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Trump Again Refuses to Condemn White Supremacists; Wisconsin Reports Record Deaths and Hospitalizations as Cases Surge; Commission to Change Rules for Next Presidential Debates. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired October 01, 2020 - 07:00   ET

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: Americans have died from coronavirus.

[07:00:02]

Yesterday alone, another 946 new deaths reported. 27 states have had an increase in cases over the last week, all the states there in orange and red. There is a surge in the Midwest, Wisconsin in particular. Yesterday, the state recorded its highly -- excuse me, its highest daily death toll, you're good, its highest hospitalizations. It was number three in the country for new cases. Its positivity rate is 21 percent. That's in Wisconsin.

Guess where the president is going this weekend, Wisconsin. He's going to hold rallies, which is a group of people, a large gathering of people close together, often not wearing masks. He's going to Green Bay and Lacrosse, areas the coronavirus task force considers red zones for having the highest level of community spread.

I want to start though with the national security crisis in the country right now. CNN National Political Reporter Maeve Reston joins us and CNN Contributor Miles Taylor, he served as former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security for President Trump.

And David Sanger's writing, saying, the most direct threat to the electoral process now comes from the president of the United States himself. It's almost as if, Miles, that the intelligence community could put out a briefing, could put out an official bulletin warning right now. Obviously, they won't.

But if you were still working there and this kind of thing could happen, what would be the warning you would issue to the American people?

MILES TAYLOR, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well, it's really difficult right now. In fact, John, he's put these departments and agencies in an impossible position because these departments and agencies are prepared to fight threats from outside the United States. But they can't fight threats from within, especially when the threat is their own boss.

And I've got to say, I would echo David Sanger's words that the president of the United States has really fulfilled our adversary's dreams by engaging in this rhetoric. So I think it's an enormous challenge. I'm not sure what type of bulletin they could issue, what they need to be doing is speaking truth to power and convincing the president to change his rhetoric.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: Maeve, President Trump sometimes says exactly what he means, and we should listen. And what he keeps saying basically over and over is that he will not accept the election results if he loses. He will fight it in the courts. He will not concede. He will claim that there was some sort of voter fraud or mail-in ballot problem. He's already doing that. He's already priming the pump obviously for that, though all sorts of election officials everywhere coast to coast say, no, we're not seeing any evidence of fraud. I mean, it's happening in real-time.

MAEVE RESTON, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER: It is happening in real-time. And he talks about it at every single rally, every single public appearance that he has. And all of that is in part to stir up the passions of his supporters, to get them ready for this enormous confrontation that he's setting up in a couple of weeks here.

And I think it's really scary for the American people that you have the person who is in the highest office in the land stirring not only this kind of disinformation about the election and therefore trying to suppress the vote because people will think that voting by mail, for example, you know, might be throwing their ballot away, even though that's absolutely not true, but also, you know, by continually making these calls to his supporters to get out there and be poll watchers and to be -- you know, have law enforcement officials at the polls. I mean, that is clearly the definition of voter intimidation, which is something that we've been trying to stamp out in this country for decades now.

BERMAN: Yes. He is literally calling for people to go to the polls, which -- and to watch, not to vote. He's telling people to go and monitor the situation, go and stir things up.

And, Miles, just to read one more sentence from David Sanger here, he says, Mr. Trump's unwillingness to say he would abide by the result and his disinformation campaign about the integrity of the American electoral system went beyond anything Vladimir Putin of Russia could have imagined.

So if you are Vladimir Putin this morning watching this, what do you think?

TAYLOR: Well, look, if I'm Russia at this point, the message that I'm taking is stand back and stand by, because the president of the United States is going to do the job for you in the meantime.

This is exactly what Beijing and Moscow and Tehran have hoped for. They have hoped that the president of the United States would take his rhetoric even further in the lead-up to the election so they didn't have to sow discord.

Now, our adversaries are just going to amplify what the president is saying. We have got to reflect on that again. Our adversaries are just going to use the president's language because they don't feel like they need to do anything more.

[07:05:01]

Again, he's doing their job for them.

I saw the threat intelligence every single week about what our adversaries were trying to do here in the United States to sow discord to divide Americans and to destroy our democratic process and our commander in chief right now is enabling that. That's not hyperbole. It sounds like hyperbole. A few years ago, I would have thought what I'm saying is crazy. But it's the reality, it's the world we're living in and I think it's the biggest national security threat to the United States today.

