will maybe be less upset with them. >> not sure we're sorry and look we're trying is going to be enough when 90 million people. >> reporter: -- were affected by this. >> to all of our viewers out there you can sign up for the newsletter at ox i don't saxios. "morning joe" starts right now. >> welcome to "morning joe." there's no shortage of important stories this morning. facebook admits its big problem and it seems to be much larger than we even expected and u.s. troops are heading to the border, but why are they heading to the border and what exactly are they going to do there? speaking of the border, the homeland security chief was grilled on the president's proposed wall, build that wall, it sounded more like they were going to actually do renovation on obama's wall and when it

comes to a possible trade war with china, that the president says you can't lose, we're going to have to see if millions of voters in the heartland agree, they don't really seem to. so with us this morning on this very warm balmy friday morning across the northeast, i may even go swimming after wards. >> opening day, joe. >> thursday. >> it's opening day though. it is opening day at fenway so we're excited about that, but it's also about 15 degrees across the northeast. so we have political reporter for nbc news carol lee. also white house reporter if the associated press, washington anchor for bbc world knews america. out with the new book, "the confidence code for girls." i read it too along with willie trying to get that extra boost of confidence that's been so sadly lacking throughout my life. >> you need it, joe, clearly.

>> i know, why do you think i'm reading "the confidence code"? it's an incredible book and mika and we'll be talking about it to audiences. we've got winning historian john meacham. i think he's written a book too. mika will be back tomorrow. so willie, yesterday was fascinating. this was, you know, we were just celebrating the life and the remarkable legacy of a woman who inspired -- inspired brown v board of education. of course that takes you back to when eisenhower sent the national guard to little rock to do extraordinary things. it transformed really our lives, our children's lives, our lives, american culture. now we have sort of the -- the

brietbart inspired and culture inspired moving of national guard troops down to the border. nobody's really sure what they're going to do there. they're not really allowed to make contact down there, but we have that and then we had conversation yesterday with the head of department of homeland security talking about the wall. but it's not donald trump's wall that mexico's going to pay for. it seems like they're going to be doing rehab on barack obama's part of the wall, so again, the last week has just seemed to be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. >> and all reactions to things that president trump has said. you can go down the list of stories that we're going to talk about today whether it's the planned now pullout of troops -- american troops from syria, whether it's the tariffs and the trade war that's come from it, whether it's sending the national guard to the border. the administration has had to

formulate policy around the statement he's made. he signed a declaration to send national guard troops to the southern border as joe said. it calls for the departments of defense and homeland security to work with border to enact security. troops will not make contact with any immigrants and yesterday homeland security secretary said she hoped deployment would begin quote, immediately although she said she's still speaking with the four border governors and that a specified plan is not in place. illegal border crossings hit a 46-year low last year but the administration insists a surge over the last month and a potential up tick this month is cause for urgency. >> we are seeing more and more advertising and very unfortunately by the traffickers and smugglers to our south, specific to how to get around our system and enter our country

and stay. we have documented cases of borrowing children, appearing at the border as a family unit in a fraudulent way. why today, not yesterday, tomorrow? today is the day we pant to start this process. the threat is real. >> george w. bush sent troops to the border in 2006 while president obama sent 1,200 in 2010. in both cases they supported border patrol and did not carry out seizures or arrests and just to underline how ad hoc this policy has been, we heard from the national guard saying we look for ward to times and dates of this plan. >> they actually have -- the national guard in california have something in common with our fighting men and women over in syria, who are trying to stop isis from regaining their foothold in that region.

and they've been telling people like david for months they would like some guidance for monmonth this president doesn't provide guidance. you've heard the threat is real, talking about the threat from -- i don't know if it's this like mystery machine skoobj van because fox news mentioned it on saturday morning. i want to make sure that i understood you. did you say that illegal border crossings are at a 43-year low? >> i did. and the -- what -- the reason that the trump white house is giving is because in the last month alone -- in the last month they've ticked up a little bit, so that constitutes a crisis in their eyes and the actions that president trump promised during

the campaign, he believes now is the time to implement them. >> well, you know, just continuing my streak of always being a little bit off, alex tells me last year was a 46-year low and carol lee, you look at the trend lines. they're going in one direction, down. and we heard they've been going down since 2008 especially since the 2008 recession. this seems to be a solution to a problem that we just don't have like we did during the clinton administration and during the bush administration. >> yeah, it seems to be born out of the president's sort of restlessness that we've been seeing in recent weeks and ever since he signed that omnibus bill that he was frustrated with and threatened to veto and then signed he seems to be reaching for ways to kind of make up for that. and this is the latest in a series of things that he's thrown out there. i think one question that's

really going to be critical in the next coming days is how they're going to pay for this. that's going to be a fight and where does this money come from? because you can come up with this idea that he has and -- to put national guard troops on the border, but that's going to cost a lot of money and it's not clear exactly where that's going to come from so i think there's a sort of scramble as you said earlier. the president speaks and then everyone tries to fill in the gaps and make what he says into some sort of formulated policy. >> and john meacham, we'll really living though here in an alternate reality. what is it kellyanne conway talked about alternative facts. you have national guard troops going to the border to protect the border that has fewer crossings since -- i mean, hell, there crossings have been going down for almost as long as i, you know, lowest since -- in 46 years. i mean, half a century.

and then they're talking about building -- building this wall for a problem that again is at a low ebb for almost half ocentury and we're going to show you just a really -- i think unintentionally funny clip in a second. this week you have donald trump blasting the washington post as a lobbyist organization. it is not, that's a lie. you have the president of the united states talking about the united states post office and taxpayers having to subsidize their services. that is false. they do not subsidize those services as everybody has been saying over the last several days and also saying that amazon gets this sweet heart deal, this special -- this special cut rate when in fact, it's just anybody that mails in bulk. i know i always ask this question of you, but how exactly

do we put this in perspective when you have a president that every day is not only lying, but is making sure that his lies and his twisted distorted views of reality let's apply that to the border wall, actually impact policy, all right, we have that part of it, but then his own party says nothing. they don't stand up to him. they don't fight against stupid trade wars that hurt their constituents. they don't fight against the trump tariff tax that hurts consumers. i mean, i could go on and on. these aren't just tweets. these are things that are hurting farmers and consumers and a lot of other americans. >> well, he's taken the point about it's better to be feared than to be loved to a remarkable maybe ultimate conclusion in the american context. i think the republicans you're

talking about, if they don't fear him, they certainly fear his voters. and one of the things that to me is really fascinating about this week and the two issues you're talking about, which is the wall and the issue we've been talking about for a couple of days which is trade, is this is an elemental play for trump in so far as there is a play for him. the amazon stuff is interesting but that could very well be seen as the nfl players of the moment or the -- whatever the storm of the moment is. but there are two things that he has talked about since he began flirting with politics as far back as the late 1980s and that's trade and there's one thing he's talked about since that first moment when he used the birther issue to thrust himself to the heart of the right wing and that's the wall. and seems to me that there's a certain psychological interest,

certain psychological significance that for all the -- as you put it for all the sound and the fury, for all the strutting and fretting up on the stage, he has gone back to two things that has -- that have stood him in good enough stead to propel him to this place in the life of the country. and that is the wall and that's tariffs. and i think that there -- i don't know if that's because he's worried about something that we don't yet know what it is, god knows what else there could be, but i think that it's a sign that he knows that there are things coming he needs that base. and that base is interested in the wall and that base is interested in saying that other countries aren't going to screw us anymore whether or not that has a basis in fact. >> and as john says the wall has been core to the president's message since he announced he

was running for president. it was discussed yesterday when homeland security was up at the podium in an exchange with peter alexander. will there be a wall or modifications to an existing wall? >> we have started building as you know. so we're building real time. >> how much is sit being built at this point. >> sf there was a wall before that needs to be replaced it's being replaced by a new wall. so this is the trump border wall. and in many cases it will -- >> replacing current wall would count as new wall in your words. >> yes, it would. we have a tool kit if you will, some of the port parts of the border are very different. in one place we have a wall that floats with the sand because of the conditions. in other places will have taller walls again depending. >> so willie, it's renovate that wall then. i mean, which i guess -- you say build that wall and that's really easy, but build that wall, it's a little harder for

renovate that wall, which is actually all they're talking about doing here. >> yeah, i mean, jonathan, to watch secretary get twisted there. because she's got to figure out what it means exactly, i guess the question is, is he building a new wall on the border or is he not building a new wall on the border? >> the chant renovate that wall and not clear how we're going to pay for it is not the sort of catchiness that we saw in those rallies. this consideration is something that, you know, has been in the works for a while. that does not match up with reality. it's rhetoric and reality, an uneasy relationship. they are -- one of the greatest things, the greatest frustrations the president has is the lack of the wall which was his signature campaign item. very frustrating for him that

there was not much funding for that in the omnibus. one reason he said he would go veto it. a lot of this is linked to the same idea that the president is feeling more comfortable in his job. he feels more sort of emboldened and he wants to go back to trusting his gut and it goes back to trusting the campaign promises. his biggest success politically is of course his election. it's not the policies he's enacted since he took office, it's the fact that he got the office to begin with and he is seeing that with the wall, with the tariffs and with the idea of pulling back american troops across from global hot spots including syria. >> this week, if his instinct has been to go with his gut, well, his gut has been making his head lie. if you're talking about amazon or a lot of these issues he's spreading misinformation every day and the question that i keep

asking myself is, we knew this of trump, we certainly -- if we didn't know it of trump before we certainly know it now, everybody has to know it now, even his base has to know now that the man just doesn't tell the truth. but the question is, how far will the republican party go out on the line with a man who does grave violence to the ideas of friedmann and reagan and launching trade wars or uses the centralized state to try to punish a, one of the most innovative businesses in america, in the free enterprise system. lies about that company, causes its stock to go down. i mean, i think i've watched enough episodes of billions to know that if you spread lies about a company or product to cause its stock prices to go

down, the fec should be coming after you -- or the sec -- let me get my alphabet soup right. the sec should be coming after you and yet again, he keeps going and not a single republican leader stands up and says no. enough. what you're doing is not only not conservative, it's radical. >> yeah, i mean, it's been remarkable. one of the things we've all noted over the course of the last year and a quarter is the fact that the republican party will side with donald trump because there are those republicans out there up for re-election who see that donald trump's numbers are stronger than their numbers and they don't want to distance themselves because they fear incurring the wrath of their voters. we will get the answer to that i guess in november in the midterm elections, but there are two things that donald trump is doing at the moment that may so hamper the success that he has achieved on the financial

markets. the threat of tariffs against china and bashing tech companies like amazon and we've seen the market really tumble dramatically in the course of the last month or two. those are the things that might actually get the republican party to be more confrontational with donald trump because those are the kinds of things that actually have a real impact. anyone with money in a 401(k), anyone with money invested in the stock market is feeling this at the moment and while the republican party has abandoned principles of free trade and abandoned principles of debt reduction over the past year, if they take a hit on the economy and the financial markets will that have them pushing back against some of the things the president is doing. >> charlie had an op ed a couple of days ago where he called trump's tariff tax a cancer on -- on the economy. >> yeah, he did. and donald trump listens to things like that. i mean, as carol pointed out a

minute ago, he signs the omnibus bill, he's ripped and criticized from the right. coulter says he's been a bust on immigration. it turns out hi's just like jeb bush and marco rubio. has dinner with stephen miller and at come all these tweets that turn into sending our men and women of the military down to the border of mexico. a storm is coming this november and it could be a category 5. the latest warning from the party's majority leader. and the white house says no, it's not the policy. u.s. forces will be staying there to fight isis for now. but first, bill karins has a check on the forecast. >> i don't have anything to say that anyone wants to hear. more snow and more cold heading in. we're freezing this morning. freeze warnings all the way down into alabama, birmingham, this morning, the windchill is in the

