Return to Transcripts main page
CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Trump and Allies Blame Biden as Approvals, Numbers Worsen; Walmart Sees Slowest Sales in Years, a Worrying Sign; Bessent Says, U.S. Doesn't Need as Many Jobs Due to Deportations. President Trump Reunites with Former Rival Michael Cohen for an Interview; Navy Weighs in Naming Remaining Carrier in Honor of Pearl Harbor Hero but Wants President Trump's Name in it. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired August 20, 2026 - 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, as the headlines grow more troubling for Donald Trump, the more MAGA blames a guy from Delaware.
J.D. VANCE, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: We inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration.
SCOTT BESSENT, TREASURY SECRETARY: We were left with a mess.
PHILLIP: Plus, new evidence from Walmart that Americans are struggling as the White House makes this claim.
BESSENT: We don't need to produce as many jobs.
PHILLIP: Also, they were never, ever getting back together.
MICHAEL COHEN, FORMER TRUMP LAWYER: He is a racist. He is a conman.
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: He's a weak person. He's lying.
PHILLIP: So, why are Trump and his former fixer making nice?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is like the reunion of Julius Caesar and Brutus.
PHILLIP: And he was a hero, a Black sailor during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, the Navy may rename a ship in his honor for Trump instead.
Live at the table, Bill de Blasio, Joe Borelli, Geoff Duncan, Elizabeth Pipko, and Kmele Foster.
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.
When all else fails, blame Biden. Tonight, the Trump administration suggests that so many of its problems right now is the fault of 46.
Now, consider the headlines from this week alone. The national debt hit a new record. Oil prices are on the rise again. The war in Iran, still going on. The USS Lincoln is finally on its way home, but not before spending a record 250-plus days at sea. Trump's approval rating has hit historic lows, and another Democratic socialist has picked up wins in his new home state.
Now, more of his candidates are also losing primaries across the country. And despite all of that, and in office for nearly two years already, the Trump administration is making like Shaggy, saying, it wasn't me.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
VANCE: We inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration.
TRUMP: 18 months ago, we inherited a catastrophe from the Biden and from the radical left Democrats.
PETE HEGSETH, DEFENSE SECRETARY: It was not a priority to fund the Department of Defense under Joe Biden.
BROOKE ROLLINS, AGRICULTURE SECRETARY: You know, when we walked in the door a year and a half ago the farm economy had seen the greatest spiral down.
VANCE: The issue that we've had under the Biden administration, and what we're still kind of dealing with, is that the debt was growing faster than American GDP.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: And before we open it up to the table here, we invite you at home to join the debate. Go to cnn.com/abby. Weigh in there. We'll get to some of your comments throughout the show.
The White House seems to be really fixated, as usual, on Biden, but when you actually look at the fact that it's been 18 months of Trump, they don't really have anyone to blame but themselves for where things stand, and voters pretty much agree.
LT. GOV. GEOFF DUNCAN (R-GA): The reality is the debt problem is a bipartisan problem. And there's not been a president or a Congress that has passed up an opportunity to spend more money, borrow more money during a crisis. And the reality is Donald Trump's first term, he had $7.8 trillion worth of national debt that got added on. Joe Biden had 8.4 trillion, and now Donald Trump in round two has $3.8 trillion. That's $11.6 trillion on his side.
So, to listen to J.D. Vance talk about this debt bomb, he's just not being intellectually honest. And the reality is there're some serious warning signs going off right now, and to just blame each other politically. You know, elections and politics and debt and economic issues all seem to blend in together, but this is a problem that we need to address.
PHILLIP: And it's not just the economy. I mean, it's also a lot of other things. I mean, the war is squarely on Donald Trump's shoulders. He launched into it. He defends it every day. It's not resolved. They actually keep talking as if it may never be resolved.
When you look at Trump's approval on a whole slew of key issues, including several that he is supposed to be strong on, immigration, he's down 17 points, foreign policy, down 26 points, the economy, down 35 points, cost of living, down 47 points. Again, this is not a Joe Biden problem. This is a Donald Trump problem.
JOE BORELLI, FORMER REPUBLICAN LEADER, NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL: Look, we typically see a cycle with presidential terms where there is some slumping after the highs of a president being elected getting sworn in the first year, right?
[22:05:00]
We call it the honeymoon period. It's something that happens every single term.
But you're right, some things that President Trump did campaign on. He seems to be not doing as well as he'd like to in the polls. They're obviously going to have the effect on the midterm.
But let's be clear about some things about the economy. You know, both parties do blame the other side for many different things, but in this instance, it has the advantage of actually being true. The record setter of one term by a debt added to the national debt was Joe Biden in his term, $8.4 trillion. That was the record. That was the biggest any president has ever done since then, and he didn't have a 2020 like Donald Trump with COVID, where there was this consensus that we needed to spend money in order to combat the threat.
