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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

Trump & Clinton Win New York Primary; Obama in Saudi Arabia for Gulf Council Summit. Aired 4-4:30a ET

Aired April 20, 2016 - 04:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[04:00:16] DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you, New York. We love New York.

HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You proved once again there's no place like home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking news this morning, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton win big in New York. Blowout victories reshaping the race for president.

Good morning. Welcome to EARLY START. I'm Christine Romans.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm John Berman. Great to see you. It's Wednesday, April 20th. It's 4:00 a.m. in the East.

And the breaking news this morning, huge wins for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in New York. Significant wins. Race-shaping wins. Both front runners, they won their home state.

Look at what Donald Trump did. He had 60 percent of the vote. He beat John Kasich, his closest rival, and Ted Cruz a distant third. Ted Cruz didn't pick up a single delegate.

In the end, Donald Trump may walk away with we have him at 89 right now. John Kasich with three, a few more to be allocated. Trump will probably reach 90 or 91. This significantly improves his chances of getting the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination in the first ballot.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton, she won a big victory. Look at that. Beating Bernie Sanders by 15 points in a state where Bernie Sanders just yesterday said he thought he had a good chance of winning. She now leads Bernie Sanders by about 260 pledged delegates. You add in the super delegates, Clinton's total delegate lead is more than 700.

Last night, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, they held very big rallies celebrating their wins.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: We don't have much of a race anymore. Based on what I'm seeing on television, Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated. As you know, we have won millions of more votes than Senator Cruz, millions and millions of more votes than Governor Kasich. We've won and now especially after tonight, close to 300 delegates more than Senator Cruz. We're really, really rocking.

CLINTON: In this campaign, we've won in every region of the country.

(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

From the North to the South to the East to the West, but this one's personal.

(CHEERS)

The race for the Democratic nomination is the home stretch, and victory is in sight.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: All right. Let's break down the front runners' New York victories this morning with CNN politics reporter, Eric Bradner, and senior reporter on media and politics, Dylan Byers.

Good morning, gentlemen.

Eric in Washington, both front runners really needed those victories last night and they got them.

ERIC BRADNER, CNN POLITICS REPORTER: Yes, they absolutely did. For Donald Trump, this is an opportunity now to sort of drop the Lyin' Ted bit, right? You heard him talk about Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich. And instead of being against them, he was talking last night about being for the democratic process. He was making his case that the only way he can lose at this point is if the system is rigged against him.

And for Hillary Clinton, it was a big win not just because it was her home state and a bunch of delegates, but because for Bernie Sanders, New York really represented a chance to fundamentally alter the dynamics, sort of change the psychology of the race by going into Clinton's backyard and winning. And not only did he not do that, but she kind of blew him out.

So, for Hillary Clinton now, if Bernie Sanders isn't in the rearview mirror, he's a lot closer to it than he was at this point yesterday.

BERMAN: Yes, he's in the blind spot or moving past that blind spot in the passing lane. Hillary Clinton's in the passing lane right now, trying to move forward.

Dylan, Eric brought up Donald Trump right there. In the shift that we saw from Donald Trump last night as he was giving his victory speech, he literally did not call Ted Cruz "Lyin' Ted". He literally called him Senator Cruz. We also heard Donald Trump talk about something he hasn't talked about

much in this campaign, how hard he will work going forward to try to win votes. This represents maybe a pivot with these new staffers coming in.

Let's listen to what Donald Trump said about the road ahead.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I'm flying tomorrow morning to Indiana. I'm going to Pennsylvania. I will be all over. So, we're going to celebrate for about two hours, then early in the morning, I get up and we begin working again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: You know, after his last few big victories, Donald Trump took days off of the campaign trail, all but disappeared.

[04:05:03] This time, it's different.

How significant do you think this shift in strategy has been for the Trump team?

DYLAN BYERS, CNN SENIOR REPORTER, MEDIA & POLITICS: The shift is extremely significant, actually. And what you're seeing play out there on stage in terms of this new tone and this new sort of work ethic is really the result of what's been playing out behind the scenes. It's a result of Trump bring in Paul Manafort to sort of lead the delegate corralling effort leading into the convention.

And it's an effort to get more serious about this presidential campaign. For so much, for the first nine months of Donald Trump's campaign, he was running what was effectively a communications-based campaign. It was based on going out there, holding rallies, saying controversial things, and getting free media attention. The more controversial, the sort of crazier the things he said, the more media attention he would get.

And that proved very effective for him until he got bogged down in a nasty sniping fight with Ted Cruz. For a guy who's trying to pivot towards a general election and come off as his party's presumptive nominee, getting in these, sort of, you know, bottom of the barrel bickering matches with your competitor punching down, that's not effective.

So, Donald Trump, these two weeks he sort of hit the reset button, brought in guys like Paul Manafort, got rid of other people on the campaign, and now we're seeing Trump 2.0. It's much more serious, sort of playing by the old rules of presidential campaigning. It's one that he believes can take him to the convention with a huge edge over Ted Cruz and possibly after this win in New York, maybe even the 1,237 delegates he needs to win this thing outright.