30s in atlanta. teens chicago and buffalo and boston. it's still a little bit windy but not as bad as yesterday in the northeast. now as far as today goes, we'll recover on the east coast but watch what happens. 30 and snowing in billings. here we go again. look at the path of snow. this is through saturday. we start the snow in montana and wyoming. then snow in areas of missouri. then friday night through the southern ohio valley, decent snow in west virginia and then possibly some heavier snow in the higher elevations outside of washington, d.c. and maybe a little bit near philadelphia and baltimore during the day on saturday. so just incredible. we can't get rid of this winter pattern. so there it is on friday. also a chance of strong storms there in the south. so we'll continue to update this forecast. the endless winter forecast we'll call it as we head throughout the upcoming weekend with more snow. next week it looks like we'll finally turn the corner and begin to warm things up.

mid april. washington, d.c. you're one of those spots on saturday. i do expect you to see some snow. i don't think it will accumulate on the roads but just seeing it this time of year is annoying enough. you're watching "morning joe." we'll be right back. hen i trave. for leisure. so i go national, where i can choose any available upgrade in the aisle - without starting any conversations- -or paying any upcharges. what can i say? control suits me. go national. go like a pro.

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welcome back. the white house says there is no contrast in tone between president and his national security advisor h.r. mcmaster who formally steps aside this month after both spoke about russian aggression only hours apart on tuesday. >> okay. >> mr. putin may believe that he is winning in this new form of warfare. >> we'll find out. i'll let you know. it will be a time when i'll let you know. >> russia brazenly and implausibly denies its actions. >> probably nobody's been tougher to russia than donald trump. >> we have failed to impose

sufficient costs. >> nobody's been tougher on r h russia than i have. >> perhaps pe believes our free nations are weak and will not respond. >> everyone agrees when they think about it. >> we might all help mr. putin understand his grave error. >> does he agree with mcmaster that we have failed to impose sufficient costs on russia? >> what mcmaster actually said is we've been very tough on russia. he echoed the president's message that he said yesterday during the press conference with the baltic leaders that no one has been tougher on russia than this president. what he also said was that other nations could do more and should do more. and we -- that's not different or in contrast to anything that we've said. >> while mcmaster said in his speech that the united states is acting he also said quote, we must recognize the need for all of us to do more to respond to

and deter russian aggression and mcmaster did not say no one has been tougher on russia than president trump. just six and a half weeks ago when he spoke about the meddling in the 2016 election, president trump tweeted this. general mcmaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the russians and that the only collusion was between russia and crooked h, the dnc and the democrats. here's the quote from mcmaster. we have failed to impose sufficient costs and john bolton, the incoming national security advisor, he's a hawk on russia as well. >> yeah and here we have one more example of sarah huckabay sanders lying and we've been talking about what the president's been doing over the past week has not been skirting issues. he's been lying outright about amazon, he's been lying about the washington post, he's been lying about russia, he's lying about mcmaster, now you have, of

course, sarah huckabay sanders, two lies there. mcmaster never said that no one's been tougher on russia than donald trump. that is a lie. full stop. sarah huckabay sanders lied yesterday again. that's a lie. she also lied when she said that -- when she denied that mcmaster said the quote was we have failed to hit them enough. and again, she lied about that as well. donald trump also -- it's just saying we'll find out later whether this man is an enemy or not to the united states when he's interfered with our democracy, he's attacking our closest ally, the one we've always had a special relationship with, killing people on british soil? i mean, what exactly does this

man have to do in syria with iran, in great britain, in ukraine across the world for donald trump to realize that he's not his friend? >> yeah, donald trump has always had this ability to make facts or situations into his reality. whether they are true or not. he does it time and again. he takes black and he makes it white and the question has always been, does he believe what he is saying or is he just trying to sell us on what he is saying? and it's interesting to ceasar ra huckabay sanders picking up that habit of saying something that's clearly not the case as if it were actually true and if it were actually fact and you get the impression in the white house at the moment that the president is increasingly surrounding himself with people who are prepared to take that line, who are prepared to take donald trump's view of the world even if what they are saying is not actually true. the people who had been prepared to say to the president a little

bit rex tillerson, to some extent mcmaster, look, stop, this is not the case, you can't do it. this is not the way it's actually done. this is not reality. those people are being eased out and increasingly what we're seeing is people who will echo this habit of the president saying this is my view of reality, it must be so. it's not the case because those things aren't true. >> and for our viewers that don't remember exactly why rex tillerson called the president of the united states a moron, it's because it was after the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and other leaders of his national security team just sat down to talk to him and explained to him what has happened in the post war world. what happened after world war ii and the post war order that was put together to try to stabilize the world and prevent a third world war in the same century. donald trump became angry, got

agitated. he said he disagreed. well, disagree -- john meacham, you -- i can't disagree that churchill and stalin met. just like after the secretary of defense walks him through the facts of the last 55 years and the post war order that the united states of america created with its allies, donald trump becomes angry, storms out of the room, he says he disagrees and so i guess now he's surrounding himself with people who are going to agree with him no matter what. >> do you remember the -- i guess maybe the day after the inauguration when the new president went out to the george

h.w. bush intelligence center? >> good lord. >> you know the quotation on the wall out there which is in the gospel of john. you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. >> right. >> you know, not to be overly grand at this hour of the day, but there's an enormous amount of salience to that. presidents historically get in trouble when they think they can put one past the broad populous. if you -- president trump johnson in vietnam. president nixon in nearly everything. and there was a great test really proposed during world war ii by churchill about how the british people or the american people could react to a crisis, could undertake great public sacrifice, but they only did it if they were told the truth and he proposed a two prong test. he said that the british people can face any misfortune with

buoyancy as long as they're convinced that those in charge of their affairs are not deceiving them, which is to say lying to the public, or themselves dwelling in a fool's paradise. put another way, they're out of touch with reality themselves. it seems to me right now the president probably fails both tests. and it may take another couple of years. it took us four years of joe mccarthy. it took six and more years with vietnam, but the truth ultima ultimately will out here and i think honestly that both the president and those who lie and misrepresent and enable him on his behalf are on the wrong side of history here. >> they are on the wrong side of history. the truth will win out and all of these lies will be looked back upon by just about everybody like -- well, let's

just say it, the lies of iraq. all of the conservatives that flocked around george w. bush, when deficits were exploding, when the national debt was exploding, when they were passing a $7 trillion expansion of medicare and they weren't paying for a dime of it with medicare part d. all of these things happened and if you crossed republicans and if you crossed the president that time you weren't considered a conservative. of course george bush got out of office and then suddenly it back very envogue to say he had a foreign policy and we're never going to do that again. of course, they're doing that again, but what john is so disturbing is, that the trend has repeated itself time and time again and trump will be called out by history. americans do always do the right thing in the end after

exhausting all other possibilities. the question is why republicans aren't expediting the process and why they don't trust their constituents enough to go to them and say, you know what? i voted with the president on taxes, but these tariffs, they're bad for america. you know what? i'm with the president on regulatory reform, regulatory relief for small business owners across america, but when he goes after amazon, he's acting more like a dictator that's trying to crush a political opponent instead of the president of the united states that's -- works within a system of checks and balances in an economy that owes more to milton friedmann than it does to len nonand marks. they could say that in town hall meetings and americans would follow them. >> can i just say something on the analogy, i think on the

front end, don't you want to be margaret smith who in 1950 opposed joe mccarthy and not in '54 when everybody else got there. you know, you want to be in the conversation going forward where you are on the right side of things early enough to make a difference. so that's one thing. the second thing on an analogous moment where presidents have tried to put fast ones past us, i think there is honest disagreement about the runup to the war in iraq. what there's not honest disagreement about is we have lendon johnson on tape talking to richard russell in 1960 -- late 1963 and '64 saying i just don't know how we win this thing. and then 55,000 american deaths later, more than a decade later ford pulls them out. >> you have johnson saying that

we can't win the war in '63, '64, that fit would be a mess. you have jfk in 1963 saying they hate us over there. there's no way we can win that war. but if i pull them out now before the election i'm not going to get reelected. and in iraq, i -- listen, i make mistakes all the time. we as a country make mistakes all of the time. the mistake wasn't -- well, it was a mistake that we went into iraq but 70% of americans and every major democrat that would run for president over the jex decade supported going into iraq. hillary clinton, john kerry, john edwards, all the people on the tickets in 2000 and 2004. >> joe biden. >> but the question is, how do you react -- how do you react after you know you've made that mistake? well, a lot of americans after

they understood they made the mistake in iraq in 2003 turned against the war in 2004, 2005. people started turning against the war in vietnam, you know, a couple of years after that. the question is, willie, when are these republicans who thought donald trump was going to sit in the white house and just be a stooge and sign all of their bills because that's what so many leaders said to me, listen, you know what, he's just going to tweet, he's going to make a lot of noise, but we're going to pass all the legislation and he'll sit down there and happily sign it. when are they going to realize that that's terribly backfired and he's destroying american conservati conservatism? he's destroying the republican party. he's destroying constitutional norms. when are they going to say that? >> i don't know. we asked that question yesterday. we've been asking that question for a year and a half now since the trump presidency began. what is the cost to republicans as john said to be out front of

this, step forward and when they see something they believe is not american, when they see something that's bad for the country, say something. there are people doing it. we talk about senator ben, bob corker has done it over this administration but you haven't seen people who are core conservatives come out and condemn things that are simply not conservative and in some cases not american. coming up this morning it spread like wild fire on conservative media. the story about the caravan of undocumented immigrants headed to the u.s. it's the latest example of president trump's playing on fears and spreading misleading information. jer jeremy joins us next with his new reporting.

