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FOX & Trump Spinning the Lethality of COVID with Propaganda; Biden Takes Biggest Lead Yet in New CNN Poll; Michelle Obama Video Urges Vote for Biden, Calls Trump's Actions "Morally Wrong" and "Racist"; Biden to Speak on Unity, Race Equality at Gettysburg; Widow of Broadway Star Nick Cordero to Trump: "Have Some Empathy"; Remembering the Lives Lost to Coronavirus. Aired 2:30-3p ET
Aired October 06, 2020 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:30:00]
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: He's mocked masks, which the CDC calls the key weapon that we have to fight the virus.
The president's behavior was an open door to the virus, a red carpet that he rolled out and the virus walked right in. And that, according to this campaign, is actually a personal experience he can tout from a position of strength.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ERIN PERRINE, DIRECTOR OF PRESS COMMUNICATIONS, TRUMP CAMPAIGN: Listen, he has experiences as commander-in-chief. He has that experience as a businessman. He has experience now of fighting the coronavirus as an individual. Those firsthand experiences, Joe Biden, he doesn't have those.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: So the strategy now is, cast his likely self-inflicted infection as a strength and downplay COVID's lethality, as he did just this morning while he is still not out of the woods according to his doctor.
Trump, again, comparing it to the flu. And where did he get that from?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): Number one, it's very contagious. And number two, it's not nearly as lethal as the experts told us it would be.
BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS HOST (voice-over): This is serious. It's very infectious. But it's but probably not -- almost certainly not going to kill you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: Fair, balanced, and unafraid to be dangerously ignorant. It will probably almost certainly not kill you. Except when it
certainly does, like it did to the more than 210,000 Americans who have died in nearly eight months.
Severely outpacing the flu. Look at the past decade. During a bad flu season that lasts about seven months, the flu kills about 60,000 Americans.
In about the same number of months of coronavirus, we're at almost four times that right now. The number of COVID deaths have surpassed the past five flu seasons combined, according to the CDC.
And according to the president as well. Because remember, this is how he described coronavirus privately back in February.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (voice-over): It's also more deadly than your, you know, even your strenuous flus.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: He tells the truth in private but tells the public the opposite. And FOX backs him up.
It's most prominent voices promoting a "dying by COVID is OK" theme, as they tell millions of viewers, many of whom are older and more vulnerable to this virus, this:-
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX HOST, "TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT": The median age of death for coronavirus in this country is 78 years old. As it happens, 78 is also the life expectancy for all people in this country.
In other words, it's dangerous to be an old person who has the coronavirus. It's also dangerous to be an old person, period.
At some point, we are all going to die. Dying is the central fact of life.
Unfortunately, a secular society has no answer for that, no explanation, and no comfort to give us in the face of it. So no wonder we're so terrified.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: The median age of a FOX News viewer is 67 years old. That's the median age. And Tucker Carlson is bringing his show to them from the comfort and isolation of a studio where health precautions are taking place.
Perhaps he should listen to someone that he admires very much, who said this in March:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) CARLSON: People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem.
No doubt these people have good intentions, as they say. This many of them, anyway. Maybe they don't know any better. Maybe they're just not paying attention.
Or maybe they believe they're serving some higher cause by shading reality.
And there's an election is coming up. That's not to say anything that might help the other side. We get it.
But they're wrong. The Chinese coronavirus is a major event. It will affect your life.
And by the way, it's definitely not just the flu.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: That's right. Before Tucker Carlson subscribed to the "no big deal" school of B.S. coronavirus thought, he told viewers about the dangers of it.
What the president appears to be calling for is herd immunity. And his TV buddies are pushing it.
Go out. Be normal, they say. But in parentheses, the part they don't say, a lot of you will die. But not percentage-wise, just hundreds of thousands of you. No big deal. Right?
What they're really saying is that some people will have to be sacrificed, but they're not raising their hands. They're raising the hands of American whose have given them their trust.
Case in point. The campaign says it won't change a thing about its rallies.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JASON MILLER, SENIOR ADVISER, TRUMP CAMPAIGN: We're going to make sure we take everybody's temperature as they're coming into events. We're going to give everybody a mask. We're going to give --
ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Which is what you've been doing.
MILLER: -- everybody hand sanitizer.
CABRERA: Which is what you've didn't doing.
MILLER: We're going to encourage people to wear their masks.
And you know what? That's been a very safe and very responsible thing to do. And that's what we've done from the beginning of this. We're taking very seriously.
And so we've always --
CABRERA: Jason -
MILLER: -- been leading from --
CABRERA: Jason --
MILLER: -- the front on that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: And Team Trump is still mocking masks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RUDY GIULIANI, PRESIDENT TRUMP'S ATTORNEY: That's a political statement to scare people, wearing that mask. You do not need that mask when you're standing on a podium and nobody is within half a football field of you.
