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CNN This Morning

Trump Dismisses Harris' Momentum; Israel and Hamas Pressured to Resume Ceasefire Talks; Ukrainian Forces Push Further into Kursk Region of Russia. Aired 5.30-6a ET

Aired August 09, 2024 - 05:30   ET

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

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: All right, just before 5:30am here on the east coast. Live look at Durham, North Carolina for you on this Friday morning. Good morning everyone, I'm Kasie Hunt, it's wonderful to have you with us.

[05:30:03]

From massive fundraising hauls to narrowing polling gaps, in just a matter of weeks, Kamala Harris presidential campaign has reinvigorated the Democratic Party. That newfound excitement has been on full display if you look at the crowds that have been showing up for her rallies.

Donald Trump, of course, has often used crowd size as a way to try and gauge political influence. Then he was asked about Harris' crowds yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: On crowd size, in history, for any country, nobody's had crowds like I have, and you know that. And when she gets a thousand people and everybody starts jumping, you know that if I had a thousand people, people would say, that's the end of his campaign.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: But it didn't stop there. He compared the audience that showed up for him on January 6th, the day of the Capitol insurrection, to the crowd that showed up to watch this, a historic speech.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech. And you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: So, let's look at that, the crowd on that day in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic, I Have a Dream speech.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: Quite a crowd. Even in his first days in office, Trump and his White House staff were obsessed with crowd size. Who could forget this assertion?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN SPICER, FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: Joining me now, national race and politics reporter for the Associated Press, Matt Brown, and political reporter for the 19th, Grace Panetta. Good morning to both of you.

Grace, the, crowds that we saw, you could see in that old video, just how many people were standing on the National Mall. It doesn't stack up to -- you know, I think we can show some of the wide shots of crowds that showed up for Trump. There's the inauguration. He was actually speaking specifically about the crowd that came to -- yes, so this is the crowd from January 6th. Maybe we could just then show the -- you can see green, like right there's grass. We could show the MLK crowds again to just kind of be clear about how this plays out. And, in fact, let's also -- so there you go, this is the crowd again for Martin Luther King.

This is something that Trump has been obsessed with since he stepped on to the national stage. It seems to underscore to me, the way that this race has changed.

GRACE PANETTA, POLITICAL REPORTER, THE 19TH: Yes, absolutely, Kasie. I think that's right. And I think in the news conference yesterday, we got a sense of what really gets under Trump's skin about Vice President Harris and the crowds is one of them, certainly. She drew huge crowds this week in Philadelphia. I was there when she appeared for the first time with her running mate, Tim Walz, and then again, upwards of 10,000, 12, 000 people in Wisconsin and Michigan. That is something that Trump did not account for at the beginning of this race, this idea that there would be such a huge enthusiasm gap between him and his opponent.

HUNT: Yes. Matt Brown, we have, some other political figures, former presidents talking about, Donald Trump's focus on crowd size. Let's just watch that and we'll talk about it on other side.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: What is his obsession, by the way, with crowd size? You notice that? He's always worried -- this is the one measure he has of success. He's still worrying about his inauguration crowd being smaller than mine.

JIMMY CARTER, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: It's even bigger, I hate to say this, than it was last year. I don't know if President Trump will admit that or not.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: So, there's Jimmy Carter saying, this crowd is bigger than the one that Donald Trump had here. I mean, to Grace's point, this did seem to be kind of our first opportunity to see how he was going to take in Harris and talk directly to reporters. It honestly felt like he was still running against Joe Biden.

MATT BROWN, NATIONAL RACE AND POLITICS REPORTER, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: Absolutely, Casey. And I think one of the things that we saw yesterday was that Trump is really still trying to drive home this message of being strong versus being weak. But I'd be remiss if we didn't note that the way that you are positioning yourself to be, quote/unquote, strong versus relatively a younger black woman versus an older white man in Joe Biden runs the risk, as many in Trump's own orbit have now expressed, to be appearing -- his attack lines that are racial, that are gendered in certain ways, and we've saw that both last night and throughout all of the last week, really, since Harris has really ascended here.

