Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

Feds Raise Concerns About White House Plan to Police Social Media; More Potential Mass Shootings Thwarted; Trump's Behavior Becoming More Erratic?. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired August 22, 2019 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:00]

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: The economy has, of course, been President Trump's strongest bragging point as he tries to win reelection.

So, his recent erratic behavior in which he retweeted himself as the king of Israel, and flip-flopped-flipped on gun background checks, snubbed Denmark, and, even more, led us to this quote from "The New York Times."

So, this is what they're saying: "Some former administration officials in recent days said that they were increasingly worried about the president's behavior, suggesting it stems from rising pressure on Mr. Trump, as the economy seems more worrisome and next year's election approaches."

So, Gloria Borger is with me. She's our chief political analyst.

And, Gloria, what we all witnessed yesterday on the North Lawn, whether it's -- whether you want to call it a meltdown or mania or Trump being Trump, is this...

GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Or all of the above.

BALDWIN: Or all of the above.

BORGER: All of the above, yes.

BALDWIN: Is the underlying issue politics and wanting to be reelected, which is all predicated upon this economy?

BORGER: Sure.

Look, this is a president who is worried about success and always has worried about being seen as a success. He talks about losers with derision, as you know. And he always talked about, we're going to win so much, you're going to get tired of winning.

And he has also portrayed himself as a person whose calling card is somebody who's able to manage the economy. And when you see these trends, it's worrisome.

And what Donald Trump is trying to do, I think, is throw everything up against the wall to convince the American public and perhaps himself that this really isn't anything and that the economy is going to be just fine and that, anyway, if it weren't fine, of course, it weren't -- it isn't his fault, it would be Barack Obama's fault or whoever else he can potentially name.

But, of course, I think people inside the White House who know him very well see this, because he seems to be spinning like a top these days, don't you think?

BALDWIN: Well, you mentioned Barack Obama. He mentioned him how many times yesterday? Twenty?

BORGER: Twenty?

BALDWIN: Twenty times?

BORGER: Yes.

BALDWIN: Why can't he let him go?

BORGER: I think because he believes that he's continually being compared to Barack Obama, and in an unfavorable way by lots of voters, and that, after the great recession, that Barack Obama, in effect, got the economy out of that.

And what Donald Trump is saying is that that's really not true, that, actually, I'm the one who has saved the economy. And so on, any given day, on any given issue, whether it's the Iran nuclear deal, whether it's dealings with Israel, whether it's dealings with Putin, the G7, he's always going to blame somebody else, because, of course, he is never personally responsible for anything that goes wrong.

So he's going to look at the person that is a popular political figure right now. One day, it might be Hillary Clinton. She's not as popular, obviously, as Barack Obama. The next day, it might be Joe Biden. The day after that, it could be Nancy Pelosi. Who knows.

BALDWIN: You look at someone like former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh...

BORGER: Yes.

BALDWIN: ... who has, you know, expressed regret about his past rhetoric and is seriously looking at a Trump challenge because, as he puts it, Trump is an unfit con man. Those are his words. Here he was.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Are you running against him?

JOE WALSH (R), FORMER U.S. CONGRESSMAN: I'm strongly, strongly considering it. The only way you primary Donald Trump and beat him is to expose him for the con man he is. And if I did it, John, that's what I would do. I would punch him every single day.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BORGER: Yes, it's kind of quixotic. You're not going to beat Donald Trump in the primaries, but I think what Walsh's saying is that somebody's got to punch him back, and somebody in his own party has to punch him back.

And, as you know, from covering politics as long as you have, there's been a lot of time people have been waiting for people in the Senate to do that with Donald Trump...

BALDWIN: Punch him back?

BORGER: ... to punch him back, because, on all kinds of Republican orthodoxy, including the size of the deficit, for example, including relationship with Russia, for example, Donald Trump has been on the opposite side of the fence.

But they're not punching him back because they're afraid of him, because he's very popular with the Republican base and they don't want to lose their elections.

Walsh has nothing to lose at this point. He's not in Congress. He can punch as hard as he wants. He's not going to win. But maybe he figures, if he has a couple of good debates with him, that he can expose him.

[15:05:01]

I mean, I -- as I said, I think it's quixotic. I don't think it matters much, but he's thinking about it.

BALDWIN: Well, let me bring in someone who has of bit of an opinion on this subject.

He's Republican strategist Rick Wilson. He just wrote a provocative piece about the president's behavior in The Daily Beast. It's called "This isn't the madman theory. This is a madman president."

