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Clinton Speech; Trump Campaign Shakeup; About Steve Bannon. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired August 17, 2016 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:00:00] BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Her campaign hoping her message will resonate with the working class, the middle class. Hillary Clinton's remarks aimed at drawing a sharp contrast from that of Donald Trump and his economic speech just last week.

Now her plan targets the 1 percent, promising a 30 percent minimum tax on millionaires. Trump's plan offers lower taxes for both businesses and individuals, but includes the wealthiest Americans and so much more.

So let's work through all of this here. Rana Foroohar is with me here in New York. She is CNN's global economic analyst and assistant managing editor at "Time." Peter Navarro, business professor at the University of California Irvine (ph) and author of "Crouching Tiger: What China's Militarism Means for the World." He is also a policy advisor for the Trump campaign. And Austan Goolsbee is with us today, a Hillary Clinton supporter and economic advisor and former chairman for the Council of Economic Advisors.

So, welcome to all of you.

And let's get just -

PETER NAVARRO, TRUMP POLICY ADVISER: Nice to be here.

BALDWIN: Thank you.

Let's get right to it. Rana, I want to just turn to you. You know, we sat here and we listened to Mr. Trump earlier last week lay it all out and then it was sort of the rebuttal from Hillary Clinton in Michigan. Here she is in Ohio.

RANA FOROOHAR, CNN GLOBAL ECONOMIC ANALYST: Yes.

BALDWIN: No mistake -

FOROOHAR: Yes.

BALDWIN: Geographically speaking -

FOROOHAR: Absolutely.

BALDWIN: Who she's talking to. Did you hear anything new?

FOROOHAR: Not really. But I think what's interesting is, she's sort of right flanking and left flanking here. She's going after the Bernie people. You know, the students, talking about student debt, talking about the issues facing millennials. But she's also here in Ohio talking about manufacturing, talking about small businesses, talking about the fact that, you know, you need to make apprenticeship programs more available and jobs available for the working class. So I think that she's trying to hit some of the vulnerability from both Trump supporters and those that might have followed Bernie.

BALDWIN: A couple of these we've heard before that she's obviously hammering home, mentioning, listen, we don't actually know how wealthy Mr. Trump is because he's yet to release his tax returns, number one. Number two, pointing out the Trump loophole. In fact, she says the Trump family would save $4 billion under what Mr. Trump has proposed.

Peter Navarro, to you, just as the Trump policy advisor, can you respond to that?

NAVARRO: Sure.

BALDWIN: The Trump family saving $4 billion?

NAVARRO: Yes, that's silly. Let's look at this simply as we can. Basically you have Hillary Clinton's raising taxes and Donald Trump cutting them. And what we didn't have last week when she released her plan is some analysis. The tax foundation just came out and said that we would lose 1 percent of GDP growth with Hillary's tax plan. We would lose 300,000 jobs. Income and wages would go down for all Americans and the lower income people would be hit particularly hard.

And that's the problem here. The basic philosophy going back to Obama in 2008 has been the standard Keynesian tax and spend, try to get us out of the problem that way. And what we have for Hillary's, Obama third term, is an economy which hasn't really performed well for eight years and we've got the slowest recovery since World War II. We got over 20 million people unemployed.

I've been through Ohio. In 2012, I went through there with my film. And I went to factory after factory after factory. And those factories are closed in Ohio because Hillary and Bill Clinton shoehorned China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and basically allowed China to flood our markets with illegally subsidized exports. So there's this big chasm between what Hillary Clinton is saying, what she's done and what the Obama administration has done.

BALDWIN: OK.

NAVARRO: And at the end of the day, it's about performance. They haven't performed. Obama hasn't. Hillary hasn't.

BALDWIN: You threw a lot out there. Austan Goolsbee, I just want to give you the opportunity to respond.

NAVARRO: Kind of like Hillary's speech.

AUSTAN GOOLSBEE, HILLARY CLINTON SUPPORTER AND ECONOMIC ADVISER: First of all - first of all, he didn't answer you question. I think there's no question -

NAVARRO: Of course I did.

GOOLSBEE: That Donald Trump's own tax plan would be a massive, probably multi-billion dollar tax cut for Donald Trump and his family themselves. And you can't say that's not why he's proposing the tax plan.

NAVARRO: I can say exactly why. That's silly, Austan. Really. Come on.

