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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin
Republican Party Civil War; Trump Versus Clinton Battle Takes Shape; Alberta Wildfire Forces Evacuation Of 90,000; North Carolina Faces Justice Department Deadline; Heavily Favored Nyquist Wins Kentucky Derby. Aired 5-5:30a ET
Aired May 09, 2016 - 05:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: -- of the Republican Party. These two leaders in the party meet Thursday. One of the things they will talk about Trump policies that seem to be at odds with Republican dogma. There is the issue of taxes, raising taxes on wealthy.
There is also the issue perhaps that Trump's position, changing position on the minimum wage. Let's get more now from CNN Politics reporter, Eric Bradner, in Washington.
ERIC BRADNER, CNN POLITICS REPORTER: Good morning, John and Christine. The GOP civil war is raging on ahead of a big meeting this week between the party's highest ranking official, House Speaker Paul Ryan and his presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump.
Here is what Trump told ABC on Sunday about that meeting.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: He wants to meet. He'd like to meet and I think we are meeting on Thursday. We will just see what happens. It is more drama. I think it is a mistake not to do this. We want to bring the party together.
Does the party have to be together? Does it have to be unified? I'm very different than everybody else perhaps that's ever run for office. I actually don't think so.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRADNER: But the meeting might not heal many wounds. Ryan wants Trump to adopt more conservative policy positions. But Trump broke from the right in two big ways on Sunday. He said he is willing to support higher taxes on the wealthy in exchange for the deal that would see Democrats give him a cut in business taxes and cut for the middle class.
He also said he's open to a minimum wage increase even though he wants that to come from the states. All of this is happening against the back drop of a big threat by a Trump supporter.
The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin. Palin told CNN that she is going to support Ryan's primary challenger.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SARAH PALIN (R), FORMER VP CANDIDATE: I will do whatever I can for Paul Neelan. This man is a hard working guy, so touch with the people. Paul Ryan and his ilk, their problem is they have become so disconnected from the people whom they are elected to represent as evidenced by Paul Ryan's refusal to support the GOP frontrunner that we just said he's our man.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRADNER: It's the first threat of retaliation against the Trump opponent within the party that we have seen so far and it could deepen the divide -- Christine, John.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Let's break down the fast changing political landscape this morning, political analyst and best-selling author, Ellis Henican. Good morning.
ELLIS HENICAN, POLITICAL ANALYST, BEST-SELLING AUTHOR: They are moving fast.
BERMAN: It's already 5:02. This week is flying by.
ROMANS: There is a lot going on this week. This week marks six months until the general election.
HENICAN: Six more months of this?
ROMANS: I know six more months. Let's talk a little bit about something that Sarah Palin said about Paul Ryan. She was on "STATE OF THE UNION" this weekend. She made a new verb, cantored. Listen to here to what she said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PALIN: I think Paul Ryan is soon to be cantored as in Eric Cantor. His political career is over, but for a miracle because he has so disrespected the will of the people. Yes, as the leader of the GOP, the convention, he certainly is to remain neutral. For him to already come out and say who he will not support was not a wise decision of his.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: Maybe you don't remember Eric Cantor. He lost his seat to a Tea Party upstart in his home state and he lost his job as speaker. My question is do you think that the outsiders in the Republican Party think that they don't need the establishment? Unifying the party is not necessary.
HENICAN: You are absolutely right. Donald Trump has shown no indication that he thinks his party needs to be unified. He has a theory about how he can win by stacking up the industrial states and rust belt states down the middle. But I don't know, it's pretty hard to make those numbers. BERMAN: The flip side is who's party? The party says what? Right, I mean, more than 10 million voters in the Republican primaries have picked Donald Trump. They say well it is only a minority. The truth is as the primaries go on, Donald Trump is getting over 50 percent. It is now a majority. Who does Ryan represent here other than Paul Ryan?
