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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Trump Stumps in Ohio as Republican Says He's a Drag on GOP; Trump Doubles Down on $5,000 Pledge Amid His Worst Approvals; Democrats Livid After Feds Search Home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in Probe. I.; Federal Judge Furious of the Tree Removal at Trump White House Golf Course; Conspiracy Theories on James Talarico Fell Apart, Ahead of his CNN-Jubilee Town Hall. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired October 12, 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]
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight, the president resurrects his bribe --
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: If the Republicans win, you will each have $5,000 in your pocket.
PHILLIP: -- as a Republican running for re-election says Donald Trump is dragging down the party.
Plus, an extraordinary escalation as the feds search the home of one of Trump's political enemies, a sitting congresswoman.
TRUMP: I think she's a terrible person.
PHILLIP: Also, double bogey. The administration is now openly ignoring the law, defying a judge's order not to destroy any more property.
And another MAGA conspiracy blows up, this one involving a state James Talarico says he's never been to.
Live at the table, Tara Setmayer, Noah Rothman, Ravi Gupta, Peter Meijer, and Jemele Hill.
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.
Tonight, with about three weeks to go until Election Day, President Trump is rallying in Ohio to save Republican candidates. But behind the scenes, a growing number of GOP lawmakers worry that he is hurting their chances of holding onto Congress. One Republican running for reelection tells CNN Trump is dragging down the party, and the numbers do not lie.
Trump's approval is at an all-time low. He is underwater on several key issues that impact all Americans. And we're told that the GOP's midterm campaign has now turned into triage, a triage operation that forces the party to pour resources into traditionally red districts and states, all in the hope of clinging to the seats that they once considered safe.
But in the face of all of that, Trump has a plan. He is once again promising to give Americans money if the GOP keeps the House and the Senate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I'm going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000. Democrat policies won't allow this to happen. In fact, the opposite. They're going to raise your taxes.
If the Democrats win, you will have an economic depression. If the Republicans win, you will each have $5,000 in your pocket.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Before we open it up to the table here, we invite you at home to join our debate. Go to cnn.com/abby, weigh in there. We'll get to some of your comments as we go throughout the show.
Noah, does anyone really believe this $5,000 thing? And seems a little desperate to be trying this, like, three weeks before the end of the election.
NOAH ROTHMAN, SENIOR WRITER, NATIONAL REVIEW: It does seem a little bit desperate. I can't argue with that. Right after he proposed this, Reuters put out a poll, said 63 percent, including four in ten Republicans, oppose this thing, and it didn't surprise me.
You know, social media lit up with, ah, Trump is so unpopular, he's even making free money unpopular. No, we've been living with the consequences of free money in this country for the better part of six years. Everybody understands what happens now when you flood an overheated economy with government cash. It reduces your purchasing power. Americans have experienced that. All of us in living memory experienced that. So, yes, to say that they'll do that again doesn't really ring a lot of bells for, I suppose, voters who are unenthusiastic.
However, I don't know why Donald Trump would think the Democrats wouldn't do this. The last time he had suggested that we should do this was in 2020, and then he lost, and, subsequently, $2,000 went out the door to every American. So, who knows what could happen in the future?
PHILLIP: It might be a little -- a bit of a miscalculation. I think that's probably fair to say.
JEMELE HILL, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: It would, but he could send them $5,000 today, right? There's nothing to stop him. He's like, if we get elected, but he could send them that money today. It's thirsty. I mean, that's the best way to put it. It's like he knows what's coming down the pike. He's historically unpopular. And to try to buy -- bribe people to vote for you makes it -- or vote for your party, it makes it seem as if you really don't have a strong position because you're supposed to be selling policy.
You're supposed to be selling a better vision, and he cannot sell either. The thing is the Republicans are in a bad spot. They have no accomplishments to sell. And I know some of you all at the table are going to probably try to sell me that they do have some accomplishments to sell, they don't have any.
The people are voting based off what their wallet and their bills say. The bills say gas is too high, groceries are too high, this country is affordable, and he is not going to be able to come up out of that.
[22:05:01]
And then every time they hear him talk, he says, oh, this is just the price you have to pay. He's unsympathetic. He's -- you know, he sort of has no at-all self-awareness about what most people are going through, and that's why they're tuning him out. All these normal tricks that they like to pull that worked in the last election, that stuff is not working anymore because people see their bank balances. That's why it doesn't work.
PHILLIP: So, Peter, in your home state here's what Jason Roe, a GOP strategist says, we were all hoping that the war was going to be over by now, but it's not, said -- this is a one Trump adviser. We shouldn't have to fight in places like Texas, and we obviously do. And then Jason Roe says, I don't know that the environment could possibly get worse than it is.
He's advising Representative Tom Barrett, who is in a tight race with a Democratic challenger, and he says, if we lose this, it couldn't have been, could -- it couldn't have been won.
The war is actually at the crux of so many things. And, you know, people point out that the two promises that Trump made to Americans was that they were going to -- he was going to take on inflation and lower inflation, and he was not going to start any new wars. And he's failed on both accounts.
