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NYT: Trump Telling People He'll Be Reinstated by August; Biden Taps VP Harris to Lead Effort on Voting Rights. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired June 02, 2021 - 06:00   ET

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm John Berman, alongside Brianna Keilar. On this new day, this morning, Donald Trump is telling people he'll be reinstated as president by August. Madness, dangerous madness.

[05:59:01]

Plus, a new and stark warning, democracy right now under attack. And President Biden is putting his No. 2 in charge of fighting it.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: And chilling new body cam video showing the moment that officers first encountered the gunman in the mass shooting at a rail yard that took nine lives.

And a socialite and partner of a billionaire's son charged in the mysterious death of a police chief. Was it a drinking game gone awry?

BERMAN: Good morning to our viewers here in the United States and all around the world. It is Tuesday, June 2, and this morning our entire democracy is now at risk. History will judge what we do at this moment. Those words from a hundred scholars as they watch what is happening across the country, new voting laws that they say that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.

President Biden announced that Vice President Harris will lead the administration's efforts to preserve voting rights. The announcement comes after Texas Democrats begged for federal help after they walked out of their legislature, blocking, but only temporarily, some of the most restrictive voting regulations in the nation.

Fourteen states have enacted 22 laws making it harder to vote. That's according to the Brennan Center. There are 61 additional bills moving through 18 state legislators [SIC] -- legislatures.

Much of that is fueled by misinformation and lies, including conspiracy theories from the likes of QAnon about voter fraud. And it's all driven by the big lie pushed by the confirmed leader of the Republican Party, the former president and his supporters, that he won the 2020 election. He didn't. Joe Biden did. And it was a convincing Electoral College victory, with an overwhelming edge in the popular vote.

And overnight, new reporting from Maggie Haberman that Trump is telling people that he expects to be reinstated as president by August. Seriously. It's madness, and it's dangerous, and you have to work really hard to hear any Republican leaders refuting it.

KEILAR: And when we see the effects of that disinformation, Republican lawmakers seem to ignore the consequences. Take the response to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

House Democrats are now figuring out their options to investigate the most serious domestic attack on America's government since the Civil War after Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent bipartisan commission to examine the origins of that day's violence.

And that block is just another result of the political gridlock holding up legislation in Congress on issues like badly-needed infrastructure. Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito heading to the White House again today to try to find a bipartisan path forward, but with a 50/50 balance in the Senate and 60 votes needed to get anything through the floor, compromise looks hard to find.

BERMAN: Well, imagine trying to find compromise with a former president telling people he's about to take over again, that the current government is illegitimate. So that's where we start with Maggie Haberman's reporting that Trump has been telling a number of people he's in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.

Maggie will join us a bit later. First, here and now, John Avlon, CNN senior political analyst; S.E. Cupp, CNN political commentator; Kirsten Power, CNN senior political analyst and "USA Today" columnist. That's Kirsten Powers, what she does. Missing a comma there. Also with us, Ashley Allison, a CNN political commentator and a former national coalitions director for the Biden campaign.

S.E., Donald Trump is telling people he expects to be reinstated by August. I honestly, when I read that from Maggie yesterday, I'm like, nothing else matters right now.

S.E. CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Right. Put everything down.

BERMAN: Put everything down for a second. The former president is telling people, and people listen to this guy.

CUPP: Yes.

BERMAN: That he's going to be back in power in the White House in August.

CUPP: Yes. I mean all jokes aside, because obviously, this is delusional, I guess, down south you'd say something like bless your heart.

But this is really dangerous. I want to know what he's telling his supporters. What's supposed to happen in October to magically get him reinstated? Does it involve another insurrection? Is he inciting people to do something?

And what are his supporters telling him? We remember back in March, QAnon said he was going to have another inauguration day on March 20. And you know, the FBI and Secret Service were kind of all over that, waiting with some concern about how that was all supposed to happen. I have to imagine they are similarly, you know, looking into what's supposed to happen in October.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, this is delusional.