[03:35:18]

The energy around her campaign is clearly getting under Trump's skin and is going back to, as we've discussed, some longstanding frustrations that he's had over crowd sizes. And it seems to be bringing out a side of him that's a little bit more erratic, a side that we have been seen previously, but not this year in 2024 as much.

HUNT: Grace, let's talk for a second about the debates because this was another sort of key focus of Trump's press conference yesterday. He said that they've agreed to three of them. We now know that Harris has agreed to at least one of them on ABC on September 10th. So, you know, mark your calendars. What do you anticipate are going to be the key challenges for each of these candidates? This is going to be a much different debate than Trump-Biden.

PANETTA: Yes, you're absolutely right there. I think some of the difficulties for Trump for, to Matt's point, is that he is going to be face to face debating a black woman for the first time and he's gone after the black woman prosecutors who have prosecuted him and his businesses recently over the years, and he's going to be on stage with a black woman prosecutor. And can he stay on message? Can he keep, you know, the debate about the issues? It seems unlikely based on past performance.

And then for Harris, it's, you know, handling someone like Trump. It's, again, it's going to depend a lot on the format of the debate, if their mics are cut off or not. But I think Harris, you know, if she can take her message on the stump about Trump and the dangers she thinks he poses to him when they're side by side. HUNT: Yes. Matt, she mentioned the fact that Trump is going to be debating a black woman. I mean, we saw when Trump last debated a woman, Hillary Clinton, will still reference how there, there was one debate in kind of the middle of them where it was a town hall-style and he kind of followed her around the stage, right? What are the risks for Trump of debating a woman, and in this case, a black woman?

BROWN: Absolutely. I think that this is going to be both in some gender dynamics, a similar way, I mean, these Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris are two women, but these are also two very different women that we should know. Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor here and has not been notably leaning into her, you know, potential historic campaign here on the campaign trail.

So, I think it's going to be interesting to see how, in particular, Kamala Harris is triangulating against Trump in this regard where, you know, Trump will be on stage. He's clearly going to be frustrated by this. We just saw last week at the NABJ interview how -- you know, when a black woman presses him, how he responds. And Harris is definitely going to be trying to take it to task in him in these debates.

It's going to be interesting to see how this particular lineup is going to resonate potentially with voters, specifically because you're going to probably see a lot more fireworks but not directed in an explicitly gendered way, as Hillary Clinton was, for instance, trying to play up in the 2016 race.

HUNT: Yes. Grace Panetta, we've we have seen, of course, this sort of honeymoon phase for Harris, for her team go on here. They've had some bumps. They've been trying to answer questions about Tim Walz's military record, for example. But otherwise, the polling continues to work in her favor. She does seem to continue to be driving this energy on the campaign trail. What is your sense and reporting around, this, inevitably they are going to face tough moments? Are they going to be ready for them?

PANETTA: Yes, absolutely. I think that's a great point. She's, for sure, been in her honeymoon phase so far in this campaign. The amount of energy and momentum, the fundraising, the polling, that's all good for her. And I will say kind of the crowd sizes and the energy we're seeing on the ground is sort of late October campaign energy, which, on the one hand, is great for the campaign. On the other hand, can they sustain that till late October?

I would also note she hasn't, you know, held a news conference, sit down for an interview, take in, you know, extensive questions from the press at length in this campaign, and though those are all, you know, things that they're going to have to eventually confront.

HUNT: Yes, for sure. All right, Grace Panetta, Matt Brown, thank you both very much for being here. I really appreciate it.

All right, coming up next here on CNN This Morning, a three-nation pressure campaign, the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar demanding that Israel and Hamas resume ceasefire talks next week. Plus, a comeback for the ages, the U.S. men's basketball team just one win away from another gold medal after a real scare against Serbia.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:40:00]

HUNT: All right, welcome back. Pressure is building on Israel and Hamas to return to the negotiating table next week to finalize a Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal. The U.S., Qatar, and Egypt issuing a joint statement last night saying, quote, there's no further time to waste nor excuses from any party for further delay. It's time to release the hostages, begin the ceasefire, and implement this agreement.

