Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Priebus, Bannon Picked for Top White House Jobs; CNN Politics Presents 'Unprecedented'. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired November 14, 2016 - 06:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

REP. PAUL RYAN (R-WI), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: I trust Donald's judgment.

[05:58:37] UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Fierce pushback against one of Donald Trump's first White House hires.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: We will not accept racism, sexism or xenophobia.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Don't be afraid. We are going to bring our country back.

RYAN: Obamacare is failing.

TRUMP: It will be repealed and replaced.

RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY: We don't want to disrupt the nation with what might look like a vindictive prosecution.

TRUMP: I don't want to hurt them. They're good people. She did some bad things.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not my president! Not my president!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Not my president! Not my president!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not my president! Not my president!

DAVE CHAPPELLE, COMEDIAN: I'm going to give him a chance. We, the historically disfranchised, demand that he give us one, too.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Dave Chappelle was really something on "SNL."

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: What a night.

CUOMO: What a comeback for him. We're going to talk about that as we say good morning to you.

Welcome to your NEW DAY. It's Monday, November 14, 6 a.m. in the East. Alisyn is off. Poppy Harlow is with us. Good to have you...

HARLOW: Good to be here.

CUOMO: ... as always, my friend.

Up first, President-elect Donald Trump making his first official staff hires. His two top two political advisors are now in place. You've got Reince Priebus. He's the head of the RNC, who you'll remember Trump used to attack during the primaries. And Steve Bannon. This man is a promoter of the alt-right.

HARLOW: We're going to talk about what all of that means to you. Meantime, Donald Trump sitting down for his first interview as president-elect with "60 Minutes," discussing his administration's top priorities, appearing to -- not just appearing to, actually softening on some of the big promises he made on the campaign trail.

We have complete coverage. Let's start this morning with our Phil Mattingly in Washington. Good morning, Phil.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Poppy.

We hear it repeatedly in the wake of Donald Trump's shocking election victory. Personnel is policy. As Republicans and Democrats try and get their heads around what a Trump presidency will mean, they're pointing to his first hires. Those will start to tell the story. Well, we got a bit of an indicator of what that Trump presidency will look like last night. And on one count, a lot of concerns assuaged. On the other, a major increase in those concerns.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY (voice-over): President-elect Donald Trump's administration starting to take shape, Trump naming RNC chairman Reince Priebus as his chief of staff and campaign CEO Steve Bannon as his chief strategist and senior counselor, creating two dueling power centers and a potential rivalry between his two top aides.

Priebus, the ultimate Washington insider with deep connections to GOP leaders. Bannon, the polar opposite, a man who has operated on the Republican fringe as executive chairman of Breitbart.com, one with a known talent for riling up the grassroots while maintaining close ties to the alt-right movement, within which anti-Semitism and racist tropes are pervasive.

Bannon's appointment drawing sharp condemnation. The spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid saying in a statement, quote, "It is easy to see why the KKK views Trump as their champion when Trump appoints one of the foremost peddlers of white supremacist themes and rhetoric as his top aide."

The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League calling it a, quote, "sad day," and the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations says the appointment of Bannon sends the "disturbing message that the anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and white nationalist ideology will be welcome in the White House." UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Donald Trump has got to go!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Donald Trump has got to go!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Donald Trump has got to go!

MATTINGLY: As thousands across the country protest against Trump for the fifth straight day...

(CROWD CHANTING)

MATTINGLY: ... Trump addressing his supporters who have harassed minorities in his first TV interview post-election.

TRUMP: I say stop it, if it -- if it helps. I will say this, and I'll say it right to the cameras. Stop it.

MATTINGLY: Trump also appearing to tweak a central tenet of his immigration proposal.

LESLIE STAHL, "60 MINUTES": They're talking about a fence in the Republican Congress. Would you accept a fence?

TRUMP: For certain areas I would, but in certain areas, the wall is more appropriate. I'm very good at this. It's called construction.

STAHL: So part wall, part fence?

TRUMP: A fence would be -- it could be some fencing.

