Return to Transcripts main page

Inside Politics

Fourth Executive Resigns from Manufacturing Council; Trump Calls CEOs Grandstanders; Alabama GOP Senate Race; Bannon on Way Out. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired August 15, 2017 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:00] KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you so much. The general always gets the last word. Sorry, Jamey (ph).

Thanks for joining us AT THIS HOUR. "INSIDE POLITICS" with John King starts right now.

JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thanks for sharing your day with us.

The president is at a most familiar setting, his Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. There are big protests outside and also big turmoil inside as talk grows of another possible White House shake-up. This one centered on Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is he going to be gone in a week?

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI, FORMER WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: That's up to the president.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But what do you think? What do you think? What does "The Mooch" think?

SCARAMUCCI: Well, if it was - if it was up to me he would be gone.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: It is primary day in Alabama. The Senate seat once held by the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is up for grabs and the fight among Republicans is a bruising reminder the GOP, even while in charge of just about everything, is in the middle of an identity war.

First, though, some breaking news. A fourth resignation from a White House manufacturing council. That, fresh evidence the political fallout continues from Charlottesville and from a presidential response being panned at too little and very late.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. CHARLIE DENT (R), PENNSYLVANIA: Then he came out yesterday with a better response, but it looked a little bit forced and half-hearted. And I think what's affecting the president here is the fact that his prior statements during the campaign were, you know, he went after - you know, he made some attacks on Mexicans, Muslims, the Indiana judge, and I think, you know, it makes these situations even more treacherous for the president.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: With us to share their reporting and their insights, Abby Phillip of "The Washington Post," "The Atlantics's" Molly Ball, Michael Shear of "The New York Times," and Mary Katharine Ham of "The Federalist."

President Trump, as we noted, home at Trump Tower today. He believes he's done all he needs to do in the wake of the hateful marches and deadly violence this past weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia. The White House says, for example, there are no plans for the president to visit Charlottesville and that, in his view, the president said all that needed to be said when, after being pressed by senior advisers, he spoke yesterday at the White House.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Those were welcome words from the president. But to many, it was too little. And to even more, it was too late. A second, a third, and now a fourth CEO resigning from the president's manufacturing council because they don't want their brand associated with his.

Kenneth Frazier of Merck Pharmaceutical was first, followed now by the CEO's of Under Armour, Intel and just moment ago by Scott Paul, who's the president of the Alliance for American manufacturing. That announcement from Paul came just moments after President Trump wrote this on Twitter. For every CEO that drops out of the manufacturing council, I have many to take their place. Grandstanders should not have gone on. Jobs.

Maybe. That's the president's reaction. But, remember, CEOs track numbers. They track markets. And President Trump's already low stock is in further decline. Gallup's daily tracking has the president with just a 34 percent approval rating. His disapproval at a new high. Sixty-one percent of Americans don't like what they see in a president about to hit the seventh month mark.

How big of a deal? A fourth CEO. Likely there will be more. Even if people aren't dropping off these councils, less likely to come to events with the president, at least at this moment, to sit next to him. His brand's clearly tainted.

ABBY PHILLIP, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Yes. I think it -- this is actually a moment in a series of moments similar to this. But one that's meaningful, I think, because, you know, if we think back six or seven months ago, there was a time when a single tweet by Donald Trump would provoke shutters through, you know, corporate board rooms, stocks would go down. Now we're seeing almost the opposite, in part because people have, I think, made a calculation that it's too risky. That, you know, perhaps they don't know whether it's going to be a good thing or bad a thing, but the level of risk is too great to associate themselves with Trump.

And it's not just in the corporate realm. You're seeing more and more Republicans speaking out, being willing to push back hard against him, including some unusual suspects, like Cory Gardner over the weekend. And you're seeing it in the military, with military leaders just saying, you know, we need to have a different process from the way that this president is typically wanting to operate. Twitter is not going to be considered an order in the United States military service. And that's a big deal and that's been happening for weeks now.

