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New Day
Trump Debases First Debate Into Chaos, Biden Hits Back. Aired 5-5:30a ET
Aired September 30, 2020 - 05:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[05:00:45]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: That was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck. That was the worst debate I had ever seen.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think Donald Trump may have ended his presidency tonight with his performance.
CHRIS WALLACE, DEBATE MODERATOR: Are you willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups?
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Say it, what do you want to call 'em? Give me a name.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The commander-in-chief refused to condemn white supremacy.
TRUMP: When needed, I wear a mask. I don't wear a mask like him. Every time you see him, he's got a mask.
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: How many of you got up this morning and have an empty chair at the kitchen table because someone died of COVID. If we just wear a mask, we can save half those numbers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.
ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to a special edition --
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Or extended night.
CAMEROTA: That's right.
Yeah. It's Wednesday, September 30th, 5:00 in the East.
If you've been up all night trying to process what you've witnessed, we feel you and we're here for you.
It's hard to describe last night's debate without using an expletive, but the newspaper headlines this morning are trying. Mr. Trump is described as chaotic, trampling, bulldozing, making a spectacle of the debate and tweeting out loud for 90 minutes.
The president repeatedly interrupted and sparred with even the moderator with nonstop interruptions. Joe Biden did not take the president's bait for the most part, hitting back at Mr. Trump and instead talking directly to the American people when he could.
Biden also called out the president's failed pandemic response.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: Between 750 and a thousand people, they are dying. When he was presented with that number, he said it is what it is. Well, it is what is it because you are who you are.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BERMAN: I think some of the headlines actually do a disservice here, just calling the debate chaotic as the "Wall Street Journal" did. It's inaccurate. They're really no both sides here. One person drove this event to the gutter and that was the president.
If it was a train wreck, it was the president who crashed the train. If it was an "S" show as our friend Dana Bash said, it was the president who took the dump.
And it was the president and the president alone who would not tell his supporters to be peaceful after the Election Day. It was the president and the president alone who provided a new rallying cry for a group that the Anti-Defamation League calls hard core white supremacist.
The president was lobbed the softest of softball questions, asked to condemn violence from white supremacist groups. This is not a trick question. But the president wouldn't do it.
Instead, he told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by. Stand by for what, exactly?
And overnight, we've seen Proud Boys supporters inspired by this comment, this new permission structure from the president. So, that's what happened on the stage a few hours ago.
We're going to begin in Cleveland, at the site of this monstrosity. Our Jessica Dean is there -- Jessica.
JESSICA DEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, John.
Well, if you were tuning in last night hoping to hear about policy, you didn't hear much of that. You were pretty much out of luck. President Trump really turning this into essentially a chaotic food fight, attacking and interrupting former Vice President Joe Biden at every turn. For the most part, though, try as he may, Joe Biden did not take Trump's bait.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) DEAN (voice-over): It didn't take long for the first presidential debate to devolve into a chaotic shouting match between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
(CROSSTALK)
BIDEN: Let -- vote now. Make sure you, In fact, let people know.
TRUMP: He won't answer the question.
BIDEN: I'm not going to answer the question.
TRUMP: Why won't you answer the question?
BIDEN: Because the question is -- because the question is --
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: Radical left.
BIDEN: Will you shut up, man?
DEAN: For 90 minutes, Trump constantly interrupted Biden's answers and even the moderator's questions and requests, resulting in Americans hearing few details about either candidate's policies.
But one of the president's responses, or lack thereof heard loud and clear was his refusal to condemn white supremacist groups.
BIDEN: I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing not from the right-wing.
[05:05:04]
WALLACE: So, what are you saying --
BIDEN: I'm willing to do anything -- I want to see peace.
WALLACE: Then do it, sir.
BIDEN: Do it. Say it.
TRUMP: Do you want to call 'em -- what do you want to call them? Give me a name. Give me a name, give me a name. Who do you like me to condemn --
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: White supremacists and --
BIDEN: Proud Boys.
TRUMP: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what, somebody has got to do something about Antifa and the left.
DEAN: And Biden didn't back down from Trump's name-calling, sending some of his own swipes towards the president.
(CROSSTALK)
BIDEN: Folks, do you have any idea what this clown is doing.
TRUMP: And there's nothing smart about you, Joe. Forty-seven years you've done nothing.
BIDEN: Let's have this debate --
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: And if you have had -- let me just say.
(CROSSTALK)
BIDEN: You're the worst president America's ever had. Come on.
