journal." it's trying to discredit the media. >> it's not that unusual for the white house to tape recordings with reporters, is it? >> it's usual because they want to have their own version. it's unusual to release the audio. thank you for joining us. "inside politics" with john king starts right now. thank you, anna. and welcome to "inside politics." i'm john king. thank you for sharing this special day with us. the government runs out of money in just four days, and yes, you have seen this movie before. the obstacles to agreement are many, and not all of them are battles pitting democrats against republicans. plus, hawaii reassigns that worker who accidentally sent out a ballistic missile alert and says it will now add new safeguards to that warning system. as we remember dr. martin luther king jr., the son of the icon delivers a message to

president trump. >> you have a president who says things but has the power to execute and create racism. that's a dangerous power and a dangerous position! we got it find a way to work on this man's heart. >> we begin on this martin luther king day with a conversation about race and about prejudice with a dispute over whom to believe and whose memory to trust. today conflicting accounts over what the president of the united states said. sources telling cnn he disparaged haitians and african nations. you might recall on friday, senator dick durbin, a democrat who was in the room with the president, told reporters that, yes, the president used the word -- forgive me -- shitholes in the context of the african nations. and he used it repeatedly. don cotton and david perdue first said they did not recall him using that word

specifically. on sunday their stories changed. >> are you saying the president did not use the word that's been so widely reported? >> i'm telling you he did not use that word, george, and i'm telling you it's a gross misrepresentation. how many times do you want me thoos? >> i didn't hear it, either. i didn't hear him say that word repeatedly. i was sitting as far away as dick durbin was. >> now seizing on the memories of senators cotton and purdue. >> did you see what various senators said about my comments? they weren't made. >> if you don't care about the truth or the president's character, that's smart politics. create confusion. make it just another disagreement between the d's and the r's here in washington. here's the problem for the president. cnn's reporting includes accounts from trump friends who says the president talked to them himself about using the vulgar term. plus the outburst won't go along

with the rewrite. dick durbin said, my memory hasn't dissolved. i know what he said and what i heard. he's asked to detail on the record exactly what was said, but he's also referring to help the white house effort to make all this go away. >> those of us in my business need to up their game. it's pretty embarrassing when you have to take your children out of the room just to report the news. so the only thing i can do is control me. i can't make anybody change but me. >> here to share their insights, john mccormick from the weekly standard and the times, molly bold. there are those who said the president didn't say s-hole, he said s-house.

there is no disagreement that he said why not let these people emigrate to norway? why do they need to be here? two republican senators and the white house seizing on that to say, well, he didn't say it. >> to me it's interesting in how the white house seems to have perceived the fallout. their initial response was to embrace it in some way, right? to claim it was a good thing because it represented how people really feel. then when they saw how it was playing, when the president saw how it was playing, the strategy became the opposite, to argue this is not what was said. they still haven't really addressed the substance of the sentiment, right, and what the president means or who he believes ought to, and on what basis, come into the country. >> if the president really did not say this, then presumably you would come up with a forceful denial right away, try to kill the story and say this is not what happened.

clearly they waited several days for this to linger. sources in the room have confirmed exactly what happened. the white house clearly did not push back initially because it seemed that was exactly what he said. to me the curious thing is why continue to fight this? this is not a fight they're going to win. why not initially maybe apologize, say you said the wrong thing, move on to the next subject so we can get off this topic and focus on the other big issues they had to deal with, namely what to do about daca, what to do about immigration, how to keep the government open. instead they're on day four of this fight and now it's a he said/she said fight, a and uncl about whether this will be beneficial to the white house in the end. >> we'll get to what the president said and all that and the global outrage in a moment. but this idea that senators cotton and purdue decide to come forward, forgive me f you're ,

