yamiche alcindor and jose barro. thanks. president trump spent a lot of time talking about the economy and tax cuts. how much that will matter by the time voters head to the polls in november. stay with us. >> this nagging sinking feeling, no matter your political beliefs, that this is not right. this is not who obviously we are. >>> small business confidence is at an all-time high. the stock market has smashed one record after another. gaining $8 trillion and more in value in just this short period of time. and just as i promised the american people from this podium 11 months ago, we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in american history. >> those tax cuts he's talking about are actually only the eighth largest in american history, fourth if you adjust for inflation. tonight the president and his speech writers clearly wanted to emphasize his economic record. that could be a preview of republicans' midterm argument later this year. unfortunately for them a healthy economy so far isn't leading to positive approval rati

and jose barro.a meesh, when we talk about the role of russia in the speech or the lack of a role for russia in the speech, there's the investigation itself but also there's the question of russian meddling in the election, a governmental response to it, possible changes in policy and an approach for future elections and no reference at all to any of that in the speech. >> as soon as i got my hands on the speech which was about 13 pages, the first thing i did was search for the word russia. as far as i could tell it appeared one time in the clip you played where he talked about russia being a rival and somewhat of a challenge for our economy. he would not go into russian -- into the russian government's actions or future actions in our elections. this is something that's continuing to plague the united states. we don't yet have and i say we meaning government agencies and social media companies, don't yet have the an idea of exactly what russia did in the 2016 election. now we have midterms coming up