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let me ask you about john boll ton really qui bolton really quickly. we were talking about whether the president was too easy on russia. how does the appointment of john bolton square with this ongoing squabble between donald trump and traditionalists? because i will say the one thing

about john bolton that i've always liked is he has been a tough, tough hawk on russia. you go back and you look at things that he wrote brzezinski sent me something he wrote in 2013 and he was ashma-- man he fire breather and talking about what things russia hates the most and that is expanding nato and why it's good for america. >> russia is the one space in which you could see president trump and bolton clashing because he is so much tougher in terms of his rhetoric and his views on russia and has been for a really long time and i think what we've seen with the departure of general mcmaster is we now have two top national security advisors to the president who took parting shots at him on russia. rex tillerson and general mcmaster. and while everyone is concerned about some of the views that bolton has coming in and replacing mcmaster, when it

comes to russia you can see him being more in line with rex tillerson and general mcmaster and that potentially puts him on a collision course with the president in terms of the one issue that really grates at him, that he can't disconnect from this russia investigation. >> meanwhile, a group of migrants traveling through mexico recently captured the president's attention. the caravan which some estimates place at up to 1,500 people became national news after the president tweeted about it on easter sunday. many attributed that tweet to a segment on fox and friends that morning. there's the banner caravan of immigrants headed to u.s. so how these events were embellished is a center of new reporting by jeremy peters who argues such exaggerations are a staple of trump fanning the flames of misinformation. similar to his retweeting mislabeled videos from the far right extremist groups britain first or when he confused americans and swedes about a

terror attack that did not exist. talk through this a little bit. what kind of story the president sees it on and how it becomes a big story and an international story. >> the moment i saw the headline caravan and the images of these people making their way through mexico i knew it was going to be the kind of story that the right wing media was going to latch on to and it would quickly take a dark turn through the fear and through fox and friends and wind up in president trump's head. think about it, willie, the images of over a thousand central americans making their way toward the u.s. border was almost too much for the president and his enablers and the conservative media to exist. but as is so often the case with these stories, whether they're partially true, partially embellished or made up, the facts quickly become irrelevant and the president becomes the chief accelerant to the flame.

so these people, the 1,200 or so quickly became thousands in president trump's words. thousands he said were making his way toward the border. that simply was not true. all the reporting, even the initial report said that there was a good portion of these migrants who were never going to come to the u.s. they were going to stay in mexico and resettle there. furthermore, they weren't going to illegal enter the country, at least many of them were not going to. they were going to go through the legal process of declaring themselves at a border check point. well, no miles of fencing or h battalions of border patrol could have prevented that. what you see here is an embellishment and really a villainization of immigrants that is in keeping with president trump stoking the grievances and fears that people in this country have about new

entrants. >> and the lies and the embellishments continue daily. of course, they did start as john meacham said with birtherism, but i mean, as president of the united states, heef we are a guy that's lying or misquoting facts about swedish terror attacks that -- his chief spokes person talked about the bowling green massacre. and then of course you had the president of the united states retweeting fascist videos that were made from great britain. this is a -- this is a man that not only moves policy on misinformation, falsehoods and lies, but also undermines key relationships across the globe because he obviously -- his words obviously can't be trusted. >> right and saying there are parts of other countries that people can't go to because they're terrified of the violence there. he does it repeatedly and there is a common theme whether it's

talking about london, paris, amsterdam or sweden and it does have to do with this idea of immigrants and foreigners and keeping other people out of your country. what's interesting i thought jeremy in your reporting is that on the case of this caravan of people coming across mexico, actually we have seen some conservative media outlets push back against some of this disinformation. and i just picked out you know, the brietbart story saying let's clarify this. these people are not storming the border wall. they are going to go through legal processes and i thought that was an interesting departure, especially when we've seen an interview on fox news with pushing back quite forcefully and you wonder if -- i don't know if you call brietbart main stream anymore but some saying wait let's put some kind of reality check here. >> this reporter from brietbart news who covers border migration

issues started noticing the false information spreading on twitter after a story he wrote over the weekend published and people are saying this is an army of illegal alien invaders and he said no, this is not the case. these people are going to go through a lawful process, at least a lot of them are. it became a story of invading central american army of ingrates coming to the united states to leach off of our social services and the humanitarian aspect of their trek up here was completely lost. so these people become so quickly villainized in an effort to split size this and make it into an issue over, you know, why the wall needs to be built or why our laws need to be strengthened and how we're a

weak nation, it's really unfortunate to watch. >> but we've watched over the past decade since we've been working together ten, 11 years and we've been in media long enough to know that we have people on the far right and you have people on the far left that will take a little kernel of truth and then they will expand it and they will turn it into this raging controversy. it will whip up frenzy and it will get listeners on the far right or the far left to tune in more. it will get, you know, cable news ratings up, it will get radio listeners up, it will get website traffic up and unfortunately that's just been the reality. but the problem here is you actually for the first time have a president who listens to that misinformation that is being used to make money in these media cottage industries where

you don't -- you narrow cast to the most extreme on your own side. >> they ran his operation. they informed -- or happenty who we still listen to, they inform his world view and ultimately policy. it's worth pointing out that that caravan, that group of migrants has announced they'll stop in mexico city next week and will not make its way up to the united states after all. >> thanks so much as always. good to see you. >> all right. still ahead this morning more fallout from facebook. it appears the cambridge analytica data leak affected more users than originally

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just ahead, president trump orders national guard troops to the southern border citing an uptick in illegal border crossings. but is the issue as urgent as the trump administration claims? former homeland security secretary jeh johnson will be our guest. plus, the president's economic team tries to ease concerns of a trade war with china. richard haass joins us. also the "washington post's" robert costa. "morning joe" is coming right back. and you have the determination to keep going. humira has a proven track record of being prescribed for over ten years. it's the #1 prescribed biologic by dermatologists. more than 250,000 patients have chosen humira to fight their psoriasis. and they're not backing down. for most patients clearer skin is the proof. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis.

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trump held a joint press conference with those leaders and here they are on stage at the same time. look at the photo. they're lined up there. watch what happened with one question they got at the end of the press conference. check this out. >> go ahead, yes, please, go ahead. >> reporter: who's your daddy? >> russia. >> there you go. very interesting. >> boy, he won that round. welcome back to "morning joe." it's thursday, april 5. still with us, we have washington anchor for bbc world news america katty kay, we have white house reporter for the associated press jonathan lemire, and joining the conversation, former republican campaign strategist now an msnbc political analyst steve schmidt. we have president of the council on foreign relations, the yankees fan richard haass. we've got professor of history of tulane university walter isaacson and political reporter

for the "washington post" and msnbc political analyst robert costa. mika will be with us tomorrow. steve schmidt, quickly, i want to go to you. obviously we know -- and we've said from the beginning -- that donald trump built his foundation after switching from being a life long new york democrat to being a republican if 2011 by lying about barack obama and spreading this lie about birtherism. but as president of the united states just over the past week, since he's gone to his gut he's lied about the united states post office's funding, he's lied about amazon getting a discount rate that nobody else gets. he's lied about nato coffers being filled when there are no such things as "nato coffers." people don't contribute directly to nato. he's exaggerated to the point of lying about caravans.

he's created a -- what he calls a security threat that requires a sending of troops down to the border, national guardsmen down to the border of mexico and talking about building the wall and renovating the wall because of a crisis of illegal immigrants streaming into the united states when steve, as we reported earlier today, actual border crossings are at a 46-year low. if this is the president listening to his gut and if this is trump being trump then actually the lies, the misrepresentations, the distortions, the abuses of constitutional norms, the dictatorial type actions where he's actually targeting one of the most innovative companies in america for political purposes, it seems like we're about to go into hyperdrive. >> no doubt about it.

he has put on a full-on clinic of incompetence over the last week, the likes of which we've never seen around the office of president of the united states. as you point out, there is zero net illegal immigration coming across the southern border. and, in fact, the american border with mexico does not need to be militarized. we see now all of his trade rhetoric being actualized, being actualized in a way that have a profound impact on actual american workers as the chinese and other countries retaliate. for example, when we look at nafta, we look at north america, we look at the canadian/u.s. trade relationship, there is more than a trillion dollars that flows across the border between the united states and canada in integrated supply chains in canada and the united

states. should he disrupt that, it will have a profound impact on the american economy. we saw his incompetence yesterday affect markets, down hundreds of points at the opening and there's no other reason driving that but this president's policy actions which are based -- founded not on any intellectualism, not on any ideology but on complete nonsense. and we saw him -- we saw him with the leaders of the baltic republics, attack nato four times over the course of the news conference, give no signal that russia would not be successful in instigating an article 5 crisis in that part of the world. so we're seeing a year plus in a profoundly incompetent president out of his depth, no idea what he's talking about on a range of issues and now the american people are suspect are about to

start paying the bill for his incompetence. >> bob costa, i keep hoping against hope -- i know a lot of people do -- that republicans who have called themselves conservatives their entire life at some point are going to speak out against these tariffs, speak out against the trade war, speak out against the sort of thing that conservatives have always been against. free market conservatives have always been against. speak out against a president acting like an autocrat attacking one of the most innovative companies in america and attacking that company for political reasons. irrational reasons but political reasons. is there any chance that a free trader like paul ryan or mitch mcconnell at some point will step out and aggressively start defending basic conservative principles over free trade and over leaders of a centralized

state trying to interfere with a business in the american economy? >> if you take mitch mcconnell, the senate majority leader, there have been scattered remarks. he's been outspoken in recent days about the policy, he says he doesn't support these tariffs, he wishes the president would pull back but there's not a widespread outcry, joe, because most of the republicans i'm talking to in congress and you're talking to, they know that -- at least they're arguing to us that they need the trump vot voter, they need president trump for these midterm election which is they already think could be a blue wave for the democrats and so they're not prepared to go to war with him. the only people going to war with the president politically are those who have chosen to retire. >> and willie, you see trey gowdy going on fox shows speaking truth to power, for instance, saying that announcement -- the story about robert mueller telling trump he's currently not a target of criminal investigation was much ado about nothing.

