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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Trump Flip-Flopping on Stimulus Negotiations; Trump Eager to Resume Campaigning. Aired 4-4:30p ET

Aired October 09, 2020 - 16:00   ET

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

[16:00:00]

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: When exactly did he last test negative? When did he contract the virus? Basic questions we still do not know the answers to, answers you have every right to know, ones that could be literally a matter of life and death for people the president wants to see as soon as tomorrow.

Today, however, the president claims he feels perfect, that he might not have recovered at all from coronavirus if it had not been for an experimental antibody therapy, which the president called a cure. It is not a cure, as CNN's Kaitlan Collins reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Just one week after he was admitted to the hospital, President Trump is insisting he's ready to get back on the campaign trail, as medical experts worry it's too soon.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I feel better now than I did two weeks ago. It's crazy.

COLLINS: While stuck in isolation, Trump urged aides to schedule rallies, but currently has no travel plan this weekend. Instead, he called into Rush Limbaugh's radio show for two hours today.

TRUMP: I could have been a bad victim. I fit certain categories that aren't so great, OK?

COLLINS: During his interview, the president exaggerated the known benefits of an experimental antibody cocktail that he was given, portraying it as a miracle.

TRUMP: I'm just saying that we have something that will cure this now, and a cure. And without us, without Trump administration, this would never have happened.

COLLINS: But the treatment, made by Regeneron, is not a cure and has not been proven to be effective in treating coronavirus. It's not widely available yet, though the company has applied for an emergency use authorization.

Trump received it under a compassionate use program, though he did not mention that today.

TRUMP: But this is better than the vaccine. And it's going out literally as we speak.

COLLINS: The antibody cocktail has shown promise.

BILL GATES, CO-CHAIR, BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION: That's always been the most promising therapeutic category.

COLLINS: The president is putting his own spin on his health, given that his doctors have declined to take questions from reporters since Monday and have only issued paper statements instead.

Last night, Trump refused to answer directly whether he has since tested negative.

TRUMP: Probably the test will be tomorrow, the actual test, because there's no reason to test all the time. But they found very little infection or virus, if any. I don't know that they found any. I didn't go into it greatly with the doctors.

COLLINS: This week, the president has made a series of head-spinning moves, first claiming that he wouldn't debate Joe Biden virtually, then asking for the debate to be delayed, and then demanding it happen next week, as planned.

Trump has also flip-flopped on another coronavirus relief bill, going from canceling the talks to now saying he wants a bigger dollar sign than even Democrats have asked for.

TRUMP: I would like to see a bigger stimulus package, frankly, than either the Democrats or the Republicans are offering. I'm going in the exact opposite now.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COLLINS: So, Jake, while we wait to see how those coronavirus negotiations play out, we do know that the president is planning on having an in-person event at the White House tomorrow, though it's not clear exactly how many people they're going to be inviting, or whether the president has even gotten a negative test result as they are planning this event.

The White House coms director said earlier they would let us know when the president has tested negative. And, Jake, they have not told us that yet. Though the president did say last night he was going to be tested today, we have not gotten an update on any of those results from the White House.

TAPPER: Yes, I mean, I don't know if it's the medication or what, but this is erratic even for an erratic president.

Kaitlan Collins, thanks so much.

Joining us now to discuss, CNN's Abby Phillip and Michael Schmidt from "The New York Times." Check out Michael's new book, "Donald Trump V. the United States," getting great reviews and, by all accounts, an excellent, an excellent read.

Abby, if President Trump's doctors continue to refuse to answer basic questions about his health, how is anyone supposed to be assured that tomorrow's White House event with him will be safe?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I don't understand any of this, Jake. It doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense that the White House would try to replicate the circumstances under which they created a massive super-spreader event and a cluster of coronavirus cases at the White House by hosting people there, when the president is still recovering from this very same virus and multiple White House officials at the senior level are also recovering and are in isolation.

That doesn't make any sense from a political perspective, from a public health perspective. And, yes, I mean, we ought to have some sense of what guidelines or justification the president's doctors are using to clear him for activity, and what they think his level of interactivity is.

I mean, people are entitled to know that, because this is a president, we already know, when he wants to speak to the public, he is taking his mask off to do that. And we should know if people are being potentially put at risk if he's hosting some kind of event tomorrow and we don't see him wearing a mask, not to mention we don't know who else on that compound might have been exposed and has been infected by this virus.

