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CNN This Morning
New Poll Shows Harris' Significant Gains on Trump; Trump Goes on Offense Against Harris; Trump Spreads Conspiracy Theories About Harris Rally Size. Aired 6-6:30a ET
Aired August 12, 2024 - 06:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[06:00:00]
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: It's Monday, August 12. Right now on CNN This morning, new polls show Kamala Harris making significant gains on Trump in critical battleground states.
And --
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DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT AND REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: No tax on tips. Do we like that?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Donald Trump trying to go on offense against Harris, accusing her of stealing one of his critical policy positions.
Plus --
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SEN. JD VANCE (R-OH), REPUBLICAN VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: If you want to be the people's vice president or president, you should have to stand before an interviewer and say, this is why I changed my mind.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: -- J. D. Vance making interview rounds as he tries to turn the tables on the campaign trail. And this --
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JOE BIDEN, U.S. PRESIDENT: I thought of myself as being a transition president. I can't even say how old I am. It's hard for me to get it out of my mouth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: -- President Biden's first sit down conversation since he left the 2024 race.
All right. 6:00 a.m. here in Washington. A live look at the White House on this Monday morning. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kasie Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us.
There are 84 days until election day, just one week until the start of the Democratic National Convention. Kamala Harris painting the choice facing voters this November in stark terms.
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KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT AND U.S. PRESIDENTIAL DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: This is not 2016. This is not 2020. This time around, the stakes are even higher. Someone who suggests we should terminate the constitution of the United States should never again stand behind the seal of president of the United States.
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HUNT: Coming off a week-long swing state tour, the Harris campaign seeing yet another sign, momentum continues to be on their side. This new poll from The New York Times and Siena College finding Harris has a four-point lead over Trump among likely voters across the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all states, Trump carried in 2016 that Biden flipped blue in 2020.
And Trump just doesn't seem to be handling any of this very well. The former president posting on social media last night, quote, I'm doing really well in the presidential race, leading in almost all of the real polls, and insisting, quote, this 2024 is thus far my best campaign, the most enthusiasm and spirit.
Those comments come after a blockbuster piece in The New York Times over the weekend, where Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report that Trump is, quote, a candidate knocked off his bearings, disoriented by his new contest with Kamala Harris and unsure of how to take her on. They write that Trump has no regrets about questioning Harris' black identity, telling donors Friday, quote, I was right. That he's sent angry text messages to a top donor, Miriam Adelson, potentially risking millions of dollars in support.
And they report that Trump has repeatedly called Harris the B word in private. The Trump campaign disputes that, telling The Times, quote, that is not language that President Trump has used to describe Kamala. It all paints a portrait of an angry man struggling to run against a woman whose campaign, at least so far is embracing joy.
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HARRIS: We are here together because we love our country. We love our country. So, look -- and I love you back. So, look. we are together, we are running this campaign on behalf of all Americans.
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HUNT: So, let's contrast that with how Trump presents this race. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT AND REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If Comrade Walz and Comrade Harris win this November, the people cheering will be the pink haired Marxist, the looters, the perverts, the flag burners, Hamas supporters, drug dealers, gun grabbers, and human traffickers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: OK. Joining me now to discuss David Frum, staff writer for The Atlantic, Meghan Hays, former Biden White House director of message planning and a consultant for the DNC, and Matt Gorman, former senior adviser to Tim Scott's 2024 presidential campaign. Welcome to all of you on this Monday, a week before the Democratic National Convention.
David, from the kind of swirl around Donald Trump this weekend, that Truth Social post he ranted against leakers as well. He clearly seems very rattled by Times piece, by the polling. What do you see here? I mean, these two campaigns are now so starkly different.
DAVID FRUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: What I see here is the story we've been living with for a decade. In 2016, Donald Trump got a smaller share of the vote than Al Gore, than John Kerry, than Mitt Romney. In fact, he finished -- of the 12 people who have run for president in the six elections, from 2000 to 2020, he finished second from the bottom. And in 2020, Donald Trump got less -- a smaller share of the vote than John Kerry and Mitt Romney, and Al Gore, and he finished this time third from the bottom of those 12 people.
