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New Day

Trump Praises Congressman Who Body-Slammed Reporter; Nikki Haley: 'Political Opponents Are Not Evil'; Mexico Sends Law Enforcement to U.S. Border Ahead of Caravan of Honduran Immigrants. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired October 19, 2018 - 07:00   ET

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

LINDSAY CZARNIAK, CNN SPORTS: Berman, you know, because that guy had a lot of stuff to prove, right? That fan base was out there waiting to see what David Price could do in the clutch, and he did it. And he was there with his little one --

[07:00:10] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: I love that new trend, by the way, of bringing your baby.

CZARNIAK: Right? It's awesome. There's nothing better.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: David Price is my -- David Price is my new best friend.

CAMEROTA: Is he?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You should give him that tie. He'll sign it.

BERMAN: He can have one for $30 million. He can buy it.

CAMEROTA: Thanks, Lindsey.

Thanks to our international viewers for watching. For you, "CNN TALK" is next. For our U.S. viewers, President Trump launches a new attack on journalism. NEW DAY continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I had heard that he body-slammed a reporter. I think it might help him.

JOE LOCKHART, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: That you can condone this kind of thing sends a message to leaders in Saudi Arabia that it's OK to take a U.S. resident and kill him and dismember him.

MIKE POMPEO, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: We're going to allow the facts to unfold.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's not an investigation. That's a cover-up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Playing along with the Saudis and being their mouthpiece undermines our security interests around the world.

TRUMP: I made this country so great, they're all pouring in, or trying to.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's focused on ginning up the base for the midterm elections.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Is America going to look into the eyes of the children and women and tell them their fear is not important to us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

BERMAN: Good morning. Welcome to your NEW DAY.

So overnight, we got a rollout of the president's midterm message. What is it, exactly? Well, part of it seems to be beat up reporters, physically assault journalists. At least one. The president went out of his way not just to praise a sitting member of Congress who had to actually plead guilty to assaulting a journalist, but he seemed to praise the assault itself. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: This will be an election of Kavanaugh, the caravan, law and order and common sense. That's what it's going to be. It's going to be an election of those things.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So we don't have the sound bite right there. We'll play it for you, but at that rally last night in Montana, the president praised Congressman Greg Gianforte who, you'll remember, in a special election, assaulted a reporter for "The Guardian," Ben Jacobs, grabbed him by the neck and body-slammed him at that rally last night. The president praised the body-slamming: "I need a guy who can do a body- slamming like that."

So why does it matter? Well, you might think that assaulting a journalist at any circumstance is bad, but remember, this happens three weeks after the apparent murder and dismemberment of "Washington Post" journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the president, we should note, acknowledged that it certainly looks like this columnist is dead. At the same time, he refuses to condemn the Saudi regime for this apparent attack.

CAMEROTA: All right. So beyond laughing at violence against journalists, voters also got to hear other issues that President Trump wants to highlight for the midterm. He's talking about a caravan of migrants from Honduras and somehow trying to blame the Democrats.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I had heard that he body-slammed the reporter. Any guy that can do a body-slam, he's my kind of --

This will be an election of Kavanaugh, the caravan, and law and order. It's going to be an election of those things. (END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: All right. Here's the deal. It's a Friday, and whoever is in the control room thinks they've already won the Mega Millions jackpot.

BERMAN: That's right.

CAMEROTA: All right. So that's what you've got to know.

Also, there were reports of this screaming match between White House chief of staff John Kelly and national security advisor John Bolton. Sources tell us it was so loud that everyone in the West Wing could hear it, and the subject of their dispute was this recent surge in illegal border crossings and how they each believe it should be handled.

So joining us now to talk about this and so much more, we have CNN political analyst and "New York Times" White House correspondent, Maggie Haberman. She interviewed President Trump about Khashoggi's disappearance.

Maggie, great to have you here.