PHILLIP: I mean, Biden was president during the COVID pandemic, you know? The first year of the Biden presidency was in the pandemic as well.
BORELLI: Look, the pandemic happened in 2020. The majority of the spending happened in 2020. That was a crisis that Donald Trump met. That added to the debt. There's no question about that. The reality was Joe Biden accelerated the debt. As the vice president pointed out, it didn't keep up with inflation.
(CROSSTALKS)
PHILLIP: As you pointed out, he's right, that Donald Trump, when you take a single president, he has contributed more than $11 trillion to the debt. If you look at the percentages here, he increased the debt by 39 percent as president just in his first term, and then another 8.6 percent just in the last year. So, I mean, there is a lot -- look, we can throw blame all over the place, but for Trump to absolve himself of his role in increasing the debt makes no sense because he had a big role in it.
BORELLI: The Trump administration came in and brought up DOGE, right? The goal of DOGE was to eliminate spending.
PHILLIP: And it didn't.
BORELLI: Everyone at this table cheered against DOGE. The Democrats voted against every single cut that DOGE wanted to make. The president wanted to use -- did the president not want to use tariffs to grow revenue? He did. Did Democrats take him to court to actually eliminate the revenue from tariffs? That case just got settled.
PHILLIP: The amount of spending (INAUDIBLE) is probably going to be about the same spending that Trump is spending on his construction projects. DOGE did not do the things that it was supposed to do. That's according to the government.
BORELLI: My point was when Elon Musk was spearheading DOGE and making cuts, all the Democrats that are now criticizing him for increasing spending of the federal government were working tirelessly against the DOGE efforts. When he was passing wait, hold on. When he was passing the one big beautiful bill and they were cutting able-bodied adults from Medicaid, cutting able-bodied adults from different social welfare spending, Democrats consistently opposed everything Donald Trump tried to do to cut revenues.
PHILLIP: Well, here's Republican Thomas Massie --
BORELLI: So, spare me -- but spare me that Democrats want to help Donald Trump cut spending.
PHILLIP: Since you bring up the big, beautiful bill, he wrote today, if you voted for the big, beautiful bill, please don't get on here and express righteous indignation that the debt is now $40 trillion. Anyone with a room-temperature I.Q. knew that cutting taxes and increasing spending was going to balloon the deficit.
FMR. MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D-NEW YORK CITY, NY): This is the core issue.
PHILLIP: It's math.
DE BLASIO: Respectfully, Joe, the American people saw these massive tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, and they see this horrible debt reality growing, and there's a direct connection, at the same time as people are suffering economically, personally, at the kitchen table, middle-class people, working-class people.
So, I hear you if you're trying to argue there could've been some other trimmings done, but this is what doesn't make sense. The president's main thrust was to put money back in the hands of the wealthy. That was on his watch. He did it also in the first term. That's what's continuing greatly here. BORELLI: Tax cuts and jobs added, more money to American middle-class families than any other tax cut prior. That's a fact. That's something he did.
I wish he could run more on his first term economic record than his second, because the first term had a lot of successes in wage growth, in job growth and a lot of other things that we are hoping for now.
PHILLIP: So, let me let Elizabeth come in here one second. But let me just read -- let me just read this and I'll let you respond to it. Because it's an interesting comment from a viewer who writes, blame Biden for the economy while saying that the economy is great, more cognitive dissonance. Trump has said we're in the golden age, but then how come that's true, but then apparently Biden is responsible for it?
ELIZABETH PIPKO, FORMER RNC NATIONAL SPOKESPERSON: Well, two things can be true at once. Things can be getting better, and you can also acknowledge that when he went in, he did inherit a mess. I mean, talking about COVID, yes, Joe Biden went in during COVID and, of course, trillions were spent in our country like other western countries, of course, when trying to revitalize an economy during a pandemic. But Joe Biden is also responsible for the highest, I believe, deficit to GDP ratio in American history outside of a recession or a war.
We have major problems to deal with. Obviously, everyone is correct. The mayor is correct. This happens every four years or every eight when people go back and forth and blame each other. But it's true. Everyone criticizes Donald Trump whenever he tries to actually solve a problem, and no one acknowledges the fact that he is trying to put money back into the pockets of the American people. No one acknowledges the fact --
PHILLIP: Is he doing that?
PIPKO: -- 100 -- you don't think tax -- no tax on tips and no tax on overtime is incredibly important?
PHILLIP: I mean, I think that there's a tax, there's a tax bill, then there are also tariffs, which takes money out of the pockets of American people.
[22:10:06]
DUNCAN: He's adding money to your left pocket, but he's taking it out of your right pocket with gas prices, tariffs and everything on the other side.
PIPKO: He's trying to bring money back into our nation, which he has done today with the jobs --
BORELLI: But if we're talking about -- you're talking about the federal deficit, the tariffs add to the federal revenue.
