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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin
Donald Trump & Hillary Clinton Win Big in Northeast Primaries; Trump University Fraud Case Will Go To Trial; Sentencing for Dennis Hastert; Will Tennessee Governor Veto Therapist Bill?; iPhones Sales Drop for First Time. Aired 5-5:30a ET
Aired April 27, 2016 - 05:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I just want to thank everybody. This is a far bigger win than we even expected. All five. That's something --
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Let's go forward. Let's win the nomination, and in July, let's return as a unified party.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[05:00:03] CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Huge victories for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The presidential front runners getting closer to clinching their party's nomination, pivoting toward a general election.
Good morning. Welcome to this special edition of EARLY START. I'm Christine Romans.
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm John Berman. It is Wednesday, April 27th, it is 5:00 a.m. in the East.
And the Acela primary, the Super Spring Tuesday in April, a big night for the front runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, he went five for five. He swept all states.
Look at some of the margins that he wrapped up there. He got 63 percent in Rhode Island. In Delaware, he hit more than 60 percent. In Connecticut, he got 57 percent. He's getting over 50 percent there, gave him a lot more delegates. In Pennsylvania, 56 percent. And in Maryland, he hit 54 percent.
ROMANS: Also, an incredibly important night for Clinton, who picked up Pennsylvania with 55 percent of the vote. Maryland, 63 percent there. In Delaware, 59, almost 60 percent there. In Connecticut, 52 percent.
Bernie Sanders won in just one state, Rhode Island, 55 percent there.
Trump and Clinton held late-night rallies, both calling for party unity, both pivoting toward the general election.
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TRUMP: I consider myself the presumptive nominee, absolutely.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich should really get out of the race now. They have no path to victory.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
Honestly, they should get out of the race and we should heal the Republican Party, bring the Republican Party together.
CLINTON: I applaud Senator Sanders and his millions of supporters for challenging us to get unaccountable money out of our politics and giving --
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
Greater emphasis to closing the gap of inequality. And I know together we will get that done.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
Because whether you support Senator Sanders or you support me, there's much more that unites us than divides us.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: All right. Let's break down last night's results with our panel. Senior media correspondent Brian Stelter, he's the host of CNN's "RELIABLE SOURCES." Senior reporter for media and politics, Dylan Byers, and CNN politics reporter, Eric Bradner.
Good morning, everyone.
I want to play a little piece of sound from Hillary Clinton last night where there are few different sound bites that really pivoted her toward the general election. One where she said, deal me in, which was talking about the woman card, playing woman card, if it's supporting families and children, then deal me in. I think you're going to hear more of that as we pivot toward a general election.
The other one was this swipe at Trump where she said, love trumps hate. Listen.
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CLINTON: We're going to imagine a tomorrow where hard work is honored, families are supported, streets are safe, and communities are strong and where love trumps hate.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
That is -- that is the future I want. I want that future for my granddaughter and for all of our grandchildren.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: Brian Stelter, that moment jumped out to you last night.
BRIAN STELTER, CNN SENIOR MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: Yes, this is one of the kind of final times she's going to have one of these big events on a primary night. If it continues to move the way it's looking now, she will clinch the nomination and this will wrap up on the Democratic sooner on the Democratic side than the Republican side.
She knew she had a big moment in primetime to talk about this and, of course, to use the word Trump, saying love Trumps hate. That's something we're going to see again and again and again in the months to come.
BERMAN: You know, and, Dylan Byers, of course, the reason she was able to try to do this pivot to the general election, the reason Donald Trump likewise was able to do this pivot to the general election were these huge results we saw last night. Donald Trump went five for five.
You know, I think we all thought he was going to win all five states, but the margins with which he did so were surprising to a lot of people. Likewise with Hillary Clinton. She took four out of five, losing Rhode Island.
But again, the margins in some cases, particularly Pennsylvania, bigger than expected. This in your mind, Dylan, really changes a lot.
DYLAN BYERS, CNN SENIOR REPORTER FOR MEDIA AND POLITICS: Yes, it changes a lot. I think we can pretty confidently say who the nominees in each party are going to be.
The reasons again being for Hillary Clinton, she's practically there. For Donald Trump, no matter what -- I mean, barring some sort of huge major change, she's going to get to the convention with at least the majority of votes on the Republican side, if not the full 1,237 delegates. As we've seen from our exit polls, the majority, a large majority of Republican voters believe that the candidate who has the most delegates should be the nominee.
[05:05:06] It's going to be very hard for the Republican establishment to come back and tell all those voters that their voice doesn't matter. But the individual I'm sort of most thinking about right now is Bernie Sanders. Having acknowledged that he's effectively going to be pushing his agenda as opposed to his shot at the nomination now.