OK, so it was interesting to hear what the president thinks should be highlighted before the midterms. So he was working the crowd up to a lather, as you know, as he does. And I think that what has stuck in our craw about him talking once again about how much he enjoyed the body-slamming the reporter was that he has claimed that he doesn't support violence --

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right.

CAMEROTA: -- that he doesn't try to incite violence. I mean, he said this with a straight face. We have a montage of the times that he has lied about this. So I think we have it. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I do not condone violence in any shape --

I don't condone violence.

I certainly don't condone that at all, Jake.

(via phone): I certainly don't incite violence, and I certainly won't -- I don't condone violence. And I don't talk about violence. I certainly don't condone violence, and it's not acceptable to me.

[07:05:04] SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president, in no way, form or fashion, has ever promoted or encouraged violence. If anything, quite the contrary. And he was simply pushing back and defending himself.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Not true. Not true. Simulating the body-slamming of a reporter and laughing about it disproves everything they just said.

HABERMAN: Yes, that's a way, shape and form of condoning violence. To say that somebody who can do that kind of body-slam of a reporter is my kind of guy. That just is what it is.

To be clear, you know, the White House has spent a lot of time condemning Democrats over the last couple of weeks, portraying Democrats as a, quote unquote, unruly mob. There have definitely been instances where Republicans in general and members of his White House staff have been approached in unnerving ways in public. And there are reasons to condemn that.

When you are the president and you stand on stage at a rally and whip up your crowd by saying something like that, it has implications, particularly as you know, a few hours after he acknowledged that Mr. Khashoggi is apparently dead. And there -- a president's words carry -- this president's words, any U.S. president's words have enormous consequences. And this seems to be something that this president does not ever want to really deal with.

BERMAN: If people are just waking up, I think we may have the sound and the pictures and the president praising Greg Gianforte, the congressman, for the body-slam. Do we have that so people can see what we're talking about here? Let's play it, if we have it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We endorsed Greg very early, but I had heard that he body- slammed a reporter. And he was way up, and he was way up. And I said -- this was, like, the day before the election or just before. And I said, "Oh, this is terrible. He's going to lose the election." Then I said, "Well, wait a minute. I know Montana pretty well. I think it might help him, and it did."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So that's what you're talking about.

HABERMAN: This isn't just condoning it. This is also saying, "Look what you can do and get away with it, and still get elected. See what I mean? It's funny to beat up a reporter, folks, right?" It isn't funny that his rhetoric about journalists is very dangerous. There are people around him, who would argue that this is, in fact, we have all talked about this so much as journalists, sticking with one of their own. Certainly true that journalist are going to defend other journalists and the cause of journalism, but it is because of the role that the institution of a free press has played in our democratic society. That is why.

CAMEROTA: I'm so glad you're pointing this out. I was so comforted earlier this week. I had a panel of independent voters who had voted for President Trump, and they brought up, without me prompting them, they brought up that one of the things that is now making them vote a straight Democratic ticket is that they're very upset on the attacks on the free press. HABERMAN: I think that a lot of people wanted to believe that what we

saw during the campaign was some kind of play acting, and then what we saw in the first six months of his presidency was just him getting his bearings.

He has been pretty consistent on a number of themes and being aggressive with a huge boom mic about the media has been one of them the whole time.

And again, as you guys know, and as you really know, the irony is this is a person who craves and needs the media, and he needs the media's approval. So the fact that he is whipping up his crowds into a frenzy and his crowds don't entirely realize that this is a game on his part, makes it extra interesting.

BERMAN: And again, this isn't just us sticking up for journalists because we're in the job. This is happening three weeks after Jamal Khashoggi was apparently murdered and dismembered.

HABERMAN: One of the things that the president has done repeatedly with autocratic regimes is he has tried to apply due process and presumption of innocence until proven guilty, which is a U.S. process. To them, they don't practice due process.