PIPKO: Exactly.
PHILLIP: Okay, yes, because by taking money out of the pockets of the American people. I don't understand how this works.
BORELLI: Yes, just like both taxes, very much temporarily.
PIPKO: Exactly.
PHILLIP: The American people, they're 18 months in, they're going into a midterm elections, and they're asking themselves, first of all, President Trump, did you deliver on your promise of making things more affordable? 65 percent say that Trump has worsened economic conditions as president, okay? That's on the economy, right?
And then they look at some of the other things. They're not happy with how he's carrying out immigration reform. They're not happy with the fact that we are in a war, which he promised he would not do. So, there are broken promises here that they have to deal with.
KMELE FOSTER, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, TANGLE: There are broken promises here, but there's also a structural reality that we've yet to recognize about the nature of the national debt here. We're talking about entitlement spending, service on the interest on our debt. Those are the two big categories of spending. That's a structural issue. That -- we've made it worse, mind you, by going after all of these ridiculous policies, not even so much the tax cuts.
I think going after the tariffs in particular was ruinously expensive for the United States, not so much because the policy stuck and extracted so much wealth from the American people, but because they created this schizophrenia in the economy. People didn't know whether to invest or not. We built up inventories of things we didn't need. We completely disrupted global trade, and none of that has stopped.
The real problem with carrying this level of debt is that it creates a great deal more financial uncertainty, and by not looking at this reality in the face and acknowledging all of the entitlement issues that will continue to get materially worse as our population ages and the economy continues to suffer under the weight of all of this economic burden is that no one, not Democrats, not Republicans, seem to be at all interested in getting serious about tackling these things.
At the same time that all of this is happening, we're having this Democratic socialist revolution in this country where people are actually advocating for far more expensive policies than the ones that are already on the table and that are already bankrupting the country. No one is being particularly serious right now.
DE BLASIO: This is a really important point. We do not have a way to have a national conversation on this topic. I think you're right on the money there, sadly.
You know, Bill Clinton, to his credit, made a big point of focusing on the question of the debt. Since then, it has left the national dialogue in so many ways. And now, because the world is about Trump and reaction to Trump and what's going to happen after Trump, there's going to be a long period, I think, of kind of healing and renewal potentially in the country. But getting us to this question of where are we going, where are we going structurally, that is going to take most of a decade to even have the right conversation in this country.
FOSTER: Which is incredibly frustrating. I was in the room with Paul Ryan something like 14 years ago when he was making these animated videos about the two stories that we might be able to tell about where the country was headed in terms of this catastrophic debt cliff that we expected to go off of. Things aren't as bad as the worst predictions in those modeling, but they are pretty bad at the moment. And there's no one serious on the horizon.
PHILLIP: I mean, they ran him out of Washington.
FOSTER: They sure did.
PHILLIP: They really did. And I and since then, you could argue that the Republican Party has largely abandoned this issue.
FOSTER: Yes.
PHILLIP: So, you know, even if you argue that Democrats don't care, it used to be that Republicans said that they cared, but now they don't even say that, so.
PIPKO: I think Donald Trump says that he cares very often.
PHILLIP: Well --
DUNCAN: I think a major issue, too, is it limits the amount of options that we have available when the next real crisis does hit.
FOSTER: Absolutely.
DUNCAN: It's not just about debt load. It's not just about entitlements and budgets now. It's about options and tools to use when something breaks in the future.
DE BLASIO: Yes, and one quick point.
PHILLIP: Next for us, we have more to come, which is kind of, related to this topic as we get another troubling sign for the economy, the president's treasury secretary is claiming that the country doesn't actually need more jobs. We'll discuss.
Plus, they became bitter enemies, and now Donald Trump and Michael Cohen are talking again on the air. We'll hear why some legal experts say that Cohen may have put his foot in his mouth.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:15:00]
PHILLIP: Tonight, the nation's largest retailer is out with a warning. Higher gas prices are cutting into Americans' overall spending, leading to the slowest sales growth at Walmart's U.S. stores since the start of the pandemic. Now, on an earnings call today, Walmart's CFO reported that sales growth, excluding fuel, rose at only 2.6 percent at Walmart stores in the second quarter. That's compared to 4.6 percent a year ago.
Now, it's often seen as a bellwether for consumer sentiment, and so the company's shares fell more than 9 percent today. On the heels of a dismal jobs report with the U.S. economy unexpectedly losing 23,000 jobs in July, Trump's treasury secretary is now insisting that Americans actually don't need those jobs.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BESSENT: I think the jobs numbers are quite noisy. And, you know, again, Sara, the other thing that's important too is like the jobs that we're seeing are going to Americans. After the deportations that we've seen during President Trump's administration and the closing of the border that like this unfettered migration, we don't need to produce as many jobs.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[22:20:03]
PHILLIP: That is quite the midterm argument, Joe, you don't need as many jobs. And, by the way, I should also say that it is not true that all the deportations have resulted in more Americans getting jobs. The labor force participation for foreign-born workers is the same now as it was a year ago. For native-born workers, it's actually down now compared to a year ago. So, what is he talking about? And why would he even say something like that?
