welcome back to "up." i'm david gura. for nearly 18 months of donald trump's presidency, special counsel robert mueller has been on a mission trying to establish if trump or his campaign coordinated with russia in the 2016 election. and the president has used twitter to attack back, by my count, tweeting "witch hunt" 143 times. and according to the "washington post," his deflection that democrats colluded with russia is one of his most-repeated falsehoods. but are his attacks working? after being sentenced to three years in prison, after admitting to covering up trump's dirty deeds, as he calls them, former trump lawyer michael cohen spoke to george stephanopoulos who asked a question at the very heart of robert mueller's investigation. >> the special counsel did say that you were doing your best to tell the truth about everything related to their investigation, everything related to russia. do you think president trump is telling the truth about that? >> two letters, one word, "no." but does the american public

think the president is telling the truth? this morning, we have brand-new numbers from an "wall street journal" poll. when asked if they think donald trump has been honest and truthful, six in ten americans say "no." a 62% split from those who think he is being honest. let's break it down by party here. 94% of democrats do not believe the president, but a majority of republicans do. 70%. when asked if robert mueller's investigation had given them any doubts about donald trump's presidency, half the respondents said "yes" and 44% said "no." joining me in the hour, christina grier, co-host of faqnyc. brendon greeley is the financial editor. and paul butler is a former federal prosecutor and nbc legal analyst. we also have new numbers on president trump's jobs performance this morning. trump's job rating in that poll stands at 43% approving, while

54% disapprove. and in the months after the results of the midterm elections, when asked who they want to take the lead role in setting policy for the country, 48% want democrats setting policy, 21% want republicans, and 19% with president trump in particular. michelle, let me start with you. and we have these dual tracks. there's the legal side of things, the investigation continues. there are the politics and the president is doing everything he can to shape perception of what's happening. your sense from those numbers of how well that's working. >> i've heard people say a lot of times, they think the fox news had been around during watergate, they're unsure if nixon would have been impeached. and when i looked back over the years, there's been a staggering number of trump world figures who have either had to resign in disgrace and kind of slink out of public life are actually now in prison or cooperating with various prosecutors. but it kind of depends on how much you are following the day-to-day. you know, somebody brought up with me the other day, he said,

you know, i never paid that much attention to the ins and outs of benghazi, because i just decided early on that it was a farce. so, you know, people -- democrats were actually much less conversant with the little details. and in that case, it really was a farce. it really was, you know, all kind of a witch hunt, if you will. but i think that the psychological mechanism of just writing it off, until there is some sort of explosive revelation, is probably the same. and sonnet one hasn't, i don't think anything is going to change unless there is either a big revelation, either from the fdny or from the mueller report, or just until the economy turns and trump's numbers soften up enough that it's not, you know, advantageous for republicans to keep holding them close. >> philip bump for "the washington post" was seated where you are today and has looked at this data over the last many months. and the conclusion he's come to, kind of what michelle is saying,

people are solidly in their beliefs at this point. try as he may by tweeting witch hunt and saying what he's saying, those who think it's not a real thing are going to think it's not a real thing, and those who do think it's a real thing will think it's a real thing. do you agree that? how much light is there for people to change their perspective on this? >> i agree with michelle 100%. it seems as though -- we were talking about this before the show. it's not just about the president, right? it's about the republican party and his administration and the institutional structure that's supporting this nonsense, right? so you have people in the republican party who are just like, yeah, it's just the democrats nitpicking. and so because this administration is corrupt from top to bottom, root to tip, so we see day after day, people going to prison, people being indicted, money missing. and it's just, it seems as though it's just this constant trickle of democrats just picking at a president who republicans believe, you know, it's not that big of a deal, where, because we haven't had an explosion, as of yet, it's not

