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Tim Walz First Solo Campaign Appearance; Trump Continues Personal Attacks on Harris; Hunter Biden's Business Dealings Back Under a Microscope. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired August 14, 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: All right. 6:00 a.m. here in Washington. A live look at the White House on this Wednesday morning. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kasie Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us.

This morning, with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both largely off the campaign trail yesterday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz took the spotlight in his first solo campaign appearance as the Democrats vice presidential nominee.

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HUNT: That's John Mellencamp's "Small Town," for those who are listening closely. On stage, Walz defending his service record after Republicans criticized him for once saying he carried weapons in war even though he didn't seek combat.

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GOV. TIM WALZ (D-MN), DEMOCRATIC VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I'm going to say it again as clearly as I can., I am damn proud of my service to this country. And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person's service record. To anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent, I just have a few simple words, thank you for your service and sacrifice.

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HUNT: Trump's vice-presidential pick, J. D. Vance, has criticized Walz for leaving the military after 24 years to run for Congress. Vance, replying on social media, quote, hi, Tim. I thank you for your service, but you shouldn't have lied about it. You shouldn't have said you went to war when you didn't, nor should you have said you didn't know your unit was going to Iraq. Happy to discuss more in a debate.

Vance does seem to be a bit more on message than the top of the ticket that he's running on in an interview with Univision, Donald Trump, continuing his personal attacks against Kamala Harris.

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DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT AND REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We're going to get rid of inflation. Inflation has hurt the Hispanic population so badly, but it's hurt everybody. She's never going to do anything about inflation. She has no idea. She doesn't even know what it means, the word means. And she is -- she's forced to go with my policies. You know, I came out a long time ago with no taxes on tips, and two days ago she said no taxes on tips. She doesn't even know what it means.

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HUNT: She doesn't even know what it means. It's that piece of the approach that many Republicans want to -- do not want to see Trump take in this reset race that has clearly moved in Kamala Harris favor.

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NIKKI HALEY, FORMER REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And the one thing Republicans have to stop, don't quit whining about her. We knew it was going to be her. But the campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes, about what race Kamala Harris is. It's not going to win talking about whether she's dumb. It's not -- you can't win on those things. The American people are smart. Treat them like they're smart.

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HUNT: All right. Joining us now, our panelist here, Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN senior reporter, David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic, Maya Wiley, president of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, and Matt Gorman, former senior adviser to Tim Scott's presidential campaign. Welcome to all of you. Wonderful to have you here.

Isaac, those -- that soundbite from Nikki Haley really stuck out to me, honestly. Like, get over this. Like, stop whining was the word that she used. What do you make of what she had to say there?

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: I mean, how many times are we going to have Republican officials go on the air and say, please, Donald Trump, we focus on policy. Stop talking about all the things you're talking about. We go through this over and over again, every couple of weeks, it feels like. And it seems like Donald Trump feels very clear of the kind of campaign he wants to run here.

It's the kind of campaign that worked for him in 2016. It is not, at least according to the most recent polls, working as well for him at this moment against Kamala Harris. We'll see what happens here with it. But it is the way that Republican officials seem to have resigned themselves to dealing with Donald Trump.

HUNT: Well, and, David Frum, you capture it this way in your latest piece in The Atlantic. You say that Trump's campaign-- you call it the Trump campaign's please shut up phase.

DAVID FRUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Yes.

HUNT: You write this, this is Trump's problem. For all his jives at her intellect, Harris is managing the mystery appeal effectively, whereas Trump, who endlessly congratulates himself on his MIT- professor uncle's brains, is fast arriving at the, will you please shut up phase of his political descent.

