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New Day
Trump and Biden Spar in Dueling, Distant Town Halls; U.S. Reports Nearly 64,000 New Cases, Highest Level in Two Months; GOP Senator Unloads on President Trump in Campaign Trail. Aired 7-7:30a ET
Aired October 16, 2020 - 07:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[07:00:00]
JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: All right. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is New Day.
And this is the day when President Trump is speaking fawningly of a group that the FBI warns likely motivates domestic terror. That's what jumped through the screen in these two town halls, is that millions of Americans watched with a little more than two weeks left to vote.
But with a pandemic that is clearly in a new, dire phase, it's what he said about that that is probably even more important. Overnight, nearly 64,000 new cases were reported in the United States. That's the highest total in two months. Nine states are reporting more new cases in one day than ever. Seven states are seeing record hospitalizations. This is the new wave, second wave, third wave. It is the new bad wave.
Estimates are that masks could save more than 100,000 lives in the next few months, one of the most important weapons in our disposal. Yet, the president is misstating facts about them and throwing shade.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: As far as the mask is concerned, I'm good with masks. I'm okay with masks. I tell people to wear masks. But just the other day, they came out with a statement that 85 percent of the people that wear masks catch it. So --
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE, MSNBC HOST: They didn't say that. I know that study --
TRUMP: That's what I heard and that's what I saw.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BERMAN: The president is wrong there. Not true, not even close. This is what Joe Biden said about masks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: The words of a president matter. No matter whether they're good, bad or indifferent, they matter. And when a president doesn't wear a mask or makes fun of folks like me when I was wearing a mask for a long time, then people say, well, it mustn't be that important.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: President Trump also admitted last night that he may not have taken coronavirus test before his debate with Joe Biden, though his campaign had vowed that he had.
President Trump also seems to like what he says he knows of QAnon, that's a fringe conspiracy network, that the FBI labels a domestic terror threat.
Joining us now, CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins and CNN Political Analyst, Maggie Haberman, she is a White House Correspondent for The New York Times. Great to have both of you and your analysis about everything that we saw last night.
Let's start with the mask stuff. Maggie, because this is where President Trump's lack of reading, as we know, he doesn't really like to read his briefing books and stuff from his advisers and his lack of being a detail person becomes dangerous. So he cherry-picks something from a study and then he runs with it in a way that is misleading.
MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, Alisyn, he runs with it in a way that is misleading because it supports what he wants people to believe. And I want to be clear, it's not that he doesn't read these studies closely, if at all, it's not that he is not paying attention to briefing books. Many of his advisers have told him that masks are overwhelmingly popular with the public and there is no -- including his senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and that there is no reason for him to be ignoring this the way he is, and yet he persists, as we have seen.
He took a study, completely misrepresented it. He pretended that he was fine with wearing masks, then he wasn't. He took apart Anthony Fauci for having initially not supporting mask-wearing. Fauci has said it for a very long time that people should. He acts as if this is his usual game that he's playing with words.
But this is very serious what he's saying in terms of masks. Studies have shown over and over, including the one that you just mentioned, that masks can help save lives, masks can help prevent the spread of this disease, and his desire to treat it like it's some kind of a political statement or cultural statement about himself remains very troubling.
BERMAN: Yes. And he chose this forum, one of his last biggest forums, speaking to the American people before Election Day, to question masks, more than question masks. Honestly, to suggest that they're not as effective as Dr. Fauci and everyone else says they were. And that really, really was notable.
Kaitlan, there was more too when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic. The president didn't just dodge questions, but really refuses to answers what is a really important question, which is, when was the last time he received a negative test before he ended up getting coronavirus? How much before the debate, where he did appear on stage with Joe Biden, was he tested? I want you to listen to this exchange.
[07:05:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GUTHRIE: When did you last remember having a negative test?
TRUMP: Well, I test quite a bit. And I can tell you that before the debate, which I thought it was a very good debate, and I felt fantastically, I was -- I had no problems before.
GUTHRIE: Did you test the day of the debate?
TRUMP: I don't know. I don't even remember.
GUTHRIE: Did you take a test though on the day of the debate?
TRUMP: If you ask the doctor, they'll give you a perfect answer. But they take a test and I leave and I go about my business.
GUTHRIE: So did you take a test on the day of the debate, I guess, is the bottom line?
TRUMP: I probably did and I took a test the day before and the day before.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BERMAN: Let me be crystal clear, Kaitlan, they know when the last time was that he took a negative test. This is not some mystery. This is a known fact and the president refusing to answer that, what does it tell us?
KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, they could also easily look up when the president's last test was. And he said there, you know, if you ask the doctor, you'll get a perfect answer. We've asked the doctor and we have not got an answer. And we've asked the president's political aides, who have also refused to say when that last test was.
But I think what the president admitted last night and something he had said earlier in the day is he is conceding he was not tested on a daily basis, like his staff has insisted to us for the last several months. When we pressed on things like, why are they not socially distancing and why is the president not wearing a mask? They said it was because he is tested every day, and that's a lie. The president said he is not tested every day and, clearly, he's not, because they do not know, according to the president, if he was tested the day of that debate.
And so you see how that changes things when you look at how the president has been interacting with people, not wearing a mask, not social distancing, coming over to reporters, asking reporters to remove their masks when they're asking him questions. And now we know he wasn't even being tested on a daily basis.
And just the egregious nature of that and the fact that they said for months that he was not only tested every day, but at one point in July, the press secretary told us he was tested multiple times a day, really just flies in the face of everything that I have said, their entire argument for why the president himself wasn't wearing a mask.
Nevertheless, you know, the broader argument he was making against masks, as aides have insisted, no, he's always been consistent with the messaging on mask and that people should wear them, he hasn't, and, obviously, that was clear last night as he was completely misrepresenting the CDC study, but also the fact that he is not tested every day like they have told us for months.
BERMAN: Let me just tell you one thing. On the idea of when the last test was, the only reasonable conclusion at this point is that he was not tested the day of the debate. And the Trump campaign had to certify to the Cleveland Clinic and others that he was. So if, in fact, they said he wasn't, now it appears they're lying. If he was tested that day, they would have told us at this point. If doctors would have told us, the president would have told us. The only reasonable conclusion at this point is he wasn't tested that day.
CAMEROTA: Hey, Maggie, how about QAnon? The president last night seemed -- well, he did suggest he likes what he knows of their, you know, so-called mission. This is the craziest conspiracy theory that, by the way, a North Carolina man fell for years ago, showed up at a pizza parlor with a gun. He got four years in prison, because he fell for the same part of the conspiracy that last night President Trump said he likes that one.
HABERMAN: Yes, appealing to conspiracy theorists, Alisyn, and being one himself, and seeing a hidden hand in things all around the world and all around him is something that this president has done for a very long time. We saw him doing it during the campaign, when he went on Alex Jones' radio show and thanked him for what he does. We have seen him repeatedly insist he doesn't really know what QAnon is. Well, if that is true, he probably has had time to learn, but it's much likelier that he does know what it is and he doesn't want to reject it.
He did it on a massive stage last night in the final three weeks of a campaign when people are paying attention and those are dangerous words. This is dangerous stuff. People have taken dangerous actions in part because they believe in this conspiracy theory. But the president is so concerned about turning off some of his potential supporters that he just leaves it open.
BERMAN: Let's play this moment here. Again, he was given an opportunity just to say, this group is crazy. He didn't. And not only did he not say that, he went a step further. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GUTHRIE: While we're denouncing, let me ask you about QAnon. It is this theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that. Now, can you just once and for all state that that is completely not true and disavow QAnon in its entirety?
TRUMP: I know nothing about QAnon.
GUTHRIE: I just told you.
TRUMP: I know very little. You told me, but what you tell me doesn't necessarily make it fact, I hate to say that. I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it.
GUTHRIE: They believe it is a satanic cult run by the Democratic states.
TRUMP: I tell you what I do know about. I know about Antifa and I know about the radical left and I know how violent they are and how vicious they are.
[07:10:00]
And I know how they are burning down cities run by Democrats, not run by Republicans.
GUTHRIE: Republican Senator Ben Sasse said, quote, QAnon is nuts and real leaders call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories. Why not just say it's crazy and not true?
TRUMP: He may be right. I just don't know about QAnon.
GUTHRIE: You do know.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BERMAN: He clearly knows something. Just to be clear, the FBI says that QAnon very likely motivates some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity, Kaitlan.
What about overall the contrasts in these two town halls? What does the White House feel that it got out of this, Kaitlan?
COLLINS: Well -- and it's not just QAnon, it's also what the president said about S.E.A.L. Team 6 and the death of Osama bin Laden, when he was asked, why is he re-tweeting these insane conspiracy theories, trying to say basically that Osama bin Laden's death was a hoax and that then Biden and Obama ordered S.E.A.L. Team 6 killed. Yes, something that crazy that the president has re-tweeted multiple times.
And last time, he was saying that he just puts it out there to let other people to decide for themselves. Though, of course, it's the president of the United States amplifying a conspiracy to his over 80 million followers on Twitter and, of course, he knows what he's doing, just like he knows what he's doing when he's not disavowing QAnon and says he doesn't know what they are, but identifying something about them being against pedophilia.