HENICAN: It's a great question. There really isn't a simple answer because we have a couple of different parties vying for this. There is a meeting on Thursday with Donald Trump and Paul Ryan, and sort of try to work out differences.
Ryan's the one with the power. If he says hold on, if he says, OK, fine. You don't want me chairing the convention, I'll quit. I don't think that's really good for the future of the Trump candidacy.
BERMAN: I also think that Paul Ryan has set up a very difficult decision and position for himself. If he decides to go with Trump, he has to explain why. What did Trump say that made Paul Ryan comfortable with him. If he doesn't go with Trump, he has to be the speaker split for the nominee.
HENICAN: You're absolutely right. Listen, we know historically that all of the momentum in times like this is unity. Eventually most people kind of come around.
[05:05:03]But, boy, there has been rough stuff said. When is Ted Cruz going to show up? That pathological liar, remember him?
ROMANS: Look, the Paul Ryan story is just so fascinating because a lot of people -- people who support him are really like him. They see him as running for president. He was a vice president candidate. They see him in 2020. Does he want the fingerprints of supporting Donald Trump on his legacy if he is eventually going to run for president?
HENICAN: That's exactly the calculus that he is making and other Republicans as well. Do they say, listen, we'll suffer defeat in the election and a couple of years of rough times if ultimately we can put this behind us. That's a tough bet.
BERMAN: I didn't mean to diminish the notion that there are real differences between Paul Ryan and Donald Trump. You look at positions that Donald Trump has taken. In some cases, they are changing. In some cases, they are at odds with the party and odds with himself.
Just this weekend, for instance, he was talking about taxes. He put out a tax cut plan, which cut tax rates for everybody. But now he is saying he is open to the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy. Let's listen to that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I come up with the biggest tax cut by far of any candidate. Anybody. And I put it in, but that doesn't mean that's what we are going to get. We have to negotiate. The thing I'm going to do is make sure the middle class gets good taxes -- tax breaks because they have been absolutely shunned. The other thing I'm going to fight very hard for business. For the wealthy, I think frankly it's going to go up. You know what? It really should go up.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: That's different. That's different than we heard from him -- the cornerstone of his tax plan which was cutting taxes for everyone.
HENICAN: Christine, the presumption is as we go from the primary phase into the general election phase, we would be getting a different kind of Donald Trump. A calmer, more measured, more policy oriented. It seems to me like he is still throwing stuff against the wall.
BERMAN: Among the things he is throwing against the wall, his comments about Bill and Hillary Clinton. Not letting up at all. In some cases intensifying as you head toward the general. Listen to what he said about the Clintons this weekend.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: She's married to a man who is the worst abuser of women in the history of politics. She's married to a man who hurt many women and Hillary, if you look and if you study, Hillary hurt many women. The women that he abused. She's married to a man who got impeached for lying.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: Donald Trump wanted them to be at his own wedding. They were wedding guests at his own wedding celebrating the nuptial of his third marriage.
HENICAN: It is an interesting point. It's clearly a sensitive point with the Clintons. You can maybe get under their skin a little bit by bringing that up again. We litigated that already. Blaming the woman for the affairs the husband had, I don't know. That wouldn't sell too well.
ROMANS: That launched the whole best-selling TV series actually. You know, I think the woman card, he's going to stick to this. The next six months, this is going to be central to his campaign. All right, Ellis, we'll talk to you again very soon. Thanks for coming so early this morning.
BERMAN: We will talk to Donald Trump this morning on CNN. He will be on NEW DAY during the 7:00 hour.
ROMANS: Donald Trump shifting on his tax policy over the weekend. You know, it's been a cornerstone of his economic policy that taxes will go down for everyone. He says taxes on the wealthy, though, now may increase after he negotiates with Congress.
But he is intent on keeping those cuts for the middle class especially for businesses. The U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate among developed nations. This is the corporate tax everybody is talking about, it's 35 percent.