FRUM: Mike Murphy, the Republican campaign consultant, a decade ago, or nearly a decade ago, said that asking Donald Trump to talk about policy, it's like teaching Charles Manson to foxtrot. He can manage a step or two, but then he's going to put a pencil in your eye because he's Charles Manson. And Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

And as you just said a minute ago, I mean, it's astonishing. Of course, abuse -- he's an insult comic. That's what he is. He doesn't know -- he knows less about policy than anybody's probably ever run for high office ever. But what he does know is how to abuse and denigrate and humiliate and demean. That's what he does. If you don't like that, he's not your guy. And if he is your guy, don't pretend he's not like that, because he's like that.

HUNT: Matt Gorman, I mean, it's --I know we've talked about -- we were talking about this on Monday.

MATT GORMAN, FORMER TIM SCOTT PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISER: Talking about it Monday, yes.

HUNT: Here on this -- around this table, is it just a pipe dream for these Republicans who are trying to say this, trying to convince them to do this, and what impact does that ultimately have on Trump's ability to win?

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GORMAN: I think there's a difference between, say, Kevin McCarthy saying it and Nikki Haley saying it. Nikki Haley might be the imperfect messenger since for all the baggage and running against him like that. But you're right, Kevin McCarthy has -- came out with this on Fox on Monday. And so, this has been a consistent kind of theme throughout many sectors of the Republican Party.

There was some more policy in there, but you're right, it's like, oh, and she's not smart enough. So, if you get there just a little further than it was say a week ago, but then you still get that overarching message. You're right. Like he's 78 years old. There's a wonder of how much he's really going to change.

HUNT: Well, and he was quoted Maya in the big Haberman Swan, New York Times opus over the weekend is telling donors at an event, I am who I am, right? Like what you see is what you get.

MAYA WILEY, PRESIDENT AND CEO, THE LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE ON CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS: Well, and we've known this since he ran for president in 2015. This is not really news that Donald Trump's. An insult comment is actually being very generous to him, David, I think. I mean, he is offensive and he has been extremely willing to personally attack people from mocking people with disabilities to hurling, you know, racial -- suggestive racial epithets, one I would consider to be racial epithets, and none of that is new.

So, when we turn now to what we're hearing from him, including calling a highly qualified black woman incompetent, that actually reads a certain way to a large number of the electorate, which suggests that he can't put himself forward and as a qualified candidate, frankly, not because he hasn't been president, but because he hasn't been able to articulate what he is going to do for the American people. I agree, I think that's what people are looking for, and that's never who he has been.

HUNT: It's certainly become a core democratic argument that Trump is about himself, right? I mean, that is something we hear from them. Isaac, I know you hear it, I'm sure on numerous phone calls every day as you go about doing your job.

Can we talk for a second -- touch on the service question? This was the first-time Walz has addressed this on camera. He just pushed back and said, you know, I don't denigrate anybody's service record. Do you see this as something that's actually going to stick and hook in with the electorate, or what are the kind of the early signs on this, or is the way they're dealing with it effective?

DOVERE: Look, it is working for certainly the Republican Trump leaning voters to have something to attack Walz on. It doesn't -- it's not clear whether it's resonated in a deeper way. I do think what's interesting about the response to it is, on the one hand, Walz took until now to really speak about it himself. So, that's a week of this almost.

But on the other hand, even from what the campaign was putting out, and it reflected what he said yesterday, it is this attempt to say, we are the patriots here, right? To have it be not the way this has been played out in past elections, where the Republicans have said they're the patriotic ones. Walz is not going back on the attack. He says, I'm proud of what I did, and thank you, J. D. Vance for your service.

That's -- that is something that it seems like we're going to get more of in the convention next week in Chicago, Democrats saying we're the party of America and of unity, and it's the Republicans who are on the attack of what we're -- what this country is supposed to be.

HUNT: I mean, David Frum, you were a big part of Republican politics as this exact dichotomy was kind of at the center.

FRUM: Yes.

HUNT: You know, John Kerry, George W. Bush, all of that. How do you look at this?

