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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Harris Shifts Focus to Contrast With Trump in Final Stretch; Harris Says, Trump Running a Campaign on Making You Scared; Trump Defends and Doubles Down on Enemy from Within. Trump Goes In A Different Direction When Interviewed By John Micklethwait; Tyra Banks Walks the Victoria Secret Fashion Show. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired October 15, 2024 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[22:00:00]
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Tonight, what women want? A town hall gives Donald Trump a stage to close the gender gap. And he defends naming names on who is an enemy from within.
Plus, this is or that?
KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: He is running full time on a campaign that is about instilling fear, not about hope.
PHILLIP: Kamala Harris highlights contrast after contrast --
HARRIS: The man has told you he intends to terminate the Constitution.
PHILLIP: -- in a new interview meant to win black men to her side.
Also, the Trump economy --
DONALD TRUMP (R), FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I was always very good at mathematics.
PHILLIP: -- the Republican nominee says, forget the numbers --
TRUMP: They've been wrong about everything, so have you, by the way.
PHILLIP: -- when confronted with cold, hard math, that his promises don't add up.
And, how do you like them, peaches? A closely watched swing state smashes an early voting record.
Live at the table, Bakari Sellers, Abel Maldonado, Brian Girdusky and Ashley Allison.
With 21 days to go, Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here they do.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIP (on camera): Good evening. I'm Abby Phillip in New York.
Let's get right to what America is talking about. Not like us. Tonight, Kamala Harris sat for a lengthy interview with Charlamagne tha God, and if you want to condense her message to black voters, those three words from Kendrick Lamar pretty much crystallize how she sees the choice that America is facing in just three weeks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: His plan includes making it more difficult for working people to get by and to destroy our democracy. You know what he says he'll do? Terminate the Constitution of the United States.
The man has told you all these things about his disregard and disrespect for your freedoms and liberty, including the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body.
January 6th, Donald Trump incited a violent mob to try and undo the will of the people and undo the results of a free and fair election.
And he has said, since then, that there will be a bloodbath after this election.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: CNN contributor and podcast host Cari Champion is with us. She's in our fifth seat tonight.
Cari, just one note before I let you jump in, the comment about the bloodbath thing, we've said it before, we'll say it again, it's not -- that is not the context in which it was said. That being said, what did you make of this lengthy, live callers calling in? It was, it seems, what a lot of people have been asking for from her.
CARI CHAMPION, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Yes.
PHILLIP: What did you make of it?
CHAMPION: I thought it was interesting because there were also people there. You could see, if you watched live online, there were also people in the, quote/unquote, audience, if you will. But what I took away right away from her and what I am hearing from her, she's bullying the bully. And she is now taking this in a way that she's not playing defense. She's playing offense. And she's letting everyone know what she thinks of him.
And she's coming across to me as a very strong leader. She's using his tactics against him. You were weak. What kind of man are you? Who would do that? You gave the Russian president COVID tests while Americans died. She started off right off the bat saying that. And to me, she was establishing her power. But the message, the bigger message was to, I believe, and I'm not a black man, I'll pass that to Bakari at this moment, but she wanted to establish some sort of loyalty, perhaps trust, some connect with black men who feel like she doesn't connect.
I also heard -- and, by the way, there's nothing wrong with this. This was the beauty of it. When they started to question the black men, start to ask her questions, they were skeptical. So, are you sure you're not just using me? Are you sure you're not just saying this just to say this? And that's what they should be doing to make her stand on what she has to say and believe in what she's saying.
PHILLIP: And there's no question that Charlamagne is friendly interviewer, but the questions that were coming at her were not necessarily coming from that perspective. Do you think she crossed that hurdle adequately for the people who want to feel like they can trust her?
BAKARI SELLERS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes. I mean, I wouldn't couch it as a friendly interview. I mean, I think you have to look at the substance of the question.
PHILLIP: I mean, he literally endorsed her, so I think that is described as a friendly interviewer.
SELLERS: Respectfully, it was substantive, right? And I think it's very substantive. I think that her answers were thoughtful. I thought that she got off talking points. Even Charlamagne at one point said, what do you -- how do you feel about people who say that you stick to your talking points? And she said, that's what call discipline.
[22:05:00]
And, you know, you just kind of go through that. It was a clear contrast.
But even more importantly, when we talk about her going to Charlamagne and speaking directly to voters, you very rarely hear the fact that most of the interviews that Donald Trump does on Fox News or on Harvey Levin, or on people who adore him, Aiden Ross, like people who look up to him, they -- I mean, Aiden Ross actually showed up in like a Trump- wrapped, whatever the ostentatious truck is that Elon Musk makes.
LT. GOV. ABEL MALDONADO (R-CA): It's called Cybertruck.
SELLERS: Yes, whatever that is. That's called -- I have babies, I can't afford it, whatever it is.
But like -- but so, yes, I mean, you know, sometimes people go and they play home games, but the questions we received tonight were not necessarily friendly questions. They were from people, as you said, who were adiaphorous, which SAT word means fence sitter. I've been studying my SAT words for this show tonight.
CHAMPION: Good for you. SELLERS: People who have their head in the sand. And black men have been cautiously optimistic about what Kamala Harris may mean. And today I thought -- and also there are a lot of people pissed off in mainstream media because this was the best interview I thought that she's done. I thought it was the best interview.
