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Kushner Bragged In April That Trump Cut Out Doctors, Scientists; Trump To Women: We're Getting Your Husbands Back To Work; Utah Hospitals Overwhelmed, May Have To Start Rationing Care. Aired 2:30-3p ET
Aired October 28, 2020 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[14:30:00]
JARED KUSHNER, SENIOR ADVISER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP (voice-over): That, in my mind, was almost like Trump getting the country back from the doctors, right?
In the sense that what he now did was, you know, he's going to -- there were three phases. There was the panic phase, the pain phase, and the come-back phase.
That doesn't mean there's still not a lot of pain and there won't be pain for a while. But that basically was -- we put out rules to get back to work.
Trump's now back in charge. It's not the doctors. They've -- we've negotiated a settlement.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: All right. That was part of an interview with Bob Woodward for his best-selling new book "Rage."
Joining me now is CNN Special Correspondent, Jamie Gangel.
Jamie, I know you have more clips to share. But let's start with what we just heard. That statement by Jared Kushner in April ages very poorly.
JAMIE GANGEL, CNN SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: It certainly does. It shows a disregard, a callous disregard for the American public, their health.
A negotiated settlement? That sounds as if they saw the doctors as adversaries.
It really just underscores that this was about a political strategy. They had one concern, Election Day. Once again, this was a failure of leadership, a betrayal of trust.
If you look at the number of deaths on April 18th, more than 40,000 Americans had died. We were at the height of it.
In between April 18th and today, we have lost another 185,000 Americans. That was the cost of this policy -- Brianna?
KEILAR: Yes. It's like a focus on points to be won, not on the lives that could be saved or were being lost.
And Kushner also had some choice words for former top White House officials. Tell us about that.
GANGEL: So, for the past four years, this is not a surprise, we have seen President Trump call people names and blame the people around him.
What we hear in this interview is Jared Kushner echoes those sentiments.
But listen carefully to how he describes the people who are now at the White House.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KUSHNER (voice-over): The most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots, right, because that has a way sometimes of getting past his defense mechanism.
Because if you're overconfident, then sometimes, you know, on a topic or he doesn't have other people around to kind of validate it, then he can sometimes say, OK, let's go with that.
So that's kind of - I think if you look at the evolution of time, we've gotten rid of a lot of the overconfident idiots. And now we've got a lot more thoughtful people who kind of know their place and know what to do.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GANGEL: Yes, there are two things that strike me. He had to have other people around to balance the overconfident people.
But the other thing, those words about senior staff who are there now "know their place."
It's clear that, you know, whether it's administration officials or doctors, health experts, President Trump wants to be the one who's in charge.
KEILAR: But he's also described -- he's almost kind of infantilizing the president, that he's controlled by whoever is swaying him at the moment and there needs to be people around him to push him in the right direction.
In the interview, Kushner also expressed contempt for the Republican Party. Tell us about this.
GANGEL: I can't imagine this is going to sit well with lifelong Republicans. I don't think it is a surprise.
But hearing Jared Kushner say this is pretty stark. He is dismissive of the party. He is dismissive of the Republican platform.
And listen to this. He credits his father-in-law with a hostile takeover.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KUSHNER (voice-over): And so you look at like the Republican Party platform. He's a document that will piss people off basically more than if it's done by activist.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Yes.
KUSHNER: You have a disproportionality between what issues people are vocal on and what the people, the voters really care about.
And what Trump's been able to do and I say he's basically done a full hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And I don't think it's even as much about the issues. I think it's about the attitude.
GANGEL: The attitude, Brianna.
KEILAR: I think that part is actually true, that it might not be about the issues. it is about the issues, but it's certainly about the attitude. I think that's a very good observation there. Some of the other stuff I don't think so.
Tell us about -- you have another clip. This is actually -- this is a new one of Trump talking about Jared Kushner.
[14:35:01]
GANGEL: So this is new audio of President Trump we have not heard before.
But I think it's important, because the president may not be happy that these comments from Jared Kushner are being made public right before the election.
But when you hear what President Trump says to Woodward, he's going to have a hard time divorcing himself from that.
Here's what Trump told Woodward about his son-in-law.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (voice-over): I told Jared to speak to you. And I believe he has.