really catching traction in the way that one would assume we're seeing, you know, the -- our constitution being stretched to its absolute limits. and real questions of our democracy. >> don't we have an explosion every single day? the president's national security adviser is a convicted felon. the man who ran the campaign is a convicted felon. his lawyer fixer is a convicted felon. so we've seen -- >> we've become immune -- >> we've become inured to it. >> well, we haven't. these republicans who a large majority say that the president is being honest and truthful, they're not being rational. for them, it's like the enlightenment never happened. it's not a matter of belief wlb the president is a liar. it's a fact that he is. and the concern is that those people who don't believe in truth are the base of the republican party. they're the base of the center truths, who will decide if the president is removed from office. >> christina is giving up that

you were talking about this in the green room. i hope we'll have some more insight as the show goes on. >> i think we did all experience the enlightenment together, but now we're into a post-modern textural analysis. we're making legal arguments. we're looking at the evidence we have and try to figure out what it might mean. trump has been very successfully making a political argument and he has been decertifying the press, telling his voters that we are lying. and it's working for him. so i think that when we say, you know, i can't believe these people don't accept the logic that has been laid out, the logic is very compelling, but they're working along a different system. trump has successfully said, don't trust them, trust me. >> during his presidency, we've seen those numbers move. >> it's worked, but i feel like his greatest vulnerability is when he's revealed as weak or as a failure. not just as corrupt and a liar

and a cheat. but actually when he sort of is taken down a notch on his own scale of value. and to some extent, i think that's already happened. you know, you're already -- he can no longer kind of pose as this mastermind of the economy, because that looks much weaker. and you just sort of see -- you can even see with some of the senator who is initially came out very strongly and said, oh, well, you know, these are just minor crimes, then sort of realized that that was a hard line -- i mean, it was very interesting to see orrin hatch pull back from his initial dismissal. >> issuing a statement. >> yeah, exactly. so i feel like you see a tteeny little bit. >> small fish. you bring up the economy. when i look at this polling data from this morning, from this new poll, overall, 28% say the economy will get better in the next year. 33% think it will get worse, and 37% believe it will stay about the same. this is what you're covering in, day in, day out.

>> so so many of us who look at various indicators, and i won't bore with you them that say that the economy might turn in the near future, there's a ton of evidence that it will, but all that means is there's something likely to happen in the next 12 months. in the meantime, we're looking at the ins and outs of everything that's happening in the news every day. the lived experience of most people in the country is, do i have a job? how much does that job pay? and right now we're at 3.7% unemployment, 3.1% wage growth. it's not where we should be, but it's growing. and we have all sorts of anecdotal evidence from all over the country where people are -- employers are going into drug treatment centers and saying, how can we help get these people into the workforce? we are running this high pressure economy that's having a ton of really good effects on real people and so i complain and complain and complain. and david listened to me do this for two years about what a terribly designed, incredibly expensive, wasteful stimulus the tax cut was. but what i forgot was at the end of the day, it's still stimulus. there was a stimulus. we're still seeing that effect. so i don't know that i can agree

that he can no longer pose as the mastermind of the economy, because we're now, as zero percent growth in stock values over the course of the year. >> it's a short-term effect, and the one concern is that for the health of our democracy, we need to get this despot out of office. and it's almost like we're in a position where if the economy isn't doing well, well, in a way that's good, because maybe that will help his base that doesn't believe in science, that doesn't believe in evidence that he is corrupt. maybe a failing economy is what it will take to push them. >> and obviously, democrats don't want to be the side of people who are ahead of cheering for the economy. >> absolutely not. >> as opposed to sort of cheering for people to see, maybe, that this tax cut was horrifically well designed or -- or horrifically poorly designed and has exacerbated inequality and the like. >> i think the long-term effects of this tax cut will be detrimental to our american economy. there's the economy and then

there's your pocketbook issues. and we know these numbers -- statistics are racialized. you can massage statistics in any way you can. so unemployment numbers are people who are actively working for work. we have so many americans who have given up. and that has some real class implications and some real racialized implications, especially for mixed status families, as well, who are still feeling the pressures of this president and his administration where they're afraid to leave their homes. these numbers to me are just not true. >> i think you're completely right about that. and we'll see that difference very soon. one of the things the president has talked about is the gap between african-american unemployment and white unemployment has narrowed. that's absolutely true, but that happens in every, you know, in every expansion. the challenge is, what we know about what drives that effect is that when the downturn happens, black workers get fired, first. >> always.

