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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Nations Bite Back At Trump's Tariff Bluster; Harris Campaign Team Opens Up About What Went Wrong; Biden Administration Wants Medicare And Medicaid To Cover Ozempic; Ceasefire Between Israel And Hezbollah Happens Soon. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired November 26, 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 VIDEO CLIP)
AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Tonight, the blowback, Donald Trump's bluster on tariffs ricochets across markets, with Mexico's new leader saying, make it make sense.
Plus, pod scrutinizes America. The Obama Bros interview the Harris campaign bosses to break down why they lost the election.
Also, Ozempic for all? President Biden moves to make the government cover weight loss drugs. But will RFK Jr. undo and Make America diet crazy again.
Live at the table, Gretchen Carlson, Scott Jennings, Catherine Rampell, Kevin O'Leary, and Solomon Jones.
Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here, they do.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CORNISH (on camera): Good evening, I'm Audie Cornish in for Abby.
Let's get right to what America is talking about, the war on wallets. Tonight, it's clear that if Donald Trump wants a global trade war, he could get it, but it's unclear if anyone else really wants one. So, take Wall Street. They don't really like these tariffs for Detroit. Ford and General Motor stock prices tumbled down, the trade war rabbit hole. Sneakerheads, not going to be happy, footwear industry group execs said the tariffs will only stretch budgets thinner. And then the countries who are the targets of the Trump tariffs, well, they're not going to take it lying down. Mexico's new president says she'll go tit-for-tat, tariff for tariff.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM, MEXICAN PRESIDENT: President Trump, threats and tariffs are not the way to address the migration phenomenon or drug use in the United States. These major challenges require cooperation and mutual understanding. One tariff will be followed by another in response and so on until we put common businesses at risk. (END VIDEO CLIP)
CORNISH: In Canada, they're going to try to keep the relationship from spiraling.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FRANCOIS LEGAULT, QUEBEC PREMIER: We cannot start a war and we have to do everything we can to not have these tariffs.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CORNISH: Now, China is saying that a trade war means mutually assured destruction, quote, China believes that China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation is mutually beneficial in nature. No one will win a trade war or a tariff war.
So, I'm here with my table to talk tariffs again. Kevin, I want to start with you because you've talked a lot about how the business community feels about Trump. But I know there are different aspects of the business community that have different feelings about what it's like to deal with tariffs. So, where do you expect the sort of pain points will be for the incoming administration when they talk about these sorts of things?
KEVIN O'LEARY, CHAIRMAN, O'LEARY VENTURES: Let's start with, this is not official policy. This is Trump putting out a social media post on his own platform, wakes the whole world up.
CORNISH: Which still can move markets, right? I mean, that's --
O'LEARY: He did, but this is a classic Trump negotiation. This is chapter four of his book. He's waking up, he's got a mandate, obviously, he won a landslide election on this issue, protecting borders. They brought Canada into it as well. But you got to remember there's a huge negotiation between Mexico, U.S. and Canada starting next year. When he's in power, this is NAFTA 3. Everybody remembers NAFTA. So, he's beginning his negotiation this way.
There will never be 25 percent tariffs on Canada. Everybody knows that.
CORNISH: Okay. So, if you're saying it's just a negotiation tactic, I want to bring in Catherine, because you're pointing out there was a few negotiations between NAFTA and now.
CATHERINE RAMPELL, CNN ECONOMICS COMMENTATOR: Oh, yes, NAFTA 2, which you left out of this narrative, was negotiated by Donald Trump himself. And he said it was the very best deal that America ever got, and now apparently it's trash. I don't understand why it's trash, but apparently it's trash.
And it's not even clear what he's asking these countries to do. I mean, he says it's about fentanyl, but like, no fentanyl comes over the border from Canada, you know, and even the fentanyl that does come over the border from Mexico is mostly brought over by American citizens.
So, it's not really clear what these countries could do to appease Trump. I really hope he is just saber-rattling because I agree, at least I think we agree, that a 25 percent tariff on all Canadian goods and all Mexican goods would be devastating, as would the likely retaliation, which would probably be much more surgically targeted to American businesses that would suffer, that are politically important.
[22:05:13]
GRETCHEN CARLSON, JOURNALIST AND CO-FOUNDER, LIFT OUR VOICES: Yes. A couple of things, he blustered about this before and did not do it. Number two, in the landslide election that happened, people voted for lower gas and grocery prices, not higher, which obviously that would be passed along to the consumer if this ever happened. Not to mention the pushback from major companies, like the auto industry and others, who are going to say, wait a minute, now you're going to pass along those costs to us? They might have to sue, if this ever came to fruition, to stop it from happening, which brings me to the congressional side of this. Trump can apparently do this without an act of Congress. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act may give him that exact right.
CORNISH: Yes, Scott, Solomon, how are you feeling?
SOLOMON JONES, AWARD-WINNING COLUMNIT, THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: Well, I think that --
CORNISH: Is this much ado about nothing? I know I've built it up by calling it a war. But to your minds, how much should we be thinking about it?
JONES: I think that Donald Trump is doing policy via Twitter. And I think that's dangerous because you've got a guy who now has you say an electoral mandate, but he also has Congress and he also has the Supreme Court. So, whatever he wants to do, if they back him up, he'll be able to do it. And the bottom line is that the people who lose in a trade war are the consumers.