>> yeah, even there you've had republicans say we don't need to introduce legislation to protect robert mueller because the president would never take that act of firing bob mueller and rolling out a constitutional crisis. they don't seem to even on that issue be able to go full out to step in front of the president on something like that. meanwhile, joe, the white house says its current stance against china with tariffs is just a bargaining chip. yesterday the president tweeted "when you're already $500 billion down, you can't lose." the president again exaggerating the u.s. trade deficit with china by $163 billion. the "wall street journal" reports president trump who initiated the tensions over chinese trade practices has put himself in a position to face mounting pressure from lawmakers, an intense campaign from corporate lobbyists and outcry from businesses big and small. they're navigating cumbersome new trade rules all of which feeding a tremendous volatility in the stock and commodities

markets. national economic council director larry kudlow expressed caution about whether the full effects of these tariffs ever will be felt. >> reporter: is it possible that these stiff new tariffs against china are, in fact, a negotiating tactic and won't go into effect? >> it's possible. it's part of the process. i would take the president seriously on this tariff issue, there are carrots and sticks in life but he is ultimately a free trader. he said that to me, he's said it publicly so he wants to solve this with the least amount of pain. >> the "washington post" reports several people who've spoken to the president say he is telling advisers he is finally expediting the policies that got him elected and he's more comfortable now without a number of aides around him who were tempering or at least trying to temper his instincts. he often cites rising poll numbers in recent weeks as a reason he should do it his way. but there is concern in

america's heartland as china's move to match america's $50 billion in tariffs goes after a key crop for u.s. farmers. according to estimates, china purchases 61% of total u.s. soybean exports and more than 30% of overall u.s. soybean production. the headline in the "des moines register" this morning "tariffs may help to sink farmers." and senator joni ernst said in a statement she spoke to the president yesterday adding, there is a real danger that increased tariffs on u.s. exports will harm iowa producers and undermine the rural economy. the administration's action could hurt global supply chains and may lead to higher consumer prices. and senator chuck grassley said the united states should take action to defend its interests when any foreign nation isn't playing by the rules or refuses to police itself, but farmers and ranchers should not be expected to bear the brunt of retaliation for the entire country. it's not fair and it doesn't make any sense.

richard haass think i think is part of china's strategy to go after the soybean industry so that the farmland, the people who supported donald trump and the senators from those states will put pressure on him to pull back. >> you think? look, what china did was strategic and disciplined. trade policy is about the intensity of the pain that people feel and what china did was reacted in a way that introduced potentially intense pain on certain constituencies in the united states and that's smart. the president and those around him -- look, there's legitimate reasons to be unhappy with chinese trade policy. forced transfer of intellectual property, stealing the property, tariffs in some cases that are higher than the ones we impose on them. all that is legitimate. the problem is the tools we've introduced won't fix most of those things and they've created a context where it might make it harder for china to do what we want. they have politics, too. and it's harder to end these wars than begin them. i think what china was basically

saying is be careful, two can play this game and you are just as vulnerable as we are. there will be no winners here. the idea we're going to win and they're going to lose, that's not how it works. either we're both going to win or we're both going to lose. >> richard, let's talk about an issue that you've been concerned about and a lot of foreign policy leaders have been concerned about and that is whether america was going to bid a speedy retreat out of syria and once again allow isis to gain a foothold in that territory. there are still remnants of the opposition scattered about the region. they certainly could regain power and cause problems once again. yesterday it seems calmer heads prevailed in the white house and over at the pentagon. talk about the fact that the president for now seems to not be doing what he accused barack obama of doing and that is announcing dates of withdrawal

and also abandoning a region to let isis take it over. >> i think the operative words there are "for now." the president obviously wants to take all u.s. troops out. what he declared is we're going say in syria, not as part of a syria strategy, we've given up on influencing the future trajectory of syria, we'll leave that to russia, iran and the syrian government, instead we'll keep troops there for a limited time to deal with isis as a counterterrorism strategy. the problem is the president still thinks one t day will arrive when we can safely take those troops out but there will always be remnants of those terrorist groups and there will always be conditions in which they can once again gain power so we can't leave until one of two things happen. one is all that changes and these individuals and groups disappear, that won't happen, joe. the other is when we have local partners that are willing and able to take them on. the only local partner willing to do that is the syrian kurds and we have to stand with them.

i think it's an open-ended commitment. low-level open-ended and the president had better level with the american people about that because these are not traditional wars. >> right. >> there won't be the battleship "missouri" where isis somehow surrenders to the united states and we can bring the troops home. >> and richard, we're not even talking about the end of world war ii. you can also say this is not the iraq war of 1991 or 2003. as you've said, small, small investments in terms of troops and also money when you compare it to past military operations and a sustainable operation over a course of time that prevents isis from regaining power and rebuilding their caliphate and also stops us from turning syria over to putin and assad. >> to be clear, this is sort of not what the president initially wanted. he is looking for the immediate hasty withdrawal ahead of the

plans that were laid out previously. he sort of got talked back from the ledge a bit by his national security advisers saying that, look, we need to have at least some sort of presence in syria for a time reminiscent of the afghanistan debate from last summer where he suggested that he didn't understand the point of why we were still there and had to be explained by tillerson around mcmaster and others why we needed to have at least some sort of presence. it comes back to, again, him feeling that this is something that he got elected on. that he's going back to what worked. the tariffs are the same way. that's an illuminating piece of footage with kudlow strolling down the white house driveway being surrounded, not strategic, not organized, this impromptu gaggle where he was surrounded by reporters and you could see he was uncomfortable with answering these questions. there is a divide in the white house about whether these tariffs are smart. mnuchin and ross on one side, navarro and lighthizer on the other. and the president wants to forge forward, others are hoping to talk him back to say look, this

can be a negotiating tactic, maybe we can get a win out of this. but at least for now the president is saying look, being tough on china is part of the reason why i'm sitting in the ol' office, i want to do this. >> walter, if it weren't so tragic it would be humorous that here we once again have a president repeating the mistake of a former president that he loathed. you had barack obama so determined not to be dick cheney and george w. bush that we get out of iraq in 2011 more quickly than most foreign policy analysts would have suggested was the prudent thing to do. isis gains a foothold. but the president gets to keep his promise. and here you have donald trump obsessed on getting american troops out of the iraq/syria region even if it's only a couple thousand troops and we have a very small, very effective, very sustainable footprint there.

you once again have a president ideologically driven like barack obama was to get out of iraq, donald trump eid lo ideological driven to get out of syria with this very small, very effective footprint and he's not looking at the reality on the ground as much as he is looking at campaign promises from past campaigns. >> well, i do think you have to put everything he's done in this context of him not being a traditional conservative or a republican but very much of an authoritarian oriented populist who's against, really, the whole notion of globalism, against free trade where we may seem like we're in a competition with china. worried about immigration, nativist instincts and

isolationist instincts that we're not going to be involved in the middle east or places like iraq and syria the way we have been before. i don't know why people are that surprised that suddenly he's going back to doing everything he said he would do but this is not a traditional republican or conservative approach either to foreign policy or to trade or to american values and institutions. going after big companies as you said for political reasons. that's just not the free market american system works. so all of that is of a piece, and it's part of a global piece in which there are around the world a lot of these movements that are nativist, populist and authoritarian. >> i think walter is right and i think the president has a point. he wants to avoid the kind of nation building transformational ambitious expensive foreign policy of george w. bush in particular in places like iraq

and afghanistan, but he's now potentially going to the other extreme. there's a difference between trying to transform countries that are not transformable and we saw the costs, human and financial of that. and pulling out and creating vacuums terrorists can fill. the real question is whether he's able and willing to see that distinction. he will not be able to fulfill the america -- the pledge of bringing the troops home again but he could with a modest investment help keep this country a lot safer. that's potentially a nuanced compromise but that is the smart sweet spot he has got to finds here. >> again, this isn't 1991 or even 2003. again, it's a small footprint, i'll keep saying it, and the key word is it is sustainable. what we have been able to accomplish with our allies, with the kurds and actually destroying the isis state over the past few years when -- let's just go back and read some of the articles written about isis

from 2014 and 2015 and the caliphate that they were building, that they believed would be a thousand-year caliphate. because we used smart power for once and we didn't go in with 100,000 troops or 200,000 troops we actually were able to leverage key alliances and american firepower and move forward with something that would be sustainable that the president appears to be wanting to blow up and turn the region over to isis, the iranians, putin and assad. >> it's a small price to pay to keep isis at bay. it's also a small price to pay to show people in the region and around the world that american power is still a reality. you saw the site just this week of how that vacuum can be filled. in turkey you had a meeting between two of president trump's

favorite strongmen, president putin and president erdogan of turkey. and what were they doing? discussing what will happen in syria and they love the idea that america is withdrawing. we've talked about why president trump has this relationship with president putin. why did president putin support donald trump's candidacy? two reasons, u.s. sanctions against russia which he hoped would be lifted and hoping that president trump would pull american forces out of syria and withdraw control from the middle east, leaving the ground to russia. that's exactly what we've seen happen. it is chilling how fast the advantage dwlum vacuum is being countries. we're seeing it happen with both russia and china and that is not a price that america wants to pay. it's not a situation the rest of the world wants to be in for the rest of the century, either. >> bob costa, this story over the last couple days has followed a familiar pattern which is that the president announces something at a public

event, he says we'll put out of syria, his advisers scramble to interpret what that means, they weren't ready to roll out that policy around it was modified to get to the policy of well, we'll stay there for now. do you have a sense of who may have intervened after the president made the statement that we're pulling out of syria and the policy that we're not ready? was it secretary mattis, perhaps, or someone else? >> you have a whole apparatus on national security, on trade. you saw what the department of homeland security did yesterday with the president's proposal to militarize the border and send national guard troops to the border. you have to president's instincts guiding the entire federal government day to day and there is a cabinet, white house advisers trying to pull him back from making those decisions and putting policy into action but at the end of the day these officials acknowledge to the "post" and others that he is the president of the united states and they can only do so much and especially at a time when they

