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Hurricane Tests President Trump; Trump Signs Order; Many without Flood Insurance; Florence Grows in Size; Houses Weather the Storm; Trump Defends Puerto Rico Response; Charleston Mayor on Preparations. Aired 8:30-9:00a ET

Aired September 13, 2018 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:00] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Victims in Puerto Rico.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, not an empathetic leader to say the least.

Look, you know, I still think the president's statements, because they come from the president of the United States and words matter, can't simply be glossed over. You know, that, itself, aids to normalization. But the logical extent is where the president starts saying, don't believe what you see with your own eyes.

The tweet about Maria's disapproval, because there are nearly 3,000 humans dead. And that lack of focus on that.

CAMEROTA: Americans (INAUDIBLE).

AVLON: Yes. And that lack of focus on that fact and the fact there hasn't been an inquest -- an official inquest. There hasn't been a full lessons learned is itself a scandal.

The administration and the folks at FEMA and the first responders are going to do their very best in the natural disaster that's bearing down on the Carolinas right now. They've -- because they have experience, because you don't have the same infrastructure and isolation problems of Puerto Rico, the mitigation of the disaster, depending on the severity, will be better. But he's got to guard against his natural impulse, which is to puff himself up while other people are in pain, because that's how you get to a heck of a job Brownie moment, which discredited President Bush so badly in the wake of Katrina. And the president's instincts are going to be running towards that. And that is just not only tone deaf, it really will create enormous blowback on the people who are suffering in states that we won, by the way.

CAMEROTA: OK, next top, but same theme, and that is, as we know, the president is very reluctant to blame Russia for the election interference. And we know from the op-ed anonymous writer that, in fact, his instincts are to not do so and that it's the people around him who have to drag him kicking and screaming to impose sanctions, et cetera.

So, now here's his new executive order that he signed on this very topic yesterday. Here it is. This executive order requires the intelligence community and other federal agencies to assess the extent of any foreign interference after every United States election. And the president, President Trump, has said that this is a very strong executive order, assessing it after the fact is the job of historians. Preventing it before it happens, Josh, we hope, is the job of our federal government.

JOSHUA GREEN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: That's right. I mean I think there are two problems with this. One, yes, this is something that's focused after the elections. And one of the complaints we've heard from lawmakers, especially Democrats, is that the Trump administrations and the Republican Congress has refused to allot more money to beef up election security and prevent these kind of things on the front end.

But the real objection to this executive order is that it is voluntary rather than mandatory. The complaint -- the bipartisan complaint you're getting from Congress is, they want to pass a bill where sanctions would happen automatically if the intelligence community found that a foreign government, like Russia, had interfered in the elections. And what this executive order does is serve a fig leaf, I think, that is meant to push back on a lot of the criticism Trump has gotten for his weakness on Russia, for his deference to Vladimir Putin at the summit in July, without actually taking the necessary step of imposing tough measures. I think that's why you've seen criticism from even Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio in Florida who want to push a tougher bill.

AVLON: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Yes, so there was this bipartisan statement put out by Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen yesterday about this. Today's announcement by the administration recognizes the threat, but does not go far enough to address it. The United States can and must do more. Mandatory sanctions on anyone who attacks our electoral systems serve as the best deterrent.

John.

AVLON: Yes. It needs to be done. It's a good bipartisan bill from Rubio and Van Hollen. But there also needs to be the funding that's been blocked for election security. There needs to be more focus on the front end as well as the back end of those punitive measures. And the problem is always isn't necessarily folks in the administration. It's the president who really does this reluctantly in half measures, if at all.

CAMEROTA: All right, Josh Green, John Avlon, thank you both very much.

So, flood insurance, of course, is back in focus as Florence is expected to dump torrential rain. Just so many, I mean, feet of rain to be dumped, as well as, of course, the storm surge. So Christine Romans is going to be here with what we all need to know, next.

Plus, hurricane survival instincts that these animals have on the outer banks. What do they know that they can teach us, John Avalon? Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:38:45] CAMEROTA: OK, it's time for "CNN Money Now."