So the idea that you were bending over backwards to suggest there could be all sorts of other options here. And he did yesterday say that Mr. Khashoggi was apparently dead. He -- clearly, the evidence became overwhelming and caught up with the statements. But he had made all of these previous statements, and they just -- they don't go away.

CAMEROTA: And so we're already hearing a narrative from some of his conservative supporters in the media, about "Well, you should look into Khashoggi's background. He wasn't a good guy." I mean, trying to besmirch the character of Jamal Khashoggi. So then it's OK to have some journalist be dismembered?

You interviewed the president yesterday. Did you hear any whiffs of that or which direction?

HABERMAN: We had a very brief -- we had a very brief interview. And so what you read in the paper is what there was. But certainly, what he said to us, there was no hint of that. And I think -- look, sort of nothing is surprising anymore.

But I do not anticipate we will hear that from the president, despite that we are hearing it from some of his supporters. It goes to a pretty ugly place. The president is not -- as much criticism as he gets for things that he says, and deservedly so for some of the things he says, he is not -- he's not divorced from reality. He does understand that this is a huge deal. I think it has taken him a while to understand why this was a huge deal.

[07:10;08] There is a grisliness about this crime that is inescapable.

BERMAN: What does Jared think, though? What is Jared doing? Because "The Times" is also reporting that Jared's saying, "You know what? Actually, just delay. Push this off. People will forget about this."

HABERMAN: Yes. I mean, I think that, look, the -- the White House has insisted that Jared Kushner is not telling his father-in-law to stand by the Saudi crown prince. We have reporting quite to the contrary that he has suggested this is a regional problem. This is -- this was not on U.S. soil, and all the things that you have heard the president say. And I think that the president is well aware that that advice, perhaps, has not been durable.

CAMEROTA: But if Jared is saying this too shall pass, isn't that true? In this news cycle, won't -- won't the attention spoke -- if they can just stick it out and not make any more self-inflicted, you know, wounds, won't this pass?

HABERMAN: In the news cycle, everything passes, and what we have learned, especially in the Trump era, but even frankly, prior to that, is that everything burns these hot and fast and out.

But when you're talking about U.S. diplomatic alliances, it's not as if the words just kind of disappear once you've said them. And so there will be lasting repercussions from this. We don't know what they are yet, but this doesn't just disappear because Twitter moves on.

BERMAN: I want to play some sound from last night from the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley. It was at the Al Smith Dinner, which is a dinner for Catholic charities in New York, where Alisyn has been the honoree, apparently, for many years in the last decade.

CAMEROTA: I've attended.

BERMAN: And I'm sure you've been an honoree, as well. But Nikki Haley said something that feels like one of those not subtle messages to or about the president. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NIKKI HALEY, OUTGOING U.S. AMBASSADOR TO U.N.: In America, our political opponents are not evil. In south Sudan, where rape is routinely used as a weapon of war, that is evil. In Syria, where the dictator uses chemical weapons to murder innocent children, that is evil. In North Korea, where American student Otto Warmbier was tortured to death, that was evil. In the last two years, I've seen true evil.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So what's so interesting is she says, in the United States our political opponents are not evil, but her boss, the president of the United States, says completely the opposite. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: It was a disgraceful situation brought about by people that are evil. It's a very dangerous period in our country, and it's being perpetrated by some very evil people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: It's pretty interesting, that juxtaposition there.

HABERMAN: It is. You said something, I think, that is the critical turn of phrase, though. You said, "and her boss." He's not her boss anymore, and that is really, I think, what the issue is here.

This is why people in the West Wing were very concerned not just about the timing of her departure but the sort of stamp of approval that the president gave with his arm around her, essentially, in the Oval Office, saying each of them, praising each other.

Aides to the president were very aware that Nikki Haley hopes to have a political future. Whether she will or not is a different issue. But they know that she was positioning herself to sort of take shots at him from the outside.