DEAN: Still, for most of the night, the Democratic nominee looked to connect to voters by speaking straight to the camera, like in this question asking how they felt about Trump's coronavirus response.
BIDEN: Do you believe for a moment what he's telling you in light of all the lies he's told you about the whole issue relating to COVID. He still hasn't even acknowledged that he knew this was happening, knew how dangerous it was going to be back in February and he didn't even tell you. A lot of people died. A lot more are going to die unless he gets a lot smarter.
DEAN: The president once again warned he may not accept November's election results, repeating his false claims that mail-in voting would result in massive fraud but there's no proof of widespread voting fraud in U.S. elections.
TRUMP: I'm urging my people. I hope it's going to be fair election. If it's a fair election --
WALLACE: You're urging them what?
TRUMP: I'm 100 percent on board. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't go along with that.
BIDEN: No one established at all that there's fraud related to mail in ballots. That somehow it's a fraudulent process. He has no idea what he's talking about.
Here's the deal. The fact is I will accept it. He will too. You know why? Because once the winner is declared after all the ballots are counted, all the votes are counted, that will be the end of it. That will be the end of it.
DEAN: Trump looked to spin criticism of his decision to hold large campaign rallies during the pandemic after Biden slammed him for constantly ignoring coronavirus safety guidelines like wearing masks and social distancing.
TRUMP: We had no negative effect, and we've had 35,000, 40,000 people in these rallies.
BIDEN: He's been totally irresponsible in the way in which he's handled the social distancing and people wearing masks, basically encourage them not to. He's a fool on this.
TRUMP: If you could get the crowd, you would have done the same thing. But you can't. Nobody cares.
WALLACE: Gentlemen --
DEAN: And just two days after the "New York Times" report on his federal income tax returns, Trump provided very little defense and no evidence to refute the newspaper's claims.
TRUMP: I paid millions of dollars in taxes. Millions of dollars of income tax and let me just tell you, there was a story in one of the papers.
BIDEN: Show us your tax returns --
TRUMP: I paid 30 --
(END VIDEOTAPE)
DEAN: Despite what happened last night, Biden adviser tells CNN that Vice President Biden cannot and will not walk away from the next debate. A senior Trump official saying, of course, President Trump will be at that second debate.
Alisyn, the next debate is two weeks from now in Miami. It's going to be town hall style. So, expect to hear from voters.
CAMEROTA: That will be helpful, Jessica, a town hall style will be helpful because I don't know -- I mean, the candidate might show up. I don't know if the American people would show up in the next debate if it would that same style.
BERMAN: Maybe one of the people in the audience will moderate. Maybe that's the advantage of having people in the audience. Someone will decide to step in and actually --
CAMEROTA: Well, I mean, that's one thing. And voters -- it's harder, I assume to argue with voters that it is -- the moderator. But we'll see.
Joining us now are CNN senior political analyst John Avlon and CNN political commentators Angela Rye, she's the former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Scott Jennings, he's a former special assistant to President George W. Bush.
Thanks, guys, for getting up early with us.
John Avlon, you are always so good at giving us perspective. How are we supposed to process what we watched last night?
JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: We watched last night a debate that degraded our democracy, almost by design. If there were any kids watching their first presidential debate last night, we owe them an apology. Really Donald Trump owes them an apology, because Joe Biden showed up for a presidential debate and Donald Trump showed up to throw rhetorical thesis, and he made a mess of himself and he made a mess of the process.
But we're better than this. We are better than what we saw last night. The president was unhinged and he always mistakes bluster for strength. It's weakness. That's what we saw.
BERMAN: I will say, again, we don't owe the apology. There was one person who did this. This debate was driven, the tone of the debate was driven by one person. It didn't devolve into chaos. One person --
AVLON: That's right.
BERMAN: -- devolved this into chaos. And I do think we need to be careful with how we phrase this, because if chaos is the headline, and Donald Trump wins, right?
[05:10:06]
He gets what he wants. He wanted the circus there. And to an extent, he got it. Now, we can argue is whether a circus for him is the best strategy, but I do think we need to be careful how we characterize it.
Angela, what did you see?
ANGELA RYE, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You know, John, I think that's fair, John. I do.
I think the challenge is that you expect a moderator to ensure that they have some type of decorum, that they follow some type of rules. And at the very least, can we get mics turned off when this happen. When we talk -- when we throw words around like sick, and despicable and unbelievable, that's not theme of last night's debate, that is the theme of President Trump's presidency, right? That is the theme of what happened in 2016. There's nothing new under the sun here.