Tens of thousands of homes are in the path of Hurricane Florence and they do not have flood insurance.

CNN chief business correspondent Christine Romans joins us now.

So then what?

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Right. Well, the eye of Florence expected to zero in on North and South Carolina and standard homeowner insurance policies exclude storm surge and related flood damage. Instead, property owners must buy separate policies, typically from the government.

In North Carolina, just over 134,000 households have policies with the National Flood Insurance Program. Around 204,000 are covered in South Carolina. But most of those policies are for properties in the special flood hazard areas of the rate maps. Many households that are further inland and outside the mapped floodplains, Alisyn, they have no flood coverage at all. And Hurricane Florence is headed straight for them.

Also, the flood insurance program itself is on unstable ground. Yesterday, the National Association of Realtors renewed its call for Congress to enact a long term reauthorization of that program. The National Association of Realtors executive there, the president said in a statement, flooding is the most common disaster in the United States, one that affects Americans in communities both coastal and inland. As another potential historic flooding event looms, we urge Congress to take up the fight for responsible long-term reform as swiftly as possible.

[08:40:03] And, Berman, another big question for you there in Oak Beach, some of these homes have been covered and made whole time and time again. There's also a big national question about how we're building and where we're building, right in the path of hurricanes that we know are coming, John.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: That's right. You hear people talk about, hey, they lived through Floyd here. They lived through Matthew here. They've been through it several times. They're about to go through Hurricane Florence as well.

Christine Romans, thank you very much.

ROMANS: You're welcome.

BERMAN: Let's bring in Chad Myers at the Weather Center.

Chad, we want to get a sense of where the storm is right now and what this slow down means.

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Well, we were doing 17 miles per hour yesterday and now we're doing 12. And so we probably, by the end of this day, will be down to about six or seven. You could run faster than that.

Somewhere making a landfall close to Wilmington. It could be north or south of there. But, Wilmington, you have a very small cone of opportunity right now and right now it's only about 150 or just -- or so miles off the coast there. That's the eye wall itself.

So somewhere about 170 miles from you, John, 155 from Wilmington, John, being right there at Oak Island.

When I heard you were at Oak Island this morning, I thought you were looking for the gold up in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia. I didn't know you were actually going to be right here in the middle of it, in the thick of it. Hatteras, right now, gusting to 33, Charleston to 20, Myrtle Beach gusting to 20.

There is the center of the eye. Now I put it into motion for you. Now this is 11:00 tonight. There is our John Berman right there. Winds are going to be offshore for you, John. That's not a surge wind. The surge at this time will be over here because that's the wind going on shore, pushing that water on shore in this -- what I'm calling a catcher's mitt.

What the problem for you, John, as I move you ahead until about 9:00 and then all the way, this is about 5:00 tomorrow morning, you will be right there in Wilmington. You will be in the surge area. And you say, well, wait, I'm OK because there's a lot of beach here between us. No, there's a river. Then it goes all the way up through here. And that river will be surging as well. The water will be coming up on the river even though it's not on the ocean. There will be salt water in that river.

And that happens sometimes. And we call that an area that can go back and forth. And it's not always fresh water. It's called Brackish (ph). But the Brackish water will be very much more salty tomorrow for your shot for tomorrow morning. I know that's where you're going to be in Wilmington. And then by tomorrow afternoon, it is all the way over toward Myrtle and the onshore flow to Myrtle makes a surge there, but probably only about five feet because this storm will be getting to slow down just a little bit.

It's a big storm, John. It's wide. It's north to south. It's east to west. It still will have a category four surge. Whether this number says one or two by tomorrow morning, it is going to be a big water mess, and then it stops and it just rains and rains and rains. We already know that.

But because this storm was a four, for a long time, it's bringing with it a category four surge.

CAMEROTA: Well, that's exactly the point, Chad, and I want you to make that point again for everyone listening because it's counter intuitive. As the category goes down, the danger goes up. People aren't used to that. So can you explain why the category's gone down to two, but the danger, as you see it, has gone up. MYERS: Yes. I can't stop this map. I wish I could. But there's the --

there's the eye right there. It doesn't look very good. I'm going to put it to the end. You'll see it. It really got torn up. There's some central dense overcast. There's still spinning around. We can see it on the radar. But if you don't have an eye, you don't have that storm breathing up and down where the air in the middle of the eye is going down and the eye wall is going up. You don't have a storm that's generating, not getting bigger. And that's good. So we don't want this to get bigger.

