Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Trump and Biden Face Off in Final Presidential Debate Tonight; Report Shows Faulty Trump Response Led to 130,000 to 210,000 Avoidable Deaths. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired October 22, 2020 - 07:00   ET

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

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Doesn't fix things.

[07:00:01]

Making stuff up doesn't make people's lives better. You've got to have a plan. You've go to put in the work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: Then minutes after Obama's blistering takedown, America's top security officials announcing that Russia and Iran are actively working to interfere in this election. The director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, accusing Iran of sending threatening emails to voters and spreading disinformation. Ratcliffe claims Iran's efforts are intended to damage President Trump, but intelligence experts are skeptical, since the disinformation seems to support President Trump.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: Let's begin with the stakes in tonight's debate. Joining us now, CNN Political Analyst Alex Burns, a National Political Correspondent for The New York Times, Margaret Talev, a Politics and White House Editor for Axios, and Seung Min Kim, she is a White House Reporter for The Washington Post. We have the best in American print journalism here with us this morning.

Alex Burns, to quote the famous Lyndon Johnson ad, these are the stakes. What are the stakes in the debate tonight?

ALEX BURNS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, John, I think you put it well. This is the last best chance for either of them to change the course of the race. And, frankly, only one of them wants to change the course of the race and that's President Trump. The burden on him is heavy going into the debate tonight, as he continues to trail Joe Biden in national polls, in nearly every swing state poll we have seen. A New York Times poll this week found that on the issue of coronavirus pandemic, voters prefer Biden as a leader over the sitting president by 12 percentage points.

I think that's the biggest thing for the incumbent tonight. Can he put a dent in those numbers? Can he say something to the country about the pandemic and the public health crisis and economic recession it has caused that causes some people who are currently writing off the president and actively leaning towards Joe Biden, because, remember, we are past the point where there are enough purely undecided voters to swing this thing to the president. Can he say something on COVID that actually pulls people away from the Biden camp?

CAMEROTA: So, Margaret, what's your reporting on what's the strategies are that each candidate will use tonight?

MARGARET TALEV, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, Alisyn, we know that President Trump's team has advised him to be a little bit less aggressive than in the first debate, be hard to not be less aggressive towards Joe Biden, and to kind of take the temperature down a notch. There's no indication that the president actually thinks that that is the right strategy toward this.

He did a lot of prep last time, then Chris Christie got sick, plus he overtorqued in the prep. So the prep is largely out the window. But the president has made clear that he thinks he has to do more than just make himself more likable to people who might still be undecided. And that he thinks that what he really needs to do is knock Joe Biden off of his pedestal.

So he's not just signaled, but basically said he's going to use this debate to try to go after Biden on his son, Hunter, and try to tie Hunter's problems and questionable business practices and relationships and such to the vice president directly. That's a dangerous territory for the president to be in. He may be successful or it may end up backfiring. So there's some consternation inside the campaign in the White House, because until you see what that looks like, you really don't know how it's going to land.

And there are new dynamics, of course, in the debate tonight, with the microphone's ability to be muted. Can the president use that to his advantage or, again, will that backfire on him? But he wants to knock Biden off his game, not just try to give himself a second chance in debate world.

BERMAN: I will tell you, if your strategy for a 73-year-old man is to be different than you've ever been in your life, to reinvent yourself for this one night after 73 years, that's a tall order. And if that's what they're asking President Trump to do and if that's what they think he needs to be, that might be a tall order.

Seung Min, what do you think the Biden campaign wants from its candidate tonight?

SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Clearly, he wants the campaign's focus to clearly stay on the coronavirus pandemic and the president's handling. I mean, you've seen the Biden campaign and Vice President Biden himself be pretty low key this week. He's been primarily doing debate prep. He hasn't been on the campaign trail and relying primarily on key surrogates, including the biggest surrogate of all, former President Obama, to do the campaigning on his behalf.

But once that's done, obviously, Biden has come under some criticism for not being out there, less than two weeks from Election Day, but that also has meant that a lot of the focus has been on the president and his, for example, outbursts against Dr. Fauci, several of them earlier this week, and the focus has remained on this growing pandemic, and the president's handling of it.

So I think the Biden campaign wants that to remain the focus tonight. He wants to do what they can to protect the lead, basically do no harm and keep the focus where they want it to be.

