond instinct versus analytics. analytics up the wazoo both sides. both general managers were in the game because of billy d. they wouldn't have been in the game if billy bean -- they were both analytics people. you could see that on the field. you saw that where the players were, how they approached their at bats. how the pitchers approached the hitters. underneath it all was a lot of study. and the point i would make about it is that when i wrote money ball, everybody said the analysts are going to take the fun out of the game. the analytics have not taken the fun out of the game. they've added a layer of interest. >> i mean a game seven it could not have been better. even if i think some of the, the mlb forces would have liked to have seen the yankees and the dodgers.

you couldn't have asked for more than we just received. >> i agree, it was wonderful. and it's fun to watch people, i mean not just, at the level of a player. but the level of the general manager. people who really know what they're doing. it's now an actual skill. running one of these teams. and the value of that job, one of the big things that's happened in the last 15 years in sports, especially baseball if you look at the relative pay of the manager in the dugout versus the general manager, it's flipped. it used to be the manager got paid all this money and the general manager was an afterthought and now the general manager is the prized creature because everybody understands the talent decisions, the big strategic decisions are, that's where the leverage is. that's what's important. >> michael lewis, thanks so much. thanks for having me. let's check in on your tweets and facebook comments. what do we have, katherine? smerkonish, i hope donald trump isn't running u.s. like his

company, can't declare bankruptcy for the entire country when he messes up. christopher read that piece by my guest, michael lewis. because it really speaks to the lack of transition that ever took place in the departments that he's analyzed between the outgoing obama administration and the incoming trump administration. which i think can be explained by even the trump campaign was shocked by their victory. one more if we have time for it. smerkonish, not sure why someone of your talent would fib lie we all know trump has done more in ten months than obama in eight years. brad, please use that same twitter feed or my facebook page and lay out that record. because i'd like to know it. and if you convince me, i'd be thrilled to broadcast it because i'm not seeing it. we've got a chief justice of the united states supreme court. zero legislative achievement. maybe a change in a lot of regulation, but not a strong record and i'm just being objective. still to come, nuclear policy discussions and a game of golf both on president trump's

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with president trump heading to asia for a 12-day trip, some had hoped he would moderate his fiery rhetoric about north korea. this week general h.r. mcmaster said that's not going to happen. >> i don't think the president really moderates his language. he's been very clear and very clear about it. been aware of the discussions about his inflammatory -- what's

inflammatory is the north korean regime and what they're doing to threaten, to threaten the world. >> i wondered what advice former presidential advance men might have for trump's trip. joining me now, spencer guisinger who work ford bush 41 and then for 43 as director of presidential advance. josh king was director of production for presidential events in bill clinton's white house. and helped plan seven trips to asia and is the author of the book "off-script" an advance man's guide to white house trips. what's the itinerary, what's the hardest stop to advance? >> i would say probably china. one because they're an adversary and they're tougher negotiators. on my trips to china, versus to japan or korea, i always found

it was tougher to negotiate with the chinese. >> well and you tell a story about being in flight on air force one to beijing for the olympics and you still didn't have credentials. how did that pan out? >> well that's exactly right. we had, i had made several trips to beijing. i think three trips prior to the actual trip itself. to negotiate everything from hotel rooms to vehicle placards to credentials to the events. and we had, at the time of the departure from andrews, we still had not received any credentials or any passes to any of the events. and we weren't exactly sure what the schedule was going to entail and president bush called me up to the conference room and asked me what events he could go to. i had talked to my lead advance on the ground and the secret service and we had decided that we were going to go to whatever events we wanted to go to and we figured that the chinese would not stop us. so when the president called me up to the conference room, he

asked me what he should go to and i said sir you can go to any events that you want to go to. i said give me a head's up of what you want to see and we'll make that happen and that's what we did. we ordered up the motorcade, told the chinese security where we were going and drove off and went there. we were never stopped. we went to the swimming events with michael phelps and beach volleyball and we had a baseball game between the u.s. team and the chinese team. >> hey josh, a trip of this magnitude requires deep reading. on the flight there, do you read or do you sleep? >> well it's a ten-hour flight from andrews to hawaii. that first leg that president trump has already taken, michael. he, he emerged to get his latest on the tarmac in honolulu. my sense is he and the first lady probably got a lot of sleep on that first leg. now it's another ten hours over to his first stop in tokyo.

