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Trump's Campaign Message; Trump on Khashoggi's Death; Campaign Blitz for 2020. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired October 19, 2018 - 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: Barbara, really appreciate it.

And thank you all so much for joining me today. "INSIDE POLITICS" with John King starts right now.

JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you, Kate.

And welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thank you for sharing your day with us.

Tougher words from the White House today, aimed at Saudi Arabia, but still no clarity on what the president means by severe consequences, as he waits now for the royal family report on the apparent murder of a Saudi journalist.

Plus, the next campaign is front and center in this campaign. A half dozen Democrats mulling 2020 presidential runs are out today making friends and urging big blue turnout in the 2018 midterms.

And the president makes his midterms closing arguments. Hi facts, sketchy sometimes. His lead issues, all about the base.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This will be an election of Kavanaugh, the caravan, law and order, and common sense. That's what it's going to be. It's going to be an election of those things.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: And we begin right there with the president defaulting to his go-to message just days now before a midterm test most predict Republicans will lose. The president's old campaign rallying cry, that illegal immigration is a danger to the country, is now the new centerpiece for the Republican closing argument.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And remember it's going to be an election of the caravan. You know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about.

A lot of money's been passing through people to come up and try and get to the border by Election Day, because they think that's a negative for us. Number one, they're being stopped. And, number two, regardless, that's our issue.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: That's our issue, you heard the president right there.

In poll after poll, most voters say health care is the issue that matters to them most, maybe the economy, when people are thinking about their vote. But the president believes immigration, especially his the fact-challenged, often conspiratorial version is still the jet fuel for the Republican base. Today, what the president's referring to, of course, thousands of Honduran migrants now near the Mexican border.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: A (INAUDIBLE) to ground. We have to, by law, with these horrible people that are making their own rules, having nothing to do with our Constitution, we have to take those people in, even if they're criminals, and we have hardened criminals coming in. You think those people are perfect? They're not perfect. You have some hardened, bad people coming in.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: With me this Friday to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Abby Phillip, Michael Shear of "The New York Times," Jackie Kucinich with "The Daily Beast," and Karoun Demirjian with "The Washington Post."

This is the president's reflex. He trusts his reflex. He trusts his instincts. I don't think who's paying -- who's paying the people in the caravan to come to the --

JACKIE KUCINICH, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, "THE DAILY BEAST": Oh, it's Soros, just like he paid for the women's march, as well as Kavanaugh protesters. This is something that we've seen the president and some of his more conspiratorial followers go back to that well. And it seems to be an explanation for people who don't agree with them, and people who are apparently out to get them, or out to get the United States, as he's casting the individuals who are in this caravan, which, of course, is organized to call attention to some of the issues that are in Latin America right now, drug violence, which a lot of these people are fleeing.

KING: And will it work? Will it work? We know this has been the president's go-to. It worked for him gangbusters in the Republican primaries in 2016. It worked for him, especially in red states, in purple areas in the 2016 general election. He's been president for almost two years. If there's a problem enforcing the border, yes, the Democrats wouldn't give him his wall money. The Republicans wouldn't give him his wall money, let's be honest. But he can do other things. He has executive powers. He can move things around. If there's a problem with the border, isn't it his problem?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I think that's why this is such a multifaceted issue for the president, why it gets under his skin so much because it's both an opportunity potentially to motivate his base, but also in some ways it kind of speaks to a political weakness, that if he can't control the border after two years, if he can't get the money for his wall after two years, that looks like a promise made but not kept. And that's one of the reasons why it's bothered him so much.

But I do think that it can be a very potent issue, which is why you see so many Republicans running on it in an effort to consolidate that base. It's potent for people who need to bring in the Trump tribe into their base in order to win. Maybe not so much for people in purple states or purple districts, but for Republicans who are have a Trump -- a hard time channeling Trumpism, this is a pretty easy, straightforward, direct way to do it.

[12:05:03] KING: It's a great point because the midterm is always a referendum on the president. In other ways this is also a referendum on the Trump playbook if you will. Did -- what -- will what worked in 2016, being Trumpy, can other people do that in 2018, including the president? To your point, this is Marsha Blackburn, Republican congresswoman, running against the former governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, in a very close Tennessee Senate race. She's playing the immigration card.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MARTHA BLACKBURN (R), TENNESSEE SENATE CANDIDATE: Because of loose immigration policies, every state's a border state and every town's a border town. When Phil Bredesen was governor, he issued valid state-issued taxpayer-funded driving certificates to 51,000 illegal aliens. He made our state a magnet for illegal aliens. And people in Tennessee remember that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Every state's a border state.

