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New Day

Coronavirus Cases Continue to Rise in States Across U.S.; President Trump Still Not Conceding Presidential Election to President-elect Joe Biden; Georgia to have Two Senate Runoff Elections which will Determine Control of Senate; What Happens If Trump Refuses to Give Up Power?; U.S. Smashes Records for New Cases & Hospitalizations. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired November 11, 2020 - 08:00   ET

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

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Think really illustrated the economic tolls versus the human tolls. And we've all been led to believe by the White House that we have to make a choice, when, in fact, there's a way to cut down on both of those, the human toll and the economic toll. But of course, it would require consistent leadership and role modeling of good behavior. But that family, I just can't say it any better than that family in terms of what they lost and they'll never get back.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Omar, thank you.

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Alisyn, and that frustration that she has -- of course.

BERMAN: It is palpable. Omar Jimenez, thank you so much for that report.

NEW DAY continues right now.

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

CAMEROTA: We're going to welcome our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY. And President-elect Joe Biden forging ahead with his transition, despite President Trump's obstruction. Here is what the incoming president thinks of the outgoing president's behavior.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, (D) PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Well, I just think it's an embarrassment, quite frankly. The only thing that -- how can I say this tactfully? I think it will not help the president's legacy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Biden is already taking calls from foreign leaders and preparing to announce his cabinet picks.

BERMAN: So today we're expecting to see President Trump, the outgoing president, for the first time since Thursday. He will take part in a Veterans Day event at Arlington National Cemetery. Serious, though, where has he been the last five days? Why hasn't he appeared in public? Has it been embarrassment to appear as a defeated president? Does he worry he cannot publicly defend his baseless claims of fraud? It does seem like he's been doing stuff, or at least someone in his name who has access to his Twitter handle has been doing stuff. We can't be sure. He or someone with his Twitter handle has pushed out several top officials at the Pentagon and replaced them with loyalists. One Pentagon official describes this as beheadings.

So why? And if he is, in fact, working, will he choose to do any presidenting on the coronavirus? The pandemic is spiraling out of control. A record number of new cases, 131,000, a record number of hospitalizations, nearly 62,000. By these measurements the pandemic is worse than it has ever been.

CAMEROTA: Joining us now to talk about all of this is CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash and CNN White House correspondent John Harwood. John, you are there at the White House. Where is the president? What has the president been doing for these past days?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The president has been stewing, Alisyn, in the embarrassment of his defeat, lashing out, and securing the acquiescence of the entire Republican Party in this charade. Everyone who is expected to reality knows that he has lost the election. The fraud claims are fabricated. And what we see is a president who simply can't adjust to this reality.

And the amazing thing is he is pretending to have won the election or that he's on the path to win the election for a job that he does not want to do. As you indicated at the top, the pandemic is spiraling out of control. The president has not taken action. His vice president, Mike Pence, had been scheduled to go on vacation to Florida this week. He's now canceled his vacation, not to get on top of the pandemic, but rather to help sustain the president's fabricated arguments about the election, and also he had some bad weather in Florida.

So this is not the portrait of an administration that is in charge excepts for the damage that the president is doing, firing his defense secretary, shuffling other officials across the government. Not clear whether that is pure spite or vengeance for people who have stood up to him, or whether or not he's got some other purpose, which is not evident to us right now. But it is -- it's a mess.

BERMAN: We can come back and talk about the defeat of the president in just a moment, but there is a transition that is under way right now, and we have begun to hear, Dana, from President-elect Joe Biden. To be fair and to be frank, this is something that President Trump has never had to deal with, which is another force that can dictate the national agenda. And so you have a president-elect now, and we heard the comments yesterday, and I'm curious about your reporting about why the president-elect chose to seem less put off than I think a lot of people in the Democratic Party now, but also what else we might see from the president-elect in the coming days. An announcement about a chief of staff, that would drive a lot of news and interest. He can set an agenda now in ways that he never could before. DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's exactly right,

and he's doing it just by announcing that he has gotten calls from world leaders, including somebody who across the pond in the U.K., Boris Johnson, who the current president considers a close ally.

