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Communities, Police Become Campaign Issues; Kellyanne Conway: Let Trump Be Trump; Images of Boy, 5, in War-Torn Syria; Fight Against ISIS Becomes Campaign Issue. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired August 18, 2016 - 13:30   ET

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


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[13:30:56] BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Racial tensions, controversial police shootings, ambush attacks on police officers, issues involving communities and law enforcement are part of this presidential campaign. You have Hillary Clinton meeting with high- profile law enforcement officials as we speak. Donald Trump calls himself the law-and-order candidate. He accuses Clinton of being against the police.

Joining me now to talk more about this, CNN politics editor, Juana Summers; and CNN politics analyst, Jackie Kucinich, the Washington bureau chief for "The Daily Beast."

Two different games here, the different constituencies that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are trying to appeal to as they talk about law and order and about Black Lives Matter.

JUANA SUMMERS, CNN POLITICS EDITOR: Absolutely. That's why the calculus here is so different for Hillary Clinton than it is for Donald Trump. Donald Trump, as he talks about these issues, you saw him go to Wisconsin, not to Milwaukee where 40 percent of residents are black, instead going to a suburb where 95 percent of residents are white. He is unlikely to win over black voters. A Republican hasn't gotten above 1976. Hilly Clinton's calculus is very different. Not only does she want to the Obama coalition, which includes voters of colors, but also the working class voters. For her to message on this is really critical.

KEILAR: It seems like one she's really pursuing, Jackie. Two of the more moving moments that almost made you want to cry, one was the Mothers of the Movement, women who have lost their children to -- their African-American children to either gun violence or police- involved shootings or in police custody. And then you had another night dedicated to police officers who had lost their lives. Their loved ones came up and told these amazing touching stories. She's really trying for both of these groups.

JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICS ANALYST: And to Juana's point when it comes to your blue collar voters, it's almost like they're trying to lessen the damage, right? It's not like she's going to win white male voters. That's going to be a really hard task for Hillary Clinton. If they manage to bring that down a bit by this focus, and also this is about the middle class. This is about keeping you safe when she's talking to these law enforcement officials. She has to do that. She has to strike a balance.

KEILAR: You make an interesting point.

She's not going to win white working class males. Donald Trump isn't going to win African-American voters. But you look at how he's polling. It's at about 1 percent. Mitt Romney had 6 percent. McCain had 4 percent. If you look at those numbers, you say that's dismal. But you need the margin. You need to take at least a few percentage points away.

KUCINICH: That's what the general election is about, making inroads where your weaknesses are. Donald Trump, with black voter, a lot harder of a task. I think one poll had him at zero percent.

KEILAR: Yeah, it's pretty incredible.

Let's talk about this reshuffle of the campaign staff, Juana. You have Kellyanne Conway, everyone in Washington knows who she is. She's known as a cool head, knows her stuff. She says the goal is to let Trump be Trump and also be focused on the issues. It's like she's still again straddling these two concepts.

SUMMERS: She absolutely is. Kellyanne has been doing this a long time. She knows polls better than others in the business. No matter how much shuffling of the chairs you do, this is all about a candidate. This is a candidate we've seen time and time again, one day he reads from a teleprompter, the next day he insults Elizabeth Warren, calling her Pocahontas. 80 days left until the general election, so in order to close the gap, the recent polls show there is a gap between the two candidates, there would need to be a change there.

[13:35:09] KUCINICH: Here is the thing about Hillary Clinton, she can speak establishment. If you're someone who just tuned in this morning and saw the interview and you're a Republican -- Lanhee Chen said it was chicken soup for the Republican soul. That said, Kellyanne isn't running. We'll see how much Donald Trump listens to her. When it comes to a Republican running for president, Kellyanne has good advice. That's why she'll be on the plane with him. Republicans who are hoping Donald Trump might moderate, maybe not moderate, but tone it down a notch, if he does, it will be because of Kellyanne.

KEILAR: Do Republicans think that's really going to happen, Juana? Are they moving towards giving up on that?

SUMMERS: I'm not hearing a lot of Republicans saying they think it's going to happen. We've heard this before. We've been talking about this for months and months, that we might see a new Donald Trump, in tone. The evidence simply hasn't borne out that fact. I think a lot of Republicans are bracing to see what will happen, looking to the down ballot races and asking the question of, with if he does lose, what will happen to the House, what will happen to the Senate?

