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Supreme Court Rejects GOP Map in Missouri; Miami Crash Investigation; President Trump Offering Cash For Votes?. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired September 10, 2026 - 13:00   ET

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

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BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Cash for control. President Trump tells Americans he will send them 5,000 bucks if Republicans win the midterm elections. But critics are questioning whether that's even legal.

No relief. Gas prices are up, and the president says they will stay up until after the election. But experts are warning they could actually take a lot longer than that to cool down.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: And first down under, the NFL making history in Australia, bringing footie to the fans, American style.

We're following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

KEILAR: They say everything's bigger in Texas, and it appears so are the promises.

The president's $5,000 pledge to Americans if Republicans stay in power after the midterm elections is raising some big questions today. Critics are calling it a bribe. But legal questions aside, if he actually were to do it, and the specifics on how he'd do it aren't so clear, it would cost the U.S. government $1 trillion, and that would add to the $40 trillion-plus debt.

CNN's Alayna Treene is traveling with the president in Arlington, Texas, where he's about to speak at the National Medal of Honor Museum -- Alayna.

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, look, Brianna, I think what we saw take place last night was exactly what the president's team wanted. It was really kind of a Trump rally. They have been calling it, his supporters and critics alike, a Trumpapalooza. That's exactly what it was.

And the goal of this, I'd remind you, is to try and energize members of the president's base as much as possible in the next 55 days before the midterm elections. I think that's why you heard the president float this idea of a $5,000 dividend check.

I think, of course, who wouldn't want to hear that, particularly people in the room who are the president's fiercest supporters? Who wouldn't want a $5,000 check? The question is that actually realistic? And I can tell you, from Republicans we have been talking to, particularly lawmakers on Capitol Hill, they were surprised by it.

And I do know as well from one of the conversations I have had with one of the president's political advisers, they told me that the president has floated this idea before, particularly among members of his political team, but it doesn't seem like this was something that was widely known or expected among and throughout the Trump administration.

But I think that just speaks exactly to the goal that I was pointing out. They are trying to find ways to energize Republicans ahead of the midterms. And you heard other themes among that last night. You heard the president trying to talk about the economy, how he believes it will get better, even though he said the Iran war is likely to continue beyond the midterms.

Obviously, that's something that's been dragging him down in the polls. But, again, you're going to hear a lot more from a lot of key speakers tonight. They're really trying to get as many people as they can energized and excited about the midterms at a time when they recognize normally it doesn't go the party in power's way.

KEILAR: Any more surprise guests expected tonight, Alayna?

TREENE: I think Senator John Fetterman coming out and giving that video was definitely a surprise to many people in the room last night. When I was standing in the convention center, you heard a lot of kind of almost gas from people in the audience.

I'm not sure they're going to have someone like that, or at least even on video tonight. But what we do know, some of the speakers we do know are speaking tonight, one is the former Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. She actually flew with the president on Air Force One to Texas.

She's giving a big speech tonight. You're going to hear from the House speaker, Mike Johnson, someone who received a standing ovation during the president's speech last night when he was mentioned. You're also going to hear from the president's son Donald Trump Jr., who co-hosted a fund-raiser on the sidelines of the convention last night.

And then, of course, the big speaker, the headliner is going to be the vice president, J.D. Vance. Trump's going to come on at the end. They're going to have a balloon drop like they normally do during a presidential convention. This is obviously quite different, but they will be having some candidates up there on the stage.

So we will see if they do have any more surprises in store. But I can tell you, I think the announcement the president made last night, things like that, they are really trying to dangle these carrots in front of voters to get them excited for the midterms, Brianna. [13:05:01]

KEILAR: All right, we will see if they bite.

Alayna Treene, thank you so much.

We're joined now by "New York Times" journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro. And we're also joined by Rick Tyler, former spokesperson for Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign.

All right, Rick, we should note the president has promised big checks before, right? I think it was less than a year ago he promised $2,000 tariff dividends last year. And he also marketed those ones as sort of a promise of sharing the wealth of what he says are policies that are really paying off.

He hasn't delivered on those, though. I mean, do you think that people will believe this? Will they be convinced by this?

RICK TYLER, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: I don't know if they will believe it or not. It's a gimmick. It makes no sense.

I think J.D. Vance suggested that it could be paid for by tariffs. Now, to make that math work, every American would have to pay $5,000 in tariff taxes to get the $5,000 back that he has promised. So it makes no economic sense.

It is designed to get the base out, except let's start with the two things that are true. It is true that when Trump is on the ballot, his base will turn out for him. It is also true that Trump turns out another base, and that's the Democratic Party. It is false that Trump turns out a base when he is not on the ballot, and it is false with that Trump turns out votes for Republicans when he is on the ballot.