MATTINGLY: And discussing his Supreme Court appointees, calling same- sex marriage a settled issue but taking a hard stance against national abortion rights.

TRUMP: Having to do with abortion what -- if it ever were overturned, it would go back to the states. So it would go back to the states.

STAHL: Some women won't be able to get an abortion.

TRUMP: No, it will go back to the states.

STAHL: By state?

TRUMP: Well, they'll perhaps have to go to another -- have to go to another state.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY: And, Chris, as we've kind of watched Donald Trump in the wake of that election victory, we started to see some shifts in his proposals, some of his key proposals from the campaign trail. One of those, will he appoint, or at least ask to appoint, a special prosecutor to look into Hillary Clinton? He was asked about that last night, and he said, "I don't know yet." He doesn't want to hurt the Clintons. I can tell you inside the campaign and transition apparatus, there's a

lot of talk right now that this simply would not be a good idea. Donald Trump himself saying over and over again, he wants to bring the country together. This would have the exact opposite effect.

Still, at least at this point, Chris, Donald Trump not willing to do away with that campaign fledge.

CUOMO: All right. Thank you very much, Phil.

Let's bring in our CNN political correspondent, Dana Bash; and CNN political commentator and political anchor for Time Warner News, Errol Louis; and CNN political analyst and "New York Times" national political reporter Alex Burns.

Errol, Reince Priebus is the easy part of the story. He's the DN -- he's the RNC chair. They were sideways during the primaries. He came over, started helping Trump. He gets his position. That's fine.

The story is Bannon. Bannon is not a journalist. He's not a political operative. He is not conventional in any way. He runs Breitbart, which is an attack site for the alt-right. That's what it is. There's no putting any lipstick on this situation. Your take?

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, that's exactly right. It's not so much about Steve Bannon himself, although he's somebody who obviously is going to get a lot more press attention. I don't know if it's going to all be favorable to him, but it's really what he represents, what Breitbart has represented.

When Bannon says, "We're the platform for the alt-right," describing his own organization. Those are his words. That's not people sort of putting something on him.

What is the alt-right? You start to -- you start to look at it. You start to look at what it has meant, where it is going, what the people themselves say. The members of the alt-right or the activists in the alt-right, what they, themselves, say that they are doing. And it is very, very disturbing.

You know, so for the ADL, for the Southern Poverty Law Center, for others to sort of say, "This is unacceptable. Nobody voted for this." You know, this is not about, you know, trade policy and getting more jobs in the industrial Midwest. This is about something entirely different.

And, you know, look, we see the attacks, the swastikas or the alleged attacks. Some of those are going to turn out to be hoaxes. There is a possibility that some of that is real, though, and this is a movement that has already surprised a lot of people. So it bears keeping a very, very close eye on it, not just by the press, but by everybody.

HARLOW: It's not just the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti- Defamation League. It's also, you know, a number of conservatives. Ana Navarro tweeting, you know, this is a white supremacist in the White House. These are her words. Other people like John Weaver coming out and condemning this.

Dana, I just wonder what you think it does within the party. I mean, you said to me last night on the show that Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon get along. In 2010, Bannon said, "We need to bitch slap" -- those are his words -- "the Republican Party." he also, in a leaked e-mail not long ago, said, "I want Paul Ryan out by the spring."

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right.

HARLOW: Now he has to work with him.

BASH: No question. Look, I think that people who didn't realize that Steve Bannon was going to be an integral part of the Trump White House probably weren't paying attention to his campaign in the last three months. Because he was by Donald Trump's side, not just as CEO but actually traveling with him, particularly in the last month or so. And he was -- he was, as Kellyanne Conway called him, their general. And he was working very closely with Reince Priebus, the RNC chair, during the campaign.

And my understanding is that Donald Trump wanted to re-create that, to take that team to the White House, because it worked well for him. He won the presidency. But the fact that Bannon is there, baggage and all, should not be a surprise to anybody.

CUOMO: Baggage? This isn't baggage. I have baggage; you have baggage. This guy...

HARLOW: Speak for yourself, Chris.