in a meeting and people sitting around in conversation like this one, and senator durbin and senator graham say that he said s-hole repeatedly, you would think you would remember that. on friday you say you don't recall. on sunday your memory is crystal clear. convenient? >> i think originally it seemed like they were going to quibble about whether it was s-holes or s-houses. again, it doesn't matter. he could have said trash holes and it still would have expressed the same sentiment. that's obviously a very close representation of what he said. >> what you have now is the following. you have further divisions or rift or confusion inside the republican party about how closely to stand by the president when he does something to shake the party or when to keep your distance, and this is really going to be pivotal heading into those midterms. it's one strategy in the primaries, another strategy in the general election, and

because after a while you get dangerously close to a tipping point. there are foreign policy incidents, there are domestic policy incidents, there are rhetorical insults, there are all these issues and they resonate different with different republicans. but trying to decide should he say this at all, when is it too early, when is it too late, none of that is enough for these guys in the pivotal midterm era. you also have foreign policy implications and that had to play some part of the strategy not on the president's instincts, perhaps, but on his top advisers when you see u.s. ambassadors to other countries in a decision point about whether to stay on the job, ambassadors from other countries criticizing the u.s. and all these agreements that are in the balance involving borders, roads that lead from one country to the next, terrorism approaches, all of that mixed up in the swirl of this. >> you had the two senators out there. you also had the president's

cabinet secretary, the president of homeland security kristin nielsen in the room as well. she's trying not to make the president mad, but she won't go as far as the senators. >> to say "i don't recall" seems i am applau implausible. if the president of the united states used the words blank hole talking about the oval office, i would know. >> it's a powerful conversation. i don't recall that specific phrase being used. that's all i can say about that. >> mr. wallace is absolutely correct. it's beyond impossible not to remember that. senator durbin is the only one who has publicly, on the record, detailed the meeting and have used those words. others have taulked about it in background, senator graham has talked about it in inference. it's pretty clear where senator graham is but he hasn't said it directly. senator durbin says i stand behind what he said and my

colleagues now have restored memory. they were there. they heard the same words i did. the president's character is the biggest issue here. if you're looking down here at the 2018 midterms, and i will be guilty of this for the rest of the year, focusing on politics, they were saying, oh, i've got to help the president out of this mess here. you would think especially the senator's remarks in georgia in the civil rights journey of this country, you might think twice about trying to rewrite the truth here, right? >> well, apparently not. but to manu's point, why doesn't the president just apologize? he never apologizes, he never backs down, he never expresses regret. as manu was saying, this becomes a bigger deal than what is he thinking because it's swept this entire apparatus into this campaign of putting out the fires by trying to contact everyone else in the meeting,

and putting the republicans and congress in the situation they have so often been put in in the last year of having to choose a side and having to prove their loyalty and having a president who is obsessed with whether people are personally loyal to him and then the entire world ends up sort of a pawn in this game over a, quote, unquote, passing comment. >> a quote, unquote, passing comment. for those of you who may be trump supporters saying i don't care about cnn's reporting. he may have told his friends i don't trust you. eric erickson, a conservative writer, wrote this over the weekend. it's weird people in the room don't remember trump using that word when trump himself was calling friends to brag about it afterwards. i spoke to one of these friends. the president thought it would play well with the base. that gets to the point you made earlier, that the initial house reaction that manu said as well. if the president didn't say something close to this, the white house would have pushed back immediately. they didn't.

they let two or three days pass and then they decided maybe this wasn't breaking the way we thought it would. >> it's about the petition charact -- president's character, it's also about the national character. does the president see this nation as an all-welcoming nation of immigrants? steven miller last year at one point argued that the statue of liberty and the inscription there is not a statement of american policy and should not be treated as such, so the whole give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, that's not in the constitution. so there is a choice to be made, whether it's electorally or however else about whether that is the america people believe in or whether it's a different standard and a different set of views. >> and john, there are also other people in that meeting that we have not heard from yet. we have not heard from bob goode yet, we have not heard from

