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Trump Spreads Lies & Stokes Fears Ahead of Elections; Trump Touts Another Tax Cut Without Details. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired October 23, 2018 - 06:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What he's doing this week is just making things up. His strategy seems to be just flood the zone with nonsense.

[05:59:13] DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You're going to find MS-13. You're going to find Middle Eastern. We're not allowing them in our country.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's ludicrous. It would be funny if it wasn't so insulting to this human tragedy we're seeing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's long been a canard and a fear tactic. He does it, I think, because it still works.

CHRIS CILLIZZA, CNN POLITICS CORRESPONDENT AND EDITOR AT LARGE: Here is a hugely powerful motivator. Don't underestimate it working.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is NEW DAY. It is Tuesday, October 23, 6 a.m. here in New York. And President Trump is waging a fact-free campaign of fear ahead of the midterm elections that are now two weeks from today.

The president is making lots of outlandish claims that seem to be getting weirder by the day. He's saying strange things about the migrants from Central America, about Saudi Arabia, about jobs, about a nonexistent tax plan. So what's going on here? Well, there is racially-charged rhetoric, and it seems tailor-made for his base.

BERMAN: Again, there is no evidence for some of these claims, which might be the very point. The big headline in "The Washington Post" this morning: Trump and Republicans settle on fear and falsehoods as a midterm strategy.

So the fib is the feature; it's not a bug. The falsehood, or in some cases, the lie is meant to scare you. And the idea is the more it is repeated and the more it frightens. The very argument about the details does some of the work for it.

So keep that in mind as you listen to what the president said overnight.

Our White House correspondent, Abby Phillip, has all the details -- Abby.

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, John.

We have about two weeks before these midterms elections, and President Trump is sticking to the same playbook that got him elected in 2016. He's hoping to drive Republicans out to the polls by stoking fears and misinformation about migrants.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TRUMP: The Democrats have launched an assault on the sovereignty of our country, the security of our nation and the safety of every single American.

PHILLIP: President Trump ramping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric ahead of the midterm elections, again, targeting thousands of Central American migrants who may be seeking asylum in the United States to try to drum up support for Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

TRUMP: People are seeing how bad it is, how pathetic it is.

That is an assault on our country. That's an assault. And in that caravan, you have some very bad people.

PHILLIP: The migrants are more than 1,000 miles from America's border with Mexico, and the individuals who have spoken to CNN, largely women and children, say they are fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries. The president claiming without proof that Middle Easterners are in the caravan, a message he doubled down on later in the day.

TRUMP: Take your camera, go into the middle and search. You're going to find MS-13; you're going to find Middle Eastern. You're going to find everything.

PHILLIP: But a senior counterterrorism official rejects the president's suggestion, telling CNN, "While we acknowledge there are vulnerabilities at both our northern and southern border, we do not see any evidence that ISIS or other Sunni terrorist groups are trying to infiltrate the southern U.S. border.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders insists that the administration does have evidence of the president's claim.

SARAH SANDERS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Absolutely, we have -- and we know that this was a continuing problem.

PHILLIP: But failed to back up Trump's assertion with facts. President Trump also spreading a debunked claim about undocumented immigrants voting illegally.

TRUMP: They've got so many people voting illegally in this country it's a disgrace. PHILLIP: "The Washington Post" found that there were only four

documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election. The president declaring that the U.S. will begin cutting off or substantially reducing aid to three Central American nations, because they haven't stopped the migrants.

TRUMP: We give them hundreds of millions of dollars. They do nothing for us.

PHILLIP: A scenario that would likely worsen the conditions migrants are fleeing. President Trump also repeatedly touting a new tax cut.

TRUMP: We're going to be putting in a 10 percent tax cut for middle- income families.

PHILLIP: The proposal surprising congressional leaders when the president first mentioned the idea over the weekend. A senior GOP congressional source tells CNN there is no serious plan for a middle- class tax cut.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIP: And President Trump is also pushing these tax cuts at a time when the Republicans are coming under scrutiny for soaring deficits, hitting about $779 billion in -- over the next six years.

But also Congress is not in session. The chances of tax cuts passing before the midterm elections are slim to none, John and Alisyn.

President Trump also hitting the road again today and tomorrow before the midterms.

BERMAN: Actually, the chances are none to none. I mean, Congress isn't there to pass a tax cut. There is no way to pass a tax cut.

CAMEROTA: I think what the president is saying is that he's going to talk about his tax cut.

BERMAN: Which he did.

CAMEROTA: Right. So he can say that.

BERMAN: Sure.

CAMEROTA: It has no bearing on what will happen.