KAROUN DEMIRJIAN, CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": It's as well a slogan, right, especially if you're trying to drill that message home in places where maybe you don't have a national inclination to be very revved up about immigration issues. Although it's a lot of internal middle of America states seems to care about this issue a lot more than you see it fairly -- they're bluer states towards the border because these are people that live among them and they're part of their communities.

But, look, this is effectively a drive out the base sort of a message, right? That people came out to vote for Trump because they love Trump. Trump's not on the ballot this time. He needs to transfer that down to the congressional-level races to keep his majorities in Congress. For that, he needs to rev people up. And this is the sort of issue that will rev up the people that were already with him to actually make sure that they get out on that -- you know, on Election Day to actually cast their vote.

I don't know if it really draws anybody from the middle because this sort of sloganeering -- it's sloganeering, really, and if people have a more nuanced view of issues and people in the middle tend to vote more on economic issues, not necessarily the red meat sort of stuff, they may not work there. But if it's a numbers game and usually you have low turnout in the midterms anyway, why not?

KING: He could, by the way, he could have more construction of his border wall. He could have had the money if he cut a deal with the Democrats that they offered him on DACA. He won't get that if the Democrats win the House this time. He could have had a deal on DACA and gotten some border wall money. He did not want that deal.

It is largely, most Republicans are agreeing with the president, that this is a good issues for them closing -- most Republicans. This is Maria Salazar running for an open Republican held now Florida congressional seat. She is the Republican candidate, Maria Salazar, former television anchor, who looks around her district, looks at what the president is saying about this caravan, and says, no.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARIA ELVIRA SALAZAR (R), FLORIDA CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: You have to understand that Honduras is the most violent country in the hemisphere. And you would do it, too, if your -- if your daughter is facing to be raped or your son to be part of a -- and I'm not condoning -- I understand that we need to protect our border. And I am a Republican and I believe that we need to have a very strict border security. But you also have to understand that our neighbors are desperate.

The overwhelming majority of those people are facing death. They're under the threat of death.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. Maria.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: The president says they're bad people. She says the overwhelming majority are anything but bad people.

MICHAEL SHEAR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": And you won't get a lot of Republicans taking that line. That's obviously a particular case.

I think what you have to understand, for President Trump, this is not only a sort of political calculation, this is a -- this is very personal for him because what you've seen over and over again is the president becoming really passionate about his failure to do what he said he was going to do. When we hear stories -- you just heard one yesterday about a screaming match between the chief of staff and the national security adviser over this issue. We've heard previous times when the president has just berated his homeland security secretary over this issue. It comes up again and again inside the White House when the president is shown evidence that despite his efforts, despite all of the things that we've heard of, the executive orders, the travel bans, the efforts to restrict -- to increase enforcement and restrict other ways of coming in, people are still coming in. And he gets handed documents that say, look, it's actually higher this month than it was last month, and it's higher this year than it was last year, and he goes into a rage. And so part of what's happening is that the politics is following -- is sort of flowing from his own personal anger on the issue.

PHILLIP: Yet he's taken a lot of heat from it, from his conservative base on television. The president watches a lot of TV. And the people that he watched talk about this issue all the time and they say, where's the border wall? Why are these caravans coming? They're showing the images of people walking up through Central America, through Mexico.

Look, this is how the president views the world. He's watching these images and he's watching people that he listens to tell him that he needs to do more. And he's going to his aides, like Kirstjen Nielson and like John Kelly and saying, what is going on with this? And they are -- they're -- they're approaching this the way a lot of administrations do, which is that you have to work with these countries. You have to work with Honduras and Guatemala in order to help -- to get -- help them help you. But the president is not interested in that. He wants to cut the spigot off, in his view.

[12:10:12] KING: It's going to be a fascinating test. You see, you're right, the candidate, Salazar, she's not a congresswoman yet, she's a candidate, she's an exception. Most Republicans are with the president. But Montana yesterday, you could sell that message. He's in Arizona and then Nevada, where there's certainly a Trump base in both of those states, but there's also a risk that he alivens and wakens the Latino community in those states, two key Senate races there, fascinating to watch as we play this out.

Up next, the president changes his approach, or at least his tone, over the apparent murder of a journalist.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: A tougher tone from the Trump administration today, two and a half weeks after the disappearance and the apparent murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. President Trump now admitting it does appear the journalist is dead. Earlier this week, his secretary of state would not even concede there was an incident at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, only saying Khashoggi was missing. The president warns consequences could be severe if the evidence points to murder.