CNN has learned that negotiations are already being planned for August 15th, either in Doha or in Cairo, but Israel and Hamas still need to confirm that they will attend. And right now, Israel is bracing for attacks from Hezbollah and Iran following the assassination of the Hamas political chief in Tehran.

Let's bring in CNN Political and National Security Analyst David Sanger for more on this. David, no one I would rather talk to about this than you. Can you set the stage for us here with this attack potentially looming, this outside pressure clearly to try to get a deal? What's really going on?

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, the pressure is part of an effort to try to get past those twin assassinations or killings that the Israelis had organized, one against Hezbollah leader, obviously, one against Hamas leader, and try to keep it from derailing the hostage release and ceasefire negotiations.

[05:45:14]

So, after working the phones, President Biden came up with this unusual joint statement with President Sisi of Egypt, with the leader of Qatar. And the idea here is to put pressure on everybody to actually come to the (INAUDIBLE). Whether or not that will work, we don't know, because this has been tried so many times. It was three or four weeks ago in the Aspen Security Forum that Secretary of State Blinken said he thought that they were inside the ten-yard line. Well, they just haven't moved the ball since.

HUNT: David, what impact does the change at the top of Hamas have on these negotiations? Obviously, the previous political leader presumably assassinated, and now Yahya Sinwar, one of the architects, if not the architect, of the October 7th attacks taking over, that seems to not bode terribly well for an agreement. What is your understanding of that piece?

SANGER: So, that consolidates Sinwar's control, not that there was a whole lot of doubt who was controlling Hamas, but he is now basically taking over not only the military side, but the negotiating side, because the Israelis ended up killing in Iran the lead Hamas negotiator. And, you know, I think one of the big questions that we'll have to look at when we get back to this is, in doing so, did Israel end up doing something fatal to the negotiations or will it not make that big a difference because Sinwar was going to make all the decisions anyway?

But, of course, it's that killing that looms over all of this because we've all been waiting now for a week for the Iranians to launch some kind of attack on Iran or to do it through Hezbollah or some kind of combined attack. And the fact that it hasn't happened in a week is really fascinating.

One explanation is that the Iranians are listening to the United States and others who has said, think hard before you do this. Because if you do a massive attack, then the Israelis are going to escalate and you could end up in a direct war and one that could do huge harm to your regime, your economy and so forth.

It's possible they're taking that on board. It's also possible they just don't want to be predictable about when the attack would be happening. And you saw in the readouts of President Biden's conferences that he's been getting these daily updates about how well the United States and allies have moved anti-missile and anti-drone capability into the territory.

If the Israelis did a big counter-retaliation, then I think we could be off to the races. And, of course, it would make it all the more difficult to get this agreement.

HUNT: David, I also want to ask you, while I have you, about what's been going on in Ukraine with Russia, which is the significant incursion, it seems, from the Ukrainians into Russian territory. And CNN has been reporting this, residents calling Vladimir Putin for help. Kursk residents who live in the Suduhensky (ph) District recorded a video address to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday asking for his help, saying that he'd been misinformed about the situation on the ground and that the Russian Defense Ministry statement about things being under control are untrue. These lies enable local residents to die, this letter says, and they say that huge furious battles are underway. How do you understand what's happening here?

SANGER: So, Kasie, this was really an unexpected development in a war whose contours we thought we understood before. So, the Russians have been making slow and incremental progress in the two areas that have been fought over for the longest time, the south and the east. And it's been frustrating for the Ukrainians who have been on the defensive.

So, what President Zelenskyy decided to do was take about a thousand Ukrainian troops and attack a fairly unprotected border area with Russia that is nowhere near any of the current fighting and has very little strategic value.

[05:50:04]

And its only purpose, basically, is to say, if you're going to go after our civilian populations, we can go after yours and embarrass you as well, and kill a lot of people who -- kill a lot of Russians to show that Ukraine can take the war to Russia.

It, as I said, has more symbolic purpose than its strategic purpose, but it's also playing with fire a bit because it's every time that Putin is embarrassed or is suffering human losses that we have seen either a major escalation or the threat again to use tactical nuclear weapons. He has not done that yet this time but we have seen that happen a few times over the past, what, more than two and a half years of war now.