>> >> if you'if you're quoting president, you have to say, "the blacks." >> oh, yes. but they haven't fixed the structural problem that causes that. the next time we have a downturn, we'll see that gap yawn wide open. there's a lack of understanding general lly among the public between cyclical things and trump is riding that cycle, that haven't changed. >> including shutting people out with these discrimination policies, that they're bachsicay stating, getting rid of affirmative action. so to the extent that some of these temperatures have helped all of americans successfully compete in the workplace, again, they're eroding those as well. >> let me just say, you talked about americans. this president is really unpopular, right? we're talking about his supporters. his supporters are actually a minority of americans, right? like most americans do see that he has not fixed the structural problems with our economy. and most americans do believe that the country's on the wrong track. >> but the problem is their

representatives act like sick infants and they just sort of kowtow to this particular president. >> and they learn stuff! people -- they're running the country. >> i think it's interesting that the democrats ran this last election on health care, health care, health care. and did not let themselves get derailed. and that seemed to have an effect. that is a real problem in the lived experience of most americans. and i think you're right, that sort of focus makes a difference. >> michelle, let me tee up your next block. we talked about personnel change, but you talked about weakness a moment ago. what's happened with this chief of staff staff, mick mulvaney being presented with the rose, or maybe just loaned the rose for a few months. >> i think it's hard for me to tell how much any of this breaks through, but i do think that you have to be kind of willfully blind not to see, this is both a humiliation of the president and also a titanic vote of no confidence in the president, right? the fact that this job is extremely sought after in a

normal washington, until now. and now you just see, i mean, it's kind of spectacular, that you can't find anyone to take a job that used to be one of the most coveted positions in washington. that you have kind of -- and also, that you have people like chris christie, you know, not just sort of behind the scenes taking themselves out of the running, but very kind of clearly, publicly rejecting trump. you know? and so, again, some people are going to kind of tell themselves that this was all a plan and that there are more than ten people who wanted this job, as trump tweeted. was i think that you -- i do think that there is a slowly expanding perception of weakness. >> and incompetence. gross incompetence. you have someone like nick ay s ayers, a 36-year-old, highly ambitious chief of staff for the vice president. and then he gets offered the job to be chief of staff of the president and all of a sudden i want to move back home and be with my family. >> and then hashing out this publicly. >> let's come back and talk a

bit more about these personnel changes. this morning, as ryan zinke trots out of washington on his high horse, are there more of the president's closest confidants abouting to sho ingte door? that is next. let's put down roots. let's build something. let's do the thing that you do. let's do the thing that changes the shape of everything... that pushes us forward and keeps us going. let's do the work. the united states postal service makes more holiday deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country. ♪ with one notable exception. ♪ discover.o. i like your card, but i'm absolutely not paying an annual fee. discover has no annual fees.

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stay connected while you move with the best wifi experience and two-hour appointment windows. click, call or visit a store today. . >> welcome back to "up." i'm david gura. more personnel turmoil at the white house. chief of staff john kelly and interior secretary ryan zinke will both step down at the end of the year and reportedly there will be more resignations soon.

dhs secretary kirsten nielsen and wilbur ross are eyeing the exit. michael beschloss joins us now, author of "presidents of war." and i want to start with ryan zinke, i want to put up the picture of him on his irish sport horse, tonto, on the first day of his work in this administration. i think we can juxtapose that with the man that he was clearly idolizing, being teddy roosevelt. we hear michael beschloss with being a lot of pivot points after the midterms. how different is it this time around? >> can i begin by saying that ryan zinke is no to theodore roosevelt. >> as long as you don't say, i knew theodore roosevelt. >> i would like to, but didn't have the pleasure. it happens -- it happens once in a while. and if donald trump had announced all of these replacements on the same day, you would say that an earthquake is hitting this administration. it happens in a number of ways.

