On Friday’s broadcast of “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated, “I was trying to think of a president who had a worse week.”
Brooks said, “Well, I was trying to think of a president who had a worse week. I mean, as Mark said, like, to have your major legislative initiative die, and — your first major one, and then get a scandal into your integrity in one week, that’s a rarity in American history, let alone this early in a term.”
He continued, “I’m not sure we’re ever going to find some smoking gun that’s going to link the Trump campaign to Vladimir Putin. I mean, there is, — to me, the big mystery is the almost magnetic pull between the Trump crowd and Russia. Like, what is the basis of that? Is it because he had so many investors? And, as I’ve said before — and we seem to be getting a little closer to this answer, where did Paul Manafort come from? How did he become chairman of the Trump campaign in the middle of all this, a guy who had ties to mobsters from Russia? I mean that’s — these are not normal things. What was the chain of events that led to that? But whether we will actually have conversations or proof or actual evidence, we — I — we’ve oversold this story at times. I’m not saying it’s not significant, but we’ve leapt to the — connecting all the dots, when the dots really aren’t there.”
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