TAPPER: Right. I mean, there are potentially dozens of people that are infected who work at the White House or have been to the White House.

[16:05:05]

Michael, one of the things that you get into, your book, is the degree to which President Trump doesn't really have many guardrails around him. There really isn't anybody that's able to say, don't do that, this is a bad idea.

You talk about the legal aspects, "Donald Trump V. the United States."

Is there anyone around him that you can tell that would say, it's probably not a good idea for you to have an event like this, because you're still potentially infected?

MICHAEL SCHMIDT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": It doesn't seem like it.

And I don't think that the people from the first two years of the administrations, the McGahns and the Kellys and such, should be absolved of that period of time.

TAPPER: No, no, of course. SCHMIDT: Because there was lot of things that went on then that the history will probably not reflect well upon.

But those people were guardrails, at the same time. And there is a lot of more audacious behavior that has occurred in the last two years of the administration that is just different.

And I think it is pretty clear that those guardrails aren't there. And I think you see it most in the president's -- not only his desires here on the coronavirus, but also with his continued rhetoric about the Justice Department.

As I write in my book, there were a wide-scale effort to try and stop the president from meddling in Justice Department's work, to try and get him to stop pressuring prosecutions. We're talking about the president of the United States using his power to go after his rivals.

And the president here, with just a few months left in his first term in office, he's just emboldened on this issue, and is going on and on in ways that I just think are astounding in history, about using law enforcement power of the state to go after the people that he thinks harmed him.

TAPPER: Yes.

And on that subject, Abby, just a few minutes ago, on the president's favorite channel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who the president's been publicly chastising, said that he's working hard to get, I can't even believe these words are coming out of my mouth, more of Hillary Clinton's e-mails out.

And Dana Perino said, "Before the election?" Pompeo said, yes, working hard to get some out before the election.

I mean, at some point, this enabling -- well, not just at some point -- this enabling is bad for the president. And yet all these Cabinet secretaries continue to do it.

PHILLIP: Yes, I think it's a little bit beyond enabling at this point.

It's -- the Republican establishment on Capitol Hill, in the White House, elsewhere in the government, they are all in on this strategy. You only have to look as far as in the Senate, where you had sitting senators using their committee to try to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and release it in a fashion that was designed to hurt his political campaign.

Now you're hearing Pompeo explicitly saying that the timing is going to be related to this information coming out before the election, although it's hard for me to understand how they think that that's going to impact Joe Biden, how Hillary Clinton's e-mails are going to impact Joe Biden.

And then, on top of that, you have a word from the Justice Department that this long expected Durham report is unlikely to have significant findings before the election, something that the president has been really public about how angry he is about that.

Look, this is everyone being involved in this project of the president's to try to create an environment that is as close to 2016 as possible, except with the subject not being Hillary Clinton, the subject being Joe Biden. And I think that is really notable, that there is not only no pushback, there is full buy-in from the Republican Party and the establishment.

TAPPER: Yes.

And, I mean, it's almost as if he's trying to get the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, to be his own WikiLeaks. And he's trying to get Durham to be his Comey, to replicate the circumstances under which he was elected.

Michael, President -- I mean, President Trump again criticizing Attorney General Barr, claiming Hillary Clinton should be in jail for deleting those e-mails. During another interview, the president called for Barr to prosecute Biden and Obama.

Your book has a lot of reporting that this is something President Trump asks for, the Justice Department to go after his enemies.

SCHMIDT: The president's top lawyer at the White House, Don McGahn, wrote in secret memos to him in April of 2018, if you even appear to be meddling in the Justice Department's work, you could be impeached, people at the Justice Department could resign, and, most importantly, you could feel the effects at the ballot box.

These were the warnings from the president's lawyers that I outlined in my book.

And to your point on the Clinton e-mail thing -- and this is something that, you write a book, and you get different things, and not everything gets a lot of attention -- I report in my book that Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch, was brought into the Oval Office by Steve Bannon to meet with Donald Trump about expediting the State Department's disclosure of Clinton e-mails.

[16:10:02]

So this was the White House chief strategist bringing in this outside rabble-rouser for the president to lobby the president to get more e- mails out from his own State Department, so they could continue to discredit Clinton.

It's just another example of this unprecedented use of the executive branch by the president to help himself politically.

TAPPER: Abby Phillip, Michael Schmidt, thank you so much.

Be sure to check out Michael Schmidt great book.

