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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Trump's Legacy?; Interview With Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R-GA); The Right-Wing Extremist Threat; U.S. Nears Grim Milestone of 400,000 Deaths. Aired 4:30-5p ET

Aired January 18, 2021 - 16:30   ET

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

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JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: And she filed this report to highlight the danger in our midst.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARA SIDNER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The conspiracy fueled deadly Capitol attack on January 6 may be just the beginning of an explosion of far right violence.

OREN SEGAL, DIRECTOR, CENTER ON EXTREMISM: The plots of tomorrow, the activities of tomorrow, the efforts for them to maintain this movement and create threats in the future are literally being planned today.

SIDNER: Far right radicalization has been building in America for years, evidence of it all over the largest social media platforms on Earth.

And even after mega-sites like Facebook said they were cracking down, the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group, found it is still easy to find extremist content calling for violence on the site.

Three days after the attack, this post: "We need to organize our militia. Wars are won with guns. And when they silence your commander in chief, you are in a war."

Another posted January 14: "Patriots, January 20, 2021, is your Tiananmen Square moment."

SEGAL: Social media to extremism is like oxygen for fire. It's required. It has shown itself to be one of the organizing factors for extremists.

SIDNER: Facebook removed the post from the site and the public group calling itself The Patriot Party, but the poison has already set in.

In Michigan, after an armed rally at the Capitol against the governor last year, federal and state authorities boarded and alleged violet plot to kidnap the governor. A few of the same men who say they stood by some of those alleged plotters returned yesterday.

And as with the Capitol Hill terrorists, these guys are out in the open, sharing their extreme views.

(on camera): And tell me about your patch.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Patch? This one. This one, this is a Boogaloo.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We do not want a civil war or anything. We want to exercise every possible way before that becomes an option.

SIDNER: Is that an option, in your mind, a civil war?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I will not fire the first shot. But if it comes to that, I will fight.

SIDNER (voice-over): The Boogaloo Boys are a burgeoning anti- government group which started online. Some of its members are pushing for civil war. At least one Michigan Boogaloo Boy was arrested this fall in the plot to kidnap the governor, a plan for violence that law enforcement thankfully prevented.

And yet those who support the plan are all right out in the open.

(on camera): Would you have supported them if they had kidnapped the governor?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would have supported a citizen's arrest on a felony, because that is what the law states. If a felony is committed, a citizen can arrest another citizen.

SIDNER (voice-over): The governor has not committed a crime, but instead was a potential victim of a violent crime. And yet the lie persists among extremists threatening Michigan legislators' safety.

They brought their weapons. They do have the right to open carry, but some see their firearms as clear threats. This guy said he just not support violence and would only use his AR-15 to save an innocent life.

(on camera): That's the weapons you hear a lot of times that are used in attacks that are not to save innocent people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

SIDNER: Why carry it? I mean, have you been in the armed forces or...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was in the National Guard, yes.

This right here is not dangerous unless the person behind it is dangerous. I would say that this ain't any different than the muskets the Minutemen carried back in the Revolution.

SIDNER (voice-over): While he stood outside the Capitol, current National Guardsmen stood nearby at the ready to protect Michigan's seat of government, much like Guardsmen are doing across the country in case the next wave of violence erupts.

(END VIDEOTAPE) SIDNER: And we should be clear on a couple of things. A musket, by the way, could fire like one or two rounds in a minute. The weapon he has could fire about 45 rounds in a minute.

And going further, we should mention this as well, that the National Guard in Washington, D.C., is actually being vetted very closely, just in case there's anyone within that group that has extremist ideas -- Jake.

TAPPER: Yes, that's not a Minuteman. That's an extremist.

Sara Sidner, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

You might remember there were some Georgia Republicans back in December warning that all these lies the president was telling could be dangerous.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GABRIEL STERLING, GEORGIA VOTING SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION MANAGER: Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot. Someone's going to get killed. And it's not right.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: That was Gabriel Sterling.

Another one of those truth-tellers who ended up being attacked by the Trump -- by President Trump is the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, Geoff Duncan, who joins me now.

And you were warning back then too. Is what happened on January 6 at the Capitol, is that what you and Gabe Sterling and others were worried about?

LT. GOV. GEOFF DUNCAN (R-GA): Well, Jake, actions have consequences. And, unfortunately, we're watching those consequences play out.

January 6 was certainly some of those consequences. When you're willing to lie to 350 million Americans for two straight months, stuff like this is going to happen. And it's unfortunate. And I cannot wait for us to continue to move forward.

[16:35:07]

Let's get Wednesday behind us and move on as a country.

TAPPER: I wish it were that easy. But you just saw Sara -- in Sara's reporting, these experts on extremism tell CNN it's not just white supremacists and QAnon members behind this growing number of violent threats. They're being joined by these fierce Trump supporters who believe, falsely, that the election was stolen from them.

