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3-Day Impeachment Trial for Trump; Biden Inherits Non-Existent Vaccine Plan; QAnon Followers Feel Betrayed. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired January 21, 2021 - 06:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:33:10]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Developing this morning, brand-new reporting on the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

Joining us now, CNN political analyst Rachael Bade. She is the brand- new co-author of "Politico's Playbook."

And, Rachael, this is your reporting. We are talking possibly about an historically short impeachment trial.

What have you learned?

RACHAEL BADE, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, John, thanks for having me on this morning.

Basically, there's a lot of talk behind the scenes right now, both from Democrats and Republicans, about an impeachment trial that could be as short as three days. This is unprecedented how quickly this could be. Past impeachment trials for presidents have run anywhere between 21 days until 83 days.

And I just want to be clear that the talks are still ongoing, right? Ultimately, this is going to be a decision that is going to be made by Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and their negotiation in the Senate. But I'm hearing behind the scenes that, you know, the Biden administration really wants this impeachment trial over with. They are very eager to move on to executing Biden's agenda and passing legislation in both chambers. And because of that, we could see something as short as three days, which is incredibly fast.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And so, Rachael, has the appetite for this, for some trial of Donald Trump, waned now that President Trump has left? I mean, obviously, right after the intersection, there was a call for some sort of action and justice to be taken. But now, if Biden doesn't really want this taking up time, are Democrats also losing the fight for this?

BADE: Yes, I would say, Alisyn, that even before the Biden -- Biden was sworn in yesterday, I was hearing privately from Democrats who weren't willing to say so publicly, but were concerned about this slowing the agenda. Obviously, there was a call for accountability and, obviously, accountability needs to happen about what happened on the siege in the Capitol on January 6th, but a lot of Democrats, you know, they are wanting to hit the ground running.

[06:35:02]

Right now they don't really have plans for what this road map in the next couple of months is going to look like. So it's kind of a jumbled mess, honestly, behind the scenes when you talk to Democrats. They weren't expecting a full power sweep of Washington when they took over those two Georgia seats and actually won the Senate away from Republicans. And so people want to focus on planning. They want to focus on the pandemic. They want to focus on what is Biden's top legislative agenda going to be? Is it going to be infrastructure? Is it going to be climate? And right now they really can't do that because they're sort of stuck thinking about what is this next thing going to be on the impeachment?

BERMAN: So, Rachael, in the playbook this morning you have a phrase, which I hope catches on, because it's extraordinarily clever. You say that President Biden is bipartisan curious. It's clunky when it rolls off the tongue, but when you read it on the page it's outstanding.

What does that mean in terms of what -- who, more specifically, he is going to focus on in the U.S. Senate? We understand he's meeting or he's having his people meet with this bipartisan group of senators this weekend to try to get an economic plan through.

BADE: Yes, I think this is a perfect example of how Democrats haven't quite figured out what they're doing in terms of agenda, in terms of strategies and timing and priorities. Obviously, everybody wants to pass pandemic relief right away. But on Capitol Hill, for the past few days, Democratic aides and lawmakers, senior lawmakers, were working on this plan to use this sort of wonky, fast tracking process, where they could pass it on a party line. The problem is, you know, the president -- President Biden came in and actually told them, no, he wants to work with Republicans. He wants to try to work with Republicans first. And so that plan to do a Democratic-only bill has been put on pause because, as we wrote in the playbook this morning, Biden is, quote, you know, curious, bipartisan curious.

And I think there's a little bit of frustration right now amongst Democrats on The Hill because they think it will take time and they're really skeptical that they're going to get Republican support. And so this is another thing, in addition to the impeachment trial, that could potentially slow things down. But Biden wants to see if he can work with the GOP. And he's got to try that first.

BERMAN: Look, you know, 78, not afraid to try new things. Bipartisan curious. No, I mean, he's always -- he's always been bipartisan curious, but I think that is a terrific phrase.

