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President Trump Makes Controversial Comment on Political Momentum During Campaign Rally; Suburban Women Voters on the Toxic Tone of Midterms; Representative Steve King Erupts When Pressed on Immigration Views. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired November 02, 2018 - 8:00   ET

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

[08:00:00] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: NEW DAY continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's all about getting people stirred up. Its' about fear. They throw rocks. I say, consider it a rifle.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My reaction is one of disgust. It is of rank political purpose to use our military like this.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We need to secure our borders. We need to know every single person that is coming in.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I spent two days with the caravan, and I didn't see criminals or rapists or terrorists.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When you know the right thing, you can't be influenced by propaganda and fear.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's been two years of promises made and promises kept.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get the hell up. Go out and vote. Take it back now, now, now!

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota on John Berman.

CAMEROTA: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to you NEW DAY. It is Friday, November 2nd, 8:00 here in the east. Just four days until Election Day President Trump is ratcheting up his anti-immigration rhetoric, using the White House podium to stoke fears. At a campaign rally last night, the president suggests that the U.S. troops deployed to the Mexican border could shoot any migrant who throws rocks at them. We of course are used to having to fact check the president's statements, but there appears to be a whole new tally of falsehoods. The "Washington Post" factchecker said the president is lying more in the final stretch of this election. By their count, President Trump has made a whopping 6,420 false and misleading statements since taking office, and that he is now averaging 30 untruths a day. JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: He went from five a day to 30. One might be

too many for the president, but now 30 a day. The Roosevelt room roll-out yesterday promised to give a glimpse, he promised to give us this glimpse of a new bombshell policy on asylum. But there was no real new policy. It was all just theater. And later at a rally the president gave us a sense of why he's staging this theater at the last minute of the campaign, because the bomb sent to Trump critics and the murder of 11 Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, an inconvenient problem for Republicans.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We did have two maniacs stop a momentum that was incredible, because for seven days nobody talked about the elections. It stopped a tremendous momentum.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Terrorizing of political opponents and mass murder had slowed the momentum.

Joining us now, CNN contributor, "New York Times" columnist Frank Bruni, CNN political commentator Ana Navarro, and CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. We're going to talk about the facts, we're going to talk about fear and immigration. But Frank, I don't want to get past that comment about momentum there which, to me, is stunning. And I refuse to grade President Trump on a curve and say, oh, this is who he is and we've known this for a long time. Eleven people were murdered at a synagogue last Saturday, and he's talking about this now.

FRANK BRUNI, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: It's morally repugnant, but it's another -- I have said this about Trump many times. He's strangely transparent. He just let us see very clearly what his values are. His values are what is my fate, how are the midterms going to go, and how will they reflect on me. And if other people were sent bombs and if other people were gunned down and killed, that's very inconvenient for me right now, John Berman, and I don't appreciate that. That's what Donald Trump is saying.

CAMEROTA: Ana, so many people, you've heard them say that they're worried about, what about when something really big happens? Will we be able to trust our government? Will we be able to trust what they're telling us? What about when there's a crisis? It's happening, actually, right now. And in fact, we have had a very violent week. We've come off of all these, as you know, bomb threats and the mass murder at the synagogue. But the president has tried to be laser-focused on this group of migrants who are still about 1,000 miles away in a different country. And they put out -- the Department of Homeland Security put out what they call a fact sheet. We have to factcheck it, it's our job, and it appears to be all over the place in terms of things that are unprovable.

They say in it 270 individuals along the caravan route have criminal histories, including known gang membership. They give no source. We don't how they would know that, but we have journalists imbedded with him and know that there are lots of mothers and children who are coming and fleeing. And here is why it is hard to believe them. The Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, told us June 17th we do not have a policy of separating families at the border, period. That was not true.

ANA NAVARRO: Oh, for the love of God. Let's stop saying things were not true. Let's just call them bold-faced lies. They lie. Here's the problem. When you work for a president who is a liar, who lies 6,500 times since he's been president, everybody around him has to lie. Every department that works for him has to lie, every person that works for him has to lie because if not they cannot keep their jobs.

[08:05:00] There is only one way of keeping a job for Donald Trump, which is defending, justifies, explaining, and bolstering up the lies he says. And so yes, we find ourselves in a position as Americans where when big things happen, when big crises happen, nobody believes him. That's why he shows up at Pittsburgh and there are protests against him, because we hear him talking about the loss of political momentum from things like Pittsburgh, from the explosives that were sent in the mail. He said it in a tweet five, six days ago, this bomb stuff has taken away the attention from the politics.

We know exactly what he feels. This is actually a rare moment of him telling the truth, telling his truth. And it is why the rest of the country does not believe him when he pretends, when he puts on the hat and cloak and frown and serious face and goes and lights candles and puts roses. That's why they don't believe him when he tries to be consoler in chief because we know him as liar in chief.