[07:05:03]

CAMEROTA: Alex, let's talk about the Obama factor. So President Obama came out and gave this quite animated, for Obama, speech in Philadelphia yesterday. And he just went right at all of the, what he considers many failings of President Trump, including, I mean, let's just start with what he was referring to as his behavior. So listen to this moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: You might be to have a Thanksgiving dinner without having an argument. You'll be able to go about your lives knowing that the president is not going to re-tweet conspiracy theories about secret cabals running the world or that Navy SEALS didn't actually kill bin Laden. Think about that. The president of the United States re-tweeted that. Imagine, what -- what?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Alex, your thoughts?

BURNS: Look, Alisyn, I think that cuts to sort of the fundamental factors around this election, that predate even the coronavirus pandemic, which is that even when the economy was good, and even when a lot of Americans were willing to give President Trump at least a measure of credit for that, he was still something of an underdog in his campaign, because so many people just detest his personal conduct.

And one thing we saw throughout the Democratic primary is that one of Joe Biden's core assets is that people have seen him standing in the Rose Garden, sitting in the Oval Office. They see him as someone who can behave like a president and with the dignity and respect that they expect out of a president.

And who better to deliver that message in the close of this campaign than somebody who has been the president. Barack Obama is the most popular living former president in the country. And he can speak both just as a political performer in terms of the way he delivers his rhetoric and then just culturally in terms of who listens to him, particularly younger voters. He can speak to that issue in a way that Joe Biden himself may not be able to.

And I think it's important to see that he went to Pennsylvania, which is a state where turnout among young voters and black voters, especially, are so important to closing the deal for his party.

BERMAN: And he was on the attack, like a running mate is often on the attack, and to an extent, I mean, look, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been running mates before. This is an inverse of the traditional relationship. But he was deliberately on the attack on, I think, President Trump's sore spots, including this new report in The New York Times that President Trump has business dealings and a bank account in China. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: He's got a secret Chinese bank account. How is that possible? How is that possible? A secret Chinese bank account, listen, can you imagine if I had had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election? You think -- you think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that? They would have called me Beijing Barry.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: By the way, I think Beijing Barry is actually trending right now, Margaret. But it shows you what the former president is trying to do.

TALEV: Yes. He's trying to attack Trump on everything from the notion of reality T.V. versus a reality presidency to foreign dealings, taxes, everything in between. But as Alex said, this really is about turnout and targeting two audiences, young voters and voters of color. There have been two elections in modern American history, in American history where the African-American vote exceeded the white vote and it was President Obama's two elections, 2008, 2012.

If he could deliver that for Joe Biden, it would transform the map. It would be crucial in what we think of as battleground state and it could potentially be crucial in states that have never really been battleground states before, only aspirationally.

We have new pollsing this morning with our Survey Monkey partners that show that there are literally five states in the entire country where young voters. And I'm not talking like 18-year-olds. I'm talking anywhere under 35 --

BERMAN: Young to me.

TALEV: -- states in the country that support President Trump among that group of young voters.

CAMEROTA: Not me.

Seung Min, in terms of voters of color, again, President Obama went right at the questions of racism and the tone of the president and the country. So here is that moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: Why are folks making excuses for that? Well, that's just him. No, it's -- no. There are consequences to these actions. They embolden other people to be cruel and divisive and racist.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[07:10:06]

CAMEROTA: What did you think, Seung Min?

KIM: Well, I think, obviously, the former president has a big platform to discuss his views and he really brought the issue that had dominated so much of the headlines this summer, the issue of racial justice, so what happened across the summer in the protests. And he's trying to fuel that fire, fuel that activism and translate that into votes this summer.

And if you look kind of at the speech writ large, I mean, Margaret and Alex touched on it early, but it almost kind of seemed almost like a venting session or a therapy session for the former president, who has been such a target of President Trump throughout Trump's presidency, with the baseless accusations of the Obama campaign spying on him, the accusations, again, that they were ill prepared, or that the Trump administration had been ill prepared by the pandemic because of the Obama administration.

You saw President Obama refute that last night, saying he literally left him a pandemic playbook that he ignored. The former president mocked President Trump's repeated claims that a health care was coming in two weeks. So you saw I think President Obama had a lot that he wanted to get off his chest yesterday.