PHILLIP: Don't project that on us. Nobody's spoke about it, okay? It was an interesting interview. Let's play more from Kamala Harris -- let's play some more Kamala Harris about --
(CROSSTALKS)
PHILLIP: Okay, Bakari. I want to play this bite because she -- this is one of the questions we were talking about. This comes from a pastor who basically says to her, this is what Donald Trump is saying about you in the churches.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You've been criticized by him and others for your lack of engagement to the black church.
HARRIS: They are trying to scare people away because they know they otherwise have nothing to run on.
Ask Donald Trump what his plan is for black America. Ask him what -- you know, I'll tell you what it is. Look at project 2025.
He's selling $60 Bibles or tennis shoes and trying to play people as though that makes him more understanding of the black community. Come on.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: So, what is Donald Trump's plan for black America, Ryan?
RYAN GIRDUSKY, FOUNDER, 1776 PROJECT PAC: Well, he hasn't endorsed another platinum plan like he did last time. But he certainly has spoken of black voters a number of times. And his support with black voters is at a -- the largest of any Republican since Richard Nixon in 1960.
I think that it's not so much Trump's campaign. This time has not been so much racialized where he speaks only to black voters and only to Hispanic voters or whatever. He's speaking to the youth demographic a lot. Bakari said he only does Fox, but he's on every podcast known to man at this point, every bro podcast, every comedy podcast. He was on with Schultz a couple of days ago. It was a huge, huge audience. So, he does speak to young men, period. It's not so racialized.
But I think it's very, very important because younger black voters, if you look at polls, are not as connected to the black church. They are not connected to institutionalized things within black America as older black voters are, which is, I think, part of the generational divide.
PHILLIP: I mean, that's a fair point. I mean, Trump is doing it a different way. Do you think it's working?
ASHLEY ALLISON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, look, I think. He does talk about stuff in a racialized way.
PHILLIP: In a different --
ALLISON: In a different way.
PHILLIP: In a different vein, but, yes.
ALLISON: Let's -- where do we begin? Quite honestly, whether it's derogatory names towards countries, like Haiti and in West Africa, or when he was asked about the Black American plan, when he was in a black church in Detroit a couple of months ago, he immediately started talking about violence and crime. He doesn't have a plan for black America. He is, as the vice president says, pandering to black Americans when he talks about a gold shoe or a Bible.
GIRDUSKY: But he's not selling it to black audiences, his gold shoes or his Bibles. That's to his fans that he --
ALLISON: Or his mug shirt t shirts, as he says, when he was in the black --
PHILLIP: And he literally said that black people like me because I have a mug shot.
ALLISON: Yes. So, it's not -- that's not a plan. That's not even a concept of a plan. That's disrespectful. That's what I mean. It's not a plan. It's not a concept of a plan.
GIRDUSKY: He did have a platinum plan though. He did do things while he was president to black Americans and in favor of them. That's -- I mean, they are -- you're acting as a --
ALLISON: Okay. So, that's his plan, the platinum plan?
GIRDUSKY: No. Well, he did that already, parts of it.
MALDONADO: I think the main point is that people have lived under his economy. And what is he going to do for black America, for Latino America? We've seen it. Prices were lower. Housing was affordable. Inflation was low. People were safe. The sea, the border was sealed. I can go on and on and on.
And all of a sudden you're asked the question, what does he have now? People have watched what he's done and now they're looking at Joe Biden and Kamala's economy and they're saying, we can't survive on this. Our check doesn't go far enough, Abby. Times are tough. The border's open.
[22:10:00]
People -- whether you're Latino or you're a black American, you want a sealed border too. You want to be safe at home. So, they've seen that all along. So, I think this notion that -- what's his plan, they've seen his plan and they know it's going to get better.
SELLERS: I hear you a little bit. I mean, I think that when people say that the border is sealed, I look at the fact that he said he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it. The wall does not build and Mexico didn't pay for it. If you want to talk about inflation, inflation is actually lower today than it was at any point during Donald Trump's presidency.
MALDONADO: People don't feel that way, Bakari.
SELLERS: And that's actually a good point.
MALDONADO: People don't feel that way.
SELLERS: You have to make sure -- and that is a very good point, people don't feel that way.
And so what people are looking for is not -- and this is where Kamala Harris has an advantage over Donald Trump. Because what you two want to actually sit here and tell viewers is, fine, let's look at the four years. And what voters actually look for is what do the next four years look like and what do black Americans think, because that that was a question Abby asked.
And when I talked to black -- I was in Detroit last night with Delroy Lindo and Don Cheadle and Cornelia Smith and Thomas Booker and a few others, but everybody's talking about the fact that he wants to do things like have a national stop and frisk. He wants to -- no he said that. You don't have to nod your head. And then he wants to -- he wants to get rid of he wants to make sure that police officers can act with impunity, and have absolute immunity.
PHILLIP: We were talking just yesterday, Ryan, about how -- in the context of riots, he was saying, let's just bring the military into it to deal with American citizens. I mean, that happened yesterday.
GIRDUSKY: Right. But there are -- the post-George Floyd riots resulted in excess of over 15,000 black male deaths in this country.
SELLERS: How?
GIRDUSKY: How? The surge of violent crime -- it was like Ferguson, the Ferguson effect and the Floyd effect.
SELLERS: Respectfully, you got to explain to me how George Floyd's death.
GIRDUSKY: Yes.
SELLERS: So, I need a causation here because you really are messing me up.
GIRDUSKY: Because what happened is after the Ferguson riot and after the Floyd riot, policemen, in fear of their jobs many times and political coverage, pull back from your jobs resulting in an increased level of publicized --
PHILLIP: Ryan, listen, I got to stop you there. Hold on. Hold on.