He negotiated USMCA, that agreement, which was followed NAFTA between Canada and Mexico and the United States, and that agreement exempts most products from those countries. So, he says he can do it, but he made an agreement that said he couldn't do it for most of those products. So, I don't understand what he's doing.
CORNISH: But these shakeups are meaningful in that it does bring these topics, as you talked about last night, back to the fore, right? So, now Mexico and a new president in Sheinbaum is in the position of moving in a new direction with her country when it comes to the war on drugs, dealing with the U.S. How do you see this as Trump reentering the kind of global trade space?
SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, on the Canadian space piece, Trudeau already called him. They've already started talking on the phone. So, it may have had --
CORNISH: Though he may not be long for that political world.
JENNINGS: But, obviously, it sparked a conversation, which they do need to have. They don't have a lot of fentanyl that comes across the border, but there are some people that come across the border.
I'll tell you what Mexico needs to do. They need to stop the people, and they need to stop the drugs. It's coming right over the southern border. They're a terrible neighbor. They have been a terrible neighbor. And Donald Trump needs to get their attention. And I think he has done that. I agree with you. This is the beginning of a negotiation, but it's more than just the economy. It's national security, and it's this poison that is killing American people all over this country.
RAMPELL: I 100 percent agree. Like the fentanyl epidemic is horrible, it's tragic, we need to do something about it.
JENNINGS: And China is part of it as well, and they're part of it as well.
RAMPELL: And you know that there actually was bipartisan legislation intended to increase our fentanyl detection technologies at the border and Trump killed it. That was the bipartisan border bill that Trump basically unilaterally filled.
JENNINGS: You keep fighting these old battles. Donald Trump -- you're not over it. Donald Trump won and he wants the border secured.
RAMPELL: That's the solution to it.
JENNINGS: But he wants the next --
RAMPELL: That's the solution to it.
JENNINGS: It's not the only solution, because Mexico has to do something. It's coming up their country and right over our border. They do nothing. It's a crisis. They do nothing.
RAMPELL: Do you know what's happened to border crossings in the last year? They've gone down by about 75 percent.
JENNINGS: It's a crisis. If you want to argue that it's safe and secure, that's crazy.
RAMPELL: I didn't say that.
JENNINGS: They got to act.
JONES: The Mexican president said something that I think everybody's skipping over. She said drug consumption.
CORNISH: I know where you're going with this. Yes.
JONES: She talked about Americans using drugs. So, what she's saying is that nobody's forcing you to use these drugs. They don't just come from Mexico. We know they also come from China. And so, you know, the problem is not just theirs, it's ours as well. And we have to get control --
(CROSSTALKS)
CORNISH: No. no. I don't want to make you think we're not listening to you, but I want to underscore this point that she said there's also a market that's not being -- demand is not being addressed.
JENNINGS: I've heard this all day long.
CORNISH: And is that something we should pay attention to?
JENNINGS: I've heard this whole, oh, there's a demand for it, like we're talking about candy bars. This is literal poison that will kill you almost instantly, and we talk about it like it's some piece of candy.
JONES: No, I know what it is. I'm from Philadelphia. We have Kensington.
JENNINGS: And I'm from Kentucky.
JONES: We have Kensington, though. It's the worst drug market in the country. So, I know what fentanyl is and I know what fentanyl does. But the bottom line is that people have to stop using. We have to start working on getting people clean, getting people off drugs, not trying to keep them on drugs not trying to keep them alive until they decide. We have to work on getting people off drugs, and then the drugs will stop coming.
CORNISH: You do actually agree.
JENNINGS: But the thing is, you can't get off fentanyl when you're dead.
CORNISH: Scott --
JENNINGS: It's deadly. You can't get off it when it kills people.
RAMPELL: That's why we should have the technology at the border to detect it.
JENNINGS: And the Mexican president should --
(CROSSTALKS)
[22:10:00]
CORNISH: (INAUDIBLE) people come into the conversation
CARLSON: What I would love is for Scott and Catherine to be able to just -- actually, Scott, to be able to say that had Trump not killed that piece of legislation, it would have helped with the border.
JENNINGS: I don't know if it would have or not.
CARLSON: Why not? What are you talking about? JENNINGS: I don't know if it would have or not.
CARLSON: She just talked about the fentanyl program that was --
JENNINGS: So, I don't know if she's right. Maybe there is some legislation.
RAMPELL: I mean, you can ask Lankford. He was the one who wrote the bill.
JENNINGS: This is about Mexico and getting them to pay attention to our priorities.
CARLSON: It's about both countries. It's about America had a plan in place to get more border agents to help with the fentanyl problem
O'LEARY: There is a big difference between these two countries.
JENNINGS: And leave a bunch of people here that shouldn't be here.
CARLSON: Why can't we just say that that would have been a great thing to pass.
JENNINGS: I don't know if it would. I don't necessarily agree.
CARLSON: And at the same time, Mexico needs to do something.