PETER MEIJER, CO-FOUNDER AND HEAD OF STRATEGY, THE NEW INDUSTRIAL CORPORATION: Yes. I think to Noah's point, you know, you want inflation, send everybody $5,000 checks. There's no way that doesn't happen. I think the frustration on the no new wars -- and, again, I kind of -- I bristle a little bit at that because the idea of the no new wars is we're not going to get into these intractable quagmires, like Iraq and Afghanistan, that are going to take decades, and how do we extricate ourselves from it? That's not Iran. Iran, you know, has been not only a very longstanding thorn in the side of the United States. There is --
PHILLIP: And there some people would beg to differ.
(CROSSTALKS)
MEIJER: But we are not in a position where we have hundreds of thousands of Americans who are in.
RAVI GUPTA, FORMER OBAMA WHITE HOUSE AIDE: But how do we know? We're still in the middle of it. How would we know it's wrong? And I think --
MEIJER: But there's no withdrawing. I mean, our forces are just -- they're in the same bases they've been in.
GUPTA: It's not a nation building.
MEIJER: It's not nation building. We're not dependent on some --
PHILLIP: But aren't you just -- aren't you acknowledging that we're still there in pretty much full force posture? We have to --
MEIJER: In similar force posture we've been for the better part of 30 years.
PHILLIP: We have to expend an enormous amount of energy to, quote/unquote, open the Strait of Hormuz to allow oil and gas to go through. That's not happening because things are at peace. It's happening because we are still at war. Our bases are still getting hit. The Iranians are still attacking their neighbors. We --
TARA SETMAYER, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, THE SENECA PROJECT: We pulled resources out of the Pacific in order to cover the Strait of Hormuz.
PHILLIP: I mean, you can call it what you want to call it, but we're not at peace.
MEIJER: My point is it's not an endless war in the vein that he was saying. But to your point, and this is where I'm agreeing with you, it has led to higher inflation in the form of higher energy costs for Americans. So, there's frustration both from the folks who care about the pocketbook and, you know, for some kind of more disgruntled elements of the MAGA coalition.
I do think you have a lot of campaigns who are just looking at polling, and the polling is bad. And they're having to make decisions, and they want to make data-driven decisions, and the only data they have is polling. Is that accurate? Is that reflective of what Election Day will look like? We don't know.
And so, yes, you're going to have a lot of folks on the Republican side who are running like they're 15 points behind, but I would rather they're running like they're 15 points behind than 15 points ahead.
GUPTA: Well, Abby, one thing we know is that the Republicans, like you're saying, are scared. You know, I'm helping to run the independent expenditure in Kansas, and we're seeing money pouring in from states like North Carolina.
Republicans have held the Senate seats, both of them, in Kansas since Babe Ruth led the Major Leagues in home runs. This is a historic wipeout that's about to happen in this election. And the through line between the $5,000 checks and what we're talking about here is voters don't trust Trump. We had DOGE dividends, that promise. We had the tariff rebates. We have this. We have the end of inflation. Remember that promise? Remember when he said that gas prices would be cut in half in the first year? Nobody trusts Trump. So, if he says, I'm going to give you $5,000 checks, it just reminds them of this very unpopular war that he promised we wouldn't have.
PHILLIP: So, can I just -- just because what you just said, just -- it actually kind of dovetails on this, which seems like a different topic, but it's similar. Trump is trying to deal with the diesel prices. And he announced this weekend that he had struck a deal with Ukraine and Russia, an energy ceasefire that maybe would allow diesel prices to go down. It turns out nobody knows about it. Nobody knew about it. He was asked by a reporter where's the ceasefire? And here's what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REPORTER: You said Russia and Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire but both sides say they have not agreed to that.
TRUMP: Well, they agreed. You know why? Because I said, you agree. That's why. They agreed because I said they agreed.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Okay. The lack it's a lack of credibility, right, when he basically admits he just made it all up.
SETMAYER: Yes.
PHILLIP: The American people, they're getting this stuff. They are -- some of them are getting it directly because they're paying attention.
[22:10:00]
Some of them are getting it indirectly. But the bottom line is when the president says X, Y, and Z's going to happen, do you believe him, or do you not believe him?
SETMAYER: Right. Well, you don't believe him. First of all, he is a prolific liar and has been his entire professional career. We know this. He has made up things all -- I mean, he made up a persona in the '80s and early '90s to cover for himself, to call, you know, tabloids to talk about himself. The guy is a liar, but he's a con artist, and that's what they do.
But to Jemele's point, the con is starting to run thin now with his own people. Yes, most of us are, saw through it, but it's his -- it's the numbers with his own voters that I think is what -- that's what has Republican strategists sounding the alarm. Because we have seen historic swings of Trump's unpopularity from -- with white non-college educated voters. His base, the base of his base swings of 40 and 50 points from -- on the issues of the economy, and trustworthiness on the inflation. They're over it because they can't live. Now, what's happening here with Ukraine is something else, too. I mean, maybe most people are not going to make that association, but the implications worldwide are huge. Trump consistently sides with our enemies. He's over here cutting deals with Putin when Ukraine is the -- that's the country that's fighting for their democratic lives that America should be on the right side of, that Europe is supposed to be on the right side of, and they are. And they're looking to America going, what the hell are you doing? What are you doing cutting deals, possibly illegal deals, with Putin, taking sanctions away when we're supposed to be on the side of democracy?