But it was already so large here that it sucked in water underneath it. And that bubble of water is still with it. It hasn't gone away because the wind's still blowing in. The wind's still blowing in 110, OK? So it's not blowing in 140, but it's still blowing in. And that water, that surge, will be right there on the Carolina coast. Probably someplace very close to Carolina Beach, where our Derek Van Dam is, and I'm sure his shot tomorrow will be quite interesting. That island may be completely over washed in water.

CAMEROTA: OK, Chad, thank you very much.

John, we'll be back with you shortly.

So, there are these wild horses that roam North Carolina's outer banks. And they, of course, will not be evacuated. They're not evacuating themselves. They will hunker down. They will ride out the storm. And that's where their horse sense kicks in. Here's Jeanne Moos.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): You know who isn't watching TV to find out when the hurricane hits? North Carolina's wild horses. There are over 200 of them on the outer banks.

Normally they're scratching or strolling the beach or even rolling on the beach. But already they sense changes in the air pressure and are changing their behavior.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They started huddling up together. They'll group up together. They go to high ground.

MOOS: Meg Pucket (ph) is herd manager of the Corolla (ph) Wild Horse Fund. The group's FaceBook page is a magnet for concern. Some worried about them. Not their first rodeo. Wild horses have more horse sense than people.

[08:45:13] UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If anything can survive this storm, those horses can.

MOOS: Forget evacuating them. Too stressful for the wild horses. Too difficult and expensive for the humans. But the experts say the horses, wildly popular with tourists, should be fine. Usually they're territorial, like these two stallions fighting over mares. But when bad weather hits, they band together.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They go into those live oak forests and they just hunker down under those trees.

MOOS: Horses have drown in hurricanes. Five were lost when Isabelle struck 15 years ago. But the expectation is that most of these horses should make it.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They wait it out. Put their butts to the wind and wait it out.

MOOS: Instead of us riding horses, it's the horses' turn to ride the storm.

Jeanne Moos, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: OK, So let's take a look right now at that light station that we've been monitoring because this gives us our best sense of the winds that are approaching the coastline of the Carolinas. So this is about 30 miles off the coast of North Carolina. And you can see, obviously, the flag whipping and all of the waves churning up. And you can listen to that wind.

OK, coming up, we are going to have the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, with how they are preparing at this hour.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:50:37] CAMEROTA: OK, there is a new tweet from President Trump and it's very relevant today. We're -- we've been trying to figure out if the federal government has learned anything from what happened, the disaster that happened with Hurricane Maria where the death toll has gone up to 2,975 people. And he is addressing that.

Abby Phillip, we find you live at the White House.

What's the president saying?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Alisyn.

Well, we've been talking about this all week and now the president has weighed in pretty definitively about what he thinks about this elevated death toll for deaths related to Hurricane Maria. He says, 3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the island after the storm had hit, they had anywhere from six to 18 deaths. As time went by, it did not go by much. Then a long time later they started to report really large numbers, like 3,000.

He then says in a second tweet, this was done by Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising billions of dollars to help Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them on to the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico.

So it's pretty plain there, Alisyn, what he's saying about his views of the death toll. But I think we really need to put this in the context of the actual numbers. When President Trump went to Puerto Rico last year, a couple of days

after the storm, the death toll was officially at 16. But just days after he left, it had already doubled to closer to -- in the 30s. And then after that, months later, in the 60s. So the death toll has increased officially according to Puerto Rico's count.

But what we're talking about when we talk about this 3,000 number is a survey that was done by researchers at the behest of the government to count the deaths associated with this storm. They came up with a number that is near 3,000. And President Trump here is just simply rejecting that number out of hand. But I think a lot of people, based on what is happening on the ground, do not agree that that is a fair assessment.