GOOLSBEE: I actually think he should release his tax returns so that we can ask, how much would he personally cut his own taxes with his plan. But the second is, Donald Trump's plan is premised on nonsense. It's funny to try to cite an economic study to talk about the damage that Professor Navarro thinks that the Clinton plan would do, when Republican economists have said that Donald Trump's economic plan would drive us into recession, would cost us millions of jobs and (INAUDIBLE) -

NAVARRO: Who - who are we talking about there, Austan? That's a - that's a pretty serious (INAUDIBLE).

GOOLSBEE: We are talking about the American Action Forum. John McCain's leading advisor. We are talking about Moody's, a non-partisan -

NAVARRO: Who is the Republican? John McCain's - who's John McCain's leading advisor. This is just spin, Austan.

[14:05:01] Let me ask you a question. Can I ask you a question, Austan?

GOOLSBEE: This is not spin. Look, the fact is the country has tried the approach -

NAVARRO: Well, let me ask you a question. You were there. You were the - you were the chief economic advisor -

GOOLSBEE: Of cutting high income taxes before.

BALDWIN: Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen, hang on a second. I want to make sure I'm listening to everyone.

(CROSS TALK)

NAVARRO: Yell even louder. (INAUDIBLE).

BALDWIN: I don't like yelling. So yelling is not happening on this show, a. I do want to make sure I hear every single one of you and I don't like people talking over people because it frustrates me. Just stand by, gentlemen, to both of you. Rana, I know, has been waiting patiently to jump in.

FOROOHAR: Yes.

BALDWIN: Rana, go ahead.

FOROOHAR: Well, one thing I would say, regardless of who Donald Trump's tax plan is going to benefit, what you can say statistically, Brooke, is that trickle-down economics and tax cuts actually haven't created growth over the last 20 years. That's - that's proven. I mean they did -- tax cuts didn't create growth from 2001, in 2003. They didn't actually even create growth in the Obama administration. So that model is broken.

And I think that there is some cognitive dissidence (ph) between some of the populist rhetoric that we hear from Trump and the idea that, you know, a lot of these tax plans are kind of classic trickle-down economics.

BALDWIN: OK. That said, Peter, you had a question for Austan. The floor is yours, sir. Go for it.

NAVARRO: Yes. Well, let me - yes, well, on the trickle down, if you look at Reagan's plan, actually what you don't remember apparently is that Reagan had a 4 percent growth rate with his supply side economics throughout the 1980s, compared to 1.8 percent.

The question for Austan is, what are you guys doing so wrong that you can't get the economy going for eight years? You've doubled our debt with fiscal stimulus from $10 billion to $20 billion - trillion dollars and you screwed up the Federal Reserve balance sheet so bad that it's going to be very difficult to unwind. You left the White House with an economy effectively not in shambles but basically on its knees. Why do you think that you did a good job? That's the question.

GOOLSBEE: OK. A, that's nonsense. And here we go again with the let's throw the kitchen sink and the Fed and 20 other issues in.

As you know, George Bush cut taxes on high income people and corporations -

NAVARRO: Oh, blame it on Bush.

GOOLSBEE: Please don't interrupt.

Cut taxes for high income people and corporations more than they had ever been cut. Donald Trump is proposing to do that times four. It is the George W. Bush plan times four and, as we have discussed, that did not work. That failed utterly. What has happened post financial crisis is we have had modest growth. It's been a struggle to get back and to recover from the worst recession of our lifetimes. But we have done so. We have now come back with the longest string of private sector job growth in American history, longer even than under Ronald Reagan. So it has been more of the tortious and not the hare. So any one year wasn't tremendously fast, but by this point, under George Bush, we were already in a recession. So we need something sustainable going forward and Donald Trump is not proposing any such thing.

BALDWIN: How is -

NAVARRO: Eight years of failure, Austan. BALDWIN: How - how - I'm listening and I'm listening to both of you very carefully and I'm also sort of channeling the American who's listening and trying sort of - I don't know if they're pulling a little bit of their hair out because they're listening to what Hillary Clinton is saying and they're listening to what Donald Trump is saying and they're thinking, well - well, how will either of them follow through? I mean it's a simple question -

FOROOHAR: Yes.

BALDWIN: But, Rana, let me just turn to you.

FOROOHAR: Yes.

BALDWIN: Because, you know, you're listening, and for folks who are undecided -

FOROOHAR: Yes.

