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At Least 120 Dead, 160 Missing After Catastrophic Texas Floods; Sources: FEMA's Flood Response Slowed By Noem's Cost Controls; Trump Pledges New 50 Percent Tariff On Brazil, Citing Trial Of Ex-President Accused Of Trying To Overturn Election. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired July 10, 2025 - 12:00   ET

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

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DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: Today on Inside Politics, deflections and delays. Texas officials stay focused on what they did in the hours after flooding descended on Texas, and CNN reports on inaction at the top. The homeland security secretary waiting a full 72 hours to sign off on a request for more first responders.

Plus, the new political, it coupled, days after President Trump publicly turns on Vladimir Putin. He does the most to help out an ex Brazilian head of state in the middle of what Donald Trump is labeling a witch hunt.

And a story we followed minute by minute, told in a brand-new light, the authors of a new revealing look at the presidential race that captivated the world, joins us to talk about new details, including Donald Trump's belief that in another life he and Joe Biden may have been golfing buddies.

I'm Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.

We begin this hour in Texas again, where officials just wrapped up, an update for reporters with new grim numbers. 120 people are confirmed dead, and 160 remain missing. Kerr County officials again said that first responders jumped into action and that without their efforts, all of those numbers would be dramatically worse.

But again, officials are not yet providing clarity on really important questions, including explanation about why Kerr County struggled to prepare ahead of the flood. And why there was a lag between when a firefighter asked to send out a coder and when it hit the phones of thousands of people in danger.

There are also new questions about red tape and how it may have hurt the federal response to flooding. Multiple sources tell CNN that a request for more search and rescue personnel sat unsigned waiting on the homeland security secretary's desk for a signature for more than 72 hours after the flooding started.

I do want to start in Texas with CNN's Shimon Prokupecz. Shimon, you were there at this morning's news conference, as you have been all week. It was only six and a half minutes today that said, did we learn anything new about preparedness?

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME & JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Six and a half minutes, Dana, and none of the county officials were at this press conference. We didn't see the sheriff. We didn't even see the mayor at this press conference. And the county officials are the people that are responsible for this area. They're the ones that have all the power where all of this happened, and it was really interesting to not see any of them there.

After days of taking questions from reporters, they decided they didn't want to talk about anything before the day of this horrific storm and only wanted to focus on going forward. But of course, as you said, there are so many questions still remaining.

You know, things didn't start striking me, Dana, until yesterday. When I went down to the river and I started going through some of these communities. And I spoke to a dad with his two little girls who went to bed in their RV. It's where he lives. It's his RV. And he and his little girl and his three-month-old girl and his other daughter went to bed.

They didn't know anything. They didn't know there was a storm coming. They weren't told anything. Now, who's to say, if anything would have been different? Would they have evacuated? It's unclear. But the point is, is that they at least deserve to know that something could be happening, and they should be aware of it.

And why I want to highlight that also is because the Texas Department of Emergency Management on July 2, issued a press release, an alert, saying that the National Weather Service was potentially forecasting heavy rainfall with the potential of flooding. The Texas Department of State put this out.

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And they also said in the release, Texans are encouraged to follow instructions from local officials. And from everything we know, and from everything people have said, there were no instructions from local officials. We can't get any answers to that, and whether or not people are sort of used to living this way and used to living under flash flood warnings, we understand that.

We understand the heroic efforts that all the officials are under here, and what they're doing to save lives and to try and find closure for these families. At the very least, though, at the very least, many of the people who went to sleep that night, thinking that they were about to celebrate the 4th of July holiday, deserve to know. Deserve to have that information that there was this storm coming, and there's no indication right now that they have that information from local officials.

BASH: Shimon, thank you for pushing for answers and also talking to officials there and to the residents who are obviously traumatized and also looking for answers and trying to deal with the unbelievable tragedy in their backyard. Appreciate it, Shimon. I want to now turn to Paul Bettencourt, who is a Republican state Senator who represents the Houston area, rather. Senator, thank you so much for being here. And I just want to say at the outset. We are so sorry for what your state is going through. It is just really -- almost hard to wrap your mind around, and also, the fact that we completely understand and applaud all of the heroic efforts to save so many people's lives.

The question that Shimon was asking, and that, you know, I know that you are asking as well is, what about before the flooding began, the efforts to prepare in those critical hours? Are you satisfied with the information Kerr County officials have provided and how they prepared for this disaster?

STATE SEN. PAUL BETTENCOURT (R-TX): Well, Dana, first off, thanks for the condolences, because a tragedy where you have hundred folks that come to an idyllic part of Texas. The Guadalupe River is one of the most beautiful areas that we have. The sad thing is, about one out of every 5000 days it's got a major flash flood.

So, what my bill does is, I'm going to just get to the heart of the matter, and the heart of the matter is simply this. When we have watersheds that can have flash floods, we're going to have to have emergency alert sirens, like civil sirens that you hear about in tornado alley or on the West Coast for tsunami.