So none of this makes any political sense whatsoever. It's all -- the problem is, the political calculus here is, we're going to put Trump, make him front and center of the election, and somehow that's going to drive people to the polls, except there's a problem.

The poll that is attached to Trump is 35 percent approval rating. So you're going to make the one person who this whole election is about who has a 35 percent approval rating, when half of Americans say that affordability is the number one issue, and 71 percent of those people blame the Republicans for the affordability issue.

So I don't know how this convention makes any sense whatsoever, except for a massive fund-raiser, which is all it really is.

SANCHEZ: Lulu, what are you going to do with your $5,000 check?

(LAUGHTER)

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Well, it's mythical, so not very much.

I mean, what he said essentially. I think that analysis is exactly correct. Beyond that, it's a sad and desperate ploy. Let's call it what it is. He's clearly throwing things at the wall at this point to get what is happening, which is like try and get some momentum, get people talking about it, hoping that that will somehow change people's votes.

The fact is, though, that Trump making this all about himself is the only thing he really knows how to do, and so therefore this is not surprising. But at the end of the day, none of this is going to help the Republicans.

But this isn't all they're doing. The only thing -- they are also trying to meddle with our election infrastructure. They're trying to undermine our voting. They're trying to do many different types of things in order to try and get a win out of these midterms, which is looking more and more unlikely.

KEILAR: So then I wonder we -- "The New York Times"' Jonathan Swan told us back in July, Lulu, that Trump's advisers were actually frustrated that he wasn't kind of caring enough about what happens in the midterm election.

So then I wonder -- and I think they wanted to...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is late. This is late.

KEILAR: Yes, this is -- he's getting in late here, but he is sort of getting in, and, yes, he's in his comfort zone. But considering what he's doing, considering what his administration is doing when it comes to mail-in ballots and that kind of thing, how do you make sense of that if he really doesn't seem to care that much about the midterms?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, I think at this point, I mean, it's imminent, right? We're weeks away from the midterms. He is invested in that.

He knows that if the Democrats take control, it's going to be a very different situation in Washington for his administration and for Republicans writ large across the country. And so at this point the rubber is hitting the road, and so I do think this administration feels a sense of urgency.

The problem is, this is very late to be doing this. And it is not clear that any American is persuaded. People are going to the gas pump right now, and they are seeing what's happening, and we know, we saw from 2024 that these economic arguments coming very late, listen, things are going to get better, it's OK, et cetera, et cetera, it just doesn't wash when you are feeling the pain.

SANCHEZ: Rick, I wonder what your advice would be to Republicans in vulnerable areas, and notably many of them not at the convention, Susan Collins, Dan Sullivan, et cetera.

TYLER: That would be my advice number one.

SANCHEZ: Just stay away from the convention.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Stay away from the convention, which they are. TYLER: Which they did.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Which they did, yes.

TYLER: I think there's five elected officials there, and those five are probably helped by being in a photograph at the convention with Trump. But the other 400 and so are not. And they're not there because it has nothing to do with the Republican Party.

And I don't think he's invested in it because they're holding on to $400 million, which they have not invested in Senate races or the Texas race or the Iowa race now or any of the other races. And my guess is in the end, they will spend about 10 percent of that money.

[13:10:09]

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why?

TYLER: Because Trump has never cared about the Republican Party. He doesn't care about the Republican Party. He doesn't care about its underpinning philosophies. His...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But he cares what happens to him, and we know that if Democrats come in, what Congress will do is open a lot of investigations into this administration.

KEILAR: So what happens if he doesn't spend the money? Do you think it would make a difference such that it affects him? Like, where you think he should be putting money such that he's -- without doing it, he's actually going to really pay for it?

TYLER: My advice would be to Republicans who actually want to win is to localize these races as much as possible, because what -- nationalizing this race in this environment is exactly the wrong thing to do. There are other times to nationalize the race.

It happened in 1994 with Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America, nationalized the race, they won the election overwhelmingly, because that was a -- that was the political decision that was correct at that time. This is not the year to nationalize this race. This is the year to localize this race and to point out how things will go worse if your Democratic -- if the Democratic challenger or incumbent gets reelected and not make it about Trump.

But he's going to make it about it. He's a black hole. Look, if J.D. Vance announced for president of the United States tonight, it would be on page 20B because Trump is going to follow him. And that's just the way it is with him. He just will take all the oxygen out of the room.