GIRDUSKY: You can look at The Washington Post numbers on this.
PHILLIP: Ryan, we got to stop you there because you're literally making a connection out of your own conjecture. You cannot just do that.
GIRDUSKY: It's a real thing. Look up the Ferguson effect. Look up the Floyd effect. It is a real term.
PHILLIP: You cannot just --
GIRDUSKY: It's a real term. I didn't make this up.
PHILLIP: You cannot just invent a connection between two things just because you want that connection to be there.
GIRDUSKY: It's like a name. It's a real thing. You can look it up.
ALLISON: It doesn't mean it's right. It could be a reckoning but it doesn't mean --
(CROSSTALKS)
PHILLIP: Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I just want everyone to settle down because people cannot hear at home when everybody's talking at once, okay? Go ahead.
SELLERS: No, I just think there has to be a level of intellectual honesty. And one of the things we can talk about here when we talk about Donald Trump is he's actually somebody who never spoke out about George Floyd's death. And for me, it's kind of personal because as a black man when you have someone with a knee on their neck for nine minutes and some change and you're actually calling out for your mother while you're being suffocated on national T.V. and you are a parent and a son and a brother, that goes a long way.
The further -- the kind of disingenuity or dishonesty for me is you cannot that what happened during that time period. Is to blame for the deaths of other black men due to violence or what have you.
GIRDUSKY: It 100 percent happen.
SELLERS: But that literally -- and my point to you is that makes absolutely no sense.
And I would argue to you as somebody -- that I'm not coming from a perspective where I want fewer police. I don't. I want police actually to be paid more. I just want better police, more qualified police. I want there to be a database where police, if they commit bad acts, they can't just go from one department to another. That's criminal justice reform.
GIRDUSKY: Okay. SELLERS: But George Floyd didn't cause 15,000 --
PHILLIP: And here, before you jump in, I mean, we should know that we are talking about things that happened when Donald Trump was president.
GIRDUSKY: Right.
PHILLIP: He was the president. So, how is he not responsible for that?
GIRDUSKY: The president doesn't control local police department.
PHILLIP: Okay. But you're trying to blame crime on Joe Biden.
GIRDUSKY: No.
PHILLIP: You don't blame -- okay. Republicans have blamed crime on Joe Biden but you cannot -- but you're saying that people who died when Donald Trump was president, that's not his fault? I don't agree with either blame being assigned to either president. I think presidents don't have a magic wand and they don't control crime from the White House.
GIRDUSKY: Right.
PHILLIP: But if you're going to say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are responsible for a rise in crime --
GIRDUSKY: I didn't say that though.
PHILLIP: -- don't you have to be intellectually --
ALLISON: All I will say is like we're talking about what the future is for black Americans. And what I will say is that Kamala Harris supports the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, which, again, I have no idea what you're talking about in terms of connection. I don't -- I will read it and then I will fact-check the sources that actually wrote that they -- but that's what we're talking about for a plan for black America is how we make public safety something so that everyone black, white, brown can live in safe communities.
That's not what Donald Trump wants. Donald Trump again, doesn't want a better border, because if he could have had a better border under this president by supporting a bill, and he didn't want to do it.
[22:15:03]
He did.
PHILLIP: We do have to pause there. There's actually a lot more to talk about. We'll continue this conversation and many others.
Coming up next, we have much more breaking news from the campaign trail tonight. Donald Trump is doubling down on his enemy from within remarks, calling the left evil. Plus, his rambling and sometimes incoherent interview about his economic plans sends his media stock falling. See what happened.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: Tonight, Donald Trump was in a barn in Forsyth County, Georgia, and he was talking to a town hall of women.
[22:20:01]
And at one point he took the opportunity to make sure that the country knows that he really meant it when he suggested using the military to handle, quote, enemies within, enemies, he says, like Democrats Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi.
Here is the full quote. He says, they're dangerous for our country. We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis. These people are so sick and they're so evil.
I don't want to hear, it's just me, one more thing about the rhetoric endangering Trump if he continues to say things like that.
CHAMPION: Yes, and it's very specific. He's specific. He's going after women again. That difficult conversation feels like dog whistle politics to me. Like is he trying to say that women are difficult? Is he trying to say Kamala's difficult? I go into so many different options.
PHILLIP: It's hard to know --
CHAMPION: What he's trying to say. But it's all a lie is the other point. It's not true.
And what's interesting is that that is the entire basis of what he has been trying to put out this campaign, is that, guess what, none of this is true, it's actually them, we forget about January 6th. It's amazing to me how we have such short-term memory, we act as if none of this happened, and it's really disgusting.
And so she has to stand there and say, yes, has to defend things about herself that I believe just aren't true. Sorry I hit you.
ALLISON: That's fine. I got very comfortable. I'm like I'm very upset about the issue.
But he is not telling the truth and his whole thing is that he wants to make it seem like he's the victim now. I'm over it.
He is ratcheting up the rhetoric in a way that if you go by what Republicans have been saying over the last several weeks, it's dangerous. If you just go by that definition, it's dangerous. He's calling Americans scum. He's saying they are evil. He's calling them vermin. He's saying that the military will handle people like Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, and Adam Schiff. Why? MALDONADO: Abby, I think if you look at President Trump, I mean, he has been the most pursued president ever. I mean, they're on him every day.
PHILLIP: Who's they?
MALDONADO: I mean, just everybody, the Pelosi's.