BERMAN: It's dangerous to the extent that it's given false hope to people who have believed the big lie, but it's crackers. It's nut burger. It's nonsense stuff and -- and should be dealt with a degree of pity. Because there's clearly some feedback loop between him and Sidney Powell, whose legal argument is that no reasonable person would believe her, because she echoed the same nonsense at a QAnon conference over the weekend. I repeat, a QAnon conference over the weekend.

So while absolutely, it is huge news that an ex-president of the United States is delusionally suggesting he'll be reinstated in power. It's also deeply pathetic.

KEILAR: I mean, John, you're completely right. It is nonsense, but it's nonsense that a lot of people are going to believe. And I wonder how worried, how concerned you are, Ashley, about it.

ASHLEY ALLISON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Absolutely. I mean, we saw what happened on January 6. It wasn't like that day was the first day Donald Trump had been telling the story about the election not being legitimate or that our democracy, you know, isn't for him and support him.

He is seating (ph) a foundation to potentially run again, but to really undermine our democracy. And Republicans are following along by all of these aggressive voter suppression bills that we're seeing in the state and being obstructionist on another level, preventing H.R. 1 from being passed, preventing from -- which is the For the People Act, preventing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act from being passed, but also forbidding infrastructure from being passed.

[06:05:09]

So he is seeding these lies to really speak to his base so that when he is ready to come back and reintroduce himself as a candidate, or other candidates, for that matter, who are aligned with him, they'll be ready.

KEILAR: What do you think, Kirsten? He's telling people that he's going to be reinstated, and he's not.

KIRSTEN POWERS, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I think he's still continuing to do what he's always done, which is undermine the democratic process, right?

So because his belief -- his followers believe what he says, when it doesn't happen, it will be another data point to show that -- that everybody is against them, everybody is against Donald Trump, that somehow, the system is thwarting him from coming back. Because as crazy as it is, there are people who believe him. That's

the part that's really hard to get your mind around. That there are people who actually, when they hear these things, they think Donald Trump is the only person that tells the truth. It's -- it's an upside- down world, right?

And so yes, so think -- I don't think Donald Trump actually believes that that's going to happen. I think it's a grift. I think it's something that he says to them in order to create more chaos and dissension and -- and sort of reinforce the cult that exists around him.

BERMAN: I once again submit this is next-level stuff, what he's telling people here. He's telling people that he expects to be back in August in office. It's next-level stuff. You have to wonder how he's telling people it will happen.

Gregg Nunziata. You guys know Greg. He's a former staffer for Marco Rubio, someone also who helped get conservative judges to the Supreme Court. This is what Greg writes about this.

He goes, "The former president, beloved by tens of millions, maintains that he's the legitimate president and that our government is illegitimate. This is a cancer, and a great political party chooses to ignore or encourage it. The idea that calling out the sedition of Trump is a distraction from the more important battle on taxes and expenditures is so ludicrous as to be offensive."

I mean, I guess that's my point, S.E. Is that, really, nothing else matters. If this guy is going out there stirring the pot, saying, I'm going to be back in office by August.

CUPP: Yes.

BERMAN: Really.

CUPP: Well, and you know, to quote Seinfeld, It's not a lie if you believe it. Except to Kirsten's point, I don't think Trump believes it, which is worse, because he knows his supporters will. So he's preying on his own fans and their vulnerability and their gullibility.

And Republicans, you know, the Grand Old Party, are enabling this, because they don't want to talk about actual issues. They don't want to bring ideas to the table. They're not a competing national party anymore. There's a party, the Democrats, and there is a cult, the Republicans.

AVLON: Yes. And look, I -- you can't get in someone's head, but I think one of the clear things we've seen is that Donald Trump's pathological narcissism knows no bounds. I think he needs to create a total fantasy world to preserve himself from confronting the fact that he lost an election.

