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CNN This Morning
Trump, Haley, DeSantis Blitz New Hampshire; Trump's Closing Argument to NH Voters: President Need Total Immunity. Aired 6-6:30a ET
Aired January 19, 2024 - 06:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDY SCHOLES, CNN SPORTS: McCormick is now 25 years old and says the pursuit of excellence, Kasie, has no goal line.
[06:00:07]
This man right here is living the dream. I would have loved to stay in college for nine years.
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: You know, I don't think I actually realized that when I was in college. Certainly, my parents would not have gone for me spending nine years in college.
SCHOLES: Helps when you have a scholarship. Helps when you have a football scholarship.
HUNT: I know. Right. That's pretty awesome. Andy, thank you so much. Have a wonderful weekend.
SCHOLES: You, too.
HUNT: And thanks to all of you for joining us, as well. I'm Kasie Hunt. You have a wonderful weekend, but don't go anywhere, because right now CNN THIS MORNING starts.
POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. It is Friday. I'm Poppy Harlow with Phil Mattingly in New York. Hope you're having a good morning.
Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, they're all on the ground in New Hampshire today, selling their closing arguments with just four days now until the primary. Haley, tempering expectations as Trump goes on the defense.
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: The former president asking the Supreme Court to keep him on the ballot, warning of chaos and bedlam if he's banned. And just wait until you hear how he's defending his claims of absolute immunity this morning.
Plus, a damning new report, outlining, quote, "cascading failures during the massacre" at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. What the Justice Department says should have happened to save lives as some victims waited to be rescued.
CNN THIS MORNING starts right now.
HARLOW: Just four days, four days until the New Hampshire primary, and today all three candidates are blitzing that state. The looming reality is that one more good night for Donald Trump could all but lock up this GOP presidential nomination really early.
Nikki Haley set to sprint through six stops starting next hour. Her schedule capturing the sense of urgency as she makes the case that she is the only one standing in Trump's way.
MATTINGLY: Now, during her town hall on CNN last night, Haley ditched any talk of a win or vote share in New Hampshire. Instead, she told our own Jake Tapper, her goal is to finish strong.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Governor Sununu is predicting a win for you here in New Hampshire, but he's also saying a strong second place finish would be, in his words, "great." Would a strong second-place finish be great for you?
NIKKI HALEY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: What I want to do is be strong. We're not going to know what strong looks like until those numbers come in.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTINGLY: That as Trump is relentlessly training his fire on his former U.N. ambassador, pushing to undercut Haley's electability among Republicans.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: She's not going to make it. She has no chance. She's got no way. MAGA is not going to be with her.
We're leading everywhere now, and she's not. You know, she has one obsolete poll that she likes -- She's about two months old -- where she was leading Biden. Well, those days are gone. She's not leading Biden anymore.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTINGLY: We begin this morning with CNN's Eva McKend, who's tracking a very big day on the trail for us. Eva, we're seeing some stronger attacks. We saw stronger attacks from Nikki Haley last night in that town hall. What's that tell you about what's ahead?
EVA MCKEND, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, good morning to you, Phil and Poppy.
What we saw last night from Nikki Haley is her telegraphing this new approach where she ties Trump and Biden together as being part of the past. And she argues she offers a new generation of leadership that America needs. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MCKEND (voice-over): Nikki Haley barnstorming New Hampshire with just days to go before the primary.
HALEY: Look, I mean, we want to do better than we did in Iowa. That's my personal goal.
MCKEND (voice-over): And Haley spoke to a statement she made earlier this week during an interview where she said America has never been a racist concern.
HALEY: America is not perfect. We have our stains.
MCKEND (voice-over): She said as a child, she experienced racism but also maintains she refuses to believe the premise America was ever a racist country.
HALEY: I was a brown girl that grew up in a small rural town. We had plenty of racism that we had to deal with, but my parents never said we lived in a racist country.
MCKEND (voice-over): Haley wants voters to consider what a rematch between former President Trump and President Biden will mean for the country.
HALEY: Do we really want to have two 80-year-olds running for president?
We need people who love America and realize, if your time has gone, move out of the way.
TRUMP: And I think cognitively, I'm better than I was 20 years ago.
MCKEND (voice-over): Trump hitting back at Haley, calling his former U.N. ambassador weak.
TRUMP: She would not be able to handle that position. She would not be able to handle the onslaught. With all of that being said, within the Republican Party, I want to bring unity.