SANCHEZ: Before we go, I have to ask you about John Fetterman. Democrats were quick to come after him after the video that was played at the midterm convention. Should they heed his warnings, though, about the platform of the Democratic Party, what he calls extremism, especially among working-class men? GARCIA-NAVARRO: You know what's so funny watching that? Fetterman is making his own calculations. He is very unpopular in his state among Democrats. I was actually just in Pennsylvania yesterday. And this is -- he is more popular among Republicans than he is among Democrats.

KEILAR: Way more.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what he's doing there, and I don't know if he's going to run again, but what he's doing there is actually speaking to people who might like him at the moment.

But more broadly, yes, of course, I mean, Democrats are also unpopular. They're just running against people who happen to be more unpopular than they are, which are Republicans. But the parties writ large in this country, there's a huge rejection of them. And there's a deep suspicion of some of these progressive candidates on the left.

Now, what I will say is that Democrats are doing Republicans' work for them. You see Democrats attacking the DSA and making the DSA a much bigger issue than Republicans are. So you have -- when you have the Fettermans and other people, instead of attacking the opposition, what they're doing is attacking the members of their own party.

And so it's a circular firing squad, and that is -- I would say is the thing that they should heed more.

SANCHEZ: Lulu and Rick, appreciate the conversation. Thank you so much.

Still to come, we have some new details on one of the black boxes recovered after that deadly cargo plane crash in Miami -- ahead, what was said inside the cockpit right before the crash.

Plus, gas and diesel prices surging again overnight. We're going to break down what this means for your wallet.

KEILAR: And, later, football fans are trading burgers for Vegemite sandwiches? No, guys, it's Vegemite on toast, I think. I don't think it's sandwiches. Nonetheless, the NFL is set to play down under as the Rams face off against the 49ers tonight.

We have that much more coming up on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

SANCHEZ: The song says Vegemite sandwiches, though, doesn't it?

KEILAR: I mean, I guess you could, but I like it on toast.

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[13:17:39]

KEILAR: Newly released black box data shows one of the pilots of that Amazon cargo jet that crashed Sunday in Miami was concerned that they were coming in to land too fast, and it also shows alarms were going off warning that the plane was too low and it was dropping too quickly. Moments later, the 230,000-pound plane overran the runway, slammed

into a van, an airport fence, concrete vehicle barriers, and an SUV before it stopped and caught fire. Five of the seven people in the van, all of them members of a cleaning crew, were killed.

The widow -- widow, I should say of victim Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo has filed a wrongful death suit against the pilots, Amazon, and the operator of the plane, 21 Air.

Let's turn now to CNN's Pete Muntean.

Pete, tell us more about what investigators have learned from these black boxes.

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: The NTSB has just given us a readout, what was on the cockpit voice recorder. This comes one day after they gave us a readout of what was on the flight data recorder, and they analyzed these all at their lab at L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C.

They put these on a 7:22 p.m. flight on Monday after pulling them from the tail of the airplane to try and get a better readout here. What is so interesting is that we now have a readout that these cockpit alarms were going off. And this really only reinforces what we knew, that this airplane was coming in on what pilots would call an unstable approach.

And any of these callouts, these oral warnings from the Ground Proximity Warning System, the GPWS, would have prompted pilots in most cases to abort the landing, go around, try again. We heard the sink rate alarm at one minute and four seconds before the recording ended.

KEILAR: Is it saying -- it's saying sink rate, sink rate?

MUNTEAN: Sink rate, sink rate. It sounds like that.

KEILAR: Wow.

MUNTEAN: And so we heard that at one minute before and four seconds before the recording ended, again at 57 seconds, too low terrain, which is even more severe, at 48 seconds, and then another too low terrain at 15 seconds before the recording ended.

One of the pilots called for a go-around, but this is when the airplane was already on the ground, and we know from the flight data recorder that the pilots increased the throttles to a level consistent with thrust four, go around. Then, four seconds later, they pull the throttles back to idle, pressed on the brakes.

It really just sort of tells the story of chaos in the cockpit, and only further underscores that so much went wrong, when these pilots could have made the correct judgment call to abort the landing, go around and try again.

[13:20:02] This is something that's also really interesting here. And we had this in the moments after the crash, but I just want to point at it again. This is a graphic from Flightradar24. And these cyan and green lines are other airplanes going into Runway 30 at Miami International Airport.

KEILAR: So, here, right here.

MUNTEAN: Yes, here, this is good, right? And so these are normal, stable descent paths.

The red line is our accident airplane, the 767-300 being operated by 21 Air. You can see it's mostly on the glide path here, and then -- but what pilots would call it balloons up, and then they begin to dive back down to the runway, which is not a good thing. Obviously, when you dive, it's like going downhill in a car.