I don't wear a mask as much as probably I should, and I haven't gotten COVID either. And a lot of people on both sides of that.
UNIDENTIFIED FOX NEWS HOST: I mean --
GIULIANI: What they claim as science is nonsense.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[14:35:06]
KEILAR: Rudy Giuliani, mind you, coughed through that interview.
It's not just masks that Trump and his sycophants mock. For tomorrow night's V.P. debate, the commission decided to put Plexiglas between Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike, who is rebuffing CDC guidelines to quarantine despite his exposure to COVID-positive patients.
Mike Pence's spokeswoman mocked it. She said, quote, "If Senator Harris wants to use a fortress around herself, have at it."
Katie Miller, who was infected herself this summer, is mocking a campaign that has been more careful and hasn't had an outbreak like it's a weakness.
She's representing a White House that is now hone to a COVID cluster of the president and aides hacking, fatigued, struggling to breathe, or quarantining working from home, refusing the CDC's help to even to figure out how big that cluster is.
As Team Trump tries to spin this, the irony and self-owns are as abundant as the vital load in the West Wing.
The campaign tweeted out an NFL clip with the president's head superimposed on a 49ers player beating an Eagle to even the score. Guess they forgot the 49ers lost that game. And Senator Kelly Loeffler tweeting out a clip of Trump pinning down the coronavirus at a WWE match.
Here's the thing though. Wrestling is fake. And so is the propaganda that says the coronavirus is not big deal. But the cost is real.
Still ahead, Joe Biden taking his biggest lead yet in a new CNN poll with less than a month until the election.
And he's getting some help from Michelle Obama. She posted a 20-minute video urging people to vote for Biden. And she's calling President Trump's actions racist. You'll hear her argument, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:40:49]
KEILAR: It's the first day of early voting in Ohio and Indiana. And a look at the line in Cincinnati earlier today as people were lining up there to cast their ballots.
Now check out all of the people who were waiting to vote in Indianapolis today.
They are among the three million Americans who have voted early in the general election.
And when we're talking about Indiana, the vice president and his wife will be traveling home Friday to vote.
And a new CNN poll finds that Joe Biden is polling ahead by his biggest margin yet with less than a month until the election. He is right now leading President Trump by a 16-point margin.
The poll also shows voters prefer Biden to handle most major issues facing the country, like the economy, coronavirus, health care, racial inequality and also crime and safety.
Biden also leads big with minority voters. And 72 percent of people of color support the former vice president. With white voters, almost evenly split.
Former first lady, Michelle Obama, pointing to the racial unrest in the U.S. as part of a video she posted today in support of Joe Biden.
In her so-called closing argument, less than a month before the election says the president's actions have been both "morally wrong" and "racist."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MICHELLE OBAMA, FORMER FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES: Put yourselves in our shoes for just a moment. Imagine how it feels to wake up every day and do your very best to uphold the values that his country claims to hold dear, truth, honor, decency.
Only to have those efforts met by scorn. Not just by your fellow citizens, but by a sitting president.
Imagine how it feels to have suspicion cast on you from the day you were born simply because of the hue of your skin.
To walk around in your own country scared that someone's unjustified fear of you could put you in harm's way.
Terrified of what four more years of this kind of division might mean for the safety of you and those you love.
Living with the knowledge that, no matter how hard we try, how much good we do in the world, there will be far too many who will never see our humanity.
Who will project on us their own fears of retribution for centuries of injustice and, thus, only see us as a threat to be restrained.
And you know what happens next. A racial slur from a passing car. A job promotion that never comes. A routine traffic stop gone wrong. Maybe a knee to the neck.
Racism, fear, division. These are powerful weapons. And they can destroy this nation if we don't deal with it head-on.
Because we can no longer pretend that we don't know exactly who and what this president stands for.
Search your hearts, and your conscience, and then vote for Joe Biden like your lives depend on it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: CNN political correspondent, Abby Phillip, joins me now.
And, Abby, she outright called Trump racist. These are carefully chosen words and that's what she said.
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And this is a continuation of what we've been hearing from Michelle Obama for months now.
And it really, I think, reached an apex over the summer with the George Floyd protests that touched off racial justice protests all across the current. And she talked about, in her podcast, the impact that had on her personally.
And in that clip you just played, she expounds on that even more, talking about, or pleading, really, with white Americans to envision themselves in the shoes of their fellow Americans, their fellow black Americans.
And really appealing to them not to get drawn into what she called the president's racist appeals to white people, to fear minorities moving into the suburbs.