others who have not fully detailed what happened. there is more to come out, especially if the white house continues to push back the way it is in an uneven way. >> it's an excellent point. kevin mccarthy at mar-a-lago to have dinner with the president. he's trying to get the president to raise a lot of money in the midterm election year. if the president hadn't said it, there was an opportunity for a senior republican to step forward in front of the cameras and defend the president. he did not. up next the president's history of defending himself as not a racist. but before we go to break, martin luther king day being commemorated around the country. here's the president's housing secretary ben carson speaking in mlk's hometown, atlanta, georgia. >> now as when he walked these grounds, the time is always right to do what is right. the time is right to put aside thoughts of division and hatred. the time is right to honor love,

forgiveness and brotherhood. let's begin.

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welcome back. an all too familiar refrain from the president of the united states to an all too familiar question. mr. president, are you a racist? >> no, no, i'm not a racist. i'm the least racist person you have ever interviewed, that i can tell you. >> that answer, you heard it right there, unequivocal. the simple fact the question had to be asked and asked again is astonishing. believe him or not, believe he's a racist or not, the back and forth over what happened and what's in the president's heart has resulted in paralysis here in washington. five days before the one-year mark as president and two weeks ahead of his first state of the

union address, washington is debating the president's character, not his accomplishments or his agenda. that is the price of this. again, we weren't in the room, but we have a pretty good sense of at least the tone and context of what was said, even though it is a dispute over a certain word. molly, you were there last week. i want to show this. the president should be talking about taxes, he should be talking about a second year agenda. you have the president and the president's seat on fire. >> it's a recurring theme of this presidency and that's what we tried to get in our one year of trump how are things going story. if you analyze what has actually happened during this presidency, republicans, at least, have a lot to be happy about. the passage of the tax bill which also includes energy and health care provisions. we're not at nuclear war with north korea, which is a low bar, but a bar that has been cleared nonetheless. and yet, you know, the constant of the trump show, the

constant -- it's not a distraction, it is the main event, of the president, you know, being -- he clearly can't be controlled. i think in the beginning there was a will he tame the republican party or will the republican party tame him? nobody has tamed anybody. they've sometimes found ways to work together, but most of the time he's got people sort of walking on eggshells, wondering what he's going to do next and how they will all have to clean up his mess. >> the clean up the the mess part and how it will affect the republican agenda and the republican brand 2018 and beyond. if you question his friend who have known him for years, no, he's not a racist, he's got a big heart. but time and time again, things he has said, his own words, racial baiting, racially tinged, call it what you will. this president keeps getting asked of the president. here's his answers. >> they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists. donald j. trump is calling for a

total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the united states. he's a mexican. we're building a wall between here and mexico. the answer is he is giving us very unfair rulings. look at my african-american over here. look at him. are you the greatest? you're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs. what the hell do you have to lose? you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. >> we have a representative in congress who they say was here a long time ago. they call her pocahontas. >> and the question gets asked for a reason. his default too often, once is too often, his default frequently is divisive, racially tinged, prejudice sounding language. it's just a fact. >> yeah, no question about it. what's been remarkable in the most recent episode is the

difference in response from the leadership in congress versus some of these other episodes. when he proposed the muslim ban, for instance, it's a pretty strong rejection from mitch mcconnell, from paul ryan. they pushed back pretty aggressively about that. over the summer you heard some pushback over the way he handled charlottesville. when he talked about the mechanics-american judge n mexican-american judge not able to rule freely, he was criticized by paul ryan about the textbook definition of a racial comment. those were ryan's words. this time around, much different. mcconnell has been silent since this remark has been reported. paul ryan did make those remarks, some mild criticism on friday but really not even close to the criticism that he levied in the aftermath of the mexican-american judge. like molly was just saying, it shows the constant bind this party is in trying to work with someone who continues to create

controversy day in and day out, and hoping to figure out a way to get something done here in washington. >> if you want to appeal to middle america, if you want to appeal to the republican suburb suburbanit ser suburbanites, we've seen a ban about as strong as you can get. some people stay home, meaning republican voters, and if some people stay home, your losses are even bigger. that's the position the president puts his party in on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. >> paul ryan likens this to how the russians were treated back in the 1990s. specifically about a mexican-american judge not ruling fairly, those are strictly racist statements.