So, all of these things tied together is partially why Trump is underwater, because the downstream effect of all of this is undeniable with people's pocketbooks every single day. And no Republicans worth their salt are going to defend all of these things and bullshit promises that he's putting out there, because they're like, we can't defend this.
PHILLIP: So, have we reached -- when it comes to what Republicans can do about this, we know Trump is trying to just use the sheer force of will, showing up at all these different places. Maybe that'll work. But then there's also like an avalanche of money coming in, including from Elon Musk, $366 million in this cycle being spent by Musk. Is this the limit of money? Because if spending that kind of money doesn't produce space in some of these campaigns, I don't know what will.
ROTHMAN: Well, I don't -- just don't think money is as important as a part of an electoral calculus as those who approach it with sort of a Marxian framework think of it, that it's just like capital moves the world. No, not necessarily. Voters evaluate candidates based on their own individual merits, always have, and a lot of people put too much stock in money.
That said, we opened this segment with Republicans are triaging resources. They have a lot of resources that they don't necessarily have to triage. They're pulling out of North Carolina. That state has slipped away from them, so has Georgia. But that's smart management. That's not necessarily triaging resources.
And, yes, you're throwing money into places like Kansas and Iowa, where the polls look very soft. But if you will listen to the pollsters who are polling these places, they're starting to hedge a little bit and say, oh, I don't know. I don't know. There's a lot of Republicans in these states that we're not capturing --
PHILLIP: But that always -- you know, that always happens at this --
ROTHMAN: And it happened to Iowa. It destroyed Ann Selzer's career. It's the sort of thing that just happened two years ago.
MEIJER: (INAUDIBLE) we should all be careful about.
PHILLIP: I do think that's a very common thing. Usually at this stage in elections, you got -- get the pollsters being like, hey, don't hold us to it, okay, because there is uncertainty. There are margins of error. And I really do emphasize to people close races don't necessarily mean that your candidate is up or your candidate is definitively down. It just means that there's uncertainty. And that uncertainty means that there will still be one person that wins on Election Day. Close doesn't cut it at the end of the day.
HILL: But I would say that I think the feeling and the sentiment, like anybody who's had any kind of conversation in a coffee shop, in their group chats, whatever, there's an anger in people now that is very palatable. And I think that's maybe what these polls are showing and maybe aren't showing. And I think the level of anger I've seen from people about what their daily expenses look like is very real. They cannot escape the affordability issue.
PHILLIP: Ravi?
GUPTA: Well, yes, and I think traditionally Republican sporadic voters don't turn out as much in midterms as they do when Trump is on the ballot. He said it. Everybody has said it.
Now, we're already -- most people are conceding that Democrats are almost certain to take back the House. That alone a couple months ago would've been viewed as a huge victory. Nobody would've thought we'd be talking about races like Kansas, Iowa, Alaska, even South Carolina at this point.
So, I think, you know, do Democrats win back the Senate? Obviously, nobody knows. But the fact that we're even having this conversation and we are moving resources from places like North Carolina to Kansas tells us that this is a very precarious place, because we're talking about six-year seats, right? This would span the entirety of the next president's term.
[22:15:02]
And that's why the stakes are so high and why the money is so high right now.
PHILLIP: Yes.
HILL: And governor's races too have huge implications.
PHILLIP: Exactly, yes.
All right, next for us, the feds search the home of one of Donald Trump's political enemies, but Congresswoman Ilhan Omar says that she won't be silenced.
Plus, a judge is furious with the administration tonight after the government defied her order to not demolish any more D.C. property. So, what happens now?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: With just three weeks from the midterms, federal agents have executed a warrant into Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, searching her D.C. home this morning. [22:20:01]
Democratic leaders are calling it corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump's adversaries, and a DOJ spokesperson confirmed that search saying that it was judicially authorized. That was part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation into Omar.
Now, multiple outlets report that the investigation involves immigration paperwork that was filled out by Omar's father when she was a child. It's also worth noting that her father died in 2020.
Omar calls the search an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement, adding that Trump had targeted her with baseless lies and smear campaigns, and she will not be silenced.
President Trump has been one of Omar's most vocal critics. He called her a disaster, garbage, and a fraud. But today, he insisted that he had nothing to do with the raid.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Well, I understand they're looking at her very, very carefully. I've always found her to be totally crooked, personally, but that has nothing to do with me.
