Tyler Pager

But the president is really just calling on Republicans to...

to abolish the filibuster as a path forward.

I'll defer to Julie on all matters of the filibuster, but really, he wants to see the shutdown end by Republicans blowing up Senate rules, not really bringing the Democrats to the table and figuring out how to get compromise.

Michael, it's really interesting.

I think back to this moment on the campaign where Trump had a campaign event in New Jersey where his advisors wanted him to focus on inflation.

And what they did was they set up this table of all these different grocery items for him to highlight how prices have rose under the Biden administration.

But privately, Trump didn't want to talk about that.

He thought it was boring.

His aides were like, please just talk about the economy briefly, and then you can go talk about whatever you want.

So he goes out to this table with all these groceries and says, you know, my advisors want me to talk about this, but I'm not all that interested in this.

But they say I need to do it.

So here's the speech and basically says it's boring and then moves on.

And I think about that because I think it's going to be really hard for the president to fully pivot and just focus on the economy.

He's really interested in renovating the White House, as you said, and he really wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

And he didn't win it this year, and there's more foreign conflicts that he thinks he can solve to bolster his case.

And look, I think there may be moments where his advisors are successful in convincing him to stay focused on the economy.

I know he is deeply...

concerned about losing the midterms and Democrats taking control of the House and investigating him.

And so his aides are trying to redistrict and do other things to try to make it possible for the Republicans to hold the House.

But I don't imagine a full pivot from Trump on messaging.