but it does damage this idea that anyone can come from anywhere, and given freedom, can strive and do great things and become a great american citizen, u.s. soldier, u.s. troop, many different ways and serve, so i really do think that's the problem here. >> it's hard to find the strategic total threat in this, because i think you see a lot of republican members trying out different methods to see what's the best way to try to work with trump. lindsey graham for weeks now we've seen him work closely with president trump, playing golf with him. a lot of people are saying, what's lindsey graham doing? and on this one he decides to draw a line and says, okay, i'm not going to cover him on this. same with bob corker. you saw him completely at odds with president trump, but then he gets on air force i because he's trying to make sure the iran deal gets done. you see a lot of these republican members trying to balance their own gut instincts trying to push back on these events against the instinct that you're more likely to get the

president come around to your way of thinking if you praise him and are seen in public with him. >> if you're the president of the united states and you think this is horrible, that you're a good person, that you have a good heart, that you're not prejudice, you're not racist, you think he would say to people he trusts this question: why do i have to keep saying this? >> tremendous crime is coming across, everybody knows that's true. it's happening all the time. i mention crime and all of a sudden i'm a racist? >> just so you know, i'm the least racist person, the least racist person you've ever seen. the least. >> if you want to have strong borders so that people come into our country but they come in legally through a legal process, that doesn't make you a racist, it makes you smart. >> i am the least racist person you've ever met, and you can speak to don king who knows me very well, you can speak to so many different people.

>> if you have to keep answering the same question -- i get we live in a polarized environment, the president has his critics, but if you have to keep answering the same question, your language is part of the problem. your blaiehavior is part of the problem. >> i just want to go back to the saga of lindsey graham here for a second because i find it so poignant. i know there are people who have no interest in feeling sorry for lindsey graham. here's someone, a member of the gang of eight, has been working on this for a long time, the issue of race, and they were so close. there was a bipartisan deal on daca, finally republican buy-in that was really legal immigration in exchange for border security, which is what lindsey graham has been trying to do for so long. and to have that snatched away at the last second by a president he's so aggressively been courting. he's been playing golf with this guy. he really thought he was getting somewhere with donald trump, and you could hear in this clip, it was so poignant, the resignation

in senator graham's voice saying, well, at the end of the day, i can't change anybody but myself. for all his efforts, he's seeing this whole deal go up in smoke. >> and what he thought met the test on tuesday, by thursday the president had moved, shall we say. before we go to break, a tribute to martin luther king jr. timothy dolan sharing this on twitter. my king, my fellow pastor, we miss you more than ever. you so powerfully upheld the dignity of every human person, made in god's image and likeness. you would remind us today that no country is a hole, no person unworthy of respect. we'll be right back. your insurance company

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i use herpecin l.re, it penetrates deep to treat. it soothes, moisturizes, and creates an spf 30 barrier, to protect against flare-ups caused by the sun. herpecin l. welcome back. some pictures here. look at that crowd, a great crowd. this is san antonio, texas paying tribute to dr. martin luther king on this martin luther king federal holiday. great crowd there in san

antonio. back here in washington, take a peek here and count them down. in just four days your government will run out of money and shut down. some of you think that's probably not such a bad idea. lawmakers and the president seemingly at an impasse over how to reach a compromise on immigration. the president says they're the ones holding up a deal. >> we're ready, willing and able to make a deal on daca, but i don't think the democrats want to make a deal. and the folks from daca should know the democrats are the ones that aren't going to make a deal, okay? >> and while yes, many democrats say they are willing to force a shutdownov over the immigration question, they're not the only ones saying that. >> the majority of my caucus, myself included, we will not fund the government without a daca deal. >> if we don't have any measurable progress towards a daca deal, i am not going to vote for a stopgap measure. and i'm asking republican and democrats to take that position. we're in congress, and regr