BORELLI: Look, a couple things. If one and a half million people who are unauthorized to work in the U.S. are no longer in the job market, that cannot mean anything but good things for the other Americans who are competing for those jobs.
PHILLIP: I mean, it could, because we deal in facts, and there's no evidence that that has actually resulted in an improvement in job conditions for Americans. The fact that the numbers --
BORELLI: If there were 1.5 million more people in the U.S. competing for jobs, that's worse for the American people.
PHILLIP: You're talking in hypotheticals, I'm talking in reality. There's no evidence. The evidence is not there.
DE BLASIO: They're not competing.
PHILLIP: It's not there.
DE BLASIO: The native-born folks are not taking it, let's be real.
BORELLI: Sure.
PHILLIP: Okay.
DE BLASIO: The farm jobs and so many other things.
PHILLIP: So, you can -- I mean, you can say that in theory, but then even let's say you say that, you know, he just said actually that getting rid of all these undocumented immigrants meant that Americans need fewer jobs. So, that's actually the opposite of what you're saying.
BORELLI: Was it an inartful phrasing? Sure. But let's just go back to the thing you led off with Walmart, because I think we have a tendency to cherry-pick different stocks, different tea leaves in the economy to try to create a total picture. We're looking at one stock.
At the same time, Target, its chief competitor, is up 60 percent this year. That's not exactly indicating that there's any big run on retail, there's any big, you know, commotion in terms of people's consumer spending. At the same time, the broader --
PHILLIP: I think that's kind of an apples to oranges comparison though.
BORELLI: The broader -- you picked one stock, I picked another.
PHILLIP: Well, no. I mean --
BORELLI: And now I'll go with the broader market. The broader market has hit multiple records. Every -- I think the market hit seven records the past two months.
PHILLIP: We're talking about different periods of time, and we're also talking -- first of all, Target has had a whole slew of issues. Their sales were down because -- in large part because of a boycott and other issues.
BORELLI: 60 percent up year-to-date, just for the record.
PHILLIP: But the reason we are talking about Walmart, it's not just us, it's because the market looks to the largest retailer and asks, what's going on with Walmart? Not because -- not just because Walmart is big, but it's also because it's a place where people who are on the lower end of the economic spectrum spend a lot of money.
BORELLI: As opposed to the millionaires who shop at Target. Come on.
PHILLIP: And when they --
BORELLI: You could cherry-pick a stock.
PHILLIP: Hold on.
BORELLI: You can cherry-pick a stock. We can look at the broader market and see that there's been consistent --
PHILLIP: When they stop spending money, it shows up in these numbers --
BORELLI: -- consistent growth in the S&P, in the NASDAQ, in the Dow --
PHILLIP: -- and they're saying this is directly as a result of the fact that Americans are spending more of their paychecks to just get around, to pay for gas. Those are just the facts.
So, I mean, you can either deal with the facts or you can ignore them and pretend like they're not happening. It just seems like a bad idea to ignore it.
FOSTER: There's also a lot of complimentary data that ought to be taken into account. Credit card debt is up. People aren't making their payments as reliably as they were just a little while ago. There is quite a bit of consternation.
And you talked about the other -- the rest of the stock market's performance. The market is pretty darn frothy at this point. There is quite a bit of concern about the elite tech stocks, even about the investments in A.I. that we're seeing. There's obviously plenty of enthusiasm. I'm a huge techno-optimist, and I want these companies to do well, but there are lots of questions about the profitability or the potential for profitability in companies like OpenAI and SpaceX, which IPO'd and didn't perform nearly as well as --
BORELLI: And yet the other people are -- the other companies are raising their guidance on most of the Mag 7, most of the tech sector. Huge CapEx spending, expanding data centers, compute.
FOSTER: Which may very well pull back very soon.
BORELLI: In fact, I would argue that we haven't had this much investment in a U.S. industry in a generation.
FOSTER: Yes, and generally frothy.
BORELLI: If you look at the broader A.I., the broader data centers, the broader A.I. movement --
PHILLIP: All right. Let me just bring it back to the American people here, because at the end of the day, that is what this is about. The tech companies can do extremely well and they are doing extremely well. But what is happening to the American people?
