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Trump Calls for Unity in State of the Union; Interview with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY); Trump Knocks 'Ridiculous Partisan Investigations'. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired February 06, 2019 - 07:00   ET

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


JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: The president appealed for bipartisanship while at the same time attacking Democrats. That's a neat trick.

[07:00:08] This was his first State of the Union address before a divided Congress. Nancy Pelosi literally looking over his shoulder. The president praise and took credit for the strong economy, and he called for unity and shared victory.

But he also renewed his call for a border wall and said Congress must confront what he called the urgent national crisis at the southern border. He also seemed to threaten Democrats on their oversight responsibilities. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: An economic miracle is taking place in the United States, and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations.

If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn't work that way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Echoes of Nixon there. You wonder if that was unintentional or intentional.

The president did manage -- look at that -- to bring Democrats to their feet with a shout-out to the record number of women in Congress. That brought the night's loudest ovation and had the new crop of Democratic congresswomen high-fiving one another.

I would note, absent completely from the president's address, any mention of the longest government shutdown in history. In the Democratic response, Stacey Abrams slammed the Trump administration for that. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STACEY ABRAMS, DELIVERED DEMOCRATIC RESPONSE TO STATE OF THE UNION: The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the president of the United States. One that defied every tenant of fairness and abandoned not just our people, but our values.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right. Joining us now, Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent for "The New York Times."

It's great have you here. Sort of a visual tease coming into the segment. We saw Maggie. It's so great to actually hear from you.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Thanks, John. Good morning.

HARLOW: Good morning.

BERMAN: There was some real interesting visuals last night at the State of the Union with Nancy Pelosi sitting behind the president. The new members of Congress or the women members of Congress all dressed in white. The people in the president's box, the first lady's box up there. What's your major takeaway from the address last night?

HABERMAN: My major takeaway is I do agree with the people who are saying this is the best he has done at this kind of speech. But remember, he doesn't give these kinds of speeches very often even though he does like the pomp around the state of the up on, he likes tradition.

He delivered what were themes of a re-election in the manner that, you know, any other president has used this speech at this point in their tenure to do. I think the problem for this president is he has so few hearts and minds that he can change. And when he says things like he did about the investigations last night, remember, some of that is about Democratic House-controlled investigations. Although to be clear, investigations have been going on perhaps at a lower level and with less intensity.

But investigations in terms of Russia and campaign activities were going on under Republican control, as well.

BERMAN: Yes.

HABERMAN: He is painting all investigations into him with a partisan brush. That seems to include everything.

HARLOW: Including the Southern District.

HABERMAN: Mueller, including the Southern District of New York, and that's not going to help him going forward.

HARLOW: So something you wrote, interestingly, just a few minutes before the president spoke last night. You wrote that there's a sense of fatigue that has set in with this constant battle mode from the president, which we saw in that remark on the investigation.

I wonder, after watching if you think that fatigue remains or if you think this was more a setup for 2020 campaign Trump?

HABERMAN: I think there's no question that this was a setup for 2020 campaign Trump. But I think that in terms -- most people, most presidents when you see them heading into a re-election, they have not had, you know, 2 1/2 to three years of fighting nonstop. Now they would blame Democrats, and they would say they never wanted to work with us.

But this president, it's important to contrast what he said in the speech, for instance, with what he said at the anchor -- the broadcast anchors' lunch earlier in the day at the White House. It was slash and burn of all of his opponents. He was criticizing Joe Biden. He criticized Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia. He went down a list who he was criticizing, including again John McCain.

And so it is very hard to juxtapose what you heard last night, which was a much more conciliatory tone, with what we know the president likes to say behind closed doors and often on his Twitter feed in public.

BERMAN: One of the people that he criticized in that closed-door meeting was the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer who joins us now.

So Maggie, sit tight. We're going to come back to you in just a moment.

Chuck Schumer, senator from New York, the Senate minority leader, is here with us. Senator, thank you so much for being with us.

Before we get to the president's words about you, which happened before the speech, let's talk about this speech itself. For you, if you are looking for something nice to say about it, what would you say?

[07:05:06] SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), MINORITY LEADER: Well, I would -- there's very little nice to say about it in the -- it's sort of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And he -- the excitement, enthusiasm was all in the Mr. Hyde parts.

