President Donald Trump surrendering American security for the sake of cozying up to Saudi Arabia should have even MAGA questioning their life choices, Axios CEO Jim Vandehei told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on Wednesday's "Morning Joe."
"If you're in MAGA and you're America First, what the hell are you thinking today?" said Vandehei. "You're watching the fact that you have the White House and Congress. The only thing that they've done in the last two months is vote to release the Epstein files over the objection of the president, who doesn't didn't want any of the files to be released in the first place. Nothing else. Then you put next to that the fact that you have a quasi-state dinner with the Saudis."
"Now, remember, like, it was the Saudis who were on the airplane that crashed into our Towers, killing 3000 Americans. That's just a fact," said Vandehei. "And it's also a fact that the journalist that he was deriding when he was talking to the press yesterday was sawed into pieces. And the CIA, under Trump, had a report that linked it pretty directly to at least the crown prince being aware of it. And you have him talking to the Saudis about getting deals from us, where we're going to let them have our F-35s on their soil. We're going to give them access to our AI technology" — even as the Saudis say they could pass that tech along to China."
It's understandable there's a burgeoning revolt among MAGA activists, Vandehei continued, because "this isn't what we paid for, thisisn't what we voted for. Thisisn't what we asked for in your competence."
"If you're a republican, you got to boil at some point because you've got Nirvana. You've got as much power as I've ever seen, vested in one party at one time in one city," said Vandehei. "And yet, if you look at the number of laws actually being signed, the things that will outlast the short term deals, very few of them. And then you look at the polling and you look at that working class white voter who put you into office and they're frustrated ... every issue that they care about, including things being really expensive and them being very worried about whether they're going to get a job or their kid's going to get out of college and enter the job market that we've seen in 5 or 10 years, not even really discussed."
"And it does come down to competence," he added. "If you have the right people doing the right work at the right time, you get really good results. That's like the trick of leading anything, running a company, running a government."