[08:05:12]

That is speaking volumes about where the president-elect is right now versus where the current president is claiming that he needs to be. What I'm told by people in and around the Biden transition is that the projection of calm and not to worry kind of thing that we heard from Joe Biden yesterday is obviously deliberate. He wants to make clear to Americans that it's not time to panic. It is still early. There are -- there is still time to move on with the transition.

But that is not a permanent thing. What I'm told is that if this continues, and when I say "this" -- the president acting out and suffocating the transition, not allowing them to have basic funds that they should have to get up and running, then the posture of Joe Biden and the transition will change. But for now they feel that it is best for them to continue to do what they're doing, and to put across the air of inevitability.

There are people who are around Biden -- John, you know this because you covered the 2000 recount -- who were there on the other side, on the Democratic side. And they understood from what the Bush people did, which is to make it inevitable, that that works in terms of the American psyche. It is not an accident that that is happening. Never mind that, you know, everybody has -- it's very, very different on a lot of levels. People have seen the votes and we understand that it doesn't make any sense for Donald Trump not to concede when it comes to the raw numbers.

CAMEROTA: But very quickly, Dana, just so that I understand, are they as sanguine behind the scenes as President-elect Biden is projecting, or do they think that some of these strange moves like what's happening at the Pentagon with President Trump firing people and installing his loyalists, that they mean something?

BASH: For now I'm told they believe it is rhetoric, and it is not meaningful. However, they are watching, and the minute something happens that they believe really is disruptive to national security, to things that they believe they need to do in the short term, you can bet that we're going to hear about it.

BERMAN: So I know Dana has reporting on this, and I do also. Anyone who has called any Republican in America over the last few days has been told that, a, they think that sooner or later this will all come to an end, but, b, what's really going on here is concern in the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, about these Georgia runoffs that take place the first week of January. Republicans, particularly Mitch McConnell, is very concerned about depressing or demotivating base voters in Georgia with two Senate seats up for grabs, or pissing off the president, excuse my French, putting him on the sidelines, keeping him demotivated so he doesn't campaign. That's why they're humoring these notions so much, John. And I am curious, though, the thing about this that I think we need to

try to figure out is how long can this go on? What is the moment that Mitch McConnell will get as much as he needs in Georgia so that he would pick up the phone and call Joe Biden? I'm not sure I understand what that intervening moment would be on the calendar. Is it when secretaries of state certify the elections, which take place in a week-and-a-half? Is it when the electors meet on December 14th? Is it when Congress approves the electors the first week of January? You start looking at the calendar here and you see Mitch McConnell can draw this out for a long time if he wants to play that game.

HARWOOD: You're exactly right. I think it's not possible to identify an end point. I do think that this Republican participation in this charade is going to erode over time. Pressure will increase. More and more people on the edge who are more firmly attached to either the moderate elements in the Republican Party or simple reality, they're going to flake off, as we've seen from people like Charlie Baker, the governor of Massachusetts, and Larry Hogan. We see foreign leaders putting pressure on. Benjamin Netanyahu, Boris Johnson, others signaling that they understand that Joe Biden has won. I do think the end point is much closer to December 8th, as you indicated, when states begin to certify their results, than it is to January 5th when we have that runoff.

But I do think it's worthwhile and notable to step back and think about what it says about the degradation of the Republican Party that motivating their voters in a special election requires this kind of pretense, this kind of fiction that the president is fostering.

[08:10:09]

So this is not just about the president's kind of childlike refusal to accept reality and deal with the embarrassment, the humiliation of losing. It's also about the base of the Republican Party which requires the same kind of humoring. It's not a pretty sight for American democracy.

BASH: They are one and the same, because the base, as we all know, listens to what President Trump says.

HARWOOD: Yes.

BASH: They are very connected. And I think that it's important to also remind people that it's not just two special elections or runoffs in Georgia. This is the ballgame for Mitch McConnell. This is whether or not he stays the majority leader, and if they win those two seats, the Republicans do, then he will, or if the Republicans lose them, then he will be minority leader and Democrats will have control of the Senate, barely, but they would, of the Senate, the House, and the White House. That is what Mitch McConnell is trying to do. He always tries to play the long game. This is a shorter long game, if you will.