BERMAN: And there are some things that are provably false, many things provably false with what he said, that are lies. He said that only three percent of people who are --

CAMEROTA: Asylum seekers show back up. It's actually 89 percent show back up. But we don't know where he makes up stuff or he pulls it out of whole cloth without sources.

BERMAN: What I find so interesting about that, Jeffrey, is that the White House knows that they are going to get called out on the lies. The White House knows that they're going to get called out on the racism. But they put that into the calculation. I think it's fascinating that they're willing to eat to a certain extent the lies and the racism here to get this message out and to get this discussion going.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Because the Trump White House has decided that we are essentially two different countries. There is the base, and the base loves to hear this stuff and they're playing to the base, and that's why they're saying it. And the rest of us who are journalists are going to fact check this and talk about how he's lying. And that will only prompt him to say we're only fake news, and he can dismiss what we say.

And one of the things that I find puzzling and somewhat difficult as a journalist is that we're accused of this relentless negativity about Trump. But what are we supposed to do when he lies over and over again? Not point it out? Yes, it is true that we are negative. But this is our job. And if there are 6,400 lies, it's our job to talk about it and point it out.

NAVARRO: It is exhausting, right? It is exhausting for everybody. It is exhausting for America. But we cannot fall into the trap of normalizing what is not normal.

TOOBIN: And that's just like your question to Frank about saying, well, the bomb, the blood of these people is a political problem. That is a grotesque sentiment. But sometimes when I hear this, I think, do we have to go through this again with him? There is a weariness that sets in that, you're right, that we need to not grade on a curve.

BRUNI: I think he counts on that weariness. I think he counts on the fact that if he keeps doing this over and over again, if he normalizes it, to use Ana's word, people will just become numb to it. They will tune it out. There are many people watching us right now and keep up on the news and who hear this over and over again and get energized and exercised about it. There are just as many Americans to whom this has all become white noise. This is just the new norm. They don't hear it, they don't feel it. And that's exactly what Donald Trump has counted on from day one. If he sticks with this, if he's incessant, if he's remorseless, then it will become something people just treat as unexceptional and move on and be numb to.

CAMEROTA: And so if he put out this video that people have called sickening of this psychopath who, this crazy psychopath who is in prison for serving a double life sentence or up for the death penalty because he killed two deputies, but he claims that somehow this guy is the Democrat's fault. And if you factcheck, Ana, and that's what we have to do, it's not being negative, it's factchecking, it turns out that guy was deported under Bill Clinton, snuck back in under George W. Bush, and got married here in the U.S. and stayed under George W. Bush. Do we blame George W. Bush? No. But how do you chalk that up to the Democrats as the president is trying to do?

NAVARRO: Right now it is all about immigration, right? It is all about using immigration as the wedge issue. It's about demonizing immigrants, sending thousands and thousands and thousands of troops to the border, birthright citizenship, this ad. I'm not sure what else he's going to come up with in the next four days that's immigration focused to keep the hysteria going. This thing on the border, he's sending a bazooka to kill a sparrow. It is the most ridiculous waste of money.

[08:10:01] I can't believe my fiscal conservative Republicans aren't up in arms about the waste that we're seeing. I can't believe those troops aren't being sent to places that needed it, like Puerto Rico, like Panama City in Florida that need the reconstruction. It is all a ploy for no other reason than to gin up his base and get people out to vote based on fear and hysteria and angst. And the only way this changes is if people reject this at the ballot box on Tuesday.

TOOBIN: And by the way, where is General Mattis, the secretary of defense? Is he OK with this?

BERMAN: He said we don't do stunts, but that was an ambiguous statement. We don't know if what he's saying is he won't let the president go too far or we don't know if he's saying what we're doing is not a stunt.

There are two quick points I want to make on this. Number one, I find it fascinating that the White House and political operatives put the president out, scripted yesterday, in the Roosevelt room and at that rally last night. That was an unusually scripted rally.

CAMEROTA: What do you think that message is?

BERMAN: They don't trust him right now. They don't trust him to wing it for an hour and 20 minutes because they are nervous what will happen if he does. And even with the script he was weighing in to an extent that was problematic by saying the momentum statement. And then, Frank, this gets to something that you have written that's out this morning. People can look at it in "The New York Times" online, but it's for the weekend review this weekend. Your focus is on how to Democrats focus this in 2020, but it really applies to now.

BRUNI: Yes.

BERMAN: So the Democrats have been struggling with this since before 2016 but throughout the first 18 months of the term here. So what did you learn?

