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Remains of EgyptAir Flight 804 May Have Just Been Found; Donald Trump Completes Improbable Trek To The Republican Nomination; Exclusive Interview With Kenny Rogers. Aired 3:30-4p ET
Aired May 26, 2016 - 15:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[15:32:55] BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN GUEST ANCHOR: We are back now with breaking news just in to CNN.
We are getting word that the remains of EgyptAir flight 804 may have just been found. Airbus has just detected signals from the Mediterranean Sea where EgyptAir flight 804 crashed last week. This is coming to us from Egyptian state media. And this means, this news means that the search grid has just narrowed dramatically. It's gotten so much smaller.
And I want to go live now to Cairo and Nic Robertson. He is our CNN international diplomatic editor.
And so Nic, to be clear here, these signals are not coming from the black boxes? What do we know?
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Well, we know that two days ago Egyptian officials were talking of a search area the size of Connecticut. Now they are talking of a search area of a circle, a diameter, radius rather at about miles. So hugely shrinking the search area.
What the head of the investigation here in Egypt has told state television is that he was contacted by airbus and airbus told him they picked up a signal from the ELT, the Emergency Location Transmitter. Now, there are three of these on board an airbus A-320. They are designed to trigger and start sending out signals on impact. What is interesting here is that normally the batteries on these devices last only 48 hours. And here we are seven days later getting this information. But it -- but regardless of how long it's taken to get this information, it does for the investigators narrow the search. Means they can start dropping in those acoustic detection devices into the sea now to try to listen for the beacons that are being transmitted by the black boxes. So this is a major step forward for the investigators right now.
KEILAR: All right, Nic. We will be following that with you.
Nic Robertson for us in Cairo. Thank you so much.
Next, he has done it. Donald Trump has completed his improbable trek to the Republican nomination. He has reached that magic number of 1,237. But instead of Hillary Clinton Donald Trump says he'll debate Bernie Sanders if 10 million goes to charity. Stay with me.
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[15:39:07] KEILAR: Donald Trump's improbable march to the Republican nomination is now all but over. He has clinched those 1,237 delegates, actually 1,238 by our count now that he needs to officially become the party's candidate in November. Well, Trump has the magic number after several unbound delegates declared their support.
I want to bring in the panel now to talk about this. Kristen Soltis Anderson, she is a columnist for "the Washington Examiner." She is also a Republican pollster and strategist. Timothy Naftali, who is also with us now. He is a former director of the Nixon presidential library and he is the author of the American president series book, "George H. W. Bush." And our Phil Mattingly is in Billings, Montana. That's where Donald Trump will make his next campaign stop here in just a few hours.
So Tim, I know you listened to Trump. He gave this rather lengthy news conference following his hitting this number to clinch the nomination. I want to ask what you think about something Newt Gingrich said. He tweeted no one in American history moved from a June 16th announcement to a May 26th winning of a majority. Trump's achievement is remarkable.
How extraordinary is this from your vantage point as a historian.
[15:40:55] TIMOTHY NAFTALI, FORMER DIRECTOR, NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY: This is a huge to use a word that we hear a lot these days development in American history. This is the first time since 1952 that someone without any elected experience has become the nominee of one of the two main parties. Not since Dwight Eisenhower has this happened and Dwight Eisenhower at least had had a career in public service. After all, he was a hero of World War II. So this is the first time that this has happened since 1952 which means you have someone who is of the nominee of one of the two main parties with a very different skill set from the skill set that a lot of us are accustomed to expecting from a potential president. And that means, first of all, some of the questions that he gets he really not comfortable with answering them because he has never really thought in those terms. That's the first.
The second thing is that everybody talks about how nominees move to the center. But they're talking about politicians moving to the center. This is the first time since 1952 that we have had a non- politician who has been nominated. He doesn't necessarily understand those rules or wish to play by them.
A very important thing happened in Washington the other day. Speaker Ryan decided to set up a policy committee to start issuing policy agenda proposals from the House. Which means that the Republican Party which normally will follow the ideas of its nominee may start to speak with two voices about policy. That should be very interesting in the weeks and months ahead.