O'LEARY: Think about the leadership of these two countries. She has a new mandate, she's feisty, she wants to fight. Trudeau is at the end of his time. It's a parliamentary system, he's hated by his own people, he's got a few months left. Trump will not be negotiating with him. He's gone. This is like the end of the parliamentary system, like Britain. A few months ago they whacked their P.M. Trudeau is -- he's irrelevant.
So, now, Trump should actually bring down the prime minister in waiting, a guy named Pierre Poilievre. He is much more in sync with Trump. He's going to lift the ban on pipelines, eradicate no more carbon tax, and investing back in Canada. People want to invest there. And he's concerned about the border, concerned about fentanyl. He should go down to Mar-a-Lago now. Trudeau, irrelevant, doesn't matter.
RAMPELL: What does any of this have to do with starting a trade war? Like why can't you develop relationships with our allies?
O'LEARY: It's not a trade war when you get in sync with these two economies. There's no way on Earth we're talking about water, paper, power, cars, gas, oil, all coming from Canada, massive trading partnership, no chance in hell there'll be a tariff.
CORNISH: Because -- just finish this sentence, no chance because it would be damaging, or no chance at all?
RAMPELL: Because it's a bad idea.
CORNISH: No, I just want him to finish his idea. O'LEARY: A 25 percent tariff would devastate both countries. It's not going to happen. But the guy to be negotiating with is not Trudeau. He's a zero right now. He's got to bring down the actual in waiting prime minister, who will be there maybe in 90 days.
CORNISH: You're making a lot of assumptions about potentially three new leaders, right, engaging on the world stage around trade. And you're making a lot of assumptions about who might blink. I mean, everyone here has something to prove in terms of saying a mandate to their citizens.
CARLSON: Yes. Well, I think that Trump had a better bargaining chance with the former president of Mexico than he does with this one. I mean, I think they were more aligned in their thinking than they might be now. And she's already putting up a fight saying that she's not going to just fall over for it.
CORNISH: Right. And also describing sort of the past remain in Mexico, all of these sort of programs that had developed.
RAMPELL: But, again, Mexico has actually put a lot more border security on its southern border.
JENNINGS: It's really working wonders. This is crazy.
RAMPELL: Yes, again, border crossings are down 75 percent. They're back to what they were under Trump.
JENNINGS: If I were her, I would be prepared for my country to possibly have United States military incursions to take out the drug factories and the people who do this to us too.
RAMPELL: So, you think we should not only have a trade war, we should have a military war with Mexico?
JENNINGS: I think we have to do what we have to do to stop the drugs.
RAMPELL: I'm glad we all agree we should be de-escalating.
JONES: It sounds like Remember the Alamo. I mean, it sounds like it. It sounds crazy. Like so not only are we going to send the military on people who are here in the United States, we're now going to send the military over the border to attack Mexico.
JENNINGS: No, I think --
RAMPELL: I think it's Americans who are bringing the drugs here.
JENNINGS: I think there are strategic ways to use the United States military to control immigration here and drugs there. And Mexico needs to pay attention to this man and work with us or face the consequences of (INAUDIBLE).
JONES: Drug addiction is a health issue. And I think it needs to be looked at and solved as a health issue. Certainly, you can stop the drugs from coming in, but as long as you have people who are going to use them, and I see it in Philadelphia, in Kensington, it's a devastated community, we have to make sure that we're doing everything we can to get people off drugs. Nobody forces anybody to use those drugs. You have to get them off and people have to want to get off.
CORNISH: I'm going to give away my age here, but I'm also getting war on drug vibes, like the U.S. kind of already went through this. Kevin, sort of what are your thoughts here about how effective it is to have this one-two combo of like, maybe we should send the military, maybe we should do this, when the country has actually been through some form of this?
O'LEARY: I'm in the camp that says there'll always be drugs in society, in a free society that we have, but --
CORNISH: And should there always be a war on them?
O'LEARY: Yes, I would like to limit access to it. There's just too much of it around. And this is, and we all agree with this, this is a killer drug. This is a bad drug. This is not like a joint of marijuana or, you know, something light. This is --
CORNISH: But cocaine was the problem for a while, right, or the crack epidemic, the thing we heard about for so long.
O'LEARY: This is worse than all of them. This is a chemically-created drug that is very addictive and kills you and that --
CORNISH: I'm not talking about the drug itself. I'm talking about the trafficking, the systems through which it exists, the economic system through which it exists.
[22:15:03]
Has the U.S. ever solved that?
O'LEARY: You know what I'm amazed by in the whole conversation? The word, China, wasn't mentioned.
CORNISH: I was just about to say --
(CROSSTALKS)
O'LEARY: Where is China? China is at the forefront of this fentanyl thing. And I think the real tariff war is not going to be on Mexico or Canada. It's focused on a cheater, a liar, a stealer, since 1999 when they came into the WTO. This is a country, not the people, but the leadership, that just doesn't want to play by the rules.
And I live it in my businesses every day. I would like to go to DEFCON 1 with China, tariffs 400 percent, I brought it up, bring the supreme leader to Washington, or crush his economy until he has riots in the streets for food.
RAMPELL: Again, we've had strategies to deal with China.
O'LEARY: No, we haven't. RAMPELL: Oh, absolutely, we have.
O'LEARY: Not one administration since '99 has dealt with them.
