good evening from los angeles. i'm tavis smiley, and our fast-paced, almost relentless news cycle we have over the last few days heard a lot about health care, a new immigration order, and an unbelievable bugging accusation and a budget that puts struggling americans on the edge, hurting some of the voters who made trump's election possible in the first place. it's another week of controversy and whirlwind activity from the trump administration, and so, tonight, "new york" magazine's andrew sullivan is here to talk about all that and then some. andrew sullivan, coming up in just a moment. ♪

>> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪ donald trump's been our president for two months now, and in that time, he's managed to keep some campaign promises, like killing the tpp and nominating a solid conservative to the supreme court. last week he released a budget blueprint outlining increased military spending and cuts across other agencies, including the epa and the state department. i am pleased to welcome back to this program, writer and political commentator andrew

sullivan to talk about all that and then some. andrew, good to see you, my friend. >> great to see you. >> thanks for coming by. >> thank you for having me. >> let me start with the news of the day. first of all, james comey testified in washington today. i don't know that he said anything we weren't expecting to hear, that they have no evidence of this wiretapping allegation, but what do you make of the fact that president trump leveled this accusation against president obama to begin with, number one, and that he won't back off of it? he didn't back off of the accusation against the british intelligence agency. what do you make of the fact that he is sticking with his story? >> he doesn't seem able, having watched him now during the campaign and as president, to back off anything. i mean, he seems incapable of saying i was wrong. his ego is so fragile, and the reality he lives in has to be maintained at all costs or he has some sort of psychic breakdown. if he were to say, i got that wrong, i think what it means in

him psychologically is that this other person has or some other entity has power over me to tell me that i'm wrong, and he can't handle that. that's why he can't handle a liberal democracy, because he can't really handle equals. he's never really dealt with equals. he's always lived in this absolute monarchy of his company in which everybody is talking to him and no one's above him, and this insecurity's been fueled, obviously, for decades. so, that silly handshake he does where he's with another world leader, and he has to yank them to put them off balance to make them feel slightly not his equal, and also why, you know, he never laughs at a joke. have you noticed that? >> yeah. >> and i mean, the reason is, is that i think -- >> he's joking. >> he's joking. which, he's the only one laughing. i was trying to figure out why, and i realize that when you

laugh at someone else's joke, you give them a little power. >> mm-hmm. >> you tell them, oh, we're together, you made me laugh, you know, so you have some power over me temporarily. and he can't tolerate that. so, part of this is funny, you know, it's a strange quirk. part of it is also terrifying, because what if he says something in an international forum that suggests we're going to use force or military force and can't back down? that means that any potential conflict we might have with another country, he's never going to be able to say, cool it. so, we could up -- he never -- he always ups the ante. >> but that was the point that hillary clinton made during the campaign when she said repeatedly and in a variety of ways, do you want this guy to have the nuclear codes, given the kind of temperament that he has, and yet, the country voted for him, at least enough people voted for him, anyway.

>> yeah, that's where we're at. and that's, i think, why so many of us in struggling to understand -- look, you can understand why some of the issues that he ran on are completely legitimate. >> true. >> so, i mean, for example, i think immigration's a real question we have to think about, and i think the way that some liberals have just said everybody's welcome, we don't draw a distinction between illegal immigrant and legal immigrant, like the democratic convention when they had this sort of immigration night, they made no distinction between people who come here legally and people who just cross the border, because they were more concerned about the latino identity group as a whole, and a lot of other americans are like, hold on a minute, do we have a country or do we have a country? is there a border? and so, you ceded some of these issues to him, just as you ceded the terrible plight of the white working class in this country, and that's how we got there. but that people did not see at

the same time that all these issues could be legitimate, but he is just not fit to have this job. >> so, obviously, you're not a latino, but you did live in this country for about 30 years, as i recall, before last year, after three decades, you finally decided to become a u.s. citizen. >> yeah. >> since we're talking about immigration, two questions here. one, why after all that time did you decide to become a citizen, and how then does that allow you to see this conversation about immigration perhaps in a more nuanced sort of way? does that make sense? >> yeah. i -- well, i lived here -- i've lived here for a long time without that citizenship, so it required renewing a visa. and i've gone through the process of leaving this country and coming in it not as a citizen. i've been detained every time. when you come in as not a citizen, you realize just how forbidding america can be to a foreigner. and i've had the insecurity of knowing that i'm not a citizen.