regretably, congress only acts when it has to. >> how has the weekend affected the possibility of a shutdown? >> we're all trying foig oto fi out, what's the fallout of the vulgar language from the oval office? one, it's hardened the resolve of those democrats who feel like this is the moment to have that shutdown, this is the moment to hold out on the spending bill, to make this fight happen. but i think the more interesting one is the second, and that is, those lawmakers who were very uncomfortable with the politics of a shutdown, uncomfortable perhaps with the politics of shutting down a government on account of undocumented immigrants, they did not necessarily think that was a political winner. they, i'm told, are starting to move towards those democrats who think that this is their moment. that obviously creates serious problems.

speaker paul ryan needs to figure out a way to get 218 of his own conference to be able to pass a short-term spending bill. if that actually happens, senate majority leader mitch mcconnell needs democrats. i heard what senator coon there said a majority of his caucus will not vote for a funding bill. he doesn't need the majority, he needs 10 or 12, depending on how the votes shake out. what has changed over the course of the last four or five days is democratic leaders are starting to settle in on the idea that the fight might be worth it, this might be the time and this is the issue. they feel there is a bipartisan proposal that is on the table. they feel like the president's comments have certainly put him on his heels on this, and this might actually occur. i will say this. john, you know this as well as anybody. usually at this moment, cooler heads start to prevail around wednesday night, maybe thursday afternoon. the adults in the room start to come in and say, maybe this isn't the best idea we've had in the world, but this is the biggest debate in the senate

right now. is this the moment to have this fight? i can tell you over the course of the last four or five days, while it certainly isn't definitive, it is trending toward the direction that the answer right now is yes, john. >> phil mattingly, as i noted, just monday. we'll be in touch all week. thanks very much for that reporting. let's pick up where phil left off. the president has a role and responsibility in this, obviously. he's the president of the united states. the president controls both the house and the senate. let's start with the democrats. they're emboldened. the wind is at their bag if you look at special elections in 2017. november is a long way off, but they believe on this day they're in a very good position to take back the house and maybe pull off the inside track they would need to get the senate back. would they risk a shutdown or would that blow up that calculus? >> it could be a big disaster for them politically to shut down. it's a huge risk to shut the government down. presumably the president could get blamed for a lot of this, especially in the run-up to this, but the politics of a

shutdown are very, very tricky. not everybody is in line in the democratic caucus to go along with this hard-line strategy. what will probably happen this week is the republican leadership is going to put out a short-term spending bill to keep the government open probably until mid-february sometime. they will not have any immigration proposal in there. they'll try to negotiate a side bill. we'll see how that progresses. then the democrats have to make a determination whether they want to dig in or block this short-term spending bill, which we'll probably see is a division between the house democrats and the senate democrats. the house democrats want to take a hard line like last time. there are a growing number of senate democrats that also want to take that hard line, but we don't know where chuck schumer is going to be, we don't know where other top democrats are. if they see progress moving on immigration, they'll say it's not worth the risk to shut the government down. >> you've got those ten

senators, democrats, up from ten states. joe donnelly in the state that trump won by 20, 30, 40 points. that's a tough calculation for the democrats. are they willing to plant their flag? >> i think it's possible to overthink this. >> correct. >> i remember last time government -- not that thought shouldn't go in the legislative process, but i remember the last time there was a government shutdown in 2013 and it was the republican-controlled house that was primarily to blame for that, and there was so pontificating about how the president had shot himself in the foot. the midterms went pretty well for the republicans, and there was still a democrat in the white house. that's what they were focused on. the elections we've seen in the trump era, trump has been in the white house and voters have been focused on that fact. i think absolutely a shutdown is very unpredictable in terms of how the politics of it play out,