You know, interestingly, Scott Bessent spent a lot of his interviews today pointing the finger in all kinds of different directions, and he actually tried to blame the fact that they were struck down on the tariffs for why, you know, these -- for why the American people don't have money in their pockets today. It was kind of a bizarre answer. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BESSENT: The Democratic attorney generals who filed a ridiculous lawsuit against this administration wanted the money to go back to the payer of record, so that is corporate welfare. The American people had that money. And if I hear another Democratic legislator say, make the inane remark, the American people should get the money, the American people had the money in the U.S. Treasury, and we were forced to give it back.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[22:25:00]
PHILLIP: Okay. I guess Democrats from here on out are going to use that line. When you tax people, the American people's money is being held safely and securely in the U.S. Treasury, and it's their money. And you can tax them as much as you want because it's their money in the Treasury.
DE BLASIO: People are really happy when their money goes to the IRS, for example, right? I mean, that's insane to equate the notion that the government has your money, therefore you should feel good, and the same guy who said, we have enough jobs.
What's striking to me is why is there not a recognition that the message has to be we're not in a good place? I mean, this is bluntly Bidenomics, you know, part two, the same mistake Joe Biden made in terms of trying to celebrate an economy that wasn't working for everyday people. I don't understand why this administration continually tells us everything's good when the average American knows it isn't.
PIPKO: I don't really think that's true though. I think they very often acknowledge the fact that we're in a conflict that nobody wants to be in, that's impacting our country in a negative way. They talk about it regularly, and at the same time they tell the American people what they're doing.
They want them to know about the record-setting investments in our country. They want them to be happy about that at the same time as working with the Trump administration and hoping that the conflict comes to an end as soon as possible. But they are very open about it, unlike Joe Biden, who not only had an administration lying to the American people, but he himself was hiding from the American people.
DE BLASIO: Wait. Hold on. Trump talks about the golden age we're in.
PIPKO: Yes.
DE BLASIO: So, this is where I'll make a very strong -- and I'm saying this as a Democrat saying I think Biden was wrong and his team was wrong to say Bidenomics, because people were hurting from the recession after -- or, excuse me, the inflation after COVID and from COVID itself.
But here's Trump celebrating a golden age, here's Bessent saying we don't need more jobs. And it's not only tone deaf. It literally feels like they do not understand that the American people now are in a desperate way. The fact that folks are not spending money is because they cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, and this is unprecedented.
We're used to having this strong middle class. We're used to the next generation's going to do better than the current one. Everything's flipped on its head. And if you said to the average college grad today there's plenty of jobs, I mean, I cannot tell you how many young people I've talked to who are petrified that they cannot find a job worthy of their education.
DUNCAN: Scott Bessent spun up a bunch of word salads all day today, right? Every time you turn on the T.V. or saw a clip on the internet, he just spun up a bunch of ineffective word salads. And the reality is there are warning signs going off every which way. A majority of Americans are waking up one phone call, one paycheck, one mortgage payment, one healthcare payment away from complete and financial ruin.
The reality is Walmart's earnings probably didn't turn out the way they wanted them to, and their stock price fell 10 percent today because they're not effectively tied to A.I. in some way that the only stocks that seem -- this is a synthetic economy. A.I. is absolutely going to change the direction of the world, but there's a learning curve that has to happen between here and there, just like the internet when it came on board.
This is a synthetic economy, and there's never been a period of time, at least in my lifetime, that the economy has helped people so much, but so few people so much. That's what's happening here. So few people are being positively affected by the economy, yet the people that are in charge, like Scott Bessent and everybody in his Rolodex, it's helping, right, these small moves in the bond markets, right? The bond market is screaming as loud as it possibly can. There is a problem. You got to do something about it.
PHILLIP: And he announced this massive bond buyback only to have the bond yields go right back up. Basically, the bond market's saying, we're not buying it, literally or figuratively. That's a problem for the, the American public. And you can explain it away all kinds of different ways, but it seems like the chickens are starting to come home to roost.
Next for us, a dirty rat, a dictator D-bag, a Cheeto-dusted cartoon character, those are just some of the many names Donald Trump and Michael Cohen have called each other. And tonight, they are making up. We'll discuss.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:30:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: He's a weak person, and by being weak, unlike other people that you watch, he's a weak person.
MICHAEL COHEN, THEN-ATTORNEY FOR DONALD TRUMP: I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist, he is a conman, and he is a cheat. Mr. Trump called me a rat for choosing to tell the truth, much like a mobster would do when one of his men decides to cooperate with the government.
TRUMP: But you know, he's a sleazebag. Everybody knows that. (END VIDEO CLIP)
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight, Michael Cohen and Donald Trump are reunited, and apparently it feels so good. Cohen has called him a Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain and was the star witness in the trial against Trump, which led to a 34 felony count conviction. He even went to jail for, among other things, crimes he claimed were committed at the direction of Trump.
But now, Cohen says that that's all water under the bridge, and we'll play that sound in a moment. But first, prior to the clip, Cohen asked his followers, can forgiveness resurrect what hatred destroyed?