CARLSON: I thought Trump was going to be tough on China. He had four years to do that.
O'LEARY: He's going to get tougher on China.
RAMPELL: I was going to say the TPP.
O'LEARY: This is time to really put the strings in (ph).
CARLSON: So, is 35 percent tariff enough for China then? Because he says it's going to be 10 percent higher than Mexico and Canada.
O'LEARY: No, it's not enough.
CARLSON: Okay.
O'LEARY: What you have to do is target parts of their economy where there's a lot of workers. Just for an example, let's say yoga mats. Let's say we import a million yoga mats a month. All the yoga mat factories, 400 percent tariffs on yoga mats, they all get unemployed. They go to the streets. They scream to the supreme leader, I'm starving, riots. That's what he wakes up, he says, wow --as well
(CROSSTALKS)
CORNISH: Can I just ask -- no, I do want to ask for people at home, they're wondering how this works. When this happened last time around when Trump launched tariffs against China, they retaliated. Were they effective at politically targeting return tariffs? Like was China able to say, well, then the tariffs on you --
RAMPELL: No, we had kind of a B.S. deal where they were going to buy more soybeans.
O'LEARY: They lied, they cheated, they steal -- stole. Excuse my language.
RAMPELL: I think we all agree on some of the problems here. The, you know, fentanyl, bad, China providing fentanyl and stealing I.P. and all that stuff, bad. The issue is we keep on going back to the same set of solutions that do not work, which is ever higher tariffs, which, again, primarily are borne by American consumers and not China.
O'LEARY: So, you suggest we ask them to be nicer?
RAMPELL: No.
O'LEARY: And kumbaya them?
RAMPELL: No. I suggest that we get together with our allies and form a coalition of the willing.
JENNINGS: Do you think they're an ally? Do you think China's an ally?
RAMPELL: No. To rein in China, TPP, which is what Mitch McConnell, your former boss, was a big fan of back when Obama --
JENNINGS: Yes, he's a free trader.
RAMPELL: Yes, when Obama was president, and then it got dumped on basically by both parties, ultimately. But that was the idea. It was that we were going to get together with our friends, we were going to set the rules of the road on trade, and we were going to essentially bully China into having to play by our rules.
O'LEARY: They don't follow rules.
CORNISH: Well, this is --
RAMPELL: Well, they wouldn't have any choice. We all get together.
JONES: Cheating and lying. Are we talking about China or are we talking about Trump? Which one are we talking about?
CORNISH: Fundamentally, this is a conversation about solutions, which are still under debate.
So, everyone stick around. We're going to be talking more this time about what's going on with Democrats, because the leaders of the Harris campaign are breaking their silence on their election loss. But did they actually come clean about some of the reasons for that loss? That is the next thing we will debate.
Stay with us.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAVID PLOUFFE, FORMER HARRIS 2024 CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISER: This political environment sucked, okay?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:20:00]
CORNISH: There was a price to be paid for the short campaign. That's from David Plouffe, senior adviser to the Harris presidential run. He says that ferocious headwinds and the breakneck pace of her abbreviated run mortally wounded her bid to shatter the glass ceiling.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PLOUFFE: I just want to -- again, it can sound like making excuses. This political environment sucked, okay? We were dealing with ferocious headwinds and I think people's instinct was to give the Republicans and even Donald Trump another chance.
So, we had a complicated puzzle to put together here in terms of the voters and it was going to take a little bit more independent Republicans than we saw in '20, maybe a percent more Republican voters for us. It was going to take voters saying, even though I judged Trump's first term favorably, I'm more concerned about him this time.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CORNISH: Catherine, I want to start with you because this has been a long conversation the last couple of weeks, but we haven't had the campaign itself weigh in. Now that it has, were you hearing things that like made sense, go against what everyone else has been talking about in those sort of Democratic circles?
RAMPELL: I think some of it is plausible, and I agree with, and some of it I think is sort of excuse-making. So, I think it is true that they had serious headwinds. Americans were really mad about inflation, they were really mad at the incumbent, and the incumbent, Joe Biden, stayed in the race too long, made it harder for a new candidate to establish themselves. Ideally, I think that new candidate should have been someone who was not part of the incumbent administration, which is obviously not Kamala Harris. All of that made things hard for her.
But, you know, they also made some bad choices here, including that given Americans were so ticked off about the incumbent, you know, that Joe Biden had historically low favorability ratings, she did basically nothing to distance herself from him.
CORNISH: Yes. And, Scott, you talked about that.
RAMPELL: She had so many opportunities to do it and she just didn't. She should have thrown him under the bus.
CORNISH: What do you make about how they talk about, for instance, the information they were working off of? Does it sound like a campaign that kind of had it together in that respect?
JENNINGS: Well, obviously not. I remember sitting here the night before the election, and we had Mr. Plouffe on, and he said they were going to win all seven swing states. They were positioned to win. I think is what he said, I think, on our network and it was all over the news that night.
[22:25:00]
CORNISH: Well, no campaign comes out and says, we're definitely losing this one, but I'll see you tomorrow, folks, right? Like there's always that.
JENNINGS: Well, today, though, the word is they're saying, well, we never were ahead.