And what she is saying just about, you know, democratic ideals in the U.S. are certainly true, and she has said some of that while she was the ambassador to the U.N. But she also offered enormous praise for the president when she was working with him, and those are going to be things that she's going to have to reconcile.

I think the assumption is that she's going to get praise for now criticizing him, because that's what happens to everybody who then leaves or turns on the president or somehow. But it does not mean that they were not working for him for a long time.

CAMEROTA: Good reminder. I want to move on to a sore spot for the president, and that is immigration, illegal immigration.

HABERMAN: A sore spot for him? I think he thinks it's a good thing.

CAMEROTA: I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so today -- OK, so I would have said that yesterday. But the reason I don't think so today is I think that that loud feud in the West Wing of John Bolton and John Kelly shows that there is a lot of tension, and the president is upset that actually, illegal border crossings have spiked. OK?

HABERMAN: The family crossings have spiked.

CAMEROTA: The family crossings have spiked. And by the way, individual crossings have spiked since last year.

HABERMAN: Right.

CAMEROTA: So 2018 numbers, which were just out from the Department -- not out publicly, but we know them from the Department of Homeland Security, are up over the last year. That's not what was supposed to happen.

HABERMAN: Right.

CAMEROTA: President Trump was going to be the hardest ever on illegal immigration, and that's not happening.

And furthermore, the family -- what he did with the family separation does appear to have served as a deterrent, because family crossings did go down while that was going on. But then there was so much hue and cry about everyone saying it's humane, and so he stopped it. And now they've gone back up. So this is, I can imagine, maddening for him.

HABERMAN: I think it is maddening for him, yes, conceptually, but I think, as you know, he is not somebody who just sits and looks at the thing on its own, and he's not just staring at the policy and saying, yes, that's what this is. He is looking what political advantage he can get. Hence my point about I don't think this is a sore spot for him.

[07:15:06] And as for what this screaming match was about, we know broadly that it was about immigration. My understanding is that it related to criticism that was being lobbed against Kirstjen Nielsen.

CAMEROTA: That she's not stopping these.

HABERMAN: Right. Except that the intensity that was gathered around it was related to the fact that she was specifically under attack. John Kelly, the chief of staff, used to have that job. She had been one of his deputies, and he has tended to feel that she is getting undue criticism. I don't think you can completely divorce the personalities from what took place here, though.

BERMAN: And I just want to throw one thing onto the screen, so people know what the situation is.

When you say the numbers have spiked since last year, the numbers are up on border crossings from last year, but if we can put this up, they're still very low historically.

HABERMAN: Over the year, absolutely.

BERMAN: Look at that, 2018, 300 and -- I guess that 86 or 96,000. Compare it to the year 2000. Look at where the trend lines are. Look at where the trend lines are over time here.

What the president is doing -- and the president may think one is too many, but the point is, he wants this and needs this to be a crisis politically.

HABERMAN: Correct.

BERMAN: Which I think is why, to an extent, he's bringing it up right now.

CAMEROTA: Well, I understand that, but I also think that it doesn't help his narrative if they go up on his watch. That wasn't supposed to happen. HABERMAN: Maybe. But I don't think -- I think we are not in a world

where fact checks are actually, I think, impacting voters. And everything about our politics right now is very much based on emotion. He knows that. It is one of the things that he's -- he has a specific genius about in terms of tapping into.

The tax cuts are not working, because -- as a message, because most voters do not believe that it doesn't really help rich people and actually helps them. Democrats were smart on that messaging.

The president is reaching for the thing that he believes helped him through his primary, and it did. It was, essentially, a uniting issue for his supporters.

Now whether, when you are president, if you get to pull that trick again, I don't know. But what he is doing is the sense of crisis he is trying to create reminds me of what the real sort of raw emotion was in 2014 around the midterms and immigration. And that was in a moment when ISIS was on the rise. There was an Ebola threat. It was -- and conservative talk radio was essentially all about melding these two along with border crossings. That's what he's going for.