But I do think if you were changing the channels last night and looking at these two town halls, of course, the candidates were not on the same stage, but you really could see such a difference in the way that they conducted themselves. And going from watching the president talking about QAnon to turning to the Joe Biden town hall, just stark differences in the way that the two of those town halls, just even their bare premise, how that was functioning.
And so you really could see the difference that has been playing out on the campaign trail. You know, whether or not it changed voters' minds to be looking back and forth between these town halls, I don't think that that's certainly the case here. But, I mean, it was -- Donald Trump was being Donald Trump and I don't think people expected anything different than that combative, defensive nature that you saw from him on stage for 60 minutes.
CAMEROTA: Maggie, before we let you go, we do want to ask about Chris Christie's change of heart. And I don't know if it's a change of heart, but he certainly is explicitly now saying how he feels about masks and regret that he has after spending days in the ICU. I don't know if we knew that he was as sick as he was in the hospital.
So you have reporting and he said, quote, I believe that I went entered -- I believe that when I entered the White House grounds, that I had entered a safe zone due to the testing that I and many others underwent every day. I was wrong. I was wrong to not wear a mask at the Amy Coney Barrett announcement and I was wrong not to wear a mask at my multiple debate prep sessions with the president and the rest of the team.
What's your impression of how he's feeling and what he is speaking out?
HABERMAN: Well, among other things, Alisyn, look, he's clearly on the mend, he's feeling better, he said that he still has some fatigue, but it's nothing like what he had had when he was at his sickest in the ICU at a hospital in New Jersey.
Look, I think that this goes back to two things, the conversation that we were talking about the president creating this sense in his age, creating a sense that he was being tested every day, creating this false sense of safety in a bubble that they were all in. Christie was in that bubble for a number of days when he was doing debate prep.
But there's a big difference, Alisyn. He is saying something we don't hear very often in politics anymore, certainly not from anybody connected to this White House and certainly not from anybody who was part of this coronavirus outbreak, which is, I was wrong. I should have been wearing a mask. He urged people to follow CDC guidelines.
He did say he thinks that there is a balance between, you know, full- scale shutdowns and, you know, reopening everything. He suggested there is a way to move toward more gradual reopenings, if people are following those guidelines.
But he was very specific, Alisyn, in saying this is a deadly, serious illness. It's so in contrast to what we've seen with the president, who toyed with the idea of wearing a Superman T-shirt under his dress clothes when he was let out of Walter Reed far earlier than I think most people expected him to be. And I think you will hear Christie continue to say things about this going forward.
BERMAN: Maggie Haberman and Kaitlan Collins, thank you both for being with us this morning.
HABERMAN: Thank you.
BERMAN: Coronavirus case hospitalizations surging in the United States this morning. It has entered a new phase. Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins us next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[07:15:00]
CAMEROTA: Here are the numbers overnight. Nearly 64,000 new coronavirus cases were reported in the U.S. That's the highest total in two months. At least nine states are reporting a record number of new cases.
CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, joins us now. The numbers seem to get worse every day. There's another data point that I want to read to you, and that is that 13 states right now have positivity rates above 10 percent, some well above 10 percent. Sanjay, where are we this morning?
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, that's the number that concerns me, really, the most, these positivity rates. Because what that basically is saying is that we are not getting a full picture of just how widespread the infection is. It's got to be much more widespread than we're even seeing right now.
So we hear the numbers, we know that they're going up. But that high positivity rate means that they're going up much higher than we even realize. You amplify that by the fact that there is this lag time. So we see the numbers go up now, a few weeks from now, for people who get sick enough to be hospitalized, that's when you see the hospitalization rates going up.
So this is coming, you know, as we've talked about for some time, right in the middle of the season where it's starting to get cold, people are starting to cluster more. And you go away for a few days and all of a sudden look at the numbers and they go, instead of linearly growing, they start to go exponentially up.
That's what hospitals around the country, in many of the states, many of the reports that were filed this morning, that's what they're seeing there, those hospitalizations rates are starting to creep up.
[07:20:01]
But over the next few weeks, you may start to see them really go up. That's the concern.
BERMAN: Some of the states, like Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, they're just skyrocketing already. And in other places, they are, as you say, creeping up.
Sanjay, a couple of things from the town hall that I want to get to, one has to do with president's own condition. A little bit of something last night, but I want to hold off on that, because the first thing, it has to do with all of us, not just him, which is this mask thing.