CUOMO: That's true. You're actually pretty clean. I checked into you. I really couldn't find anything. The -- this is baggage, though. This guy is what he is. I mean, the headlines from Breitbart, Poppy could read them to you all day.

HARLOW: Let's put them up.

CUOMO: Put them up.

HARLOW: I mean, the headlines from Breitbart, talking about Bill Kristol, a conservative, saying he's a Republican spoiler and a renegade Jew. Also talking about "Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy." Also "Political correctness protects Muslim rape culture." Those are just some of them.

CUOMO: Now, so the question becomes this. He is what he is. Let's see, Bannon wants to lie about what he is, that will be his choice. We'll see how he presents himself.

But Donald Trump deserves a chance as president of the United States. Why? Because he won. That's why. But that chance is conditional, right? It's conditional on him assuaging the fears of people who feel that they're going to be marginalized or targeted. How do you put Bannon in and still convince somebody who is concerned as a gay American or an African-American that it will be OK, or Jewish American? ALEX BURNS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I think it's tough to do, Chris.

And I think that one of the important dynamics to watch, I think, just sort of viewing how the country responds to Trump is I spoke to I don't know how many voters during the campaign who said that they like Trump. They wished that he would tone it down a little bit.

But they basically didn't believe that he really meant a lot of the stuff that he was saying and that some of the attacks that Hillary Clinton was making, tying Trump to the alt-right movement tying him to some of the really extreme racial views of folks associated with Breitbart. Voters, a lot of them, just sort of refused to believe it. Well, sort of believe it now. Right? This is a very direct link, and it's going to be tough for Trump to sort of move on the way he did during the campaign, because no other candidate for him to kind of redirect attention to.

HARLOW: Yes. It is Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and he has Reince Priebus on his right and Steve Bannon on his left. Who wins? Who does he trust more?

BASH: I mean, that's the question with this power structure. You know, it's unclear. My understanding from sources in and around the campaign was that the two of them, Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, for the most part, kind of come together on big issues and surprisingly, I was told, that despite the fact that Steve Bannon had a mission to take down the House speaker, who happens to be one of Reince Priebus' best friends. During the campaign, he had his eye on the big prize, which is the presidency.

HARLOW: And he didn't go after Paul Ryan.

BASH: And Steve Bannon would say privately to Donald Trump, "You know what? Tone it down. I know you're mad at these Republicans criticizing you. Don't tweet about them. Don't talk about them in the south.

However, as you said so well, Alex. That was the campaign. This is governing. So, there's not a clear answer to your question, Poppy. It's unclear if that partnership will continue who will have the final answer? Or, frankly, if it will just be the last person in the room with the president.

HARLOW: All right, guys, stay with us. Because we're going to talk about those positions, as Chris was saying. We heard one thing on the campaign trail. We heard a lot different, frankly, last night in this interview with "60 Minutes." Build a wall, locker her up, repeal and replace Obamacare. Those were his rallying cries on the trail. What he's saying about them now as president-elect. We'll discuss, straight ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARLOW: President-elect Donald Trump talked policy in his interview with "60 Minutes." He appeared to soften, he did soften, frankly, on his stance and some of these key campaign promises like immigration, build a wall. Let's discuss with our panel: Dana Bash, Errol Louis, Alex Burns back with us. Let's begin with immigration, because so many times he said deportation force, deportation force. Let's take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: On day one, I'm going to begin swiftly removing criminal, illegal immigrants from this country.

What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers. We have a lot of these people, probably 2 million. It could even be 3 million and we're getting them out of our country or we're going to incarcerate. We're getting them out of our country. They're here illegally. After the border is secured and after everything gets normalized, we're going to make a determination on the people that you're talking about, who are terrific people. They're terrific people. But we're going to make a determination. But before we make that determination, it's very important we want to secure our border.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[06:15:06] HARLOW: Dana, he also said -- Paul Ryan also said when pressed by Jake Tapper yesterday morning, a deportation force is not what we're talking about right now.

BASH: Right. And to be fair, as Kellyanne Conway and the third campaign team came on towards the end of the campaign, they started to try to soften that language and even policy.

