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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Millions Traveling Despite CDC Warnings; President Trump's Chaotic Final Days. Aired 4-4:30p ET

Aired December 24, 2020 - 16:00   ET

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

[16:00:02]

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN HOST: The NBA says Harden can return for Saturday's game if he continues to test negative for COVID-19.

Go, Rockets.

That's it for me. "THE LEAD" starts right now.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Pamela Brown, in Jake Tapper on this Christmas Eve.

And we begin today with the politics lead.

President Trump is using his final days in office to unleash chaos. The president has thrown into question much-needed economic relief for American families just before Christmas, though it's still not known whether he will even sign the bill, and the legislation is being flown to him in Florida just in case.

President Trump is also risking a government shutdown, vetoing the annual defense bill and delivering gifts in the form of dozens of pardons, many to his own allies.

CNN is learning that the president is frustrated that his vice president is not doing more to overturn the election. That's what sources tell me and my colleague Kevin Liptak.

And despite the president's official schedule, saying he would be -- quote -- "working tirelessly," the president today is golfing, as CNN's Joe Johns reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): President Trump teeing off his Florida holiday vacation today on the golf course, despite this schedule sent from the White House press office saying: "He will continue to work tirelessly for the American people. His schedule includes many meetings and calls."

Moments after the Trumps landed in Florida, the White House announced 26 new pardons, including two more men targeted by Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and longtime ally Roger Stone, both convicted by juries of multiple crimes. Both refused to cooperate with Mueller.

ROGER STONE, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN ADVISER: Now the left invites -- invents a totally new canard, which is, Stone traded his silence regarding misconduct by the president in return for commutation of his sentence and now a pardon. That is a lie.

JOHNS: Clemency also for Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son- in-law. The elder Kushner pled guilty to tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering in a scheme that involves hiring a prostitute to sleep with his married brother-in-law and then blackmailing him with a sex tape.

Chris Christie, then U.S. attorney for New Jersey, was in charge of the case.

FMR. GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE (R-NJ): It's one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney. And I was U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

JOHNS: Trump's pardons spree leading to outrage on Capitol Hill.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's corruption to the first degree.

JOHNS: And Republican Senator Ben Sasse saying in a statement: "This is rotten to the core."

The pardons following Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, something Congress must now take up Monday, after leaving for the holiday weekend.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Merry Christmas.

JOHNS: The move set up a possible veto override vote that could pit Republicans against the president.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000 or $4,000 for a couple.

JOHNS: Another thorn in Republicans' sides, Trump's last-minute demand to increase COVID stimulus payments, something Democrats are in favor of doing.

REP. STENY HOYER (D-MD): I ask unanimous consent.

JOHNS: House Democrats quickly trying to pass the measure today, but Republicans objected, leaving any changes to the $900 billion package in doubt.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying: "If the president is serious about the $2,000 direct payments, he must call on House Republicans to end their obstruction."

(END VIDEOTAPE) JOHNS: Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence in Vail, Colorado, for his holiday, getting greeted on Twitter by a blast of criticism from Democratic state Senator Kerry Donovan.

She writes, in part: "Stay tuned for a story a day of things that would be different if you had chosen to lead and address, instead of ignore and minimize COVID-19." And she writes that Pence should make sure you pack a mask, because it's a mandatory mask zone.

Merry Christmas to the vice president -- back to you, Pam.

BROWN: All right, Joe Johns, thanks so much reporting for us there in Florida.

And, meantime, we have Ron Brownstein, Abby Phillip joining us to discuss all of this.

Good to see you both.

So, Abby, today, I'm learning that President Trump and Vice President Pence met for an hour yesterday just before, not long before Trump retweeted that post saying Pence should act to stop Congress from accepting the Electoral College results.

And Trump has told people around him recently that Pence isn't doing enough to fight for him.

What do you make of this dynamic between the president and vice president?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think this is probably the toughest spot that Mike Pence has been put in yet in the Trump presidency.