BRUNI: The important thing, and Democrats have made this mistake, an they'll continue to. The important thing going forward is not to constantly let him have the news cycle in the sense that you are just rebutting his lies, whatever he says. So take Tuesday is a good example. He came out and he said I'm going to end birthright citizenship with an executive order, which he can't do, which I think he knows he can't do. But for an entire day all we talked about, all Democrats talked about was what Trump had put out there.

The main thing Democrats need to do and the main thing a successful Democratic challenger to President Trump needs to do in 2020 is not have every day be determined by what he tweeted the previous night, by what he said that morning. Have something else to say, insist on saying it, and just don't get constantly trapped in his game and be totally reactive to him. And right now I think if you look at the last two years, Democrats have constantly been reactive, reactive, reactive.

CAMEROTA: Not take his bait.

TOOBIN: I think that is an interesting proposal. But what are you supposed to do? Do you really just not respond? I look at this as a journalist, not as a politician, but when he says these clearly untrue things about birthright citizenship, which is a very important issue, do you just say something?

BRUNI: No, you respond. You make clear that that's ridiculous, but then you move on. You don't talk about it for the next 24 hours, the next 48 hours. And also it puts the onus on Democrats, and this is tough, to really come up with some ideas and some messaging, to have a conversation with voters that is interesting enough that we're actually talking about that conversation as well as whatever lunacy is coming out of Donald Trump's mouth. I'm not saying it is easy, but it is imperative because we can't have a second --

NAVARRO: Democrats have to figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time. They have got to both rebut but they also have to offer something else. It is not enough to think that people are going to vote for them just because they are going against Trump. They have got to give them something to run towards.

BERMAN: Is the health care thing they're pushing right now, Democrats trying to stay on the message of health care, is that an example of what could work?

TOOBIN: They certainly seem to think it's working. Talking about the Trump administration's effort to take away protections for pre- existing conditions, that has certainly been the dominant Democratic policy message. I think it's a --

BRUNI: I think they need to talk about it in a more vivid and memorable way, and they need to make sure while they are talking about it, if they want to reach the voters they're trying to reach, they need to lose the condescension to Trump voters. If there's one thing, I talk to a lot of people for this piece, and if there's one message that came through more loudly and clearly than any other, it was that Democrats can't have a conversation that seems to condescend to the people who voted for Trump, that tells them they were duped, but that's not going to win their favor and bring them into the Democratic side.

NAVARRO: Where I live, I'm in a Congressional race that is up for debate. I live in a Senate race that's up in the air, and I live in a governor's race that's up in the air. And what I'm seeing work the best and cut through the best is when they offer a contrast. On the one hand in Florida, for example, in the governor's race, you have got DeSantis who has got ads about building walls, which is rather strange when you live on a peninsula like Florida surrounded by water on three sides, but OK, that's besides the point.

(LAUGHTER)

NAVARRO: And you have Andrew Gillum who is out there being the happy warrior and offering a unifying message. And he's reaching the people that Hillary Clinton couldn't quite reach in 2016, the African- Americans, the Latinos, the young people in Florida are voting big time. They have got to somehow be able to reenergize, ignite the fire in that Obama coalition that wasn't very energized in 2016.

[08:15:00] BERMAN: Ana, Jeffrey, Frank, thank you very much. A great discussion. We went on way longer than they wanted us to in the control room because we think you're awesome.

(LAUGHTER)

NAVARRO: Who cares about the control room?

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Yes.

BERMAN: Unfortunately I got this on my ear.

Republican Steve King locked in a really tight race and now lashing out over questions about his hard line, some would say racist views.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. STEVE KING (R), IOWA: No, you're done. We don't play these games here in Iowa.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: We're going to talk to his Democratic challenger next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Time now for part two of our latest voter panel. I sat down this week with a group of New Jersey swing voters the political pundits tell us could decide these midterms. They are college educated suburban women. Three Republicans, three Democrats. These women are all part of a book club, and they tell me that since their book club formed in 2004, they have never discussed politics because they were afraid it would not go well. But we tread into that dangerous territory and we started with the toxic tone in the country.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Show of hands how many people are uncomfortable with the tone in the country right now? OK. All six of you.

Denise, go ahead.

DENISE PANYIK-DALE, NEW JERSEY DEMOCRAT: Political sparring is nothing new. I mean, it's gone on forever. But I think that the inflammatory rhetoric that is happening right now is beyond compare.

[08:20:02] CAMEROTA: Do you think that the tone comes from the top?

PANYIK-DALE: I think that the tone is spread.

JEANNE ANN, NEW JERSEY REPUBLICAN: The tone has been around for more than Trump's election.

CAMEROTA: Do you think that President Trump has set a different tone than President Obama?