How much blame do you think Donald Trump and those who supported this lie, including the outgoing Senators Loeffler and Perdue, how much blame do you put on them? DUNCAN: Well, I'm still astonished at the amount of misinformation

that continues to fly in and folks just being misinformed to complete conspiracy theories.

But I will tell you that that -- it's in the process of slowing down, that chatter, but it's still with us. And, certainly, this is going to be a pivot point for us to move forward. The tragic events on the 6th were awful. But I truly see it as a catalyst moment for this party to move on to better and brighter days.

And I have said this before, Jake. We let ourselves put a person in front of the party. And that, I assure you, should never happen again in the Republican Party.

TAPPER: From your mouth to God's ears, sir.

But in a new CNN poll, it's very clear that only 19 percent of Republicans say that Joe Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency; 75 percent of Republican voters falsely believe he did not.

How do you fix that, when a majority of your party, not just people in Congress, but rank-and-file just normal citizens, believe these lies, and there are so many members of your party who are spouting them, including elected officials?

DUNCAN: Certainly, we have got a lot of work in front of us.

I'm -- you have heard me talk about this before, GOP 2.0. We're actually starting the wheels in motion, and got an exploratory committee together not to create a new party, but -- and not to try to reinvent the wheel, but to reform and start to heal the party through reminding folks of the policies and reminding ourselves of the policies that make us Republicans, community outreach, tone and messaging that rivals Ronald Reagan, and not Donald Trump's messaging patterns for the last four years.

We got our work cut out for us. But, look, there's brighter days ahead and more civil days ahead for the Republican Party. I can assure you of that.

TAPPER: I know that you're making an effort to do this. You stripped of their committee chairmanships or memberships in key committees three Republican lawmakers in Georgia who supported these lies about election fraud.

But what about here in Washington, D.C.? You have House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. They both pushed these lies, pushed them. Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the RNC, the RNC Twitter account was not just pushing lines. They were pushing out the craziest stuff, Sidney Powell, that lawyer who just espoused all this lunacy, saying that Trump won in a landslide.

How can your party move forward when these people are leading your party nationally?

DUNCAN: Well, certainly, like I said, we got a lot of work in front of us.

But I think it comes on focus. The focus has got to be on reaching in to the communities that we -- Jake, we talked about before on the policy side. Build a wall was a project name. It was not an immigration reform. When we talk about health care, we can't just scream about Obamacare. We have got to work with folks. We have got to have big ideas.

We got to move away from these folks that the misinformation was a short-term sugar high. And we need to focus long-term. I'm selfishly focused on long-term because I have got three young kids. I want to hand off a party and a country that's admirable.

TAPPER: Well, just for the record, you were there saying the truth about the election all through November, December, January, and we thank you for your integrity.

Republican Lieutenant Governor of Georgia Geoff Duncan, appreciate it.

DUNCAN: Thanks, Jake.

TAPPER: President Trump is leaving the White House with his reputation, frankly, in tatters.

The big question, of course, as we were just discussing, will the GOP wake up from their Trump trance?

Stay with us.

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TAPPER: We're back now with the final hours of the Trump presidency.

President Trump expected to leave Washington early on Wednesday morning, skipping president-elect Biden's inauguration, planning a major send-off for himself instead.

Let's discuss.

Ron, as Trump packs off to fly to Mar-a-Lago. What do you think is his legacy will be?

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think the legacy is that he leaves America more divided than at any time since the Civil War and with its underlying political institutions at greatest strain since the Civil War.

He has knocked down the barriers between the Republican Party and far right, racist extremism, provided oxygen to those movements over his four years. And in the mainstream of the party, he has accelerated a turn toward anti-democratic means of trying to keep power as the country demographically evolves away from them.

And you saw both of these things converging with a -- we know the assault on the Capitol, followed by a majority of House Republicans still voting to throw out the election results. And unless the Republican Party gets ahold of these two dynamics, whatever Joe Biden does in the coming years, America could be in for a very tumultuous and difficult decade of the 2020s, which I have written could be the most difficult decade for America since the 1850s, the decade before the Civil War.

TAPPER: Nia, what do you think? What is Trump's legacy?

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: I think Ron is exactly right.

You add to that death at a scale we haven't seen in this country; 400,000 people will be dead of COVID likely by the time that Joe Biden is sworn into office. You think of the racial division. You think of the destruction of America's reputation around the world, really, I think embodied by what we are seeing here in D.C. now, with those National Guard troops, thousands of them, guarding the Capitol, guarding the site of this inauguration.

Now people will not be able to celebrate this moment because of what Donald Trump incited his supporters to do.

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It will take years to repair America's reputation around the world and this internal strife that Ron Brownstein is talking about, this will be something that Biden will have on his to-do list. How do you really get at the root of a lot of this sort of angst that's going on amongst white Americans about this changing America that they feel deeply angry about and deeply uncomfortable about the future of this country?

TAPPER: President Trump, Ron, is expected to pardon some 100 people tomorrow on his way out the door, Kaitlan Collins and others at CNN are reporting. What we don't know is that he's going to attempt to pardon members of his family or even himself.