KEILAR: What is the range of possibilities there, when you're looking at Congress, Jackie? What are the concerns about what could happen? KUCINICH: The Senate, the Senate, the Senate. Everyone is worried

about the Senate, if you're a Republican. Some of these states, the vulnerable incumbents, someone like Kelly Ayotte, who says I'm voting for Donald Trump --

KEILAR: But I don't support him.

KUCINICH: -- but I don't support him.

KEILAR: What does that mean?

KUCINICH: I know, right? They're also trying to strike a balance by looking like they're not turning against their party but not going full throttle for Donald Trump. It was a dangerous balance they have to walk. That's why you see Republicans right now voting kind of for triage, for the RNC, saying don't help Donald Trump, help us keep the Senate because that's what's going to happen if Hillary Clinton is president.

KEILAR: Voting for triage. That is so interesting.

Jackie Kucinich, Juana Summers, thank you so much.

We've been talking about this image that is just tugging at our hearts. If you haven't seen it, this is it. It's a young boy. We understand he's about 5 years old, a young Syrian boy, caught in the crossfire in the bombing of his home. Left alone, in shock. We've got this story, next.

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[13:42:00] KEILAR: It's all too easy for many of us to lose perspective in long-running conflicts like the civil war in Syria. Sometimes it's a single picture that drives it all home. This is Omran, the 5-year-old sitting in an ambulance, face bloody, covered in debris. This single image captures the horrors of war, faced daily, by those who live in Aleppo, including many children. Omran was pulled from the rubble after an air strike destroyed his home. Alone. And he's really the lucky one. The Syrian Observatory for human rights say more than 4,500 children have been killed in Aleppo in the five years of fighting there.

We have Nima Elbagir joining us from London.

Tell us about this boy who is capturing the hearts and so much emotion from people all over the world.

NIMA ELBAGIR, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: He's given people a moment of pause, hasn't he? What we've come to expect from these images in Syria is the noise, the screaming, the air bombs, barrel bombs. In the middle of all this, you have the perfect stillness of this dazed child. It's almost pulled into focus everything around him in that moment.

We spoke to the cameraman who took the images. He described to us how they dug for nearly an hour to try and pull Omran out from the rubble of what was his home. You can only imagine being 5 years old, trapped in the dark, and these voices calling on you to stay strong, to stay calm. When you see him in that footage, Brianna, he still didn't know that the rest of his family had survived. His mother and his brother, we understand, are still in horribly critical condition because of the circumstances inside Aleppo and the complete disintegration of the health care system. They've had to be smuggled out of Aleppo to seek care. As you said, he is unbelievably one of the lucky ones -- Brianna?

KEILAR: You just see the daze and how he realizes he's bleeding. There's a sense that a child should not have to go through this.

You have the E.U. calling for an immediate cessation of violence. Tell us about that.

ELBAGIR: Russia has now amazingly indicated that they are looking towards as early as next week for what they're calling a humanitarian pause. And while a lot of those we're speaking to inside the international aid groups and inside the U.N. are hopeful that this moment, this child, this global pause that he has to, that it will result in something tangible on the ground for not just himself and his familiarly, but their friends and neighbors and the hundreds of thousands that are trapped alongside Aleppo. We're waiting to see if that actually does materialize.

But there is a sense that he has in impassive silence, that he has pushed to open this window.

[13:45:09] We spoke to one of the doctors who was in the hospital that was treating him, and he said, yes, he is in extreme shock.

This is what broke my heart. He is 5 years. He's as old as the conflict itself. This is what he knows. This is the generation of children in Aleppo who are taught not to cry when they hear air strikes going on. The worry is that will draw the danger to them. As much of what you see as shock, it's also a child who has become accustomed to the realities of the horror -- Brianna?

KEILAR: We've seen this before, too, in the refugee crisis. It's the children I think that remind people of their humanity. And we're seeing that with this.

Nima Elbagir, thank you very much for your report.

For ways to help the Syrians, go to CNN.com/impact

Still ahead, the Pentagon says U.S.-backed coalition forces are making significant progress in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. We'll get an update from Baghdad.

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[13:50:04] KEILAR: The fight against ISIS is a campaign issue right now. Just this week, Donald Trump proposed extreme vetting -- that is what he called it -- of immigrants and joint military operations abroad. U.S. defense officials say there is significant progress in taking back key territory from ISIS.