And the one thing I will add to answer John's question, the other data point, is these lawsuits. The Republicans I talked to on Capitol Hill think that they will be thrown out and they won't go anywhere. That could happen relatively soon, that judges will say, no, no, that's not relevant, that's not legitimate. And that's another thing that Republicans on the Hill are watching. They're watching the courts.

HARWOOD: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Dana, John, thank you both very much for all of that information.

All right, so President Trump lost the election by nearly 5 million popular votes and counting, but, of course, he is refusing to admit defeat. So what about the official vote in the Electoral College? Could that somehow lead to a constitutional crisis? Fareed Zakaria is going to talk about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:15:44]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: As of this morning, world leaders currently outnumber Republican senators in congratulating President-elect Joe Biden on his election victory. This is what the president-elect thinks about that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT-ELECT: Well, I just think it's an embarrassment, quite frankly. I know from my discussions with foreign leaders thus far that they are hopeful that the United States democratic institutions are viewed once again as being strong and enduring.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Joining us now, Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS."

And, Fareed, this is no small thing. America is a beacon of democracy around the world and when elections are held and not respected in other countries, America says "shame on you".

I mean, what does this do to that notion, to that worldwide relationship?

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS": John, you have it exactly right.

I've always said that America is respected more for what it is than what it does. In other words, there are a lot of people around the world who dislike some aspect of American foreign policy, disagree with American policy in the Middle East, in Asia, whatever, but they all respect America for being the world's oldest constitutional democracy, and, in fact, even in previous times of crisis, like Watergate, what was remarkable to me -- I was in India at the time growing up -- was that people respected the fact that while it looked very messy, what was happening was a president was being held to account by Congress, by institutions. In other words, power was being checked.

Here what you have is the opposite. You have essentially what appears to be an attempted -- and I emphasize -- an attempted effort to kind of subvert the will of the people, subvert the rules and norms of the republic.

It's important to notice, people will say he's within his legal rights, President Trump is. Of course he is, but a lot of democracy is not about your legal rights, it's about the norms and procedures and respect you give to the process.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And so when Secretary of State Pompeo says what he did yesterday at the podium to reporters, basically saying that he is preparing for a second transition for a second Trump term, what message does that send? What is that?

ZAKARIA: Well, let us hope that that was an effort -- a very bad effort at a very bad joke. If he meant it seriously, then, again, what he is suggesting is that he is not trying -- and, remember, this is a man who holds constitutional office in the United States, he is, what, fifth in line to the presidency. He suggested we are a kind of banana republic where the party in power is going to use every means it can to stay in power and subvert the opposition.

Look, you pointed out, Alisyn, at this point it's 5 million, it will probably end up being a 6 million vote difference. This is actually -- if the mail-in ballots had been counted first as they were in Ohio, this wasn't close. He won by the same number of electoral votes as Donald Trump did and by about 6 million votes in the popular margin.

BERMAN: Yeah. If it had been done in that order Nevada, Michigan, wouldn't even be discussed. Pennsylvania probably wouldn't be under any kind of discussion. The margins are that big that they -- you know, these races would have been called early on that night.

So, Fareed, you note the popular vote and there are a lot of people who will note that a 5 million, 6 million popular vote victory is significant. The one place it is not significant is the U.S. Constitution because the Founding Fathers didn't care about the popular vote, they chose to ignore that.

You wrote in September about what you thought was an alarming possibility, an alarming scenario that could happen with the electors. I'm not sure I agree that the system is in place for this alarming possibility, but explain what concerns you.

ZAKARIA: Sure. And to be clear I outlined two outcomes, one I said the most likely thing is what is happening now, which is that Trump is going to claim victory and claim that, you know, the votes on election night are the ones that should count.

[08:20:08]

But there is this possibility I outline which is that they raise -- the Republicans raise enough questions about a few of these state delegations, most of which have Republican legislatures, and they tell the legislators, the state assembly, the state Congress to send in their own electors, you know, to Congress. Now, it gets even more complicated than that because they could in a sense send a rival set of electors, so Pennsylvania could send two, one attested by the secretary of state, one by the state legislature.