Do you think it's still a possibility?

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Sure. I mean, look, what we have seen over four years is Trump has taken the measure, particularly of the Republicans in Congress, each time he has broken a window, they have swept up the glass. And so you've gone step by step in moving further and further toward shredding the rule of law, you know, steps like weaponizing the postal service, trying to tilt the census, extorting the government of Ukraine, everything that's happened since the election.

And I think he will push to the absolute max until the end and it really is going to require a big clean-up effort after, one that will have to involve both parties if we are serious about re-establishing constraints on the executive and respect for the rule of law, because Trump has shown us that what we thought were hard and fast barriers turned out to be pretty paper thin.

TAPPER: I agree completely. I mean, just think about what the world will look like if Governor Ducey of Arizona or Governor Kemp of Georgia were less ethical individuals, or any of the other individuals, Raffensperger from Georgia, Schmidt from Philadelphia. Imagine if Kevin McCarthy, Nia-Malika, imagine if Kevin McCarthy were not House minority leader during this period but speaker, what would the country look like right now if Kevin McCarthy had actually had influence on whether or not the electoral votes were certified?

HENDERSON: You know, that's the thing, how close we came to a different outcome here in terms of what went on with this election. This president mounted a hell of an effort to overturn it, to steal it. It's something that Hillary Clinton in her speech at the DNC convention, she sort of warned about, that he would try to steal this election. That's exactly what he did.

And he had willing partners, in many ways a lot of these states. These Republicans who came to believe the big lie he was telling them about this election. So we are grateful that the courts did what they did and some of these folks in states like Georgia. But, listen, if lots of Republicans had had their way, they would have overturned the results of this election, an election that Joe Biden clearly won and easily won in a lot of these states, places like Michigan, places like Pennsylvania. So, it is very scary to think how close America had come to overturning democracy.

But even with that, what we saw on that Wednesday, this insurrection by the president's loyal supporters and what that is going to spark for years to come is still a very, very scary thought, what he has unleashed and the fact that Republicans are still kind of running cover for a lot of those folks who were so violent on Wednesday.

TAPPER: Absolutely. President Trump might be leaving, but the enablers remain in the Congress, in the House and the Senate, and the terrorists that he has emboldened are posing a clear and present danger to the country right now.

Ron Brownstein, Nia-Malika Henderson, thanks to both of you. Appreciate it.

HENDERSON: Thanks, Jake.

TAPPER: Small science of hope in the fight to get rid of the pandemic. That's next.

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TAPPER: In our health lead today, a staggering 60 percent of all coronavirus cases in the U.S. have been reported just since Election Day. Sixty percent. Incoming CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, is warning the U.S. is in for some dark weeks ahead, predicting we could reach half a million deaths by just mid-February as CNN's Nick Watt now reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) NICK WATT, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Today, Moderna will follow Pfizer's second doses of COVID-19 vaccines should begin. The pace needs to pick up. As of Friday, more than a month into this haphazard rollout, only 1.6 million Americans had received both doses, less than 0.5 percent of the population.

DR. JONATHAN REINER, PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: We have 20 million doses that have not gone into arms yet.

DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, INCOMING CDC DIRECTOR: Where there are any bottlenecks in that supply, we will, you know, address those bottle necks.

WATT: In L.A., the Dodgers Stadium parking lot is now a massive mass vaccination site.

DAVID ORTIZ, LOS ANGELES FIRE DEPARTMENT: It's surreal. It's surreal. It feels like you're waking up to a nightmare every day. We are trying to make a dent.

WATT: Sixty percent of all confirmed COVID-19 cases logged since Election Day, a dramatic spike.

But look at this map, that's two weeks ago. States in red and orange average case counts climbing. And today, states in green, that's average case counts falling. Hope right there, if it holds. Big if.

Some places are already easing restrictions.

GOV. DOUG BURGUM (R), NORTH DAKOTA: We're utilizing that flexibility and authority we have to allow the statewide mask mandate to expire.

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WATT: And a more contagious variant might derail progress.

DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB, FORMER FDA COMMISSIONER: The only backstop against this new variant is the fact that we will have a lot of infection by then. There will be a lot of immunity in the population and we will be vaccinating more people but this changes the equation.

WALENSKY: I think we still have dark weeks ahead.

WATT: One model projects a U.S. COVID-19 death toll of half a million in mid-February.

DR. LEANA WEN, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: If only we had a national plan the last ten months what a difference that would have made.

WATT: President-elect Biden has one. His first full day in office will be exactly one year since the first confirmed COVID-19 case in America.

(END VIDEOTAPE) WATT (on camera): And now, more than 24 million confirmed cases, about a quarter of all the cases on earth. We're still leading the world, Jake, but not in a good way.

TAPPER: Nope. Nick Watt, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Coming up, the number three Democrat in the House, Congressman Jim Clyburn, on inauguration day.

Stay with us.

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