BOB WOODWARD, JOURNALIST & AUTHOR (voice-over): Yes.
TRUMP: But I just told him a little while ago that, if you would do me a favor, Jared, and go and make a little bit with Bob, so that Bob can speak to anybody he wants to. Jared will handle it. Very capable guy, Jared. You can't get people like this.
WOODWARD: We talked more -- (CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: And if you could deal with Jared a little bit. See me whenever you want.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GANGEL: One smart cookie, Brianna.
But this is just not the kind of thing that the White House wants out there, because he very specifically says that the president wanted to sideline the doctors -- Brianna?
KEILAR: Yes, illuminating sound that you've got there, Jamie. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. Jamie Gangel.
GANGEL: My pleasure.
KEILAR: I want to get a medical perspective on all of this. I'm joined by professor of medicine at George Washington University, Dr. Jonathan Reiner.
As you here that, Dr. Reiner, when you hear that, what you reaction is. When you hear Jared Kushner say Trump is back in charge, not the doctors. That was back in April.
DR. JONATHAN REINER, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: It makes my blood boil, Brianna.
Back in April -- I think that was taped on April 18th -- we had 700,000 cases in the United States. Since that time, there have been eight million more cases. That was around the time the country was opening against the CDC guidelines. States were opening up and not adhering to CDC guidelines.
Many of us have wonder whether what has happened since has just been simply incompetent or malfeasance. Now we know the answer, that it's both.
That the president intentionally disregarded the advice of his Coronavirus Task Force. And this is why, over the ensuing weeks and months we saw less and less of people like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield.
Because their strategy was to bury them and proceed with opening the states for the president's own political reasons.
KEILAR: I think --
REINER: It makes me really, really angry.
KEILAR: Yes. To that point, I think what this -- I said to Jamie that these pieces of tape are so illuminating, because you realize that they're rebuffing doctors who were valuing public health and they were valuing human lives.
When you listen to the tape of Jared Kushner there, you do not get the sense that that is what he's valuing.
REINER: No. Not at all. In fact, on one of the tapes, he said -- I wrote it down -- "And if you're preparing for a worst-case scenario, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
No, no, that's wrong. In medicine, we always prepare for the worst- case scenario, in case it happens.
That's what a pandemic response is. It's preparing for the worst-case scenario.
So because they weren't preparing for the worst-case scenario, we're still reusing PPE. Because they didn't want to prepare for the worst- case scenario, because it will look bad or discourage economic regrowth, right, we don't have enough testing.
And because they wanted to open up and because they put the president in charge rather than the doctors in charge, right, we've had 185,000 more deaths. That's what's happening.
KEILAR: It's staggering.
Dr. Reiner, thank you so much for being with us.
REINER: My pleasure. Thank you.
[14:39:25]
KEILAR: Next, the president tells suburban women we're getting your husbands back to work. We'll roll the tape why that view is pretty outdated.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KEILAR: Nostalgia, most everyone loves it but not everyone lives it quite like President Trump. He may be running for reelection in 2020, but President Trump is living in 1950, back when father knew best.
In a tone-deaf plea to suburban women yesterday, he said this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I'm getting your kids back to school. Get your kids back to school.
(CHEERING)
TRUMP: You know what else? I'm also getting your husbands' -- they want to get back to work, right? They want to get back to work. We're getting your husbands back to work.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: He seems to miss that, decades ago, women joined the workforce en masse. Now, they actually account for the majority of it. The current recession is hurting them more than men. Layoffs happening
in sections of the economy where women are disproportionately represented.
[14:44:59]
And one in four women report they're considering leaving the workplace or cutting back time because the burden of the pandemic is falling more on working moms.
But this is hardly the first time the president thinking of women waiting all day at home for their husbands to return from their bread- winning careers.
In his false claims that Joe Biden and the Democrats will destroy the suburbs, which, by the way, are more diverse than ever, he refers to women who lives there as housewives.
Even in his interviews from the '90s, his outdated view of the world was clear.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I think putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing.