BERMAN: Correct. He just can't say that there is going to be a 10 percent tax cut before November.

CAMEROTA: Of course not.

BERMAN: Which is what he's been saying.

CAMEROTA: No, but he's just talking about his concept for this --

BERMAN: Yes. CAMEROTA: -- that may not ever result in anything.

Abby, stay with us, if you would. Let's bring in CNN political analysts David Gregory and John Avlon.

So David Gregory, obviously, we all understand the effectiveness of fearmongering, but often in the past, it has seemed that there is some germ of truth, which the president then builds on and fabricates out of. But now things are sounding unhinged.

[06:05:07] I mean, the making stuff up out of whole cloth, that just picking things out of the air and saying them about Saudi Arabia, about the migrant crisis. What is going on?

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, this is a president who is having flashbacks to 2016 and the fearmongering that worked for him to create such a big contrast between his leadership -- he's made this about him -- and the Democrats, and to be very afraid of the Democrats taking power.

And what's so frightening and upsetting is that immigration is what he uses to stoke this kind of fear. There is a legitimate problem. We do have immigration laws that need to be reformed.

Seeing this kind of caravan does pose a legitimate challenge to our law enforcement at the border. But instead of recognizing the compassion that's due here for people who are fleeing a situation where they don't have a job, can't make enough money or fearing violence, corruption in their own country, this is a president who makes things up.

Go back -- this notion that there are terrorists streaming across the border was a canard that was first floated by immigration hardliners when George W. Bush, who really got the immigration problem, was in office. And it failed then because of such claims, and now the president is reviving it without evidence.

We're creating this specter that all these brown people are coming to invade the country. He sounds like an ignorant person, but he's not. He's doing it on purpose, and that's what's really unfortunate.

And the larger frame here is that the president doesn't want to run on accomplishments, because there's a fear there that enough people won't come out if they feel like, well, the economy is doing well; the tax cut helped; he got his judges on the Supreme Court, those things are good. What they want is the way that fear and anger can motivate the base to come out.

BERMAN: And there's a plan behind what he says. He says there are Middle Easterners there, and then we say, "What are you talking about, Middle Easterners?"

He says, "Go ask."

John, it's the B-3 bomber from "Wag the Dog." They say, "Well, what about the B-3 bomber?" "There is no B-3 bomber."

"Well, then why are you asking about it?"

Literally, the plan is to have us talk about it like this when, as you know, because you've looked into it, there's just not any evidence. First of all, even if there were Middle Easterners, as he said, there's no evidence that he said Middle Easterners would be terrorists, and there's no evidence of even that.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Not at all. This actually is an old right-wing conspiracy theory that spawned in the wake of 9/11 and has been looked into and is simply -- is just a fearmongering fact-free point. In fact, the only accused terrorist -- attempted terrorist to cross a border was in 1999 across the northern border, but somehow securing that never seems to be the emotional issue the politicians who want to demagogue this go after.

Look, this is fear and loathing on the campaign trail 2018. And when Hunter S. Thompson wrote the book about the '72 campaign trail about Richard Nixon, Trump and Nixon have a certain affinity.

And one of Nixon's political operatives says people don't vote out of love. They vote out of fear. They don't tell you that in Sunday school, but it's true. Donald Trump believes that.

And so we are in a stage of a campaign, where he has thrown out a lot of fact-free issues rooted in fear to try to gin up the base to hope that negative partisanship get people out more than his accomplishments, as David indicated.

CAMEROTA: Yes, but you know what's really interesting? Is that speaking about the compassion of the people who are fleeing violence or economic, you know, abject poverty, one person who understood the compassion, because he had worked in the region of Central America, was someone named General John Kelly. And general John Kelly used to talk about the migrant crisis and the motivations for the migrants. And in 2015, he said this --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEN. JOHN KELLY (RET.), WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: Many of the problems of these countries are a direct result of our drug consumption, a direct result of our drug consumption in this -- in our country. Cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, it all comes from that region of the world.

And so yes, they love their children. They love their children as much as we love our children. In many ways they're trying to save their children's life by putting on to this very, very efficient but still very dangerous network to get them into the United States.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: They love their children. They love them as much as we do, and they're trying to save their children's lives by making this really dangerous journey.

What's happened inside the White House that that -- that no longer matters in terms of being able to talk about this?

PHILLIP: Well, the answer is simply Donald Trump. I mean, the president is the person setting the tone on this issue.

John Kelly understands that cutting off aid to Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador is the exact opposite of what's needed to stem the flow of migrants up from Central America to the United States, but at the same time, this is what the president wants to do and, as chief of staff, John Kelly has to carry that out.