I think she's a terrible person, but that's really up to the DOJ. I have nothing to do with it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: The details of what's likely an immigration investigation are still unclear as of right now, but remember, in an interview in March, J.D. Vance was very candid about why the government was targeting Omar.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
J.D. VANCE, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. So, we actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America. And I talked to Steve Miller about this actually recently. We're trying to look at what the remedies are. That's the thing that we're trying to figure out, is what are the legal remedies now that we know that she's committed immigration fraud? How do you go after her? How do you investigate her? How do you actually do the thing? How do you build a case necessary to get some justice for the American people?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Well, the vice president there was actually being recorded, and it'll be interesting to see if there is a case, how that will play into it, because he says there she definitely committed immigration fraud. He seems to have prejudged the situation.
And it's also worth noting he mentioned Stephen Miller. Well, his wife, Katie Miller, today was gloating over this, and she posted and then deleted something that said, promises made, promises kept. So, is this about the evidence, or is this about going down a rabbit hole that the MAGA base has wanted for a long time?
SETMAYER: Well, I -- we all know that Donald Trump has had a bee in his bonnet for Ilhan Omar for years. She was part of the S-hole countries that he talked about, people need to go back to 2017 -- 2018 actually, 2019 when he was saying all these things.
And so regardless of what she did or didn't do, we don't know the facts here. But it is clear to anyone who's been paying attention that he's targeted her, this entire administration has targeted her, and I think that's going to be problematic in any type of prosecution if there is in fact one.
And on top of that, I mean, miss me with this whole like we're going to save the American people from her fraud when you have a president who pardoned all of the January 6th perpetrators, who's pardoned dozens upon dozens of fraudsters in this country that blue -- white collar criminals who have defrauded the American people to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars, and people who have given money to Donald Trump and his sons and their businesses, but he's okay with pardoning them --
GUPTA: He's running ads on T.V. that are illegal.
SETMAYER: Exactly, running ads on T.V. with American taxpayer dollars. And all of the fraud that's going on there, you had Kristi Noem and her, you know, paramour Corey Lewandowski handing out contracts to people. We're going to talk about the D.C. golf course contracts and all that. I mean, the level of corruption and the criminality in, inside this administration right now is -- it's really tough to swallow listening to J.D. Vance and the rest of them be sanctimonious about this, and they telegraphed what they were going to do.
ROTHMAN: I've heard a lot of Democrats getting out over their skis today. Without knowing what's going on in this investigation, which began under Joe Biden, which has been conducted by the U.S. attorney's office in Minneapolis and the Justice Department, which involves --
PHILLIP: Well, I would say, even those details, I'm not sure anybody really knows. But to your point, there's a lot that is not known.
SETMAYER: Right.
ROTHMAN: New York Times and NBC reporting saying this goes way beyond those allegations that were, we started with, that it involves whistleblowers, it involves documents, that it involves a prolonged investigation, it has to do with contacts between Omar and foreign individuals, it has to do with campaign finance, which, by the way, is not hard to believe because the Minnesota Board of Elections, Minnesota Board -- again, if you said people have been paying attention to this.
GUPTA: Yes. I have.
SETMAYER: Yes.
GUPTA: Minnesota Board of Elections found that she misused her campaign finance funds, and they didn't refer her, but they also found that in 2014 and 2015 she filed jointly with her second husband when they were not married, raising questions about her first husband and their immigration status.
All this stuff is public knowledge. It's not public knowledge among Democrats, and they're experiencing it now. And I would recommend they keep their powder dry because there is more to come.
HILL: Because the hypocrisy is too loud.
GUPTA: Yes.
HILL: That's the problem. The hypocrisy is so loud it's blowing my eardrums out.
[22:25:02]
And that's --
ROTHMAN: But, Jemele, you're closing your eyes to the other facts and evidence before us.
HILL: I'm not -- look, I'm not one to say --
PHILLIP: Well, just real quick, I just want to say on all the things that you talked about, you talked a lot of different types of things, we don't know if any of those things are what this case is related to.
ROTHMAN: Yes, it's just in what's being reported in The New York Times.
PHILLIP: Because her immigration status, I don't know if -- we don't know if it's about her immigration status necessarily or about something else, an immigration petition that maybe she filed on someone's behalf. But just to just to position people, she became a citizen when she was 17 years old. She was a minor. So, she -- so her --
ROTHMAN: This is why we should think there's more there than just that, you know?
PHILLIP: Well, I guess --
MEIJER: But just -- and her date of birth is also a point of contention.
PHILLIP: My point is -- my point only is a lot of those, those things that you mentioned don't have anything to do with her immigration status. And so if it's about those other things, we don't really know. But we also know she's denied, explicitly denied some of those claims that, for example, that she married her brother in order to get an immigration -- she's explicitly denied that. So -- HILL: And I don't want to -- you know, I'm definitely not one of those that wants to sanction any wrongdoing. Corruption is corruption. The problem is the people who are sending the message about her being supposedly corrupt are the biggest perpetrators of actual corruption. So, it's a little hard -- this is like Nino Brown giving out the turkeys at Thanksgiving. I know you might not get that reference, but it's the pre-dawn raid?
(CROSSTALKS)
HILL: You got to look it up.
SETMAYER: I'm not my brother's keeper.
HILL: But like -- it's like, yo, it's -- if you are out here with a president that has made billions of dollars in enhancing the wealth of him and his family, and even though he says, I have nothing to do with it, but we know that the Justice Department acts at his behest all the time, it's like, I can't hear you because your hypocrisy is too loud.