[06:05:00]
There was not a day in his presidency when, according to any reputable poll, Donald Trump had the support of even half the American people. The story of the Trump era has been how do you lever 46 percent of the vote into 60 percent of the political power? It worked in 2016. It didn't work in 2020. And what's going on in 2024 is the anti-Trump majority, which has always been bigger than the pro-Trump minority, is -- but has always been less cohesive.
Is it reassembling and reenergizing itself to stop the man who tried to make a coup d'etat from returning to the presidency?
HUNT: Matt Gorman There are a lot of Republicans around Donald Trump who are trying to get him to do things a certain way, and he does not seem to be listening to them. I mean, what has stood out to you over the last --
MATT GORMAN, FORMER TIM SCOTT PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISOR: A couple of things, right? Like we -- a month ago, we were all up in Milwaukee, and it was remarkable kind of the discipline that he had. But again, it was easy to have the discipline when you're up, you know, two to five points.
HUNT: Winning is easy.
GORMAN: Exactly, right? And so, I think --
HUNT: Winning is very straightforward.
GORMAN: And there's an Axios piece that came out talking, kind of alluding to that same sentiment that The Times talked about, and he had J. D. Vance in the Sunday shows really effectively levering some strong and probably the best, I assume, polling messaging against Kamala, at least it certainly was when Joe Biden ran into that chameleon type attack. And then Axios piece publishers talking about how kind of Trump is kind of very fuming and angry and then he posts about, you know, Kamala and the rally and A.I.
And so, what you have, I think, is Vance trying to have that traditional messaging, the one that follows where the Trump ads are. And then, you know, you end up kind of Trump kind of careens into a whole different set of things.
HUNT: We end up in Trump world, right? You're referring to -- they accused Harris of putting out an A.I. photo of her crowd at a recent event.
GORMAN: Ye.
HUNT: We're going to talk about that in our next block. Meghan Hays, one of the things that we're obviously tracking is, is this going to last? And also, as we're starting to see these new polls, what is it that's driving voters? And Frank Luntz conducted a focus group with undecideds. Some of these voters were previously voting for Trump. And here's how they explained to him how they've started to change how they look at the race. Let's watch.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's more of an issue with Donald Trump and the options that are now available.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When he chose J. D. Vance, it kind of, pushed me over to having an open mind.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I switched to voting for Harris because she's younger, she's vibrant.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I switched because J. D. Vance scares the heck out of me. And that Joe was just a little bit too old.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She looks presidential.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Even if I don't agree with all her policies, I trust that she'll have good judgment.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Really interesting. And J. D. Vance kept popping up there.
MEGHAN HAYS, DNC CONVENTION CONSULTANT AND FORME BIDEN WHITE HOUSE DIRECTOR OF MESSAGE PLANNING: Yes, I think, you know, people say that the vice-presidential pick doesn't matter, but I think that the McCain campaign would probably disagree with that, going -- you know, if we look back in history.
But I do think -- you know, I think that the Harris campaign has offered this new enthusiastic, new energy that went into the Democratic Party when you have these double haters that didn't want to vote for Biden, didn't want to vote for Trump, now the Harris campaign is giving people a place to go.
And also, J. D. Vance's the childless cat comment --or the --
HUNT: Childless cat ladies?
HAYS: Yes, comment. They -- you know, that really turned a lot of people off, and those are the independent voters that they need to win. So, I just think, you know, the Harris campaign is working on their enthusiasm -- are working that enthusiasm piece and really pushing forward and I think it's really beneficial. And if they can keep it going into November, I think they're in a good spot.
FRUM: The Trump campaign has this weird problem. If your main line on attack on Kamala Harris is that she slightly shifted her opinions at various points in her career, who are we going to put this message in the hands of? Who's going to deliver it? The biggest flip flopper ever on a presidential ticket.
I mean, many of us -- J. D. Vance used to publish on my website. You know, there's a Hollywood joke, do you know Doris Day? Why, I knew her before she was a virgin. I knew J. D. Vance when he was a moderate Republican who supported the Iraq war, supported free trade, and that was not when he was in his 20s, that was as a person of making his way in politics.
As late as 2016, he was publishing articles in The Atlantic, our magazine, denouncing Trump as a fascist, a Nazi, a threat to everything good and decent. And then, he is the man you're going to select to deliver the, she's shifted from like this point on the center left to this slightly different point on the center left, this guy? Incredible.