BERMAN: Yes. He went right at him on the things that are most important to the president, including his T.V. ratings and his Twitter habits. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: I never thought Donald Trump would embrace my vision or continue my policies, but I did hope for the sake of the country that he might show some interest in taking the job seriously. But it hasn't happened. He hasn't shown any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself and his friends or treating the presidency like a reality show that he can use to get attention.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Reality show. Alex, talk to me about the geography again. Former President Obama in Philadelphia, we learned he sent to, where, Miami over the weekend. How will the Biden campaign deploy him and what's the targeted goal?

BURNS: Well, I think it's sort of as simple as it looks on its face, and that Pennsylvania and Florida are the two biggest swing states on the map right now, unless we sort of take Texas into the picture, which is still kind of a question mark. Among the traditional swing state, he is going to the real big one. And if Joe Biden wins those two states, it's very, very difficult or impossible for President Trump to mount a comeback in this election.

And I do think that in addition to speaking to the groups within the Democratic base that are so important for Joe Biden to mobilize right now, you do hear, including in that clip that we just heard, the former president really trying to make a persuasion argument to people who may still be undecided. People don't necessarily remember how much time and effort and energy and money the two Obama campaigns put into reassuring and peeling away a suburban white voters and rural white voters, including a white man without college degrees. He's peeling some of them away from the Republican Party in order to bring down Republican margins in areas that are never really going to go blue.

And what you hear him doing there, and we heard this in several of the clips, is trying to take away some of the excuses that voters make to themselves for why it's actually okay and it's not all that serious if you vote for President Trump, the idea that the tweets fundamentally don't really matter, or that they aren't necessarily specific consequences for these kinds of character arguments. And that argument, I think, specifically, John, the president is not interested in doing his job is one that has pretty broad appeal. There are people who like President Trump personally but feel that he has not measured up to the task at hand.

BERMAN: Alex, Margaret, Seung Min, great to have you on this morning. Thank you so much. Enjoy the debate tonight.

CAMEROTA: And tonight, Joe Biden and Donald Trump face off one last time before Election Day. CNN's special live coverage of the final presidential debate begins at 7:00 P.M. Eastern.

Okay, a brand-new report says that hundreds of thousands of American lives could have been saved if the Trump administration had a response, a more coherent plan to respond to the pandemic. We have the details for you, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:15:00]

CAMEROTA: Developing this morning, a new report just released from Columbia University on the pandemic estimates that at least 130,000 deaths in the U.S., perhaps as many as 210,000, could have been avoided with earlier policy interventions and more robust federal coordination and leadership.

When the president was asked on Wednesday if there was anything else his administration could have done on coronavirus, this is how he responded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: With COVID, is there anything that you think you could have done differently, if you had a mulligan or a do-over on one aspect on the way you could have handled it, what would it be?

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: Not much. Look, it's all over the world. You have a lot of great leaders, a lot of smart people, it's all over the world. It came out of China, and China should have stopped it.

No, not much. (END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Joining us is CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, to see an actual number of death toll, a number of Americans that could have been alive today if there would have been any kind of leadership or plan, modeling of mask-wearing, any widespread testing, any contact tracing, I mean, all of the things that successful countries have done to keep their numbers down, to know that more than 100,000 of our Americans and fellow loved ones would still be here. That is just a really shocking revelation this morning.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And I know, you know, a lot of families of people who have died from COVID watch this show. I email with them regularly. And they hear this and it's very, very dispiriting. It's absurd to think that the best this country could do was to be the worst in the world with regard to our handling of this pandemic.

You know, I've been following this modeling coming out of Columbia for some time. And let me just add a few more layers to it. If we can actually look at -- we know, generally, that, obviously, a lot of lives could be saved.

[07:20:00]

But they broke this down by countries as well and basically said, look, if you had adopted what a country like South Korea had done, if you adopted a policy like what Japan had done, what would things have looked like then?

And we could show that. The numbers may be hard to read there. But, basically, they say, look if we had done in the United States what South Korea had done, by roughly this point, 2,799 people would have died in this country as opposed to 222,000.

So it's a pretty remarkable thing. If you look at Japan, 4,300 would have died, Australia, 11,000 people would have died. I mean, the point is that there were policies put in place and some of these countries, different policies. In South Korea, you may remember, they never really went into a shutdown. It was largely masks, it was largely people staying indoors when they could, and lots and lots of testing and tracing. Same stuff we've been talking about for months now.