CAMEROTA: On that subject, Miles, I want to stick with you for one second because you do know about national security threats. What the president says, I don't know, I only see left-wing violence, which is actually plausible since he only watches Fox, and as we know his -- the people who brief him sometimes have to shield him from information that he doesn't like.

So he keeps trying -- he keeps refusing to say anything about right- wing violence, and he just immediately pivots, as you saw in the debate to what he wants to talk about, which is Antifa or left-wing violence. Are these two things the same? I mean, can you just give us the reality of what we should know?

TAYLOR: Well, look, the president always wants to pick a side, and he wants to pick the side that supports him. But Donald Trump has created, in my opinion, the favorable conditions that have allowed these domestic terrorist groups to rise.

And again, another place where I saw the threat intelligence, the White House wanted to cover its eyes and wanted to cover its ears when it heard about domestic terrorism because they didn't want to pay attention to the right-wing extremists that they saw as a potential base of support.

As a consequence, the president's rhetoric has served as a loaded gun for those groups who have since taken his words as sort of permission to do what they're doing. If you look at what happened in Charlottesville, when the president said that there were fine people on both sides, those groups celebrated afterwards. Violent right-wing and racial supremacist groups celebrated afterwards.

In El Paso, when 23 people were killed in a domestic terrorist attack, the shooter in his manifesto used the president's own language of an invasion to justify the killings. And now, we see the president saying the language that we've invoked frequently now since the debate, stand back and stand by and these groups are celebrating.

So, at the end of the day, Alisyn, if a group supports the president, he refuses to condemn them. In effect, he enables them with his words. I think that's a big worry and I think it's contributing to the rise of these white supremacist violent organizations here in the United States. BERMAN: Let me read, in fact what Elizabeth Neumann who you work with at the Department of Homeland Security has written about this and the president's language over the last few days. She writes, I work to develop policies, laws and programs to better prevent domestic terrorism. My colleagues and I tried to educate the president and his staff on this threat. Initially, I thought the rebuffing was due to having other priorities, defeat ISIS, counter IRAN, et cetera.

She also writes, I concluded after the attacks in El Paso that the president was complicit in the deaths of the Americans for his refusal to recognize his language, it was in the shooter's manifesto. Tonight, meaning the night of the debate, he was given the opportunity to condemn white supremacy. He refused.

And, Maeve, the president once again, yesterday, would not say the words white supremacy out loud, even though he said, oh, I've always denounced all of that, that, he says, but refused to say the words. And now it's beginning to put Republicans on Capitol Hill and those runs for office around the country in a difficult position, isn't it?

RESTON: Absolutely. Because as we've seen over, you know, the last four years as he's done this at such a repeated pattern with him, this is exactly the kind of language and equivocation that has driven, for example, many women voters away from him. They don't want to have to try to explain to their children why you would see equivocation on white supremacy from the president of the United States. It becomes a character issue.

And so it's such an example of his biggest vulnerability, which is that if he believes a group, any group, no matter how abhorrent their ideology is likes him, then he refuses to do anything that he thinks will alienate him. And in this case, he's not only hurting himself by losing more of those women and other voters who drifted away from him but also hurting those down ballot Republicans who now are going to have to spend the next couple of weeks explaining his comments and where they stand on these issues.

CAMEROTA: That's interesting, Maeve. Let's listen to them. Let's listen to what they felt they had to say to the microphones yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TIM SCOTT (R-SC): I think he misspoke. I think he should correct it. If he doesn't correct it, I guess he didn't misspeak.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): Well, I want to associate myself with the remarks of Senator Tim Scott.

He said it was unacceptable not to condemn white supremacists. And so I do so in the strongest possible way.

[07:10:00]

REPORTER: Will the president condemn white supremacy?

SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): Absolutely. REPORTER: Was it a mistake for him to leave that hanging out there?

COLLINS: Yes.

SEN. BILL CASSIDY (R-LA): He should unequivocally condemn white supremacy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: So, Maeve, just one last point on that political point you were making, you think that voters will hold Susan Collins and the like responsible for President Trump's words?

RESTON: Yes. Because what they want to see from Susan Collins, those voters that she absolutely needs, is independence from the president and the ability to call him out when he's wrong. And in her case, she has walked such a careful tight rope on that and often has probably not gone far enough to bring those independent voters back into the fold. And this is just going to be another example of that. And I think it's going to hurt the Republicans all the way across the board.

BERMAN: All right. Maeve Reston, Miles, thank you both for being with us this morning. I appreciate your insight.