so, i think part of me understands quite profoundly, really, the insecurity that people live with. now, i don't -- i'm so much more privileged than a lot of these people. i don't want to say that. but psychologically, the longer you live a place with no security of living here forever, the anxiety increases over time because you put down more roots. and so, when they're uprooted, the trauma is so much greater, let alone if you have kids. and i think people who don't see the humanity of this, the terror that people are living in right now, the fear that children have of their parents being taken away from them, of families being split up, of people's entire lives of trying to rebuild in america will be taken to nothing, taken right back where they started. so i understand that, but i also understand, having spent god knows how much money trying to do this and going through the final processes of doing it,

just how difficult it is to become an american citizen, if you're not, and how one form filled out the wrong way, you're finished, you know? one traffic fine, you could be back to square one. >> is the process, andrew, too difficult? and i ask that not because a difficult process justifies one coming here illegally, but if you understand the factors that drive people here in the first place, number one, and then if you compound those factors by a process that's impossible to navigate through, then one could conceivably see how the combination of those two things creates this problem and certainly exacerbates the problem. >> yes. it is -- i mean, i could not have done it. i'm, you know, a relatively smart, educated, privileged person. i couldn't have done it on my own. i mean, i had to get a lawyer that knew exactly what was going on. and the number of trip wires in that process is enormous.

the reason i did it was because, frankly, i thought donald trump was going to be president, and i was scared. and i think -- and also, i just wanted -- i wanted to contribute -- i knew i wanted to contribute to this country if he were to become president, and i felt i could do that better fully as a citizen, even though i had been here forever. >> that's fascinating for me, because there were some american citizens who were threatening to leave -- >> right. >> -- if he became president. you had a choice to leave, but rather than leave, you didn't just stay, you invested yourself more deeply in this citizenship thing. >> i love this country, tavis. i mean, it's hard to -- some of us who chose to live here love it, and i think that those of us who love it have been -- i mean, many of us have been kind of traumatized by what has happened. and i won't deny that after the

election, i sort of got really depressed, to be honest. and before the election was extremely anxious. but then i was going to do my bit to fight for this. and when you take the oath, which is an amazing -- i don't know whether you've been to -- >> i've never been to one. >> oh, it's quite interesting. and you take an oath to defend the constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. >> same one that donald trump took? >> no, because i'm not going to be president of the united stat states, thank god, but -- >> but that line, there a lot similar to that. >> but we don't pledge allegiance to a president. >> yeah. >> we pledge allegiance to -- we don't even pledge it to a country. we pledge it to a constitution, which makes us very different than many other countries in the world. and you know, i'm not a subject of her majesty, which is what i would be in england, and that's what the passport will tell you. here, you are a citizen of a

republic, and the republic is defined by this document, and that's what you are there for. >> yeah. >> and i think he's a threat to it. >> that constitution is what we live under. >> yeah, yeah. >> and that constitution is subject to interpretation. >> yep. >> which leads me to the second issue, this big news today, the nomination hearings for judge gorsuch started today in washington. what do you make, then, of the first bite at the apple that this president has at stacking the supreme court? >> i have to say, i think if you're a republican president and you picked gorsuch, i think he's pretty much as good as you'll get. i really do. i mean, i think he's a principled, interesting intellectual who is incredibly well qualified to do what he's doing. now -- so, i have nothing against this guy at all. i mean, i'm a believer that the party should take turns. so, that means, however, that the republicans' refusal to allow the democrats to take

their turn last time was a real breach of civil norms and constitutional norms. and we're finding, you know, the constitution isn't just laws, it's norms. it requires us to obey them and to respect them and to act as if they really operative on us, and that requires us to respect the other side, it requires us to respect the process, and i think what we saw last year when they refused to give merrick garland a hearing, a real abrigation of that core commitment to the norms that underpin a liberal democracy. and what you see with this president, too, whether by his just reckless forces -- let's put it that way -- reckless forces, even against, especially against a whole branch of government like the judiciary, which is crucial to our system of government -- that corrodes

entirely the confidence we have to have in that branch of government, which we will need at some point. and so, part of me also understands why some democrats want to say, well, we're going to tit for tat. >> see, i just want to push back on your thesis ever so gently. >> sure. >> because it was to be sure a violation of democratic norms, but it was more than that. to me, it was a trampling on the constitution by the republican party, who did not give mr. garland a hearing. they can vote him up or they can vote him down. barack obama didn't do it because he had nothing to do. he was obligated to put forth that nomination and they were obligated to take it up, i believe, and vote up or down, but it wasn't just a violation or abrigation of norms it was a trampling on our most precious document. >> well, if you were to parse the document, it doesn't say they must. it says "he may nominate," and you don't have to have nine people on the court. >> that's true. >> so, i don't think they