[14:45:04] And specifically, I think this message really is going to be aimed at women, who she's always had a lot of sway with. Suburban women, she always had a lot of sway with them.
But they are also the constituency most open to this kind of message. And most likely to have such a pivotal role in this election.
As they continue to move away from President Trump because of his actions and because of his words, especially around issues of race and on the issue of the coronavirus.
KEILAR: And Biden, Abby, just gave a preview to reporters of a speech he's going to be giving on unity at Gettysburg today. He said it's about, quote, "The soul of America and racial equality and what significant trouble we're in right now."
Do you think that it strikes voters as authentic when he is speaking about race?
PHILLIP: You know, that's a good question. Historically, I would say that Joe Biden has not necessarily been known for being the -- the candidate who is sort of speaking to racial issues centrally as a politician.
You know, as I'm sure you know, Brianna, I think his sort of identity as a politician is on this idea of speaking to the working class, speaking to sort of middle-class people who grew up the way that he did in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and in Delaware.
But what has happened recently is that because he served as vice president to the first black president, he now has to carry on that mantle. It's one of the reasons that he won the Democratic primary.
I think the speech today is going to be him trying to make that case in a more fulsome manner.
He started the campaign saying he got in -- into the race because of how President Trump dealt with Charlottesville. Now he's making a closing argument on those same themes. And, I think, trying to get that credibility.
Does he have it right at this moment? I'm not so sure. But it's critical for him to develop it between now and November 3rd.
KEILAR: Abby, thank you so much. Abby Phillip.
And we are back now to our breaking news. Pentagon leadership, including the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are now forced to quarantine after a top Coast Guard official tested positive for coronavirus.
Plus, the widow of Broadway actor, Nick Cordero, who died from COVID- 19, will respond directly to the president's tweet that we should let the virus dominate our lives.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) AMANDA KLOOTS, WIDOW OF BROADWAY ACTOR NICK CORDERO WHO DIED OF COVID- 19: It's beyond hurtful. And have empathy. Why are you bragging?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:52:07]
KEILAR: When President Trump told Americans, don't be afraid of COVID, don't let it dominate your life, the message did not sit well with many people who have lost loved ones to coronavirus.
Among them is the widow of the late Broadway star, Nick Cordero. Nick was hospitalized in March. He was put on a ventilator. He had one of his legs amputated and he suffered severe lung damage.
And he fought like hell against the virus, but he still passed away at the young age of 41.
Here is his wife's message to the president.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KLOOTS: Not everyone is lucky enough to walk out of the hospital after two days, you know? So we saw what this disease can do. So guess what? We are afraid. We are. I still am.
And, you know, I think about, like, if I got it, if I got as sick as Nick, Little Elvis, he doesn't have his mom anymore. So I'm afraid.
And, you know, let it dominate your life? No one is letting it. Nick didn't let it. It wasn't a choice. And it dominated his life. It dominated my life. It dominated our family's lives for 95 days.
And because he didn't make it, it will forever affect my life. Even if he would have survived, it would have forever affected and changed our lives.
It's beyond hurtful. And have some empathy. Why are you bragging? Have empathy to the Americans that you are our leader. Have some empathy to the people who are suffering and grieving.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: Nick is just one of the more than 210,000 Americans lost to this virus. And it is important that we honor them and we acknowledge them.
Julie Davis was a third-grade teacher in North Carolina, just 49 years old. She died just days after learning she had the virus. Her daughter says she was selfless, caring and that she loved being a grandma. Her grandkids called her Lolly.
And 73-year-old Rebecca Cryer was a district court judge of the Choctaw Nation. A survivor of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. She leaves behind a husband of 56 years, three children, and five grandchildren.
Former Major League outfielder, Jay Johnstone, played for 20 seasons starting in 1986. He was an infamous prankster. He is best known for hitting a home run for the Dodgers in game four of the '81 World Series. Johnstone was 74.
Finally, Isabel Papadimitriou was a respiratory therapist at a Texas hospital. Her daughter says she's proud of her mom. She's proud of her for being brave enough to risk her life to save others but believes her death could have been prevented.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[14:55:07]
FIANA TULIP, LOST HER MOTHER TO COVID-19: My mom did not want to leave this earth. She had a grandchild for the first time in 64 years.
And she was so excited to spend her first birthday with her grandchild on August 25th. And she didn't get to because she died on July 4th.
She didn't want to die. She didn't deserve to die.
Don't live in fear? That's just not the kind of message that we want to hear.
Of course, we don't want to live in fear, but we have to, because the policies are not put in place to protect us.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: In Isabel's obituary, her family asked everyone to honor her by wearing a mask, washing your hands and social distancing.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[15:00:00]