And the fact that a large portion of a political party would follow him down that path of delusion is the real problem, to S.E.'s point. You know, Greg's exactly right. You can't curry favor with this chaos,

with this cancer. You can't play footsie with fanatics. You can't say we're going to vote against a bipartisan commission to investigate the origins of an attack on our Capitol, and maybe no one will notice. Because you are complicit if you do not confront this.

CUPP: If there were no one there to help him -- sorry, just one last point. If there were no one in the Republican Party to enable this and push this nonsense forward, it would be, you know, the tree falling in the forest, with no one to hear it. He'd just be a crazy old man running the halls of Mar-a-Lago.

And instead, he's -- you know, he's got real political support behind him.

KEILAR: Yes, because the ignoring is the enabling, and the ignoring is really just, you know, when you ignore what is going on, you're kind of is you focus on some other legislative issues, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic here. I think that's the alarm that's being sounded.

Mitch McConnell is speaking up. Doubling down. He says that a January 6 Commission isn't necessary. Let's listen to what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): Nobody's going to get away with anything who was involved in the incident at the Capitol on January 6. I think we'll know everything we need to know. We were all witnesses. We were right there when it happened. And I simply think the commission is not necessary.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: That, Kirsten, is if he is assuming that the only people here who bear responsibility are the folks who actually marched into the Capitol, when there was a whole sort of system of disinformation that was coming even from members of Congress that was pushing them on.

POWERS: Yes. And the president of the United States at the time. And so who -- again, that's the other piece we should talk about here with what he's saying about him being reinstated.

He could potentially be inciting more violence, right, because if people believe that he's supposed to be reinstated the same way they thought that he won the election before and they needed to go in and overthrow the election, then it follows that there may be people who feel like they have to come and engage in some sort of violence, because the government has -- you know, is basically a fraud and is denying him his rightful place in the White House. Right?

I mean, we just had this happen. And now he's doing it again. So for Mitch McConnell to sit there and act like -- first of all, that he has some high-minded reason for opposing this, that everything -- everyone is being held accountable, and so we don't need to worry about it. That's not it, Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell is doing this for

political reasons, pure and simple, because the Trump voters don't want any kind of accountability. And it will be very bad, also, for them politically to really dig deeply into what happened and really spend time looking at the former president and various members of Congress who encouraged the violence.

KEILAR: What do you think?

ALLISON: Look, I mean, I try not to get in the head of Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, or the whole cast of characters in the Republican Party.

KEILAR: You kind of need to.

ALLISON: I know. There's no place to go.

But I will say that there is no floor for this party right now. They are so thirsty to be in power they do -- they don't care about our democracy. They don't care about their voters. They only care about themselves.

And Mitch McConnell, we saw the whole Obama years what his plan was. His good friend, President Joe Biden, he doesn't care that he's the president. He says, I'm going to be an obstructionist to you.

And now, he's saying, Yes, we saw what happened on January 6, but I don't care, because I don't love this country enough to actually investigate. I just want to have power and push my judges and push -- not relief for the working folks and literally just put a strangle on our democracy.

It's really, really dangerous, and I know people say, Oh, it's just the left fanning the flames. No, people. We saw it happen on January 6. It was just four months ago. It can definitely happen again.

BERMAN; Right. I mean, you know, to go back to the Trump thing, it's a phrase that Brianna Keilar taught me. It's a red-light problem. It's not a yellow-light problem or green-light problem when you have a former president saying he's going to be back in power by August. It's a red-light problem.

KEILAR: That's right. This is actually how my sister taught me to speak to children about the different levels of problems, but I actually think it's very informative for adults to think about, where if you're going to be upset about something, you know, you should probably focus on the big-picture stuff. And this is a really big- picture one.

BERMAN: It's a red-light problem, a phrase you probably taught me when I was doing something that required a reprimand of some kind.

All right. Stick around, everyone. Next, President Biden gives a new job to the vice president. The war on voting.

KEILAR: Plus, he also calls out two Democratic senators are considered roadblocks to his agenda.

BERMAN: And chilling new body camera video of the moment officers encountered the rail yard gunman who killed nine of his co-workers.