Well, the answer appears to be yes.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
COHEN (on the phone): After all of what took place, all of the name- calling, the years of the public war, the verbal missiles that we threw at one another, how is it possible that the two of us can ever sit down again?
[22:35:02]
The answer is, that we forgave. Not because the past didn't happen, not because the scars disappeared, not because every disagreement suddenly becomes irrelevant, and certainly not because I have forgotten anything. I have not.
Forgiveness does not require amnesia. It requires the courage to stop allowing yesterday to dictate tomorrow.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
KMELE FOSTER, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, TANGLE, AND PODCAST HOST, "THE FIFTH COLUMN": Slow clap.
PHILLIP: But is this about the two of them having gone through some cathartic moment, or is it about their incentives aligning? That Michael Cohen, we know he has a sitting pardon before the DOJ. He gave it to the Biden administration.
It's still there in front of Trump now. He wants a pardon, and Trump wants the star witness to recant his testimony in a case that he wants thrown out.
GEOFF DUNCAN (R), FORMER GEORGIA LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR: Politics makes odd bedfellows, for sure, and this one may take the cake. I don't know if I saw this one coming by a mile stretch.
Yes, certainly there's some sort of personal mission profile set up for both these guys somehow that I don't see and don't really care to see. I do think it's very interesting. In a week that had Natalie Harp kind of deliberating the whole issue around her, this guy really connected all the dots with the authorities for previous affairs that had happened in Trump's life, and history is a great predictor of the future.
I think we've seen a lot of these dots show up. We've seen a lot of these issues, we've seen infidelity that's been well documented, we've seen the other issues, open hot mics, 0-9 yards. This is going to be interesting to watch play out.
PHILLIP: Trump also, or Michael Cohen also made a claim in his sub- stack, and in an interview with Jake Tapper today, where he said, "I felt pressured and coerced to not only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government's desire to build the cases against and secure a judgment and convictions against President Trump."
This is one of the reasons that a lot of people said, Michael Cohen's a terrible witness. You can't hang a case on him. What does this do?
I mean, Elie Honig earlier today said that this undermines that case, that hush money case against him.
FOSTER: And appropriately so. I think it was a politically motivated case. I'm happy to be critical of the President in any number of contexts, but this Stormy Daniels hush money thing always stunk to high heaven, and Michael Cohen obviously seemed like someone who was being extremely pressured to turn against the President in order to keep himself out of jail and further trouble.
But this was one of several attempts to get the President on something like a tax evasion kind of circumstance. The thing about it is that the President of the United States, rather than having these things done to him, and then demonstrating how this was politically motivated and not something that should happen, has doubled down on this tactic and has done it in the most extreme and absurd ways, going so far as to personally sue all sorts of people for saying things about him, and many in cases intimidating them into going about agreeing to settlements.
I mean, it is heaping injury on top of injury and making our politics far worse and more toxic. But yes, Michael Cohen does in fact have a point about those cases. The challenge for Michael Cohen and his newfound former friend, his erstwhile now restored friend, is that Donald Trump is continuing to do exactly the same sort of stuff.
This is egregious and awful, and I think it undermines our best traditions in terms of jurisprudence and integrity.
PHILLIP: I felt pressured, okay? Not I was pressured.
FOSTER: He was facing jail.
PHILLIP: I felt pressured. I mean, if you're going to claim you were pressured, then just say it. But he's saying I had a feeling, which is not the same thing as this was actually what happened.
BILL DE BLASIO (D), FORMER NEW YORK CITY MAYOR: Yes, no, the problem with this whole thing is when you listen to what Michael Cohen said about the experience of working with Donald Trump, the indictment goes far beyond anything. I hear your point on Stormy Daniels, but the indictment that he makes, the way he recounts working for Trump, the racism, the intimidation of people who opposed him, etc., that's a much bigger set of issues.
So I agree with you. First of all, there's no evidence he was coerced or pressured. But beyond that, Michael Cohen had a moment where he actually seemed to lay bare a larger set of truths about Donald Trump that other people have been too scared to say, I don't know how he walks that back now.
FOSTER: There's kind of the standard litany against Trump.
PHILLIP: And I think also, like, in all of those things, you could argue, I think your point, Kmele, is well taken, that his incentives have always been to protect himself. And even when he was a resistance figure, he was a problematic resistance figure and the problematic nature of Michael Cohen is still there today.
[22:40:01]
ELIZABETH PIPKO, FORMER RNC NATIONAL SPOKESPERSON, AND FORMER TRUMP 2016 CAMPAIGN AIDE: Well, he's incredibly problematic. I think the President would agree with you on that.
Look, he came out and he did say he was pressured. He said he tried to get out of testifying several times. He said that he was told he was subpoenaed and he had no other choice.