But the reality is that the people in this country who do have fear, some of them who are marching in the streets, they didn't hear that. They are still worried that their friends, their neighbors, their family members, if they are here illegally and not criminals, are going to be kicked out of the country.

So to hear President-elect Trump say that is important. The fact that he is still saying that criminals should be kicked out and so forth, that is what Republicans and, frankly, Democrats at some point have been saying for some time. The question is, how do you do it? We still don't know the answer.

CUOMO: but it always has been. And look, Donald Trump said to me, "We're going to get a force. We're going to put them together. We're going to go out, we're going to do it, and it sounded like, you know, gestapo to a lot of people. So then they backed off.

But this is politics, Errol. This is what you do. You get one group of people who want one thing, and then you find a way how to move off it to get something else.

LOUIS: Well, that's right. But we're heading for inauguration day, and we're heading for reality, away from the politics of a campaign and the politics of governing is quite different.

So, even -- let's be clear, even this slim down version of only 2 million people or 3 million, according to what he says, the estimated cost to remove somebody, something like 10,000 per person. So we're talking about $20 billion or 30 billion. This is not something he's going to do on his own.

CUOMO: If you talk to Democrats about this, whether Hillary Clinton or any of the main party people are elected. They'll say if you're here illegally, the law says you have to go. There's only one slice even of the left that says, "I don't care if you're here illegally. You should stay anyway." I mean, this is not controversial.

LOUIS: Nobody wanted the current situation. And he has campaigned as if Democrats somehow wanted this to happen. The reality is, even under almost any scenario, you've got a bare minimum of something like a half million people who have absconded who are supposed to be slated for removal and who just kind of vanished into the country.

How you find them, short of deportation force of some kind. It's not -- it's not a small task. It's not a cheap task. It's not going to be quick. It's not going to be easy. So I mean, they can call it whatever they want. But the reality is if you're talking about a massive change in federal policy, based on the campaign promise, some version of that promise.

HARLOW: Donald Trump also ran on saying he knows more about defeating ISIS than the generals. He said that more than once. He was asked about it in the "60 Minutes" interview last night, because as commander in chief, this is on him now. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STAHL: You have said that you're going to destroy ISIS. Now, how are you going to destroy ISIS?

TRUMP: I don't tell you that. I don't tell you that. I'm not going to say anything. I don't want to tell them anything. I don't want to tell anybody anything.

STAHL: What about the American people?

TRUMP: They're great generals. We have great generals.

STAHL: You said you knew more than the generals about ISIS.

TRUMP: Well, I'll be honest with you. I probably do. Because look at the job they've done.

HARLOW: He needs the generals in his corner. So, he says in one breath, "We have great generals, but I still know more than them when it comes to defeating ISIS."

BURNS: Right. And this is going to be, Poppy, one more way in which Trump has probably hemmed in his ability to actually implement policy. If you talk to anyone from the Obama administration, the Bush administration and go back to any administration you want, one of the biggest challenges any president has is on an administrative level, is taking the federal bureaucracy, the civil service on one hand. The uniforms at the Pentagon, at the other end, orienting them towards the policy that you want to implement. Trump has campaigned as though the president just gets to sign a document, and suddenly the federal government turns over. Not the way it works. And when you're out there openly antagonizing the people who would be implementing your policies, that doesn't make it easier to bring about the kind of top to bottom change that Trump has promised.

CUOMO: What happened here? Was this just like a mental hiccup? He did what he needed to do on immigration. He scared -- you know, you scared one group of people, but that was OK, because you got these people who are angry about immigration on your side. They're not going to leave you. There's nothing close to you that that base can find. So they'll be OK even if you soften.

On going after Hillary Clinton, you know, you softened on that. Why? Same exact reason.

But on this you're disrespecting the group that everybody respects. And, you're materially wrong about the situation going on in the war. Mosul is not a disaster by anyone's estimate. Why? Why doesn't he do what he did on the other issues here? Why button -- why double down?

BASH: I wish I could answer the question. I don't -- I don't know except for the fact that, you know, on the military issues, on, you know, starting back from the fact that he said he was against the war in Iraq. We won't relitigate that.