MICHAEL SHEAR, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": I mean, look, I think the irony of the president's most recent tweet about grandstanding is that White House councils are all about grandstanding. I mean, they're, right, they're ultimately about sort of that kind of political messaging. The -- in addition to the lack of fear that Abby talked about that I don't think is there quite as much, there's also not, in the business community and in Republican circle, not as much optimism that the president is the one that's going to help get through their other pieces of the agenda, the infrastructure that so many of these manufacturing companies would have liked to see. The tax cuts that all of business wants to see.

[12:05:13] You know, if you're not scared and you also don't think that the president is bringing a lot to the table in terms of driving your agenda forward, then what advantage is there to be part of his sort of coalition? Especially if the brand is a problem.

KING: And just raw math. I mean if you're at 31 percent, you can't afford to lose friends, right?

MARY KATHARINE HAM, "THE FEDERALIST": Yes. Well, and he -- I mean, he makes it extremely hard to ally with, right?

KING: Right.

HAM: Like -- and I think -- it's ironic because I think he is a very transactional guy. You get in a room with him and have a conversation as a CEO and he might be like, that sounds like a great idea. Let's move on that. But he does so many other things that make it hard to be in that situation. And for politicians as well, where you don't know if he's going to spout off on you the second you leave the room or the second you pass some legislation that was really hard to pass and three days later he's trashing it.

SHEAR: Look at Mitch McConnell, has so of gone (INAUDIBLE) space.

HAM: Right, or going after a CEO who leaves the board instead of going after by name white nationalists.

SHEAR: Right.

HAM: Like there - it is fair to say, what are the priorities here?

KING: And it's fair to say, isn't it, that what he tweets tells us about what is most important to him, what is driving his own internal conversation. Yes, he read a statement yesterday in a teleprompter at the White House three days after Charlottesville. And we're told, and I'm sure your sources say the same thing, under pressure from senior advisers saying, Mr. President, you've got to clean this up. You've got to do a better job here. It took three days for an American president to say neo-Nazis are bad. That's a pretty shocking thing in its own right. But then you get the pure Trump in the Twitter feed and he's mad at these guys for, in his view, abandoning him. He has tweeted about them. First it was Ken Frazier of Merck. Now these other grandstanders, as he calls them. He has not tweeted once about the KKK or neo-Nazis or white supremacists.

MOLLY BALL, "THE ATLANTIC": Well, and I think, you know, the Donald Trump that we have always known is someone who himself call as counterpuncher and people around him call him a counterpuncher. It's all about him. If it's good for him, he likes it. If it's bad for him, he doesn't like it.

And I think what people are increasingly seeing is, this isn't a calculation about what's good for America. This is a calculation about who has said nice or mean things about Donald Trump. And that is the sole basis on which he makes his judgments about who to attack, who to praise, and that's why he is so begrudging when it comes to condemning people who he doesn't feel that he's being attacked by.

KING: A very important points because I want you to listen here. Here are three of the CEOs. Again, the president's poll numbers were at their worst state now, but they've been bad from the beginning. He lost the popular vote. He's had tough getting traction on some issues. These business meetings at the White House, to Michael's point, have been very important for the president to send a message. I'm going to bring back jobs. The stock market is going to do better. The economy is going to start to boom. They have been important character witnesses for the president as he tries to get started.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEVIN PLANK, CEO, UNDER ARMOUR: I think he's highly passionate. He definitely - it's -- you know, to have such a pro-business president is something that's a real asset for this country.

BRIAN KRZANICH, CEO, INTEL: It's really in support of tax and regulatory policies that we see the administration pushing forward that really make it advantageous to do manufacturing in the U.S.

KENNETH FRAZIER, CEO, MERCK: It's an honor to be here at the White House, and I'm grateful for the administration's continued support for American innovation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, those three, plus a fourth now, have walked away from this council, which denies the president either the testimony on television or those photo ops at the White House.

PHILLIP: And one thing that I want to highlight here, Kevin plank, the CEO of Under Armour, has taken a lot of flak in the past for being associated with the Trump administration. He was at the White House in the very early stages, one of the first CEOs to show up in the White House. And he had some of his -- his sort of celebrity faces of his brand basically pull out and say we can't be associated with you because you're associated with Trump.