PHILLIP: Hold on, hold on. I mean, who is they? I just don't like the use of the term they when there's a legal system that's working completely independently from some kind of universal they. So, can we be specific?
MALDONADO: But you look at former presidents who has been more mistreated than President Donald J. Trump, if you think about that -- I mean, think about that. Every day they're on him every day So, of course, he's going to fight back. He kind of fight back every -- that's who he is. He's a counterpuncher He'll tell you that.
PHILLIP: Is that what this is fighting back or is he threatening his political opponents with the military?
MALDONADO: I think he's fighting back, him personally.
PHILLIP: He's threatening them with the military.
MALDONADO: I mean, if you think about it --
PHILLIP: Which is actually, let's be clear, not constitutional, but that's what he's saying.
MALDONADO: Oh, I understand that. But, you know, you got to understand, I mean, I look at him sometimes and I ask myself, President Trump, he's a fighter every day. I mean, if it's, I mean, impeachment, I mean, suits, I mean, it just goes on. So, of course, he gets a little testy. He got a punch back. That's who Donald J. Trump is.
PHILLIP: Let me read a little bit more about from what he said tonight. He said, somebody asked me, can they be brought together? You know, I never really -- I never thought, really, I wasn't thinking like they could because they are very different. And it is the enemy from within. They are very dangerous. They're Marxists and communists and fascists. They're sick.
Again, I'm old enough to remember this summer when the talk was that Trump was going to try to bring this country together. He's saying, can't be done. They're fascists. They're Marxists. They're communists. They're sick.
GIRDUSKY: I don't know who they is that he's talking about. I would say, first and foremost, he shouldn't call Nancy Pelosi evil since her husband was attacked, first and foremost, and it was horrific. But I think that there's -- Donald Trump's essential problem a lot of times in his interviews is he's speaking half in his head and half out loud. And unless you're privy to the part of the conversation he's said before in his head, you don't really kind of understand where exactly he's going. I don't know exactly what he's talking about there.
I will say there are nuggets though that are true. There are people in this country who don't have very good intentions for it and there are also foreign adversaries that don't have very good intentions for it that are operating within our country. We've had a number of people, elected officials, having spies within their office, high level ranking offices. So, I don't exactly know where he's gone with the military corps.
PHILLIP: He's talking about Democrats. It's pretty simple. The context is that he's talking about Democrats because he named two of them.
GIRDUSKY: He named --
PHILLIP: Pelosi and Schumer.
GIRDUSKY: Schumer, okay, yes.
PHILLIP: Pelosi -- I'm sorry, Pelosi and Schiff.
GIRDUSKY: Schiff, okay.
PHILLIP: Yes.
SELLERS: I think it's something totally different. I mean, I think we're giving the former president way too much credit at this point. I just think that he is diminished.
CHAMPIOHN: Correct.
SELLERS: I don't think that he's being, you know, somebody who is necessarily saying today I'm going to go out and incite political violence.
[22:25:03]
I don't think today he's like, I'm going to go out there and talk to my base. I mean, that's just not exactly who he is right now. He is a diminished person, when we saw the sit-down today with Bloomberg.
MALDONADO: How could you say diminished, Bakari? He's never (INAUDIBLE) in this campaign.
PHILLIP: I mean, we'll talk about that in a minute. I mean, well, Bakari, do you think, because we were discussing this yesterday and there was a times piece I'm just talking to a lot of Trump voters who basically say, I don't take this seriously, Trump is Trump, and he's just saying things.
SELLERS: He asked me a direct question, so let me answer it. He said, how can I call him diminished? The question was asked on C-SPAN today at Bloomberg News. They said, should Google be broken up? And Trump's response was, Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of hundreds and thousands of bad voters. And then the reporter looked at him and said that the question was about Google. GIRDUSKY: He should have said like, I'm from a middle class family.
PHILLIP: Just to -- not as a spoiler alert, but we have a whole segment about that coming up.
SELLERS: Yes, but my only point is that like, it's very clear. And, I mean, if you're going to sit here and tell viewers that the Donald Trump of today is the same one of 2016, then I think the viewers would probably say that you're not being honest with them. This man is somebody you need to give some Denny's and tuck him in.
CHAMPION: And also, you keep saying, that's just Trump. Why is that okay? What other person?
MALDONADO: That's who he is.
CHAMPION: His brand?
MALDONADO: Yes, that's Donald J. Trump. And you know what, you know what? People are following that. Look at the Hispanic community. Who'd have ever thought, tight on the border, secure the border, deport criminals, 44 percent Latinos endorsing President Donald Trump.
SELLERS: It's not 44 percent. He's teetering around 35 percent, 35, 36.
MALDONADO: No, he's higher than that.
SELLERS: He's not higher than that.
MALDONADO: 39 percent New York Times/Siena polls versus 54 percent for Kamala Harris.
ALLISON: I mean, I guess I just want more. I want more -- I want our adults to demand more from our leaders. And I wonder, I've been really reflecting like, what are children thinking about this right now? When, I mean, I remember growing up, you were told not to lie. You were told not to speak nasty about people, be kind. We aren't seeing that in the nominee of the Republican Party.
Now, I'll say there has been heightened rhetoric. I don't like to both sides it, but there has been heightened rhetoric and what, but those aren't the candidates. Kamala Harris is not saying that about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is saying that. And I think --
MALDONADO: She did call him a threat to democracy in the interview.
ALLISON: I think he is a threat to democracy too.
GIRDUSKY: But that's your opinion, but people do agree with Donald Trump.