GUPTA: So, you know, what I want to know is where's the pre-dawn raid at the embassy in Athens?
HILL: Exactly.
GUPTA: We have text messages from Kimberly Guilfoyle that explicitly show a crime. You want to know why there isn't one? It's the same reason why they took the Collins investigation off, and it's the same reason why Trump's son just inexplicably says he gave back $100,000 to a Russian oligarch. And we don't investigate that, right, or any other crime that any friend of Trump has. They wouldn't give a parking ticket to any of their political allies.
So, whatever they find from her, which, by the way, was, is within the 60-day window that we're not supposed to be announcing these types of things and taking action, something that Trump complained about in the last election, and Democrats like me actually defended him, and Elie Honig I know on CNN also defended Trump on that one, somehow, we don't ever get these indictments or these investigations or these pre-dawn raids on people committing crimes in plain sight in this administration.
SETMAYER: Absolutely. Exactly.
GUPTA: Whatever they find out about her, it will be because of a result of a political fishing expedition, and they could find something --
ROTHMAN: But it began under Joe Biden. So, is Joe Biden doing the political fishing here?
GUPTA: But you're mixing up a bunch of things that we don't know. Right now, what we --
ROTHMAN: The New York Times cited this in this report. GUPTA: Here's what -- they cited a 1995 piece of paperwork. This is what CBS and The New York Times are citing. You cited a whole bunch of other stuff that has not been confirmed as of today. If we start finding out there were a whole bunch of other things that weren't confirmed before this that were listed when they went to the federal judge, then, sure, we could talk about that, but that still should have waited for after the election. We all know this. We've all made these arguments over the years. There's a reason why that 60-day rule exists is so we don't politicize these things.
PHILLIP: Yes. I mean, on that 60-day rule, I mean, it is right before an election. She is a candidate. What do you make of the decision to just go forward with something this politically volatile at this moment?
MEIJER: No. I think it's right to have a lot of suspicion on that 60- day window, which is not hard and fast, but it's a good principle to abide by to avoid that, you know, interfering with an election. You know, that deserves further scrutiny, right?
The flipside of the argument is that if there's information that should be relevant to a voter, are you hiding that? I mean, this is what James Comey wrestled with in the 2016 election, and everybody has opinions about that.
You know, regardless what happens, Ilhan Omar is not going to lose her re-election. I mean, that is as deep a blue seat as you can. She doesn't necessarily have a credible Republican challenger. But I will say on the corruption side of the House, like Kimberly Guilfoyle's under inspector general of the State Department investigation right now. You know, Trump is saying that, you know, he's not happy, that she might get fired. Good. You know, there should be accountability, you know? Yes.
GUPTA: The Office of Public Integrity, which they cited saying that they had checked with the Office of Public Integrity within Department of Justice, went from 36 employees to 2 under Trump. So, who are they citing? The loyalists who are left there, and it's like they can rubber stamp anybody now.
SETMAYER: And they fired virtually all of the inspectors general of all of the agencies as one of the first things that they did when they came into office, and they're responsible for investigating wrongdoing inside the agencies. And then don't even get into what happened with DOGE. So, you know, that's -- I think that's the issue.
[22:29:51]
Nobody's disputing, you know, whether she should or shouldn't have been investigated or, you know, what's happened under a -- Biden. All of those things we'll find out later on.
The problem is we don't have a credible Department of Justice. We can't believe anything they say. There are targeted prosecutions. She's been on the list. You've got the wife of Trump's right-hand guy giddy about it. You have Markwayne Mullin telegraphing that they were going to do this with Benny Johnson on September 10th in Dallas. Talking about, oh, it's coming down the pike, don't worry, it's coming with her.
So that's the problem that we have here. It's the lack of integrity with the Justice Department under this administration.
NOAH ROTHMAN, SENIOR WRITER, "NATIONAL REVIEW,", AND AUTHOR, "BLOOD AND PROGRESS: A CENTURY OF LEFI-WING VIOLENCE IN AMERICA": I just know the President wants everybody on record saying that you can't trust this administration on this particular issue because --
SETMAYER: In general, I'm not defending her.
ROTHMAN: Everybody will regret it.
SETMAYER: Do you think that this Department of Justice is honorable?
ROTHMAN: Skepticism means open-mindedness to the facts that you don't have access to.
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: Next for us, a federal judge is livid tonight after the Trump administration removed more than 400 trees on a golf course in D.C., defying her order. We'll debate.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:35:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: Tonight, a federal court tells the government that they have lost the credibility of the court and can't be trusted.
U.S. District Judge Anna Reyes told the administration that she was furious over the removal of at least 430 trees from a D.C. golf course that President Trump is seeking to renovate. The White House wants to turn the public course into a professional one and has been wrapped up in litigation over that. Friday evening, the Interior Department informed the court in a filing that it was removing the trees as part of a separate renovation, but they began removal Saturday morning.