He stayed in it up until now. That kind of tells you that I think a lot of CEOs had given it a good, old try, and they've really are feeling like this is the end of the line for them. They cannot go no further. That's an important moment. These are not just people who have been passively going forward. Many of them have been taking a lot of flak for many, many months, and this was the final straw.

KING: And Charlottesville, a final straw. We do know and I think, you know, we'll know more about this in two weeks, in two months than we do about it today in terms of the political fallout. Whether the president can find a way to reset it after what I think by most -- by most accounts, unless you're a total Trump loyalist, was a disappointing initial reaction on Saturday.

But we know this, even beforehand, in our polling before Charlottesville, is Trump a person you admire? Sixty-seven percent of the American people say, no, they don't admire the president of the United States. Can Trump unite the country? Will Trump unite the country, not divide it? Thirty-five percent, yes, 61 percent, no. That is part of the calculation that was already out there in the country before an event like Charlottesville.

And I'm going to make a -- what's probably a contrarian argument here, that by attacking these guys as grandstanders or saying I can replace you, I'm not saying that's a presidential thing to do, but it puts the president at least attacking all of them, whereas yesterday out of the box he attacked Mr. Frazier, and African-American, in the wake of Charlottesville. An African-American CEO takes what he describes as a position of principle. I can't be around this guy if he's not going to be more forceful about this. The president attacked him.

[12:10:20] And here's Congressman Charlie Dent saying that that particular play by the president, in his view, an especially bad call.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. CHARLIE DENT (R), PENNSYLVANIA: I was a bit miffed yesterday when he attacked Ken Frazier. I know Ken. He's from Philadelphia. His father was a janitor. I just thought it was kind of a cheap shot. You know, other CEOs stepped off that council, too. He didn't attack them. They weren't African-American either. So I thought, you know, he didn't handle that well at all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, Charlie Dent has been a critic of the president from the beginning. He's a more moderate Republican. The president's more toxic in his district, if you will, so you have to filter the politics through that.

But CEOs leaving the council. More and more Republicans openly coming out with no hesitation now, not trying to sugar-coat their words in any way. Is this some sort of a breaking point for the president?

SHEAR: Well, look, I think it is indicative of a lot of problems on the horizon when, after Labor Day, everybody comes back and they're going to try to pull together as a party to try to get something salvaged, something out of this first year of the president's term.

And, look, I think Trump -- Trump's problem is that he's measured -- we know him. We've seen him over the last couple of years. And, you know, I thought about this the other day. That when you watched his passion on the campaign trail about the people who, in this country, who were killed by, in his words, illegal immigrants, who came to this country and murdered people - there was that case in San Francisco that he talked a lot about.

KING: Kate Steinle, right. Yes.

SHEAR: You know, he would sit there at the podium and grip the podium and speak in emotional, powerful terms about his, you know, anger and frustration with that -- those cases. And he could go on for, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes at these rallies.

And then you watched what he did even on -- over the weekend and it just wasn't filled with any of that, right? It was reading words off a page. So even if he read the right words, you didn't see -- people didn't see - and none of his allies on Capitol Hill saw any of that passion. And I think that's what they're reacting to.

BALL: Well, and to your point, John, I think it would be one thing if he was intentionally, as a category, going after big business, right? If the attacks on CEOs were part of a larger message that was saying, I'm on the side of the people. I'm not on the side of these, these, you know, fat cat CEOs, because a lot of what was attractive to so many voter who were not traditional Republican primary voter or Republican general election voters was that Trump did seem independent from the Republican donor class and the economic agenda of the sort of one percenters.

And so -- but this was obviously done as a sort of petty, personal retaliation. It wasn't part of Trump really coming up with a coherent message of saying that he was going to fight for the little guy. And, you know, the CEOs on that council obviously felt that they weren't getting anything out of the president in terms of the trade agenda or bringing manufacturing jobs back.

KING: And he is on the record heaping praise on all of them when they were at those meetings, when they were with him, singling them all out to say nice things about them. But now that they've done something he doesn't like, they're grandstanders.

HAM: Yes. A couple things about this. When it comes to the credibility numbers and the lack of admiration, a lot of that was built into this when he came into office. That's what people voted for and sort of compatriot (ph) -

KING: Right. My question is - you know, how do you - is it possible -- Charlottesville was an opportunity to start to make it better if he had been strong out of the gate.