I think Stacey Abrams showed the president what real leadership was last night. She was thoughtful. She was caring. She talked about her family and the American dream is fading out of reach for too many American families.

And the president was political, divisive, calculating, even nasty at times. You know, you can't talk about comity and working together and give a speech that is so divisive. That just doesn't fly.

So in the areas where he tried to reach out -- you know, drug prices, transportation, infrastructure -- there was no meat. There was no enthusiasm. All the enthusiasm was for the divisive parts like immigration, abortion, things like that. So it was not a good speech.

The president's hurting. He knows he's hurting, but he doesn't seem able to dig himself out of the hole and give a truly bipartisan speech and start working with us. We want to work with him.

BERMAN: Will you work with him on infrastructure, on drug pricing, on AIDS prevention, some of the things that he did call for last night?

SCHUMER: If he's real about it, yes. The trouble is, we've had Infrastructure Week about ten times and no real infrastructure plan. His last plan put no money into infrastructure. Can't do it, can't build a road without some dollars.

When he last did drug prices, the stocks of the pharmaceutical companies went up, because it was such a weak-kneed plan.

So it's got to be real. It can't just be words. And so much of his stuff is just hypocritical. He talked about ending -- ending the prohibitions on preexisting conditions. But at the same time he talked about that in his speech, his administration's in a lawsuit saying end protections for preexisting conditions.

And that kind of hypocrisy was rife throughout the entire speech. Do you think anyone believes that, if there was another president we'd be at war with North Korea? That was a real eye-roller.

BERMAN: It was a statement that does not have any foundation to back it up. But, some of the things he said about the economy are true. The unemployment rate is very, very low. You are starting to see wage increases in the middle class.

Isn't that something Democrats can say: "Hey, it's a good thing?"

SCHUMER: Well, the problem is the president's policies have been directed at helping the wealthy, and middle-class incomes are not going up the way they should. They're not going up in line with productivity.

Eighty-three percent of the profits that the major companies make goes to stock buybacks and dividends. And that's after his tax cut, his tax cut he said would create $4,000 increase in the average middle class family's pocket. Instead, it's created increased -- greater increased wealth for corporate America. That just doesn't fly.

So the state of the economy is not helping middle-class families. The state of healthcare is not helping middle-class families. His administration, the state of his administration is chaos, and his foreign policy is inside out, patting dictators on the back like Putin and Kim Jong-un and attacking our allies. The American people know this is a mess.

BERMAN: Do you think the president --

SCHUMER: The president just can't dig his way out of the hole.

BERMAN: Very quickly on Kim Jong-un, he announced there would be a summit on February 27 and 28. Do you not want him to meet with the North Korean leader?

SCHUMER: Of course I want him to meet, but it's got to be real. After the last one, he said we will no longer have a nuclear North Korea. And if anything, since the last summit they've gotten more nuclear in certain ways. So this not a reality show. This is not a one-day hit. This is serious work, and the president seems unable do it on North Korea or most anywhere else.

BERMAN: Let me ask you on the subject of unity and comity.

SCHUMER: Yes.

BERMAN: Listen to what he said about the politics of revenge last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Your reaction?

SCHUMER: Well, his first two years of the administration were not that at all. He loved divisiveness, he loved hot-button issues that inflamed his base but divided America.

The speech was more of the same. The most enthusiastic parts, the parts that seemed to have the most weight, were the divisive parts. He's got to change to make America better. He's got to change to work with us in a bipartisan way.

Look, we just had the shutdown. The president is correctly blamed for the shutdown. He wanted it. And he didn't seem to back off in any way, didn't mention the word "shutdown," but he's sticking to the wall. And the American people know that the wall is a bad idea. And if he insists on it, I think our Republican friends in the Congress will realize how bad the first shutdown was and try to overrule him.

[07:10:17] BERMAN: You said the president needs to change. Do Democrats bear any responsibility here? Do you need to take any steps toward the president whether it be on border security or another subject?

SCHUMER: We're willing to do border security. We always have. We offered border security to the president.

So we have always tried to be bipartisan. We have tried to work with our Republican colleagues. And in fact, when the president stays out of it, we get it done. The last two budgets, the president stayed out of it, and we got great budgets which do a lot of things --

BERMAN: Are they getting it done behind closed doors, the Senate negotiators, and the House negotiators, the appropriators, are they getting done?