GORMAN: Because he's the one sitting for interviews, right? He's had to answer that. Right now, the Kamala Harris kind of tactic is she does an anonymous aid sends out, which essentially the anonymous aid disowns everything she -- that she talked about from 2019 to 2020. So, you haven't had that opportunity in whatsoever. So, she's had really a total 180 from when she ran in 2019 and 2020. And we don't know why.
HUNT: Yes. I mean, David, do you think Harris is going to have to sit down for these interviews? I mean, she hasn't yet, and it has not been her strongest forum in the course of her career.
FRUM: Yes. I imagine she will. I don't know. But the way you communicate presidential campaigns is also a little different, in the TikTok era from the way it was in the network television.
HUNT: Meghan is nodding. She doesn't think candidates have to do these interviews at all.
[06:10:00]
FRUM: In the network TV era. And you also sit down with different kinds of people that in the TikTok era from what you did. You know, it -- look. this is television. I don't want to say anything disrespectful of television. But if we were on radio in 1950, wondering when is the candidate going to sit next to -- next -- his or her next interview on the mutual broadcasting system, they'd say, well, there's this thing called television that has come along and it may be changing politics. And TikTok has done the same thing.
HUNT: Really interesting. All right. coming up next here on CNN This Morning, Donald Trump's interest in crowd size enters a new arena. The former president spreading false conspiracy theories about the size of a Harris campaign rally. Plus, Donald Trump points the finger at Kamala Harris for mirroring one of his policies. And President Biden speaks out about his historic departure from this campaign.
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JOE BIDEN, U.S. PRESIDENT: A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in their races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic.
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[06:15:00]
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TRUMP: I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, it's the same -- the real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not, we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.
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HUNT: Size matters to Donald Trump. So, much so that, of course, he is now making false claims about Kamala Harris crowd sizes. He insists nobody attended her rally in Michigan last week, demanding that she be disqualified from the race for using a fake crowd picture, again, with no evidence.
As you can see, again, we were there. Thousands of real people actually packed an airport hangar near Detroit to see the vice president at this rally. Trump not letting these facts get in the way, posting these photos on his Truth Social platform, alleging Harris used A.I. technology to fake the photos. Again, of course, the issue here that there were plenty of actual reporters there to document what is going on at these events.
David Frum, David Plouffe said this, these are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet. The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades. What's up with this?
FRUM: Well, we often casually use the word narcissism to mean someone who's self-involved. But that clinical narcissism is different. The clinical narcissist is struggling with deep inner feelings of worthlessness. And he constructs, or she constructs, a giant ideology of self-assertion to cope with their inner feelings of worthlessness.
When anything threatens to puncture that -- those fantasies, those fictions, the person can spiral into all kinds of mental collapse, into aggression, into violence, into self-hatred, but that's the Donald Trump story. I think that down there is seething worthlessness and self-hatred. He's constructed this fantasy of his life. And now, it's being contradicted and he cannot cope.
HUNT: I will just say none of us are actually card-carrying psychologists. So, we'll just -- we'll leave that there. I take your point.
FRUM: But some of us have no narcissists.
GORMAN: We're in media and politics. We know a lot of it. Yes.
HUNT: But, Matt, I mean, this is like -- I mean, Come on.
GORMAN: No, I mean, look. I -- and I took -- I approached from -- as I said in the first block, from a communications point of view, right? You have lining it up, Vance, and you have this kind of progression with your messaging and then it gets thrown kind of away. And that was -- again, that was what we didn't see a month ago, as much as Democrats kind of -- when we were talking in Milwaukee, Democrats are begging for things like this to intrude, to kind of distract from the Joe Biden is old, Joe Biden might drop out narrative. And, you know, we're having out in spades now.
And I think that's the tough part, because, again, I think a lot of Republicans I've talked to are very frustrated because there's really potent attacks on Kamala and Tim Walz right now. There's a lot of them. And Vance is giving -- as we saw on the Sunday shows, a pretty good articulation of them. But when you have the top of the ticket veering off of this stuff, this is why you spend eight minutes talking about this stuff.