BERMAN: Very different situation right now.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

BERMAN: Al Smith honoree Maggie Haberman, great to have you here with us. Thanks --

CAMEROTA: Appreciate it.

BERMAN: -- so much.

CAMEROTA: He's bitter.

HABERMAN: Appreciate the --

BERMAN: I have been to the Al Smith Dinner.

CAMEROTA: Prove it.

BERMAN: I have. All right. I haven't been invited. But that's a different story.

President Trump floating another conspiracy theory, that Democrats are behind the caravan of migrants heading to the U.S. border to Mexico. Obviously, no evidence to support that. We'll discuss, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:22:03] CAMEROTA: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet with Mexico's president today as a caravan of more than a thousand migrants from Honduras heads through Mexico towards the U.S. border. We have new video of Mexican authorities heading to their border to try to stop them.

CNN's Leyla Santiago is live for us with more. What have you learned, Leyla?

LEYLA SANTIAGO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Alisyn, all week long we've been wondering if Mexico will cooperate, if the Central American governments will cooperate. Well, certainly, those images that you just saw shows that Mexico is cooperating, sending more law enforcement to their southern border.

And I've got to tell you, I've been there multiple times over the past year, and that is something that we don't typically see. You don't typically see this level of law enforcement on the southern border right there with Guatemala.

So, you know, what will happen when they try to cross? They're already starting to reach the border, some of them. But we'll have to wait and see over the next 24 hours if they will be allowed to come in.

Who -- who was in this caravan? That's a big question, as well. I actually spoke to one of the human rights advocates with them, and they said they spoke to many of them to sort of try to tally up who's in this caravan, why they're leaving. Women, children, men. The reasons that they are fleeing Honduras, he told me, are family reunification, poverty and violence. Many of them will tell you they're seeking asylum. But those reasons alone, in many cases, are not enough to actually seek asylum in the United States.

You know, caravans are actually something that are pretty common. Some are annual. Some have religious roots. But this is clearly something that President Trump is trying to -- to get ahold of and even using it as an issue for the midterms -- John.

BERMAN: Leyla Santiago for us. Leyla, thanks very much.

Joining me now is former Republican senator, Rick Santorum.

Senator, thanks so much for being with us. I will get to immigration in just a moment, but I actually want to start with the issue of journalism here. You and I have had some very heated discussions. We've sworn at each other.

RICK SANTORUM, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You didn't swear at me. You didn't swear at me.

BERMAN: Behind your back I did. The point here is that, despite that, you've always treated me with respect. So do you think that -- that a politician who body-slams a reporter deserves praise?

SANTORUM: No, I don't. I don't think the president should be praising that.

Look, I've always been concerned about the president's language on a lot of these things. I think the -- I excuse a lot of that, because the president uses a lot of hyperbole when he talks. And -- and I always say don't look at what the president says. Look at what the president does, but the bottom line that, you know, this is not helpful. It's not good. I understand his frustration. You know, journalism -- journalists

have not been particularly fair or kind to this president; and when the president sees people that attacks him he hits back. But he has to understand, as you pointed out, you know, the ramifications of doing that to the press.

[07:25:12] BERMAN: When we see Jamal Khashoggi, of course, a "Washington Post" journalist now --

SANTORUM: I'm not sure you can tie those two things together. That's a completely different situation.

BERMAN: I'm not saying that Jamal Khashoggi was murdered because of Greg Gianforte. What I am saying, though, is that if you're the Saudi crown prince, you don't look at the current White House, the Trump administration as an administration that stands up for the rights of journalists around the world. Would you agree with that?

SANTORUM: Well, no, I wouldn't agree that -- that the crown prince got some comfort in thinking that he could kill and dismember someone in a Turkish embassy and have the United States turn a blind eye to it. No, I think that -- that's going a little bit too far.

BERMAN: What message does it send? What message does it send to the rest of the world, then, though, Senator, when the president does say something like that?