You know, most U.S. companies don't pay the top tax rate. They have loopholes, legal loopholes and deductions that they use. You can see how other countries fall in here.
France, Belgium, Australia also have tax rates about 30 percent. The worldwide average is 22.9 percent tax rate. He wants to cut those taxes. He also wants to fight companies that refused to bring profits earned overseas back to the U.S.
He said he would create incentives to get companies to cooperate with his tax plan. Pretty interesting. Two of the big points of his economic policies he shifted on, minimum wage and taxes on the wealthy and that doesn't break with the Republican orthodoxy.
BERMAN: All right, this morning, hundreds of thousands of acres up in flames. The wildfires blazing over Western Canada. Destroying everything in sight. Can a turn now in the weather create some kind of break for those battling this blaze?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[05:13:51]
ROMANS: Nearly 90,000 people in Alberta have been forced to flee their homes escaping a devastating wildfire burning an area half the size of Rhode Island. More than 1,600 homes and buildings already torched.
As firefighters struggle to beat back the flames, officials are concerned about extremely dry conditions and these unpredictable winds. They fear this could be just the beginning of a long, hot, dangerous summer.
We get more from CNN's Paul Vercammen in Edmonton.
PAUL VERCAMMEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: John, Christine, I'm in front of the evacuation center where many of the fire refugees are either grabbing supplies or spending the night or both. They are all concerned about what has happened to their homes.
Some know, some don't, one factor in all this, the wind, you can hear it. The firefighters battling with it. Now fortunately, the wind blowing the fire away from Fort McMurray, that was the town ravaged by the blaze.
Quite an ordeal for the families in Fort McMurray and imagine what all of this was like as it blew through there last week through in the eyes of a small child.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: I saw the flames and they were very bad and like the fire was very big. I saw the smoke downtown. We thought my school was burned down, but it wasn't. It's like very bad.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[05:15:10]VERCAMMEN: And as we said, you can hear what firefighters are up against. It's that wind. Some 40 blazes in all burning in Alberta, Canada. We have about 1,500 firefighters on the line. Some of them becoming beleaguered, needing a break.
Help is coming from Quebec and New Brunswick. There's already more firefighters here from parts of Ontario. All of them hoping that they get the relief in terms of more manpower and the wind dies down. Back to you, Christine and John.
BERMAN: All right, Paul, thanks so much. Just devastation up there. Here in the United States, severe weather all across the plains on Sunday. Multiple reports of tornadoes touching down in Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.
Some issues with hail in Texas. We have some amazing footage from Colorado. This is an EF-2 tornado that tore up the town of Wray. I think this almost looks fake. It looks like CGI. It is so incredibly vivid.
ROMANS: Five people went to the hospital for injuries around that town there. I mean, it is just incredible. You see the brown dirt kicked up from that.
BERMAN: All right, so will this continue today? Meteorologist Pedram Javaheri joins us with the latest.
PEDRAM JAVAHERI, AMS METEOROLOGIST: John and Christine, good morning to you both. Yes, the severe weather threat is still there, about 24 million people impacted by this. Look at the concern this past weekend across wary, Colorado. The massive tornado that touched down across the region.
The area of concern between noon and 3:00 p.m. the bulk of the storms to fire off. A three for the threat of concern across Little Rock, Shreveport east of Dallas. The main concern being large hail and damaging winds.
Certainly tornadoes are going to be possible across this region as well. Pretty expansive area for severe weather will continue. Notice into the afternoon hours around portions of Central Missouri and northern portions of Arkansas, you get a good line of storms that fire up into the evening and afternoon hours.
Notice these temperatures. They soar across Wichita into the upper 80s. How about the mid-90s by Lubbock across this region by Tuesday. Even Oklahoma City warms up to July and August like temperatures.
Dallas gets up to about 88 degrees by this afternoon. The place to be, New York City and Washington enjoy the 60s and 70s, and it remains that way for much of this week with mild temperatures across the northeast and extremely hot down across the southwest.