1940, franklin roosevelt changed two cabinet members to show that he was moving toward intervention and the war in europe. 1979, jimmy carter did fire almost half of his cabinet, because things were not working. there was inflation, the soviets were being more assertive, and energy crisis, and it actually hurt him very much, because people felt that there was a big crisis in that administration. 2006, after the democrats re-took the house and the senate, george w. bush fired donald rumsfeld because, and this may be the most germane piece of history, he was nervous about rumsfeld having to go before the democratic house and senate and defend the very unpopular iraq war. so he got him out of there. >> brendan, i'll turn to you and mark the departure of ryan zinke, we make fun of the horse and tonto and the nine guards who had to ride with him. i'll continue to make fun of that. but in that piece in "the washington post" about his arrival this day is this line. within hours of his arrival, he

signed two secretarial orders, including one that overturned the fish and wildlife guidance on national wildfire refugees. it began immediately. there was a plan in place. and yes, we can laugh about some facets of him as a personality, but he did accomplish a lot for what he and his backers wanted. >> i think we saw this with scott pruitt, as well. i think there are two things that come together when a republican administration comes in. they do believe that government is bad at things. and so they want the government to stop doing things. but paired with that is a basic assumption from decades of conversation that says government doesn't work, government is awful. and weirdly, that gives a shield, right? if you think that government is inherently inefficient, why should you care if you're running your department efficiently? of course there are going to be scandals. it's the government. but i think that it has been effective, generally within the administration, and i think we take the bait every time. and i think that the regulatory

rollback that happened under scott pruitt is far more serious and far more important to your point than the antic of the various ways in which he scuffed up his landlord's hardwood floors right, because that makes really good copy. but the epa stuff is in ways, completely terrifying. michael beschloss, can a white house be run without a chief of staff? and i ask this because you've got mick mulvaney now, who's going to continue in his capacity as heading up the office of management and budget, is going to take on this role in an acting capacity. there's no way he could do both. the white house says he's going to cede control of omb. how important is that role to the white house generally? >> well, modern times, every president has had a chief of staff, even if that person didn't have that title, back to dwight eisenhower in 1953 who did it, because he was a military person and wanted to have his staff well organized. i think we are probably, i think you've got your finger on it, dade, whether a white house can

operate without a chief of staff, because we're not going to have a full-time one. and can you imagine dwight eisenhower asking someone to be his chief of staff and the guy basically saying, i want to be acting, because i don't know if i can personally stand the ordeal of working for you. we are in period of history we haven't experienced before in this respect. >> paul butler, is palace intrigue the right word for this? it was a phrase we used a lot during the obama administration. there was a popular fascination with the figures in the white house. this is not that. this is not a popular fascination with who's doing what within this white house. >> this is corruption and this is the mechanism of government failing, breaking down. the remedy, again, under the constitution, when we have a president who does not do his job, who is corrupt and incompetent is impeachment. but i've never elected to use the word constitutional crisis, because there is a remedy. there is a political crisis though if the republicans don't

step up. the encouraging news now is that we have a house that will now fulfill its responsibility to check and balance. and so they can actually haul in people like the secretary of education, people like ben carson and find out how they've been failing, expose the corruption, and as a legal matter, there's a lot more power they have to investigate cabinet officials, than they do folks in the white house. because people in the white house can claim executive privilege. >> michelle, is he avoiding all of this, when he goes back to whi whitefish, montana, is he escaping the scrutiny of this congress? >> my sense is probably, just because in a normal situation you would want to kind of retrospectively get to the bottom of all of this corruption. but there's such an all you can eat buffet of crime with this administration that you have to prioritize things, right? so do you prioritize the people who are still there or do you prioritize kind of figuring out