Reyes questioned the timing of this and suggested that the attorneys had misled the court. She said she wasn't just furious, but disappointed with the government. A DOJ attorney responded that they had done their best to inform the court, and the plaintiffs, Reyes replied, no, you did your absolute worst.
This is, on many levels, just a truly bizarre story, but Trump's determination to just tear things down first and ask questions later seems to be what's at play here.
PETER MEIJER (R), FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, MICHIGAN, AND CO-FOUNDER AND HEAD OF STRATEGY, THE NEW INDUSTRIAL CORPORATION: You can admire that you can just do things ethos when it runs head first into something that looks like it's out of the Lorax and he's the Once-ler. Like that's a little bit -- I like trees.
This guy signed or supported the Trillium Trees Act, you know, internationally.
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: It is crazy.
(CROSSTALK)
SETMAYER: And they already started taking trees down before. I mean, look, I've lived in the D.C. area for 30 years, I went to college there, I used to play flag football over there, Haynes Plain, East Potomac Park over there.
This is a beautiful part of the city, and the fact that Donald Trump is just, he's the destroyer-in-chief. He just likes to destroy things that are living, beautiful things because, I don't know, maybe the moral rot inside of him doesn't allow for beauty.
I don't know, but what he's doing here, you have to think about this because he does this all the time. And to put a freaking golf course there to replace the one that's there, there's history here also with that golf course that people need to understand.
There's history there, it was one of the first desegregated golf courses in Washington, D.C. Back in 1941, three black golfers went to play with the escort of police because they were jeered because people didn't want black folks playing there.
And you know what? The next day, the Department of Interior head said, that's it. We're desegregating all the public courses.
Trump seems to have a specific disrespect for anything that's historic or anything that has civil rights involved. That course also, along with the other one, Langston course, which is a public course in D.C. named after the first dean of law at Howard University and the first black congressman of Virginia, that course also has presented opportunities for minority kids to play golf. You have one of the first black female students to play out in Pebble Beach at the Tiger Woods Junior Invitational thanks to you taking golf lessons and her opportunity at these public courses.
Those opportunities are now being taken away because Trump has come in and taken the leases away from the National Links Trust. So he can have a pro golf course there, another wish he's got.
Tom Fazio is the golf architect who's done the golf courses for all of Trump's courses. It's ridiculous. It's for the public.
PHILLIP: It's really good that you laid that out because I think that some people might hear this story and think that, what's the big deal? It's just a golf course, so why not make it nicer and private?
But there are people who have equities here and want it to be public for a reason because of some of that history. And the bigger issue is whether Trump can actually, in fact, just do whatever he wants, even if the courts say, hold on a second, let's listen to all sides of this and determine what the actual law says you're allowed to do.
ROTHMAN: All of that history was fascinating and unknown to me and I appreciated it. I think as far as a political issue, it's very relevant to D.C. voters, but I think the Democrats are probably going to want to turn this into a metaphor to appeal to a broader audience.
(CROSSTALK)
[22:40:01]
It's a metaphor that will appeal to people who are willing to turn out in a hurricane to vote for Republicans.
PHILLIP: Let's call it part of a pattern. There's the Kennedy Center, there's the ballroom. Literally today, the Trump administration basically defied another court order using taxpayer dollars, money that Americans, their hard-earned money, to pay for his propaganda ads.
The judge ordered them to halt and those ads still aired hundreds of times. And then the DOJ says, oh, I'm sorry, we didn't hear about this ruling until the next election.
ROTHMAN: That's a much more concrete thing to say than to make this broader metaphor.
PHILLIP: But that's part of a pattern of this administration simply ignoring the law.
RAVI GUPTA, FORMER OBAMA WHITE HOUSE AIDE, AND AUTHOR, "THE INVISIBLE LIST": And Abby, this is not going to show up in ads, but I think this is just annoying to the American public when they see a President who's obsessed with putting his name on things, with making everything look nice around him. At the same time, we've been told that we need to burn food aid before it reaches starving children because we need to save money or shut down rural hospitals because we're going to cut Medicaid.
But somehow we're paying $40 million for this golf course renovation, (inaudible) less public.
SETMAYER: It's $50 million plus, it's being designed by Trump's personal golf architect, Tom Fazio, and it's going to cost a billion dollars more because they have to redo the seawall. Now that, in fairness, is something that they've needed to renovate in a long time, but now all of a sudden it's a priority. It's terrible.
JEMELE HILL, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, "THE ATLANTIC", AND PODCAST CO-HOST, "FLAGRANT AND FUNNY": And people in general are like, I didn't hire you to be, you didn't get elected to be HGTV. We don't care about your renovation projects.
Most people are looking at this and they're seeing their taxpayer money go out the window and they're wondering. So let me get this straight, he cares more about a reflecting pool, he cares more about putting his name on the Kennedy Center, he cares more about this golf course than he cares about the people who elected him and are looking at him for leadership and guidance while everybody else is starving. So it's a bad look regardless.
GUPTA: The most obscene example of this is when he dragged Xi out to his helicopter pad at the same time where China is providing intelligence that's killing American soldiers. I mean, we just have an unfocused, unserious President.