HAM: Yes. Well, and my point is that when you're making that calculation, and that's the guy you're voting for, you will lose the guy who has the moral clarity at the podium at that moment. If we're going to have a national conversation about political violence, which, by the way, should not be limited to one kind of political violence, you need a guy who's careful and clear and knows of what he speaks and is trying to do it responsibly. And this is not who was voted for.

KING: It's not.

All right, everybody sit tight. We'll continue the conversation.

Up next, nine Republicans bailing it out at the ballot box this hour with an eye on Jeff Sessions' old Senate seat. But only one has the backing of both the president and his often nemesis, Mitch McConnell.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:18:14] (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Hi, this is President Donald Trump. And I love the people of Alabama. And I hope you go out and vote for Luther Strange for Senate. It's so important that you do. He's helping me in the Senate. He's going to get the tax cuts for us. He's doing a lot of things for the people of Alabama and for the people of the United States.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: You hear the voice of the president there backing Luther Strange. That's a surprise to some because President Trump makes no secret of his displeasure with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But those two, the president and the majority leader, on the same team today as Alabama picks candidates for the Senate seat once held by the attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

It's a deep red state, so the contest that matters most is the Republican primary, where interim Senator Luther Strange has the backing of both the president and the majority leader. Now, some Trump allies are mad at the president because they see Strange as being too cozy already with Washington insiders like McConnell, and they view other Republican candidates, Congressman Mo Brooks, former State Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, chief among them, as anti- establishment disrupters much more in the Trump 2016 mold. If one candidate cracks 50 percent, he's the nominee. If not, the top two have a run-off next month.

Now, the president remains popular among Alabama Republicans and Senator Strange hopes that means a lot today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. LUTHER STRANGE (R), ALAABAMA: I've done everything you could possibly do to support the president's agenda. And, believe me, that's what the people of Alabama want to see done.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Molly strange - Molly Ball, you were down covering the Strange race. (INAUDIBLE Molly strange. You were down coving this race and you write in "The Atlantic," Strange himself was surprised. He nearly drove off the road when Trump called him from the White House on Tuesday afternoon he said. Why is he so surprises?

BALL: Well, it is actually a unusual thing for a sitting president to intervene in a Republican primary. Now, Strange is technically the incumbent. He was appointed to the seat. He's been there for six months. But a lot of the people around the president and around Luther Strange were surprised that Trump would weigh in. It is the first time the president has weighed in in a contested Republican primary. He was expected to really stay out of it.

[12:20:14] Mitch McConnell did lobby him hard to endorse Strange some months ago, but when Trump declined to do that back then, it was thought that it wasn't going to happen. And so even the Strange campaign didn't know this was coming. And the way Luther Strange himself tells the story, he was driving down the highway in Alabama on Tuesday when he got a call saying, please hold for the president, and that's when he nearly drove off the road.

KING: We'll see. He nearly drove off the road. He didn't. And so we'll see what happens today.

I mean what a rebuke it would be for the president if he did this rare, unusual step and Luther Strange somehow didn't make the runoff. Most people seem to think Luther Strange will make the runoff and most likely the former state supreme court chief justice Roy Moore. But the people are voting today. We'll see what happens. You never know in these low turnout, you know, special primaries.

Let's look at the other candidates and who has endorsed them. Luther Strange, as we noted, has the support of President Trump and Mitch McConnell. Strange bedfellows. They've been at war with each other lately. Mo Brooks, the congressman, has talk radio host and Fox News host Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham. Roy Moore, "Duck Dynasty's" Phil Robinson, Chuck Norris.

What does this tell us? We have watched - we have watched -- you know, Trump won in 2016 after a hostile takeover through the Republican primaries. The Republicans control the Senate. They control the House. They control most of the governorships. The Republicans run just about everything and yet, as they do, there's still a civil war going on within the party. What are we going to learn from this?

HAM: As I keep saying, sorry, broken record, but the GOP won the presidency while - and probably going through a very ugly divorce. And they continue to go through that divorce. And that's what we're seeing. I think the thing about this race that's interesting, is because

McConnell and Trump are aligned, and those represent two very different forces in this battle, it will be very hard to decipher, in a special election primary while it's raining in Alabama, what force actually mattered here. And so I think that's going to be hard to decipher.