MCKEND (voice-over): Trump has sharpened his attacks against Haley, even resorting to calling her by her first name, Nimarata, an attack meant to be a racist dog whistle against his rival.
HALEY: I know President Trump well. That's what he does when he feels threatened. That's what he does when he feels insecure.
MCKEND (voice-over): On Thursday, Trump's lawyers filed a brief to the Supreme Court, urging them to reverse Colorado's decision to remove him from the ballot.
[06:05:04]
Trump is claiming Biden is the real threat to democracy, in response to Biden arguing the same thing about him. TRUMP: Well, we put on three great justices, and you have some other
great justices up there, and they're not going to take the vote away from the people.
Now, Biden is a threat to democracy.
MCKEND (voice-over): Biden, for his part, is looking to the general election, campaigning in North Carolina.
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Hello, Raleigh!
MCKEND (voice-over): The president is facing a primary challenge in New Hampshire, even though he is not on the ballot. His supporters are hoping Biden can win the primary as a write-in candidate.
REP. DEAN PHILLIPS (D-MN), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Believe in change?
MCKEND (voice-over): Representative Dean Phillips, who is running a lesser-known operation against Biden, is campaigning in New Hampshire and picked up a key endorsement from former Democratic candidate Andrew Yang.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MCKEND (on camera): Now, in New Hampshire, Haley is expected to benefit from a more moderate primary electorate. But Trump, he returns to the state today for an event in Concord, and he's really hoping to have a decisive victory in the state to dull the momentum of his rivals.
HARLOW: Eva McKend, thank you for all your reporting.
MATTINGLY: We have a lot to get to this morning. Joining us now to break it all down, CNN political commentator Errol Louis; former Republican strategist and pollster, Lee Carter; and Democratic strategist and former director of the New York state Democratic Party, Basil Smikle.
Errol, I want to start with you. First, I have to make this point, because it's been bothering me for several days.
Democrats are not allowed to vote in the New Hampshire primary. Donald Trump keeps saying that. That's not actually how it works. You can change your registration a month beforehand. It actually had to be in October. Independents can vote. Democrats cannot vote.
However, to Eva's point, it is a more moderate electorate. There's no question about that. There's more independents. There's no question about that. At least in Iowa, certainly in South Carolina.
Nikki Haley saying she wants to finish strong but not setting any specific expectations. What's that tell you?
ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes. Well, it tells you that, like everyone else who has tried to take on Donald Trump, she's unclear about what her chances are, and she doesn't want to alienate his base.
So that, rather than put it in dire sort of terms, stark terms and say, either you vote for me or the party is going to collapse. You know, or either you vote for me or the Democrats are going to steamroll us in November. Rather than say anything like that, she continues to do this little dance.
And so she doesn't want to set expectations too high, because she's got a very unusual and sort of low odds path to victory.
She's got to win New Hampshire. She doesn't want to come out and say it, but that's really what all of the political odds makers will tell you. Is that she's got to win it, and that will change the race fundamentally.
If she can't win it, outright, she's got to come very, very close and come out of there with something like a moral victory. And from what she's been doing, all the resources that they poured into the state, the messaging that she's been doing. That is actually what her strategy is. She didn't want to come out and say it.
But you know, if it doesn't work out for her on Tuesday, it's going to be very hard to see a path to victory.
HARLOW: I mean, this is one of the reasons why she is trying to sort of tow that line in the middle.
Gary Tuchman, who always talks to voters and gets a real sort of sense of what's going on, on the ground, was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Here's what some of the voters told him who plan to vote, about Donald Trump and all these, you know, charges against him and if they think it makes him ineligible at all. Here it is.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Is Donald Trump fit for the presidency if he's convicted of a crime. Ninety-one counts against him.
HANK BOUCHER, NEW HAMPSHIRE VOTER: I would say yes, because I don't think there's any legitimate things that they're charging him for.
TUCHMAN: Why is that?
BOUCHER: What are they charging him for? It's all crap stuff.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If he's convicted of a crime, I don't think he should be the president.
TUCHMAN: Is he fit if he's convicted of one of these crimes?
MATTHEW PRATT, NEW HAMPSHIRE VOTER: I do feel as though he is still fit to be president of the United States, yes.
(END VIDEOTAPE) HARLOW: "I do," by the way, at the end there. And this mirrors that Iowa entrance poll that we did. Two-thirds of -- of Iowa Republican voters who went in there to caucus would still vote for him if convicted here. This is the line that Nikki Haley is trying to tow.