He was pressured to say a lot of disparaging, awful things about the President. He said at one point, people tried to tell him to say that he wasn't sure the President had ever been physically violent with Melania, and they were angry at him for outright denying that fact. He was definitely pressured into saying horrific things about the President.
This was the star witness. As you said, incredibly problematic, but that's who they chose. And President Trump said several times that he was a victim of a corrupt prosecution of left-leaning attorneys and politicians and their star witness just proved them to be 100 percent correct.
PHILLIP: Here's what he said about whether he takes back the things that he testified to. This is both what he said about this back, what Trump said in January and what he said back in January in response to Trump, and then what he said today.
So listen to both of these.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: He took back everything he said in court, took it all back.
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHO: You did not recant your testimony on the witness stand. What's he referring to?
COHEN: I have no idea. He makes things up. (END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
TRUMP (on the phone): I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said, and that's a big thing that you did.
JAKE TAPPER, CNN CHIEF WASHINGTON ANCHOR: You're not going to discuss things you said in the past, but you're not retracting anything, right? I mean, you're not taking anything back.
COHEN (on the phone): Like I said, I refuse to go back in time. What I said was said, and that's where I stand with it.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
DE BLASIO: That's interesting. He could have said when he had Trump online, hey, I didn't recant.
PHILLIP: What do you even believe is a legit question with all of this? But also, he has had many opportunities to, in fact, take it back. Why won't he do it?
JOE BORELLI, FORMER REPUBLICAN LEADER, NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL, AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, CHARTWELL STRATEGY GROUP: The problem with Michael Cohen and his testimony and the things he said over the years is that we can't all now selectively pick and choose when Michael Cohen was truthful, when he was lying, when he was against Trump, when he was for Trump. That's why most prosecutors who sat down with Michael Cohen made the determination without bringing any charge, an indictment or used his testimony to not make him the star witness of a trial.
He was always fundamentally flawed. I will say something that's not cynical about the whole Trump and Cohen interview. I listened to it live, and it was somewhat interesting and in his lead up, he made up a really interesting point. He basically said that so many people are consumed with hating Trump and hating Michael Cohen, and they're people that have never met the two.
And his point was that if I can make up with Trump and talk to him and he could talk to me, maybe there's some light at the end of the tunnel for the Trump derangement symbol system that we're in. And as you said before, we're going to have this period of post-Trump where we don't even know what to do with ourselves.
Maybe Michael Cohen is the harbinger of a post-Trump piece.
DE BLASIO: Did you see that one coming? That's not what I'm hoping for.
DUNCAN: That's the most optimistic thing I've heard of all.
PHILLIP: We shall see.
BORELLI: It's going to be nice. You know, well done.
DUNCAN: Well done.
PHILLIP: We shall see if Michael Cohen is the harbinger of things to come.
All right, next for us. He's a black war hero, He was even portrayed in the movie "Pearl Harbor." But now the Navy is considering renaming a carrier that honors him and replacing it with Donald Trump's name.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:45:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: The U.S. Navy is considering renaming an aircraft carrier set to honor a black war hero after President Trump instead. During the Trump first term, the Navy announced that the carrier would be named after ship cook third class Doris Miller, who jumped into action during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And Miller carried several wounded shipmates to safety and he manned an anti-aircraft gun despite no prior training.
Cuba Gooding, Jr. portrayed Miller in the 2001 film "Pearl Harbor."
(VIDEO PLAYING)
A source tells CNN that the Navy is looking and said to name another warship after Miller and is recommending him for the Medal of Honor.
Now, I think the family is supportive, obviously, of him being awarded the Medal of Honor. But for them to sort of take him out of the running in the near term in order to do something that would be unprecedented, which is to name an aircraft carrier after a sitting President, that says a lot.
FOSTER: Has the President suggested that this isn't his idea, which is usually the way this works?
PHILLIP: I don't think he's directly responded yet.
FOSTER: I find all of the self-aggrandizement that the President engages in and that the people around him insist on kind of heaping on him so incredibly uncomfortable and gross. It is the strangest thing that you want to be remembered and revered in this way while you're still alive so you can be around to observe it all.
It strikes me as someone who is just extremely self-conscious and unsure of himself.
[22:50:00]
It just feels really weird. And I set aside who is being displaced since, again, in this particular context, it sounds like they may name another ship for him or give him some other honor.
The real question here is why the President seems to insist that he needs to be the face on the passport, on buildings in D.C., on the money that we are currently spending. There's something about that that is weirdly self-obsessed.
PIPKO: Also, is it true that the White House come out and say we're trying to now take Miller's name off of it and name the ship after Donald Trump?
I don't think that's true. I don't think anyone has said that.
DUNCAN: I hope it's not true.
PIPKO: I don't think anyone has said that it is.
PHILLIP: Well, look, the reporting is that, first of all, one of the reasons that we know about this is because even though in previous documentation, the ship has been named for this shipment.
PIPKO: Named by the Trump administration, by the way.