violated the letter of the constitution, but they violated the spirit, and the spirit matters, because that's what gives it life. and if it's just a dead letter, it's just a dead letter. and i find that incredibly depressing, and i have to say that the violation was really, to my mind, disrespect to the president of the united states, contempt for the president of the united states, which they had for eight years. >> no doubt about that. i raised this issue a year ago when this happened and some people got it and some people maligned at me for it, but what happens next? we end up, are we considering people being slaves again? we end up reconsidering the right for women to vote? we could parse that 18 different ways. so, if the conversation is going to be, well, they didn't violate the letter of the constitution, but -- do you take my point? >> i do. >> i don't know where we end up if that's how we start playing the game. >> you can, but they're not violating a law or enacting a law that could violate the constitution, and that's a big distinction.

>> okay. >> but i do think the constitution will not work like a machine will not work, unless it's greased with trust. and i think what's happened in this country, tragically, is the polarization has led to complete lack of trust, on both sides. however, i believe, and i don't think i'm a crazy outlier for this -- i'm not a super liberal. i consider myself a pretty mainstream, right-of-center person. i think the way the republican party has behaved as if the other party has no legitimacy, as if they can never -- as if they don't want a system in which they share power. you know, and i think that's crucial. we don't want to control everything. we believe in a system. we don't believe in ourselves, so it's good for there to be another party to come in and correct the errors and do this kind of thing, as opposed to complete obstructionism and pursuit of one-party rule. >> yeah.

"the new york times magazine," i saw over the weekend had a nice piece, cover story. i think it was called "the new party of no," so the democratic party now is the new party of no. do they have any other option? i mean, i'm piggybacking on the comment you're making now about how the republicans are trying to run washington. does the democratic party have any other option than to be the party of no? do they have any other option other than obstructionism at this moment? and if they have no other option, how does that make them different than what the republicans did to obama for eight years? >> well, they're different as much as they don't have any power. [ laughter ] >> well -- >> so, they can say whatever they want. >> yeah, yeah. >> they can't actually stop anything. >> right. >> except by this norm of the filibuster, which is another norm that we had. but in this case -- >> which may go out the window eventually. >> well, it has -- >> yeah. >> the thing is, tavis, harry reid threw it out the window, partly because of their obstructionism. but again, you see how this

process continues. and now we're possibly getting rid of the filibuster for the supreme court. so, that's why i don't think -- and i think with someone like gorsuch, i would -- my position would be, give this guy a very tough hearing. make sure that the lesson of what happened with merrick garland is not lost, but he could put up someone much worse than this. so, reserve the full opposition to somebody else. but we may not get 60 votes. >> what's your sense of how the media ought to challenge, hold accountable, at the very least, cover this presidency? how do we do that? >> it's really hard, tavis. and i think what you -- obviously, what you can do and what people have done, and increasingly, is to say, the president did this, this and that, he said this, that is not true. he said this, that is not true. he said this, that is true.

but to consistently, unlike any other president, assume -- i mean, i've come to assume that everything he says is untrue unless shown otherwise, because, to be honest, there's so much coming out that's just simply wrong. so, but then, you know, how do you handle a president that just accuses his predecessor of wiretapping him with no evidence? i mean, what are we supposed to do with that? what are we supposed to do with a president that says, the crowd at my inauguration was bigger than obama's, when we can see with our own eyes, right? we can see -- now, if somebody we came across in real life started telling you that this is a beautiful purple set, that we're on these amazing red couches here, and isn't it great? isn't it? >> yeah. >> and you'd be like, oh, okay, and you'd slowly kind of walk out of the room and try to stay away from that person, but unfortunately, we can't stay away from this person. he is in our lives. and he is, to my mind -- i don't

mind going there -- he is psychologically unwell, and let's put it that way. he's clearly not a well person. if he had been appointed a ceo of a publicly traded company on january 20th and had behaved this way, the board would have removed him by now, easily, within a day. you can't represent a big organization and keep telling untruths, let alone a country, let alone the leading power in the world. >> so, how do we cover that? >> i think we cover it the way we see it, and i think we have to be not afraid to say this is bonkers. this isn't just wrong. there is something really wrong here. this is not normal. there are lies that politicians have always told. they spin, they put a topspin on it, they say things they don't really mean, they exaggerate what they don't -- all that goes on. we know that and we can point that out. but to actively be clinically