SANTORUM: Well, I mean, look, we -- we have a media here that, unlike in other countries, where -- like in Saudi Arabia, that's controlled by the government, this is a media that's actually very, very hostile to this government. So I'm not too sure you're looking and talking about apples to apples. In most of these authoritarian countries, you know, journalists are not, you know -- they are not folks who are problematic to them. So you know, this -- I don't think people look at what goes on in America and apply it to -- to how they do business.

BERMAN: I would argue, and I want to move on here, though, that that's all the more reason to stand up for the rights of journalists and the rights of a free press, so that you can send the message to those countries.

Just one more point on Jamal Khashoggi here. Some, in some Republican circles now are starting to question his background, the fact that he had had Islamist writings before or had some connection to some Islamists in Saudi Arabia. Does that matter at all in our country?

SANTORUM: No. Look, I think the bottom line is that, you know, he was -- he was in Saudi Arabia, which is, you know, a pretty radical Islamist regime, you know, preaching Wahhabism and establishing madrassas all over the world. I mean, so it would -- it would actually be consistent with the policy of the kingdom. So no, I don't think that as an issue.

BERMAN: All right. I want to talk about immigration here. I'm going to start in a counterintuitive way. Admittedly counterintuitive way, given where this discussion is today, but I want to put this chart up on the screen, hopefully, here to show you arrests at the southern border since the year 2000.

You'll see in the year 2000 it was 1.6 million, and in 2018 it's about 386,000. How do you explain the downward trend of border arrests over this 18-year period?

SANTORUM: Demographics. I mean, if you just look at the reality of what's going on in Mexico, is that birth rates have dropped dramatically, as they have in a lot of other countries.

And the demographics have changed in Mexico, and you know, it's not a situation where you have, you know, large numbers of people that are, an ever-growing population of Mexicans that are, you know, looking for opportunities; that's not the case.

And Mexican -- you know, NAFTA has worked well for Mexico. You've seen a lot more development in Mexico. And as a result the demand to leave Mexico was reduced. So it's a combination of economics and demographics.

BERMAN: So again, when you look at that chart purely on a numbers basis, illegal border crossers less of a problem now than they were in 2000?

SANTORUM: Yes, I would say they are less of a problem, but that doesn't mean that they're still not a serious problem. I mean, the reality is that we still have a right to protect our border, that the reality is that people come into this country, these 300 and some odd thousand over the southern border. These are just arrests. We don't know how many people have gotten here who weren't arrested.

The reality is that they are competing for jobs here in America, and this is where Trump has hit a nerve. They're competing for jobs with low-wage workers in America, and those low-wage workers over the past 20 years during that same time frame have seen their wages stagnated.

Now, it's changed here in the last year, but Donald Trump has hit a nerve with people of color, many of whom in America, talking about this issue because of the unfair competition of these -- of these people crossing the border have on wage here in America and the opportunity for people to get good jobs.

BERMAN: It is a point that he makes, and it is a point that I've heard people of both parties make over the last, you know, ten, 20 years.

I will note that if you talk to economists right now or people in business in some parts of the country, Christine Romans always drums it into my head, there aren't enough people to fill the jobs right now that exist in some parts of the country. So economically, the reality doesn't necessarily match the rhetoric here.

SANTORUM: Well, yes. Here's what I would say about that. I mean, we still have record levels of people on disability, and of course, that's fraught with, we know with a lot of fraud. We also have a lot of people who have chosen not to enter back into the workforce, so there's -- that's changing. We're seeing the work force grow so marginally.

BERMAN: Rick, I will tell the president that you apologize for not giving him full credit for having this record low employment. You say there are mitigating factors, and there are more people, in your mind, that want to be working that aren't.

Let me play you how the president describes this issue of illegal immigration, last night, and he talks about this caravan that he wants to shine the spotlight on. We don't have it.

OK, but the point is, is he blames Democrats for it. He's blaming Democrats for this.