Remember, in South Korea, they had these testing kiosks. Testing just became a way of life over there. You could test, find out if you were positive. If you were, you'd stay home. If you were negative, you could be out and about with the mask on. If you did that, look at those numbers again, 2,700, 2,800 people could have died instead of 200,000.

So, it's tough to look in the rearview mirror, but going forward, some of those same policies will still work and still save a lot of lives going forward. BERMAN: And that the really is the question, are we doing enough now with more than 60,000 new cases a day, and that number rising, 40,000 new hospitalizations, that number rising.

Sanjay, new guidance from the CDC that I want you to help explain and explain the significance, changing what they consider to be a close contact with an infected person or one of concern from being 15 minutes straight next to somebody to 15 minutes total over the course of the day. Explain this to us and why it's important.

GUPTA: Well, I think that this sort of reflects what has been arbitrary sort of definition for some time. I mean, close contact, this is something contact tracers have to sort of figure out, what constitutes a close contact. And just as you said, John, what it was, what the guidance was up until yesterday was at least 15 minutes within six feet of contact with somebody who was infected with the virus. That's basically what it was.

And what they're saying now is that those 15 minutes can be cumulative over a 24-hour period and this came out of a study of a Vermont corrections officer, who never had the previous definition of close contact, never had close contact with somebody for 15 minutes, but has several brief encounters with inmates and subsequently became infected.

Look, like I said, it's always been arbitrary. I spoke to contact tracers about this a few months ago and they said, look, where were you when you had the contact, were you in a small setting? Were you indoors? And if you were indoors, was it a large warehouse-type setting or smaller? Were you outside? Did someone sneeze? Were they speaking very loudly? Did they have to shout, for example? It's always been arbitrary.

What this is really about is masks. Again, if you wear masks all the time, you can mitigate these exposures no matter if they are intermittent or if they are constant or whatever. So I thought it was arbitrary before. I think this layers a little bit more definition on to it.

CAMEROTA: But just help me understand one more layer of it and that -- so in other words, it's all about viral load, right? So if you are -- if you spend one minute with somebody who is infected, 15 times that day, I assume that means you're getting more droplets, okay, into, you know, your nose and that's making you sicker. So if you just had one minute of contact with somebody who is infected and you had some droplets, maybe your system would be able to fight it off? I mean, is that what I'm supposed to understand from this?

GUPTA: Yes, I think that that's fair. It is a question of viral load. And we've known for some time that the viral load does determine how much more likely you are to get infected and even how much more likely you are to get sick if you get infected.

But, you know, Alisyn, I think it has been arbitrary. I mean, you can have a brief exposure if someone is talking very loudly and putting a lot of virus out and they are pre-symptomatic, meaning they're at a point in their illness where they have a ton of virus in their nose and their mouth, it's a very different sort of exposure.

So I think what contact tracers were trying to do early on is say, look, we can't possibly contact trace every single person someone has come in contact with, so let's figure out how to better define this. And they realize that the definition was probably too loose. They needed -- what this is now reflecting is more restrictive.

But I think, ultimately, it really comes back down to just the masks, to wear the masks, you're going to have a lot more protection.

BERMAN: All right. Sanjay, we're going to have you back in a little bit, because I know this is a day that you've circled on the calendar for some time, where this is the FDA panel talking about vaccines. It's going to be like something we've never seen before. And I know you'll explain why and what you're watching for today. So, stick around, don't go far.

GUPTA: Yes.

BERMAN: We want to remember some of the more 222,000 Americans lost to coronavirus.

62-year-old Karen Batten was the probate judge for Brantley County, Georgia, handling everything, from wheels to weapons permits.

[07:25:04]

Colleagues say she was a genuinely kind soul, quick to share a joke. She loved her job.

57-year-old Dr. Mukul Chandra was a prominent cardiologist and health educator in Dayton, Ohio. He won the American Heart Association Distinguished Achievement award in 2008. He is survived by his wife and two children.

Professor Stuart Bowyer almost singlehandedly turned U.C. Berkeley into an early center for both ultraviolet astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial life. The New York Times reports that starting in the 70s, he led teams that sent instruments into space revealing more than a thousand stars, galaxies and technicolor gas clouds, and he pioneered the search for radio signals from distant, possibly intelligent civilizations. Bowyer was 86 years old.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:30:00]