So, Rick, we wanted to talk to you today. And of the parts your piece that I can quote on national television, you say that the president is bat-bleep crazy, and that there is not a damn thing anyone can do about it until 2020.

So I see you're really on the fence on this one.

(LAUGHTER)

RICK WILSON, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: It took me a long time to decide that Donald Trump was nuttier than a than a outhouse rat, but it's true. He is.

The guy is clearly showing signs of cognitive decline. He's clearly showing signs of instability. I mean, you combine every -- all these pressures of the presidency on a normal human being, and it's going to bear down on them heavily.

The office always ages people heavily. But in all of our presidents before us, no one ever woke up and thought, hey, I wonder if Barack Obama is going to nuke Denmark today or if George Bush is going to nuke Belize because they insulted him on Twitter?

And nobody ever, political disagreements aside, woke up and said, hey, I wonder if that guy's really actually out of his mind?

But Donald Trump every day is giving us more and more evidence that he is not mentally capable of holding this office. I mean, we know he's not morally capable of it or intellectually capable. But there's a real question now of whether Donald Trump is actually a sane person.

BALDWIN: Again, nobody here is his doctor. I just feel the need to say we can't -- we don't know what's going on.

WILSON: Oh, no. I'm just an amateur psychiatrist.

BALDWIN: Yes.

But I was talking to Gloria a second ago about -- we mentioned Joe Walsh and Republicans. I mean, you were one of the Republican operatives who recruited Evan McMullin as, you know, a never-Trump independent candidate in '16.

Is there a Republican right now who can truly challenge Trump and disrupt his base?

WILSON: Look, I think it's a very high mountain to climb for any Republican to break Donald Trump, because it is no longer the Republican Party. It is the Trump party.

And so I think it's meritorious that guys like Joe and other folks and Bill Weld and other folks are either in or considering getting in, because I do think that there are still 15 to 25 percent of the party who actually believe the things we always said we believed in, fiscal discipline, limited government, individual liberty, the rule of law, and aren't just members of the Trump orange Kool-Aid cult.

But that is a very high hill to climb. I think, though, all of them are gambling on one big thing, that there may be an externality. There may be a moment where there's something that's so shocking, that actually Republicans do have to admit that this guy is not the stable genius, that he is not the great negotiator, that he is not some god walking along the surface of the earth.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: But don't they know that?

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Of the not drinking the, what did you call it, orange Kool- Aid, I mean, there are plenty of Republicans who are looking, who would love a more maybe viable option who have been offended by much of what you write about.

WILSON: Sure. BALDWIN: I'm just wondering, if you have a Joe Walsh or a governor Weld, and we can predict how the primary would go -- in the end, I guess I'm wondering, would that be a gift to the Democrats?

WILSON: Look, I think that Donald Trump deserves a challenge. He deserves to have someone from the right critique him. He deserves to have someone from the right go out and punch him just as hard as he punched everybody else.

And there are so many fundamental weaknesses in Trump's intellect and his presidency itself, that it is obvious that somebody needs to make that case. Is it a tough case? Absolutely. Is it a hard lift? Absolutely. Does anyone underestimate it? No, I don't think so.

BORGER: No.

And I think, look, the Republican base wouldn't necessarily buy it, as you know, Rick, right? And I think...

(CROSSTALK)

WILSON: No, no, no, I completely agree.

BORGER: Right.

And in the end, it may not be something momentous, as you put it, that would defeat Donald Trump, but rather something more like the exhaustion of the American public that could in the end defeat Donald Trump...

WILSON: Sure.

BORGER: ... which would be not so much the base that is solid, it is rock-solid, but independent voters, who -- many of whom kind of held their noses because -- and voted for him because they didn't like Hillary Clinton, who could say, you know what, I'm just exhausted by all of this every single day.

(CROSSTALK)

BORGER: And that might -- that might do it, rather than some big momentous news event or calamity, God forbid, occurring.

WILSON: Sure.

BALDWIN: Do you -- I mean, go ahead, Rick.

(CROSSTALK)

WILSON: I'm sorry.

I do think, in the general election, that's a much more likely scenario than the externality, the meteor striking the Earth scenario, or Donald Trump like deciding to wake up one morning and wander around nude on the White House lawn.

[15:10:07]

But those things -- that exhaustion is real. That desire to, like, not have the show every day and have an actual president who isn't playing reality TV games, that's absolutely out there. And I think could be a sort of general election factor.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: I was talking to Evan McMullin last hour. And he was saying to me, really, between now and the election, expect more of this behavior, it will get worse, he will want to further divide the country, and especially if -- I mean, the variable here is the economy, which his reelection could be predicated upon, right?