And he's worked really hard over the last four years to avoid publicly contradicting the president, to avoid these kinds of public conflicts with him.

[16:05:05]

But this might be one that he just simply cannot avoid. There are not many options available to him to do what the president wants him to do. And, frankly, what the president wants him to do is based off of Internet memes that he's retweeting online, and not based on anything that is legal or allowed as part of this process.

So, it's not clear to me how Pence is going to handle this. He can't not preside over this session. But I think both options are bad options if you're Mike Pence. But perhaps the worst option is that, if Mike Pence wants to have a post-Trump future, it will reflect very poorly on him if he tries to undermine the will of the American people on the Senate floor on January 6, and going along with a really ill- fated scheme by President Trump.

BROWN: Right. I mean, it's the will of the American people or the will of Trump. But all of this, of course, comes on the heels of a Lincoln Project ad

targeted at President Trump. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NARRATOR: He's backing away from your train wreck, from your desperate lies and clown lawyers. When Mike Pence is running away from you, you know it's over. It's over. And Mike Pence knows it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: And Jonathan Swan with Axios reported that Trump just recently found out about that commercial and got really upset. And I think that is when he really started direct his ire toward the vice president.

But through all of this, Ron, Pence has remained very loyal to Trump, as Abby pointed out, from the beginning. How does he walk this tightrope now, given his own likely political desires?

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, look, it's almost impossible.

Everyone who tries to ally themselves with Donald Trump sooner or later comes to a point where it's clear that alliance and loyalty for him is entirely a one-way street. And everyone sooner or later gets asked to do something they know they should not do, often many times something they should not do.

And we have seen through the four years, the Republican Party repeatedly fail that test. As I have said to you before, Pam, you don't get to this point by yourself and you don't get to this point by -- in a day, where the president is trying to undermine the election, where he is doling out pardons to allies and to confederates really who blocked -- tried to block the Mueller investigation.

You get there only because he has concluded, I think fairly, after four years, the Republican Party in no way will constrain him or try to hold him within the boundaries of the rule of law.

And so now not only is he threatening Mike Pence, but, as you see, he is threatening already primary challenges against Republicans in 2022 who he feels did not work hard enough in his effort to overturn the election. And I believe this is essentially what Republicans have locked themselves into for the next few years.

By allowing Trump to spread this fantasy that he wasn't defeated, that the only reason he's not taking the oath is because the election was stolen, they have enlarged his leverage in the party and made themselves more likely to be living under his thumb for months to come.

BROWN: Yes, he's making lots of threats.

I'm told by someone close to the president that he's mad at everyone. And you know what? Right now, what he's doing also is threatening relief for millions of Americans by upending the economic relief that was passed,

Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Dingell recounted this conversation that she had with a struggling father. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. DEBBIE DINGELL (D-MI): A father who called me two weeks ago, and he said to me he had told his child that Santa Claus couldn't come this year.

But he wanted to be able to feed her for Christmas. And then the president, when we finally thought that we'd be able to give people hope -- that's what people need, hope -- and be able to begin to continue to work on this in January -- doesn't give a damn about people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: So, Abby, the president has played these political games before, right?

But it seems as though there is a different dynamic at play. First of all, the stakes are so much higher for these millions of Americans and the fact that a government shutdown looms. But, also, the president lost this election.

And some would say he has nothing to lose by just throwing out fire after fire right now.

PHILLIP: Yes, I mean, from his perspective, I'm sure he thinks that he has nothing to lose, because this is a president who looks at everything through the lens of his own self-interest.

But it is incredibly tragic that we're here on Christmas Eve, and the president is in Florida golfing, holding up a bill that could get money in the pockets of Americans who desperately need it. And he's doing it for no good reason other than that perhaps he wants to punish Mitch McConnell and John Thune for daring to say that Joe Biden is the president-elect.

That is really beyond the pale. I mean, I think it is hard to express how incredibly just wrong that is. And for people to be watching this, I mean, President -- there's no recourse.