The question that I think the Sanders campaign is asking themselves is this: how much leverage do we have? This movement we've created, how much of a force can that be at the convention, and what are we going to try and lobby for?
Hillary Clinton is busy extending these olive branches. The Sanders campaign has to be asking itself, OK, what issues do we want to press? What do we want to get Hillary Clinton to commit to behind the scenes in order to give her our support publicly?
STELTER: Yes, the results last night from the delegate race for Sanders and Clinton sort of speak to his campaign overall: 214 delegates for Clinton versus 160 for Bernie Sanders -- an impressive performance by Bernie Sanders. A lot higher than people would have guessed a year ago. But just not there, just not enough to catch up to Hillary Clinton.
And that's been the story essentially all season long, summed up against last night.
ROMANS: Eric Bradner, I want to ask you about another moment on the campaign trail last night, especially the victory speech from Donald Trump, where he had this new line of attack against Hillary Clinton, accusing her of playing the woman card. Listen to what he said.
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TRUMP: Well, I think the only card she has is the woman's card. She's got nothing else going. And, frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she's got going is the woman's card, and the beautiful thing is women don't like her, OK?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: What do you make of that moment? And is that setting us up for a gender general election?
BERMAN: A genderal election.
ROMANS: A genderal election?
(LAUGHTER)
ERIC BRADNER, CNN POLITICS REPORTER: Yes. So the most interesting part of that comment was Mary Pat Christie in the background sort of casting some side eye in Trump's direction.
Listen, for Trump, this is the kind of comment that gets him in trouble. The biggest myth of the primary so far is that Trump has this Teflon quality. Well, that's true with Republican primary voters, but it hasn't been tested yet with the general electorate.
And this is another big piece of the bank of footage that Democrats are going to unload on Trump in the general election.
He does really well with white n, with people he sort of, famously called poorly educated, high school graduates, people without college degrees. But there aren't enough of them to win swing states in the general election. He's going to have to start broadening his appeal. He's going to have to keep there from being a massive gender gap, as Brian Stelter pointed out earlier, 53 percent of the electorate in 2012 was female.
So this is the kind of comment that Trump throws out that his crowd loves. It's an attack on Hillary Clinton, who he's been saying he's going to start hitting harder for weeks now. It plays well in the moment. The crowd eats it up.
But it's going to be a different story in the general election when these comments are used against him in front of an audience that might not be as $ receptive to them.
STELTER: It doesn't just offend some women, it also offends some men. In some ways, Donald Trump was playing the -- I don't know what we would call it. I guess the men's card. I'm not sure what that is because normally this stuff is applied to women in a way that's unfair.
BYERS: Let's fact check what he said when he said women don't light Hillary Clinton. His negatives are much higher. There's no question that Hillary Clinton -- look, a Trump v. Clinton election is an election in which both nominees are running with the highest negatives for a candidate from both parties in modern history. That said, his negatives among women eclipse hers. Let's call that either pants on fire mostly false.
BERMAN: All right, guys. Stand by. A lot more to talk about on this front.
ROMANS: Yes, Donald Trump has a lot to celebrate. He'll be doing that this morning on CNN, where I suspect he'll be asked about his comments on the woman's card this morning live on "NEW DAY" at 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time.
BERMAN: Also on "NEW DAY," Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. He says he's not running for president and warning the candidates who are not to wait until the convention to get their acts together, else it will be too late.
ROMANS: All right. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton winning big. Is there any path to victory at all for their primary competitors? We've got that next.
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[05:14:09] SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Do we want to the support a campaign that is based on yelling and screaming and cursing and insults? Or do we want to unite behind a positive, optimistic, forward-looking, conservative campaign?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: What we are seeing on national polls, which have us 15, 20 points ahead of Donald Trump, far more than Secretary Clinton.
(CHEERS)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: All right. A big night, though, for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The race for president far from over. New exit polls are showing the front runners, how they won, and whether there's any path to victory for their primary competitors.
I want to bring our panel back in to discuss, Brian, Dylan, Eric.
You know, when you dig within these numbers, what I think you see, Dylan, is you see how both of these front runner candidates took their core support and expanded it.
[05:15:03] They did very well, both of them, really across the board.
BYERS: Yes, that's absolutely right. Donald Trump continuing to prove that his ceiling is higher than his doubters often said it would be.
And then, I think on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton most crucially sort of expanding her support among white voters. She's always had the support of minority groups and Latinos, African- Americans, but her ability to sort of stop Bernie Sanders in his tracks when it comes to the white vote, I think, is clutch. And again, it goes back to this idea she's trying to expand her base as she pivots toward the general election.
She's trying to convince those white voters, those young voters that it's time to come around to her and that doing so is by no means giving up their dreams of a more -- a brighter, more progressive future.