feel they're vulnerable to being fired because they feel every week there's a new cabinet member who tried to moderate him who's shown the door. >> but walter isaacson, i don't know why this would be hard for conservatives on the campaign trail to go whether they're in louisiana, northern florida or western iowa and say listen, i don't want the united states of america to be the 911 for the world. i want our allies to help. we have to be partners in fighting terrorism and we can't carry that burden ourselves. i've said that repeatedly. but in this case you have donald trump wanting to retreat from a region that means the united states retreating from isis. the united states in full retreat from iranian influence. the united states in full retreat from assad's syria and i think perhaps most telling here,

donald trump in full retreat from putin's russia and basically donald trump deciding we're going to get our troops out when none of his military advisers think that makes any sense. no foreign policy experts think that makes any sense but donald trump in so doing would in effect cede syria to vladimir putin. >> that's the important point, the point you made, the point katty kay made earlier. this plays right into the hands of putin. and this also then raises the whole question about why was putin so supportive of trump? why is trump so supportive of putin? the whole investigations around this. down here in louisiana, if you want to sort of question the foreign policy of this president is why does he keep playing into the hands of russia? everything russia wants, whether it's the baltic states and the way he's mishandled that recently or whether it's playing

into the hands of what russia and putin would want us to do in syria and throughout the middle east. also playing into iran's hands and it's mysterious because he's so vulnerable on the russia question in many ways and yet he keeps saying i'm going to do russia and putin's bidding here. >> richard, quickly, final thoughts? >> there was an awkward moment in washington where the outgoing national security adviser h.r. mcmaster gave a very tough anti-russian speech, far tougher than the administration's policy and at one point criticized countries that were not standing up to russian attempts to interfere in their internal politics and basically said shame on you. i sat there watching and said wow, you seem to have ignored the fact the government he's been working for for the last year, this is one of the governments not standing up to russian attempts to undermine the integrity of other countries and there you have it. >> there you have it.

all right, richard haass, thank you so much. robert costa and walter isaacson, as always, great to have you with us. still ahead on "morning joe" -- >> we are seeing more and more advertising, very unfortunately, by the traffickers and smugglers specific to how to get around our system and enter our country and stay. we have documented cases of borrowing children appearing at the border as a family unit in a fraudulent way so why today not yesterday or tomorrow, today is the day. today's the day we want to start this process, the threat is real. >> and why today? because today is the day that donald trump said some embarrassing things that i now have to come out and cover for despite the fact that crossings over the u.s./mexican border are at a 46-year low. that was homeland security secondary kirstjen nielsen describing the president's decision to deploy national guard troops to the southern border despite the fact, again,

that illegal immigration coming into this country from mexico is at an almost 50-year low. up next, we'll bring in her predecessor from the obama administration jeh johnson. he is here in the studio to try to explain this to us. we'll be back with more "morning joe." here's the story of green mountain coffee roasters sumatra reserve. let's go to sumatra. the coffee here is amazing. because the volcanic soil is amazing. so we give farmers like win more plants. to grow more delicious coffee. which helps provide for win's family. all, for a smoother tasting cup of coffee. green mountain coffee roasters.

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>> we are preparing for the military to secure our border between mexico and the united states. we have a meeting on it in a little while with general mattis. >> oh, great, another thing for general mattis's to do list. he's already planning your dumb military parade, now you want him to guard the border. [ laughter ] why don't you just combine the two and have the parade along the mexican border? [ laughter and applause ] think about it. have you ever tried to cross the street during a parade? [ laughter ] immigrants would walk up to the border and be like "oh, man, this is today?

bagpipes, let's get out of here." joining us now, former homeland security secretary under president obama jeh johnson. mr. secretary,'d go to have you with us. >> good morning, willie. >> so before you were homeland security secretary but also under the obama administration in 2010 about 1200 troops, national guard troops, were sent to the border. >> correct. >> do you believe it's a good idea for president trump to do the same in this case? >> well, the reality is, as you and joe have pointed out many times over the last 24 hours, apprehensions on our southern border are a fraction of what they used to be. the high was ef- 2000. $1 1.6 million. then over the next 16 years, the bush and clinton and obama administration administrations built a wall in places where it

makes sense to build a wall. surveillance technology, aerial surveillance, more border patrol agents, ask any border patrol expert, any border security expert they'll tell you what they need more is surveillance vehicles, roads, lights, and possibly people. and this idea of putting "the military" on the border is problematic for several reasons. one, when you talk about military and the border it conjures up an image of soldiers in uniform standing there with bayonets on the rio grande. we have a law against what we refer to as a posse comititus. so if you deploy the guard to the border they can do no more than support and though illegal migration is a fraction of what it used to be, the demographic

is totally changed. the stereotype -- the traditional model where single adults from mexico with the improving economy in mexico over the last 15, 16 years, which has also contributed to the downturn, what we see now are women and children from central america coming in and a lot of them don't expect to evade capture in the first place. and that's the issue we have to address. in central america with aid to central america we began that in the beginning of the last administration with congress and if you really want to move deportations through the system, we fe we need more immigration judges. that's the bottleneck in this whole system. putting more national guard on the southern border. i feel like i've seen this movie before. >> so under certain circumstances, though, it is a good idea to send the national guard. in other words, in 2010 it was appropriate because of the number of crossings that were happening or do you believe fundamentally troops on the border are not a good idea.

>> fundamentally what we need is aid in central america. these women and children are coming here because they are desperate to get out of central america. it's as bad as places in syria. and i've spent hours and days in southern texas with these women and children asking them why did you come here? and the story very often is my mom sent me here because she told me the gangs were going to kill me and there's no amount of -- there are no number of national guard personnel that are going to deter that, frankly, in the longer term. perceived changes in migration policy send a shock through the system that lasts short term. you see short-term downturns but then it reverts back to its traditional patterns which is what we're seeing now. >> steve schmidt, we hear generals are always fighting the last war. that's the case with the president in syria but it's also the case in immigration.

he's got some idea that it's still 1996 when as secretary johnson said and as we've been saying for some time, again, border crossings, illegal border crossings are at a 46-year low and border crossings from illegal immigrants from mexico also moving towards record low rates for the past 25, 30 years. the war donald trump is fighting is a war that no longer exists. it's far more diffused. >> the united states has had a long and complicated relationship with mexico but one of the things that's true over the last 30 years, we've had an interrupted arc of improved relations and one of the things that has contributed mightily to the decrease of illegal immigration is a liberalized mexican economy, a privatized energy industry.

it's on the verge of becoming a wealthy nation. what donald trump will have precipitated when americans choose their next president is the election of someone -- lopez obrador -- who is anti-american, hostile to free market capitalism, likely to do great damage to that mexican economy and, of course, when the mexican economy crashes, where do mexicans go? do they go to el salvador? do they go to brazil? or do they try to come to the united states? they try to come to the united states. so donald trump is going to be the architect of the problem that he frequently denounces. and lastly, on all these policy issues, profoundly so they are disconnected from reality. when you read the tweet about china, we're down $500 billion. these are the musings of an imbecile. this is completely profoundly

detached from economic reality, from the bilateral reality of the trading relationship between the united states and china and when you have someone incompetently making decisions, incompetently applying ideological solutions to deep and serious problems, when you have all of that combined, what you will get is real pain in the american economy and for the american people ultimately and maybe at the end of the day when we look from a national security perspective, we'll see someone precipitate a national security crisis that could get a lot of people killed. >> well, that sort of gets to my question to you which is if you just step back and look broadly, what do you think is the biggest threat to the homeland right now? we've seen that facebook is now saying that 87 million users may have had their information improperly shared. is it cyber? is it the boarder? what is it? >> cyber. in my private life that is the threat everyone wants to know about.

cyber security, cyber security, cyber security. in many facets. i believe the cyber threat to our homeland will get worse before it gets better. the cyber threat is coming from a range of actors including nation states, criminals, hactivists and so forth and we've yet to turn that corner. so that is my -- that's the concern everyone is talking about and that's, as i was leaving office, probably my biggest concern. >> why isn't the government doing? you were open, we had you on several months ago, that maybe the administrati the obama administration maybe could have done more, adam schiff said the obama administration should have done more. now that we know what we know, why do you suspect more hasn't been done to batten down the hatches? >> well, i've been impressed that the treasury department and our departing national security adviser gave a strong speech on this the other day is stepping up, doing more to deter russian

behavior. when you're talking about a nation state and defending our cyber security, all nation states, whether they're communist regimes, dictatorships, respond to sufficient deterrence so clearly more is necessary. we put on a number of sanctions in the end of the obama administration but more has to be necessary. if you believe our intelligence chiefs, they're still at it with the 2018 election so i have been pleased that we're stepping up our deterrence in response to this, in response to what happened in the united kingdom but more needs to be done. in election infrastructure, cyber security and in the private sector as well. >> and in fact h.r. mcmaster the national security adviser said two days ago we have failed to impose sufficient costs against russia. former homeland security secretary jeh johnson good to see you, thanks so much. >> thank you. coming up next on "morning joe," after a series of damaging reports, embattled epa chief scott pruitt tries to clear his name. we'll play part of his combative new interview ahead on "morning joe."

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still ahead on "morning joe," the saudi crown prince continues his three-week u.s. charm offensive, apparently hanging out with the rock at rupert murdoch's estate. dwayne johnson hosted the report

on instagram yesterday confirming he was hanging out with the crown prince. "time" magazine asks should the world buy what the crown prince is selling? the author of the new cover story joins us ahead on "morning joe." liberty mutual stood with me when this guy got a flat tire in the middle of the night. hold on dad... liberty did what? yeah, liberty mutual 24-hour roadside assistance helped him to fix his flat so he could get home safely. my dad says our insurance doesn't have that. don't worry - i know what a lug wrench is, dad.