ALLISON: But my point is, I can call him a threat to democracy, and that doesn't mean I'm calling him evil or calling him names. I'm saying I want to beat him at the ballot box. And if I don't, then I realize that hopefully a democracy can survive. Hopefully a democracy can survive. But what he is saying is that he doesn't actually want a democracy. He wants to go after people who disagree with him as enemies of the state, which is not what happens in a democracy. That's what happens in a dictatorship.
PHILLIP: Do you acknowledge that there's a difference between someone saying that his political opponents, the left, are scum and evil, and someone's saying that this person is not going to uphold the Constitution and is a threat to democracy?
GIRDUSKY: Okay. But Harris --
PHILLIP: Is there a difference?
GIRDUSKY: Yes. And which is why, the fact that Harris lied in that interview, which she pointed out, when she said there was a bloodbath, there was going to be a bloodbath, and she lied about it.
PHILLIP: That is irrelevant to the conversation.
GIRDUSKY: No, it's not. She lied.
PHILLIP: I mean, it is, because --
GIRDUSKY: And you point out that she lied, and she said --
PHILLIP: Yes, I called out that falsehood.
GIRDUSKY: And you did, because you're a good journalist.
PHILLIP: But what I'm asking you is, if you're trying to compare rhetoric to rhetoric, and Trump is saying they're scum, they're evil, I need to go after them with the military, don't you think that that is substantively, in terms of tone, in terms of tenor, in terms of magnitude, very different from an argument that says Donald Trump isn't going to respect the rule of law?
GIRDUSKY: Well, she did say he was going to promote violence.
PHILLIP: I mean, it's a yes or no.
GIRDUSKY: No, no, she did say that he was going to promote violence.
SELLERS: Is that not true, though?
PHILLIP: I should say, you said yes earlier, so let's leave it at that, because I think that that's really what this conversation is about, is that Trump is taking the rhetoric to a different level. And I don't think if you want to defend the rhetoric, defend the rhetoric, but don't try to say that it's the same. It's not the same.
GIRDUSKY: I didn't say it was the same, but I did say she did do that.
The second point is, I think there's always been a problem with Donald Trump since he ran for office, where a certain set of people take him figuratively and certain people take him literally. And the ones in the media who take every word he says literally cannot understand the deal --
PHILLIP: Hey, guys, we got to go, but I'm going to --
CHAMPION: Yes, made it right on time.
PHILLIP: Here's what we're going to do here. We're going to report the things that Donald Trump says, and then let the voters decide. Cari, thank you very much. Everyone else, stick around.
CHAMPION: Bye. I'll see you later.
PHILLIP: Coming up next, an eye-opening scene when Donald Trump is confronted about his economic plans and responds with deflections and insults. You heard some of it earlier. Another special guest is going to join us in our fifth seat to discuss all of that next.
[22:30:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight, what you might call a very revealing interview with Donald Trump, the setting was the Economic Club of Chicago, and the topic was, of course, the economy, or at least that is what the former president was supposed to talk about. Instead, there were a lot of questions asked that were then not answered.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN MICKLETHWAIT, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, "BLOOMBERG": With great respect, I was asking about tariffs. You've gone off about that.
DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CURRENT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE (R): So, what I'm saying is this.
MICKLETHWAIT: My question was about your allies, not about China. The question is about Google.
TRUMP: You can't go that quickly.
MICKLETHWAIT: You've gone from the dollar to the dollar.
TRUMP: So, let me just tell you. So, I said, no, I'm just telling you basic -- it's called the weave.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: It's called the weave. Philip Bump is the national columnist for "The Washington Post". He joins us in our fifth seat now. Bakari, you were talking about this earlier, so I want to pick up where you left off. I want to play a little bit more of Trump going in a different direction. Listen.
[22:35:05]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MICKLETHWAIT: You're flooding the thing with giving giveaways.
TRUMP: But we're going to grow.
MICKLETHWAIT: I was actually quite kind to you. I used seven trillion. The upper estimate is 15 trillion.
TRUMP: Oh, you can forget.
MICKLETHWAIT: People like "The Wall Street Journal" who's hardly a communist organization --
TRUMP: Yes, but you don't know.
MICKLETHWAIT: They have criticized you on this, as well. You are running up enormous debts. What is "The Wall Street Journal" now? I'm meeting with them tomorrow. What is "The Wall Street Journal"? They've been wrong about everything. So, have you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Well, here's what I will say, Philip. I'll let you jump in here. This was not a softball interview.
PHILIP BUMP, NATIONAL COLUMNIST, "THE WASHINGTON POST": No.
PHILLIP: And that's kind of how it went. A lot of the interview was like that.
BUMP: Yes, this was not Maria Bartiromo on Fox News the way it was on Sunday, where it's just the person nodding along. You know, I think what this was really revealing about this interview, and we don't see a lot of interviews like this. I think we can all acknowledge that Donald Trump doesn't do a lot of sit downs with adversarial interviewers.
What was really revealing was the extent to which he has made his opposition to the enemies, the central element of his campaign. It used to be that he would come out, you know, I'm a business guy, I know how these guys work, I'm going to do, you know, good stuff. And now, it's just like, I'm going to do terrorists. Immigration's bad. I'm Donald Trump and I'm going to take out the bad guys. That's his pitch and that was the pitch there.
Normally, you'd expect that the presidential candidate sit down with someone, you know, with the gravitas of "Bloomberg" and, you know, the interviewer there in that setting and have real policy positions and articulate exactly what he's going to do. But Donald Trump recognizes or at least believes that he doesn't need to do that, that he can just do the same pitch.