[06:20:00] But he believes, looking in very far from the outside in, not the inside out, that there's something that they're not doing. But you're exactly right, Chris. These are experts in battle. They're experts, obviously now, after having been there for more than a decade in the region.

And what they had suggested during the campaign, and I remember there was a time where he said that the military had been reduced to rubble and that I actually interviewed Mike Pence afterward and he was trying to clarify. No, no, no, what Mr. Trump meant was that it was the president who reduced them to rubble. You know, it was the commander in chief, and it was his problem. But that's not what he said in that "60 Minutes" interview.

CUOMO: Does Bannon bring, part of them still being told, military industrial complex; and it's part of the system so you have to go after it. Do you think that's what could explain it?

BASH: I don't know, but all I know as commander in chief when he comes in, and he has that first meeting with the generals and the military brass and he is, you know, going to be confronted with the reality of what they know and what they have done. Maybe we'll hear a different Donald Trump in the next interview after that.

CUOMO: All right, thank you very much. We'll be speaking to you, again, painfully soon.

The story behind the campaign. CNN's chronicle of the 2016 election as it happened. There's a stunning revelation in there that could have changed everything. We'll tell you what it is, ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:25:38] HARLOW: As you know by now, it was a race like no other. CNN politics there capturing every unexpected twist and turn of this wild election, compiling it all in its first ever book entitled "Unprecedented: Inside a Shocking Scoop -- Inside a Shocking Scoop on the Historic Election," including a major revelation about Donald Trump early in the campaign.

Our chief political correspondent, Dana Bash is here breaking the news this morning. Chris Christie, Donald Trump had a deal, basically, that no one really knows about until now.

BASH: That's right. This is one of the more fascinating revelations in this book. And I should say it was reported by Susan Baer, who's one of the main reporters in this extraordinary book.

And what her scoop is, is that in 2015, so, during you know, the beginning of the campaign, that Donald Trump told Chris Christie that he didn't think he would make it past October and that, if that ended up coming to pass, that he would end up endorsing Chris Christie. The two of them had been friends for quite some time. Obviously, that didn't happen. You know, Donald Trump took off, was just somebody who was unstoppable; and it was Chris Christie who was left, you know, staying in New Hampshire, campaigning very hard and really not getting anywhere.

HARLOW: Right. But that would help explain why Chris Christie was the first of Donald Trump's chief rivals in the primary to come out and back him. I mean, I remember that day vividly.

BASH: Yes.

HARLOW: We were all shocked. The news hadn't leaked at all. All of a sudden, there was this joint conference, and Chris Christie is backing him. But now Chris Christie has been taken out of the top role of leading the transition. Mike Pence is in that. He's got the Bridgegate scandal hanging over him. The question is sort of what does the future hold for Chris Christie in a Trump administration, if anything?

BASH: I don't think there's an answer to that yet. There's no question that there's a cloud still hanging over Chris Christie with the Bridgegate scandal. Two of his former aides were found guilty, and there's still a question about him personally.

So there's -- there's an open question as to whether or not he is going to participate in the Trump administration at all. Whether or not they'll just kind of let the Bridgegate issue play out. And then -- and then confront that.

You know, Chris Christie is also somebody who has been in public life. He was governor, of course, finishing his second term. He was at the Justice Department before that and, so, you know, he also might want to stay out of the administration. Might be mutual and, you know, go make a little money.

HARLOW: Not to mention not exactly great relations between him and Jerry Kushner, Trump's son-in-law.

BASH; Whole other department.

HARLOW: That's a whole other department. Dana, thank you for the reporting.

Again "Unprecedented," you can get more of CNN's behind-the-scenes story of this wild campaign as it happened, along with never before seen photography, the inside docs, and all the twists and turns of this unprecedented campaign. Order "Unprecedented: The Election that Changed Everything" at CNN.com/book.

CUOMO: All right. So, the Democratic Party is in a jam. They just lost a race they were expected to win. They were the party of the working class, but, so what are they going to do? We have someone at the center of situation, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)