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plus, for a limited time, get a $250 prepaid card when you buy any new samsung. xfinity mobile. it's a new kind of network designed to save you money. click, call, or visit an xfinity store today. joining us in new york, "time" magazine editor karl vic who writes "by the time 32-year-old mohammed bin salman departs the u.s., he will have visited five states plus the district of columbia, four presidents, five newspapers, uncounted moguls and oprah. the heart of the pitch the crown prince has taken on the road is forward-looking, universal and delivered in the confident fact-stippled surge of words that might describe a start up. bin salman in large part is looning for money, foreign funds being a crucial element of vision 2030, his plan that

promises to reconcile feudal society with the world around him. for all his power and wealth, bin salman needs outside help to do it. karl, good morning, good to see you. let me you ask on the cover. should america buy what the crown prince is selling on the three week trip to the united states. >> he seems to be sincere. everyone he seems to meet, he's sort of master salesman. remaking the brand. so we always thought of these guys, these old men in flowing robes who were sort of double dealers. sold us oil and had own agenda. which included exporting this extreme form of islam that would -- that begun in the desert and put everywhere in the world. he wants to get off the oil and diversify the company.

he says that it has been hijacked and talking about a more moderate islam. more rights for women. they're going to be able to drive. and overseas he's an activist. he's been helping to make bigger mess in the middle east. that's outside their borders. >> full disclosure, i think women being able toll drive in saudi arabia is a great thing. my mom used to drive there, but she was described as a man. we almost got driven off a road because they realized she was a woman driving. flip side of all of the reforms carrying on at home which most people think are real and sincere and lead saudi arabia to a better place. you look at yemen. you look at his stepping up the rhetoric with iran. is he at risk of pushing the middle east into a position that is even more unstable because of this confrontation with the iranians both on southern border and potentially even with iran itself. >> i mean, it's certainly true

that iran has been more active and more emboldened in the last few years. and saudi arabia is historically the arrival and the counter balance to it. and one of the reasons president trump and his white house loves saudi arabia and this guy is he's stepping up to fight iran. he a few days after being made defense secretary, defense minister at age 29 by his father the king, he started the war in yemen. and it's ten thousands civilians killed. stalema stalemate. a mess. poorest country in the arab world. and iran wasn't terribly involved in yemen before. there is a sense that he's maybe rash and impulsive and some places doesn't think things through and stirring the pot and overdoing it. >> the trump administration particularly the president and

his son-in-law have chosen to really embrace the crown prince. what was your sense of how emboldened that makes him feel and i'm looking here that he told you saudi arabia is the biggest victim of extremist ideology. what did you make of that. >> that was a talking point. he has his own explanation for why islam inside saudi arabia is changed. a lot of the world looks like egypt and women were not wearing hijab and hr secular society and a lot of things happened in 1979. iran became islamic republic and there was also quite a revolt in saudi arabia by extremisextremi the country then became much more conservative after that. i forgot the question before that. >> how emboldened they are. yes. trump made his first trip abroad

not to canada, which was traditional, but to saudi arabia. and right after, you remember he danced with the sword and all held this globe and right after he left, saudi arabia and some of its allies in the gulf sort of all ganged up on another country qatar in the gulf which was bothering them. and trump tweeted support for that. it was a strange sort of intraera feud that they now had the americans on their side. that did seem to embolden them and trump likes what they're doing in yemen. selling them a lot of arms to do it. >> steve schmit, sort of joked in the the tease before this segment that the rock, duane johnson has sad down and had dinner. private dinner at rupert murdoch's house. other actors there. other people from hollywood. obviously vaughn is going to invest in movie business now. opening up theaters and letting women in.

i think black panther is the first movie that's going to be shown there. i wanted to ask you as the rock. a guy who understands political system and a guy who has run a campaign. should we be thinking about duane johnson as a serious candidate for president. >> if duane johnson wanted to run for office in this country he would be a serious candidate. to understand american politics is this. the next president will always have oppositional virtues to the last president. and so when you look at duane johnson, there is an element of genuine kindness, interest, he's a nice person who takes time with every fan. you read the things he talks about. he smart, articulate, understands there are things he doesn't know and seems interested in learning them. has a type of humility that's profoundly oppositional to

donald trump. so i look at duane johnson, i don't look at him as a celebrity. i look at duane johnson as someone who possesses qualities of character that are quite oppositional to the incumbent president that makes him a possible candidate. >> but steve, that's like saying you let the lawn boy do brain surgery on your mother and he was kind of nasty lawn boy, didn't know how to do brain surgery and killed your mother, but there's another lawn boy across the street who is nice and has a better way about him when he's mowing your lawn and collecting payment for mowing your lawn. i mean, the rock doesn't know more about government than donald trump. we're talking about the rock. we're talking about oprah. i could go down the list. mark cuban who actually bob iger. people that effective in their

own ways, but, again, are we doomed to continue electing presidents that have no idea how to make the government work? >> i think that when you look at donald trump for example, the issue isn't that donald trump didn't know anything. the issue is that donald trump has no interest in learning anything new. so to me, that's where the fault line is on this. my conception of the office is that the dominant requirement, the number one is character. you have character, you have those qualities. i think you can be an effective president. certainly preparation knowing what you're talking about. knowing what you're doing. being able to put together a team is an important quality. i don't think that you

necessarily our entire pool of people who are eligible to run for president of the united states come out of the united states congress, which is perhaps most dysfunctional institution in the country. i'm not so interested in necessarily well this person knows everything there is to know about government. is he interested in learning. is he interested in preparing. will he put the work in. does he have the requisite quality of character to make decisions to make the country a better place for generations of americans you have born. the answer is maybe yes, maybe no. be who knows. i think it would be formable. new issue of time magazine on the crown prince of saudi arabia is available now. still ahead, facebook doesn't make you pay to log in, but are you paying with your privacy. the social media company scandal just got going ahead of mark zuckerberg appearance before congress next week. morning joe is coming right back.

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the president's proposed wall. build that wall. sounded more like they were going to actually do renovation on obama's wall. we'll show you that as well. when it comes to possible trade war with china that the president says you can't lose, we're going to have to see if millions of voters in the heart land agree. they don't really seem to. so with us this morning, we have political reporter for nbc neue carol lee and associated reporter for the white house express. she and co-author are out with new book, the confidence code for girls. it's for girls, but i read it too. along with willie. just trying to get that extra boost of confidence so sadly lacking throughout my life. >> you need it, joe: clearly. why do you think i'm reading the kp competence code part two. mika and catty talking to

audiences is really inspires. john, i think he's written a book too. mika will be back tomorrow. willie, yesterday was fascinating. this is we were just celebrating the life and remarkable legacy of a woman who inspired, inspired brown v board of education. of course that takes you back to when eisenhower sent the national guard to little rock to do extraordinary things. it transformed really our lives, our children's lives, our lives, american culture. now we have sort of the breitbart inspired i guess an cu, moving of national guard troops down to the border. nobody is raerl sueally sure wh they're going to do there. not allowed to make contact down

there. and then we had conversation yesterday with the head of the department of homeland security department talking about the wall, but it's not donald trump's wall that mexico is going to pay for. it seem like they're going to be doing rehab on barack obama's part of the wall. so again, the last week has just seemed to be a lot of sound and furry signifyings nothing. >> all reactions to things president trump has said impulsively. stories whether it's planned to pull out of troops of american 2r507 troops of syria. whether it's the trade war that's come from it. these are things donald trump has gotten ahead of his own administration. they've had to scramble in behind him to formulate policy around a statement he's made. send national guard to the southern border. calls for the department of defense and homeland security. to work with border governors to fight illegal immigration.

the move is being activated under title 32 which gives governors command and control over troops while the federal government foots the bill. troops will not make contact with any immigrants and yesterday homeland security secretary said she hoped deployment would begin, quote, immediately. although she said she is still speaking with the board of governors and a specified plan is not in place. illegal border crossing hit 46 year low last year. administration insists a surge of the past month and potential uptick this month is cause for urgency. >> we are seeing more and more advertising by the smugglers to ourself specific to how to get around our system and enter our country and stay. we have documented cases of borrowing children appearing at the border as a family unit in a fraudulent way. why today not yesterday, tomorrow. today is the day. today is the day we want to start this process.

the threat is real. >> president george w. bush sent 6,000 national guard troops to the border in 2006. while president obama sent 1200 in 2010. both cases they supported border patrol and did not carry out seizures or arrests. joe, just to underline how this policy has been, we heard yesterday from the national guard in california we look forward to detail about timing and dates and plans for this because it's the first a lot of people who will be implementing this policy will be implementing it. telling people like david ignatius for months they would like guidance from the white house. this president doesn't provide guidance. you know, willie, you heard the

threat is real. talking about talking about the threat i don't know if it's mystery machine school busy van that donald trump has been obsessing on. can we go fwoback to that. did you say that illegal border crossings reasonable degree at 43 year low? >> i did. and the what the reason the trump white house is giving is because in the last month alone, in the last month they've ticked up a little bit. constitutes a crisis in their eyes. the actions that president trump promised during the campaign he believes now the time to implement them. alex tells me last year was a 46 year low. and carol, you look at the trend

lines. and they're going in one direction. down. and we heard they've been going down since 2008. this seems to be a solution to a problem that we just don't have like we did during clinton administration and bush administration. it seems to be born out of the president's. we've been seeing in recent weeks. ever since we signed that he was frustrated with and vetoed and signed. this is the latest in a serious out there. one question that is going to be critical in the next coming days is how they're going to pay for this. that's where it comes from. you can come up with this idea to put partial guard troops on

the border. that's going to cost a lot of money. not clear exactly where that's going to come from. i think that's sort of a scramble as the president speaks and everyone tries to fill in the gaps and make what he says into some sort of formulated policy. >> john, we're really living though here in an alternate reality. what is it kellyanne conway talked about alternative facts. you have national guard troops going to the border to protect a border that has fewers crossings since -- the crossings have been going down for almost as long as i, you know, lowest in 46 years since -- the crossings have been going down for almost as long as i, you know, lowest in 46 years. then they're talking about building this wall for a problem that again is at a low ebb for almost half a century. this weekend donald trump

blasting "the washington post" as a lobbyist organization. it is not. that's a lie. you have the president of the united states talking about the united states post office and taxpayers having to subsidize their services. that is false. they do not subsidize those services. and also saying that amazon gets the sweet heart deal. this special cut rate when in fact it's just anybody that mails in bulk. i know i always ask this question of you, but how exactly do we put this in perspective when you have a president that every day is not only lying, but is making sure his lies and twisted distorted views of reality let's apply that to border wall. actually impact policy. we got that part of it, but then

his own party says nothing. they don't stand up to him. they don't fight against stupid trade wars that hurt their constituents. they don't fight against the trump tariff tax that hurts consumers. i could go on and on. these aren't just tweets. these are things that are hurting farmers and consumers and a lot of other americans. >> he's taken the point that it's better to be feared than to be loved to a remarkable maybe ultimate conclusion in the american context. i think the republicans you're talking about, if they don't fear him, they certainly fear his voters. and one of the things to me that is really fascinating about this week and the two issues you're talking about, which is the wall and the issue we've been talking about for a couple of days, which is trade. is this is an elemental play for

trump. so far as there is an elemental play for him. the amazon stuff is interesting. could very well be seen as the nfl players of the moment or the whatever the storm of the moment is. there are two things that he has talked about since he began flirting with politics as far back as the late 1980s and that's trade. one thing he's talked about since that first moment when he used the birther issue to thrust himself to the heart of the right wing and that's the wall. he has gone back to two things that have stood him in good enough stead to propel him to

this place in the life of the country and that is the wall and that's tariffs. i don't know if he's worried about something we don't yet know what it is. god knows what else there could be, but i think that it's a sign that he knows that there are things coming. he needs that base. and that base is interested in the wall and the base is interested in saying that other countries aren't going to screw us anymore whether or not that has a basis. still ahead on morning joe, has build that wall become fix that fence. we'll show you what the homeland security secretary said about that next on morning joe, but first, bill karins has a check on the forecast. >> i don't have much good to say. at first it was kind of like, okay, it's going to take a little bit for spring to get here. now people are giving up on spring. 33 in tlaatlanta. windchills in the upper 30s.