ROMANS: We heard Hillary Clinton in her victory speech in New York basically appealing to Sanders' supporters. I mean -- and also pivoting toward the general election. Let's listen to what she said reaching out to Sanders' supporters.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: And to all the people who supported Senator Sanders, I believe there is much more that unites us than divides us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: Much more that unites us than divides us. Is she going to be able, with him potentially in her rearview mirror here, is she going to be able to appeal to those independents, to those very progressive Democrats who have been drawn to Bernie Sanders? Are they going to buy her message now?

(CROSSTALK)

BYERS: Sorry, go ahead.

ROMANS: Go ahead, Dylan.

BYERS: I was going to say, it's absolutely going to take some work. Just because Hillary Clinton won and won with quite a decisive victory in New York by no means -- that doesn't mean that she's solved her problem in terms of millennials, in terms of the 18 to 29 set. She still has a lot of work to do in that regard.

Look, I think it's becoming more and more clear to voters that Hillary Clinton is getting closer to the nomination, and it's very hard to see Bernie Sanders' path. He loves talking about momentum. He picked up so many small states, but if you really want to be your party's nominee, you've got to win the big states. And those are the states that Hillary Clinton has won.

And so, now, as she once again for the umpteenth time pivots towards the general election, she's also thinking about how she can bring in that Bernie Sanders coalition, how she can sort of set the stage to make an appeal to them at the convention where the Sanders contingent, the Sanders movement, if you will, will be a powerful voice.

BERMAN: You know, I want to be clear. On the Democratic side, I was talking to staffers on both campaigns in the days leading up, it's a bigger margin than the Clinton team thought they would win by, and it's a bigger margin than the Sanders team thought they would lose by. Fifteen points is at the very, very high end of where they thought this race was.

Likewise, on the Republicans side, Eric, you know, I heard Republican say, you know, Donald Trump would be around 80 delegates when all was said and done, 55 percent. Now, he got to 60 percent and probably around 90 delegates in New York.

And when you look at the overall delegate board, the delegate map, what he's managed to do is go from the largest margin of lead over Ted Cruz in recent weeks to now what is the biggest margin of lead he's had in this campaign today, nearly 300 delegates -- a significant edge right now in the delegate race. BRADNER: That's right. New York is actually one big contest and then

27 other little ones, 27 congressional districts. It's really, really big for the Trump campaign that he not only won statewide, but he was able to top the 50 percent mark in almost all of those congressional districts, which mean he gets all of the delegates, all three delegates from each of them.

That's a good sign headed into five more East Coast states next week, all of which have similar rules where if he's able to win not just rural and urban but suburban congressional districts one by one, the delegates really start to add up.

[04:10:00] The core of the stop Trump effort is to win those sorts of little fights, those delegate-by-delegate battles that Trump has been frankly sort of bad at so far. But with margins like this on the East Coast, it's going to give him a much better chance of getting to that magic number of 1,237. So, yes, Ted Cruz's campaign was --

BERMAN: I'm going to stop. Eric, we're going to talk about Ted Cruz.

We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk much more about Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Bernie Sanders and the race ahead for the people who did not win here in New York.

So stay with us.

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I'm so excited to share with you what America has learned over the past few months, and it has nothing to do with a politician winning his home state tonight.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We lost tonight. There are five primaries next week.

[04:15:01] We think we're going to do well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: Senators Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders clearly determined to fight on despite crucial wins overnight by the front runners, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. What exactly are the paths forward for Cruz and Sanders, and have these long primary fights fractured their parties?

We'll dig into the exit polling and talk about what's next for these other candidates and put these questions to our panel.

Gentlemen, nice to see you again.

Eric Bradner, let's answer that question about what happens for Ted Cruz in particular. We were talking about that just before the break. What is the next step for Ted Cruz? BRADNER: Yes. So, Ted Cruz is going to have to compete in states

like Pennsylvania and Maryland where he's not likely to win statewide. He's just hoping to pick off some rural congressional districts. But then the big fight ahead for him is the week after next, in Indiana. That's where he will look to defeat Donald Trump and sort of regain some of the momentum that he's lost at this point.

For Cruz, last night was rough. It turns out that bashing New York values is not the way to make friends and influence people in the New York Republican electorate. So, you know, he had spent time in New York. He had really been hoping to make some inroads and make it tough for Donald Trump there. And the fact he wasn't able to do that at all doesn't bode well for five more East Coast contests next week.

So, Indiana is the one that he's really got to circle on the map right now.

BERMAN: No, you brought up a good point. I mean, look, Ted Cruz campaigned in New York. And he thought, he's run a very smart campaign. They thought all the intelligence they've used elsewhere would help them surgically pick off delegates, maybe Upstate, where in some Democratic districts where there aren't many Republicans in the city. That didn't work out.

He finished a distant third, well behind John Kasich, and John Kasich is the one who emerges with delegates. Ted Cruz gets zero.

And, Dylan, let me read you a tweet from the Kasich campaign. They say, "Going forward, polls show John Kasich is consistently the best candidate to take on Trump. Second in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, and second in tonight in New York."