JEANNE ANN: Yes. But I feel the whole -- the country was ripe for that type of tone. There is examples on both sides, but I just think it's crazy that people are able to get away with behaving this way. It's just rude. You know?

CAMEROTA: What do you think, Cindy? CINDY RUGGIERO, NEW JERSEY REPUBLICAN: I think the standards were set

much lower for the presidency when what happened with Bill Clinton. That disturbed me tremendously as a woman.

CAMEROTA: The affair with Monica Lewinsky. The affair with Monica Lewinsky.

RUGGIERO: Yes. Yes.

CAMEROTA: You feel was more offensive?

RUGGIERO: Much more offensive.

CAMEROTA: And how do you reconcile the more than 15 women who have said that the president sexually harassed or assaulted them, President Trump?

RUGGIERO: I'm not saying I condone that. But in the White House --

CAMEROTA: Well, I'm just trying to figure out if there is a double standard between that you're not as bothered by the women who say that Donald Trump has crossed a line with them as you are by Bill Clinton.

RUGGIERO: No, no, no. I am bothered by it. But I am more bothered by the fact that President Clinton was in the White House --

CAMEROTA: The location bothers you.

RUGGIERO: The location and his status at that time.

FRAN FURTADO, NEW JERSEY DEMOCRAT: It makes me crazy when people go back to Obama or back to Clinton in comparison. When Trump came into -- was voted into office, I was ready to support him and our country. I wanted to be wrong. I prayed that something happens that his Twitter feed dies and he somehow starts talking --

(LAUGHTER)

FURTADO: Starts talking about uniting us as a country and being part of this global world, as opposed to this nationalism that he's been touting from day one. I think that that word nationalist was food for some of the things that went down the last week.

CAMEROTA: You think that was a dog whistle?

FURTADO: Yes, absolutely. And I think he knows it.

CAMEROTA: How many of you, show of hands, feel that President Trump has played some role or contributed through his rhetoric to the violence that we have seen in the past week with the mail bombs or with the synagogue shooting?

PANYIK-DALE: Again, we've said words matter. And while the vast majority are not going to act on, you know, words, words do have consequences. RUGGIERO: I feel differently. I think actions speak louder than

words. You know, Trump comes from New York. He's a New Yorker. And we all know New Yorkers are a little more brash, and they come -- they say what's on their mind. That's New York. That's a New York attitude.

CAMEROTA: How many people are uncomfortable with the times that the president says the press is the enemy of the people?

KIM HARWANKO, NEW JERSEY REPUBLICAN: Oh, that's ridiculous.

CAMEROTA: What do you mean?

HARWANKO: That's just ridiculous. The press keeps the watch. They're our watchdog. If you're not there, where is the checks and balances? Sorry. We need you.

CAMEROTA: What advice would you give to President Trump or lawmakers in Congress for what you'd like to see them do?

RUGGIERO: I think cream rises to the top. And being a little kinder might not hurt.

PANYIK-DALE: I think restoration of a feeling of kindness is important. It means putting yourself in that other person's shoes but still being true to yourself.

FURTADO: I would just say just act like the moral leader of the world's greatest country.

JEANNE ANN: Please keep doing what you're doing well, but have empathy. You're president of the entire country, not just those who voted for you.

DEBORAH DEWEY, NEW JERSEY DEMOCRAT: Focus on being a little bit more honest and saying things that are less bombastic because I think it does seek to divide us.

HARWANKO: I think we all need to have more compassion and empathy for each other. But I think we can do this because it can start right here in my family room.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: That's really interesting. Right? Because even people who tend to be supportive of the president there wish he would change the way he talks and how he talks and shows vulnerability.

[08:25:02] CAMEROTA: Absolutely. These are all New Jersey women, as I've said, so they have all said the tax cuts did not help them. OK? So they are not feeling the benefit of any tax cuts. They will vote, they say, in part on health care but in large measure on the tone in the country that they all want changed. BERMAN: All right. Republican Congressman Stephen King under fire

for his views. Can Democrats flip a seat in a very conservative part of Iowa? His Democratic challenger joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: Seven-term Republican Congressman Steve King under fire for racially charged comments finds himself in a tight race with just four days to go and he's obviously feeling the heat. Watch as Steve King, the congressman, erupts after facing questions about his extreme views.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You and the shooter both share an ideology that is --

KING: No, don't you do that. Do not associate me with that shooter. I knew you were an ambusher when you walked in the room but there's no basis for that and you get no question. And you get no answer. No, you're done. We don't play these games here in Iowa.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Steve King, just in case you didn't know, supported a candidate for mayor in Toronto who has espoused some neo-Nazi views and during a tour of Europe after visiting holocaust sites, met with neo-Nazi-ish parties in Austria as well.