CORNISH: Okay. That's hopeful.
JENNINGS: And so, I don't know, I agree with almost everything you just said.
CORNISH: Wow. I know. A moment of silence, we're actually going to wrap the show now. It's been wonderful (INAUDIBLE) because we've solved America's problem.
JENNINGS: Her failure to separate from Biden was terrible. His failure to understand his own shortcomings was terrible. I mean, usually, you can't --
CORNISH: Not unusual for a vice president and president pair, right, like Al Gore had that problem.
JENNINGS: Usually, in campaigns, the simplest thing is the true thing. She's just not a very good candidate. She was not a very good candidate when she ran in '20, never made it to '20. She was not a good candidate in this election. And if she tries to run in '28, she won't be a good candidate again. Presidential campaigns show the limit of your talent.
JONES: I think that's unfair. She only had three months.
CORNISH: Yes.
JONES: Donald Trump was running for four years.
CORNISH: Well, technically, like nine.
JONES: Right? I mean, he was running constantly. He created his own social media platform, which I thought was brilliant from a political standpoint, because now you've got these people trapped in this loop. And they're hearing the same message over and over again. And then Elon Musk then buys Twitter and then he uses it the same way. They have Fox then using all of that and then repeating all of that. And so these people are hearing the same message over and over again for four years. She had three months to combat that. I think she did as well as she could do.
CORNISH: Hold on one second. I want to play one more piece of tape because this autopsy, so to speak, and when I think about this happening during the post-Mitt Romney period, right, where basically the Republicans were like, this is not working, we need to come up with a new plan, like let's make a report.
So, one of the other ideas comes from Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who called -- who was talking about the Harris campaign embracing, basically, Liz Cheney as a huge misstep, and, basically, talking about the idea that they leaned too hard on this sort of mystery woman Republican who is going to vote against her husband and all this stuff. Gretchen, you're shaking your head.
CARLSON: Look, this is not Liz Cheney's fault, okay? Didn't she face enough scrutiny for being brave and coming out about January 6th? She basically completely ruined her political career by telling the truth. So, I don't think that this is Liz Cheney's fault about saying that she was going to vote for Kamala Harris.
I think that Donald Trump got away with not having to explain his policies. The same thing did not happen to Harris. They wanted to know more details. The same thing was that, you know, Donald Trump didn't do interviews with unfriendly resources. Harris was said, well, she should have done more interviews. I agree with that.
CORNISH: Yes. I mean, he did do a couple -- a lot of unfriendlies.
JENNINGS: And press conferences.
CORNISH: I think so. Yes, and press conferences.
CARSLON: He didn't get --
CORNISH: One of the first ones out of the press conference --
(CROSSTALKS)
JENNINGS: He did far more press interactions than Harris, like not even close.
CARLSON: And I criticized her for that.
JENNINGS: Yes.
CARLSON: I said at the beginning, she should have done more.
O'LEARY: The root of this mistake actually came very early on. They didn't run a process. They made an excuse of $317 million in the kitty. They kept the same campaign manager and said, we will anoint this faulted, broken candidate who did was inconsequential in her vice presidency, lost in 2019 as you detailed, complete loser in 2020, never could articulate anything, had no compassion for people.
And her own advocates, let's not forget this, I remember the minute this happened, I was in Europe, she went onto The View, all those women wanted her to win, they threw her a softball. They threw her a second softball. She was so weak as a candidate, she couldn't even answer that she would do something different. It ricocheted around the world. She was finished. They will never do that again.
CORNISH: I know. Well, let me go back to the campaign, because I don't want to call her broken or a loser. I'm not in that business. But I do want to talk about what the campaign.
O'LEARY: No, she is a loser. Let's be sure of that.
CORNISH: That's fine for you to say, but I will not be name calling on this show. It's not my vibe. I'm not bringing it in.
O'LEARY: Did she lose?
CORNISH: Here's Clinton folks from the campaign talking about what they thought was a problem.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
QUENTIN FULKS, FORMER HARRIS 2024 DEPUTY CAMPAIGN MANAGER: Republicans don't make Trump apologize. And as Stephanie said, we don't have to mimic it, but I think that there are a lot of times where if you're in the Democratic Party and you step out of line, you get punished for it.
Trump has put in these Republicans in the worst possible political or what would seem to be, and they support it. Because at the end of the day, they understand that it weakens Trump. And, you know, this may sound like a shot across the bow, but it should be. Democrats are eating our own to a very high degree. And until that stops, we're not going to be able to address a lot of the things that just need to be said.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CORNISH: I'm going to play one other piece of tape, and that's because advance of all this, like way back James Carville had been out talking a lot about what he thinks the problems could be, and he was sort of like rattling the chains of Clinton campaign pass. And like this is a similar idea that he brought up.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAMES CARVILLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Huge (BLEEP) error to make, is when people said campaigns need to reflect progressive values. No, they don't. No, they don't. Campaigns are authoritarian by their nature. And if I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23-year-old saying I'm going to resign if you don't do this, not only would I fire that (BEEP) on the spot, I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[22:30:40]
CORNISH: So, obviously I'm playing this for the subtlety and nuance. But it's also because everyone who is doing the vivisection of Democrats is talking about this idea of did they listen too much to their coalition and create litmus tests that no one could pass. Solomon, I want to know if you have a sense when you hear those two clips, if you hear that debate in a fulsome way.