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: So isn't that what's driving this behavior, Rick?

WILSON: Well, look, the idea used to be that Trump was a strategic genius who played eight-dimensional chess and did all these things.

I think, though, he has an instinct for destruction, an instinct for division, an instinct for the con. And those are the things -- I think Evan is right on that point, that Trump will do more and more and more of this to try to divide the country, ratchet things up.

But he does it almost from this weird reflexive position that it's almost like a defiant child. It's almost like a toddler who's going to keep hitting the spoon on the table, because he knows it irritates you and he knows it bothers you.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: But that child needs an adult in the room. And I'm wondering also with behavior, is this also because he's gotten rid of so many adults, right, people who tried to keep things somewhat normal in government?

WILSON: Sure. Sure.

BORGER: Well, he doesn't feel like he needs them. I mean, that's been the big difference.

I think when Donald Trump came to his office, he believed that he needed to learn how to be president. And now, from my sources, he believes that he doesn't need that anymore, that, of course, he can be his own press secretary, he can be his own secretary of state, he can be his own national security adviser, he knows how to do it.

So he doesn't need the advice of other people anymore, nor does he need the advice of allies. The thing that I think we are seeing now is that he does have the potential -- while he does have an uncanny instinct of an entertainer to know what appeals to people, he also can miscalculate.

And if you look at what he's done, for example, with Jewish voters over the last couple of days, I would argue that, in the long run, when we look back on that, that will be regarded as a huge insult to Jewish voters and a huge miscalculation the part of the president.

BALDWIN: But at the end of the day, going ahead into November, what is his vulnerability, right, for people to pounce on, whether it's the Joe Walshes and the Governor Welds, or the Joe Bidens or the Elizabeth Warrens?

Like, where can they, I don't know, win?

BORGER: Well...

WILSON: Well, all presidential campaigns are -- reelection campaigns are a referendum on the incumbent.

And they need to be making a case not about whatever esoteric policy they think is going to drive primary voters. They need to be making a case in the general election audience that Donald Trump has lied and failed to deliver his promises, that the actions he has taken have in fact hurt, instead of helped them.

And that's easily provable in a lot of cases, like the trade wars destroying farming, manufacturing, timber, all sorts of different industry sectors in the country. You also need to prove that Donald Trump is putting himself first. He's a guy whose ego and his bottom line are much more important than the American people.

There is no real MAGA. It is make Donald Trump's bank account right again, make Donald Trump's ego great again. These are things that are obviously ways you make it a referendum on Trump, and you show people the delta between the lies and the reality that this guy has foisted upon them.

And I think that's where the argument becomes more credible than saying, oh, we're going to fight Donald Trump on policy.

He has no policy. His policy fits on a trucker hat.

BORGER: Right.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate both of you guys.

And if you have not read Rick's column, whew.

(LAUGHTER)

BALDWIN: That's all I'm saying, over at The Daily Beast.

BORGER: Right.

BALDWIN: Rick Wilson, Gloria Borger, thanks for the party conversation, you two. I appreciate it.

BORGER: Sure.

WILSON: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Coming up next, two more mass shooting threats stopped in what has been a series of arrests since the back-to-back attacks in El Paso and Dayton. This time, a hotel and school were the potential targets.

And Governor Jay Inslee drops out of the presidential race. We will talk about whether his singular focus on the climate crisis may have changed the 2020 conversation at all.

And just in to CNN, the Trump White House getting major backlash for a proposal to regulate what it believes is censorship on social media. And this is all coming from inside this administration.

So stay right here. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:19:49]

BALDWIN: We're back. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

We are learning new details of two additional mass shooting threats thwarted by police, first in Long Beach, California. Police say a suspect amassed a collection of high-powered and high-capacity weapons and was preparing to target the hotel where he worked.

[15:20:06]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT LUNA, LONG BEACH POLICE CHIEF: Suspect Montoya had clear plans, intent and the means to carry out an act of violence that may have resulted in a mass casualty incident.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: And then, secondly, in Florida, police arrested a 16-year- old girl for threatening to carry out a shooting at her sister school via text message.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHELLE SOSA, ALTAMONTE SPRINGS POLICE DEPARTMENT: The reason why they do this, we don't know. But there is no tolerance for threats like these. And we want to encourage parents to educate their children. Let them know that this is not a game, it is not a joke.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: So these arrests now make 29 incidents where police were alerted to a possible shooting threat since the Dayton mass shooting earlier this month.