I have days where I come home and -- I don't want to sound too much like a chauvinist, but when I come home and dinner is not ready, I go through the roof.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: More recently, when asked more about investigations of his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, over accusations that Pompeo had staffers perform personal chores, here is what Trump said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Look, he's a high-quality person, Mike. He's a very high quality, he's a very brilliant guy. And now I have you telling me about dog walking, washing dishes.
And you know what? I would rather have him on the phone with some world leader than have him wash dishes because maybe his wife isn't there or his kids aren't, you know.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: Saying a man should never wash a dish when a woman is around to do it fell out of vogue in politics long ago.
Back in May, when the president was still having coronavirus briefings during a pandemic, he signaled out two CBS reporters who he felt were unfair to him, Weijia Jang and Paula Reid.
He told the "New York Post," quote, "It wasn't Donna Reed, I can tell you that. Paula Reid, she's sitting there and I say how angry? I mean, what's the purpose? They're not even tough questions. But you see the attitude of these people, it's like incredible."
Donna Reed, the good wife from "It's a Wonderful Life." And the housewife from herself-titled 1950s sitcom.
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(MUSIC)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: Her husband on the show was a doctor. She managed the housework and getting dinner on the table. They had two kids, one boy, one girl. They were white.
Life was practically perfect if you ignore the injustice happening outside their suburban neighborhood.
As they say, ignorance is bliss. The president certainly seems to think so.
His penchant for the black-and-white era also includes movies.
Here he is longing for something other than the foreign-language film, "Parasite," that won the best picture at the Oscars this year.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: What the hell was that all about?
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: We have enough problems with South Korea, with trade. On top of it, they gave them best movie of the year? Was it good? I don't know.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: You know, I'm looking for -- let's get like "Gone with the Wind." Can we get "Gone with the Wind" back, please?
(CHEERING)
TRUMP: "Sunset Boulevard"? So many great movies.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: "Gone with the Wind," which romanticizes slavery in the antebellum south. It's a bad look for a president living in an age of reckoning over racism.
And I guess he even missed the part where even Scarlet O'Hara got a job managing a business.
Last year, when Pete Buttigieg was running for president, Trump told "Politico" that, quote, "Alfred E. Neuman cannot be president of the United States. Alfred E. Neuman was a fictional character from the 1950s whose face
was synonymous with "MAD" magazine. Buttigieg said he had to Google it because he didn't know who Alfred E. Neuman was.
Recently, Trump also took a jab at Dr. Anthony Fauci with another outdated reference, saying Fauci gets more airtime than Bob Hope. Bob Hope, who died in 2003, is an icon, no doubt. But he was in his 50s in the 1950s.
It's not just Trump. It's the folks he's surrounded himself with.
Listen to his former campaign chairman, who later convicted and sent to prison. Here's Paul Manafort was back in 2016 trying to explain why women voters would flock to President Trump.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PAUL MANAFORT, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN MANAGER: Many women in this country feel they can't afford their lives. Their husbands can't afford to pay for the family bills.
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: You know what you said? You said women are concerned about their husbands' income.
(CROSSTALK)
MANAFORT: I can speak personally to that.
MATTHEWS: Is that the 21st century talking? Is that the big concern, how their husbands are doing at work?
MANAFORT: Because they can't afford their lives anymore. That's the point. It's not -- some people don't have jobs.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: But the president's 1950s world view extends far beyond the household. He once cited the '40s and '50s as a time when, quote, "We were not pushed around. We were respected by everybody. We had just won a war. We were pretty much doing what we had to do."
[14:50:06]
He also talks as if steel and coal are the future of the U.S. economy. In fact, many of his meetings look like a steel company board from the '50s, all white men.
He denies systemic racism exists. He touts Confederate symbols. His version of exercise is golfing with a cart.
Even his go-to post, hearkens back to another tough guy from a sitcom set in the '50s.
And he waxes nostalgic for the hay day or the highway featured in malt shops and the "Grapes of Wrath."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: For many decades, Route 66 captured the American spirit. The communities along this historic route were a vivid symbol of America's booming industry.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: But as the Eagles once said, coincidentally, during the height of second-wave feminism, "Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy."
His nostalgia for the '50s is obstructing his understanding of the present-day suburbs.
It's 2020. Lassie is not coming to save us and June Cleaver is not waiting at home with meatloaf.