Models show that we can save 100,000 lives if everyone wears masks in the next few months. Those are some of the projections. The president, I think, misstated information from a study that honestly didn't have anything to do about masks. Explain to us what the truth is and what the CDC had to clarify.
GUPTA: Yes. So, first of all, this is a study that came out some time ago. And the headline from this study, what the study was sort of designed to find was, when are you most likely to get exposed to the virus? What are those sorts of situations?
And what they found as part of the study, again, from some time ago, is that people who tested positive were twice as likely to have eaten out at a restaurant, more likely to have gone to a bar, more likely to have gone to a coffee shop and more likely to have had close contact with someone with known COVID. Those are all not surprises.
Now, that all makes sense and at the time that the study came out, we sort of had some glimmers of that already. It really was not about whether or not you were wearing a mask or not. There was self- reporting, do you wear masks sometimes, do you wear masks all the time? It really had no context for, you are more likely to become infected.
Now, here is a really crucial point, I think. And I think this goes back to the beginning and this back and forth on masks that we still continue to have. In the beginning, this idea that people wear masks, as you know, was not necessarily recommended. There was a concern about shortages, but there's also a more fundamental question. Does wearing a mask protect the mask wearer, okay? That was the question that was trying to be answered.
What we found out in March is that people who didn't even know they had the virus, they were asymptomatic, they could be spreading the virus. So then the discussion point became, people who wear masks protect others around them.
I know, for a lot of people listening, this is totally obvious, right? But this is still a fundamental point that I think gets missed.
So here is what the CDC said in response to the president's comments. We asked them specifically about this and we can put this up on the screen. But they're basically saying that the CDC is -- the guidance was clearly to -- that the mask -- I'm sorry, wearing a mask was intended to protect others in case the wearer of the mask is infected. Just let that sink in for a second. You wear a mask to protect others.
Again, I think a lot of people realize that at this point. But that's when things really changed. That was in March. So that's sort of is the reason people said -- oh, you never said to wear masks in the beginning, that may be true. But once was realized you could spread this asymptomatically, you wear a mask to protect others.
So if you want to find out how beneficial masks are in that study, the question should have been not, do you wear a mask, it's are you around people who are wearing masks? If you are not, you are more likely to become infected.
CAMEROTA: Sanjay, the reason that there were dueling town halls last night was because there was an outbreak of coronavirus at the White House. 34 people at least connected to the White House became infected. And the question always was, was President Trump and his campaign truthful that they were on the honor system at the last debate about whether or not he was tested that day. They represented that he had been. Last night, not so clear. Let's just play a moment of that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GUTHRIE: When did you last remember having a negative test?
TRUMP: Well, I test quite a bit. And I can tell you that before the debate, which I thought it was a very good debate, and I felt fantastically, I was -- I had no problems before.
GUTHRIE: Did you test the day of the debate?
TRUMP: I don't know. I don't even remember.
GUTHRIE: Did you take a test though on the day of the debate?
TRUMP: If you ask the doctor, they'll give you've a perfect answer. But they take a test and I leave and I go about my business.
GUTHRIE: So, did you take a test on the day of the debate, I guess, is the bottom line?
TRUMP: I probably did. And I took a test the day before and the day before.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CAMEROTA: Hats off to Savannah Guthrie. She got more of an answer there than anybody has been able to out of Kayleigh McEnany or anyone else, or the doctor, for that matter.
GUPTA: I had to ask the question like four or five times. I mean, it's pretty clear that he did not take a test, I think, on the day of the debate, which is shocking, I think, for a lot of people. I mean, people beg for these tests to be able to take them daily at schools and other organizations. He decided not to do that or it was decided not to do that.
And I have to say, as well, that the Cleveland Clinic, which was overseeing the medical protocols, they created a pretty porous sort of system here. [07:25:05]
The testing had to be -- it could be any sort of authorized test, it didn't need to be a PCR test, it could be an antigen test, which we know could have higher false negatives and they just have to say that they took it. It was really this honor system.
So I was -- I was surprised by that. Clearly, there's a known answer here. It's not a, let me check the records. They know whether or not he took the test, it should have been documented. So we still don't have a clear idea on this. And it matters, you know, because of his own contagiousness.
So we talk about professional sports, getting these tests daily, but not a presidential debate.
CAMEROTA: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you very much. I really appreciate all of that information.
Okay, a sitting Republican senator openly slamming President Trump and issuing a dire warning about the GOP's chances in November. Hear what Senator Ben Sasse had to say.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[07:30:00]
BERMAN: So this is sort of remarkable. We are hearing it out loud. We've heard whispers about this. You hear people saying, these are the types of discussions that are happening.