FRUM: I think these guys are -- they don't understand what the machine is and why it -- how it operates, so they can't make it work again. The reason these debates in 2004 were so powerful with John Kerry, is this country ripped itself apart over the Vietnam War. It was a trauma, the support, the opposition. John Kerry had come to national prominence at a young age as a vehement opponent of the Vietnam War, which he criticized not just as a mistake, but as a crime. He accused Americans of committing atrocities. People remember -- in 2004, that was a memory. Then in 2004, he campaigned as a war hero. And so, the question you ask is, wait a minute, you have denounced this war is like equivalent to Genghis Khan's -- literally, Genghis Khan's depredations against humanity. And now, you say, but elect me because I was a hero in Genghis Khan's army. How does that make sense?

What J. D. Vance is -- it's just pedantic. You served as a command sergeant major, but you didn't retire as a command -- like, if you're interested in the federal pension schedules, that's interesting. If not, you think, that's just boring and tedious and nitpicky. And everyone's going to say, look, Iraq did not tear the country apart the way Vietnam did. And by the way --

HUNT: It was divisive, but I absolutely take it for granted.

FRUM: It was divisive. And by the way, J. D. Vance used to support the Iraq war, and now he says he opposed it, which he has done only after he became a Trumpist. So, what is your point except to say, yes, I'm looking at the federal pension schedule and the rank you had in service, you did not retire with because you didn't complete enough paperwork to retire with that rank and that pension.

[06:10:00]

DOVERE: I think the other thing here though is Walz was 24 years in the National Guard. J. D. Vance was the year he spent in the Marines. Let's not forget, Donald Trump did not go to Vietnam, right? And so, it is --

FRUM: He went to Studio 54, which is every bit as tough.

WILEY: Yes. I mean, they make jokes about that being like going to the Vietnam War.

HUNT: Well, and if the issue is lying as well, there are questions about why Donald Trump did not serve in Vietnam, right?

DOVERE: It just seems to me strange to take that shot at the bottom of the ticket when your own top of the ticket has this vulnerability.

WILEY: Well, it also goes back to the underlying point, if you're not pressing a policy -- a set of policies for the American people about the future, you're left to simply attacking, which frankly looks a little weak, not only for all these reasons, I agree with Isaac and David, but also because I'm sorry, the vast majority of Americans are going to look at the coach who's standing up and saying 24 years. I mean, he was 44 years old when he was shot.

FRUM: And this is a ticket, and J. D. Vance is a candidate, who wanted to abandon allies in Ukraine, who wanted to destroy NATO, who stopped aid to Israel and Ukraine for six months, which cost the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of brave Ukrainian soldiers and many Israelis. And you want to talk about patriotism?

After -- we have never ever gotten to the bottom of this mystery of what exactly is it that makes Donald Trump so infatuated with Vladimir Putin. You want to talk about patriotism? This ticket?

HUNT: Last word?

GORMAN: Look, I think there's a legitimate question about what the exaggeration of his rank and what his actual -- how we talk about weapons in war. But look, he's allowed to metastasize over the last week because they haven't addressed it. That's the thing.

HUNT: That's kind of my thing.

GORMAN: That's the thing, right? They're finally realizing now --

HUNT: Like, they could have put it to bed.

GORMAN: Exactly. They've been changing bios and things like that over the last week, but when you allow it to metastasize, there's still no signs of it really ending anytime soon, especially they're addressing it now. They're just going to add another new cycle or two to the fire.

HUNT: It just seems to me that he could have made these on camera comments like a week ago, and it would have been a little bit easier for them to deal with.

All right. Coming up here on CNN This Morning, Hunter Biden's business dealings are back under the microscope. The new report that says he asked the State Department for help from a Ukrainian -- for a Ukrainian gas company.

Plus, abortion access is officially on November ballots for Arizona and Missouri as the fight for abortion rights hangs over the race for the White House.

And Donald Trump doubles down on his messaging around immigration policy.

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TRUMP: I was looking in New York today, they have attacks all over New York from illegal immigrants who are being attacked. It's a new form of crime in the U.S. It's called migrant crime, and it's caused because of Harris.