Back to you.

CAMEROTA: Well, I think we need to deal with the facts, which is that these 2,975 people did not die of old age. That is not true. That is not true. They did not die of old age. They died of neglect. And they would still be alive today if they had had electricity, if they had been able to get their medicine, if they had been able to get water. Those are the people that are counted.

And, by the way, if the federal government cares that much, they shouldn't have left it to all the journalists and university to just have to go there and look into this, which is what ended up happening because the federal government didn't do an exact count.

But, Abby Phillip, we appreciate you getting this breaking news to us. That really is helpful.

John, this is, again, a very different lens that the president is looking at this tragedy, this American tragedy through, same amount of people died in Hurricane -- as a result of Hurricane Maria as 9/11 and yet, obviously, we talk about those disasters so differently.

BERMAN: Yes, and, Alisyn, it is not factual, as you said. And just one more point I want to make. It's not helpful to the people where I'm standing right now. It is not helpful to the millions of people standing in the way of Hurricane Florence, which is beginning to hit the Carolina coast. It will have a huge impact and the president can satisfy his own ego however he wants, but the people down here are the ones in need.

Let's move beyond politics. I want to go to Charleston, South Carolina. The mayor of that city, John Tecklenburg, joins me now.

And, mayor, we had a chance to speak with you yesterday. You will feel the effects of this storm one way or another in the coming days. How do you feel this morning?

MAYOR JOHN TECKLENBURG, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA: Well, good morning, John.

We feel prepared. And I want to thank all the folks who have offered their prayers and mayors from around the country have been calling me. We're so thankful for your support.

But we've been doing an amazing job of preparation. Number one priority is to protect our citizens and then their property. And it's really hard for a mayor of a vibrant city that prides itself on hospitality to say, we're looking for Charleston to be a ghost town this weekend, quiet and easy to protect and lives safe and away from here, if possible. But come next week, Charleston is going to be cooking, and we're going to be back in business.

BERMAN: Yes. No, I know what you're trying to say right there. A mayor's job is to tell people to come in, come into my city. In these last few days you've had to tell people to get out.

[08:55:05] Mayor, it's going to rain a lot. You're going to get dumped on there. A foot of rain, maybe more. You may get some storm surge as well. It's the low country. We talked about It's called the low country for the reason. What's going to happen with all that water?

TECKLENBURG: Well, we actually believe that's our highest risk here in Charleston is the rain. We've seen four events in the last four years. We prepared as best we can. We are the low country. We have urged people that live, and we continue to do so, in very low lying areas or in properties that have flooded in the past to please go to higher ground, to evacuate. We've helped them do that. We've opened shelters. We've cleaned ditches and outfalls (ph). We've got portable pumps in place. So we're ready to move to our next phase of protecting our citizens when the storm comes through over the next couple of days. And then all is in gear for a full recovery thereafter.

BERMAN: Where will you be spending the next, I guess, you know, 48 to 72 hours as this storm bears down?

TECKLENBURG: We have an emergency operation center right here in the -- in downtown Charleston. And we'll be coordinating from here. But I got to tell you, most of our public safety personnel, including parks, storm water personnel, recreation, we're -- all hands are on deck to be ready for recovery. We've got folks stationed around the city, in fire stations and in hotels, that are mostly empty this weekend, admittedly, but we're ready for a big response.

BERMAN: All right, Mayor John Tecklenburg of Charleston, South Carolina, it's a beautiful city, south of where I am right now. Thanks so much for being with us.

TECKLENBURG: So, Joh, if I -- if I --

BERMAN: Alisyn, you're in New York.

Go ahead.

TECKLENBURG: If I may close, this may --

BERMAN: Oh, I think we just lost Mayor John -- go ahead.

TECKLENBURG: This may be a powerful storm, but it is nowhere near as powerful as the spirit and resiliency of this city and its people. BERMAN: No question about that.

John Tecklenburg, mayor of Charleston, thanks so much.

For Alisyn Camerota, who's been up in New York, I'm John Berman in Oak Beach, North Carolina.

CNN's special live coverage of Hurricane Florence continues right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)