SCHUMER: I believe, John, if the president stays out of it, we will get a deal, a good deal that every -- that Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate, can support.

It's when the president weighs in with his heavy hand, his unrealistic heavy hand -- he doesn't know how to negotiate -- that things get messed up. So if he stays out of it, yes, I believe the odds are very high we will get a deal.

BERMAN: Let me ask you specifically about something the president said about you, and this was in a meeting that he had with network anchors yesterday.

SCHUMER: Yes.

BERMAN: "The New York Times" reports that he called you a nasty son of a bitch.

SCHUMER: Yes, so much -- SO MUCH for inclusiveness. so much for working together.

I criticize the president. that's part of my job as leader and part of my job as an American. And his answers should be on the merits.

I said yesterday -- it got under his skin evidently -- that 364 days of the last year he's divisive. We hope this one day speech will -- if it emphasizes some kind of comity, will be more than a day. Instead of answering that on the merits, he uses an epithet. That's like a 10-year-old in a school yard in Brooklyn or Queens. It just don't work.

BERMAN: You said what he said got under his skin. Do you try to get under his skin?

SCHUMER: No, I try to talk the truth. But, you know, this president doesn't like to hear the truth. When you news people call tell him the truth, he calls it fake news. When politicians call him fake -- tell him the truth, Democrat or Republican, he calls them names. He called John McCain names yesterday in that interview. Please, this is an American hero who's gone from us.

BERMAN: One of the things the president said yesterday was that we can't have legislation while at the same time having investigations.

SCHUMER: Yes, I mean this was another one. One of the functions of the Congress, the Article I section of government from the days of the Founding Fathers was oversight of the executive branch. And the president says, "If you investigate me, I'm not going to make progress." That's doing what he did with the shutdown. Holding the American people hostage.

You know what I think it shows, John? He's scared. He's got something to hide. Because if he had nothing to hide, he'd just shrug his shoulders and let these investigations go forward. He's afraid of them.

BERMAN: Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts who is running for president, told "The Washington Post" and CNN, or didn't deny to CNN that she did sign a document in the 1980s where she identified herself as an American Indian. This was her registration to the Texas Bar.

Has she done enough, again, to explain how she has identified over the years here? SCHUMER: I think she's apologized. I think she's handled it well. I

think people ought to be debating the many interesting ideas that she's putting out.

BERMAN: One other question on politics in Virginia, the state of Virginia. Of course, Ralph Northam under attack for the racist photo that appeared on his yearbook page. Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, there is a woman who has come forward and says that she was assaulted by him in the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston.

Do you feel that this charge needs to be investigated? What answers do you need from the lieutenant governor?

SCHUMER: Look, I don't know any of these details, but when a woman makes a serious allegation, it ought to be taken seriously.

BERMAN: Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, it is a pleasure to have you with us this morning.

SCHUMER: Likewise, John.

BERMAN: Great to see you on NEW DAY. Come back very soon.

SCHUMER: Thank you. Nice to talk with you.

HARLOW: All right. Important voice this morning. Fascinating interview, and then seem as divided as they were before the State of the Union. We're going to talk more about the big address and what happens now, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:18:28] HARLOW: All right. Welcome back.

President Trump using his State of the Union address in part to threaten Democrats, slamming their oversight duties as, quote, "ridiculous partisan investigations."

Let's bring back Maggie Haberman and bring in our chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin; Nia-Malika Henderson, our senior political reporter; and David Gregory, our senior political analyst.

Good morning, one and all.

Nia, to you. Yes, the president was a la Nixon in that line last night, echoing Nixon, I think unintentionally there. As Nancy Pelosi stands above him, a reminder of the congressional oversight duties of a House now led by Democrats.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER: That's right. And she doesn't really have much of a poker face, right? So you could very much tell her emotions there, that line she obviously didn't stand. The camera panned to Adam Schiff, too, who is kind of the face of a lot of the oversight and the investigations here.

It was fascinating to watch her with this new dynamic, all the women in white. She, of course, was in white, as well. There were times when the caucus, the Democratic caucus got a little unruly, and you could see her basically saying, you know, tamp down and pipe down.

So, yes, I mean, that was a really fascinating dynamic that we'll see going forward. You know, I think the president sort of knows the reality at this point that there are going to be investigations.

And listen, I mean, some of these investigations are led by Republicans.