Rachael Bade, great reporting. Thanks so much for being with us this morning.

BADE: Thanks for having me on.

BERMAN: So you are not going to believe the reaction from QAnon supporters to the inauguration of Joe Biden.

That's next.

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[06:41:29]

BERMAN: All right, breaking news, we heard moments ago from officials inside the Biden White House saying basically this morning they're inheriting no vaccine distribution plan from the prior administration. They tell us this morning they more or less have to start from scratch. This as 4,229 new deaths were reported overnight.

Joining us now, CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, obviously, they've been reporting about the clunky nature of the vaccine distribution plan, but to hear from Biden administration officials that there's more or less no plan and they have to start from scratch is stunning.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: It really is. And it follows this pattern, you know, where the -- when you -- when you don't have a specific national plan and you hand things off to the states, you see these problems happen over and over again.

We saw this with testing, you know, going back to early last year. We saw this with personal protective equipment, even with ventilators, when we thought ventilators were going to be a bigger part of addressing this pandemic. And now with the vaccine, I mean we spend so much time reporting on the scientific achievement, which was tremendous in terms of actually developing these types of vaccines, the idea that Operation Warp Speed would then go hand the vaccine off to the states and say that's basically it, we're done with this, is -- it is stunning. And the fact that the state aren't -- were not prepared for this, they've been under funded in terms of their public health departments for some time, in some ways maybe you could have anticipated this.

As I've talked to, you know, people within various states, you find that in some places supply is outstripping demand, and in other places it's the reverse, you have too much -- you have not enough demand in some places. So it's a really strange rollout. It's very uneven. And hopefully it can be fixed. We're starting to hear some of the details, including setting up these community centers all over the country, and those are going to be coordinated by FEMA.

We'll see how this goes up. There's a lot of work to be done to catch up to the numbers that we thought we would be at by now.

CAMEROTA: But, Sanjay, as you sit here today, can you still tell us that we might be back to some semblance of normal this summer?

GUPTA: Yes, I do. I mean, you know, it's not totally normal, but I do think that there's a chance, and a significant chance, when I talk to folks at different parts in this whole chain, that they could start to really ramp up vaccine distribution and actually getting these shots into arms.

In fact, you know, if you look at the numbers overall, the 100 million shots in a hundred days is probably under targeting. I think they could really ramp that up. As you know, in order to get to herd immunity, we're going to need to get to close to 500 million shots, because it's 250 million people, roughly, times two. And you -- at the same time you do have these other vaccines that are potentially going to come online. We do have to account for that. It's not guaranteed, but if you do get Johnson & Johnson, 100 million of those shots, one- shot dose, and even potentially Oxford/AstraZeneca, I think it's going to make a significant difference.

But, Alisyn, I mean, it's a fair point. I mean, you know, you've got to be humble with these things. We don't know for certain. We've been surprised just about every step of the way. But I'm optimistic still by -- by some summer certainly. I tell my teenage daughters that by the time they go to school next year, start school at the end of the summer, early fall, it should feel very much back to normal.

BERMAN: So, Sanjay, pause for a second here because today is an important milestone, which is, it's one year ago today where we recorded the first coronavirus case in the U.S.

[06:45:10]

GUPTA: That's right.

BERMAN: You've gone back and taken a look at this past year.

So let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA (voice over): January, 2020. At Providence Regional Medical Center, just outside of Seattle, George Diaz was about to become the first doctor to care for a COVID-19 patient in the United States. He and his team had already been running disaster drills, anticipating the worst.

Remember, even though the official word out of China was that it was unclear if the coronavirus was spreading from human to human, we were also seeing these incredible and terrifying images of entire hospital systems being constructed.

Yes, we knew it was coming, but we couldn't yet see it, feel its power. We couldn't be convinced to hunker down and take cover.

GOV. JAY INSLEE (D-WA): On January 20th, samples were confirmed by the CDC.