Why President Trump's push to get emergency approval for the Regeneron therapy he received could be potentially dangerous. And then new information about the men charged with plotting to kidnap

the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, and what one of them was getting from Amazon.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:15:04]

TAPPER: In our health lead today, President Trump just admitting that he was, quote, not in great shape when he flew on Marine One to Walter Reed over the weekend. It's a reminder, of course, that the president's doctors said that very day that the president was doing, quote, well, and later that day, Kayleigh McEnany said the president was only going to Walter Reed out of an abundance of caution.

Apparently, that's not true. The president today told Rush Limbaugh during a radio rally that the experimental antibody treatment he receive heeled him and he might not have recovered COVID at all if not for those drugs.

CNN chief correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, joins us now.

Sanjay, we still do not have a full and complete picture of President Trump's condition, and yet now, the president is continuing to push this Regeneron antibody treatment before it's been approved by the FDA. Take a listen.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We're already starting the processes. Hundreds of thousands of vials are being sent to the hospitals all around the country. People are going to get immediately better like I did. I mean, I feel better now than I did two weeks ago. It's crazy.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

TAPPER: Your reaction?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICALCORRESPONDENT: Well, I mean, there's a few reactions. One is obviously that he's one person, and we don't -- that's why you do studies on these things to right to figure out if in fact this is something that's making people better.

There's not a lot of data around this. There is a lot of enthusiasm, and I think it's warranted. You're giving antibodies, proteins that can help neutralize the virus, and it makes sense imminently.

But who does it work for? What dose to give? Does it have side effects? These are the reasons you have studies.

But the other thing, you know, when he says, I'm feeling better than 20 years ago, that won't be the monoclonal antibodies. Those are to help neutralize the virus. What's making him feel so good? He's on other meds, you remember. He took the remdesivir and I think

he's still getting steroids because, typically, it's a 10-day course. Of course, as you mentioned, the doctors haven't told us, so we don't know for sure.

But when someone says they're feeling better like that, steroids tend to give people a lot of energy, I mean, sometimes to the point where people become manic, and they don't sleep, and they're very restless and things like that.

So, I don't think it's the monoclonal antibodies that are making him feel better. They may have work in the terms of neutralizing the virus, but we don't know. He's an N of one here, Jake.

TAPPER: Sanjay, you regularly cover when candidates run for office and reveal their health records. I remember you doing it with John McCain when he ran in 2008. I remember you doing think it with plenty of -- but I could go through a list.

Have you ever seen a White House cover up and hide so much information about such a serious disease?

GUPTA: No. I really haven't.

I mean, sometimes the summaries that you would get from some of the candidates would be very, very cursory, you know, but they would have the basic details -- the meds, the test results. You know, going back for some time, even you remember going back two years ago, they did a press briefing, Ronny Jackson did, where he came out and talked about the president's potassium and sodium and he's on these medications.

At no point did he say that the president also had a coronary CT scan to evaluate him for heart disease. Never offered that information. It only came out because I asked him about this, and then he said it.

So, he tells you basic lab values, correct, but doesn't tell us about an about normal test result in a very significant exam. And that's been a pattern that we've seen over and over again.

2008, John McCain let us have access to all his medical records for a period of time. So, it's varied in terms of access. But this is a totally different level and significant sins of omission, perhaps outright -- outright telling us false information at times.

TAPPER: Yeah, and the reports, of course, about the doctors and others being forced to sign nondisclosure agreements after President Trump went on that secret trip to Walter Reed last year. There's obviously a lot we don't know.

And let me ask you, because President Trump has just announced that he's expected to host an event at the White House tomorrow. He's expected to address the attendees from the balcony. This is just two weeks after the Supreme Court ceremony in the Rose Garden that Dr. Fauci today called a super spreader event. We don't even know if he's still contagious or if he's tested negative. GUPTA: Yeah, I mean, and he still could be sick. Don't forget, a week

ago today, he was essentially medevaced from the White House to Walter Reed, dropped his oxygenation, needed supplemental oxygen, was on all these drugs we talked about.

So, this is -- you know, he's likely still sick. I mean, it's just -- we say that because you look at the time course of the disease, and again, the team line still doesn't make total sense here. It changes a little bit today as I was doing reporting on this.

But nevertheless he is likely still sick. But, Jake, even before the president's diagnosis, the idea in the middle of a pandemic of having an event, aggregating people together, even if it's outside, we saw as you mentioned, what happened before.