HARLOW: And they were going on before.

HENDERSON: Exactly. Exactly. So this idea that this is, you know, led by Democrats and a witch-hunt, not really true. I do think it was interesting the -- sort of the rhyming of there can be no legislation with these investigations.

And I don't know if that was, like, Steven Miller. It's sort of like -- there was a lot of alliteration in that speech, too. It's like, you know, bad eighth-grade writing in some ways.

[06:20:08] DAVID GREGORY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: But it's also the threat. It the same threat that he issued the morning after, you know, the shellacking in the midterms. Which is "We can work together. We can get a lot done, but don't investigate me. Because if you do that, then I'll investigate you or we won't get anything done."

And that was essentially, for all the talk of potential unity, the president revealed these glimpses of what he really thinks about. For him to decry the politics of revenge and then, in the next breath say, "You know, we can't actually have legislation that I'll sign if you're investigating me," is just -- that's not going to work.

BERMAN: And if we can actually go down this road for one more second on the investigations themselves, Jeffrey, the news yesterday is that the Southern District of New York, which is not partisan -- right? It was a U.S. attorney appointed by the president. Wants to interview folks in the Trump Organization.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Which just shows the breadth of investigations that are going on. The campaign, the transition, the foundation, the businesses, the presidency, all under investigation.

And, you know, just to talk about the State of the Union, he says, "Oh, these investigations are terrible." He has no leverage to stop those investigations.

In fact, Nancy Pelosi has pressure to do more investigations. She's the one who's trying to, you know, we're not talking impeachment yet. Don't talk about impeachment. So the idea that he can force or limit these investigations, it's just the opposite of true.

HARLOW: About mid-speech, about 41 minutes in here, Maggie, you wrote that you are consistently struck by how you think the president undercuts his message by the exaggerations he uses in the language.

HABERMAN: So I was thinking particularly about "American carnage," which was a couple of years ago.

HARLOW: Sure.

HABERMAN; But he does this thing where he goes to the absolute extreme so that when he comes back and says something that is, you know, closer to accurate or accurate, it's just harder to either take it seriously or to hear it ---

HARLOW: Like "countless Americans murdered, injured by illegal immigrants," for example.

HABERMAN: Correct. And so, you know, he used a line last night he was talking about ISIS, and he was talking about territories that have been, quote, unquote, "liberated" in the Middle East.

That is actually true what he said. It's just that it reminded me of something that he has said about towns that are have been, quote, unquote, "liberated" by the Department of Homeland Security, because they're facing the threat of MS-13.

And that is another of the exaggerations that he does that makes it harder to sort of focus on his rhetoric.

The other point I would make in his rhetoric in speeches like this, part of that is he speaks so often in so many different forums, in so many different formats that it becomes less of a standout moment when he does a State of the Union. In fat, it becomes the anomaly, because he's given a speech that is so at odds with his rhetoric. You know, I mean, I think Chuck Schumer actually said a version of this. It happens to be true.

When the president does one thing 364 days of the year and even 365 yesterday, if you include what he said at that lunch, it becomes harder to then look at the speech as if this is some sort of moment of meaning. I think presidents tend to use these as reset moments. And I don't think the president can do that. This president can't, because so much of this is baked in based on his own actions.

GREGORY: Also, some of the rhetoric is hysterical, right?

HABERMAN: You mean literally hysterical?

GREGORY: Literally hysterical. Like, you know, I can't stop laughing. We go from this big beautiful wall that's concrete and paid for by Mexico and now he sounds like Ralph Lauren. You know, it's going to be this steel, see-through, you know, barrier sensible for spring.

I mean, this migration of what the wall is going to be is --

HARLOW: It's a little lace trim.

GREGORY: Yes. BERMAN: Everyone should go back and read David Gregory's tweets from

the State of the Union --

GREGORY: Before I fell asleep.

BERMAN: -- because they're hilarious until he falls asleep. I would like to, if we can, all be Tony Romo here for a moment and talk about one of the more fascinating moments.

HARLOW: It's Wednesday.

BERMAN: The patriots won the Super Bowl.

HARLOW: They did.

BERMAN: But I want to look at this moment from the State of the Union, where there was a sense of unintentional applause and comedy here, when the president talked about the historic gains and women in the workforce.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: No one has benefited more from a thriving economy than women who have filled 58 percent of the newly-created jobs last year.