BERMAN: You see winning white voters in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Keeping it close in Connecticut. This is not something we've necessarily seen from state to state as these primaries have gone on.
You know, Eric Bradner, you know, Romans was saying, you know, do Donald Trump's opponents have a path to victory right now? One interesting thing we saw in the exit polls is that the voters seem to say, we're not sure we want them to have a path to victory right now because that only path would be through a contested convention.
And we asked voters, if no one gets to 1,237 delegates to nominate, what do you want to happen? And look at that, in Pennsylvania, 70 percent said they want to see the primary winner, the person who gets the votes. Connecticut, 66 percent said the same. We saw that in Maryland as well.
More than two-thirds of the voters essentially say they want the person with the most votes to get the nomination, even if they don't get the required number of delegates.
BRADNER: Right. This means people are going to the ballot box, voting for Ted Cruz or John Kasich, and also saying they don't want a contested convention where Cruz or Kasich battles it out and wins on the second or third or fourth ballot, which is a fascinating result.
It really underscores why Trump is talking consistently on the campaign trail about what we now have to say is a reality. The only way he can be denied the nomination is if this sort of democratic process does not lead to the person with the most votes, the most delegates being awarded the nomination.
That's a point Trump is absolutely going to drive home in Indiana, which is sort of the next big contest. It's up next Tuesday. Cruz and Kasich are, you know, have this divide and conquer strategy, but Trump's argument that it's kind of conniving seems to really be sinking in.
So, this number shows that the Republican electorate seems to be growing more and more comfortable with the idea of Donald Trump as its nominee.
STELTER: That was the big message I heard from Trump last night. He went to this TIME 100 Gala, which is this big party "TIME" magazine holds here in New York. It was kind of date night with Melania, it was her birthday. So, he brought her to this event.
And the big message he got for me and other journalists there was, look, you've always underestimated us, you always thought there was a ceiling on our supporters, as you said, Dylan, 50 percent, now, 60 percent and above is the ceiling. That's with only three people.
In fact, that was his message as well to the RNC chairman as he was leaving last night.
ROMANS: One last interesting point about those exit polls. When you look at what it means for the party, whether the parties are energized or disrupted by the primary process, you see very different pictures between the Democrats and the Republicans. Majority of Democrats in these states last night saying they're energized by the primary campaign.
But the Republicans, look at this in Pennsylvania. Has the Republican campaign mostly energized or divided the party, 58 percent say divided. Look at Democrats in Connecticut, 66 percent say it energized the party.
I think, John Berman, that's like an interesting, interesting tale of this --
BERMAN: Interesting to see how that plays going forward.
All right. Donald Trump did win big overnight, but Trump University being taken to court, accused of scamming students. How will this affect the election? Details next.
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[05:23:20] ROMANS: A Trump University fraud lawsuit will go to trial, and it could lead to Donald Trump taking the stand. A New York judge ruling that the $40 million suit brought by the state's attorney general against Trump, the university, and its former president will move forward. The attorney general alleging Trump appeared in ads that falsely claimed Trump University would used hand-picked experts to teach get-rich real estate schemes. The attorney general says that fleeced students out of millions.
This morning, Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert learns his fate for paying hush money to cover up sex abuse. Hastert already pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators and orchestrating illegal bank withdrawals in the 1970s as part of the plea deal. The judge is expected to hear testimony from at least one of Hastert's accusers at today's sentencing before deciding whether the 74-year-old should serve jail time.
Tennessee's governor must decide by tonight whether to sign or veto a so-called therapist bill. The legislation would allow psychotherapists to refuse service to LGBT patients for religious reasons. Last week, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam convinced lawmakers to withdraw a similar bill which would require transgender students to use restrooms according to the gender on their birth certificate, not the gender with which they affiliate.
Time for an early start in your money this morning. The Dow futures slipping this morning after some bad corporate results last night. Oil prices are up. Stock markets in Europe and Asia are mostly down here.
Two well-known tech companies could suffer some big losses in the stock market today. Apple posted its worst quarterly results in 13 years. Here's what that looks like, profits sinking 22 percent during the first three months of the year, revenue down 13 percent.
[05:25:01] IPhone sales dropping for the first time ever, down 16 percent compared with a year ago. That's 10 million fewer iPhones sold.
Apple shares tanking 8 percent in free market trading. Wow. The stock is down some 20 percent over the past year.
We're also tracking shares of Twitter. Twitter shares down 13 percent ahead of the opening. A bad miss on sales. Twitter is also giving a lower guidance -- lower outlook for the rest of the year. For the past 12 months, that stock has lost more than half of its value.
All right. Twenty-five minutes past the hour.
The big story this morning: big wins for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. "NEW DAY" picks up our special post-primary coverage next.
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