I mean, remember, Alisyn, also, we were talking over the summer about, you know, family separations, the policy of separating children from their parents. That idea first surfaced when John Kelly was the person leading the Department of Homeland Security for the Trump administration.

[06:10:24] So what you have often here -- and I think this is not any different from in any other administration -- if you work for a president, you adopt his ideology, you adopt his approach, you adopt his tone towards these issues.

And I think John Kelly of that time is probably a different John Kelly than the person that you're seeing today, in part because he knows he works for one person, and that's Donald J. Trump. And Donald J. Trump wants to have a more hardline approach to these issues. And quite simply believes that you have to use some kind of form of punishment in the form of withholding aid, even though everybody who works on these issues understands that literally the only way to stem this is to try to stabilize these countries, stabilize the region financially in terms of law enforcement, law and order, and not withholding aid in a way that only hurts the United States at the end of the day.

GREGORY: It's also consistent with how the president has positioned the United States under his leadership. And let me just say parenthetically, where there is a commitment by the Trump administration to clear leaves on the White House law behind Abby, which they maintain --

PHILLIP: Every morning.

AVLON: Only during the 6 a.m. hour.

CAMEROTA: Only during Abby.

GREGORY: That is the continuity from the Obama administration.

BERMAN: But that's why Abby has built a wall around her for her live shots and the leaves cannot get in.

GREGORY: But -- but, you know, when the president talks about America that he is a nationalist. I think we really have to really pay attention. And part of that nationalism, which is to seal off the border and to just protect our own interests is really a rejection of the idea that the United States plays a very large role in the region and, of course, in the world.

And that's what General Kelly's point goes to, which I think is really good context from 2015, is to say we have a stake. We are a big draw, both economically because of drug use and to allow these countries to become failed states, in effect, creates this kind of exodus.

We have to exert some responsibility, whether we want to or not. We -- nobody, including the hardliners who warn about Middle Easterners coming into Central America, do not believe in letting Middle Eastern states or, in South Asia like Afghanistan, become failed states, because we know what the effect of that is on our country and our national security, but we willfully disregard that when we put it in this context.

BERMAN: I also think that, for 12 minutes now, we have done the bidding of the president by having a discussion about the rights and wrongs of the caravan.

The point isn't the policy. The point is the picture. They want the picture up there to stoke fear. Barry Bennett, a nice guy who used to work for President Trump during the campaign, and Ben Carson before that. Listen to what Barry Bennett says. "I wish they were carrying heroin," he says of the caravan. "I wish we had thought of it. It speaks to the dearth of our creativity, unfortunately. There are 7,000 people marching to the U.S. border. One party wants to let them in, the other party wants to keep them out."

It's just about fear. It's just about stoking. Now, you can argue whether or not it's effective or not. And voters are going to have to make up their own mind how they feel about it, but that's what's going on here. It's not a policy debate. It's the same thing with the voter suppression issues and the voter fraud issues, John, when the president says that it's happening everywhere, that voter fraud is happening everywhere. It's not. No, it's not. And people are going to have to watch and decide for themselves.

AVLON: Well, ultimately, yes, people will have to make up their minds, but we have to conduct a fact-based debate; and that's why simply parroting a lie from the president doesn't illuminate.

We've had multiple studies about voter fraud in this country. It is minuscule. It is rare. And yet the president keeps returning to it because he -- whether he says that millions of undocumented people voted to account for his popular vote loss, which apparently irritates him, his failed voter fraud commission --

CAMEROTA: Well, let's talk about the failed voter fraud commission.

AVLON: Let's.

CAMEROTA: He had a chance to prove voter fraud, and he couldn't. He couldn't. The commission couldn't. I mean, all the studies --

BERMAN: They actually ran away, when all of a sudden they were going to have to share information with the public and the Democrats. CAMEROTA: They can't. They can't prove it. There is truly a handful

of cases. I mean, literally that number, a handful of cases over the past couple of years, but there's vast evidence of voter suppression. So they can't find the evidence that they need, so he just keeps making these outlandish claims.

BERMAN: But it's narrative, the president seems to want to communicate. And the policies seem to move towards voter suppression.

And so I think, to John Berman's point, as we discuss these things, it's not to repeat the president's lies. It's actually to say we are going to put it through a fact-based filter, folks, because that's our job. And democracies depend upon reasoning together, and that means that people are doing their best to tell the truth even when there's pure disagreements. This is not fact.

GREGORY: We wouldn't be talk -- but we wouldn't be talking about -- to your point, John, we wouldn't be talking about this if the -- the caravan issue if the president had not elevated in ways that are -- that aren't factual.