You weren't supposed to do that. Thank you very much.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So, Maggie, there's so much going on in there all at once.

HABERMAN; There's -- there's a lot there. And actually, we didn't get to the other part of that moment, which is when he talks about the historic numbers of women in Congress, which he actually is responsible for, just not in the way he means it. He's responsible for it, because the majority of those women, A, are Democrats and, B, ran against his platform.

[07:25:10] But it was one -- it really was one of the standout moments. And it was -- it was a striking moment in that the president didn't seem unhappy that these women were cheering, because it was still cheering and he was standing up; and I think at the end of the day, that was his takeaway.

TOOBIN: Can I make another observation about a crowd moment? When the president went on at great length, more than, I believe, any other president in history against abortion and abortion rights. You saw the Republicans, overwhelmingly men, stand up and cheer; and the women, all in white, silent. And so the idea --

HARLOW: Let's look at that for anyone who missed it last night.

TOOBIN: Do we have that?

HARLOW: Yes, we do.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother's welcome moments before birth. These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and their dreams with the world.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: We didn't have --

TOOBIN: We didn't have the reaction.

HARLOW: Sorry about that.

TOOBIN: But that was only part of it.

HENDERSON: Northam was also part of it, as well. Right.

And again, even you were talking about his tendency to exaggerate. He basically twisted Northam's words here and said that Northam said that he himself would basically execute a newborn baby.

HARLOW: Which is not.

HENDERSON: Which is not what he said at all.

HARLOW: Can we talk about the --

GREGORY: I do think this is -- that was both a crowd moment, but it was an area where I thought he was strong, where I think the president is most strong when he unites Republicans.

He's done it with his Supreme Court nominees, generally, his judicial nominees, now taking up the issue of abortion and the big callout moment which it is to say America will never return to socialism. That was a loaded word. It was aimed at AOC and other progressives who want to raise taxes, and this is going to be a fault line in 2020. He knows it. He can feel it, and he knows how to drive it.

HARLOW: He grabbed it. He grabbed it last night.

You heard Dana's interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she was walking in. And she said, "Can you work with the president on anything?"

And she said, "Well, I'm open if he wants to change his platform." Right? It shows the divide there.

GREGORY: Right.

HARLOW: But the response from Stacey Abrams, again, the gubernatorial candidate who lost by a tiny, tiny amount there. They're looking at her for a potential Senate bid in 2020. She doesn't represent the far-left wing the party. HENDERSON: Right. She talked about values, right? The values that

she sees the Democrats have in common over voting rights, climate change, guns, immigration reform, healthcare. She talked about student loans.

You see Democrats now try to figure out how to speak to white working class voters. Their approach before in the last two responses were white men. It was Steve Bashir, I believe, and then Kennedy, as well.

And so they figure out at this point, if you look at what happened in 2018, a lot of women ushered into Congress, a lot of women of color, as well. And then so Stacey Abrams representing that.

I thought her performance was fantastic. A lot of times those speeches are panned, because they have kind of an airless quality to them. But her speech was probably the best we've seen of the responses. It was very well-written. It was very well-delivered.

TOOBIN: It was on at about 2 in the morning.

HENDERSON: Yes. You may have missed it.

HABERMAN: But what it was is it was not -- tonally, it was actually very calm and it was -- there were a bunch of Democrats who I heard from last night who were actually critical of it and saying that "This isn't doing it for me."

And what they're referring to really is that they want -- they are used to a more pitched form of a fight. And what she was presenting was a less stridently partisan message. It was a forward-looking message; it was a positive message. It was framed around her own biography, and I thought that that was an interesting moment.

BERMAN: I think the thing to remember here is she did not watch the president's State of the Union.

HARLOW: Yes, that's fascinating.

BERMAN: So it was literally not a response to the State of the Union. It was a response to the Trump presidency.

And I think if you look at it in that frame, it explains what was going on there. I'm a campaign reporter at heart, so I think everything is about elections in 2020. But I think we saw a lot of that last night.

HARLOW: That clearly was.

HABERMAN: I agree.

HARLOW: All right. Thank you, one and all.

Can lawmakers -- can they, yes? Will they reach across the aisle to turn proposal into action? We ask a Republican lawmaker who is calling for bipartisanship and civility. Did he like what he saw last night?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)