don't think of augusta being that cold. it's a cold morning all through the great lakes, ohio valleys. not many warm areas. map looks like the beginning of march instead of the beginning of april. getting better throughout the middle of the country. texas looks nice. cold air in place. here comes the next storm. snow breaks out tonight. 1-4 inches in areas of montana. some highers elevations could get 8 inches. then snow dives down to nebraska later tonight and tomorrow morning. areas of 2-4 inches of snow. light snow is during the daylight hours tomorrow. not a lot going to accumulate on the roads. probably see snowflakes tomorrow in missouri including st. louis and kansas city. then tomorrow night when the sun goes down the snow begins to accumulate heavy in areas of west virginia, kentucky under winter storm watches. areas of northern virginia. mountains get hit pretty good and d.c. could get accumulating snow as early as tomorrow morning. ridiculous stuff. northern new england light snow throughout tomorrow. saturday, we just continue to watch these conditions out there. just cold and wintery for pretty

much the northwest all the way through the northeast. new york city is a spot thinking of chance of snow on saturday. haven't heard one complaint that it looks like it is going to miss us to the south. you're watching "morning joe." we've been preparing for this day. over the years, paul and i have met regularly with our ameriprise advisor. we plan for everything from retirement to college savings. giving us the ability to add on for an important member of our family. welcome home mom. with the right financial advisor, life can be brilliant.

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welcome back to morning joe. the trump administration is weighing in on the status of the proposed border wall with mex o mexico. repeated two of the president's false claims act that the wall is currently under construction and that the billion dollars in newly secured border funding goes towards fulfilling that campaign promise. >> we have started building as you know. we're building realtime. >> how much do you all have to build at this point. >> this important question. to us it's all new wall. if there's a wall before that needs to be replaced, it's being replaced by a new wall.

this is the trump border wall. in many cases. >> you're replacing new wall. >> yes, it would. we finished evaluating all the prototypes. tool kit, if you will. some of the the part os of the border are very different. we have a wall that almost floats with the sand. other places have taller walls, depending. >> willie, it's renovate that wall then. which i guess you said build that wall. that's easy. build that wall. it's a little harder for renovate that wall. which is actually all they're talking about doing here. >> jonathan to watch secretary nielsen get twist instead notes to explain the wall because she has to run in blind what the president has thrown this public and figure out what it means. is he building a new wall on the border or in the building a new wall on the border. >> joe is right. the chant renovate that wall and

i'm not clear how to pay for it does not have the same catchiness that we saw nietght after night at his rallies. the white house insisting they roll out this has been in the works for a while. that doesn't not match up with reality. as many of the things the president says the rhetoric and reality and uneasy relationship. one of the things greatest frustration the president has is the lack of wall. which was his signature campaign item. that was as karl said very frustrating. wasn't much funding for that. one of the reasons why he suggested he might go back and veto it after he promised to sign it. and we're seeing time, and, again, a lot of this is linked to the same idea that the president is feeling more comfortable in his job. feels more em boldened and wants to go back to trusting his gut. goes back to trusting the campaign promises. biggest success politically is his lenelection.

not the policies he's elected. the fact he got in the office to begin with. he's saying that with the wall. with the tariffs and with the idea of pulling back american troops across from global hot spots, including syria. coming up on "morning joe" the white house says general hr mcmaster agrees with the white house position on russia. if that's true, then why did the president fire him? we'll show you the tape that directly contradicts what sarah sanders said about the national security adviser. "morning joe" is coming right back.

back to morning joe. the white house says there is no contrast in tone between president trump and hr mcmaster. after both spoke about russian aggression only hours apart on tuesday. >> mr. putin may believe he is winning in this new form of warfare. >> we'll find out. i'll let you know. >> russia braisingly and implausibly denies its actions. >> probably nobody has been tougher to russia than donald

trump. >> we have failed to impose sufficient cost. >> nobody has been tougher on russia than i have. >> perhaps he believes our free nations are weak and will not respond. >> i know you're nodding yes because everyone agrees when they think about it. >> we might all help mr. president understand his grave error. >> does he agree with mcmaster that we have failed to impose sufficient costs on russia. >> what mcmaster actually said is we've been very tough on russia. he echoed the president's message that he said yesterday during the press conference with the baltic leaders that no one has been tougher on russia than this president. what he also said was that other nations could do more and should do more. that's not different or in contrast to anything that we've said. >> while mcmaster said in his speech that the united states is acting, he also said, quote, we must recognize the need for all

of us to do more to respond to and deter russian aggression. mcmaster did not, as sanders claims, say no one has been tougher on russia than president trump. just six and a half weeks ago when mcmaster spoke about the kremlin undermining the election, president trump tweeted this, general mcmaster according to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the russians and that the only collusion was between russia and crooked h, the dnc and the democrats. here's the quote for mcmaster. we have failed to impose sufficient costs and by the way, the incoming national security adviser, he's a hawk on russia as well. >> here we have one more example of sarah huckabee sanders lying. two lies there. one, mcmaster never said that no one has been tougher on russia than donald trump. that is a lie.

full stop. sarah huckabee sanders lied yesterday again. she also lied when she said that when she denied that mcmaster said that quote was, we have failed to hit them. she len thied then again as wel we'll find out later whether this man is an enemy or not to the united states when he's interfered with our democracy, he's attacking our closest allies, the one we've always had a special relationship with. killing people on this soil. what does this man have to do across the world for donald trump to realize that he's not his friend? >> donald trump has always had this ability to make facts or

situations into his reality. whether they are true or not. he does it time, and, again. he takes black and he makes it white. the question has always been does he believe what he is saying or is he just trying to sell us on what he is saying. it's interesting to caesar ra huckabee sanders picking up that habit. picking up the habit of saying something that is clearly not the case. coming up on morning joe, next guest says facebook free service comes at a serious cost. did you really think the social media giant was holding your photos and hosting your groups out of the goodness of its heart? that wakeup call is next on "morning joe."joe."

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shared with the data firm up to 87 million. facebook issued those updated figures yesterday saying it reflects estimate of total number of users whose data could have been acquired by cambridge analytica. following the announcement of new numbers, issued a statement disputing the figures saying in part it licenses data for no more than 30 million people and did not receive more data that than. facebook ceo also announced yesterday the company would offer all the users same tools and controls required under european privacy rules. those rules go in effect next month give people more control over how companies use digital data. zuckerberg did stop short of making the rules standard for social network across the world. joining us now, editor of commentary magazine. columnist at the new york post and bachelor analyst.

did you think the company that allowed you to consume news and opinions was doing so out of the goodness of their heart. not an adult in this country that shouldn't know better. from radio to broadcast tv to internet the model has been the same. you sell yourself, your years, eyeballs, attention and you get entertainment and exchange. everything has a cost. if you according to that or refuse to see it in your relationship with facebook or believe any of these things, sorry, you're a fool. just didn't care until you cared. until that is you decided this was a convenient way of explaining away the victory of donald trump in the 2016 election. honestly it's time to stop being fools and start owning up to our role in all of this. >> john, we talked about this yesterday when the story broke. which is that we've spent the last ten decade or more giving everything. giving everything. giving your ie themty.

giving all your personal information and never really considering what was happening on the other side of that. >> yes. as i said here, something inherently foolish about this. over the years, there have been stories year after year that say if you post your photo on facebook, facebook has some ownership of that photo. if you put information up about, you know, if your posts are not your personal property. this is a free site. you go there, you spend no money. you do not pay them a cent. and the exchange is that they get your information and your data and they are peddling it as a global eco-system of information. and the notion that somehow in 11 years after 12 years after facebook really explodes, that people go, oh, my god. what are they doing? this is just terrible has a

disingenuous quality to it. i think most rank and file people who use facebook don't think about these things in this wholistic way and what it gets from you, but you can't go some place for an hour and a half, two hours a day and hang out there. like if you went toe a starbucks, they throw you out if you don't buy a cup of coffee. you're the cup of coffee when you're on facebook. >> john, you talk about disingenuous for people to be surprised and you connect it to the election of donald trump. perhaps it's just a sheep like quality that we've all been engaging in for the better part of the decade. over the past year, aside from donald trump, aside from politics, we've been learning that people are listening in. that when we say certain things, suddenly adds pop up on our

screens. the federal government this past week is now warning us that when we talk on telephones or send texts, it's going to likely be intercepted by foreign governments. aren't we all beginning to wake up to all the threats, all the concerns, not just from facebook, but from you know using our iphones, by using samsungs, using all of these things we thought actually freed us and liberated us, but actually sending all of our information either directly to governments across the world or to some of the largest tech companies on the planet. >> so you download an app, right, on your phone and the app is free and then you get this service. right. you get this, you know, app will serve you up apartments for rent in your area or best vacation or this and that and the other thing. where do people think those apps have the hundreds of people working for them? how they're getting paid?