HAYS: And people want to know how they're going to make their lives better, how each of these people are going to make their lives better, and how their economic policies and what their vision is for the future. And when you are not talking about the issues and talking about this nonsense, it is a distraction and you lose voters.
GORMAN: Yes, that's what we talked about like --
HAYS: Yes.
GORMAN: We had that same problem with Joe Biden, right? When you're only talking about like Joe Biden during that whole month, that was what you're distracted from, and Trump was remarkably on messaged with that stuff. HUNT: I mean, the sort of irony here, David, is that it just serves to highlight the crowd she's getting that he's doing this.
FRUM: And also, look. the basic grammar, the basic math of the Trump era has never changed. 46 percent of the country either likes him or will put up with him. And a majority of the country dislikes, disrespects, fears him. And that what we are watching is the anti- Trump majority, which has always been there. This is not new. We're not seeing momentum. We're not seeing momentum. We're seeing the coalition of the decent coming to life.
HUNT: All right. Still ahead here on CNN This Morning, a controversial finish on the racetrack. The final lap that led to an improbable victory, crushing defeat and some really hard feelings.
Plus, a catastrophic explosion in a Maryland neighborhood. That's one of the five things you have to see this morning.
[06:20:00]
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HAYS: All right. 23 minutes past the hour. Five things you have to see this morning. Video on social media showing Ukrainian soldiers taking down Russian flags in the Kursk region and replacing them with Ukrainian flags. Right now, hundreds of Ukrainian troops are advancing into Russian territory in a mission that's caught the Kremlin off guard.
This morning, a pilot is dead after a helicopter crashed onto the roof of a seaside hotel in Australia. Guests inside the hotel were immediately evacuated as the building went up in flames.
New video in Maryland shows the aftermath of a house explosion that we now know killed two people. The Sunday morning explosion believed to be caused by a gas leak, leaving 12 families displaced.
[06:25:00]
Two NASCAR drivers upset at this aggressive finish to a race Sunday. Austin Dillon was in the number three. His car spun out one driver and crashed into another before crossing the finish line. The victory secures Dillon a spot in the playoffs, but critics say he was reckless.
The black box from the Brazilian flight that went down Friday has now been extracted. Authorities are looking to the data to determine what caused the crash, which killed all 62 people on board.
All right. Time now for weather. What was Hurricane Debby is done, but now, parts of the southeast dealing with heat and a lingering flood risk. Another tropical system could be taking shape in the Atlantic. Let's get to meteorologist Elisa Raffa with the latest Elisa, good morning.
ELISA RAFFA, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yes, good morning. We're watching potential tropical cyclone five, it could become a depression later on today, a storm by tomorrow, and the name would be Ernesto. That's the next one on the list.
It's got winds at 30 miles per hour, still trying to find its center of circulation, sitting more than 600 miles east and southeast of Antigua. We've got tropical storm watches in effect for the Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico as it heads that way. Tropical storm force conditions could start as soon as Tuesday and then it makes this turn into the Atlantic, where it could become a hurricane as it heads towards Bermuda. Looking at some four to six inches of rain possible across parts of Puerto Rico. But it's 10 inches possible in some of those higher elevations, and that could cause flash flooding and mudslides.
So, here's a look again at the steering kind of where it goes. It makes this turn because in the Eastern U.S. we have this area of high pressure and a stalled front along the east coast, and that's what's going to keep Ernesto out to see. What it's also doing, though, is not really making the situation of all the rain that we got from Debby over the last five days any better for anyone in the Carolinas.
We still have some flood watches in effect, and we still have all of these flood warnings along the rivers because they're still reacting to the 10 to 20 inches of rain that they got from Debby. So, you could see still some river rises in the forecast, still up to major flood stage for the Cape Fear River, again could get up to 16 feet and still, again, rising at the Tar River as well. So, we'll continue to see some river conditions could potentially get worse over the next couple of days. Kasie.
HUNT: All right. Elisa Raffa for us this morning, Elisa, thank you very much.
All right. coming up next after the break, Kamala Harris embracing a new economic policy, why it might sound familiar to Donald Trump and Republicans.
Plus, Vice Presidential Candidate J. D. Vance sat down with CNN's Dana Bash. She joins us next with the highlights from her interview.
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