In that circumstance, is it possible that what the Republicans and Congress say, look, we've got two, let's not -- let's not count these two or three states in which case if Biden doesn't get to 270, the election of the president goes to the House of Representatives, decided not on the basis of a majority, which the Democrats have, but a one vote per state delegation, which actually favors the Republicans. I think there are 26 or 27 Republican state legislatures.

So all you have to do is gum up the works enough that Biden doesn't get to a 270 tally in Congress.

CAMEROTA: You're sending a shiver down the spine of the 75 million people who voted for Joe Biden and so are you seeing any indication that we're headed for that scenario?

ZAKARIA: Well, 19 Republican legislatures in Pennsylvania yesterday made essentially the call that -- call for the legislature to do exactly what I outlined. It seems to be a minority right now. I pointed out this is an unlikely -- this is a kind of Hail Mary pass, but I would just say does anyone think that there is any ethical bar for Donald Trump in terms of doing this?

No. The question is just practical, could he get away with it. There is no question if he could, he would.

BERMAN: The one thing I will note is that Pennsylvania -- take the case of Pennsylvania, the Constitution gives state legislatures the power to pick electors but the legislature already has done that and they've given the power of the secretary of state to certify the electors.

So the problem in this scenario is that the law gives -- now the state law gives the secretary of state in that state and other states are handled differently the power to elect electors. It isn't clear the legislature in the state of Pennsylvania has any legal role whatsoever anymore in appointing electors and that's in Pennsylvania, it's different in other states, but it's not quite a linear path there.

You would have to explode norms and laws to get to the point that I think you're most worried about, Fareed, but, as you said, 2020, anything can happen.

ZAKARIA: In -- you know, this case in Pennsylvania about who has the ultimate power has gone to the Supreme Court about a month ago and it deadlocked 4-4.

BERMAN: That was on the timing of the vote on receiving the vote, it wasn't about --

ZAKARIA: It was on --

BERMAN: -- the law itself.

ZAKARIA: It was on whether the state supreme court or the state legislature had final authority. So, all I'm saying, again, it's a remote possibility, but it's a scary possibility.

BERMAN: I appreciate your time, Fareed. Thank you as always.

The U.S. has broken new records for coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. Dr. Sanjay Gupta reports on what has changed in the course of this pandemic.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: The United States set another record for new coronavirus cases, more than 136,000 new cases just yesterday. The U.S. has added more than a million cases in just the first ten days of November. Cases are rising this morning in 45 states. Another record overnight, nearly 62,000 people hospitalized with the virus.

So joining us now is CNN chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, what do you see today and where are we headed?

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Where are we headed? I mean, you know, you look at these numbers and I hate to give you such bad news first thing in the morning but the numbers are all heading in the wrong direction. And, you know, you keep in mind we look at these hospitalization rates, which, as you know, is the pressure that I pay closest attention to because I think it's the truest, sort of most consistent measure of what's happening with this pandemic and you see over 60,000 people this hospitals now for COVID going into flu season, that's a real problem.

I mean, you're starting -- a few weeks ago I was saying, hey, look, hospital administrators are worried about this, I'm talking to a lot of them, now you're starting to hear panic as you heard from some of the folks in Omar's piece as well.

But also keep in mind, another fact is that 60,000 hospitalizations today is reflected in some ways of what was happening several weeks ago. So, if you go back from middle of November where we are now to middle of October, middle of October there were around 50,000 people becoming infected on a daily basis.

Fast forward a few weeks and you are seeing the impact on hospitalizations. So what does that mean four to five from now, what does that mean four to five weeks after Christmas and the holidays, you start to realize that the apex, the peak of this is probably not going to be until end of January, early February time frame, that's according to a lot of the models. It's going to be tough sledding I think for some time and hospitals are starting to try to get as prepared as they can now to take care of their patients.

BERMAN: Yeah. When you look at the number of new cases and you look at the number of hospitalizations, it is concerning because even with the advances that have taken place, if the number of hospitalizations and cases rise so much, it won't be able to keep up. It just won't be able to keep up. And with that, Sanjay, I do want to take a pause here, I know you

filed a report for us, I will let you set it up here on exactly what has changed.