[16:10:07]

President Trump is still the president. He can do whatever he wants to do. But the fact that we are in this situation is not because the president wants to give people $2,000 checks. He could have said that and pushed for that three or four months ago.

It's because he wants to be able to throw a wrench into this process, which he knows that he can do, but he should not do. And there are probably not enough people, especially on the Republican side, saying that to him right now. BROWN: And what's so interesting about what's -- how this is playing

out, Ron, is how the Democrats have responded to the $2,000. You had Nancy Pelosi say Democrats will introduce a bill to increase payments to $2,000, as the president requested.

You have the Democrats in Georgia involved in the Senate run-off jumping on this. What's going on, on the Republican side? Where's McConnell in all of this?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, look, I think they're, as often, totally confused as to what the president is doing or if there is any strategy involved here, because, as you say, his demand has amplified the Democratic demands for weeks, for months for a much larger payment, particularly in those two critical Georgia run-off elections.

So, it is -- but, look, this is the bed they have made. I mean, they have chosen over four years to kind of always find a way to excuse his erratic behavior. And what's happening since the election would be reprehensible on its own terms, trying to overturn the votes, disenfranchising voters in four states, 20 million people, the pardons that he's delivering, 91 percent of which are to people who have some sort of political or personal contact to him.

All of that would be reprehensible on its own. But when you consider what is happening instead of, instead of action on the COVID spike, which is now taking the death toll of a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 a day, not to mention the enormous human need that is -- the bill is trying to respond to, when you look at kind of each side of the ledger, the chasm between what the president is doing and what the country needs at this point really could not be wider.

BROWN: And you brought up pardons.

Abby, I want to go to you on this for your analysis, because the president has been giving out dozens of pardons, including to those convicted in the Russia probe. I covered the Russia probe, and I recall Robert Mueller mentioned in the report that they had looked at whether President Trump was obstructing justice by dangling pardons.

And now, Abby, it seems all of that may be coming to fruition here.

PHILLIP: Yes. I mean, this is exactly the type of behavior that not even years ago, but probably about a year ago, that even Republicans were saying, President Trump dare not do this, because it would implicate him in basically an obstruction of justice scheme, that he would basically be acknowledging that people who protected him were going to be rewarded with pardons.

And you heard the same kind of conclusion from Andrew Weissmann, one of the top attorneys on the Mueller investigation, who said that, unlike any of these other kind of cases that you might prosecute, when you're dealing with the president of the United States, who does have this unilateral power to pardon, you can't prevent things like this from happening.

And so I do think that this was inevitable, but it is so beyond the pale. There's been nothing like this in American history, truly. And I think that it should give people pause, I think, going forward about what this can mean about what justice really means, even if you're the president of the United States.

BROWN: Yes, Tim Naftali was on our air saying even Nixon didn't do this. He dangled, but he didn't even follow through with it.

BROWNSTEIN: No.

BROWN: Ron Brownstein--

BROWNSTEIN: It's demeaning to American democracy, right?

I mean, it just makes America look like a tin-pot dictatorship in the final hours, kind of an addled, erratic, unsettled tyrant, strongman who is kind of doling out favors as the walls close in. And it really reveals all of those Republicans who have enabled this for four years, who have taken up to this point step by step, as kind of courtiers who have traded their dignity, trying to squeeze out momentary self- advantage, the kind of things you see in a Third World country.

And I think that label now applies to Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio. They have all brought us to this point by allowing Trump to believe that they will stand with him no matter how outrageous, as Abby said, behavior that is now really unprecedented in American history.

BROWN: All right, Abby Phillip, Ron Brownstein, thanks for coming on, sharing your opinion, perspective.

And merry Christmas eve.

PHILLIP: Merry Christmas, Pam.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes, indeed.

BROWN: Well, not heeding the warnings, hundreds of thousands of Americans are traveling right now -- what this could mean for the new year up next.