BASIL SMIKLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: She is trying to tow that line, and she's not doing it very well, quite frankly.
HARLOW: Really? How do you do it better?
SMIKLE: Well, I'm not saying she can do it better.
HARLOW: OK.
SMIKLE: I'm just saying she's not doing it very well. I mean, on the one hand, you're not going to be able to pull Donald Trump's voters away from Donald Trump. That's just not going to happen.
So can you walk this line between trying to get Republican -- some disaffected Republicans and independents to say that enough is enough with Donald Trump.
The question then becomes, does she have a compelling argument and create enough of a differentiation between herself and Donald Trump to be able to make a compelling case. And I just don't think that she's done that.
If you're on a debate stage and saying, Well, I'll pardon Donald Trump or, by the way, yes, these charges aren't -- don't amount to much. All you're doing, really, is propping him up, not staking out a good enough claim for yourself.
What she's doing now, probably should have been done months ago. But the fact that she's doing it right before New Hampshire, I don't know if it has any legs.
HARLOW: Just one note. I thought it was interesting when Jake asked last night, Would you give a preemptive pardon, like Ford did? And she said, no, I wouldn't. Like, you have to let the process play out for Trump. But still, she did say after, if he's convicted, she would.
[06:10:04]
MATTINGLY: Yes. Can I -- I've been thinking about the Haley theory of the case a lot, trying -- trying to game it out. Right? We all have. What's the map? What's the pathway, all of these types of things.
And the way I think it goes is you show that Trump is not infallible, is not invincible in New Hampshire. And then all of a sudden, things just start quickly your way.
You can compare it to, like, "Rocky 4," right? Drago has a weakness. This is a little weedsy. But I'm coopting it from somebody. An individual knows why.
And all of a sudden, that creates this, like, cascade effect of people rushing to Nikki Haley. When you look into the numbers, do you see any evidence that that theory of the case would play out if she wins New Hampshire? If she stuns the world on Tuesday night?
LEE CARTER, FORMER REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST AND POLLSTER: Well, if she were to win New Hampshire, and then I think Ron DeSantis would have to drop out. Right? Because Ron DeSantis then really has no path, and he's not going to win South Carolina. He doesn't have anything.
And then things start to get interesting, because those votes can start shifting to Nikki Haley. Because what Nikki Haley does have is the "never Trump" vote and all of these people who decided they're not going to vote for Donald Trump.
So she could pick up all of the Ron DeSantis votes but say -- she'd have to pick up all of them. And then she has a possible path, but it's very, very unlikely.
And I think, you know, what she's saying right now is, she's got to be within striking distance. She's got to be within what -- what the votes are that Ron DeSantis is picking up. And then she can start making an argument, I can go -- I can go forward from here.
HARLOW: What do we know about the history of New Hampshire in terms of those undeclared voters and how late they make their decision? We were talking about the candidates blitzing the state today. I think six stops for Nikki Haley. Those stops start in one hour from now.
Can she change minds in the next four days?
LOUIS: Look, the fact that independents can come in, really, at the last minute, and declare that they want to show up. It means that, if you wanted to do an exotic kind of pulling strategy in the final days, you have an opportunity to do that.
Is it actually going to come together? It really seems unlikely. I mean, that -- that is a very tough thing to do in the modern age, to do it sort of secretly, is just not even an option, right?
So you'll have to do something where people like Corey Lewandowski, you know, a prominent Trump leader who's there in New Hampshire, will detect it, will deter it, will sort of call it out.
And all of a sudden, social media and everything else is kind of, you know, telegraphing your strategy, so that sort of a sneak attack at the last minute, pulling in a whole bunch of -- of independents, very unlikely.
MATTINGLY: Big day, though, today. Six events, very clearly making the full-on sprint. Guys, stay with us. We've got have a lot more to get to.
HARLOW: We certainly do. Donald Trump has been warning of chaos and bedlam -- his words -- if he is removed from the state's primary ballot. Now, his lawyers are using that same language in their actual filings to the Supreme Court. The latest on this ballot fight next. MATTINGLY: And new overnight, the House Armed Services chairman asks
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to explain why his hospital stay was kept under wraps even from the president. New details on that, ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[06:16:42]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Well, we put on three great justices, and you have some other justices up there, and they're not going to take the vote away from the people.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HARLOW: Donald Trump predicting the Supreme Court will go his way and strike down the ruling that took him off the primary ballot in Colorado. His lawyers urging the justices to do just that.