I'm going to do a bunch of terrorists because we're going to make the Chinese and foreign manufacturers pay. Immigration is at the heart of all this, and you're a jerk. And that's it. And that's the campaign.
PHILLIP: He was kind of -- ABEL MALDONADO (R) FORMER CALIFORNIA LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, TRUMP SUPPORTER: That's what people want to hear.
PHILLIP: But Bakari --
MALDONADO: That's what people want to hear.
PHILLIP: He was kind of losing a little control of himself, it seemed, in those moments, because he was getting angry when the question was basically explained how your policy is going to work.
BAKARI SELLERS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes, you know, I think it was wrong with policy. I want people to understand what the policy was. Donald Trump is going to raise taxes on everyone in the country. I mean, he even admitted that. That's what tariffs are. He's going to have -- he's going to -- tariffs don't --aren't taxes.
UNKNOWN: Which is just what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do.
MALDONADO: He's using tariff as a tool to negotiate, Bakari.
SELLERS: No, he's not using tariff.
MALDONADO: Look, look, he talked about our vehicles going to Europe. They put 100 percent tax credit --tax tariff on the --
SELLERS: So, let me ask you a very simple question. When he implements these tariffs across the board, these 10 percent tariffs across the board, and they're not retaliatory, they're not tariffs just against China. But they're across the board.
You want to talk about vehicles? You want to talk about the manufacturing that GM does in places like Mexico? The parts that come from Mexico? The fact that those -- the prices of cars and vehicles are going to go up? Will everyday citizens have an increase in cost, yes or no?
MALDONALDO: Bakari, every tariff, Bakari, that will be put on a vehicle or anything coming in, he's made it very clear, he wants America first. He wants the jobs here.
SELLERS: Will it cost Americans more or less?
MALDONADO: Since when did we --
SELLERS: Will it cost us more or less? It's a tariff.
UNKNOWN: It still didn't go up.
MALDONADO: It's not going to go in. It's a negotiation point.
SELLERS: I'm sorry. He's B.S-Ing.
PHILLIP: Well, here's --
MALDONADO: It's a negotiation point. SELLERS: He is B.S.-ing. He's full of it.
UNKNOWN: We agree.
MALDONADO: He's negotiating a tariff.
SELLERS: He's full of it. Okay.
PHILLIP: Well, here's the problem with that, is that Trump is both, if you claim that it's a negotiating tactic, he is --
MALDONADO: One hundred percent, Abby.
PHILLIP: Yes, but he is also saying -- he's also saying and I'll play -- I'll play the clip. He's also saying that it is going to be how he pays for everything. So, listen to this part of the interview.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MICKLETHWAIT: If you add up all the promises you've made and your plans would add $7.5 trillion to the debt, that's more than twice the total for Vice President Harris. You're on course to push up debt up to 150 percent of GDP. This is a very business-like audience. Why should they trust you with that?
TRUMP: To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. And it's my favorite word. It needs a public relations firm to help -- but to me, it's the most beautiful word in the nation.
MICKLETHWAIT: Tariffs, do you think that will bring in the revenues to use another bipartisan group?
TRUMP: Yes.
MICKLETHWAIT: Pearson Institute, they say they'll only bring in $200 billion.
TRUMP: Yes.
MICKLETHWAIT: That is only -- that's barely the cost of two of your promises.
TRUMP: Yes, but that's like for what company are you talking about?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Okay, you cannot, you cannot have it both ways. It cannot be just a negotiating tactic and also going to raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, trillions of dollars in revenue to pay for the things that he wants to pay for.
BUMP: Let me just very quickly point something out. Dude was president. He imposed tariffs Americans paid for, like --
MALDONADO: And Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did not retrieve them. But left them in a place. BUMP: But that's not the point. You're moving the goalpost. The point is, it's not just negotiating back. He said he's going to do it and cost went up.
RYAN GIRDUSKY, FOUNDER, 1776 PROJECT PAC: When Trump included a steel tariff in 2018 March or 2018, the price of steel today, which Biden never took that tariff away off of China, the price of steel today is less than it was in 2018.
ASHLEY ALLISON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think --
GIRDUSKY: Despite COVID, despite everything else --
UNKNOWN: Right.
GIRDUSKY: -- prices did not spike.
UNKNOWN: This doesn't -- this doesn't change the point.
SELLERS: The same question I asked him though. I mean we're talking. I hear you. But will the cross for everyday goods from middle-class America go up or not if he implements these tariffs?
GIRDUSKY: No, no. Those who aren't buying steel. That is not true.
SELLERS: How is that not true? It did. There are studies. Of course it did.
GIRDUSKY: No, it did not.
UNKNOWN: Absolutely.
UNKNOWN: He even called it a tax.
GIRDUSKY: What's going to happen is they're going to repatriate different industries to increase amount we're producing in this country. And when do you want with tariffs if they're producing this country. That's just the truth. And also- I mean, you also say that like as a turnkey. Like, okay, let's open a factory tomorrow. Like, I mean, this --
BUMP: That's what Joe Biden has attempted. That's what Donald Trump has attempted.
GIRDUSKY: Well, sure, yes.
BUMP: Every president but not under the auspices of this tariff, which has already increased costs for Americans.
MALDONADO: And then you add no tax on tips. You can add everything else that he's talked about.
GIRDUSKY: That's what he's saying all the giveaways, right?
MALDONADO: I mean, yes, it's all -- what do you mean giveaways?