For more, we are joined now by Colonel Chris Garver, spokesman for the Anti-ISIS Coalition in Iraq.

Colonel, thank you so much for joining us.

And if you can just give us a sense of what the state of the fight is against ISIS right now.

COL. CHRIS GARVER, SPOKESMAN, ANTI-ISIS COALITION IN IRAQ: Thanks, Brianna. Glad to be here tonight.

The state of the fight against ISIS is that ISIS is getting weaker in Iraq and Syria, as our partners on the ground, the Iraqi security forces in Iraq, then the Syrian Democratic forces and our other partners in Syria, as they are getting stronger. We are seeing significant progress both in Iraq and Syria. Just recently the Syrian Democratic forces and the Syrian Arab coalition element of that seized the town of Manbij, which was a significant line of communication between Raqqa, the self-proclaimed capitol of the so-called caliphate of -- that ISIS holds, and the rest of the world. So that was a significant victory for the Syrian Democratic forces, and we are continuing to see progress like that in both Iraq and Syria.

KEILAR: We're seeing some of that progress there on the ground. Thousands of ISIS fighters have been killed by coalition forces. But we have also seen that as is there on the battlefield maybe struggles a little bit, is losing territory, we've seen them branch out. For instance, the airport attack in Istanbul. What do you do to stop just the movement really of the threat from where you are to other soft targets abroad?

GARVER: Well, clearly it is a significant problem and it is a global problem. We know that ISIS wants to conduct these attacks in our home towns, in our countries, no inside Iraq and Syria. But the caliphate that they have declared, the center of their own country in between where they stole pieces of Iraq and stole pieces of Syria, that has been a rallying cry and a sense of recruitment and inspiration for fighters, sickos, crazies, around the world. We need to defeat that here in Iraq and Syria to take away that inspiration. And then clearly there is work to be done around the globe that defeat this ideology that ISIS has injected into the world.

KEILAR: We've seen this image of the little 5-year-old boy in Aleppo, Omran. Earlier this week, Russia said it was close to a deal with the U.S. and joint military action against militants in Aleppo. I think a lot of people have stopped maybe paying attention to Syria, but then they see something like this, they pay attention and they want to know what could be happening with this development. What can you tell us about that?

GARVER: Well, the negotiations between Russia and the coalition led by the United States, they are ongoing or being led by our State Department and our Department of defense. I don't -- we do not have an arrangement with them yet. We are conducting our operations against ISIL and we remain focused on ISIL. We have seen Russians and Syrian regime be focused on rebels and on doing things other than just fighting ISIL. So we are -- there is no deal yet. We are continuing to conduct our operations against ISIS.

KEILAR: They say -- the Russians are saying that they're targeting ISIS, but you don't believe that because of where they're targeting.

GARVER: That's correct. They target some areas where we know there are concentrations of ISIS fighters, and then they target areas where we don't see any ISIS fighters. We see that on about -- one-quarter of their strikes seem to be where there are ISIS fighters, the rest of them, the majority of them are elsewhere. So we welcome those who want to fight ISIS and those negotiations are ongoing, but we would also look for someone to demonstrate some level of trust actually that they're trying to do that.

KEILAR: Russia's military, for the first time, launched air strikes against Syrian targets, you were just talking about those target they've done this from a base inside of Iran. The U.S. certainly disputes that ISIS is the target, as you mention. But other than that, what are your concerns with this cooperation with Iran?

GARVER: Well, our primary concern, as we fight ISIS in both Iraq and Syria, is the safety of our pilots and of our partner forces on the ground. We want to make sure that our pilots are safe which is why we have an understanding and a mechanism to call the Russians call us or we call them when we are conducting operations around each other to make sure that our planes don't bump into each other, that they don't have an incident in the air. We also want them to not bomb where our coalition partners are. We've seen that happen before. So those are our main concerns as we remain focused on ISIS, that they keep their operations away from where we are conducting operations.

[13:55:21] KEILAR: Colonel Chris Garver, thank so much for joining us from the region. We appreciate it.

He's is from the anti-ISIS coalition in Iraq.

KEILAR: That is it for me. I'm going to be back at 5:00 eastern on "The Situation Room." Hope you will join me.

For our international viewers, "Amanpour" is next.

For our viewers in North America, NEWSROOM with Brooke Baldwin starts right after this.

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