Plus: New concerns about allergic reactions to the Pfizer vaccine, we're going to put that all in perspective for you.

And happy birthday, Dr. Fauci. The country's favorite COVID expert opens up about his holiday plans and his future. Is he retiring soon? You can find out next.

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[16:19:09]

BROWN: Welcome back to this special edition of THE LEAD.

Turning to our health lead now: a new travel record during the pandemic; 1.2 million people went through airport security yesterday. That's according to the TSA. And that's despite the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci and countless other experts and leaders warning against traveling and gathering right now.

And, as CNN's Alexandra Field reports, prominent COVID model is now upping its forecast, predicting more than half-a-million deaths by April.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: -- by staying at least six feet or two meters from other guests and employees.

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Even on this COVID Christmas, America's airports are packed full of people.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: From Florida, from Orlando.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just came in from Denver.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mom really wants to see us. You can always say no so long.

FIELD: On Wednesday, a new pandemic era travel record set, nearly 1.2 million passing through airports, according to the TSA, which has counted around a million flyers on each of the last six days.

[16:20:05]

MICHELLE WILLIS, HOLIDAY TRAVELER: We have got lots of masks and lots of hand sanitizer and headrest covers and gloves and disposable everything, so, feeling good.

FIELD: Even so, images of so many air travelers are fueling fears we will, in fact, see another surge superimposed on a surge, and dark January days ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm very scared about what we're about to see.

FIELD: Hot spots are now spread out all over the country, from Maine to Alabama to California, which has passed the eye-popping threshold of two million COVID cases, a first for any state in the nation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A few months ago, we had five COVID patients in the hospital. And now we're up to nearly 100. So, that shows you the -- within just a couple months, how much it's accelerated.

FIELD: Hospitalizations are at a record high. December will soon become the deadliest month of the pandemic. And we are careening toward a total of 330,000 American deaths. That's one in 1,000 Americans killed by COVID.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We need to tell everybody that this is not the time to have large, indoor maskless parties, holiday parties. This is the time to hunker down.

FIELD: The CDC now projects as many as 419,000 deaths by January 16, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation upping its projections again after just one week, predicting as many as 567,000 deaths by April. Their model suggests more than 33,000 lives will be saved from now until then by vaccinations; 9.5 million doses of them have now been delivered.

Just over a million doses of Pfizer's vaccines have been administered, according to the CDC, much less than expected. So far, there have been fewer than 10 cases of allergic reactions. But that's actually a bigger number than experts thought we'd see.

DR. MONCEF SLAOUI, CHIEF ADVISER, OPERATION WARP SPEED: We are working with the FDA and the CDC to set together a very, very high- performance active pharmacovigilance system that resembles almost to the day the assessment that we do in clinical trials.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FIELD: And, Pamela, in yet another sign that this Christmas will be unlike any before it, along with sending letters to Santa this year, some children also sent letters to Pfizer, one asking for enough vaccines for everyone, another asking for the vaccine for Santa.

Pfizer's CEO has responded, saying, this just underscores the importance of the work they're doing.

And, Pamela, for the record, Dr. Fauci has also confirmed that Santa himself has, in fact, been vaccinated.

BROWN: That's right. He confirmed it right here on CNN.

Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it.

Well, joining me now is the co-director of Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital, Dr. Peter Hotez.

Good to see you.

I know it's always tough for you to be the bearer of bad news about where we are with this pandemic, especially the day before Christmas. But we have got to face reality here, Dr. Hotez. We are seeing ICUs across the country full or near capacity.

What does this potential surge after the Christmas holiday look like for hospitals already full and front-line workers overworked?

DR. PETER HOTEZ, BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE: You know, Pamela, as I think about tomorrow being Christmas, it was January 1 of this year when most of us heard about the COVID-19 pandemic starting out of Hubei province in China.