[12:15:10] (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: Mr. President, what are you considering for possible consequences for Saudi based on those --

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, it will have to be very severe. I mean it's -- it's bad, bad stuff. But we'll see what happens.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Tough words as well from the vice president. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE PENCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The world deserves answers. If what has been alleged occurred, if an innocent person lost their life at the hands of violence, that's to be condemned. If a journalist in particular lost their life at the hands of violence, that's an affront to a free and independent press around the world and there will be consequences.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: It is a tougher tone. The question is, what do they mean by it or are they just holding space, or, as they assess what they know, things we don't know, because they have access to intelligence, are they moving to a tougher stance from where the president was at the beginning?

SHEAR: I mean, look, I think the striking thing is what the vice president just said. The words that the vice president said were exactly what any regular politician would have said the first moment that this came up, right? And if you had said -- if the president and the administration had taken that stance, which is not to say condemning the -- you know, Saudi Arabia, which is a long-standing ally of the United States out of the box necessarily, saying we have to wait for the facts. But if the facts are as they are, we're going to take strong action. If they had said that at the beginning, you might -- they might have well given a little bit of space for the various investigations to proceed, for things to march forward. But it's -- what is remarkable is the extent to which this administration fails again and again to kind of -- to kind of set the right tone early on. And, instead, they simply stumble their way through a series of mistakes to, in this case, maybe getting to the place where they needed to be.

KING: Well, you can understand that, though, because if your reflex is to do what the vice president does, which is the right and responsible thing from the beginning, look, we're going to wait for the facts. We're not going to rush to judgment. But if -- if interrogated, tortured, killed, dismember, you know, and then -- then you're lying -- and then smuggled -- the body smuggled out of the country, then they lie about it, then there will be tough consequences. The problem is, none of them know what the president's going to say. And the president has said, well, he's -- it didn't happen here. He's not from here.

(CROSS TALK).

KING: Yes.

DEMIRJIAN: And the other people is it's not --

KUCINICH: (INAUDIBLE).

DEMIRJIAN: Right, it's not happening in a vacuum. Look, the U.S./Saudi relationship is complicated but the president, the current president, took a really hard turn back towards really strengthening this alliance with Saudi Arabia because Obama had moved toward Iran. He wanted to make it clear that he wasn't going to do anything that Obama had done in this geopolitical space. He's also somebody who has looked at other strong men and said, I don't think Putin meddles in the election because he told me he didn't.

So Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince, is a much more of socially acceptable -- politically acceptable, I suppose, and stronger ally, actually. And so it would take a lot for the president to turn away from that. And we have this stuff that the president has said about journalists just going on down. So, yes, he has a tendency to, in independent situations, shoot his mouth off and nobody knows what he's going to say, but he also has a track record of things leading up to these situations, which makes it seem like the not best possible case scenario of what a president should say is what will likely be going through his head. And that's why there's even higher stakes, I support, on everything that he is -- I don't want to -- that he's kind of ad-libbing his way through right now.

KUCINICH: Well, and one of the common -- I mean, one of the common things, though, with -- you mentioned Putin. It seems like the president likes to do whatever is expedient, whatever allows him to move on the next thing and get past a controversy. So, yes, I just believe him. We're going to move on now. And in this case, he can't.

And it's further complicated, the fact that the de facto Saudi ambassador is Jared Kushner. There isn't an official one. There is Jared Kushner, who has laid extremely low since all of this broke. But you have -- and -- but he has been -- earlier he had been back channeling. So that also -- you can't -- you can't fire him. He's there. He's your son-in-law.

PHILLIP: The risk that they face now is that there has been damage done already. They're trying to deliberate their way through it. They're trying to put the brakes on the speed with which people are demanding answers, but they've already done a lot of damage.

When President Trump echoed the rogue actor's explanation, that created space, a huge amount of space for Saudis to distance themselves from what happened.

KING: Right.

PHILLIP: It also demonstrated to the world that the president was willing to potentially take a hard to believe excuse for something like this at face value. Those things have long-term consequences. I think they may not be apparent right at this moment. He may feel like he's gotten past this immediate crisis. But I think that one of the reasons we're hearing from administration officials about concern about this moment is because they're worried that the next time they face a huge human rights issue or crossroads, they're not going to have the moral authority to move past it.

KING: Right.

PHILLIP: And that's already been done. [12:20:08] KING: How can you lecture Honduras, how can you lecture others and what signal do they take in Beijing, in Pyongyang, across the Arab world? What signal do they take.