ROMANS: All right, Pedram, thank you for that. The governor of North Carolina has until the end of today to respond to a letter from the Justice Department challenging the state's controversial new transgender law.
Governor Pat McCrory says he will answer the letter before the deadline insisting U.S. officials did not give him enough time to stop enforcing law or to repeal it all together. At stake, more than $800 million in federal education funding that could be pulled from North Carolina schools.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOVERNOR PAT MCCRORY (R), NORTH CAROLINA: They gave the ninth largest state in the United States, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, three working days to respond to a pretty complex letter and to a pretty big threat.
Well, we don't think three working days is enough to respond to such a threat. We are really talking about a letter in which they are trying to define gender identity. There is no clear identification or a definition of gender identity. It's the federal government being a bully.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: The Justice Department has warned North Carolina its new law which requires transgender people to use public bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate. The Justice Department says that law violates the Civil Rights Act.
BERMAN: Ferguson, Missouri spurs in its new police chief today, Major Delrish Moss, the longtime spokesman of the Miami Police Department takes over nearly two years after the shooting death of Michael Brown. Moss says the Ferguson Police Department needs diversification. His first order of business will be to increase interaction between officers and young people.
ROMANS: All right, the run for the roses is in the books, the favorite, Nyquist, crossing the finish line first after a decade's long drought. Are we about to witness two Triple Crown winners in a row? Coy Wire with this morning's "Bleacher Report" next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[05:23:34]
BERMAN: All right. Oklahoma City star, Kevin Durant came up huge on Mother's Day. All with his mother court side.
ROMANS: Coy Wire has more in this morning's "Bleacher Report." Hey, Coy.
COY WIRE, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Christine and John, remember a couple of years ago, Kevin Durant wins the NBA's MVP award. He tells his mom, Wanda, she is the real MVP. Last night against the Spurs with mom in the front row, the four-time scoring champ played like he wanted his title back.
Durant went on a scoring spree in the fourth quarter. He scored 17 of his career high playoff high 41 points. Thunder wins, 111-97, tying the series at two games apiece. Game five has now moved to San Antonio tomorrow.
Two games tonight. TNT is the place to be. Raptors and Heat 8 Eastern followed by Warriors and Trailblazers at 10:30.
After nearly a 100-year hiatus, the America's Cup is back in New York. New York City is a skyline over 100,000 spectators lined the Hudson River to take in the breathtaking scenes of the world's most prestigious sailboat race.
Last year's winners, Oracle Team USA had the lead at one point, but New Zealand would win the second of five regattas retaining their lead in the America's Cup World Series.
More than 167,000 spectators witnessed the Kentucky Derby over the weekend. Nyquist would hang on and capture the run for the roses. He is an 8 for 8 in races. Some think race fans are wondering if we won't have to wait long to witness another Triple Crown winner.
[05:25:07]American Pharoah just last year became the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years. A couple of weeks, guys, May 21st, Nyquist will make a run for the second jewel in the Triple Crown at the Preakness.
ROMANS: What a race, that was a very cool race.
BERMAN: Very cool.
ROMANS: All right, thanks so much. Nice to see you, Coy.
The primary may be over, but the battle is just beginning. Donald Trump feuding with top Republican leaders threatening to pull Paul Ryan as chairman of the GOP convention if Ryan doesn't endorse him. That's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BERMAN: All right. The Republican Party civil war. They may be wearing the same tie, but that may be the only thing they agree on. Is party unity possible?
ROMANS: Hillary Clinton hoping to gain some of those anti-Trump Republican votes in the general election, but Bernie Sanders is not letting her get ahead of herself. Pledging to stay in the race until the last vote is counted.
BERMAN: Huge wildfires consuming hundreds of thousands of acres, 90,000 people evacuated. Firefighters hoping for a change in the weather, hoping for some kind of help, will they get it? Welcome back --