[06:15:07] And the truth is that this is a hard problem. This does put a strain on our immigration. The fact that you have a caravan of migrants who want to come into the country has to be dealt with. And the Obama administration had to deal with it and deported a lot of people and had to deal with it. So to deal with the problem head on is to acknowledge that it's difficult. It is not to do it in a way that is woefully ignorant.

AVLON: Right. This is a -- sorry, Abby.

PHILLIP: I think the problem, though, is very real. But what -- it seems to me what's really happening here, especially as we get just a few days before the election, is that the president has really just made a determination that no one -- there's not enough time for the fact check to penetrate. That even when he makes these claims, that it's not really going to get to voters. They're going to hear him first and, you know, the fact check second.

And so while it's boom time for fact checkers, I think it's also really difficult problem that we face, which is that the president has made a calculation that whatever he says on the trail, whatever he says on Twitter is going to be the first thing that people hear; and it's going to be the one thing that sticks with them, and that everything else that happens after that is going to be only secondary. And that's the calculation for the midterms. It's that the fact check, honestly, is not going to matter to people, at least in not enough time for it to matter for him or Republicans.

BERMAN: You might be right. Look, he might be right. I don't see the evidence that there are voters who care that deeply about some of these --

CAMEROTA: I do. I do. Yes, when I do the voter panels, I don't think that his base or his voters, I guess, are as clueless as he thinks they are. I don't think so. I mean, I interview people who voted for him all the time, and they tell me that they have their own issues. They do their own research. They can tell if their own paycheck has been affected, if their own family has been affected by the opioid crisis, or et cetera, et cetera. And so I don't think they're as clueless as he thinks.

BERMAN: I'm not saying they're clueless. I'm saying they don't care that he's lying. I think there are two different things. I think they're absolutely not clueless. I give voters a ton of credit. I think they look at it, they listen to what he says and they decide if it bothers them or not.

CAMEROTA: Yes, I agree. Every issue is in your own backyard, but everybody will decide that in two weeks.

AVLON: Facts matter.

CAMEROTA: Facts do matter, John. Thank you for that note. Thank you all, panel.

Another fact President Trump seems to struggle with, how many jobs would be at risk if the arms deal with Saudi Arabia fell through? We have that for you next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:21:05] BERMAN: So we've been talking about the president's final campaign push, which seems to be facts be damned, full speed ahead. For instance, take his claim on how many jobs would be created by the arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We're talking about over 40,000 jobs.

It's 450,000 jobs.

It's 500,000 jobs.

Six hundred thousand jobs, maybe more than that.

Talking about over a million jobs.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Unreal. He's either lying or he has magic, which is possible. He can change 40,000 to a million and then just flat --

CAMEROTA: I mean, that was the anatomy right there of a fabrication. That was the anatomy. That his last claim wasn't good enough for him anymore, so he keeps upping the ante.

BERMAN: It's a lie. It's a flat-out lie. Because he knows that one of those numbers is true. It's not that he's forgetting, and thinking, "Oh, it's 40,000. I just came up -- a million. I got 40,000 and a million confused." One is true, one is not.

We're back with Abby Phillip, John Avlon and David Gregory there.

You know, David, I'm picking you, because you're good at math.

AVLON: That's cool.

BERMAN: Explain to me how 40,000 and a million are the same.

GREGORY: You know, it's not just the fact that he will willfully choose when to assert which number. It's the unseemliness of the fact that he's emphasizing that aspect of a deal with Saudi Arabia after the Saudis have allegedly, in a brazen and grisly fashion, murdered a journalist working in America for one of the top news outlets in the world. And the fact that he is elevating that aspect of our relationship over American values.

This president, who talks about the press as the enemy of the people, willing to countenance, it seems, the idea that interests like creating jobs and selling the Saudis military hardware is more important than protecting our -- what our values are as a country in the face of something this ghastly.

AVLON: That's explicitly the point, though, I think. For the president, look, why fixate on facts? As long as everybody is getting rich and feeling good, why fixate on these details of policy? Why fixate on these issues? That's the underlying pitch. I use the phrase pitch intentionally because this is still a real estate guy who believes in hyperbole. As long as there are more jobs, the specific number is just designed to make you feel good. It's not about whether it's fact-based.

CAMEROTA: Yes, but I mean, Abby, it's like he doesn't know that we have videotape.

PHILLIP: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Because it is weird. It is weird to watch, in the space of a short time, him making up new numbers and as though we can't dig into our library and find all of that. And so, again, I mean, doesn't that make voters think, "Maybe that 40,000 number also is made up out of whole cloth. Maybe we can't trust any of this."