BALDWIN: And the economy is the - one of the most important issues of this election -

FOROOHAR: It's absolutely - yes.

BALDWIN: How do you know who's -

NAVARRO: Yes, I think that's -

BALDWIN: No, it's true.

FOROOHAR: Well, let me tell you. Let me - let me just say one thing, and this is really important because, you know, we heard a little bit about the Fed.

BALDWIN: Yes.

FOROOHAR: And the Fed's role. One of the reasons that the Fed had to do a $4 trillion money dump is that we couldn't get a bigger fiscal stimulus plan through Congress because there was gridlock, right? So whoever the next president is, they are going to have to be able to have a mandate to push investment through Congress. That's going to be a big deal. Will Hillary Clinton have that mandate? That's one of the biggest questions. Would Donald Trump have that mandate?

BALDWIN: But following up on my question to you, Rana, and I'm just going to say with you. You know, something, though, I think we had heard from Hillary Clinton just now is she was saying her plan would create 10 million new jobs, right, if she's elected. That's what she's saying. She is saying Trump would cost the American economy 3 million jobs.

FOROOHAR: Yes.

BALDWIN: Where do those numbers -

FOROOHAR: Well, you know, I wouldn't put too much stock, frankly, in the exact number of jobs because we don't know what's going to happen in the -

BALDWIN: We don't know.

FOROOHAR: I mean, you know, frankly, predictions one or even two years out economically are often wrong. But I think that what we can say is that the Fed is tapped out. We really can't do much more with monetary policy, so we are going to need Washington to - to probably invest. We're going to need to push through some fiscal stimulus. I think most people on Wall Street would agree with that, too.

BALDWIN: And then, Peter, just back to you. You know, once again, here she is, she's hitting him on wealth, how wealthy is he, we don't totally know because, you know the line, he hasn't released his tax returns. What say you about that?

[14:10:08] NAVARRO: Well, let me say this. The previous commentator has it exactly wrong. See, this is the problem. We don't have -

BALDWIN: Can you - can you first answer my question about tax returns?

NAVARRO: But let me say this. This is really important for CNN viewers. We don't have a problem that you can fix with more fiscal stimulus. That whiskey's not working. What Donald Trump has proposed is a synergistic plan of energy policy reform, tax policy reform, trade policy reform. And these things all work together synergistically, like they did in the '80s with Ronald Reagan. And we need to harness our American people by getting them back to work with good trade policies.

We need to move forward in that way. And, really, we can't kind of have a new president come in and just ask Congress for another fiscal stimulus. It simply won't work. We have a - this structural problem that relates to China basically stealing our factories and jobs and we don't have the horsepower or firepower to get our economy going again. And that's why this is such an important election. We've got Hillary Clinton -

FOROOHAR: Brooke, Brooke, I got to - I -

NAVARRO: (INAUDIBLE) and Donald Trump, the supply sider Reaganite (ph).

BALDWIN: Go ahead, Rana, (INAUDIBLE).

FOROOHAR: I've got to jump in - I've got to jump in with just two fact checks.

A lot of analysts would say that China's responsible only for about a third of the lost manufacturing jobs in this country over the last ten years. But also it's worth saying, China's in the same boat. China's wages are going up and they're losing jobs, too. So, you know, this is not a zero sum game. There are structural issues, but basically they're about 40 years of market knows best trickle-down economics and we do need something different, I think.

GOOLSBEE: And I think that's - look, Donald Trump has proposed - NAVARRO: And Trump's got it. Hillary's got the same and Trump's (INAUDIBLE) -

GOOLSBEE: The largest ever trickle down tax cut. So we're going to cut billions for businesses, for high-income people. And all I'll ask you is, just look at the 2000s and how do you decide that what went wrong in the 2000s is we didn't cut high income people's taxes enough and that's what the Trump thing is based on.

BALDWIN: All right.

NAVARRO: It's just Robin Hood, Austan. That's all you've got.

BALDWIN: All right, all right, Austan Goolsbee, Rana Foroohar, Peter Navarro, thank you.

NAVARRO: Thanks so much.

FOROOHAR: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Thank you.

GOOLSBEE: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Just a reminder to all of you watching. CNN is hosting a town hall with the Green Party. Presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka. Please watch live tonight, 9:00 Eastern, right here on CNN.