KEILAR: I definitely agree with you. And it's interesting, Kristen, he doesn't have the same rules. We have seen that over and over again in the primary battle and now as we move towards the general election. I wonder when it comes to something that he is obviously going to be criticizing Hillary Clinton over a lot which is the whitewater controversy from the '90s and this is his counterpunch to when she questions his business credentials and the mortgage crisis. I wonder from your perspective as a pollster, is this something that polls effectively and if not does that even matter if it's Donald Trump using this as an attack line versus some other candidate?
KRISTEN SOLTIS ANDERSON, COLUMNIST, WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Well, it's definitely true that Donald Trump doesn't play by any of the usual rules. And in some ways none of the rules really apply to him. Things that any other candidate could have said that would absolutely destroy their campaigns months ago are sort of a feature rather than a bug for Donald Trump. He can say outlandish things. He can make outlandish charges and it all winds up being OK for him.
When it comes to something like corruption, when it comes to something like sort of shady real estate deals, one of the things that I think is going to be interesting about how the public receives things about Clinton versus Trump is that with Trump, you know, there's a sort of cloud of noise around him but for a lot of people they don't care about that. They think he is good businessman. Stuff may have happened but you know what? His name is on a lot of buildings.
But for Hillary Clinton, this idea that she is somebody who is maybe not trustworthy is already more built into her brand. When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both viewed unfavorably by 57 percent of the voters, it is for very different reasons. And for Hillary Clinton, a lot of that is about trust and corruption. It's not that way about Donald Trump right now which is why I think he thinks he has the upper hand in this debate.
KEILAR: Phil, and speaking of debates, Phil, let's talk about this idea because Donald Trump says that he welcomes a debate with Bernie Sanders and actually lets pull up a tweet from Bernie Sanders. He just put this out moments ago. He said I'm delighted that Donald Trump agreed to debate. Let's do it in the biggest stadium possible. Is this game on, Phil?
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: No. I don't think it is. Look. I think we would all love to see it. The Bernie Sanders campaign would absolutely love it. I don't think there's a lot in it for Donald Trump. I think bouncing this off of a couple of kind of outside Trump advisers today. They all kind of chuckled about it like the idea of how Jimmy Kimmel brought it up last night. And Donald Trump is going to keep talking about it particularly when he talks about the idea of donations to veterans groups, perhaps or other charities to make this actually happen. But the idea that this would actually come together, I think everybody in the Republican Party would tell Donald Trump, hey, maybe don't do this. You don't need to do this yet. You are the presumptive nominee. It is not necessarily in your best interest. But man oh man, what an interesting spectacle it certainly would be. And I think for Bernie Sanders there's nothing to lose here, Brianna. You know that from covering the Democrats as well as anybody. The idea of Bernie Sanders getting on the stage with Donald Trump is something he and his supporters are pretty much dying for right now. I just think the odds of that actually ever coming together logistically that actually happening are pretty low at this point.
[15:45:10] KEILAR: Yes. And we know that different campaigns can say that they are in on a debate and then things sort of get thrown up that are obstacles to actually scheduling it. So we will have to see how that all plays out.
The Paul Ryan issue, Tim, today Donald Trump says, you know, that he had a good conversation with Paul Ryan on the phone. Obviously, they have talked in person. There's still no endorsement. But there's been rumors about is Paul Ryan going to endorse him? Can you historically imagine a situation where the speaker of the house as a Republican does not endorse the Republican nominee?
NAFTALI: Well, as we have been saying and we all understand this to be true, the rules have changed. Let me -- this is a -- this is a very important moment in the history of the Republican Party. All great American parties change over time. But it's not been since the early 1950s that the isolationist sentiment, the nativist sentiment that Donald Trump appeals to has been in a powerful position in the Republican Party. After Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, after Dwight Eisenhower was nominated, the Republican Party was the party of trade and interaction with the world.