I just never believed that we would get to 330,000 American lives lost by Christmas Day and still accelerating at 3,000 deaths today. And, you know, at this point, there is such a screaming level of transmission in our nation that it's hard to even know what's due to a surge and what are due -- what's due to anything else.

It's such a high baseline level, it's hard to even detect that rise. It's hard to believe it could get any worse. But here we are, and those dismal projections from IHME. We're probably looking at 420,000 Americans who will lose their lives on Inauguration Day, on Wednesday, January 20, 2021.

I just can't imagine how we could have let ourselves go like this.

BROWN: It's just tragic, I mean, to hear you say that.

And I think, for so many of us, we're so many months into this pandemic. We have been hearing the warnings. Is there a threshold where we have such a severe surge that it doesn't matter that we have these additional holiday cases because our hospital system is so overwhelmed?

Just, if you would, try to paint a picture for us of what that looks like.

HOTEZ: Well, I think the message is that we can still save lives.

Remember, the mortality numbers really go up, the deaths go up as hospital staff gets overwhelmed. It's not so much the beds. You can convert a regular bed into an ICU bed. It's not having sufficient number of trained nurses and doctors and respiratory therapists and everyone else that goes to the care of an ICU patient.

[16:25:03]

And when our ICUs get overwhelmed, we saw this back in March and April in Southern Europe and New York City. That's how the mortality numbers skyrocketed. And so this is happening now all across the country. We're reproducing that Manhattan and New York City epidemic from March and April now times dozens of times

And we still can stop it. And this is why the message has to be, we can -- no one has to lose their lives over the next few weeks and months. We have vaccines on the other side. It's a tough message to get across, though.

BROWN: And we have this new COVID model that's predicting 567,000 deaths by April 1, but that we can save more than 33,000 lives with vaccines and 49,000 lives with more mask-wearing.

Do you think that that is realistic? And is that sort of what you're talking to, in terms of it doesn't have to be as bad?

HOTEZ: That's right.

Remember, every -- every death that we're talking about this afternoon is preventable. We have -- the vaccine efficacies look great. We're going to have more vaccines, I expect, in the new year. Not only will we have the two mRNA vaccines. we will have the two adenovirus vaccines from J&J and AstraZeneca/Oxford. We will have the particle vaccine from Novavax, maybe our vaccine that we're accelerating right now in India.

So, we can move pretty quickly vaccinating the U.S. population after we have all those vaccines. And so we have to stop thinking about those numbers we just threw out, 420,000 Americans dead by inauguration, 567,000 by April 1.

None of this has to happen. We have the ability to stop these deaths, getting vaccines out, keeping masks on, social distancing. We just have to get everyone to hang in there a few more weeks.

BROWN: But help us understand the fact that there are more than nine million doses of the vaccine that's been delivered across the U.S., but just more than one million have actually been administered.

HOTEZ: Yes, that's disappointing.

It's not too surprising, though, because, of the different vaccines as we have been discussing, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is the most complicated logistically because of that deep freezer requirement. And this requires extra amounts of work and unpacking and monitoring and doing the inventory and making ultra-certain there's no temperature incursion that would make the vaccine go bad.

It's more fragile than some of the other vaccines. So, the other way to look at this is, if we can get this right with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, it will make -- it'll provide a glide path for the other one.

So, it is a little disappointing that we have not ramped up more. On the other hand, this is the toughest of all of them. And we will have the Moderna vaccine, which is a little bit more forgiving in terms of freezer and temperature requirements. And then it gets easier from then on.

BROWN: Yes. And that is certainly encouraging.

All right, Dr. Hotez, thank you for coming on. Merry Christmas Eve. Thanks for all of your hard work during this time.

HOTEZ: Thank you, Pamela. All the best. Merry Christmas to you and family.

BROWN: Thank you.

Well, chaos in the Capitol -- a key Republican senator admitting he has -- quote -- "no idea" what Trump plans to do, leaving lawmakers baffled and millions of Americans on the brink of a financial crisis.

This is a special edition of THE LEAD. Stay with us.

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