Coming up next, one of the other huge headlines today, Donald Trump shaking up his campaign again, this time the gloves are off. We will tell you about the political street fighters he's enlisted to run his campaign now and some absolutely fascinating new details just in about what's to come and apparently it does not include a teleprompter now.

I'm Brooke Baldwin. You're watching CNN's special live coverage.

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[14:16:52] BALDWIN: You are watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thanks for being with me.

Donald Trump's campaign undergoing a major campaign shakeup again. Paul Manafort, he's key - he's there. He's still keeping his title as campaign chairman. But the team at the top is growing. You see the picture here. Kellyanne Conway, you've actually seen her on CNN a bunch as a guest. She's a pollster. She's a more conventional conservative who's been promoted to Trump's campaign manager.

But the real game changer - and this is where we're going to go next here - is the new CEO. This guy by the name of Steve Bannon. Bannon runs Breitbart News, adored by so many on the far right for its combative and steadfastly conservative talking points.

So, let me first bring in Sara Murray, our CNN politics reporter, on Trump campaign. I mean we have seen different iterations of leadership over the course of, you know, a year and some change. This is the second change in two months. What do you know about the timeline, the decision and just why?

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICS REPORTER: Well, Brooke, it feels like this is really a move to get Donald Trump back to basics. He was very unhappy with the direction his campaign was going. This sort of attempt to make him palatable to the establishment, kind of the antithesis of how he wanted to run his campaign as the outsider candidate.

So we know he had a number of conversations over the weekend, including with Kellyanne Conway, where he made it clear he just was not happy with the way things were going. And then on Tuesday there was a meeting between Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, who's, of course, the campaign chief, his right-hand man, Rick Gates (ph), as well as Kellyanne Conway and steve Bannon, where Kushner made clear sort of what the new pecking order would be.

And, look, this was a realization by Donald Trump that he didn't want to keep running his campaign this way, that he didn't feel like he was surrounded by the kind of advisors he wanted to be surrounded by. And on top of that, he was, of course, trailing in the polls. So this is a move to say, look, I feel like I have a chance to win. Donald Trump still thinks there's that opportunity there. But I want to do it my way. And at least if I lose, I will have run the kind of campaign that I'm hoping to run.

But, of course, this is also inviting a lot off criticism from the Clinton campaign who is saying Donald Trump is just surrounding himself by people who peddle in conspiracy theories, Brooke.

BALDWIN: OK. Sara Murray, thank you for the setup on this whole story. Appreciate that.

Now, Trump's new campaign chief has been called - and I'm quoting - "the most dangerous political operative in the United States. Take a look at the cover of Bloomberg Business Week labels Steve Bannon as, quote, "the vast right wing conspirator."

My next guest wrote the piece about Bannon that's featured in this particular Bloomberg issue. And in it he writes, quote, "Bannon, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, is the sort of character who would stand out anywhere, but especially in the drab environment (ph) of Washington. A mile a minute talker who thrums with energy, his sentences speed off ahead of him and spin out into great pile-ups of nouns, verbs, and grins. With his swept back blonde hair and partiality to cargo shorts and flip flops, he looks like Jeff Spicoli (ph)," who was Sean Penn's character in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "after a couple of decades of hard living and he employs, dude, just as readily."

Josh Green is who penned those words. He's the national correspondent for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He wrote this piece a year ago. Perhaps you had a hunch you would be talking on national television about now his involvement in the Trump campaign. So it's an incredible peaceful of detail, so let's just get to the nitty gritty.

[14:20:11] What was - you spent weeks with him, off and on, you know, getting this information and interviewing him.

JOSHUA GREEN, NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK: Yes.

BALDWIN: What was he like? Personality? Weird quirks? Traits?

GREEN: I mean Bannon is just a charismatic wild man, mile-a-minute talker. You know, he's a guy who's had this bizarre series of careers from naval officer to Goldman Sachs banker to Sarah Palin filmmaker who fell in with Andrew Breitbart, the late conservative provocateur, and wound up taking over the Breitbart News Network after Breitbart died. So he is sort of insinuated himself into the center of this alt right world of splinter conservatives who have bedeviled GOP establishment leaders like Paul Ryan, like John Boehner, like Jeb Bush. So it makes a weird sort of serendipitous sense that he would wind up at the head of Donald Trump's political campaign.