So, John Kasich, who by the way still trails Marco Rubio in the delegate count more than a month after Rubio dropped out of the race, is using the results last night to cling to hope going forward.

BYERS: Yes, and look, John Kasich has been saying this for a long time. He says, you look at the polls, I'm the best positioned to beat not only Donald Trump, he also says he's the best positioned to beat the Democratic nominee. The problem is at the end of the day, presidential primaries are not a game of polls. They're a game of results. And if you look at the results, he doesn't have them. He's won his home state, and that's it.

So, if anyone was going to come to listen and sympathize with Kasich's plea, it needed to be the Republican establishment. The Republican establishment needed to coalesce behind him, really give him a lot of money and sort of make him the sort of savior of the Republican Party. There's a reason they didn't do that. It's because they didn't believe that he could beat Trump or Cruz. And it's very hard to see how he can pull that off going forward, despite what is a very good spin on the fate of his campaign.

ROMANS: So, that's the Republican side. Let's look at the Democrats and Bernie Sanders, where he is this morning. Back home in Vermont recharging his batteries. He made some comments yesterday that I thought were pretty

interesting. He talked about independents. We talked about how notoriously closed the New York primary process is.

Listen to what he said about how his supporters were robbed of their voice last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SANDERS: Almost 30 percent of the eligible voters, some 3 million New Yorkers, were unable to vote today because they had registered as independents, not Democrats or Republicans, and that makes no sense to me at all. People should have the right to participate in a primary and vote for their candidate for president of the United States.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: Eric Bradner, that wasn't a surprise, though, that people who were not registered -- that was not a surprise, should not have been a surprise to this campaign. Was it a surprise, in your view, how wide the margin was for Hillary Clinton's victory against Bernie Sanders last night in New York?

BRADNER: It was a bit of a surprise. The fact that not only did she get into double digits but won by more than 15 was a bit of a surprise. But Sanders is right in pointing out that closed primaries where only registered Democrats can participate do tend to work well for Hillary Clinton. They shut him out from bringing mass quantities of independents into the process.

But the rules are the same going forward, in four of the five states that vote next week. So this is something that Bernie Sanders has known about the entire time and something he's going to have to confront. People who are loyal Democrats tend to support Clinton.

[04:20:00] We've seen that in exit polls out of state after state after state.

BERMAN: It will be interesting to see if Democrats -- establishment Democrats start to call the Sanders team to tone down their attacks, or not attacks but criticisms of Hillary Clinton and that campaign going forward. We'll discuss that in our next half hour. So, guys, thanks so much. Stand by.

ROMANS: All right. Twenty minutes past the hour.

In just hours from now, President Obama in Saudi Arabia and how to fight ISIS, but this is a strained relationship with new controversies. Could that stand in the way? Next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: In just over two hours, President Obama arrives in Saudi Arabia to discuss the fight against ISIS. The visit comes at a time when relations between the U.S. and Saudis are pretty badly frayed. [04:25:03] King Salman not happy about the nuclear deal with Iran or a

bill currently before Congress that would allow families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudis for damages.

I want to bring in CNN's Nic Robertson live in Riyadh this morning.

Nic, these are important meetings that come at a very precarious time.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Absolutely. And certainly, President Obama is going to walk into that meeting with King Salman today and there's going to be a very frigid atmosphere. The tensions between the two countries have been growing, particularly with the bill that's before Congress right now, these 28 pages.

What do they contain? Should it be made public? That's certainly going to cloud the atmosphere.

But what President Obama hopes to achieve here is to get Saudi support and regional support on tackling ISIS. He wants stability in the region, security in the region.

What King Salman is going to want? He and the other -- his Gulf allies here want a ballistic missile shield against any -- what they consider potential aggression by Iran in the future. They relied -- the Saudis rely heavily on U.S. military systems. They're investing hugely in their defense and security infrastructure here.

So, what President Obama can promise and talk about speeding and expediting the delivery of that ballistic missile system, that's going to sort of iron out some of the wrinkles in the relationship. But really, it's in a very bad place right now, John.

BERMAN: We'll hear from the president in just a few hours.

Nic Robertson in Riyadh, thanks so much.

ROMANS: All right. Time for an early start on your money.

Dow futures are lower this morning and oil is behind that drop. It's back down around $40 barrel. European stock markets slipping. Asia finishing mixed overnight.

The Dow is now up five of the past six days. Even more impressive, from its bottom in February, it's up more than 16 percent, 2,500 points the Dow has rallied.

For the year, the Dow is up 3.6 percent. The NASDAQ still down a little. The S&P 500 up 2.7 percent.

One stock we're watching today, Intel. Shares are down 2 percent in premarket trading. It's laying off a stunning 12,000 workers around the world. Most of the cuts will take place over the next two months. The stock is one of the worst performers on the Dow this year.

Intel is the largest chip maker in the world that's been struggling to break into mobile devices as PC sales slide. Intel also one of the stocks, it's likely in your 401k somewhere, widely held stock.

BERMAN: All right. Huge victories, very big, significant victories for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in New York. We'll tell you what it means. That's next.

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