MELISSA FRANCIS (CO-HOST): A lot of fire in the Rose Garden today! Let's bring it right on out to the couch here. David Webb, let me ask you first. He did go back, he did answer those questions, but he wanted to control the flow of questions at the beginning and focus on trade because this is something they have been working on for a long time and he's gotten used to this idea that you come out and you make yourself open to questions and it gets hijacked away from what it is that you want to talk about. He did circle back. But boy, that was contentious.
Some of the quotes -- Cecilia Vega was the one at the beginning, from ABC News. That was the most contentious, when he called on her first and then he said “she was in shock because I picked her.” She said something similar to “I was not thinking of” and he said “I know you are not thinking, you never do.” And she said “excuse me?” What did you think about all those exchanges?
DAVID WEBB (SIRIUS XM RADIO HOST): Actually if you look at Trump over time and who he is, the president being pretty much who he is. I do like the fact that he controlled -- “we're going to talk about trade first.” And people can argue about the style, but there's a lot of substance in this deal and that's what we should focus on. He did go back to Kavanaugh. And for everybody who doesn't want to talk about the president's availability to the press, this has been the most available president to the press. You've all just watched another example. He'll take the Q&A. Katie and I were joking that before the show, he'll take the Q&A longer than the speech, three times over. So he gave the press what they wanted. And I'd rather talk about the substance.
FRANCIS: Katie, the thing is, obviously this trade deal is enormous. He had promised a better deal, and people have been making fun of him forever saying, you're out there, you're putting everything in peril -- the tariffs, you don't really want this. So he's frustrated, he finally got out there. But the tone with those reporters, especially when he said to her “I know you were not thinking, you never do.”
KATIE PAVLICH (CO-HOST): Look, I don't think he would've said anything different to Jim Acosta from CNN. So if we're going to focus on the him telling her that she wasn't thinking about something, which I'm sure the media will, in the environment that we're in -- he treats reporters fairly. And he's had this tone since he started out on the campaign trail with reporters. So I think that continuing to focus on it is actually huge distraction away from the news here.