And the reason why is this, this mobile phone is so overloaded with information, Amber alerts, security alerts, bank alerts, et cetera. People are turning this off at night, and they're not listening to it during the day. So, my idea was to grab old technology sirens and work it together with this technology.

So, as just as Shimon was saying, people in that RV would hear that audible siren, and they would know to get to higher ground because that's the problem here. You can't -- when you got a 28-foot wall of water coming at you in 45 minutes, you've got to get a notice. And the -- and without that siren alert, and if their phones were out of cell service, they wouldn't have had an alert. No matter if they put -- if the county commit commissioners -- excuse me, the county judge or the mayor had hit a button, it wouldn't make any difference because they couldn't have heard it.

BASH: Right. So, what you're saying makes so much sense. The obvious question is, given the fact that you said, what, one in 5000 or 500 days, there is a massive flood there, it is in a flood zone. Why wasn't this in place before this tragedy, given the very deep understanding in the broader state? And also, the locals who live along that river of just how easy it is for floods to happen.

BETTENCOURT: You know, we had -- the last major flood we had was about 10 years ago in Wimberley, which is a town that's close by. And they took a lot of steps that are very similar to what any community does after they've had a disaster. They, you know, put up towers, et cetera. They got grants from the water authority.

There's actually a town right on the river named Comfort that actually put a siren in and used it that day.

BASH: Yes, they did.

BETTENCOURT: Right. So, what we're talking about here is the state just coming in and doing it, because there are -- I mean, over 50 local rural counties in Texas. It's a huge place, Dana. And we've got river authorities like the Western Guadalupe River who thought about this, and they actually were working on it up to 2021, and then they stopped the project.

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It doesn't matter, we're going to come in and do it, because it's not just the Guadalupe River. We've had flooding on the Frio, the Llano, that could go all the way up in Central Texas. And look, you've got 4000 governments in Texas. It's a big place. Not everybody has the resources to get it done.

So, Lieutenant Governor Patrick, who was the first elected official into Camp Mystic this week to talk to those survivors, as well as the grandparents and the parents of the bereaved family members that are looking for them. He said, we're going to pay for it, and the state of Texas is going to pay for it.

BASH: Senator, just to follow up on that, and you alluded to this. State and local officials, according to several reports said, and particularly the local officials in and around Kerr County said, there was a discussion, a lot of discussion for a while about putting the kind of system in place that you say, that the state will just do for them now.

But doing it on a local level, like they did in Comfort, and that they couldn't find the $1 million it would have cost to install that monitoring equipment near Camp Mystic in particular. And just for context, the Associated Press is reporting that a million dollars is about the same amount of money that Kerr County spends on courthouse security every two years. So, was it an institutional failure?

BETTENCOURT: Look at the Senate committee chair of local government, and that is -- there's a long-complicated case, and you quoted the AP, and there's a whole bunch of investigative reports. We're going to run. While we do hearings on these ideas, we're going to bring in everybody.

And as we did with Winter Storm Uri, we're going to go down and bore down to exactly who did what and when and why it didn't occur. And we're going to have a complete transcript available to the public, because it's important to know the mistakes of the past, so you don't repeat them in the future.

But by any measurement, I've got, you know, to -- you know, legislation coming because you have to protect people from 20-foot walls of water because you can't survive that unless by the grace of God, you do.

BASH: Yeah. BETTENCOURT: And so, we have to get people out of the way. And that's what the idea of taking sirens and combining it with these alerts will do because you have to get folks out of a flash flood path. There's no other option.

BASH: But --

BETTENCOURT: If people -- and Dana, by the way, I just -- I mean, I saw an engineering report that was involved in this and an engineering report said this. They said they would worry that sirens would cause panic. It's the wrong answer. You know, the right answer is, siren saves lives. So, we're going to go through this in detail, and we'll have it, you know, we'll have everything at, you know, at a legislative hearing because Lieutenant Governor Patrick will insist upon it.

BASH: OK. Just real quick because we're out of time. I just want to underscore what you said. You, as a senior Republican in the Texas legislature, you do want answers, and you intend to use your position on your committee to find those answers to investigate.

BETTENCOURT: When we have hearings, all this will come out, because we've had hearings on every tragedy since I've been in the Senate and all the senators, bipartisan, unanimity will be asking questions until we get all the answers that we need to make sure that we're doing everything we can to make loss of life, you know, as little as possible in the future. And that's the only way to answer the question. You got to recognize the obvious and move forward.

BASH: Well, it sounds logical. Not everybody sees it that way, but I appreciate you saying that. Senator Bettencourt, I know that you have dealt with this in your family. You've dealt with terrible flooding in the area you represent in Houston. Please come back. We have a lot more questions. Thank you for your time.

BETTENCOURT: Thank you, Dana.

BASH: And up next. President Trump lashes out at Brazil and threatens it with a new tariff. But this time, it actually has nothing to do with economic policy. We'll explain after the break.

