CHUCK TODD (HOST): George, I will give you the first word and that is on the president's credibility. Is it -- at what point does it become a problem on Capitol Hill when you're trying to sell health care and sell this budget?
GEORGE WILL: It becomes a problem immediately and there's a much bigger credibility problem down the road. This week, Secretary [of State Rex] Tilllerson in the far east, in Korea, obliquely but clearly raised the possibility of preemptive war against the ballistic missile program and nuclear weapons program in North Korea. That means there's a not trivial possibility that some time in the life of this term, this presidential term, the president will have to come to the country and say, “We have to do something dangerous and difficult and even morally ambiguous because the intelligence services tell me X, Y, and Z.” And the country's going to say, “Wait a minute. Those are the people we don't trust and you don't trust, and we're not sure about you particularly,” so it's hard to hermetically seal the loss of credibility.
TODD: Robert, do they understand this, or are they not thinking about this?
ROBERT COSTA: My sources inside of the White House tell me that the president reviews news organizations' information sometimes even more than intelligence information.
TODD: So we're more important than the presidential daily brief?
COSTA: Well he gets the presidential daily brief, but if you look at the tweets a few weeks ago that started the whole wiretapping situation, it was because of a Breitbart article, my sources tell me, that was put in front of the president. Now he's watching Judge [Andrew] Napolitano on Fox News and he's digesting all of this information, rather than just the intelligence brief, and he's disseminating it publicly.