PHILLIP: And next for us, despite the best efforts of MAGA voices, the conspiracy theories around James Talarico's absence from the campaign trail are going up in flames. We'll tell you what's behind them next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:45:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: MAGA's desperate conspiracy theory about James Talarico is imploding in its face. Prominent right-wing voices, from Elon Musk to Spencer Pratt, have been amplifying unsubstantiated rumors that claimed James Talarico was missing from the campaign trail because he suffered a mental health crisis.
It all reached a fever pitch when one conservative influencer claimed Talarico was receiving treatment in Ohio. But not only did the supposed health facility deny Talarico was being treated there, but Talarico also said he has never been to the state. A Democratic Senate candidate says he just came down with the flu.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAMES TALARICO (D), TEXAS SENATORIAL CANDIDATE: I had the flu. This is the craziest thing I've ever heard. It's wild that someone can just post something on the internet and then the media just runs with it.
I've heard credible reports that Ken Paxton has a serious medical condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice. He has asked for proof of life from me. I'm asking for proof of spine from him.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: His opponent, Ken Paxton, says he's not buying it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KEN PAXTON (R), TEXAS SENATORIAL CANDIDATE: The reality is the big story is the fact that he was missing from the campaign trail, and he'd love to change the topic to debates. But the big story is two weeks is a long time to be away with the flu, and it's just a very strange time to disappear.
(END VIDEO CLIP) PHILLIP: Okay. If you don't believe the polls, I think this should tell you everything you need to know about what's happening in that Texas race.
GUPTA: I think it's baffling that Ken Paxton, down in most polls that we see, including their own from what we've seen from reporting, is ducking a debate. At the same time, he spent the entire time that his opponent was off the trail, peddling conspiracy theories that turned out to be false, or wasted an entire week plus, nine days, of campaigning. I mean, he really is the gift that keeps on giving, easily one of the worst candidates I've seen since I started getting into politics.
ROTHMAN: I mean, the most you can say about the not-debating strategy is it seems to be a Texas GOP-wide strategy. Greg Abbott isn't debating either.
But Greg Abbott has been ahead in a couple of polls, right? You need to change the dynamic here. The status quo is not in your favor. So why would you duck debates to do that sort of performance on television?
That's not winning, it's obviously not winning.
PHILLIP: And Trump has gotten in on this whole conspiracy, too. Here's both Trump and Paxton.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I hear the guy's disappeared. Nobody knows. You know where he is? He's sick because he's been forced to eat meat for political reasons, and he's throwing up all over the place.
PAXTON: Where do you think they hid that little socialist? One, two, three -- Where is James Talarico?
TRUMP: Now we're all looking. Nobody can find the guy. He's gone for two weeks.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MEIJER: Trump did that well. Paxton did not.
[22:50:02]
HILL: This would be really hilarious if it wasn't happening in the country I live in. I'd be looking at this like, oh my God, this is gold.
SETMAYER: It's an episode of "Veep."
HILL: It is.
PHILLIP: Some of these things, you had Spencer Pratt saying, oh, I have inside information about what's happening with Talarico. They put out a phone call that they claimed was from this health center. It is beyond belief how far this went, and how many people were like, wow, this is a serious problem, despite absolutely no evidence that this was even close to a real thing.
HILL: Do they realize how dumb they sound? Sometimes I wonder that.
Do you realize we can hear you?
SETMAYER: No, they don't.
First of all, you're asking Donald Trump to have self-awareness. Have you seen his face? The guy has no self-awareness. He thinks that looks good.
This is so sad. This is the moment that we're in.
I guess they didn't get their timing right, because the Russian bots weren't around to amplify this on Twitter, because Ukrainians bomb the hell out of the Russian data center bot farms. So I guess that they weren't able to amplify it, which is why it's falling apart.
This whole thing is so asinine and James Talarico has been running an exquisite campaign. He's done all the right things. His messaging has been incredible on this.
ROTHMAN: We shouldn't have to lose sanctimonious here.
SETMAYER: Are you kidding me?
ROTHMAN: We had conversations around this table. Mitch McConnell was dead. And they needed proof of life for Mitch McConnell.
(CROSSTALK)
I'm serious, because a lot of people who are a partisan are willing to do this for me in order to believe crazy narratives that confirm the lies.
PHILLIP: Hold on a second.
Let me just say that the conspiracies about Mitch McConnell being dead, despite the fact that there was no evidence that he was dead, were unhinged on the left. However, you would acknowledge, hold on Noah, but would you not acknowledge that Mitch McConnell was gone for months.
He did in fact have a medical emergency. He was hospitalized and there was, for much longer of a period of time, very little in the way of proof of life and that's a different situation.
GUPTA: Abby, remember Tom Keene Jr. also.
ROTHMAN: I mean, it's a longer situation, but Occam's razor applies in both cases.
PHILLIP: I guess the point is that somebody being out of the public eye for seven days because they have a flu is not the same thing as being gone from the Senate with their office saying absolutely nothing about it.
HILL: And people lying about fake miles.