what damage has been done by the people who have cut their losses and left. the same might be true of scott pruitt and the same might be true of kirstjen nielsen is she leaves along with john kelly. it's important to hold her in particular accountable, because there has been such humanitarian done under her purview, but i also think that, you know, congress is going to want to prioritize holding accountable the people who are actually running the government. >> we're going to get to that next, kirstjen nielsen in just a moment. michael beschloss, author of the book "presidents of war." she came into the u.s. and was pronounced dead just hours later. how the death of a migrant girl is sparking outrage and what her father is now saying about how the administration has reacted, next.

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welcome back to "up." i'm david gura. nery caal has spoken about the death of his daughter after she was apprehended with her dad. the grieving father says the family wants a transparent and neutral investigation of her death while in custody. as a national debate continues

over border patrol procedures and administration policies, the department of homeland security's acting inspector general says he plans to launch a probe into jake llin's death. joining me now is maria teresa kumar. maria, let me start by this contradiction we're seeing now, the department of homeland security saying she was deprived of food and water for many days before she made it to the border. the father now saying that's not the case. your reaction to that and your sense of what this investigation needs to look like, going forward. >> well, i think that, first of all, i'm very familiar with rubin garcia, he is the gentlemen that is housing right now the father of jakelin and runs a network of over 20 shelters called the enunciation house. and he is someone who is part of a religious order and works very closely, so he is someone who read the official statement and they're working very closely with lawyers. i would make my bet on what jakelin's father is saying,

based on the individual who is actually delivering this message on his behalf. and sadly what we're finding increasingly with the border patrol is they are not transparent. i have been at border several times, i have visited te nuhe enunciation house and i can share with you the conditions under which a lot of these children are being transpareake are not transparent, they are not providing the medical attention they need, there's a laundry list of abuse we've been able to identify not under the supervision of the border control, but also of these shelters that are housing many of them, that are private detentions. >> you mentioned those private shelters, and i want to ask you about their ability to house all of the individuals that they are housing at this point in time. how we hear a lot about how woeful that infrastructure is, especially since we have an influgs flux in children, there isn't the infrastructure backing to do it. >> exactly right.

>> and instead of addressing the issue head-on, as previous administrations have done, which basically allows an unaccompanied minor, if they have a sponsor here in the u.s. to be released to those sponsors, they're being housed for an extended period of time. and they created a sting operation, where about 120 of these sponsors came in. they turned out to be undocumented. and instead of releasing them to these sponsors, they instead went in and created a detention process for these sponsors. so now people who can help these children get out of these internment camps, as senator hirono said on the show, instead of releasing them, they are making the sponsors afraid to come out of the shadows and provide relief for many of them. the american pediatric society has declared that we are in a state of emergency. the law basically says that these children should not be in custody for more than 20 days.

what we're seeing in tornia, we're seeing these children that are in custody for six, seven, eight months or more. and even the u.n. declared we are in gross voilss of children's rights, specifically. >> we were talking about prioritizing investigations in congress going forward. what's your sense of the muscle congress will bring to this, as maria just mentioned? you have senators going down to the border once again as a result of this happening. do you expect the legislators to take action here? >> i expect the house, hopefully to move on it, especially with the new, young, diverse congress that's coming in, to put pressure on some democrats who have actually been there for quite some time. the problem is, the republican party, for much of the past two years, has been in lockstep with this president, at least outwardly. so there's a lot of, oh, we should do something, we've got to figure it out. when you have the president saying, shoot on site, these people are infecting our nation, all of this horrible rhetoric, it's really motivating the republican party to stay silent in a way that not only does the