Your speed increases, and that is what is the telltale of an unstable approach.

KEILAR: Can I ask you? So, should you know if you're flying at this point that you're doing this? I mean, do you have a sense that you're above the glide path, and that at what point in this ballooning would be a good time to make that call of a go-round?

MUNTEAN: Probably around here. We're probably talking maybe a mile out or so, and you can tell if you're too high based on what you see out the window, one, and then, two, what you see in the cockpit indications, whether or not you're on the glide path.

Typically, even if you're flying approach and approach visually, using your eyeball, you're also dialed into the ILS, the instrument landing system. That essentially is a radio beam that you fly down laterally. It gives you the localizer, which is left and right, and the glide slope, which is up and down.

If you're off the glide slope way too high, you can just call it off and come back in and try again. This is flying 101 stuff, by the way. You -- I can tell you, as a flight instructor, students learn this very, very early on when you're getting your sensory inputs sort of dialed in, what we call the sight picture.

And so you spend a lot of time with very early students going around. Some big, big questions here about why they did not do this earlier.

KEILAR: Because it's easy to fix right here, right?

MUNTEAN: Easy to fix here, much harder to fix when you're two-thirds of the way down the runway and going 150 knots with runway being eaten up every second.

KEILAR: Yes, seems like a Hail Mary at that point.

MUNTEAN: Yes.

KEILAR: Pete, thank you so much.

MUNTEAN: Any time.

KEILAR: Still ahead: Lawmakers are calling for more regulations on artificial intelligence as Anthropic discloses yet another hacking incident involving one of its own A.I. models.

Plus, the Supreme Court dealing another blow to Republicans' hopes of capturing an extra congressional seat ahead of the midterms.

And great barrier beef, the NFL's 49ers and Rams taking their rivalry to Australia. We will have that next.

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[13:26:56]

KEILAR: Mortgage rates are climbing fast, making it even more expensive to buy a home. Rates just hit a new high for this year.

According to new numbers just out from Freddie Mac, a 30-year fixed rate mortgage is now up to 6.76 percent. That is the highest since June of last year, and that's likely to put even more pressure on the housing market.

The National Association of Realtors says home sales slid last month, down 1.2 percent from last year -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: We're also following a major decision at the Supreme Court that could affect the midterm elections, the justices rejecting a newly drawn congressional map in Missouri that favored Republicans. It could have potentially given the party a seventh winnable seat in the U.S. House, compared to six under the previous map.

CNN's chief Supreme Court analyst, Joan Biskupic, joins us now.

So, Joan, a very quick decision by the High Court. Do we know how it was reached?

JOAN BISKUPIC, CNN CHIEF SUPREME COURT ANALYST: Yes, it was so quick because there were really no grounds to appeal up to the Supreme Court. This is part -- this is one of many controversies heading toward the Supreme Court right now because of the November midterm elections, ballot issues, redistricting issues.

And this case for Missouri is -- was part of President Trump's effort to get Republican legislatures to redistrict. Missouri did that and came up with a map that had, as you say, seven Republican seats, only one Democrat, as opposed to what the prior map had with six Republican seats.

And the state Supreme Court had struck that down, said it was -- it violated state law. There should have been a referendum to voters to do it, rather than the state legislature. And the case had actually come up to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, and Brett Kavanaugh on his own, without even referring the matter to the full Supreme Court, had rejected it.

He said, you have got no claim. He gave no reasons, but the implicit explanation was that the state Supreme Court ruling got it right that this -- there was a violation of state law there in Missouri and that the old map would have to be used. A conflicting district court ruling emerged, and they had to come back again.

And, again, today the Supreme Court rejected it without any comment, which shows, Boris, that it really was an easy case for them, no real dispute. The state law prevails.

SANCHEZ: There's another big case concerning the midterms...

BISKUPIC: Right.

SANCHEZ: ... that the court may weigh in on soon, President Trump's executive order on mail-in ballots. There was some movement today.

BISKUPIC: Right. We finally got the last response from the Trump administration. This one is really important.

This is the most important one to date, because this is the case that arises from President Trump's March executive order changing the rules for mail-in ballots, saying the -- giving the post office a lot of authority for just ensuring that there are certain bar codes on envelopes, a new process the states say they're not ready for, a post office whistle-blower says they're not ready for, the postal workers union says they're not ready for.

And the states challenging this say this could potentially disenfranchise millions of voters, especially the disabled, the elderly, the military. And, right today, Boris, the Trump administration gave its final legal argument, saying, look, this is just a modest thing we're trying to do here. We're not trying to have the post office take over elections.