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Trump Doubles Down on Divisive Rhetoric Ahead of Midterms; Local Officials & Congressional Leaders Shun Trump in Pittsburgh. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired October 31, 2018 - 07:00   ET

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


JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: To do it as a stunt a week before the election, it's demagoguery. It's not policy.

[07:00:05] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president met with four patients. He expressed his thanks for their service.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It just wasn't the right time. Democrats and Republicans refused to come here, as well.

CHRIS CILLIZZA, CNN POLITICS: Imagine that the president did not make a visit at all.

RABBI JEFFREY MYERS, TREE OF LIFE SYNAGOGUE: We are a Tree of Life. We will rebuild, and life will continue in this building.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning and welcome to your NEW DAY. Happy Halloween, October 31. We worked very hard on our costumes.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Yours is uncanny.

BERMAN: Jake Tapper.

CAMEROTA: He's going as Jake Tapper. I mean, the likeness.

And I'm Dana Bash. I mean, I can't tell the difference between myself and Dana Bash right now.

BERMAN: No. I didn't -- not enough gray in my hair to be Jake.

CAMEROTA: Here we go again.

BERMAN: It's true.

CAMEROTA: Jake Tapper on line one, Mr. Berman.

BERMAN: He doesn't get up this early.

CAMEROTA: We'll see. We'll see.

BERMAN: Except to color his hair.

All right. Less than one week to go until the midterms, two clear trends. We know the president's message, and fear is a big part of it, a big part of that closing argument. He's ordered thousands of troops to the U.S. border with Mexico to stop what he calls an invasion of migrants 800 miles away. He has also claimed that he can defy the U.S. Constitution and end birthright citizenship. Legal scholars, Republican lawyers, they say no.

I said there were two trends. The second trend is that some Republicans now seem uncomfortable with the message the president is sending.

CAMEROTA: We will get to that.

Meanwhile, the president and the first lady visited Pittsburgh yesterday to pay honor to the 11 Jews who were murdered in their synagogue. They lit candles, and they placed stones on memorials. They also visited several injured police officers at the hospital.

Some, including the rabbi of the Tree of Life Synagogue, welcomed the president's visit. Others opposed the timing of this. Local officials and congressional leaders shunned some of the events that the president was at. Several thousand protestors denounced the president's divisive language.

Joining us now to talk about everything is CNN political analyst and White House correspondent for "The New York Times," Maggie Haberman, appearing as herself.

Happy Halloween.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, stressed-out mom I think I'm pulling off really, really well. I'll let you know later how it goes.

CAMEROTA: Very good. All right. Midterm messaging, we'll start with from the president.

So he seems to be zeroing in on the two pillars of: the media, continuing his vitriolic attacks against the media; and migrants, continuing to, in fact, ratchet up the language about them and, frankly -- I mean, I have to say it -- using some of the same language that the mass murderer at the synagogue used in terms of "invaders" and "invasion."

So is that what he's sticking with for the next six days, those two?

HABERMAN: I think, look, six days is an eternity in politics in general, let alone in the Trump era, it feels like six years, so we don't know what else will happen, what else he will be talking about.

I do expect that he will, to some extent, still be talking about the caravan. He has ratcheted it down a little bit since, as you note, the -- supposedly on social media accounts that belong to the alleged shooter in the synagogue incident, he was spurred on by talk about the caravan.

I will say there's two differences. One, the caravan is taking aim at migrants. Talking about birthright citizenship, that's aimed at Americans, because if you -- and these are not similar, I think. One is a stunt in terms of the caravan and sending the military to the border; and one is actual policy. And remember, a policy that he talked about first in August of 2015, talked about -- he used the phrase "anchor babies."

CAMEROTA: You don't think this as a stunt? You think this is something that he would really do if he could?

HABERMAN: I think -- I think that it will gin up, you know, fear and I think it will certainly resonate with his base. But I don't think it's something that he's necessarily going to drop after November 6. I could see them absolutely revisiting this.

Again, every -- as you know, every lawyer, House Speaker Paul Ryan has said that this is not something -- you cannot change the Constitution with an executive order. In fact, Republicans were very upset when President Obama addressed immigration laws with an executive order as opposed to through Congress. And there's a lot of complications there.