u.s. congress need to be a lot more aggressive in dealing with -- it's a humanitarian crisis, it's not just an immigration policy issue. but also, it's time for the u.n. to step in and step up. because what we are doing as americans, as a nation, right, are the same things that we criticize yemen and saudi arabia and all of these other nations -- you know, we wag our finger around the world. we don't ask ourselves why are people coming here in droves. what are we doing to their countries or not doing to their countries that are making them flee upward to the united states. >> i think that's incredibly important. what we're talking about is redefining how we handle asylum in the united states. and we should be looking at why it is that they know exactly how dangerous it is and how awful it is to wander for days in the desert. >> a hundred miles. >> and yet they're coming anyway. i just got back from a conference about economic development in the meramericas. and one thing everyone is saying is china all over latin america writing checks. >> and has been. >> and building infrastructure. >> they're building

infrastructure there. when we look at what's wrong with honduras right now and guatemala, is that we're seeing societal breakdown. and part of that is washing up on our border. but we have thus far, and this is a multi-administration problem, bun interested in looking down our continent and thinking about how to help fix those problems where they are. >> because we don't want to help them. when you look at the way that the administration responded to the tragic death of this little girl, with these callous statements that basically blamed her and her family for her own d.o.t., we ha death, we have to understand that these inhumane conditions are intentional. they are to deter people who are trying to come into the united states, just like all of these folks' ancestor's did, everyone except christina and mine, came in looking for a better opportunity, and now the trump administration is saying, no, and we will create these discou.

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nancy. >> we have a proposal that democrats and republicans will support, to do a cr, that will not shut down the government. we urge you to take it. >> and if it's not good border security -- >> it is very good. >> the last time, chuck, you shut it down. >> no, no, no. >> and opened it up very quickly. i don't want to do what you do. i also know that nancy's in a situation where it's not easy for her to talk right now. >> mr. president, please don't characterize the strength that i bring to this meeting as the leader of the house democrats. >> let me pull back the curtain here a little bit. this is one of those moments where we didn't see that unfold in realtime. there were reporters that were ushered into the oval office and we began seeing trickling out reactions to what happened. yamiche alcindor saying how incredible and stupefying what she saw was that happened in there. my panel back with me. there was so much body language to watch in the course of a 15 or 16-minute long interview.

and as everyone wrote, the president decided to do this last minute, wanted to open the door to reporters, to watch all of this unfold. i kept looking at chuck schumer, who never made eye contact with donald trump, so much as i could tell. >> a couple of things. first of all, he's obviously -- trump is not used to being challenged directly, right? it's like why he barely has press conferences anymore. he's not used to being challenged directly and certainly not used to being challenged directly by women, right? and you can see that he was sort of angry and discombobulated. and i think they both did a pretty good job of setting him up to basically say, i take responsibility for a government shutdown, you know, which is going to be a quote that haunts him forever. so i think that one thing we saw there is why it is that nancy pelosi is and should be the leader of the house democrats, right? there was all of this angst about whether or not she was going to get that position, and people forgot just how good she

is at her job. >> i mean, listen, this president does not understand how congress works. he doesn't understand how the constitution of the presidency works. and so when nancy pelosi, my favorite part for nancy del asandro pelosi says, we're the first branch of government. and you can sort of see donald trump not fully understanding it. had you read the constitution, you would know that article i talks about the legislative branch, and article ii. she walks him through methodically. but i agree with you, there was not a shadow of a doubt that nancy pelosi should be the leader and will be the leader. and donald trump is used to just bluffing and blustering. he's very insecure and he never confronts people face to face, so she essentially said, we know how to do this. and he thought the cameras would sort of make him look great and he's reading off of flash cards with data from nowhere. >> and we add something about the shiv she stuck in afterwards, when she said, it's a manhood thing for him. >> they let that leak