This is NEW DAY.

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[06:17:08]

KEILAR: This morning, Vice President Harris has a monumental new challenge on her plate, which is protecting voting rights. President Biden tapping her to lead Democrats in a daunting legislative effort to repel what he calls, quote, "a truly unprecedented assault on our democracy."

Jeremy Diamond is covering this story for us. He is live from the White House.

Tell us about this new development, this new portfolio for the vice president.

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, listen, as President Biden was commemorating the hundred-year anniversary yesterday of the Tulsa massacre, the president also talking about the current state of the fight for racial equity.

And at the forefront of that, President Biden talking about this new assault on voting rights, on democracy that is happening in Republican-controlled state legislatures in different states across the country and now tapping Vice President Harris to lead the fight to repel some of those efforts and also to push voting rights in Congress.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DIAMOND (voice-over): President Joe Biden announcing Vice President Kamala Harris will lead his administration's push to protect voting rights.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'm asking Vice President Harris to help these efforts and lead them, among her many other responsibilities. With her leadership and your support, we're going to overcome again, I promise you, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of work.

DIAMOND: Harris's new assignment coming as several state legislatures like Texas pushed bills to impose sweeping new restrictions on voting, Biden condemning those attempts on Tuesday during a speech condemning the Tulsa race massacre in Oklahoma.

BIDEN: This sacred right is under assault with incredible intensity like I've never seen, even though I got started as a public defender and a civil rights lawyer. With an intensity and aggressiveness we've not seen in a long, long time. It's simply un-American. It's not, however, sadly, unprecedented. DIAMOND: Last month the vice president also addressed the moves to

limit voting.

KAMALA HARRIS, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We have the opportunity to make voting easier, not more difficult. To lift up more voices, not fewer. And we must start by fighting against attacks on voting rights, and it is happening right before us in so many instances in such a blatant way and in an unapologetic way.

DIAMOND: Now, Harris says she'll work with community organizers, voting rights groups, the private sector, and Congress to get the job done, pushing to muscle voting rights legislation through a divided Senate and staving off attempts to limit early and mail-in voting,, writing in a statement, "Our administration will not stand by when confronted by any effort that keeps Americans from voting," adding, "The work ahead of us is to make sure every vote is counted through a free, fair, and transparent process. This is the work of democracy."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

[06:20:00]

DIAMOND: And after being tasked with tackling the root causes of migration at the southern border, there's no question that this next assignment from the president to his vice president is another very difficult assignment.

Democrats already passed the For the People Act, this major voting rights bill in the House. They're now trying to push it through in the Senate, but they are facing a wall of Republican opposition, as well as the ongoing existence of the filibuster.

Now, President Biden said he'll use every tool at his disposal to get this passed through. It's not clear whether that includes getting rid of that filibuster -- Brianna.

KEILAR: All right. Jeremy Diamond, live for us at the White House.

Ashley and Kirsten back with me on this.

I mean, he said -- Jeremy said it, Ashley, and we all know this. Yes, it's a tough assignment. Is this an upgrade? I mean, she was, you know, doing a lot of stuff having to do with the border issue and the root cause of that. Is this maybe a better portfolio?

ALLISON: Well, there's no more important issue that is happening in our country than protecting our democracy. The attacks we are seeing on the state level and on federal elections.

I think when Joe Biden -- when we were on the campaign trail and he was thinking about who was going to be his vice president, he wanted to be able to give someone like a Kamala Harris, who was from the Judiciary Committee, who had an understanding of how to move this legislation, even when they didn't have the majority when she was a senator. So I do think this is an important portfolio. I don't want to compare immigration to voting rights. But you have to have voting rights to be able to do immigration reform, because people have to be able to go to the ballot and actually be able to vote for people who are going to put these policies in place. And I think she can be up for the job.

KEILAR: So the vice president is now tasked with this. But let's be honest, Kirsten. A lot of this comes down to two moderate Democratic senators, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and it appeared the president had a bit of a message for them yesterday. Let's listen.