This president has been known to forge ahead. When he says, "And they're now telling me I can do that," I would like to know who the "they" are. Don McGahn, White House counsel, has been gone for a few weeks. The new White House counsel, Pat Cipollone is not there yet. This president has a habit of saying that mysterious people who he doesn't identify support his -- his concepts, whether they are legally dubious or not. So we will see where this goes.

But I don't think that they are identical, but may serve some of the same purposes, but they're not identical.

BERMAN: "The Wall Street Journal" is flat-out trolling the president on that last point you made, where is he getting his legal advice? In their editorial today, they asked, you know, "Who's telling him that this is legal? Michael Cohen?"

HABERMAN: Right.

BERMAN: Which, again, that's a direct troll there.

It is a stunt to the extent that he's saying it can be done with an executive order, when as you noted, every constitutional scholar you can talk to says no. And I think he's putting it out there and floating it to have it discussed this week.

I am struck by the resistance that it faced. I am struck by how quickly Paul Ryan said no. I'm quickly -- I'm struck by how quickly George Conway and "The Wall Street Journal" came out and said no here. It seems to me they are uncomfortable, and I think we are talking about Ryan specifically, they're uncomfortable not just with the constitutionality, but with six days to go until the midterms, how this plays in the suburbs. They don't think this helps.

HABERMAN: No question. I think that if you -- Democrats believe and again, there's no way to know. Democrats believe and a lot of Republican strategists believe, if the elections were held right now today, the Democrats would probably win. The climate has sort of shifted back and forth structurally.

This has always been likely the Democrats were going to win, just for all of the reasons you said, that they're -- A, there are too many retirements; and B, in a lot of these suburban districts, the president is toxic, particularly with women voters. So this is not something that they want to be talking about right now as their closing messages. There is no clear closing message, except that it is all about Trump. And when the president says things like that, it makes it every more about Trump.

And I think that what has been very frustrating to him -- he has made clearly publicly -- is that he is not controlling the narrative in the last week. Between the pipe bombs, between what happened at the Tree of Life Synagogue, he is not in charge of, you know, sort of directing where all of our attention goes; and he has clearly been trying to get that back.

CAMEROTA: Well, also because these tragedies work at cross purposes with these narratives.

HABERMAN: Right.

CAMEROTA: So it's hard for him to celebrate his narrative of vilifying migrants when, again, the alleged mass murderer did the same thing.

HABERMAN: No.

CAMEROTA: It's hard to talk again about the targets of people who received bombs. I mean, it's just -- it's too complicated, you'd think. But he's threading that needle at rallies.

HABERMAN: Or something -- I think that, look, we will see him do several more rallies going into Tuesday. I think we don't quite know yet what those are going to look like. We certainly say at Saturday, even after he gave what was a really forceful denunciation of anti- Semitism in really specific terms. He talked about destroying those who want to destroy Jews. He described them as "wicked," quote unquote. Those were very specific pieces of language.

And then he veered back into, you know, Maxine Waters, who had just gotten a pipe bomb a few days earlier. I expect you will see some of that. It is not quite as full-blown as we've seen it. Who knows? He might get there. Nothing -- nothing should be a surprise at this point, I think, in terms of how he does it.

The reality is that he is facing a vote in six days now that could be very difficult for him heading into next year, if Republicans lose control of the House, and I think that he is feeling that pressure quite acutely. BERMAN: You talked about the president's message about anti-Semitism,

and you've written -- you have a really fascinating story with Katie Rogers, I believe, overnight about the influence of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Since Saturday, in the president's messaging here, what have they done?

HABERMAN: They have been very involved in -- and it's not just them. But since certainly, they are the most visible Jews in that administration, so they get a lot of attention.

They were on the phone with the president, according to our reporting, on Saturday. They usually observe Shabbos. The president was talking to them from aboard Air Force One as he was traveling through the Midwest, trying to, you know, sort of figure out what to do next.

I've been told it was the president's idea -- I don't know if this is true -- that it was the president's idea to have a rabbi at this official government event that he went to involving farmers, where the rabbi would give a blessing shortly after the shooting.

They were very emphatic with him, according to our reporting, that he needed to really strongly denounce this. He needed to denounce the hate behind it. And for him, he -- that was a pretty strong denunciation. It's just that it was buttressed by all this other divisive rhetoric, and so it sort of undoes what the first message is.