JONES: Yes, so I worked on a campaign, a Merrill campaign, a candidate loss, but he was in Congress so he got to stay there.
But you can't have too many chefs in the kitchen. You can't have too many people trying to set the message and trying to set the vision. There has to be one message. It has to be simple. It has to be clear. And it has to be something that people understand.
I think one of the problems that Democrats have is that you have this big tent, but the tent is too big. You got to figure out who's not going to be in the tent in terms of your message when you're -- when you're running your campaign.
After that, you can open up the tent as wide as you want, but you got to figure out a message that's going to resonate with the most people and not try to have multiple messages for everybody.
CORNISH: Yes. And Scott, to that point, I'm interested because for so many years, Trump supporters have been asked, he does this, but you shouldn't support that. Like, it's sort of going by the old rules of like, what a Republican should look like. And he broke that and they stuck with him.
JENNINGS: Yes, he --
CORNISH: You hear them saying Democrats can't do that.
JENNINGS: He didn't -- he has created a whole new orthodoxy for the Republican Party and it's kind of hard to pin down because it's not the traditional orthodoxy. He brought new people in, he brought people in and his cabinet appointments reflect an ideological, you know, diversity, as well.
The real thing that separates them, though, is authenticity. People hear Trump and they don't think somebody handed him a script to read. People hear Harris and they say not only they hand her a script, but she can't even do it that well. And so, there was an authenticity gap between them. This happens in a lot of presidential campaigns. It happened in 2012.
CORNISH: Yes.
JENNINGS: I worked for Mitt Romney. I love this man. He would been a great president. He had a little bit of an authenticity gap with the sitting president, Barack Obama, who was a good political talent. Sometimes political talent makes the difference. In this case, Trump had it. She didn't.
CARLSON: But to Solomon's point, there are too many factions within the Democratic Party. When you think about the Republican Party -- the economy, immigration, abortion, right? And they don't have to feel like they're pleasing all of these --
CORNISH: But they're powerful factions.
CARLSON: They're very much so. But I'm saying it's more splintered in the Democratic Party. And I've been paying attention to some of the Democrats who I think have been more brave in coming out and saying, like Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, who says, we should stop doing that before we start playing the blame game.
We should do a little bit more introspection and look inside of ourselves for our messaging problem. And I think that that's what the Democratic Party has to do right now.
CORNISH: OK. Everyone, hang tight because next, we're going to be talking about what President Biden wants the government to do, as he's talking about in the last couple of months, pay for weight loss drugs like Ozempic. We're going to talk about this because RFK Jr. is not exactly a fan. We've got a special guest joining us for our fifth seat. That's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:38:08] CORNISH: Tonight, a Biden bet on how to make Americans healthy again that clashes with the guy who will be Trump's fitness guru inside the government. The Biden administration wants Medicare and Medicaid to cover Ozempic, the diabetes-turned obesity, drugs, slimming down celebrities everywhere you look. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says, basically, that's cheating.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., TRUMP TRANSITION TEAM CO-CHAIR: The idea that a drug is going to cure drug addiction or alcoholism. We're spending $1600 a month on this drug. There's a bill right now before Congress that will make it available to everybody who's overweight, which is 74 percent of the American population. That alone will cost $3 trillion a year.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CORNISH: Dr. Chris Pernell, director of the NAACP Center for Health Equity joins us now in our fifth seat. And I'm so glad to have you here because I can't think of a drug that has had a more kind of radical reshifting in its view from the medical community saying like, oh, actually we can use it for this and maybe we should embrace it.
So, there's been this cultural shift. What comes to your mind when you hear the way RFK Jr. is talking about it?
CHRIS PERNELL, DIRECTOR, NAACP CENTER FOR HEALTH EQUITY: He doesn't know what he's talking about. And that's coming from a physician, a physician who practices firmly in the public health and health equity space.
Look, there is a lot of bias and stigma that surrounds overweight and obesity. Obesity is a complex chronic health condition and you have to have every tool in the toolkit to be able to treat and manage people who are living with obesity.
So, to say that we can just need our way out of this complex issue or work out our way out of this complex issue is just not rooted in the science. It is not rooted in the lived experience of those who have been experiencing obesity.
CORNISH: I just want to bring in our group here. But just bringing in the costs basically of these drugs right now because between the demand and just the cost of them from the companies, it's pretty significant in terms of that sort of average one month supply.
[22:40:11]
And one other thing, the number, the percentage of adults using drugs for weight loss is a lot higher than people might realize. I think the most recent report, we were saying something like 40 percent of people who were using them were using them specifically for that reason.
Throwing this open to the table, I don't, I mean, it probably costs more to treat someone with a variety of maladies that might come than the care, but --
UNKNOWN: That's what I was just going to say.
CARLSON: I've actually done a bunch of reporting on this. Yes, I mean, nobody's talking about the cost of what obesity is doing to America.
PERNELL: Right.
CARLSON: I mean, if RFK Junior is correct in 72 percent, I was going to say at least half of America is obese. The idea that you now have -- how long have we been talking about dieting and losing weight in America? I mean, decades.