immediately. like, who's going to leak this. >> i look at that again in contrast with all of these other -- he does this all the time. president trump will have cameras come in to cabinet meetings, and there he's got a clack of cabinet members who say a prayer, often, express how glad they are to be working for the president and how glad they are to be in that capacity. so perhaps he was under the illusion that's what this was going to be. >> he's been steadily taking a lot of the norms of the way things are done in washington and doing away with them. this was supposed to be what they call a pool spray. they were supposed to come out, shake hands, and say something innocuous in a pool spray. and after about a minute, you hear the clack of the cameras, everybody gets out of there and then they have the real meeting. i think it's sill they wave pool spray. the pool spray is only there to tell people that a meeting is happening. so the idea -- >> but in this administration, we need to know, so i'll take

it. >> i think it's hilarious he upended what i think is kind of a ridiculous way of doing things in washington, but he didn't do it with enough planning to get it right. he did ambush them. you can see them at the beginning of the video saying, hey, this is the pool spray, buddy. we're about to go have a conversation. and he challenges them to say things in public. but having issued that challenge, he's not capable of carrying it out. >> that goes back to michelle's point, he thought he was going to catch them off guard. and when they have facts and they know how institutions are run, they caught him off guard because they couldn't keep up. it's not like they baited him. they had facts and he can't respond to those in adequate fashion. >> i know i have a producer in the control room who is so eager to put up that picture of annapolnancy pelosi of overcoat and sunglasses on as she leaves the white house. so where does she go from here? what does this tell us about the way she's going to go and what

the democratic leader going forward behind closed doors or not. >> it tells us that nancy pelosi is a boss. she's bad. our democracy is in good hands if she is leading the house republicans. i think she's had a lot of on the job training, so it's also an opportunity to give other people that same benefit. so i think the term limit on her speakership makes sense, given how diverse and, you know, competent this new group of democrats think. it also makes me wonder, given how easy it was for trump to be manipulated many public on camera, we still don't know what happened when he and vladimir putin were in a room alone but for their translator for hours. and if he gets taken advantage of like this on national television, what in the world happened -- >> or that other -- >> from 1970. the other version of the pool spray, when sergey lavrov and sergey kislyak were in the luce

and tas was the pool spray. one thing we didn't solve in that meeting was this shutdown rusk and we are five to six days away from a partial government shutdown. >> we'll stagger forward. we always find a way. >> the american way. >> so one thing we gerforget isw many pieces of substantiative legislation that nancy pelosi passed out of the house in 2006, 2008, before she lost the house, that died on the filibuster in the senate. immigration reform, cap and trade. these are substantiative policy ideas. it wasn't just the aca. i'm looking forward in addition to the investigation, which i think should happen, you know, democrats have a chance to define themselves again, with new substantiative legislation. and you know, she's done it before. i'm excited to see what happens again. >> we'll leave it there. coming back in just a moment, 2018 was full of so many political controversies and bombshells, there can't boebl ti -- possibly touch on everything, we're going to try. our recap of the year's biggest events, coming up here on "up."

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this will be the first of many offshore wind farms in the u.s. ♪ ♪ . welcome back to "up." i'm david gura. we are at the tail end of a very long year. in a new op-ed, michelle writes, quote, astronomers at harvard wrote that a strange oblong space object might be a probe

sent to earth vicinity by an alien civilization. that barely made a ripple in the news. that was too much else going on. 2018 sending more hopefully than it began. we've got a wall behind me here, showing the year that was. and let's go to guess. let's stick with where we are, michelle. i'll start and as we note here, so much happened in this russia investigation in december. this is really the point of your column. wrongs were righted here in 2018. >> yeah. i feel like this is the year that trump world finally saw justice. if you look at where we were a year ago, right, coming into 2018, michael cohen was still donald trump's loyal attorney. paul manafort was still sleeping in his own bed at night. rick gates not yet within a cooperation agreement with the special counsel. steve bannon still running breitbart, hadn't blown up his relationship with the trump administration and with the right and with the world really.