PHILLIP: Yes. I mean, in some cases, the president, literally the very next day, changed the number from 500,000 to a million. I mean, that's 24 hours' worth of inflation on those job numbers.

And honestly, I'm not really sure, as someone who's asked the White House repeatedly about this issue, I'm not sure they know the answer to the question, how many jobs is this deal going to create?

First of all, we have to start with the fact that the deal is not even what they say it is. It's not $110 billion that the Saudis have spent. They haven't even spent a fraction of that money, and some of it may never be -- may never be spent. Some of it includes money that was already promised or spent in the Obama administration. So just the basic premise of the claim is false. And then, secondly, the White House has made absolutely no effort to substantiate any of those numbers: not the 40,000, not the 450, not the 500 and not the one million. I think we should really emphasize that that's very unusual.

In past administrations at least on some basic level that, if you're going to make a claim like this or like something else, you -- the burden is on you to substantiate the claim, to prove to people that this is true, that this is real.

[06:25:08] This administration is notable in how -- how infrequently they do that, ever. When the president claims there are ISIS members in the caravan, the administration says, "You guys go prove that that's true." That's not how these things work.

AVLON: Yes.

PHILLIP: And I think that's emblematic of a deeper problem with the fact that they're not concerned whether or not things are true, whether or not they are misleading the public with these kinds of --

AVLON: That's because they've not nothing. Let's be honest. Behind the scenes conversation there's going to be, "I don't know what he's talking about. We've got to figure something out."

I mean, you know, if you ever -- I've worked in government, not anything like this circumstance, but the chaos behind the scenes of the communication shop is usually what you should bet on, not the professionalism and efficiency.

BERMAN: You know, there's a million ISIS members coming over the border --

AVLON: I've heard that.

BERMAN: -- who have told the president that there will be a million jobs created.

CAMEROTA: You're not helping.

BERMAN: No, but it's the same thing. He's making it --

CAMEROTA: I know that.

BERMAN: He's absolutely making it up.

CAMEROTA: There's no better illustration than day after day pulling a different number out of thin air.

BERMAN: So the numbers don't matter here, or at least they don't matter to the president.

David Gregory, I do want to come back to you with one number you brought up last segment, which has to do with the president now saying he is a nationalist, which is striking and interesting in a big moment. Robert Costa for the "Washington Post" noted overnight that he

actually had conversations with the president repeatedly in 2015 and 2016 about whether he considered himself a nationalist; and President Trump then didn't like the word because of the connotations it brought with it, but now, he clearly thinks it's OK.

And Robert Costa looks at this and says, this is the president just finally fully embracing Bannonism and Breitbartism and not caring about the connotations that come with it.

GREGORY: Well, at least he doesn't dare now in the context of getting a certain segment of his voters to the polls, in the same way that he was trying in 2016, with the expressed opinion -- we know the president pays attention to the fine points of voter turnout, especially in this context. People who might not be otherwise motivated by some of the good news that the administration can be credited for to get out and vote, who might respond to more fear tactics.

But I agree, I think the idea of being a nationalist and rejecting globalism is a serious point. One, it does speak to the shortcomings of globalism as we've defined it since the early '90s and who has been left behind from globalization, which is a real argument to make as a political figure.

The more nefarious piece of it is to be a protectionist. And, again, there's arguments for the president's position on trade. But it's the idea of retreat and self-isolation as America and a rejection of our responsibilities around the globe. And that, I think, goes back to the issue of Saudi Arabia.

The question that to me which is unanswered, which is why did the Saudis feel they could get away with this given our relationship -- their relationship with the United States? They either felt that the administration was too weak or they felt they might be sympathetic at some measure and that they would put our interests in countering Iran and our arms deals over such a gross violation of human rights and straight-out murder.

AVLON: Look, they took the president at his word when he talks about a vision of global sovereignty that basically says you can do whatever you want.

GREGORY: You do you, and right. Yes.

AVLON: You do you and as long as everybody is getting rich.

Look, the most important thing is that in -- throughout American history, there is a fundamental difference between patriotism and nationalism. And this president is saying, "I'm all in on the nationalism front." And that obliterates a lot of what we've understood as American exceptionalism, that we are a creed-based nation, not a tribe-based nation.

BERMAN: Thank you, Abby, John and David, and the 65,000 others of you who have joined us for this panel this morning as part of it, because you know, what do numbers matter here?

We do have breaking news from overnight about the investigation into the murder of "Washington Post" journalist Jamal Khashoggi. We'll get you those new details right after this.

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