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TRUMP: Yes, we have people coming into our country from all over the world. Not just from South America. Everyone thinks South America. It's really from all over the world. They're coming from Africa, from the Middle East, from Asia. We're being attacked. It's a new form of crime in the U.S. It's called migrant crime. And it's caused because of Harris.

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HUNT: Donald Trump criticizing Kamala Harris on immigration. In an interview with Univision, Trump accused Harris of flip flopping on the issue.

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TRUMP: They come from prisons, they come from mental institutions, and they come from all over the place. You know, they're drug dealers. And they're now in our country. We're like a dumping ground. And now, she's saying, oh, she was tough on the border. Before, she just had open borders. And that's what they want. They want open borders.

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HUNT: And then there was this. A tweet from an official Trump campaign Twitter account sharing this image with the captions, your neighborhood under Donald Trump and your neighborhood under Kamala Harris. Let's just sit for a second and look at what those pictures show. There was another message, quote, import the third world, become the third world.

I want to give this one to you initially. There's a lot there, obviously, it's like impossible to miss.

WILEY: Look, there's just a lot of racism there. I mean, we just have to call it what it is. It is offensive. I think so many of us remember the Donald Trump who called Mexicans criminals literally as a group, not about any individual conduct of any individual person questioned and was reportedly talking and calling Haiti and African countries, expletive whole countries. I won't say it on CNN, but we all know the reference.

I mean, this is a long-standing Racializing immigration. First of all, immigrants come from all over the world. There are European immigrants in this country who didn't come with documentation. All he talks about are people of color and what he does and what he did in that was simply doing a Willie Horton on immigrants of color as a group.

Now, we have real issues that we should deal with on immigration, but that is not a debate on policy. That's an attack on people.

HUNT: That's what I was going to say, Matt Gorman. Like, there is -- I mean, the -- there is a crisis at the border. Now, everyone agrees on that. It did take Democrats a while to come around to that. New York City. I mean, it's on the cover of the -- it's The New York Post. It's Murdoch owns. We'll take that for what it is. But it is a real problem, right? It's a real problem. They can talk about it as a real problem without doing what they did there. GORMAN: Yes, you're right. I mean, it's one of those things where we're winning on the issue. I firmly believe. Look, we've been doing this for a long time. The Overton window has shifted on this. We always talked about how -- you know, with border security had to come some sort of legal status as we saw that was not a part of any time of the recent stuff on Capitol Hill. It's always been kind of border security focus.

So, look, the question is, how do you kind of keep the focus on that and not drifting to kind of these other tertiary things where you can lead yourself down rabbit holes? I think that's the key on this and I think it goes to kind of the discipline of not just Trump, but others around him. How can we kind of keep the focus on it -- on that?

[06:20:00]

HUNT: Yes. I mean, look, Isaac Dovere, we have talked a lot about how Trump's personal attacks on Harris ultimately worked against him with swing voters. This is going to be a really ugly and a really nasty campaign, and this is an issue where voters trust Republicans and not Democrats, and the reality is we have sometimes seen when campaigns touch these ugly things, it can be effective for them.

Do you think that the -- and I know you spend all your time talking to Democratic sources and kind of getting a sense of how they think about this. I mean, what is the Harris campaign on this kind of thing, how are they thinking about working against it? I mean, do they think it works to just say, this is clearly racist and move on, or do they see a potential threat from this line of attack?

DOVERE: Well, they're not so far saying this is clearly racist themselves. I think that's number one, that they've avoided getting into that kind of fight about it. We'll see how this goes. Look, if you go back to 2022 in the midterms in New York, there were so many fears about what had happened with crime in New York City that it led to, depending on how you count, five or six House seats in the New York area, the New York City area going to Republicans and Kathy Hochul, facing a much tougher race than she thought she was going to face.