so you just have seen one by one elliot freudy, steve wynn, all these people in prison, in cooperation. because the election of trump was such a shock, it suddenly made him seem almost not like an idiot but like an idiot savant. he figured something out. none of the old rules applied. and this year, he did start to see the old rules apply, right? donald trump did all these things and it resulted in a democratic landslide in the midterms. basically, every organization that he has ever been associated with, his business, his foundation, his campaign, his inaugural committee and his presidency is now under criminal investigation. >> paul, let's go back to

february. we had a new yorker reporting on these payments. here we are now in december. who could have predicted the import at the moment of those stories. >> yeah. and, so, this month the united states department of justice said that the president of the united states coordinated and directed an illegal conspiracy. so to your point, at least the justice department is still doing its job, in part because robert mueller has been left in place. we still don't know what's going to happen there. again, we don't know if matt whitaker, rosenstein, we don't know who is running the investigation. now we should know that. but, you know, there are beacons of light. at the same time, when we look at the politics, you know, i still can't help but thinking about the loss of elections in georgia and florida based on old school racism, just not letting black folks vote. >> we were talking about

personnel changes in april of last year. >> so courageous of the president. >> this has been a theme through the year as well. when you look at the changes that we have been talking about. there is on the one hand nikki haley getting the ten minute swan song in the oval office. on the other end, somebody like rex tillerson getting the virtual boot. >> we are sort of learning about the presidency by tweets, right? i mean, we know that this man is very erratic. he's very insecure. no grown person -- i'm not going to say grown man. no grown person should be communicating with anyone via twitter. >> i'm going to write that down. >> oh, no! >> if i am in charge, if i have something to say to you, especially my secretary of state, it should never be on twitter. we know the president uses this as a tool to manipulate and intimidate president. this is why he finds himself tweeting, i got ten people who really want the job. no, you don't. i talked to my dad the other

day. he said, they're jumping off this administration like rats from a burning ship. you're right. they are. we are starting to see cracks in the foundation. we are hopefully seeing like our constitution will hopefully see this. i have some issues with the framers. however, they did take very great care putting in some trap doors to protect us. i would implore your viewers to read federalist 51. we're starting to see now that the democrats will take control again. we can't have all three branches weakened. but we have a corrupt executive. we have now a partisan judicial, and we can't have an abdicating judiciary. this goes back to nancy pelosi to bring us back to some sort of status quo and maybe even progress. >> brennan had the singapore

summit. president trump meeting with his north korean counter part there. >> so much fun. >> a lot of dinners. >> stand up in front of the television cameras. >> i ask you about this because you focus on trade policy, focus on economic policy. >> yeah. >> there is big talk and the stuff has to be hammered out. we learned through the course of the year, the announcement comes before the policy. >> we were talking about this during the break. i am frustrated with america's trade policy for the last 20 years. it turns out that we thought that it was going to be totally fine if we sign trade agreements with other countries. it was not. and we were unwilling to deal with the consequences for a very long time because we were unwilling to see the consequences. right? we were being told there were massive job losses in north carolina and rhode island because the manufacturing base disappeared in three years. and we listened to economists who, at the time looking at the data we had, said that's not

happening. my frustration is that this administration does not seem to have the attention to detail to actually fix the problem with trade policy. so it seems to be trade theater. right? that's not trade policy. that's trade theater. i can give you a hopeful note. >> 15 seconds. >> businesses are -- we're seeing what businesses will do for workers when they absolutely have to retain them. that won't be forgotten. >> happy to leave it on a hopeful note. thank you very much. and coming up on a.m. joy, fresh reaction to a washington poll and a 2020 poll that has democrats talking this morning. (chime)

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that does it for me today. thank you very much for watching. "a.m. joy" with joy reed starts right now. >> he says he directed me to do it and, oh, my goodness. he directed me. he's a lawyer. he's the guy you depend on to determine whether or not you should do it this way or that way. >> this is a guy who stood up in court and said i was fiercely loyal to donald trump. that's why i did it. no, he wasn't. he was taping him, lying to him. his client. that's outrageous. can you imagine how a j