[16:20:02]

I mean, that was a super spreader event in that many people became infected as a result of that event or the events right around it. So, regardless of whether or not the president has COVID, that's not a good idea.

TAPPER: That's a good point. Even if he is no longer contagious, which we do not know, it's still a bad idea. Listen to Trump coughing on "Hannity" last night.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

TRUMP: I think the first debate, they -- excuse me. On the first debate they oscillated the mic. I want them to vote. But I will say this, absentee is okay, because absentee ballots -- excuse me -- absentee ballots are fine.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

TAPPER: I mean, he sounds sick to me.

GUPTA: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think he's still sick. This could be a sort of milder cough, but again, in the context of he was medevaced a week ago, he's been on oxygen recently, all these drugs. He's probably still on the steroids, again, if he's following the basic trial protocol.

He's 74 years old. I mean, he's -- I mean, just from a humanity standpoint, I mean, the guy should just take a break for a while. I hope his doctors are telling him that. I don't -- he's just not listening. I've had patients that have been difficult to counsel in the past as well, and sometimes you just got to sit down and really have a tough conversation.

I don't know if that's happening or not. But I agree, Jake, he sounds sick and he's had this significant medical history over the last week.

TAPPER: And he has preexisting conditions and he's clinically obese.

GUPTA: Right. TAPPER: Sanjay, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Be sure to tune in tomorrow for a new CNN global town hall, "Coronavirus: Facts and Fears". Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Anderson Cooper will be joined by other experts in the field. That's tomorrow at 8:00 p.m.

Is the plot to kidnap the Michigan governor just the tip of an extremist iceberg? That story coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:26:38]

TAPPER: In our national lead, the governor of Michigan, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, is now explicitly calling them domestic terrorists. We're talking about a group of suspects accused of planning to kidnap her and overthrow the government.

Michigan's attorney general says group such as the Wolverine Watchmen are making similar plans across United States. Thirteen men now charged with alleged domestic terrorism for their planned attack.

CNN's Sara Sidner joins me now.

And, Sara, you spoke to owner of the store where the suspected terrorist plot leader was living.

What did you learn?

SARA SIDNER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, we talked to a gentleman named Brian Titus. He says that they were friends, he's known him nor a long time and that he had just been kicked out of the place he was living with his girlfriend. He offered him a place to live. He had been working for Titus as well.

His name is Adam Fox and the FBI says he is -- was the leader of this plot to overthrow the government and also to try and kidnap the Michigan governor.

And so, he says, look, he was living down in this basement. It's quite an interesting shot when you see him opening up this very heavy wooden, what looks like a door that's on the floor and then you walk down deep into the basement. He was living there with his dogs.

But he said everything was fine until he started noticing packages show up and he was concerned about what he was seeing in those packages from Amazon.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN TITUS, STORE OWNER: He was getting more from Amazon. He was buying more stuff.

SIDNER: What was he getting from Amazon?

TITUS: MREs, food, stuff like that. SIDNER: Survival stuff?

TITUS: Yeah. I told him, you have to have your own police on 1 November.

H was buying more like attachments for like an AR-15.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: So, you heard him talking about buying attachments for AR- 15s, buying MREs, that's food that can be stored for a long time, sort of like a survival mode.

He got worried and said, you know what? You're going to have to leave. You can't stay here.

He said he was aware that Fox had been part of a self-styled militia group but had been kicked out, he said. He said then Fox created his own self-styled militia. Now, he is charged with many different charges but charged in what is being considered a domestic terrorist plot to try to kidnap the governor -- Jake.

TAPPER: And, Sara, Governor Whitmer has directly tied the president's refusal to condemn specific far right violent groups not to mention his encouragement of protesters against her, she's tied that to this plot. President Trump responded by again attacking her and how she's governing.

SIDNER: Yeah, she did. And, look, let's listen to some of the things she has been saying. She talked about when he was at the presidential debate and how he was unable to very clearly condemn white supremacists. She then talks about also that she sees him as encouraging extremists.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER (D-MI): Anyone who gives safe harbor to or encouragement to is complicit, and that's precisely what he did on the national stage in the middle of a presidential debate when he said, stand by.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: She also talked about the president lambasting her for how she's handled the coronavirus, and he did it again. His response to her saying that was that she's done a terrible job, that she locked down her state for everyone.

[16:30:00]