GIRDUSKY: That's exactly what the Bloomberg ESC said.
PHILLIP: Abel, you were a lieutenant governor.
MALDONADO: Yes.
PHILLIP: Okay, no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime. That costs money, right?
MALDONADO: No, you can deduct your interest on your vehicle.
PHILLIP: No, no. Yes, but it costs money. So, how are you --
MALDONADO: Lower the corporate rate from 21 to 15 if you're in America.
PHILLIP: You can't invent policy for Trump, that's not Trump's policy. His policy is that the way to pay for that is tariffs. That is the policy.
MALDONADO: No, it's not. I think tariffs is just a negotiation point. His policy is grow the economy. Grow the economy, put people back to work. Put Americans back to work.
PHILLIP: You can't -- I know that that is what you want. The policy theme but that's not what the policy is.
SELLERS: The point of this entire conversation is neither one of them. One of the things Kamala Harris talks about all the time, that neither one of them have been able to articulate because Donald Trump hasn't been able to articulate it, is the fact that we want to increase wages for American workers. You're talking about costs rising. The best way to cap costs is to go out there and do things like price gouging.
GIRDUSKY: Which Trump did when he was president.
SELLERS: But actually, it's actually growing at a faster rate now.
GIRDUSKY: Not if you reduce inflation over the last three years.
SELLERS: You just can't mix stuff up.
GIRDUSKY: That's not true.
SELLERS: I'm just telling you, every economic indicator from the GDP, to inflation, to wage growth, to the stock market. Every, literally, every economic indicator over the last three years has been better than it was under Donald Trump. And you forget to mention COVID.
PHILLIP: Ryan, I want Ashley to be able to get in because she has been sitting here patiently.
SELLERS: I'm sorry, Ashley. I got excited.
ALLISON: Well, I thought this was a great robust discussion. I guess what I'm thinking here is that the challenge is the reason why it's a neck and neck race is because I said this last night. I don't actually think this is about policy. This is about who the voter is trusting right now to have their best interests in mind. And part of the frustrating thing is that we just are able to say things now and I shouldn't look at you because I'm not there.
UNKNOWN: It's okay.
ALLISON: But like you're sitting next to me but we're able to say things now whether they're Trump's policies or not. He gets to just go off and say like what did he say, see spot dog run, you know, and it's like, that's a great policy, that's wonderful. And there's no fact checking of him. There's no real testing of it.
And then there's people that go out and say like, yes, that's right. Like that's right. And so, the American people, they know that they want costs to go down. And I'm not sure they actually are paying attention to anybody's argument about how it's going to happen.
PHILLIP: Well, we got to --
ALLISON: They just want to trust the person that they care about what's happening.
PHILLIP: We have to watch this. Hold on. We do have to go. I do want to say I think that you're on to something and if you listen to this whole thing, you would maybe expect to hear something more concrete about how this is going to work for the American people. You didn't. And that was part of what made it such a -- fascinating.
Listen. Everyone, hang on. Coming up next, breaking news tonight out of the state of Georgia. A judge there makes a ruling on Republican efforts to change the voting rules in that swing state as early voting is already shattering big records.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:48:06]
PHILLIP: Breaking news tonight, a judge in Georgia is pausing a new rule that would require officials from-- to hand count the number of ballots cast in each polling place. That rule comes after Georgia voters set a record today for early votes in that battleground state.
More than 300,000 votes were cast. That is more than double the previous record set during the pandemic in 2020. That's pretty extraordinary. They're just votes. We don't know anything about them. We don't know where they're from. We don't know who they're from. But it tells you something about enthusiasm.
GIRDUSKY: Right. In every early state in Pennsylvania, in Virginia, in Georgia, they've all had record-breaking, our first day voting. Virginia had huge -- no episode of Pennsylvania out of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh area. The difference is as though the mail-in vote in Georgia is substantially smaller this time. It's smaller by hundreds of thousands. But there is a very high intensity for very high propensity voters to get out there and vote early on the first day and we're seeing it across the entire country.
BUMP: Yes, I was going to I mean, I think generally that's right that these are not necessarily people who are not going to vote. They're people who are excited about voting. Michael McDonald from the University of Florida, who tracks early voting very closely. He has a note of caution that in 2020, it's not exactly apples to apples because in 2020 things weren't exactly working right in Georgia. So, we should take that with a grain of salt.
You know, the thing that I think is interesting is this question of enthusiasm and the metric that I looked at earlier this week that I thought really spoke to that well was that in YouGov's polling for CBS News, they actually found that while three in 10 Trump voters say they're voting for Trump because they want to oppose Kamala Harris, only four in 10 Harris voters said they were doing that because they wanted to oppose Trump. And that's different.
We had seen previously that it was most Biden voters, for example, both in 2020 and 2024, were doing it because they didn't like Trump. This is actually enthusiasm for Harris, which I think is an interesting indicator for her campaign.
ALLISON: Two things I would say.
[22:50:00]
ALLISON: One, I understand your point about mail-in versus in person. I mean we were in the middle of a pandemic so people were stuck in their house and so obviously, voting in person was a higher risk. But even still, these numbers are something to watch because just three months ago when Joe Biden was still in the race, Georgia wasn't even a state that people were talking about that was in play.
And the question you have to ask is that for so long, people did not want this matchup of Biden and Trump and the enthusiasm level was down. So, is this playing in Harris' favor because the numbers are going up? Is that bump because she's now in the race?