and i hope that on that leg they're taking off in the morning. from honolulu. that they'll spend a lot of time in the conference room with h.r. mcmaster, with john kelly and dena powell poring over the briefing books, because from this point forward every stop is, has diplomatic pitfalls that need to be avoided. there's a slow ramp on this trip. on sunday he's playing golf with prime minister shinzo abe, that should be a pretty easy lay-up. they've spoken 14 times on the phone and shared a round of golf when the prime minister visited the united states. things get trickier on monday, once you get to beijing. what i've seen about this white house, unlike going to michael phelps' swimming meets at the olympics is, this white house doesn't have a lot of creativity or a lot of people to put on a lot of bells and whistles on these trips so they're staying very much in a narrow diplomatic protocol lane. almost giving yourself over to

your host, go where the host asks you to go, show up to the meetings that they ask you to show up. don't take a lot of risks. don't do a lot yourself. because frankly, they don't have the personnel or expertise to do it. >> hey, spencer, is there a rock band quality to this when you're doing five nations back to back, that you almost forget where you are and it's hello, cleveland, even if you're not in cleveland? >> no, not so much. throughout the whole advance you're talking to your teams on the ground. you have a really good understanding feel for what's going to happen. these trips are highly scripted. they're thought out months in advance. every step that the president is going to take has been walked by the advance teams in security. every route that the motorcade will travel has been traveled previously and practiced. so there's a lot that goes into this thing. what you have to avoid is a self-inflicted distraction. you want to stick to the script.

go to the event as josh said, go to the events they want you to go to. be prepared when you're there. and then execute the trip that you have, that you have planned. and not try to do things on a whim or sort of, ad hoc. you want to stick to the script as best as possible. because things will happen and you have to react to them. there's always something that comes out of left field you have to deal with. >> josh you're going to have to wear the native dress. we were showing some images of bill clinton. your former boss, if you're with the saudis, you might be expected to hold hands, there's always those wrinkles at every location. true? >> this is a shot of the apec conference, this is a palace in indonesia. i think it was the second or third apec conference, the first one we hosted in seattle. and our dress code was just -- come casually to the island where the leaders were meeting. once we started going to these asian conferences they said

please wear the native garb and these were the fwmpb atik shirts that the indonesian shirts asked to wear. president clinton was already about 12 inches taller than all of his counterparts, so he stood out to begin with and that guy with his pale complexion didn't look great in a batik shirt. but you go along to get along. that's a rule of requirement when you go to these apec conferences. >> spencer -- any fun for a president on it? i know he's going to golf with abe. is any of this fun? >> oh yeah, absolutely. you get an opportunity to learn so much about their culture. there's fun times and there's times to relax as well. those apec shirts, there's not a president that has served in our country that likes wearing those apec shirts, i can tell you. >> so there's one thing that can bridge the partisan divide. not liking those shirts.

it's like the ridiculous sweater at christmas. gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. >> thank you, michael, good to be with you. still to come, your best and worst tweets and facebook comments. like this, smerkonish, what the reason for potus well he's not going around north korea. i guess you mean in close proximity. we talked about this here. he will not be going to the dmz. should he go? he's not going. back in a sec. give up, skeletor! you're finished! curse you, he-man, you interfering imbecile! give us one good reason we shouldn't vanquish you to another dimension! ok, guys, hear me out. switching to geico could save you... hundreds on car insurance. huh, he does make a point... i do like to save money... catch you on the flip, suckas! geico. because saving fifteen percent or more on car insurance is always a great answer.

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and facebook and maybe b your comment will make it to the air. what do we have? as an independent, i hope tom friedman is right b about elections. hard to see how we rest party i, too, was thinking when tom friedman said that, yeah f the two parties are dead, there's great opportunity there. ha 45% of us regard ourselves as independents according to gallup. an all-time high. hit me with another one. smerconish, every saturday, my wife, i say smerconish, she says whatever. yeah, papadopoulos. see, i said it again. one more. papadopoulos. papadopoul papadopoulos. recommended i took a drink each time you said p's name wrong. i'm definitely buzzed by 9:15 a.m. thank you so much for watching. i'll see you next week. never going to live it down. fi,

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you're live in the cnn news room. great to have you with us. right now, president trump is en route to japan. the first stop that will take him to five countries in 13 days all amid concerns about a nuclear north korea and while president will have plenty on his plate abroad, the trip comes at the end of a landmark week and robert mueller's russia investigation, including two indictments, one guilty plea and plenty of questions abo ant h t 2016 meeting when according to court documents,