but if people next november are primarily still reacting to trump, they are not going to care what role democrats played or didn't play in the legislative process in washington where they control none of the apparatus. >> to that point, i mean, the last time there was a shutdown, it was in october of 2013 which gave a whole year where you had the obamacare, healthcare.gov debacle. we don't know how long this will last. republicans in 2013, the numbers, just the generic number turns strongly against them. we just don't know how long the timing would affect us not being in the election year. >> i do think the fate of the daca people, these are are peop people who came here as children, their parents brought them here as children. it's really very important compared to the fate of the shutdown deadline. march will be here like that. different than the implications of some of the administration's other immigration decisions such as the protected status or

changing that for folks here from el salvador, folks here from haiti. put that aside. the daca group includes young adults who have gone to college, who have served in the military, right, and americans across the country including swing voters, including republicans have a sympathy and appreciation for these folks. even as a separate question from the shutdown, the democrats have a decision to make which is if they don't push hard enough for daca, they lose momentum. their base kind of creates a fissure and they also miss the opportunity to press republicans on this. >> you saw that republican congressman from florida, he's in a very tough district, saying, i won't vote for this unless they do the daca bill. if they trust president trump, do the government shutdown first, have another month to deal with daca, they would. but that's one of the fallouts from the other day, thinking the president is moving back to a hard line position and we better

get it in the senate where we have leverage. how pressing the wrong button led to 38 minutes of panic in hawaii.

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♪ [speaking french] ♪ this is what our version of financial planning looks like. tomorrow's important, but, this officially completes his education. spend you life living. find an advisor at northwesternmutual.com. phoenix, arizona last hour. look at that. a parade to honor martin luther king jr. the russian foreign minister sergei lavrov says the united states is destabilizing the world with its stance on iran and north korea. during his news conference, lavrov also said a withdrawal

from the iran nuclear deal would be further evidence that the united states, in his view, is not a reliable world partner. he did not specifically mention president trump. shortly before his death, supreme court justice antony scalia spoke positively about trump. justice scalia thought it was fresh to have a candidate pretty much unfiltered and frank. that was from the early days of the presidential campaign. agi pi said he will make sure something like what happened in hawaii will never happen again when somebody accidentally pressed the warning button. pi said they're looking at issues nationwide. >> part of the issues we're looking at, are there steps we

need to take, federal officials working together to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. we're looking very closely at some of the steps we need to take to make sure the vulnerability we saw in hawaii on saturday is not replicated throughout the country. we need to make sure there are no more false alerts in any state in this country, and that's what we're intending to do. >> that would abe great result but hard to say if that's any consolation to the people of hawaii who spent 38 terrifying minutes believing this might be the end, that nuclear war had begun and that they would be the first casualties. that's how long it took for that oops message to go out saying that alert was sent in error. listen here. a reporter from a local tv station said her family had nowhere to hide. they spent that 38 agonizing minutes clinging to each other. >> there was a mad scramble figuring out where to go. they were aon a beach house on the north shore so there weren't many options. they decided to wait it out.

the phones were jammed and nothing was getting through. they were hugging each other, they were crying, they were very, very upset and stressed and they were also worried about me. so for that amount of time, and 38 minutes is a long time to feel like you're potentially going to die, that was incredibly traumatic for them. >> just to hear that sentence, 38 minutes is a long time to think that you're potentially going to die. this is a stunning problem, a stunning question, and now let's hope. hawaii says they're going to add a second or third layer to have the safeguards put in place, the employee has been reassigned, but what a dramatic story. >> of course. the immediate concern is that people might act crazy in the moment or just get very upset and hurt themselves. the longer term concern is if there is another threat, people might not believe it because of what happened last time. then the question of what can the federal government do? my understanding at this point is the inclination is to keep this as a state system, because

states use their alert systems for other things besides incoming missile threats. but the federal government is taking a look at what it can do to kind of help coordinate our backstop to try to minimize incidents like this from ever happening. >> was the federal response in the immediacy, was it appropriate? the president was golfing at the time. he said it was good, the white house was stepping up, taking accountability. this is james clapper, former director of intelligence, who says he thinks the president should have taken a moment to step forward and reassured the country that, okay, this is a mistake, we're going to get to the bottom of it, all is well. >> i do think as far as the white house is concerned, it's kind of a lost opportunity here for the president to be the reassurer in chief. >> fair? >> in some ways, yeah.