SELLERS: And you can actually tell a lot about this more so than people actually give it credit for. I mean, you were looking at the numbers today out of places like Richmond County, which is Augusta, Georgia. It's a place where, you know, Joe Biden won by 20 points plus and you had nearly double the number of voters come out and vote early.
And so, you can't tell who's voting for what, when, where, how, but you can get a good feel for it. And when you look at places like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Democrats have to feel good about that. When you look in places, and Nevada somewhat, but when you look in places like Arizona and North Carolina, you say Democrats have work to do.
But I do have to give a shout out, particularly in Georgia, to somebody like Stacey Abrams, because this didn't happen overnight. Georgia was a deep red state for a long period of time. It was a deep red southern state for a long period of time. Stacey Abrams did the work and now, it's uphill for Republicans
because you've had Raphael Warnock. You've had John Ossoff. You've had Raphael Warnock. You've had Raphael Warnock. It feels like he's run every other month. You've had Raphael Warnock and then you had Joe Biden win, as well. And so that bode, listen. Early votes traditionally bode well for Democrats.
PHILLIP: I, you know, I think this is kind of speculation but it does kind of seem to me that voters, they understand the dynamics here and they want to cast a vote in a way that they know is not going to slow down the process. It's going to definitely be counted when they want it to be counted. And that's probably why they're voting early as opposed to by mail, as well.
MALDONADO: Abby, I just got off the bus. I spent three days in North Carolina on the Trump 47 bus. And I got to share with you, the enthusiasm is off the charts. Wilmington, all of Charlotte, Gastonia, all over the state of North Carolina. And the message has been very, very clear. Get out and vote early. Get out and vote on the first day that you're available.
Why? So, we know we can take you off the rolls because money's tight on our end. But the enthusiasm's high. So, today when I saw the lines in Georgia, in my mind, it's the message of get out and vote early for the Republican party, for Donald J. Trump. That's kind of how I feel. And I'm witnessing it on the ground.
PHILLIP: Both campaigns perhaps feeling optimistic about those numbers. We'll see. Philip, thank you very much for joining us. Everyone else, stick with us. Coming up next, the panel gives us their night caps, including a last minute move by Republicans in a nail biter of a race.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:57:26]
PHILLIP: We are back and it's time for the "NewsNightcap". You each have 30 seconds to say your piece. Bakari, you're up.
SELLERS: Look, I am absolutely just excited about the celebrity environment around Kamala Harris's campaign last night. I had Delroy Lindo and Don Cheadle. I hear rumblings that Usher's coming out. You've had people who --
PHILLIP: Usher.
SELLERS: U-S-H-E-R-R-A-Y-M-O-N-D. Anyway, and so, I just feel like there's a lot of energy. The only person who wants to hang out with Donald Trump are Jason Miller and my homie Corey Lewandowski. And I just think that there's a lot of energy to be had, particularly in Philly, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, and a lot of black men are coming out. So, I'm excited about the energy.
PHILLIP: People want to know when the Beyonce concert's happening, but we'll -- SELLERS: We'll see.
PHILLIP: We'll see. Go ahead, Abel.
MALDONADO: Abby, today is National Cheese Curd Day in America. And I just want you to know that, as a Californian, I've never had them. But when I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the Republican convention, and I visited the CNN Grill, they were on full display. And I got to tell you something, when you bite those suckers, you can hear the squeak in them.
GIRDUSKY: So, Happy National Curd Day.
MALDONADO: Republicans left their wallet in Milwaukee.
SELLERS: I've never had one.
PHILLIP: We love it. Go ahead.
ALLISON: Right. You hear the squeak.
GIRDUSKY: Republicans are spending a last minute at ablutes across the country on the issue of boys playing girl sports, on surgery, and gender surgeries for criminals, and on the idea of allowing children to get puberty blockers with their parental consent. This is the issue that got Glen Youngkin elected in Virginia. It's the issue that red- pilled Elon Musk and it is the issue that's going to push a lot of men into the Republican party this November.
SELLERS: You all are totally different.
PHILLIP: I was going to say we went from Cheese Curds to that.
GIRDUSKY: I know. It messed me up on lockers.
PHILLIP: From light to -- took a very dark turn. It's okay.
ALLISON: I'll bring it back up.
PHILLIP: Go ahead, Ashley.
ALLISON: Tyra Banks is back. She walked the Victoria Secret Fashion Show today. She's 50 years old. I just think that this is a reminder that you can come back to the thing you love. You can reinvent yourself. I feel like it's a woman empowerment thing and she killed it. So, we love you, Tyra.
PHILLIP: I, you know what? I think people -- this is going to be, this is my hot take. People have been coming for Tyra but I think that she is a trailblazer.
SELLERS: She is.
PHILLIP: And everybody, we all have flaws, but she deserves her flowers for doing what she has done for so many years. And then for coming back. ALLISON: Coming back. It's not easy to come back in the fashion
industry at a woman at 50 and say like --
PHILLIP: Yes.
[23:00:00]
ALLISON: -- I love the body that I'm in and I'm proud of it. It's a great message for -- for women --all, and people all around the country, love the body that you're in.
GIRDUSKY: I wonder what Naomi Campbell had to say about her. Naomi. Yes.
ALLISON: We love Naomi here, okay?
SELLERS: I was like, if you're beef --
PHILLIP: That's what I was wondering if you have enough there we can see that --
ALLISON: We can love Naomi and Tyra.
PHILLIP: You're right. We can love them both. Everyone, thank you very much. Thank you for watching "NewsNight State of the Race". "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.