BERMAN: Sock puppets?

KEILAR: I know. We need one.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: I hear all the folks on TV saying why doesn't Biden get this done? Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But we're not giving up.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: I mean, ouch. That was the actual president, by the way. That was. I mean, what do you think? He's -- there he is saying, warning, guys.

POWERS: I mean, he's frustrated, because that's not -- because Joe Biden is very much the kind of person who loves to, you know, strike the deals and find middle ground. So when he's saying something like that, he's at the end of his rope, basically.

And so I think that -- and I think he should be at the end of his rope, because I do think that there is a baseline in today's Democratic Party of what it would mean to be a Democrat, and the base line would be that you would support voting rights. Very -- very -- like, that's the lowest bar you have to meet, basically.

So the fact that they're not getting on board with this, I do think he should continue to pressure them and make very clear, you know, that this is going to be a real problem moving forward, and they come and they want something.

KEILAR: He's really kind of putting them on notice saying, you enjoy caucusing with the Democrats. Remember. Remember that.

BERMAN: He just -- one eagle-eyed viewer notes that, one, there is a factual issue with what President Biden said, which is that Manchin and Sinema have voted with President Biden --

KEILAR: That's true.

BERMAN: -- 100 percent of the time. That said, it's because Manchin has browbeat the various legislation into an area where he could vote for it. He changed it. But a hundred percent of the time so far. You can't do much better than that.

AVLON: No, you can't. And so the president, whose political charisma comes from a reputation of telling the truth, did not tell the truth there. I mean, you can't get any better than 100 percent. I understand the frustration with the Senate.

Also, it's important to say they -- it's not that they don't support voting rights. It's that they don't support ending the filibuster to achieve it. That's important to --

BERMAN: Joe Manchin has said explicitly he will not support the For the People Act.

AVLON: But he will support the John Lewis Voting Act.

BERMAN: Right, right. But he said -- but he did lay down a marker, saying he would not vote for a certain piece of legislation.

CUPP: Well, listen, spoiler alert. The federal government is not swooping in to solve this problem. These problems are happening in state legislatures and state houses. That's where they need to be solved.

And to do that, you need to go vote in midterm elections, people. You cannot just sit home and wait for every four years to vote in a new president. Because every midterm becomes a base election when you sit home, and that's how these extremist Republicans keep getting elected.

BERMAN: What about special elections? Because it turns out there was one yesterday. And in Mexico -- and there are people who think we look at special elections too much, others too little. It's raw data.

And Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat, won a Democratic seat. Now, Joe Biden won this district by 23 points in November. She's got about a 24-point edge right now. So Democrats are actually very happy with this. Now, that said, they dumped a ton of money into this race, so that it would be a large margin, and the Republicans ran on an anti- crime sort of campaign. What does this tell us?

[06:25:09]

CUPP: Look, these are important elections. Special elections are important, and Democrats are right to focus a lot of energy and money on these. It takes one, one, you know, member of Congress, one elected official to really have a lot of power. See Joe Manchin. See Kyrsten Sinema.

AVLON: And it just reinforces the reality that, as much as Democrats want to run the table right now. I understand the urgency of now. They have a razor-thin margin, not just in the Senate but in the House.

CUPP: That's right.

AVLON: And that's why this special matters.

BERMAN: It also matters because, look, in the earlier months of the Trump administration, while Republicans were hanging onto some seats in special elections, they were doing it by much thinner margins than they should have been. And this is -- this is about the margin. Maybe even a little bit more than Democrats thought that they would get there.

So S.E., John, Kirsten, Ashley, thank you one and all.

Chilling new body camera video shows the moment the police encountered the shooter who killed nine co-workers at a San Jose rail yard.

KEILAR: Plus, a deadly shooting at a Los Angeles firehouse eerily similar to what happened in San Jose. What drove a firefighter to target his own colleagues? We'll have the latest on the investigation, next.

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