you know, how does that work? that's part of the role of an honest adult consumer is to understand that there is a transaction in every -- tell you a quick story. have i a website. commentary website. we use google ads. google ads is a passive ad server and put up ads on your site and you get money at the end of the month. the ads follow the interest of the person who is reading it at the time. i got calls 2009, 2010, somebody would call me and say you have to take this ad -- it's disgusting. i got this ad for toe fungus and it's sitting there and really ugly and makes me sick and i would say, you know, we didn't -- that's you. you must have done a search for toe fungus or male order bride. like, i we're not -- we didn't

sell that ad. you sold that ad. and then people there's this kind of like shock moment. >> so the 87 million numbers the headline out of facebook. if you read through a statement from the chief technology officer, says this. given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on facebook, 2 billion people on facebook, could have had public profile scraped in this way. they don't know the extent of the problem. >> let many ask you this. on monday facebook will start alerting people about whether they had data stolen, right. do you think when you receive your little notification on your phone that you are one of those people whose data has been stolen or misused and sent to cambridge analytica and potentially had an impact in the 2016 election that will actually make a difference. people will start thinking, wow, this is real. >> i suppose so. although again i think the exchange is not unfair exchange. these are people say facebook

claims that. >> it might make people think i don't want to be part of this. facebook says rather shockingly large number of its users spends an hour to two hours a day on facebook. so if they are confronted with the fact that they will have to stop spending 15 hours a week on facebook or whether it's okay with them. it hasn't hurt them very much. what do you think they're going to do. we talk about the data being stolen or misused. facebook hasn't sued cambridge analytica. hasn't sought to impose any legal remedy on any of the businesses that it did business with with this data because it's not illegal. it's not a misuse of the data. it's exactly what facebook wanted to happen with the data. they wanted third-party people

to use it to bring people to the site and keep people at the site. >> we're going to have much more. unfortunately we're out of time. john, thank you so much. coming up next on "morning joe." >> i do believe as we do our work, ed, as we're focused on these types of things, they're transaction national. this place has been a place for years that has been used by the left environmental left to advance an agenda. >> embattled epa chief scott prosecute blames the left for serious of controversy surrounding his tenure. that combative interview. we'll show more of it. including reaction to reports that top staffers were given big raises over the objections of the white house. keep it on morning joe. david. what's going on? oh hey! ♪ that's it? yeah. ♪ everybody two seconds!

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that should not have been done. >> there may be accountability. >> career person or political person. >> i don't know. >> you don't know who did this. >> i found out about this yesterday. i corrected the action. we are in the process of finding out how it took place and correcting it. >> hang on. both of these staffers who got large pay raises are friends of yours from oklahoma. >> they are staffers here in the agency. >> they're friends of yours. >> they served a very important. >> you did not know they got the

pay raises. >> i did not know until yesterday. >> why did you then accept $50 a night to rent a condo from the wife of a washington lobbyist. >> let's talk about that. that's something again that's been reviewed by the officials here. they've said it's market rate. >> renting it from the wife of a lobbyist. >> who has know business before the agency. >> mr. hard has no clients that have business before the agency. >> exxonmobil has no firm. >> member of a law firm. to take his relationship and extend it. >> you're not answering the question. >> like an airbnb situation. the landlord had access to the entirety of the facility. when i was there i had access to a room. common areas. they used the facility at the same time i was there. >> so you only paid for the nights you rent that you were there. >> that's right. >> that's a sweet heart deal. >> no, it's not. >> that iis epa administrator scott pruitt with fox news amid a series of controversies. on the topic of that condo,

"washington post" is reporting after moving out of it last summer, pruitt had no fixed address in washington, d.c. for a month. pruitt instead traveled extensively work and remained at home in tulsa, oklahoma for weeks. declined to disclose when the administrator michigan renting second d.c. apartment. amid the controversy, the white house was asked to address where pruitt stands with president trump. >> confidence in the epa administrator at this point. >> president thinks he did a good job on the deregulation front. we're taking this seriously. we'll let you know when we f finish. >> list is long surrounding problems of scott pruitt. >> this guy is corrupt. corrupt. running around with 30 person detail.

this rental agreement at $50 a night from a d.c. lobbyist in a global city in an expensive city. it is corrupt. it is a corrupt deal. this guy has broken the public trust. all of the shenanigans around the administration, he's unfit for public service. unfit for a cabinet ranked job. he has broken the trust of his high office. and he should be gone. and any normal administration he would be, but this is just every day in trump land where it's the head of apollo meeting in the west wing with jared kushner and outside of the regular loan process which and i have no idea why there's no oversight and investigation into this. they loan $500 million. immediately after west wing meeting. the level in the mag pseudoof the corruption around the administration is something that you see in banana republics. not in the united states of america. extraordinary. >> any talk in the white house about getting rid of scott

pruitt. >> i think the combination of that interview and what sarah sanders said where she didn't say the president had confidence and compartmentalize the work on the regulation is not good for him. >> we'll see. more to come on this. now to katty kay and claire's new book. you'll remember the confidence code. and they're out now with the followup book t confidence code for girls. katty is still with us. journalist claire shipman joins our table as well. congratulations on the book. the followup to the best seller. we've all been talking about it in the break already. i have a ten-year-old daughter about to be 11. steve had a daughter. joe has a daughter that fits right in the zone. why target girls. what did you learn from the first book. >> we wrote the first book about the confidence gap and did the research with scientists it became clear it starts younger. starts around the age of 12. poll out that came out with the book that shows girls lose confidence by about a third

after the age of 12. hit puberty years and never recovers for the rest of our lives our confidence never matches that of boys. girls start feeli ining they fet want to fail, they want to be perfect. they want to be good girls it the problem with all of those thing, gets you "a" grades in school but it doesn't prepare you for life. >> what are the factors at 12 years old? what happens after 12 to a young girl? >> i think what's happening at puberty in some cases it starts as early as 8 which is really surprising. it's a perfect storm really. so estrogen, which girls get, a lot more of than boys, helps us to become higher eq people, right. we're watching everybody. but we become more cautious. boys are getting testosterone. to build confidence, you have to be taking risks and failing and moving through that. and at the same time, so girls are a little more cautious, you

have parents and teachers who are unwittingly encouraging the girls to just do very well, dot every i, cross every t. because they can, right? we all love that as parents. but by the time they're in high school, they're full-blown perfectionists who don't want to fail. our girls aren't learning to fail. >> joe. >> so claire, i'm so glad you brought that up. estrogen versus testosterone. i remember seeing fran like yo wits asked one time by a college student, who can we break down the divide so there's no difference between men and women. she said, well, if you can figure out how to bottle testosterone, good luck with that. she said there's nothing like it. and she went on on. then of course she talked about what you just talked about, and that is the values that young girls and women have and that they share that men are so poorly lacking. isn't it important that we teach our girls -- and it's sort of an

ongoing conversation in our house with my 14-year-old daughter -- that there are differences between boys and girls? don't try to be like boys. don't try to erase the differences between boys and girls. understand what you are and use that to your advantage. >> i think that's exactly right. i mean, there are differences and the -- what girls bring to the table in terms of emotional intelligence is incredibly valuable. honestly. we need more of that in leadership today. but girl's confident needs to be in line with their incompetence. we could write an entirely different book on male overconfidence, right? that's a different subject. it's an important one. >> yes. >> there's tweaking to be done there. what we realized is for girls, understanding what's going on is the most valuable thing. so they can say, oh, right. if i take a few more risks, i

get used to it and i can speak up for myself. >> male overconfidence leads to marketing crashing, wars beginning. i'm dead serious. >> yes, serious. >> that's what men have lacked through the ages that women add to a discussion. it's what i always talk about to you one of the most telling studies i've seen in your area came a study of third and fourth grade boys and girls. the boys always overestimated their math skills. the girls always underestimated -- again, on average, their math skills. it begins at an early age like you say. >> actually, they're doing pretty much about the same. i think the other thing that does seem to hit in with puberty. i'm sure you see it with your girls. social media kicks in and they get this huge pressure to be perfect online, right? they want to present the perfect sexy picture of themselves. they want to look like they have the most friends or the longest snapchat streak. what we're also trying to do in

this book is look, social media is here. let's use it for positive. we've teamed up with instagram for a campaign, capture confidence. it's girls doing things. they're not trying to look sexy or pretty. they're posting pictures of themselves actually doing things. we think there's a real desire amongst girls to use social media in a way that makes them feel confident. doesn't make them feel they have to fit into a stereotype. >> you wrote about one of the hardest things for a parent to do is to watch your child fail. >> right, so hard. >> you have to do it. >> yes. >> you have to do it. i was just going to say, willie you know this, as does katty. mika is a wonderful example, in that she bends over backwards to not look perfect on instagram every day, with chickens -- >> back with the chickens? >> and pigs and an assortment of other barnyard animals. >> just watch what you see, mika

is not here, but i bet she's listening. >> i know. >> the book is "the confidence code for girls." katty, claire shipman, congratulations. o cover almost anything. even "close claws." [driver] so, we took your shortcut, which was a bad idea. [cougar growling] [passenger] what are you doing? [driver] i can't believe that worked. i dropped the keys. [burke] and we covered it. talk to farmers, we know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two. ♪ we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum ♪

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about it with john pedora. roseanne last night aft effort getting more than 25 million viewers on that first episode came back with 15.5 million viewers again last night, holding a ton of its audience. >> katty. >> and on a host of issues we've talked about this morning, tariffs with china, pulling out of syria, the border wall with mexico. just don't know what the administration is going to do. what they say is one thing. what they actually do is another. tariffs is an interesting example of that. it may not actually happen after all. >> i'm look aerin aring for thet to go to west virginia to talk about tax reform. will his aides have to come in and create a policy around his rhetoric? >> facebook turns out to be both a battlefield and crime scene from the 2016 election. i think people are just starting to get their heads around it. i think these hearings next week are going to be profoundly

interesting. >> all right. thank you, guys, so much for being on. willie and i want to thank all of you for watching. make sure if you have a girl to go out to a book store and go to amazon and get katty and claire's book, "the confidence code for girls." it's so important. it's such an important read. we're going to have them back when mika's on the show to talk about this much more. that does it for us this morning. we thank you, again, for watching. stephanie ruhle picks up the coverage right now. >> thank you, joe, thanks, willie. good morning, everyone, i'm stephanie ruhle. i'm starting today with some tough talk. the president ordering troops to the southern border. he's also staying the course on china. despite fears of a trade war adding to the list of campaign promises. hitting reality roadblocks. >> this is the one constant in this erratic presidency, which is that he does not get crosswise with his base. >> and