Peggy Noonan: Trump Couldn’t Get The Grown Ups To Join the Admin; He Got Who He Got

YAMICHE ALCINDOR: All of those people are people, not just that he dealt with personally and dealt with in a business manner, but those are also people that he thought had his back. There’s reporting that David Pecker had his secret in a safe, at The National Inquirer. The president has to be sitting back and thinking, “If all of these people are talking, and Paul Manafort is just another name on the long list of people, what’s the story that they can tell?”

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: What a commentary it is on the nature of our politics today that we constantly are talking about prosecutors, we’re constantly talking about people flipping, people going to jail. We should be talking about the state of the country and they’re obsessing us, and understandably so.

PEGGY NOONAN: I think part of the story perhaps with the president and all of these people who’ve been indicted or come under questioning is that he may not have any deep insight into their nature because he didn’t really know them. So he almost can’t judge where they’re going next. The people around Trump during the campaign were an island of broken toys. They were individual operatives. They were driven by their own drama. Trump couldn’t get anybody else. He couldn’t get the grown ups to join. He got who he got.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: And that shows the lack of experience, coming in from the outside and not bringing in the people who knew what they were doing.

PEGGY NOONAN: Oh, sure.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Absolutely.

CHUCK TODD: For what it’s worth, Trump’s always built his worlds that way. It’s not just in politics. He’s always sort of ends up with, you know, everybody with their own agendas. And that sort of – and it ends up clashing. All right. We’re gonna pause here. When we come back, quick look at the midterm elections and how quickly one of the outlooks has changed.