And, by the way, just for - just for a baseline on where we are in American politics, leading on a Democratic primary, Robert Kennedy Jr., no relation, just because his name is Robert Kennedy Jr.

KING: Right.

HAM: So -

KING: Sometimes a name like that helps.

I -- forgive me - forgive me for being unobjective here, but the Republicans 'going to win this race.

Let's listen to -- this is Mark Levin, of talk radio fame, who has been generally a big supporter of the president. Wants somebody to come into Washington. Despises Mitch McConnell. Thinks the insiders like Mitch McConnell are part of the big problem in Washington. As more so than the Democrats or even the bureaucracy. Mark Levin and others blame Washington insiders, dealmakers like Mitch McConnell. Listen to his disappointment with the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK LEVIN, TALK RADIO HOST: And the president of the United States didn't have to do that. He could have stayed out of it. But he didn't. But he put his finger on the, on the scale. Luther Strange is Mitch McConnell's guy. He's a hack. He's an insider. He's got all the problems that you and I rail against day in and day out. And Donald Trump just endorsed him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Is this a one-shot, isolated frustration by slices of the party and the base that support the president, or is this back to the conversation we just had, a guy at 31 percent who can't afford to be losing people, whether it's business CEOs quitting your manufacturing council or your allies in talk radio in the grass roots base of the Republican party saying you're stabbing us in the back, which are words Mark Levin has used?

SHEAR: It's not isolated and it's not just connected to the conversation we had, but the conversation we're going to have about Steve Bannon and maybe his future and it's ultimately about this ideological war going on inside that building at 1600 Pennsylvania, that's been going on in the party long before Donald Trump came.

But when Donald Trump came and really kind of tried to fuse the sort of businessman Trump with all of the corporate interests that we've been talking about with the Bannon Breitbart kind of right wing of the party. And, you know, I mean we've seen in the past how hard that's been in Congress and how that's played out and now it's playing out in the White House and in sort of the vying back and forth. And this is, you know, another one of those moments.

KING: We'll count the votes tonight. We'll talk more about this race tomorrow. But we'll continue the conversations. As Michael notes, it is all connected.

Steve Bannon, no Mitch McConnell fan. Steve Bannon, no Chamber of Commerce fan. The president went with Mitch McConnell and the Chamber of Commerce here, not Steve Bannon. Is that yet another sign, if you believe all these rumors, Steve Bannon is on the outs, perhaps headed for the door, or too soon to say? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:28:36] KING: Welcome back.

It is Chief Strategist Steven Bannon's turn to take center stage in the latest installment of real staff wars: Trump White House edition. And as more and more Trump insiders say Bannon's days may be numbered, his allies at his old company, Breitbart, are making clear how they see this latest very public West Wing power struggle.

Take a look. "Report: Murdoch and White House Dems urging POTUS to dump Bannon. Give Trump voters middle finger."

That headline references "New York Times" reporting that Fox chief Rupert Murdoch is among those recommending to the president that Bannon be shown the door. The Dems reference, of course, to presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Manhattan White House allies.

Now, we've known for some time Kushner and Bannon are at odds. And Breitbart and many other conservatives view team Kushner, which includes, of course, the president's daughter, Ivanka, as liberals bent on tossing away the 2016 Trump campaign agenda on immigration and other issues.

Plus, as this drama continues, we were reminded last night the former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci wishes he was on the job long enough, just a week, to get Bannon canned.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is Steve Bannon a white supremacist?

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI, FORMER WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Again, I don't think he's a white supremacist, although I've never asked him if he's a white supremacist. What I don't like though is the toleration of it. It's something that should be completely and totally intolerated (ph).

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Not sure that's a word, intolerated, but CNN's senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny is outside the Trump Tower, where the president is.

Jeff, a lot of advisers there with the president. There's a big event this afternoon. Is Steve Bannon among them?

[12:30:09] JEFF ZELENY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: John, good afternoon.

Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist, is not here in Trump Tower. Of course he