Wisconsin this morning is seeing an exponential rise in coronavirus and setting all kinds of records in the last 24 hours. So why is President Trump going to hold not one but two campaign rallies there this weekend? Next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:15:00]

BERMAN: Nearly 1,000 new deaths reported in the United States from the coronavirus just yesterday, more than 42,000 new cases. Wisconsin set new records for daily deaths and hospitalizations. Look at those charts. The state ranked as the third highest in the country for new cases.

The situation is bad there. President Trump is going there and holding two mass gatherings, two campaign rallies the middle of all this.

Joining us now CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Ashish Jha, he's the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

Sanjay, Wisconsin may be one of the worst places in terms of the coronavirus. It seems to be the type of place where you want to do more social distancing, not less. So what's the impact of holding two large gatherings there right now?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I mean, if you're trying to create a recipe for potential super-spreader events, I mean, that would be it. You go to a place where there's a lot of virus circulating and then you bring a lot of people together knowing that the chance of any of those people within that rally actually coming in contact with someone who is carrying the virus is much higher.

And you're pointing out exponential growth there. We also know that the positivity rate in Wisconsin is above 20 percent, meaning there is a significant percentage of people who are carrying the virus that don't know they're carrying the virus. They're not doing enough testing there. So this is a huge concern.

It goes back to the conversations we were having in the spring. If we could see this virus and we treated this more like a storm, think of it like a hurricane, you would be asking people to shelter in place, not go out and aggregate in large numbers. So, it's deja vu. We've had this conversation before. It's the wrong thing to do.

CAMEROTA: And that's what the White House coronavirus task force is saying, Dr. Jha. They call this a red zone. So they call where the president is heading a red zone because it has the highest level of community spread basically in the country.

DR. ASHISH JHA, DEAN, BROWN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Yes. So, good morning and thanks for having me on. There are three things about this. First of all, it is like after the Dakotas, Wisconsin is the highest place in the world -- sorry in the country right now in terms of number of cases. It's about three times the level that the White House as its red zone. So it's not just red, it's really, really, really deep red. i agree completely with Dr. Gupta. This is not the time to hold a rally in Wisconsin.

BERMAN: So, let's talk about the vaccine situation right now. AstraZeneca had its trial put on pause because of an adverse reaction we learned, Sanjay, from one of the people, one of the patients involved in the research. Now, it's restarted in the U.K. but not in the U.S.

And now, there's new information this morning from Reuters. Reuters reporting and others that there is this increased investigation surrounding all of this but yet we don't know, I guess, exactly what the details are. What's going on here?

GUPTA: Yes. This is -- this sounds like it's a much deeper investigation now, as you point out, not only looking into this particular trial but essentially looking into this type of vaccine platform. It's called an adenovirus vaccine. They take an existing adenovirus, they scoop out the genetic material, put in some of the genetic material from this coronavirus and using that as the vaccine.

They're going back and saying, hey, look, there may be a larger problem. We want to look at previous vaccines not only for the SARS- COV-2 but for MERS in the past, for other vaccines that they have created. So we don't have a lot of details yet.

We got some early indications from talking to people within the FDA that they had larger concerns about this, more than just this one person with these side effects. So we don't know. But you're right. The pause is still in effect here in the United States.

CAMEROTA: Is that mystery Dr. Jha, surrounding this unusual? Is it unusual that AstraZeneca hasn't been more forthcoming? Should we know why there's this long pause?

JHA: So, the pause is pretty common. Pauses like this happen all the time in clinical trials. And the first thing I would say is that this is evidence that the FDA oversight process is working, that they're doing the deep investigation that is necessary.

You know, people might argue that while we generally don't share the details around these things, and I understand that, I've actually been calling for more transparency and I've been saying these are really unprecedented times and they need unprecedented transparency.

So I do think without revealing any patient information that we should know more information. But this is pretty common for how clinical trials run.

[07:20:00]

BERMAN: Yes. Look, it would be good to get more of the science, the transparency there and hear from the scientists involved rather than the executives from the companies involved, the ones who are maybe most concerned about making money or as concerned or at least concerned about making money and not just the scientists looking for the facts.

Just one very quick question about vaccines. Moderna, which is running a whole other trial, they're now saying that their vaccine will be available if all things go well for wide distribution the middle of next year.