look, he has -- he boasts often about his twitter feed, and this is a way he could have used his twitter feed for good if, in fact, he was briefed during that 38 minutes that there was no threat, this was a false alarm. presumably the president could have said, all is okay here. people, do not panic. i think there is a dispute over what was the president told in that 38 minutes and why didn't he act? i don't think he's answered that question yet. >> should the president be on twitter during a tense moment like this? i don't think so. you have people like marco rubio and ted cruz during the the campaign saying the president couldn't be trusted with nuclear codes. i don't think they want the president popping off on twitter with whatever comes into his head. >> mitt romney is feeling the political buzz. he's running for senate by sounding off again on president trump. shawn evans: it's 6 am.

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a bit earlier today a hint from mitt romney about what kind of senate candidate he'll likely be if he makes a run. this morning romney responded to the president's s-hole comments on twitter. the poverty of an aspiring immigrant nation is as irrelevant as their race. the sentiment attributed to potus is inconsistent with america's history and antithetical to american values. may our memory of dr. king buoy our hope for unity, greatness and charity for all. romney texted a friend saying he definitely plans to go for utah's senate seat. how would the president react if he chimed in? the lieutenant governor said, i think if romney wants to be a check, it won't hurt him here

like it has others. mitt romney is generally a cautious guy but he's been a fierce trump critic. is he ready to come out as a check, but if he does things like he did in the oval office, is there a solution here? >> a lot of questions in 2017 about ed mcmullen. >> that's true, and the congressional delegation is not totally on board with trump. in fact, really only orrin hatch, who is retiring, was the only one in support of him. it will be interesting to see the role that romney plays. it does seem that almost certainly he's going to run. that was the expectation for hatch's retirement. it would be shocking if he didn't. but certainly romney wants the opportunity to have this voice and push back on the president when he feels he needs to. >> a big race that will get national attention because he was the presidential candidate,

because of who he is, and it underscores the very attention we talk about every day. they still wonder how to handle their president which many republicans say is toxic. >> fairly early in the primary, the president had them behind him and when he won in arizona he also got blown out in utah. most republicans are fine with people like justice gorsuch and tax cuts. but i think that he will be one of those rare voices who will speak out consistently. >> in a lot of ways, i think this is easier for mitt romney than it is for a lot of current republican members of the united states senate who are terrified to say what they really think about the president and the things that he sometimes says. romney has chosen a path already where he says exactly what he thinks and sort of lets the chips fall where they may. now he's hugely popular in utah, he's hugely popular with members of the church of latter-day saints, and they are extremely

pro-immigration. you will not find a more pro-immigration group of people than the mormon church. so there is a deep sympathy for mitt romney, particularly on this issue, and i think that to the extent that he can run by -- it will be a very interesting race. what i'm interested in is how does the president react and does he start going off on romney? >> excellent point. thank you for joining us on "inside politics." happy mlk day. wolf blitzer in the chair after a quick break. rk for. and with panera catering, it's food worth sharing. panera. food as it should be. on a perfect car, then smash it into a tree. your insurance company raises your rates. maybe you should've done more research on them. for drivers with accident forgiveness, liberty mutual won't raise your rates due to your first accident. switch and you could save $782 on home and auto insurance.

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hello, i'm wolf blitzer. it's 1:00 p.m. in washington, 6:00 p.m. in london, 8:00 p.m. in jerusalem. wherever you're watching, thanks so much for joining us. the president in 2018 declaring he is not a racist. the new fallout from his vulgar remarks and the republicans who are still silent. all of this as the clock ticks on a d.r.e.a.m.er deal