In their new filing, Trump's lawyers echoed their client's own language. They wrote that the efforts to erode Trump, quote, "promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado's lead."
MATTINGLY: Meantime, in the legal battle over the federal 2020 election case against him, Trump digging deeper into the argument that presidents need to be completely immune from prosecution.
In an interview with FOX's Sean Hannity last night, Trump was asked for his closing message to New Hampshire voters. Trump, of course, said make America great again, and then this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: The president of the United States -- and I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about any president -- has to have immunity. Because if you take immunity away from the president -- so important -- you will have -- you will have a president that's not going to be able to do anything. Because when he leaves office, the opposing party president -- if it's the opposing party -- will indict the president for doing something that should have been good.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HARLOW: Let's bring in to the table, to the conversation, CNN senior legal analyst, Elie Honig. Errol and Lee and Basil are still with us.
Elie, the filing is really interesting from Trump's lawyers. Not just -- and we'll get, by the way, to the immunity stuff, because that's filed, too, in a moment.
But this filing at the Supreme Court by Trump's lawyers, it echoes his language. It's trying to make a number of arguments, in hopes that one sticks with the Supreme Court. Their main argument here, though, that this was -- the president, in
-- what he did didn't amount to participating in an insurrection. And by the way, if you do this, you will create a chaotic country, which is not a legal argument.
ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes.
HARLOW: How do you expect the Supreme Court to address that?
HONIG: Well, so a lot of focus is on this phrase, "chaos and bedlam," that's in the brief. I can't defend the "bedlam" part of it.
But the chaos part of it, I think if you look at the brief, he actually says -- they say legal chaos, political chaos, and they're right.
I mean, we've done the map. We've shown the map. Right? The red states are all the states that have rejected these 14th Amendment challenges. The yellow states -- and there's about a dozen of them -- are the ones where the challenges have failed so far, but not finally.
And then you have the two blue states. You have Colorado and Maine that have thrown him off. That is chaotic. And in fact, one of the Colorado Supreme Court justices said the the -- the dissenters said the problem with all of this is it's chaos. You can't have some states throwing him off, some states not.
HARLOW: My question to you is, it's not really a legal, constitutional issue -- that is not -- that the Supreme Court would address. Can they still do it that way?
HONIG: That is a policy argument that you can make to support a legal argument.
With respect to the legal arguments, there's two categories in the brief. One is the factual claim, I did not engage in insurrection. I don't think the Supreme Court's going to take that. That's not what they do. That's not their function. They don't make findings of facts. That's what judges and juries are for.
Then there's this series of procedural arguments, which boil down to, in a sentence, we don't know how this process works. And we can't make it up on the fly here, different state by state, and then apply it backwards.
And so there's various sort of versions of that. But I think the procedural arguments where this is going to be decided and, I think, won on Trump's behalf.
MATTINGLY: Errol, I really want to talk about immunity. Not my own, unless apparently, I'm the president of the United States. Nikki Haley was asked about this issue and what Trump has said it by Jake last night. Take a listen.
[06:20:07]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HALEY: If a president is doing something, and it's related to, you know, whether it's terrorist threats or something like that and people die, that's one thing. But do you get just total freedom to do whatever you want? No, that's never the way it was intended to be.
There needs to be accountability. No one is above the law.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTINGLY: Just for clarity here, part of this is tied to a Trump post on Truth Social, his truth, if you will. It says, "Even events that," quote, "'cross the line' must fall under total immunity, or it will be years of trauma trying to determine good from bad. There must be certainty."
Like, I'm going to be doing some criming if you reelect me. But that's OK, because -- like, walk me through kind of the thought process here.
LOUIS: Look, it's a pretty straightforward statement of what dictatorship is? Right. A president -- in his case, he is talking about himself -- should be able to, must be able to legally do, with legal impunity, do whatever it is he or she wants.
The word salad that we got from Nikki Haley, it ended where it should have begun. No one is above the law is the principle with which you have to start this kind of a conversation if you're serious about democracy.
Not, you know, sort of trying to do what she's trying to do. And I understand she's trying to win an election, so she -- she kind of wanders around it, talks about it. And chaos seems to follow him, like you know, mysteriously; like some stray dog, it seems to follow Donald Trump.