delusional, to be saying things that are completely untrue, and then to treat our relations with other countries in this petty, childish way. like, with merkel, probably the most important figure in europe at this point, to sit there and refuse to shake her hand in public, what is that? it's a child -- it's like a child, a toddler you have to tell to take a time-out. >> and what do you make of the sycophants around him, who after he says something outrageous will then come on a variety of media shows and try to spin to the best of their ability or defend to the best of their ability what he said? i'm only asking that not to go after mr. spicer or ms. conway or mr. priebus or anybody else, or mr. bannon. i'm raising that because it seems to me that if ever he is going to see the error of his ways -- assuming that he's even capable of doing that -- it's because the people close to him say, mr. president, you cannot

keep doing this, you cannot keep putting us in harm's way, asking us to explain stuff that we can't explain. and again, maybe i'm wishing on a star here, but what do we make of the people who are spinning for him after he says the crazy stuff? >> he's an absolute monarch, and these are his courters, or he's a dictator and these are his apperachics. so when you watch spicer go out there and say things he knows are not true, he's doing it for an audience of one, and that's his boss. this is how dictatorships work, that people slowly -- not slowly, but quickly sacrifice their core integrity, because that's the only way to survive. and so, they create an atmosphere of total falsehood. so, i think of like in the communist era, whether the national dialogue was, the five-year plan is going great! this military raid was a fantastic success. my speech at the cia was a home run. you know, this stuff is crazy! >> yeah. >> you have to kind of within

your own world and within the people you know, and certainly, the media, with you and your readers, create a parallel universe of truths that just persists so that you don't go crazy, because he'll wear you down. >> yeah. >> his psychotic energy is greater than ours. >> i'm worried about, as i've said many times on this program, i'm worried about the resistance fatigue, get too tired, he wears us out. >> that's the thing. you wear the will out of people. it's gas-lighting. so, you become -- in the end, you're like, there's no way out of this except for submitting to this guy. >> this budget he submitted is clearly going become a pretty big political football in a matter of days, but i remind you about the king's words, who king said repeatedly that budgets are moral documents. budgets are moral documents. if budgets are a moral document, what does this budget say about donald trump? >> it says i'm cynical enough to leave the big drivers of our

debt intact, because many of the recipients and the majority of the recipients are elderly and white, and they are black as well, but nonetheless, medicare. but poor and minorities are not part of my country. and look, i actually like obamacare. i'm on it. i've been on it. and the reason i do is because i'm actually kind of a conservative. i actually think that -- i grew up in a socialized system, didn't like it very much, think the marriage of private-sector doctors, hospitals, with public-sector support and subsidies is the most conservative way to get universal coverage, in other words, the most conservative way to be humane. >> yeah. what are the chances that donald trump figures out that he does have at his disposal the resources to be a fairly successful president? he controls the house, he controls the senate, he will soon control the supreme court. what are the chances that he comes to his senses and realizes, you know, i've got to

change my ways, because i really could be a winner, i could be a successful president given the tools at my disposal? >> what he would have to do, and i think this is what some people thought, is pick those topics and those issues which democrats like, like pick infrastructure. imagine if his first issue had been, we're going to invest in infrastructure in this country and reached out to schumer and tried to do a deal with that, and how different people would see him. if he had just actually been -- if you can rewind the last two months and see him being generous, like saying about the women's march, for example -- i hope to prove you wrong. just something out there, like most presidents would do. look, the other thing is, he's down at 37% in gallup, 39%, i think, today. and somebody in there is going to tell him at some point, brother, you know, you keep going like this, you're going to have no political capital. and if you keep attacking through your budget or your policies the very people who voted for you, at some point,

some of them are going to say, hold on a minute. hold on a minute. and the democrats in 2018 have a very simple message, if they have any competence, which they don't -- [ laughter ] a very simple message -- >> hold up, barney frank is listening. >> is that, check him! one branch of government needs to check him. that's all you need to say. people, even if you like him, check him. >> from your mouth to god's ears. andrew sullivan, great to have you on. thank you for your insight. >> thank you. >> thanks our show tonight. thank you for watching, and as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. hi, i'm tavis smiley. join me next time for a conversation with glenn beck. that's next time. we'll see you then. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com

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