Joe Biden, to John Avlon's point, did show up to debate. He showed up to debate Mitt Romney. The problem is Mitt Romney hasn't been on the stage since 2012.
So, you have to show up to debate a clown as he so aptly put it, who shows up every day on Twitter with no facts, right? And so, I left the debate last night feeling like I just binge-watched "Love & Hip Hop" which left me with an achy feeling. I stopped watching the show.
It's not because there was a bunch of rap references thrown around or any type of real diversity, even in question. Diversity was shirked (ph), right?
But the reality of it is it gave me a disgusting feeling. It didn't feel good. And the only way I thought Joe Biden could have won against Donald Trump last night was swing on him, especially when he brought up his son and talked so poorly about his kids. CAMEROTA: What did you see, Scott?
SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Actually I want to disagree a little bit with John's point on chaos. It doesn't play into Trump's hand. There's not much time before the election. Trump needs to change the trajectory.
It's been a pretty stable race in the polling. So, if you look at it through the lens of audiences, what kind of audience does he need to recollect, does he need to recapture, that he had in '16, that he doesn't have now. There's a lot of suburban women. There's some senior citizens that seem to have gravitated away.
If you were in those audiences, I'm not sure watching the chaos, if that's the word we want to use, would have done anything to recapture those people. So, while I think Trump's hardest core supporters love to smash mouth and I think Biden's supporters, of course, feel aggrieved that -- and they, you know, this validates all their views about Trump, it's those niche audiences that Trump would have to recapture.
And I didn't -- you know, he was on -- he was on offense but he crossed the line and became offensive, and those audiences I don't think are going to respond to that kind of -- you know, that kind of overplaying your hand.
BERMAN: And I do think that raises, Scott, I think the second major question here, and you're always free to disagree with me and I appreciate that, which is to what extent was this effective? To what extent did this change the race? To what extent, John, did this help a president who was losing going into debate night?
ALVON: It didn't. I mean, to Scott's point, if he's trying -- if there's anything resembling strategy in the back of Donald Trump's brain, as opposed to just instinct and impulse, he would have been trying to reach out to suburban women, he would have been trying to reach out to senior citizens.
But instead, he was just a loud mouth guy screaming at the end of the bar, fact free, talking over everybody, acting like the rules don't apply him to. All things that I think he authentically believes, but he went incredibly overboard.
And that's why one of the big lies of the night was Joe Biden saying, look, shut up, man, because he spoke for a lot of people at home. And just the constant stream of insults we saw. It's a real view into his soul that we see every day through Twitter, but we rarely see on stage.
And, look, Biden did not have a great night. He had a good night. The best thing about his performance was Donald Trump going so overboard that he clearly was the only adult in the room.
CAMEROTA: Angela, in case people --
JENNINGS: Yeah, if I may -- if I may res -- CAMEROTA: -- are just walking up -- oh, yeah, quickly, Scott?
JENNINGS: Yeah, sure. I just wonder, I think John has a -- has a good point. Biden, he had an okay night. There were a couple of moments where Trump had Biden on an issue for instance on the Green New Deal. I thought Biden was all over the place. And so, that was a moment where Trump could have scored if not for overplaying and overtalking it.
And so, you could see a nugget of strategy in there what Trump was trying to do on some of these issues. But then by overplaying it, he sort of ruined the hole he was trying to dig for Biden.
So, it was -- to John's point, he never -- they never allowed Biden to dig the hole that they wanted to dig because Trump just, you know, he couldn't let it breathe, he couldn't let the strategy breathe.
CAMEROTA: That's interesting.
But there was moment, obviously, that's gotten so much attention in case people missed. The president refused to condemn white supremacy. Here is that moment.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups --
TRUMP: Sure.
WALLACE: -- and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we've seen in Portland?
[05:15:09]
TRUMP: Sure, I'm willing to do that.
WALLACE: Are you prepared to specifically --
BIDEN: Do it.
TRUMP: But I would say --
WALLACE: Go ahead, sir.
TRUMP: -- I would almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right.
WALLACE: What do you -- what are you saying --
TRUMP: I'm willing to do anything -- I want to see peace.
WALLACE: Then do it sir.
BIDEN: Say it, do it. Say it. TRUMP: What do you want to call them, what do you want to call them.
Give me a name, give me a name --
WALLACE: White supremacists and right fringe militia --
BIDEN: Proud Boys.