There are real fears about what's going on. There are a lot of people who have arrived. In New York City, the number was over 100,000 last September. I don't remember exactly what we're up to now, but it's more than that. And how you deal with this issue is a big question, but we shouldn't forget the larger political argument that Donald Trump has made here, which is that when the immigration bill, the bipartisan immigration bill came forward the beginning of this year, he said he wanted this to be a political issue and he urged Republicans not to support it.

The question that Democrats are trying to figure out is whether they can say, hey, we had a solution and Donald Trump torpedoed it. It's not clear that voters are connecting with that.

HUNT: Last word. FRUM: I wrote in The Atlantic in the first month of the Biden administration that relaxing border controls was going to be the biggest mistake they ever made and it was going to be costly, costly, costly. That said, there are two things that I think everyone needs to understand. Why did this crisis happen? Two reasons -- two most important reasons. First, the U.S. economy is the hottest job market on the planet. And while Americans deny it, everyone else on Earth knows it, that there is a giant we're hiring sign in the United States. If you can get here, there is work, work, work and well-paid work. And that is a point that needs to be drilled home. This is a booming economy. A thriving job market. That's why they're coming.

And the second reason they're coming is because the brutal socialist regime in Venezuela has collapsed and 8 million Venezuelans are fleeing that -- what Chavez and Maduro did to their country. And that is something that you would think that the party that of enterprise and markets would say, Venezuela is a disaster, people are fleeing, and the world needs a solution, and they need a transformation in Venezuela, but in the short-term, there are people who have to eat, and that means they have to work, and that means they're going to go to places where they're looking for work, because socialism has failed again, and that's a message that Americans of all parties should be able to emphasize, that the American economy works, other ways of organizing society don't, and the world wants what America has.

HUNT: Yes. Of course, we had Donald Trump talking to Elon Musk about going and having dinner in Venezuela because it would be safer there if Kamala Harris wins the election.

FRUM: Well, it's a dictatorship and he likes this.

HUNT: All right. Coming up next here on CNN This Morning, Tropical Storm Ernesto is gaining strength as it nears hurricane force, leaving people in the Caribbean at risk. How states -- also, how states with abortion on the ballot this November could impact other races. We'll look at that.

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HUNT: All right. 27 minutes past the hour. Five things you have to see this morning. Watch.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One of the returns is kiss my -- this is --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know what? No, no, no. I'm going to tell you what. You don't come in here -- you don't -- OK. That's contempt. That's 93. Keep going. That's another. That's another 93.

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HUNT: Some free legal advice, don't curse at the judge. A Michigan judge is going viral after holding a defendant in contempt for his cursing rant. That man now faces 558 days in jail, 93 days for each of his outbursts.

A house in New Jersey blasted with water after contractors apparently made a mistake and struck a water main soaking the home. Oh, my goodness. Look at that.

New body cam video shows the moment a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri was struck by a man. It happened during protests marking the 10-year anniversary of Michael Brown's killing. The suspect was arrested and the officer still in the hospital with a brain injury.

A convicted murderer on the loose in North Carolina. Police say 30- year-old Ramon Alston escaped Tuesday while he was being transported to receive care at a local hospital.

Homes and businesses destroyed in Greece's worst wildfire of the year. The wildfire impacted 156 square miles of land. Firefighters still working to try to put out some hot spots.

All right. Time now for weather. More than 100,000 customers without power in Puerto Rico as Tropical Storm Ernesto makes its way across the region. The storm is just shy of a hurricane. It's getting stronger, and it has the potential to hit Bermuda later on this week. Let's get to our meteorologist, Derek Van Dam. Derek, good morning.

DEREK VAN DAM, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yes. Good morning, Kasie. Even though it's still a tropical storm officially, it's behaving like a hurricane. Look at this latest satellite loop. Starting to get its act together. The eye of Ernesto just north of Puerto Rico. But there was a lot of rain associated with the system.

So, here is the latest radar.

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