But they also said something that I found very interesting. They say they're not going to be ready for emergency use approval application until the end of November at the earliest, Dr. Jha. And that means that two of the three of the earlier vaccine trials, that would be AstraZeneca, which we just noted is on pause here, and Moderna, they won't happen before Election Day.

It really does seem now that the, dates whether we realize it or not, are slipping further and further.

JHA: Yes. So, first of all, this has all happened at unprecedented speed. So -- and everything has gone incredibly well so far. I don't think we would ever expect there to be no hiccups along the way. It just never happens. So this is all pretty consistent with timelines I think most of us were expecting.

I think this is partly why we were getting frustrated when we heard politicians talk about trying to get a vaccine ready before Election Day. That's not the scientific timeline. We've got to let science drive this.

CAMEROTA: Sanjay, I want to ask you about the largest study on Earth about contact tracing and what it teaches us. So this was in India. And I'll read to you what we know about it. The study based on a giant contact tracing effort involving more than 3 million people in India shows that most COVID-19 patients never infected anyone else. The researchers found that 70 percent of infected people did not infect any of their contacts while 8 percent, only 8 percent, of patients accounted for 60 percent of observed new infections. So, in other words, some people are super-spreaders themselves. Not just events, some people are super-spreaders. And do we know is that because these people have more viral load? Is that because they themselves are more active?

We also know that most of the first patients, the spreaders, are between 25 and 40 years old. So, what does this tell us?

GUPTA: Yes. This is a really fascinating study. We have been following this for some time. I encourage everyone to read it and spend a little bit of time with it if they can today. It's very interesting.

They're basically talking about something that we've seen before known as dispersion factor. And it's this idea that a small percentage of people account for the majority of the spread. There was a study back in July that showed about 10 percent of people accounted for 80 percent of spread here in the United States.

And this will be high interest to you, but what they found in that study was that household contact, so you have the virus, you're living with a bunch of people, the question has been what's the likelihood they're going to get it now the people that you live with. And what they found was that 60 to 90 percent of the time your household contacts did not get it, okay? Did not get it, really important.

So you have two people. Person is at home, they have the virus. They don't spread it to their contacts at home. That same person may go to a crowded setting and all of a sudden could spread it to dozens of people.

So, Alisyn, it may, in fact, be the same person. It may not be that the person at all is different genetically or carrying more virus. It seems very much to do with the circumstance, which is really interesting. We still don't fully understand why that is that the virus become more aerosolized in a certain settling. We don't know. But it is really interesting that about 10 percent of people account for 80 percent of spread.

And they also found kids, Dr. Jha will remember when we talked about eh South Korea, it was unclear how with little kids at that point if they -- how much they spread. This study seems to suggest that kids spread to each other.

BERMAN: Let's talk about that, Dr. Jha. Because, as Sanjay, suggested, I did spent some quality time reading the research here because there was a lot in it. The thing that jumped out to me more than anything was actually the information about children because there was a lot of data here.

JHA: Yes, there was a lot of data. This is one of the best studies we have seen so far. It's really important. It does show that kids can spread to other kids. But I do think the most important findings is something that we have seen before, and I'm going to just reiterate what Dr. Gupta said, is that it's a small proportion of people doing almost all of the spreading, and that can include children.

So we just have to be much more thoughtful with how we deal with kids and not treat them as somehow either immune or unable to spread to others. The data just doesn't quite back that up.

BERMAN: Dr. Jha, Dr. Gupta, thank you, as always, for being with us this morning.

JHA: Thank you.

GUPTA: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: We want to remember now some of the nearly 207,000 Americans lost to coronavirus.

This story is jaw-dropping. Chad Dorrill was only 19 years old and described as super healthy. Appalachian State University in North Carolina, where he was a sophomore, says he was initially diagnosed early last month.

[07:25:02]

He apparently recovered but then suffered serious new symptoms and died on Monday.

Friends called him quiet and soft spoken but the most selfless person, kind person, you'll ever meet.

28-year-old Daniel Welch's mom and younger brother both contracted the virus, but he was the only family member hospitalized in Norman, Oklahoma. CNN affiliate KFOR reports during his early days in the ICU, he texted his mom, I love you and thank you for everything.

52-year-old Millie Phillips taught high school social studies in Robstown, Texas. For 28 years, winning teacher of the year three times, her brother told the Caller-Times, she played guitar and sang for her church. She was a genuinely good person.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: So, this morning, new reaction to what the president did at the first presidential debate and to the debate moderator.

[07:30:04]

We have now heard from Chris Wallace for the first time. He tells The New York Times.