But they were involved also in having aides on the ground in Pittsburgh. They were involved in sort of micromanaging, essentially, the trip, and I don't mean that in a negative way. They were micromanaging the trip ahead of the president's visit. Yesterday -- I know there was originally some report that they weren't going to go. That was never my reporting. I think they were always accompanying him.

And so it's not really a surprise. He tends to lean on family in normal times, right? But when you are dealing with the nature of this tragedy, it's not a surprise that they are who he would listen to.

CAMEROTA: Let's talk about Barbra Streisand.

HABERMAN: Segue.

CAMEROTA: Perfect segue.

HABERMAN: Sure.

BERMAN: Don't bring me flowers.

CAMEROTA: Any more.

HABERMAN: Oh, boy.

CAMEROTA: You interviewed her. And she has a new album. Much of it, the motif of which is Donald Trump.

HABERMAN: Yes, it was sort of striking. So her folks came to me about this album. You know, Barbra Streisand is a Brooklyn lady like myself, you know, somebody who has been a cultural icon for a long time. She clearly can't get Trump out of her head. I mean, that was -- it was sort of remarkable.

She didn't want to talk only about Trump, and yet she kept circling back to Trump. Every question basically became about Trump or the election. A question about "#MeToo" turned into something about Al Franken, and whether he should have resigned while Trump is still in office and that's why Hillary Clinton lost. She described him as mean.

I mean, I don't -- I'm not in the habit of really just giving people an open mic, not making a singing reference, to just sort of do a lengthy diatribe. But this is clearly something she's infused in her art now, and that's pretty rare for her over the years.

[07:10:12] But yes, most of the album is -- there was a song called "Walls," which is the -- the title track.

BERMAN: Subtle.

HABERMAN: "Don't Lie" -- right, we can figure this out. "Don't Lie to Me..

BERMAN: Subtle.

HABERMAN: Also subtle. And on, and on and on. And then it's -- you know, and then there's a cover of "What a Wonderful World" and the song "Imagine." And it ends with "Happy Days Are Here Again," which she said she has sung a lot in her career.

She said she's getting fat because of eating -- stress eating.

CAMEROTA: She's eating her emotions?

HABERMAN: Right.

CAMEROTA: OK. Here it is: "I'm just so saddened," she says, "by this thing happening to our country. It's making me fat. I hear what he said now, and I have to go eat pancakes now and pancakes are very fattening."

HABERMAN: They are. True story. But they make them with healthy flour, she said.

BERMAN: Do you have a favorite Barbra Streisand song?

HABERMAN: I would -- honestly, I don't even think I could cast my mind to favorite.

CAMEROTA: John's going to sing you one.

BERMAN: I sang "Don't Bring Me Flowers" in break, and Maggie wanted to run away.

HABERMAN: We did that portion of the show already, and I don't think we need to reprise it. We're OK.

CAMEROTA: The dress rehearsal during the commercial break did not go well.

BERMAN: I'm going to ask Maggie about politics so she doesn't flee.

CAMEROTA: Go ahead.

BERMAN: You said the next two years could be difficult for the president. Is the White House yet trying to figure out how to handle an election where Democrats take back the House? And I'm not talking about legal positioning.

HABERMAN: No, I understand.

BERMAN: I'm talking about political messaging. What do they say -- and I don't know if it's going to happen. But what do they say if it happens?

HABERMAN: So remember, A, there's a difference between what the White House is going to figure out and what the president is going to do, because he tends to keep his own counsel.

No. 2, you've seen early discussion of this, that Democrats and some of the White House were looking at what can they work on together, both to try to make the White House not look terrible and not make the Democrats look as if all they're doing is attacking.

I think that's going to be very hard for the Republican base. It's going to be hard for the House Freedom Caucus to, essentially, sit idly by if he is then going out and trying to do an infrastructure bill.

I think at the end of the day, the Democratic base is not going to go for that. So I think that what you have next is the president saying to people, "This is good for me. I have a dysfunctional Congress," which is what they assume is going to ultimately be what it looks like, not in terms of the investigations and what we expect to come but just in terms of getting anything done beyond -- including possibly a budget. He believes that a divided government could be useful for him. Whether that reality is the case, we'll see.