HUNT: Really interesting. All right, David Sanger, I really appreciate you on this Friday. Thank you so much.

SANGER: Great to be with you.

HUNT: All right. Time now for sports, the world's fastest man, Noah Lyles, falls short of the sprint double after testing positive for COVID. This was a really dramatic moment.

Amanda Davis joins us now with more from Paris. Amanda, what happened?

AMANDA DAVIS, INTERNATIONAL SPORTS ANCHOR: Yes, it's Saturday that is meant to be the blockbuster day here at the games. There's an incredible 39 gold medals on offer tomorrow, but it's going to have to go some to beat what we saw in terms of Thursday night's news and action, Noah Lyles being helped off track in a wheelchair. Was not how it was meant to go, was it? He was looking to become the first man since Usain Bolt in 2016 to do the 100, 200 Olympic double, but he ended up with a bronze in the 200-meter final after visibly struggling and then revealing he was suffering from COVID having tested positive on Tuesday.

Obviously, that raises a lot of questions. It turns out he kept the test results secret from his rivals. As he said, he still wanted to compete and didn't want to give his rivals an edge. Instead, it was Botswana's Letsile Tebogo who took the gold, the 21-year-old, with a really special night. He dedicated the win to his mom, who passed away in May, clocking an African record as he finished ahead of Kenneth Bednarek who took a silver. He actually had his mom's birthday written on his spike.

So, I did get to witness, though, a one, two, three of golds at the Stade de France for Team USA. It was a massive victory for the team co-captain, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, smashing her own world record to successfully defend her Tokyo crown in the women's 400 meters hurdles. She admitted she was 1,000 percent nervous ahead of the start of the race, build hers ahead against Femke Bol. But you'd never have known it. She was a class apart. She became three-time Olympic gold medal winner with a big silver medal for Anna Cockrell as well.

There was a massively emotional goal for Tara Davis-Woodhall in the women's long jump. She admitted she nearly gave it all up after Tokyo, but battled back from depression to put herself on the top step of that podium.

And that is exactly where Grant Holloway will be standing as well, the world number one in the 110-meter hurdles claiming the only major medal to have eluded him up to this point, doing it in style.

But boy, oh, boy, were the U.S. men's basketball team given a scare in their semi-final against three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic and Serbia. It took what Kevin Durant described as a godlike performance from Steph Curry to pull the massive. Tournament favorites back from the brink. They were down by a double digit deficit at the start of the final quarter, but up Steph Curry and LeBron James, LeBron with a triple double, Curry scoring 36 points to ultimately take it 95 to 91. You can see what it meant. Coach Steve Kerr said he was humbled to have been part of it, and it doesn't get any easier for the eight-time Olympic champions.

The final the scriptwriters were hoping for the USA against host France led by none other than superstar NBA Rookie of the Year Wemby, Victor Wembanyama.

HUNT: Amazing. All right, Amanda, thank you very much. Enjoy the last weekend of the Olympics. Thank you.

All right, coming up next here on CNN This Morning, after much back and forth, Donald Trump finally agrees to a debate with Kamala Harris with two more potentially on the horizon.

Plus, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offering her thoughts on President Biden's exit from his campaign.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): I thought we were going to see Joe Biden from the State of the Union. I never wanted the debate, because it's always, he's a joke, you know, it's not a funny joke, but it's a joke. And he said no.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[05:55:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HUNT: It's Friday, August 9th. Right now on CNN This Morning --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Well, I'm glad that he's finally agreed to a debate.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: -- it's official, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will meet on the debate stage. Will this debate be as consequential to the race as the last?

Plus --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: In history, for any country, nobody's had crowds like I have.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: -- across all of history, Donald Trump's obsession with crowd size hits a new peak.

And this --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PELOSI: His legacy will go right down the drain if that what's his name ever got in the White House.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[06:00:00]

HUNT: -- Nancy Pelosi weighing in on Joe Biden's legacy and how a Trump second term could impact that.

Plus, a little later, she --