The idea that you now have drugs that might actually help people. It seems to me that it's just a very easy answer to be able to offer them to people and not have them pay out of pocket.
O'LEARY: Let me take another side of this.
RAMPELL: Well, there's data on this.
O'LEARY: This drug was created for diabetes.
UNKNOWN: Yes, but it happens to work for something else. That's how drugs work.
O'LEARY: Hang on. You're telling everybody in America, listen, this drug is safe for you to take for weight loss. How do you know that? It's been on the scene for 36 months. What happens 10 years from now and everybody gets it never canceled?
PERNELL: There have been clinical trials that not only looked at these drugs. in the setting of diabetes but have looked at these drugs in the setting of obesity. You want to talk about what obesity costs? If we look at recent data, obesity has direct medical costs roughly around $173 billion.
If you look at indirect costs due to lost productivity, you're talking about anywhere from another $3 to $6 billion. That doesn't even account for disability. That doesn't account for present team -- present team is a meeting people showing up --
O'LEARY: Educating on food and diet and exercise.
PERNELL: You can do those things but would you take a person with diabetes and say I'm going to educate you out of this disease. I'm going to tell you what to eat so you could be healthy.
O'LEARY: You have to modify your diet.
UNKNOWN: People do that.
PERNELL: Of course, you do but that's not the only thing you do. That's a distinguishing feature in characteristic that we have to make sure we are communicating. And why the proposal is the best use.
O'LEARY: You're right on diabetes but why do you say you should transition this to weight loss?
RAMPELL: Diabetes, Alzheimer's, certain kinds of kidney problems.
PERNELL: Yes, we've looked at it in those who are experiencing obesity. You have similar metabolic processes that are underlying both obesity and diabetes. As you were just saying, not only do these drugs work for diabetes and obesity, there are studies that show they work in kidney disease, studies that show they work in cardiovascular issues, studies that show they probably work around issues of dimension.
CORNISH: Yes, and just -- I want to bring it back to this government policy because we're talking Medicaid and Medicare, right?
PERNELL: Definitely.
CORNISH: The very poor and the elderly communities that, you know, are dealing with diabetes, et cetera. But Scott, I actually saw you nodding and I feel like I need to embrace that moment. Because I am thinking about the ways that RFK Jr. seeks to reshape how we think about certain kinds of health care assumptions. And like, how are you hearing it?
JENNINGS: Well, I'm sensitive to his views on, you know, our food, what we're eating.
CORNISH: Yes, vaccines. Well, I mean on the weight loss stuff, it is objectively true. If we ate better food and we did walk more, I mean that is absolutely true. But I got to tell you, I have fought this my entire life.
My weight has gone up and down my entire life. I was a lot heavier than I used to be, and then it went down, and then it went back up, and then it went back down. And I've, you know, like a lot of Americans, you know, fought it and tried different things. It's hard.
PERNELL: Right.
JENNINGS: And when you're, you know, when you're somebody who's also fighting everything else in life, like going to work every day and taking care of your kids, and maybe you're not as well-educated on everything, you know, that you need to be doing, it's hard.
And the downstream consequences of not dealing with obesity when we have something that we could use to deal with it. I think we need to analyze that because there's a lot of communities in this country and a lot of people who simply have reached a dead end when it comes to just figuring it out on their own.
So, I'm sensitive to the Biden plan because there may be something here. I'm not qualified to talk about all the studies and stuff. But I am qualified to talk about what it's like to be overweight.
UNKNOWN: Exactly.
RAMPELL: I actually could talk a little bit about the cost issue here because I've done a bunch of reporting on this. So, you mentioned that there are all of these other diseases and illnesses that are linked with obesity that have their own costs, as well as lost productivity, fewer years of working because people have disabilities or what have you.
Based on the current list prices, these drugs don't quote, unquote "pay for themselves". But if they were discounted maybe around 50 percent over the long term, they would actually pay for themselves in terms of the additional economic benefits and social welfare.
[22:45:03]
Now, that's a separate question, of course, from when we're talking about the elderly, right? Because people who are on Medicaid are older, they have fewer years of those potential health complications to save money on.
So, I don't actually know what the -- what the numbers would look like on that regard. But if you're talking about relatively younger people who are on Medicaid, potentially it could actually pay for itself.
CARLSON: And I just want to say to Kevin that I'd agree with you that there should be personal responsibility but -- but the flip side of that is it's a socio-economic issue, as well.
PERNELL: Definitely.
CARLSON: And so, if you can only afford fast food, and by the way, fast food, they make salads the most expensive thing.
UNKNOWN: Let's weigh in here. Let's weigh in here.
O'LEARY: The government says this is free to you, which is what we're talking about --
PERNELL: We're not talking about --
O'LEARY: -- which endorsers say it's a drug to save you --
PERNELL: We're not talking about --
O'LEARY: Everybody will turn into Wegovy (ph) zombie.
PERNELL: No, listen, listen.
O'LEARY: They'll be walking down the street to burn down Main Street.
PERNELL: No, no. Let's make this profound and let's make it clear. We are talking about a complex social and clinical chronic health condition.