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BASH: Today, President Trump is flexing America's economic might to help one of his political allies. President Trump is threatening to impose a 50 percent tariff on all goods from Brazil. It's not because of a trade deficit, because there isn't a trade deficit with Brazil. It's because of charges against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a MAGA movement ideological soulmate.

Prosecutors allege that Bolsonaro undertook a desperate effort to cling to power after losing the 2022 Brazilian election. Those efforts allegedly included encouraging his supporters to storm all three seats of government and green lighting a coup that would have killed the current President Lula da Silva. And President Trump's telling the trial going on in Brazil is a witch hunt that should end immediately.

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I'm joined now by two terrific reporters, Ron Brownstein of Bloomberg and CNN, and Seung Min Kim of the Associated Press. Ron, I want to start with you, because this is so fascinating for a lot of reasons. And if we can just kind of look a little bit more under the hood here at not only did President Trump call this a witch hunt on social media, the investigation into -- and the trial into Bolsonaro.

He also, in a letter posted on Truth, wrote to Lula, who is the current head of Brazil, that the way that Brazil has treated the former president, Bolsonaro, highly respected leader throughout the world during his term is a disgrace and that the witch hunt should end immediately.

And as we start this conversation, I just want to say, obviously this is a like-minded person who is under investigation and perhaps could get -- he's been prosecuted and could get convicted. So, what the president is doing is using his economic levers. What we hear from the president all the time is that he wants to use tariffs to correct unfair trade imbalances. Just check out what the trade situation is like with Brazil. There is a $6.8 billion trade surplus, trade surplus with Brazil.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yeah. I think there are two large points you can make about this. One is that Trump is kind of running a modern version of the Comintern of the, you know, from the Soviet era, where both he and J.D. Vance are systematically trying to promote the prospects of far-right ethno-nationalist parties around the world, the AFD in Germany, you know, Hungary, et cetera.

But I think something is even bigger here and that affects also the way Trump is governing at home, which is that -- this is just the latest evidence that he feels utterly unbound. In his second term, that all of the constraints that limited him in any way in his first term, whether from Congress or the courts, or from officials that he had to appoint with his own administration. All of that has faded away.

I mean, just before you got here in L.A. earlier this week, he sent a convoy of armored vehicles and National Guard, not just ICE, heavily armed armored National Guard into a public park in an American city.

And so, I kind of look at this as a piece with that where he basically feels there are no constraints limiting him on basically trying to bend institutions at home and abroad to his will. And generally speaking, feeling that you are invulnerable and impregnable is the predicate, I think, to overreaching as a political leader.

BASH: And Seung Min, if these tariffs go into place, if there isn't something that, you know, gets dealt with, with Lula, the current president. It could be that consumers -- American consumers in the United States, the president's constituents get upset because the U.S. gets a lot of things that they care about from Brazil, coffee and tea, beef, orange juice, sugar, chocolate is high on my list.

Are there any concerns -- are there any concerns from sources in the White House that actually -- this is one of those economic decisions based on a political decision that could come back to bite them?

SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think there are economic concerns with almost basically any tariff that the president has been threatening on various countries. I mean, we are in a global economy. The United States gets lots of goods from all corners of the world.

But, you know, it's really fascinating, Dana, just we're seeing -- like you mentioned at the top, we're seeing a shift into President Trump using the threatened tariffs in ways that are not economically related. It was actually at NATO last month. He was angry at the fact that Spain would not agree to that 5 percent defense spending level, and he actually mentioned in a press conference at the summit that he would be willing to threaten tariffs on Spain for that reason.

Now remember, Spain is part of the E.U. The E.U. is the one that's negotiating trade policy on behalf of Spain and the other countries and the bloc. But he does see this as something that's broader than just an economic tool. And that goes to what Ron said earlier that he is -- he is kind of unleashed and unbound in a second term.

There aren't a lot -- there isn't a lot of push back internally at the White House that we're seeing more on Capitol Hill from Republicans who would usually hate this kind of tariff policy. And that's why you're seeing him act in the way that he is right now.

BASH: And just -- go ahead.

BROWNSTEIN: OK. Is the international equivalent of what he's doing domestically. I mean, he's threatening to cut off funds from blue funds unless they adopt a variety of red state policies on transgender kids, you know, competing in sports or DEI or classroom instruction. I mean, they just went to court against California yesterday, basically saying that they are violating federal law by not banning transgender. I mean, it's the same idea.

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To the federal government, it's almost as if there is a meeting every week, you know, where you basically say, what is a lever we can use from the awesome power of the federal government, not necessarily to advance national interests or to apply public policy, but to coerce institutions that are resisting us to bend to our will. And I think what you're seeing internationally is the exact parallel of what's unfolding domestically.

BASH: Yeah. Gosh, it's so true, and it's just so brazen and transparent. There's not even an attempt to hide the fact that he sees parallels between himself and Bolsonaro, particularly with this trial. Ron, thank you so much. Seung Min, thank you.

Up next, planes, trains and rocket ships. The transportation secretary takes on an out of this world additional job.

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