GUPTA: You are looking at images of where the first patient confirmed with COVID-19 in the United States was treated, transported on a special gurney in an isolation room. This robot being used to communicate with him.

GUPTA (on camera): How worried were you? How -- how sick did he actually become?

DR. GEORGE DIAZ, INFECTIOUS DISEASE, PROVIDENCE REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER: Around the fifth day or so, he started developing oxygen requirements. He became more short of breath. He said it was harder to breathe. And we did a chest x-ray and we saw the development of pneumonia.

GUPTA (voice over): He was discharged after two weeks, but by February 26th, the United States reported 15 cases and then President Trump tried to reassure the country.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT (February 26, 2020): Thank you very much. The 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.

GUPTA (February 26, 2020): This is spreading. It's going to spread maybe within communities. That's the expectation.

TRUMP (February 26, 2020): It may.

GUPTA (February 26, 2020): Does that worry you?

TRUMP (February 26, 2020): No.

GUPTA (February 26, 2020): Because that seems to be what worries the American people.

TRUMP (February 26, 2020): No, because we're ready for it. It is what it is. We're ready for it. We're really prepared.

GUPTA (voice over): We weren't prepared. Not by a long shot. Fifteen did not go to zero. About a year later, 15 went to more than 24 million cases, the worst in the entire world.

Make no mistake, this did not need to happen. We had met the enemy and it was us, starting with our faulty tests.

DR. NANCY MESSONNIER: It wasn't working as expected.

GUPTA: March 1st, the CDC had officially counted 32 confirmed cases in the United States, but according to some estimates, there were already 28,000 cases or more around the country, a nearly 10,000-fold difference right out of the gate. We had no warning signs before we saw the terrifying outbreaks in nursing homes and cases exploding in the northeast. Hospitals were overrun, short on even the most basic personal protective equipment.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's like we're going into a war with no protection.

GUPTA: But while health care workers were begging for more masks, many in the public refused to wear them.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're not anti-masks. We're not for masks. We're for choice.

GUPTA: March 16th. For the first time, nearly two months after the first patient was diagnosed, more of the country started to worry.

TRUMP (March 16, 2020): We've made the decision to further toughen the guidelines and blunt the infection now.

GUPTA: But a theme also started to emerge, personal liberty over protective stability. We didn't shut down early enough or long enough. One study found that shutting down just two weeks earlier and we could have prevented 84 percent of the deaths.

Nearly every step of the way, science was trumped by rhetoric and politics, giving fuel to the worst and most dangerous theories.

TRUMP (April 23, 2020): And I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or --

GUPTA: June.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTES FOR ALLERGIES AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: We are now having 40-plus-thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around.

GUPTA: It sounded apocalyptic at the time. But since December, we've averaged more than 200,000 cases daily. As the weather turned cold, we came back indoors. Fatigue set in. And after months of not seeing friends and family, at least 7 million people traveled by air over the holidays. And now, hospitals all across the country are buckling. Similar to what New York saw in the spring.

DIAZ: When you don't have that unity across a country on a mission to reduce the impact of this pandemic, then it's going to be haphazard.

GUPTA: States like Vermont, or Dr. Diaz's home state of Washington, that opened more cautiously, and leaned into basic science, have among the lowest death rates per capita in the country.

[06:50:06]

But states like South Dakota, which openly flaunted science, never issuing mask mandates and letting people gather en masse --

GOV. KRISTI NOEM, (R-SD): Let me tell you, my people are happy. They're happy because they're free.

GUPTA: Have some of the highest rates of infection, hospitalization and death per capita.

This one-year mark comes at a time when the calendar has flipped another year, and a new president is in charge.

But this virus, it doesn't care about anniversaries. It just cares about finding more and more hosts. By February 13th, up to half a million people in the United States are expected to die and thousands more in the weeks to come. Most of them have not yet been exposed. Many of them have let their guard down, thinking this is all over. It isn't.