And with me now, Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama.

So nice to see you.

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Live and in person.

BALDWIN: Twenty-nine arrests, by CNN's count.

KAYYEM: Yes.

BALDWIN: Why are we seeing more of these plots thwarted? Is it that law enforcement have been doing this all along, we're just paying more attention, or that more people...

KAYYEM: It could be that.

So, there's a combination of factors in play. So one is obvious focus on this particular threat. We see this case of the one 16-year-old girl. She's an outlier. We shouldn't focus on her. All the other cases are white men, following in the lines of El Paso and that kind of animation or that kind of ideology.

(CROSSTALK)

KAYYEM: So the FBI is looking for it.

Friends and family are now more cognizant that this is no joking around. So they're coming forward with the information. And then I think there's a little bit of a sort of 15 minutes of fame aspect to this.

What I find so interesting in these terror -- they're terrorism cases -- in these cases is, almost all these guys are advertising it. They're publicizing it, like, as if it's...

(CROSSTALK)

KAYYEM: Yes, it's like they're waiting for the Nielsen ratings or whatever.

And so part of that is new, but it also means that they are getting caught so far, fortunately, before any of these mass shootings.

BALDWIN: A majority of these instances stem from family members and friends alerting police, to your point.

KAYYEM: Yes.

BALDWIN: So do you think that leads to this notion of red flag laws being passed, that people -- if family members do know...

KAYYEM: Yes.

BALDWIN: ... and they can tell authorities to take away guns or what have you?

KAYYEM: Right. I feel strongly about this. I think that's a piece of it, which is

the family members, the friends, the girlfriends. A lot of these men have sort of female animus or hatred towards women. So there's going to be evidence of suspicious behavior or violent behavior.

So the family is going to know and they should come forward. And there's an embarrassment factor or a, it couldn't possibly be him, he's just joking around or he's always been like that. I think you're starting to see family members take this more seriously.

I, however, and many of us in homeland security also believe the combination of the ideology, motivation, right-wing extremism, the failure by the White House and the president to condemn it, combined with assault weapons, things that -- weapons that can kill people very quickly is what's leading to this sort of series of mass shootings that we have seen.

And so while it's important to address ideology, and it's important to address the kind of anger that's getting people to the places that they are at, we can't forget that we have instruments of war on the streets that are killing lots of people very, very quickly.

And if we get -- if we forget that that's part of the debate, we all lose, because we see these numbers, what, 12 killed in 30 seconds.

BALDWIN: Yes, yes. No, that's obviously a huge, huge part of the conversation.

KAYYEM: Yes.

BALDWIN: Going back to the family members, though, and those just girlfriends or what have you, if they have, let's say, a Facebook thread...

KAYYEM: Right.

BALDWIN: ... or sort of a text thread that shows that person X was considering doing something, and they don't report it, is there any -- is there potential criminality there?

KAYYEM: Generally, there is no duty to come forward unless you're a conspirator. So you can -- because your defense is going to be, I thought it was a joke.

But what we recommend when we're in government is, it's often even -- let the legal process determine whether it's a joke, because what the person looking at the texts may not know is that the other day the guy bought a bunch of guns, and then two days before that he was online learning how to shoot or make a bomb.

So the texts are only a piece of the picture of what the criminal activity is. But if you can bring those texts forward, then you might be able to disclose or stop a tragedy. And so it's important that people not think they're seeing the totality. You're seeing a piece, but that piece is very, very -- could be an important piece to stopping terror attacks. BALDWIN: And to report it and to leave it up to law enforcement to move forward.

KAYYEM: Yes.

BALDWIN: Juliette Kayyem, thank you very much.

KAYYEM: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Just into CNN, new details on how federal regulators are pushing back big time on a White House proposal to regulate social media.

And the president's personal lawyer going out of his way to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden -- what we're learning about Rudy Giuliani's closed-door meeting with a Ukrainian official.

We will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:29:35]

BALDWIN: Just in to CNN, President Trump's plan to police Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms getting now major pushback from federal officials who would be asked to serve as Internet police.

Sources telling CNN a draft of a Trump administration executive order is raising serious concerns among officials at the Federal Communications and Trade commissions.

A key issue raised, that the Trump plan may be unconstitutional.

So, let's bring in CNN tech reporter Brian Fung, who is breaking the story.

And so, Brian, what are you hearing from federal officials about their major concerns regarding --

[15:30:00]