PHILLIP: Yes, now in current Pentagon documents, it's being given a number name.
PIPKO: Right, but not President Trump.
PHILLIP: Right, but the reporting is that they are considering. We didn't say that they're going to do it, but they are considering naming it after President Trump, which they are not denying. So that is also worth noting.
But to your point, it was actually the first Trump administration who suggested naming this ship for this hero. So it's not even like this was some kind of Biden-Obama thing. It was a Trump thing.
PIPKO: Right, but what was a Biden-Obama thing, by the way, is them trying to get him a Medal of Honor for many years. And now it's the Trump administration that's actually considering giving it to him.
BORELLI: Which is something the family saw for many years and was denied 80 years since Pearl Harbor when this man obviously served and did something so valiant.
But just to clear up a couple of things, nowhere in this reporting does it say that Trump is trying to put his own name on an aircraft carrier. That's a myth that we're debating right now.
It could be Barack Obama's name. Why could it be Barack Obama's name? Because there's already a George W. Bush, there's already a Ronald Reagan.
PHILLIP: No, I don't want you to mischaracterize.
BORELLI: The four past carriers are all named after Presidents.
PHILLIP: Hold on, stop. You're mischaracterizing the reporting, okay?
It is not that Trump is pushing to put his name on it. It's that his name is --
BORELLI: It sounded like it when Pearl was talking about it.
PHILLIP: Okay, Joe, listen for just a second.
BORELLI: It sounded like you were making that face. Listen for a second.
PHILLIP: The Pentagon is considering putting his name on the aircraft carrier. That's the first thing.
BORELLI: Newsflash, considering every President, all the other Ford carriers are named after Presidents. They're definitely considering Obama and Trump and Biden. And at the same time, it's Barack Obama.
PHILLIP: Stop, just one second. Joe, seriously. Just listen for one second. I'm just asking you to use your listening comprehension.
There has not been a sitting President with their name on a warship. A sitting President.
Donald Trump is the sitting President, Barack Obama is a former President, Joe Biden is a former President.
BORELLI: So he's going to be in office in 2035 --
PHILLIP: George W. Bush is a former President.
BORELLI: So he's going to be in office in 2035 when this ship is floating --
PHILLIP: The question is, are they going to name it after him now? Okay? That is not decided. Our reporting doesn't say it's been decided.
BORELLI: Okay, but the information is that it has been decided and we don't know that. Another point.
PHILLIP: In the other context is that the President has already put his name on a 250th anniversary coin, the U.S. dollar, the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace, battleships, National Park passes, TrumpRX, Trump coins, Trump accounts, Trump gold coins. I could go on and on.
BORELLI: Sixteen men won the Medal of Honor at Pearl Harbor, all served on it. Fourteen of those men have ships named after them. The fourteen men who have ships named after them who served in Pearl Harbor and won their Medal of Honor from their valiant service on that day, December 7, 1941, all of those men have destroyers named after them, not aircraft carriers.
So if this person who's so deserving of this, there's no question about that, gets a ship named after him, it would be more in line with the precedent of the other fourteen men who got the Medal of Honor on Pearl Harbor and he gets a destroyer. PHILLIP: Because it was actually the Trump administration who made this call in the first place. So the fact that they made the call in the first place and that are reneging on it now, you got to take it up with them. Don't take it up with me.
DE BLASIO: Can I suggest some interesting politics here?
PHILLIP: Last word.
DE BLASIO: Yes, look, God bless the men in the first administration. They did it.
In the first administration, they also spent a lot of time trying to win over, and in the campaign before, African American voters and Latino voters, especially young men.
PIPKO: Which they did.
DE BLASIO: But what's interesting is, now we see none of that and in fact taking, if it's true, they're taking the name of a hero off of an aircraft carrier. That's a spit in the face of a community. And that's something they wouldn't have done in the first term.
DUNCAN: I would not have done it. I never met Doris Miller. But I bet you he has more bravery in his pinky finger than Donald Trump has in his entire body.
PIPKO: That's just nonsense.
We're going to react to your feedback from cnn.com/abby when we come back.
[22:55:05]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: Now, your feedback from cnn.com/abby.
First one, Abby, you have a new drinking game. Every time they say Biden, take a drink.
Luckily, I'm not drinking right now.
Next one, Michael Cohen and Donald Trump are probably planning a new reality T.V. show.
[23:00:05]
FOSTER: We'd well watch that.
PHILLIP: I could see that actually happening.
And this is a good one. Geoff Duncan and Bill de Blasio are two people that I would like to meet in person. You guys have some fans out there.
DUNCAN: Look at that.
PHILLIP: Maybe together.
DUNCAN: He's much taller than I am. He's taller than everyone. I just thought you were short.
PHILLIP: All right. Well thank you guys for watching "NewsNight," "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.