ROTHMAN: My congressman, Tom Keene, similarly disappeared, but at no point did I win credence to any sort of notion that he was actually a corpse somewhere. That would be so crazy. And it goes both ways, is all I'm saying.
SETMAYER: But they weren't honest about what was going on with him.
ROTHMAN: And that's a different issue too. And that's a very valid issue, but it's certainly not one that you don't have to go make a literary narrative.
GUPTA: There were plenty of reasonable people saying that the McConnell conspiracy theories are wrong.
I was one of them. I went on a left-wing podcast and said it. The thing about the Keene Jr. case that's interesting is Trump turned around and endorsed him.
Mike Johnson defended him. And now they're attacking Talarico for the very same thing. And there's a difference between fringe left-wing figures going after McConnell, I think, and peddling wrong conspiracy theories while he was gone for 90 days, versus setting up a tip line when you're a candidate for a U.S. Senate for people to put in spurious claims that this guy is a mental institution in another state without any evidence.
MEIJER: But I think that's part of the point here, is you just, you get it into the consciousness and people who are low information, they're not paying a lot of attention. Those people probably think Mitch McConnell is dead right now because they saw it on CNN.
GUPTA: They're not wrong.
PHILLIP: I wouldn't say that they saw that on CNN. But look, I mean, part of it is also that this is a Trump base that feeds on conspiracies from the top down.
GUPTA: The electorate feeds on conspiracies.
PHILLIP: Yes, the electorate does.
The biggest conspiracy theorist, the biggest conspiracy theorist in politics is the President of the United States. And it makes it much easier for people to believe anything when he goes out on the campaign trail and says it and amplifies it.
Well, anyway, speaking of Texas, this weekend, the Senate candidate, James Talarico, comes face-to-face, excuse me, Wednesday, face-to-face with voters. Erin Burnett will moderate the CNN and Jubilee Town Hall this Wednesday at 8 p.m. on CNN and streaming live with an all-access subscription. You don't want to miss that. Next for us, though, we are going to react to your feedback from
cnn.com/abby. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:55:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: And now, viewer feedback from cnn.com/abby
Here's the first one that says, Williams went to illegal immigrants and Ukraine, but were mad at Trump giving a $5,000 dividend. Make that make sense.
SETMAYER: We don't have enough time for that to make sense. Ukraine is Ukraine. It's important for us to support our strategic ally in Europe, their democracy, and they're fighting for their lives against Russia, who's our enemy, and we don't have a long enough conversation about what happens with illegal immigration.
[23:00:04]
ROTHMAN: Inflation, bad. Russia, also bad.
SETMAYER: Yes, there you go.
ROTHMAN: Two bads.
PHILLIP: All right.
SETMAYER: Pop sticker. Democrats, there you go.
PHILLIP: So, okay, related to this, if election integrity is so important, another viewer asks, why is it acceptable for the President to offer bribes for people to vote for a party?
SETMAYER: It's not. Right?
HILL: Yes, I was like, you can give me $5,000 today.
PHILLIP: I mean, is it a bribe?
MEIJER: I mean, is student loan forgiveness a bribe to folks who?
HILL: Yes, it's not a bribe.
MEIJER: I mean, is that?
HILL: That's an obligatory benefit.
PHILLIP: Or was that really, if you don't vote for me, you won't get the student loan?
HILL: He put the contingency on it.
MEIJER: If there was a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate and a Democratic President, you never would have gotten that.
PHILLIP: Come on, Pete.
HILL: No, I never said it. You're trying to shift the illegality. You're trying to shift it.
GUPTA: More than the illegality, it's the pettiness of it. It's like the fact that, okay, only if we win, even though we have a lined up session and we theoretically could pass it either way, I would just not advance this $5,000 for you if you don't give me what I want. To me, it's everything you need.
SETMAYER: And it's more than the COVID checks, which is going to blow up the deficit even worse, but let the fiscal hawks figure that out.
PHILLIP: So I've got two comments here about this golf course story.
The first one says, we need more judges to not only yell at Trump's actions and crimes, but enforce consequences. Should there be consequences for defying the court?
ROTHMAN: Well, the consequences are that the courts continue to rule against you and it makes you look horrible, which is the point I was trying to make earlier in that segment. The thing that stands out to me is the degree to which the administration says, more than once, untrue things to judges and get reprimanded from the bench as a result of it.
PHILLIP: It makes you look bad, but it doesn't stop them from doing it.
ROTHMAN: Well, the courts don't have a military, right? But the thing about our country is that we defer to the courts because there's political power behind that and it's buttressed by Congress and it's buttressed by the electoral system.
And the electoral system responds to that. This is all part of the system, we shouldn't short-circuit.
PHILLIP: So one more comment on this. I'm positive that somehow the golf course renovations will also become a matter of national security. Honestly, just mark your clock by that one.
MEIJER: Exactly.
PHILLIP: All right, before we go, you can stream this show live or watch on demand with an all access subscription. Scan that Q.R. code on your screen or go to cnn.com/watch to learn more.
Thank you very much for watching "NewsNight." "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.
