>> karoun, your thoughts on this?it's interesting we haven't seen him come out directly and call stormy daniels a liar. we are seeing it through friends like this. the president has been disciplined about not react to go that enter is view last night and when other parts of the story have come out. so he seems to be at least listening to his advisers on this when it comes to other things that have happened during his presidency that affect him. that suggests there is a reason he is keeping quiet. this is all being dragged into courts again and who is at more fault. as trump gets more involved and in saying she's not telling the truth, maybe stormy daniels would say there is potential defamation to bring up. she is saying publicly she is telling the truth. he is listening to advisers apparently. i'm sure they are telling him to keep his own counsel. >> politically this is very unusual. he has been counseled plenty not to say things about certain people and he does anyway, even when there is potential legal exposure whe

. >> karoun, the thing that's missing from and other size strong show of retaliation are the words from the president himself. is that relevant? >> yes. it's definitely significant. it's significant that the united states and the trump administration decided to join with so many european nations to make this move. i think that's a real answer to the concerns that were out there about whether trump would be in lockstep with europe and nato when it comes to the matters of looking at what's coming from moscow. we have not seen the president change his personal tune. this is not the first time there's a disjointed nature between what trump is saying and what his administration is doing. if you go back to the questions of russian meddling, the president hasn't said this is the bottom line of what happened even though everyone else in this administration has. he's taking a pretty significant step with these expulsions with the russian officials in the united states, but the most recent thing we have is him flouting his national security advisers and deciding the congratulate putin on his elec

karoun, i'll send this to you. want him to do something, if you tell him to do something, he's going to do the opposite would it have made sense not mention anything about congratulations putin or not or say maybe you just want to say a little congrats. could that have pushed him the other way. >> try to use reverse psychology on how the president will engage with other nations is a risky game. it is a dereliction of duty. what if he decides to listen to them that time because it lines up with what his inclinations were to begin with in the first place. that is a risky deal there. his advisers are trying to keep him in check. the list chris made with all the reasons not to outardly warm putin. add to that that there is app investigation of allegations that the president has ties to russian officials linked to putin. but, look, this is standard advice when you deal with russia you need to maintain a position of strength and also distance because there are various malign activities that are going on that the intellig

let's bring in cnn political analysts david avalon and karoun demirjian. dr. ronnie jackson. reportedly the president floated this with some of his advisers. they thought he was joking or didn't think this would actually happen. but in fact, he trusts his personal white house doctor because this doctor travels with him regularly. he knows him forwardly intimately. and he has decided to give him this huge responsibility of the second biggest agency in the government. >> this is an agency with $186 billion budget, over $300,000 employees. i'm sure he certainly did well defending the president on on air at length after the physical. some of the particulars may come up in confirmation hearing, as chris was saying earlier. it is not a criteria for running this kind of brureaucracybureau. this is a president who also wanted to nominate his personal pilot to run the faa. this is who do i know, who is nearest, how about you. >> even the way we were describing it. he knows him. he likes him. he travels him. since when does that equate run with run 377,000 people, hundreds of billions