Ahead, Hurricane Zeta is now a category 2 storm barreling toward the gulf coast at 100 miles per hour and expected to make landfall very soon. We're going to take you there.
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[14:55:29]
KEILAR: Another coronavirus record has just been set. More than half a million Americans testing positive in the past week alone.
The U.S. is now averaging nearly 72,000 cases a day. There are 40 states that are seeing a rise in cases. You can look here. See all that orange and red on this map? That is not good.
And take a look at this. There are deaths that are rising in 27 states. Authorities are reporting 985 new deaths. The nationwide death toll has now surpassed 227,000 Americans lost to this virus.
Many hospitals across the country are overwhelmed with the spikes they're seeing in coronavirus patients.
That includes in Utah where officials are warning that if these hospitalization numbers don't turn around soon, some of their hospitals may have to start rationing health care.
I want to bring in Dr. Edward Stenehjem to talk about this. He is an infectious disease physician at Utah's Intermountain HealthCare.
Doctor, thank you for taking the time to be with me, and taking the time.
Because you're very much on the front lines of Salt Lake City treating patients. What are you experiencing with this surge? What is it like in the hospitals?
DR. EDWARD STENEHJEM, INFECTIOUS DISEASE PHYSICIAN, INTERMOUNTAIN HEALTHCARE: Yes, right now, we are seeing increasing hospitalizations throughout our entire system. Our system spans the entire state of Utah.
And what we're seeing is cases in the hospital are going up all throughout Utah from the southern end to the northern end.
Our hospitals are getting quite full, both on the medical units and also in intensive care units.
KEILAR: And so as you're seeing case numbers on the rise in Utah, do you worry that you could be or hospitals could be facing rationing care, deciding which patients have the best prognosis to take up resources to be in the ICU?
STENEHJEM: Yes, we definitely are worried about cases continuing to rise.
As we know, hospitalizations typically lag seven to 10 days from cases that are reported to the state. So we anticipate our hospitalization numbers will continue to rise over the next couple weeks. And that's assuming something changes in the community.
And what we're doing with Intermountain HealthCare is, we're really trying to accommodate that surge in being able to bring in our patients and spread them throughout our system so they have beds available for them.
For us, it's -- the beds aren't the issue. We can develop beds and locations for them.
But what we worry most about are our caregivers. Our caregivers are exhausted. They're fatigued.
We've been at this for seven to eight months. And now we're adding more and more cases to them. And it's really going to be a limitation of resources at our caregiver level.
KEILAR: So it's the staff more than the beds.
I think a lot of us struggle to even imagine what's going on until we hear it from people like you, because this is all happening behind closed doors at hospitals.
Tell us more about the exhaustion. Tell us the conditions and the hours that folks are working at as they're also trying not to contract COVID themselves. What are they dealing with?
STENEHJEM: Right. As you can imagine, we have ICU physicians and nurses and staff and also our hospital-based staff taking care of these patients day in, day out, suffering with these patients. And they're tired and they're fatigued.
As our cases rise, we're going to be continuing to ask more of them. Longer shifts, more shifts, less breaks.
Quite frankly, if we continue to add patients, we're not going to have enough ICU doctors, ICU nurses or trained medical staff on our floors to really care for them. And so then we're going to have to really shift our model of care where we're going to have ICU doctors potentially supervising doctors that not necessarily have been trained in the ICU but are going to be caring for patients in the ICU.
So it's really going to be a change in the model. And it's not how we would like to care for patients here with us.
KEILAR: Look, the good news is that people can do some simple things.
Can you tell us what you're asking members of your community and people across the country to do to try to ensure that staff members aren't overwhelmed?
STENEHJEM: Right. I mean, at this point in Utah, we're seeing a very significant spike in cases, and we need to do something now at a community and state level that's aggressive and that's bold that will actually change the tide of this infection that we're seeing here in the state of Utah.
In my opinion, that action needs to be a temporary pause. We need to really be thinking hard about shutting down restaurants in congregate settings and really minimizing any kind of group activity.
[15:00:00]
It's really going to be something like that that will really make an impact on our community-based cases.
Right now, we're continuing to call on the community to always wear a mask and be 100 percent compliant with mask use.