O'LEARY: Let's solve it with drugs.
PERNELL: That disproportionately impacts historically excluded groups. Approximately 49 percent in black and African American populations are obese. Approximately 45 percent of Latino populations are obese. Approximately 40 percent of Americans are obese.
When you start to combine overweight with obesity, you balloon to numbers around 75 percent, OK? So, we're not just talking about ensuring that people have access to a drug, but we also have to have a conversation about the cost of it.
O'LEARY: Why are we so fat?
PERNELL: Why are we so fat?
O'LEARY: Because or food is crap.
PERNELL: We are so fat for multiple, yes, no one in public health is going to argue you down on that.
O'LEARY: So, why don't we fix the real core problem?
PERNELL: We need access to healthy foods. We need access to affordable foods. That's why we talk about food justice. We don't just want to see food swamps, fast foods on every corner. We want to actually get into the food deserts and put healthy, affordable foods there. We want green spaces. We want people to be able to walk around --
O'LEARY: Wait a second.
PERNELL: -- work out and have access to the drugs that will treat their condition
O'LEARY: They're not obese in France and Switzerland and Norway.
RAMPELL: Obesity rates are very high in well-developed countries.
PERNELL: And have access to the drugs that will treat their condition. Yes, we have a problem with ultra-processed foods in the United States.
O'LEARY: So?
PERNELL: Yes, we have a process with sugar-sweetened beverages in the United States.
O'LEARY: I'd rather spend some money there.
PERNELL: It's not an either or.
JENNINGS: It may be that these things are not mutually exclusive. The drugs are available now, but also you're right. If we could improve the food that we're eating and get people more educated on how they should be eating and how they should be exercising but that's going to take a long time. And so, it may be that we have a tool today and a long-term strategy and maybe they're not mutually exclusive.
CORNISH: All right, Dr. Chris Pernell, thank you for coming here --
PERNELL: Thank you. CORNISH: -- bringing receipts, bringing stats. We love it. Have a good
holiday. The rest of you, stay put, because dictionary.com is choosing their word of the year. We're going to ask our panelists to actually choose their own. So, please stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:52:18]
CORNISH: OK, we are rowdy at the table today because we're about to talk about the dictionary for our "NewsNight" cap. We're doing a spin. Dictionary.com naming demure as its 2024 word of the year. I'll give you a moment to google that meme from TikTok. So, in 30 seconds or less, your word of the year, Gretchen Carlson, you start.
CARLSON: Miscalculation -- on the border, the economy, abortion, young men, Latinos, the Israeli-Gaza situation, the influence of podcasts in our culture, the threat to democracy polling high, except that it was not just Trump who was a threat, but apparently Harris, the polls. Miscalculation -- which I believe should lead to reflection.
CORNISH: OK. Scott Jennings.
JENNINGS: Oh -- Trump. He was the through line for the whole year whether we were talking about Biden or then Harris or the campaign at any time or even now since the campaign is over, you've got athletes from all over the world doing his famous dance.
Donald Trump was the through line for our entire year. His people feel like they were vindicated. The other half of the country feels demoralized, but he's ubiquitous in our politics and our culture.
CORNISH: OK, this side of the table. Solomon?
JONES: Agenda. Trump has Agenda 47, and I believe that every community that has been targeted by his policies should have their own agenda as well. I think a lot of communities are left feeling like they're kind of on their own.
Some of the coalitions that we thought we had are not there. And so, especially for my community, the black community, there has to be a black agenda so that we can take care of ourselves because we sure can't expect it from Donald Trump.
CORNISH: OK. Catherine.
RAMPELL: Mandate. I think the word mandate has taken on a very different connotation by the -- from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. Beginning of the year, you heard mandate, you thought about vaccine mandates. Maybe if you were old school like me, you thought about insurance mandates. That was another political moment.
CORNISH: That's a deep cut. Yes deep cut.
RAMPELL: Yes deep cut. And now, mandate is the word that all the Trumpers invoke for anything that Trump wants to do. I would say his mandate is lowering the price of eggs, but apparently his mandate also encompasses appointing accused sexual predators to the Capitol.
CONISH: OK. Kevin, to you.
O'LEARY: Cash flow. During the pandemic, I only invested in companies because I got very nervous, like every other investor, in companies that had free cash flow. Boy, has that worked for me. I only invest now in companies with cash flow. And I've also thought, if I ever get a dog, I'm calling him or her, cash flow, come here cash flow. Come over to me cash flow. I just love that name, cash flow.
[22:55:01]
CORNISH: I appreciate these high-class problems. Everyone, thank you so much for being with us. We do have some breaking news tonight. We want to talk about foreign policy issues because a break from the bombs, Israel and Hezbollah are in an hour, one of the -- in the midst of a new ceasefire deal. We're going to talk about whether or not it can hold. You're going to hear that next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:00:03]
CORNISH: Breaking news, just a short while ago, a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah is going into effect. The deal presses pause on a year plus of fighting between the IDF and the militant group inside Lebanon. Under the terms of the agreement, Israel will have 60 days to draw down its troops inside Lebanon.
Israel's war cabinet greenlit the U.S. backpack. We want to thank you for watching "NewsNight". "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.