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: Proud Boys. Stand back and stand by, but I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. Somebody has got to do something about Antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing -- this is a left wing.
BIDEN: His own -- his own FBI director --
TRUMP: This is a left wing problem.
WALLACE: Go ahead, sir.
(CROSSTALK)
BIDEN: -- white supremacists. Antifa is an idea, not an organization.
TRUMP: Oh, you've go to be kidding.
BIDEN: That's what his FBI -- his FBI director said.
WALLACE: Gentlemen --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CAMEROTA: Angela, the president has the hardest time condemning it. What more do we need to know? I mean, what more do we ever need to ask him. He can't do it.
RYE: Well, he won't do it, Alisyn. Your president is a white supremacist and he's a racist and he's a bigot and those are words that I said from the very first moment that he came down the escalator announcing his campaign. This is the same president who called Barack -- or said Barack Obama was not born in this country. He was the spokesman for the birther movement.
So it's fascinating to me as the number of people blown away by the fact he would not condemn the very thing that he built his entire campaign upon, right? Of course he's not going to condemn his base. That's a key part of Donald Trump's strategy to continue to gin them up.
The most important thing is that he wouldn't condemn white supremacy is that went hand in glove with this idea of not accepting election results. It's the very same thing.
It is the reason why people all over this country, whether they live in progressive states or red states are talking about going to shooting ranges and learning how to shoot. People do not know what's going to happen on the other side of this and the number of conversations that I'm a part of right now where people are talking about civil war is next is a real problem.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is Donald Trump's America. That is the problem. I feel terrible about talking about and critiquing Joe Biden's debate strategy when we're literally trying to put a demagogue out of office.
The truth of the matter is Joe Biden did not have a great night but America had an even worse one. That's what we're dealing with.
BERMAN: You're right, Angela, the president was given an opportunity to tell his supporters that they should remain peaceful after the election and he wouldn't do it.
John Avlon, I just want more on this discussion and I know we're going to go to next segment soon, but so people can see the impact of the president telling Proud Boys to stand by. This is what they heard. I hope we have these tweets up on the screen here. Some of these Proud Boys --
CAMEROTA: Drop the banner, you can see that they say -- yeah.
BERMAN: There you go, stand back, stand by. Again, the Proud Boys is a group the Anti-Defamation League calls a white supremacist group that inspires violence here. And you can see, John, that they the hook as a call to arms.
AVLON: Absolutely. And we have discussed this before because this is part of a pattern, going back to when he refused to denounce David Duke. He refused to call out white nationalist violence, clearly, consistently. We did a real check about it just a few weeks ago, and these groups take his lack of a clear condemnation as an endorsement.
The point Angela just made is so important because he segued soon after that horrific comment to talk about how he wants his supporters to rush to the polls. Sound like an invitation to voter intimidation. And this is a powder keg the president is setting to degrade our democracy, but we cannot let him do it.
BERMAN: And we're going to break here, I'm going to leave you with these words from Thomas Friedman overnight in op-ed. When extremists go all the way and moderates just go away, the system can break and it will break.
AVLON: Yeah.
BERMAN: And that's his fear overnight.
We've got much more to discuss. Friends. Stand by. We want to get your high points and low point. We want to talk about what issues might have broken through in this debate.
CAMEROTA: OK. So, Joe Biden and President Trump taking jabs at each other over coronavirus. We have much more from last night's debates.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[05:23:40]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I wear masks when needed. When needed, I wear a mask.
WALLACE: OK, let me ask --
TRUMP: I don't -- I don't wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he's got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from me and he shows up with the biggest mask I've ever seen.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BERMAN: That's the president of the United States criticizing Joe Biden for wearing a mask in the public. Obviously, the pandemic has now killed 206,000 Americans.
Our friends back with us. John Avlon, Angela Rye, and Scott Jennings.
So, John, what pulled through in term of the pandemic and to an extent, you know, Americans know what's going on in pandemic. I don't know what needs to break through but what do you think they heard in terms of this?
AVLON: You know, the fact that there could be such a debate and Donald Trump doubling down, nonsensically throwing out numbers if Biden was in charge, the number would be 2 million. I mean, there are millions deaths in world right now.
But Biden really took to him hard and also spoke to the American people who've suffered loss, which highlights kind of that empathy gap. President doubled down on trying to make the debate about China. He tried to sort of say that no -- no one had been harmed in his rallies to date. Someone tell that to Herman Cain's family.
