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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin
Trump Clinches Republican Nomination; Clinton Defends Email Use; President Obama Visits Hiroshima. Aired 4:30-5a ET
Aired May 27, 2016 - 04:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANA CABRERA, CNN ANCHOR: And so, Donald Trump getting the world's stage as the president marks historic moment here visiting Hiroshima, Japan.
[04:30:08] The first U.S. sitting president to visit this city.
ALISON KOSIK, CNN ANCHOR: And as we wait, we are waiting on remarks from President Obama as he visits Hiroshima. He is inside the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum there.
CABRERA: You know, we will continue to watch these images and -- is that him? Nope. That's not. We will watch the images for you. We will take a quick break and be right back. As soon as the president starts speaking, we will take you there live.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KOSIK: Donald Trump clinching the Republican nomination. Celebrating his win with new attacks for Hillary Clinton and promising to debate Bernie Sanders.
CABRERA: Hillary Clinton defending her use of private e-mail as secretary of state to CNN.
[04:35:01] Why the Democratic frontrunner still insists she did nothing wrong.
KOSIK: President Obama arriving in Hiroshima, a first for any U.S. president, 70 years after the atomic bomb was dropped. We're going to take you live to his speech when it begins. You're looking at pictures from moments ago when the president arrives in Hiroshima.
Welcome back to EARLY START. I'm Alison Kosik.
CABRERA: I'm Ana Cabrera. Happy Friday. It's now 35 minutes past the hour. It's a busy morning.
And it's official. This morning, Donald Trump is now the presumptive Republican nominee when you look at the numbers. By CNN's count, he has crossed that threshold of 1,237 delegates, enough to win the nomination in July. Trump campaigned across the west yesterday throwing more barbs at Hillary Clinton and President Obama and he seems to brush off the president's remarks at the G7 Summit when he said that world leaders have been rattled by Trump. Let's listen. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: That's good if they're nervous. That's good. That's good. That's good. Let them be a little bit nervous.
By the way, I'll have a better relationship with other countries than he has, except we'll do better and they won't be taking advantage of us anymore, and they won't be calling us the stupid people anymore.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CABRERA: There have been a number of twists and turns in the past 24 hours. We have CNN's Phil Mattingly traveling with Trump campaign.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey there, Ana and Alison. Well, Donald Trump had two campaign events in Thursday, on in North Dakota, one in Montana. These were supposed to be events that were crucial to getting him over that 1,237 delegate total to secure the Republican nomination. At least that's what they were supposed to be about.
Donald Trump reached that total. Obviously, the rest of his opponents dropped out weeks ago. Donald Trump now has clinched the number of delegates needed to be the Republican nominee. He's ready to attack. High on his list: the man currently in the office that he hopes to win in November. Take a listen.
TRUMP: He is a president and does a horrible job. He is a president that allowed the countries to take advantage of him and us, unfortunately. And he's got to say something. And it's unusual that every time he has a press conference, he's talking about me.
So, you know, it's just one of those things. But I will say this. He is a man who shouldn't be really, you know, airing his difficulties and he shouldn't be airing what he is airing where he is right now. And I think that you're going to see it stop pretty soon.
MATTINGLY: Now, Trump speaking to reporters in North Dakota also targeting Hillary Clinton and also continuing his fight with Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who has attacked him so thoroughly on both Twitter and in YouTube videos over the last couple weeks, a fight -- a heavyweight fight, if you will, that you can pretty much expect is going to continue in the weeks and months ahead.
For Trump, though, this is a crucial moment. He has been shifting to the general election for the last couple of weeks. But now, it has become very official. That is his job. That is his sole role here. And you're seeing, while he's been on the campaign trail the last couple of days, it's likely he will head back to New York soon and really start to mobilize, not just for the Republican convention in July, but the path forward.
His poll numbers right now are fairly even with Hillary Clinton. But no question, through certain segments of the national population, he has a lot of work to do. His campaign advisers acknowledge that but say the work ahead will cause his numbers to rise and give him an opportunity to beat Hillary Clinton.
Back to you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CABRERA: Thank you, Phil Mattingly.
Right now, breaking news: President Obama arriving at Peace Memorial Park. This is where he's visiting now Hiroshima, Japan, and expected to make historic remarks in a matter of minutes.
You can see he is going through some formal motions here, paying tribute to the 140,000 lives lost 70 years ago.
KOSIK: He is standing next to the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as well as he lays the wreath, remarking the historic moment. Interestingly, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe not making any plans to reciprocate any plans for a visit to Pearl Harbor. Pushing the U.S. into World War II. Nevertheless, President Obama visiting Hiroshima, the first sitting president to do so.
CABRERA: Let's just pause for a moment and mark this tragedy.
(INAUDIBLE)
[04:40:52] CABRERA: So again the president and the prime minister of Japan laying the wreaths at the memorial in Hiroshima. The president now taking the podium to take a few reflection remarks we're told.
Let's listen.
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.
Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.
Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.
It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind.
On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.
The world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.
In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die.
[04:45:06] Men, women, children, no different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death. There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war, memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity.
Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity's core contradiction. How the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our toolmaking, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.
How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth? How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.
Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill.
Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.
Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.
The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.
That is why we come to this place. We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and the wars that would follow.
Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again. Some day, the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination.
[04:50:04] It allows us to change.
And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.
Still, every act of aggression between nations, every act of terror and corruption and cruelty and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man's capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.
We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics.
And yet that is not enough. For we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale.
We must change our mind-set about war itself. To prevent conflict through diplomacy and strive to end conflicts after they've begun. To see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build.
And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.
For this, too, is what makes our species unique. We're not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.
We see these stories in the hibakusha. The woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself. The man who sought out families of Americans killed here because he believed their loss was equal to his own.
My own nation's story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
[04:55:00] Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family -- that is the story that we all must tell.
That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here, 71 years ago.
Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it.
When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
The world was forever changed here, but today, the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.
(APPLAUSE)
SHINZO ABE, PRIME MINISTER OF JAPAN (through translator): At the 70th anniversary at the end of war, I visited the United States, and gave a speech as prime minister of Japan at a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress.
That war deprived many --
KOSIK: All right. You are looking at the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, making remarks after President Obama made his remarks in Hiroshima. He is the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima there at peace memorial museum.
Let's go to White House correspondent Michelle Kosinski who is standing by with us.
Michelle, are you there?
MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Right. Hopefully you can hear me.
KOSIK: We can hear you. How is President Obama's visit being received?
KOSINSKI: It's hard to overstate how much this means to the Japanese people and how powerful a moment this is. I mean, they have been wanting a U.S. president to visit this site for decades. They have been asking for it, talking about it, not necessarily looking for an apology, because that raises issues within Japan as well and sentiments here that this government doesn't necessarily want to address in that way, and uncomfortable feelings.
But this is exactly what they were looking for.