And she's going to pardon him for whatever crime he might have committed, even though she doesn't know what it might be.
All of that stuff undermines the really -- the core argument and takes us away from what other candidates have tried to do, which is sound a sense of alarm. You cannot have a major party candidate saying, at the top of his lungs, trying to influence a specific Supreme Court decision, but also trying to influence all the rest of us, to say that the president can do whatever they want.
HARLOW: And let's remember, we're going to find out, Basil, in maybe even a couple of days, what this appellate court is going to do on the immunity argument.
And I think everyone remembers what Judge Pan said in the hypothetical to Trump's attorney: Let's say that you, as president, SEAL Team 6 take out a political opponent while president; would you have immunity? And the word salad answer from the attorney was an eventual yes.
SMIKLE: Right. But I think what we have to remember here is that, as Donald Trump talks about political chaos, he's the one that created it. To be clear.
And so what he does, to Errol's point about what dictators do and how they sound, the whole point here is to get his supporters riled up, motivated to get the sense that he is the aggrieved, right; the system is against him; and in order for me to deliver for you, I have to be able to do what I want. That your path through salvation, if you will, as a voter is through me.
That is a really, really stark sort of view of democracy from his point of view. And for Nikki Haley, who's trying to walk this line and this word salad, the problem, again, is -- as I said before, she should have done that earlier.
Chris Christie, God bless him, was trying to sort of sound that alarm very early on. Didn't get too far doing it. She's trying to figure out a way to walk that line to get a couple of votes.
But too little, too late. The party could have done something to stop this a long time ago, and they didn't.
CARTER: I think it's -- It is a really stark line where he is right now. But the problem that we're facing right now is that you've got a huge number of Republicans who really do view this all as unfair. They all -- I mean, more than 80 percent of Republicans view everything that's happened, with all of these indictments, as politically motivated.
They look at this, and they say, this is about political opposition; this is not about crimes that have been committed. And so Donald Trump has this ability to be able to navigate in that and still have the support of so many folks.
MATTINGLY: Can I ask you something about that, though? Because when I saw it, it doesn't -- my first inclination was not to play the usual game of, like, is this going to upset Republicans? Np, it's not going to upset Republicans. No, it's not going to upset his base. No, his base doesn't care about this at all. If anything, it will make them like him more.
Which makes me wonder, why is he doing it? Like, what's the rationale here? They're already fired up. They already think everything is fraudulent and an attack and a two-tiered justice system. Why are you saying, I should be able to break any laws I want?
CARTER: Well, I'm not sure why he should be saying that. I can't really defend he should be able to do anything, and I understand that's playing right into the dictator argument.
In some ways, I feel like he likes to stoke the bear.
MATTINGLY: Yes.
CARTER: And I think he believes the more that this argument comes that he's a dictator, that he's an authoritarian, the more his base gets excited, the more people are likely to defend him. And it works. And it's incredibly effective. I think he just loves to dance on that line that makes people crazy. The crazier people get, the more he wins.
SMIKLE: I'll just say very quickly, what is emotional -- what is intellectually stimulating and persuasive is not always emotionally compelling.
CARTER: Yes.
SMIKLE: And Donald Trump needs that emotional argument to continue to lift his candidacy. What others have done is try to create an intellectual argument on democracy, and it doesn't have that emotional content. That's why Donald Trump is --
[06:25:05]
HARLOW: Really good point. Thank you, all, very much.
Ahead, a CNN exclusive, one-on-one. A sit-down with the attorney general, Merrick Garland. Attorney General Garland thinks Donald Trump's election subversion trial needs to begin quickly.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MERRICK GARLAND, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: The special prosecutor has said from the beginning that he thinks public interest requires a speedy trial, which I agree with.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTINGLY: Plus, Garland's Justice Department releasing a blistering report on the police response to the Uvalde school massacre, opening a lot of wounds for grieving parents. We'll have more next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTINGLY: At nearly 600 pages long, we now have a new Justice Department review of law enforcement's response to the mass shooting nearly two years ago at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
It's the most comprehensive accounting yet of why it took nearly 400 officers 77 minutes to confront and kill one shooter, who murdered 19 children and two teachers.
CNN's Shimon Prokupecz has been leading our coverage of this story since the very first day and takes us inside the new report.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT (voice- over): The Justice Department releasing a damming new report about law enforcement's failures --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