But this really was such a clear contrast, because Biden knows this is an issue he can hammer the president on with credibility and the president was just trying to pick up anything lying on the ground to beat him back with.
CAMEROTA: I thought it was a telling moment, Scott, where President Trump tried to claim that he was joking about telling Americans --
[05:25:03]
AVLON: Yeah, that was a good one.
CAMEROTA: -- telling Americans to inject disinfectant.
All of the medical emergency hot lines that lit up after that, they didn't think that he was joking and nobody who watched that press conference ever has thought that he was joking. That tells you something, I think, Scott. I'm not sure exactly what other than the president must be embarrassed. JENNINGS: He really struggled in the coronavirus portion of the
debate. Not just on litigating his actions to dedicate but he failed, I think, Alisyn, to make the pivot. Where he's going to have had better success in talking who's got a better plan for recovery in the future.
So Trump had trouble with his, you know, job approval on this, which is low and his actions and he needed to make the pivot.
For Biden who I thought won the exchange, I do they -- his ticket is still playing with fire when it comes to discussing this vaccine. I think the vaccine has been politicized. He and Harris have made dangerous and inappropriate statements casting doubt on the vaccine. And I think that's whole conversation still makes very uncomfortable --
(CROSSTALK)
CAMEROTA: Scott, just to challenge you on that, I hear you.
JENNINGS: -- when Americans are going to need to trust it when it comes out.
CAMEROTA: Yeah, of course, but I just -- aren't they challenging the president's judgment on the vaccine? I mean, they keep saying we trust Dr. Fauci.
JENNINGS: Yes. Look here's the deal to borrow a phrase. When this election is over, if Donald Trump loses, and a vaccine come out, it will have largely been developed during the Trump presidency. I don't think you should leave people with the impression that the winner of an election should determine whether you should take a medicine or not in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
So, look, I'm not here to defend Donald Trump on the coronavirus so far. I am here to say, at some point, we'll have medicine. It will be developed by very smart doctors and scientists and we need to -- we need to trust that.
BERMAN: Angela, if I can change the subject briefly because I am getting a little bit of a hint of this from you. You, of course, are a Democrat and are supporting the Democratic ticket. You've not been a boisterous Joe Biden supporter from the beginning of the political process here.
What would you have liked to have seen that you didn't see from Joe Biden last night? Should he have handled it differently or did it make sense to try to play a reverse rope-a-dope and just let the president go out and debates the moment?
RYE: Yeah. That is very generous of you. I definitely have not been the robust Biden supporter.
I believe that he is a very decent person and he showed up in decency and civility on the debate stage, as you would ordinarily expect a presidential candidate to do. I think that Joe Biden, again, I'm acknowledging my own shortcomings
here. To me, the only thing Joe Biden could have done that would have made me happy and actually a very robust Biden supporter is swinging at Donald Trump yesterday.
I think the other issue that we have, though, knowing that that's not a good idea since he has Secret Service protection is that he really has to swing back, like at least verbally. You have to spar with a bully.
The moment that you strike a bully back, the bully backs down, at least for a moment. I think that Joe Biden thought the normal kind of sly grin and normal just little jab under his breath was sufficient and it was not, right?
Joe Biden had so many moments where he was under Donald Trump's skin talking about the COVID response. That moment where he looked straight to camera and said, you might be an American sitting across from an empty chair talking about the coronavirus, it was powerful. He needed more moments like that.
I certainly acknowledge that he couldn't get them out, right, because you had the interrupter in chief across the other podium. But the reality is Joe Biden let Russia attack his son stand against the president who was there because of Russian interference. It's like how do you let that slide?
So there needed to be something, some types of comment. I don't know if they weren't doing sparring and debate prep, but that's certainly is what needed to happen. He didn't look like he was ready for fight of what this election will be. And what it really is, people are already voting.
That is key for his success. People need to be excited about what we have. Joe Biden is what we have.
BERMAN: You know what? That brings us a ton more questions. We have a lot more to discuss.
Luckily, we got a lot more time, because this is a special --
CAMEROTA: We have a 10-hour show.
BERMAN: This is a special edition of NEW DAY that will take us into 2026.
We thank you all, all for being here with us this morning.
AVLON: Have a good one, guys.
BERMAN: All right. Nearly 1,000 deaths, more than 42,000 new cases of coronavirus in United States yesterday. There's growing concern over a resurgence of cases in certain places that, man, don't want to see it one bit, including New York City, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