BALDWIN: So that was the - that - explaining kind of how he got here today. You write also about his Washington, D.C. townhouse, that the Lincoln era detail and his daughter. Tell me about that.

GREEN: Well, Bannon lives in a townhouse a couple of blocks from the Supreme Court that is decorated down to the curtains in 1865 Lincoln era style. It's got an elaborate dining room mural. It has American flags. So it feels like you're stepping back 150 years in time when you go over to what is known in Washington as the Breitbart embassy. Breitbart's D.C. bureau is down in the basement.

And a portrait of Bannon's daughter, who I believe is in the U.S. Army, sits on his mantel place. She's holding a machine gun and sitting in Saddam Hussein's throne. So it's quite an experience stepping into Bannon's world.

BALDWIN: And the so-called valcaris (ph), the millennial women, the in-house, you know, gals who are his - I don't know what he tests them as far as what millennials today care about, want to know about. So that's that whole piece of this.

But let's get to Trump. How did they first connect?

GREEN: Well, it would make sense. I don't know if Bannon found Trump or Trump found Bannon. But what Breitbart has become is sort of the outside the establishment conservative group beating down the walls. That's exactly who Donald Trump was when he decided to run for president. And very early on, Bannon and some other folks were up talking to Trump, advising him informally. After the big break that Trump had with Megyn Kelly and Fox News, Bannon and Breitbart were real champions of Trump, while Fox and the other wing of the conservative movement stood up for Kelly. And so they butted heads there.

But I think Trump enjoys the aggressiveness and spirit that Bannon brings to Breitbart News and clearly wanted to do something to shake up his own campaign to kind of unleash his inner Trump. And so he brought in Bannon to be CEO of his campaign.

BALDWIN: So on the spirit and unleashing the inner Trump, here's really sort of my big question as we look ahead to the all-important first presidential debate, right, September 26th and what the Bannon fingerprint would look like on the verbal Trump jabs with Hillary Clinton on stage. What would that look like?

GREEN: Well, Bannon and Breitbart don't do subtly. So I would imagine what it would look like is direct frontal attacks on Hillary Clinton from everything from the Clinton Foundation money, to Goldman Sachs speeches, possibly to dredging up Bill Clinton's sex scandals back in the '90s. One interesting thing I thinks is underappreciated about Bannon is that he's also the head of a non-profit in Florida called the Government Accountability Institute, which produced "The Clinton Cash Book," that came out last year documenting ties between the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton, and various shady donors and foreign investors. So he -

BALDWIN: But also the Jeb Bush book.

GREEN: And also a Jeb Bush book, which I guess that goes to show us -

BALDWIN: Yes.

GREEN: That even Bannon didn't anticipate Trump's rise. They thought Jeb Bush was going to be the establishment Republican nominee. Instead, they wound up with Donald Trump.

BALDWIN: So as we're looking at, you know, whether formally, informally or just in communication with Mr. Trump looking ahead, you have, as we've been reporting, Roger Ailes, you have Roger Stone, and you have Steve Bannon. And then, of course, Mr. Trump himself. I mean mega personalities. Do you think that there is potential for a clash, even a potential implosion before we get to the first debate?

GREEN: Well, I think there's always a potential for a clash, any day, any hour, in Trump world. Steve Bannon stepping in certainly doesn't lower the odds of such a thing. But from where I sit anyway, it seems like a pretty clear move by Trump himself to decide, you know, I'm done with this idea of trying to moderate my image, contain myself, make myself palatable to the Republican establishment. You know, instead, I'm going to go with someone who is a media person like me, which Bannon is, who is out there and provocative and outrages. And so I expect we'll see more of that from Trump out on the campaign trail and certainly on the debate stage too.

[14:25:25] BALDWIN: And just quickly, Steve Bannon's motto is -

GREEN: Honey badger don't give a shit, after the Internet meme that became famous a couple of years ago. You can google it.

BALDWIN: I believe you. There you go, Joshua Green, Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Thank you very much.

GREEN: Always a pleasure.

BALDWIN: Fascinating. Thank you.

Coming up next, we have some brand new polls just in that show some interesting battleground races. David Chalian is joining me next to break them down. Can you say that on CNN? You did.

Plus, Donald Trump calling for more policing as he courts African- American voters. And in the thick of things, he called Hillary Clinton a bigot. And he says Democrats have failed the black community. We'll discuss.

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