On CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, sports analyst and television personality Stephen A. Smith spoke about the first few months of the Trump administration.
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00:00What was your reaction when he said that the other night?
00:05I was aghast, to be quite honest with you.
00:07I wasn't looking for any kind of endorsement from anybody, especially him.
00:11But he is the president of the United States.
00:13There's a bit of flattery that comes with getting such words from the man who holds the highest office in the land,
00:19and I can appreciate that.
00:20But in the same breath, I'm saying to myself, you know what, evidently I'd have no chance
00:25because if somebody like that is throwing out my name, clearly they'd think that, yeah, go ahead and do it
00:30so we can beat you, we can romp you, too.
00:32So I'm not falling for it.
00:33It was nice.
00:34It was nice to hear, and I appreciated it.
00:36But obviously, it is what it is.
00:38I hear where he's coming from, but I wasn't thinking about it any more seriously than that.
00:44President Trump's been in office now for more than 100 days.
00:48What's been your reaction to his administration so far?
00:53I think it's been a bit haphazard.
00:54That's something I've been on the record as saying.
00:57Certainly, we understand that waste, fraud, and all of that stuff needs to be addressed,
01:01but the manner in which he went about it with Elon Musk gave me cause to pause with Doge,
01:06so I certainly wasn't happy about that.
01:08The tariff wars, I thought he was going to focus first on lowering taxes.
01:11That's what I would have liked to have seen, because that was something that he campaigned on,
01:15even though he campaigned on tariffs a lot as well.
01:17I certainly expected him to—I would have liked, rather, to see him focus more on lowering taxes first
01:23as opposed to engaging in a tariff war, particularly a tariff war that didn't just include China,
01:28but practically everybody else, at least for a short period of time before folks got in his ears
01:33and got him to sort of retract a little bit.
01:36So I see that.
01:37I have no problem with what he's done with the borders.
01:39I thought it was absolutely necessary.
01:41So I definitely think that that was a plus, because I was never a proponent of open borders.
01:46But outside of that, I take a wait-and-see approach, because, you know, history has taught me
01:51that the prism of history is how you determine the success of a president,
01:55as opposed to looking at things in the moment, in real time,
01:58because usually that's going to garner extreme reactions one way or the other,
02:02and I try not to lean in either direction of the extreme.
02:06I'm a centrist and a moderate at heart, and I try to make sure I'm as balanced in my thinking as I possibly can be.