And I just want to play this because it's eerie. This is Mr. Khashoggi, November 2017, talking about how the world is watching President Trump, and that's where these cues come from.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMAL KHASHOGGI: We argue about that. Is it the Trump effect that -- that made Prince Mohammad bin Salman feel empowered to this impulsive behavior in foreign policy? It is dangerous. It is dangerous for Saudi Arabia, for the region.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: A debate months ago about the issue painfully, sadly, we face today.

DEMIRJIAN: Yes. I mean, look, and this is not the first time this question about what is the human rights stance of the Trump administration has come up. It's just kind of always been the, you know, the sidebar of whatever else is going on in the moment, whether it's, you know, Pompeo's confirmation or it's the president's international trip, or speeches in North Korea.

(CROSS TALK)

DEMIRJIAN: Exactly, not bringing that up. I mean this has been a repeated refrain of you need to be putting more weight behind this, and they don't. But it's never the story. And now it is.

SHEAR: It's also just an indication of the isolation of the United States.

DEMIRJIAN: Yes.

SHEAR: Because in cases like this, especially human rights cases like this, where you're, you know, confronting a regime, oftentimes the most effective, you know, way of doing that is by allying all of the other western democracies in a kind of common, sort of sense of condemnation of whatever has happened. And, in this case, you really do. There have been joint statements by the E.U. and others. The United States has not been part of that. And that's partly because of the way that President Trump has distanced himself from all of our traditional allies and it makes it harder in moments like this.

KING: Makes it harder. I think next week is going to be a fascinating week because the handful of days that they've given the Saudis to give a report on themselves will elapse next week.

We'll keep an eye on this one.

Up next for us, back to politics. Democrats closing arguments of 2018 give you a glimpse at 2020. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: Brothers and sisters, health care is a right, not a privilege.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:27:04] KING: 2018, it seems, is a great time to make a down payment on 2020, or a test run. Call it what you will, but look at this. Just today, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, they're in South Carolina, Then Harris heads to the Midwest, Wisconsin. Bernie Sanders also Midwest bound, going to Indiana, Michigan and Iowa. Then, for Bernie Sanders, on to South Carolina.

Former Maryland governor, presidential candidate Martin O'Malley, remember him, he's in Ohio today, guitar (ph) TBD (ph). Joe Biden will visit Nevada this weekend.

Making friends for 2020, yes, but not without an appeal to vote this year.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: What my Republican colleagues wants is for people not to vote. And when people tell you -- and I've heard this for such a long time, well, I'm not going to vote, my vote doesn't matter, all politicians are crooked, you tell them that -- you tell them that you're sick and tired are hearing them moan and groan about what's going on.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: My dad used to say something like that. The language wasn't polite, though.

These things always collide. People with ambition in the next election try to make their mark in this election. It's a great way for congressional candidates to get more people at their rallies, to gin up support and for these other 2020 hopefuls to start getting names, e-mails, phone numbers.

DEMIRJIAN: All of the above, right. I mean it's also a test to see how much they can actually affect and do and do they actually -- is there a bump in the poll after they've gone out to campaign or anything like that. And it gets their face out there to states and districts, depending on where they came from, where they're not known. But the field is pretty wide right now in terms of the number of people that are throwing their hat in this type of ring and we'll see who actually is considered to be doing a good (ph) job.

KING: Yes, and, what, we've got -- we have five people at the table. We do not have enough fingers for all of the potential Democratic candidates, but --

DEMIRJIAN: Exactly.

KUCINICH: But I think what's different -- so what we're seeing right now with the candidates going to the different states and trying to help out their colleagues, that's fairly common. What we don't see, and I think what has been ill-received, is what Elizabeth warren did on Monday --

KING: Right.

KUCINICH: With the DNA test and really making a spectacle of herself before -- right before the midterms. I was talking to Democrats this week. There was -- there's was a lot of like, what are you doing? Can't you just wait?

KING: Right.

KUCINICH: And it --

KING: Selfish. Selfish.

KUCINICH: Yes. Well, right. And that definitely was not appreciated the same way as having, you know, Cory Booker stand on the stage with you.

KING: Yes, so you have Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, familiar faces, if you will, Cory Booker out as well saying, no, what about a new guy?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CORY BOOKER (D), NEW JERSEY: We are the party of we, not the party of me. We're the party of Social Security. We're the party of Medicare. We're the party of Medicaid.

[12:30:00] They blew a $2 trillion deficit in our tax -- in our budget, and now they want to cut Medicaid, Medicare and social Security.

But we've got to respond to them, not just with our voices saying hell no.