One year later, sadly, this is the worst it's ever been.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: So wild to look back over this last year. And we could have done an hour in terms of just trying to trace all these developments, look at what went wrong most of the time, trying to find a few bright spots in there.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. That's pretty clear. You look at any model now, even the CDC's model, and they say that the number -- you know, we just crossed 400,000 people dying, they say it will be closer to 500,000 about three weeks from now. And that's on average 4,400 people dying every day.

So these -- we're going to hear about a lot of measures over the next couple of days, even today in terms of what the new administration is going to do, and that's going to be very important. But it's very hard, keep in mind, to throw the brakes on a pandemic. It's going to take some time to see the impact of all these measures that are being put into place.

CAMEROTA: All right, Sanjay, we've learned that the very hard and painful way. Thank you very much for all of your reporting.

GUPTA: You got it.

CAMEROTA: Now to this, what are followers of QAnon thinking this morning now that none of their predictions came to pass? We have a CNN "Reality Check," next.

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[06:56:15]

CAMEROTA: Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy were so convinced that President Trump would serve another four years that yesterday, when Joe Biden was sworn in, they became very confused. On message boards they had tons of questions.

John Avlon has a "Reality Check."

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Joe Biden's inauguration was a day of new beginnings, a celebration of the endurance of our democracy. But for QAnon conspiracy theorists, it was a dark day of reckoning because many finally realized that they'd been had, duped, bamboozled. It was all a hoax.

Now, this shouldn't have been a surprise. After all, the core tenants of this conspiracy required believing that Democrats were part of a deep state controlled by a satanic child-eating cabal. Seriously. It was negative partisanship on PCP. But it's a sad fact of the temporary insanity of the Trump years that a self-evidently absurd conspiracy theory proliferated online and drew in many people, including at some point at least two current Republican members of Congress, and helped fuel a seditious attack on our Capitol.

All it took was Biden's inauguration to break the fever dream for some QAnon supporters. They'd been told to trust the plan, that Trump would hold on to power with the help of the military, and many were looking forward to what they'd been promised would be public executions. But Trump lost the election, something they'd been told was impossible.

Then the claim of mass election fraud failed to materialize in court. Inauguration was the final straw for many. They searched for meaning in the 17 flags behind President Trump as he left. "Q" being the 17th letter of the alphabet.

But when the peaceful transfer of power finally went forward, without mass arrests or martial law, their nutburger dreams turned into dung. There was panic on the QAnon message boards. Oaths taking place, there is no plan, posted one commenter. It's over and nothing makes sense, wrote another. "Q" was a larp the entire f'ing time, complained one, while a poster on a QAnon Telegram channel said, it simply doesn't make sense that we all got played. Yes, it does.

Perhaps most damning was a sign-off statement posted by a prolific "Q" supporter who hosted many "Q" drops on 8Q (ph), as we enter into the next administration, please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.

Yes, don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. Except, this was a massive fraud with the encouragement of many people in Trump's orbit who thought they could profit personally or politically off the conspiracy theory. It was a scram but it took on the trappings of a belief system for the gullible and the cynical alike.

And while many are now desperate and disillusioned, others will no doubt double down and drift on to some other conspiracy, making them ripe targets for neo-Nazis and other far-right groups, as Ben Collins (ph) and Brandy Zedrozni (ph) have reported. The people who have been duped are victims, but they still need to atone for their part in this fraud, while the con artists who perpetrated it need to be held accountable.

And we all need to find ways to unite, to confront the real challenges we still face as a nation.

And that's your "Reality Check."

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

CAMEROTA: We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY.

And we do begin with breaking news.

There was no plan. The Biden administration tells CNN that the Trump team left them no plan for distributing the coronavirus vaccine. So, on day one of his presidency, Joe Biden will have to start from scratch, his team says, to get hundreds of millions of Americans vaccinated. [07:00:06]

The U.S. just reported its second highest death toll on Wednesday.