CAMEROTA: Just in terms of having another target --

HABERMAN: A target, something to run against. Exactly. When you -- when you are the party in power, it can be pretty hard to find someone, as we have seen repeatedly, as he has yelled about a Republican-controlled Congress as if they have nothing to do with him.

CAMEROTA: And Democrats believe that it could be useful for investigative purposes.

HABERMAN: Yes, look, I think that you can expect that there is going to be a rather broad menu of investigations that are going to be started by House committees if they are led by the Democrats, one of which you can assume will be in the Judiciary. Where that goes we don't know, but they certainly know they are going to face a large number of subpoenas if Democrats take control of the House. That's just -- that's not a surprise to anybody.

And I don't think they're prepared for that reality, honestly. That's the reality they really are not -- "they" meaning the president and some others, that this is going to be very, very ugly if that happens.

BERMAN: Maggie Haberman, the way we were.

HABERMAN: The way we are.

BERMAN: The way we are. "The Way We Were" was a great movie. You can't deny that.

HABERMAN: A great movie. Amazing movie.

CAMEROTA: And pancakes are good.

HABERMAN: And pancakes are good.

CAMEROTA: Thank you. Thanks, Maggie.

President Trump's solemn trip to Pittsburgh, it did not have the usual reception line of local officials awaiting his arrival. One lawmaker who rejected the chance to meet the president tells us why, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:17:37] CAMEROTA: President Trump made a somber trip to Pittsburgh to pay his respects to the victims of the synagogue massacre. The city united in mourning but divided on the timing of the president's visit and, of course, his heated rhetoric. Protesters marched and chanted and sang in the streets to greet the president.

Joining us now we have Rabbi Yitzhak Husbands-Hankin. He was near the synagogue during the attack. One of his friends was wounded. He knew the victims.

And Democratic Allegheny County executive Rich Fitzgerald, he declined to meet with President Trump -- Trump yesterday.

Gentlemen, thank you both so much for being here. Mr. Fitzgerald, I want to start with you. Why didn't you want to take the opportunity to meet President Trump?

RICH FITZGERALD (D), ALLEGHENY COUNTY EXECUTIVE: Well, this really is not the time for that type of visit and that type of, really, a political atmosphere. This is a time for this community to heal.

I certainly knew a number of the victims and their families, as did the mayor and others. So this hits -- when you say this hits close to home, although, you know, my county is a county of about 1.3 million people, I live in the shadow of the Tree of Life. And this is a small community that we all know each other. And we're burying our dead and we're mourning with our community. And this just wasn't -- isn't the time for political demonstrations

and the type of political divide that's going on in this country right now.

CAMEROTA: And when you watched the video of President Trump and the first lady and Jared and Ivanka visiting with the rabbi of the Tree of Life Synagogue, what were your thoughts?

FITZGERALD: Well, again, and I think the president didn't -- didn't hold a rally. He didn't do anything in what would be an outwardly political way, so from that standpoint that was -- I was glad to see that. And I was glad to see that there were -- the protesters that were there were -- were a number of blocks away. So it didn't become, you know, more -- more of the political carnival or circus that you often see.

But really the focus needs to be on the families and on the -- on the community. We have a special community here in Squirrel Hill. Unfortunately, it kind of took a tragedy such as this to show that.

But I think people around the country realize that we all work together. We play together. We pray together. We worship together and celebrate together.

[07:20:07] And it's always been that type of community where Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and nonbelievers all work together, and so I think people are realizing that right now. And, you know, if the president had come a week or two later, you know, that would have been something maybe a little more appropriate as opposed to during the time -- literally the day the first funerals were beginning. And there will be a number of funerals today and on the next couple of days.

CAMEROTA: One last question, Mr. Fitzgerald, before I get to you, Rabbi, but isn't it customary for U.S. presidents to go to the grieving community in the days right after something horrific like this? And as you know, the rabbi from the Tree of Life Synagogue said that he would welcome the president's visit. I mean, if the president had waited, as you said, a couple of weeks, wouldn't that also have been criticized?

FITZGERALD: I guess, you know, you can always look at things in different ways. I would also note that it wasn't just one party or another. The U.S. senator who's a Republican, the congressmen who are Republican also refused to greet the president, as well. So it wasn't a political or partisan -- it was really just about this community and the grieving that has gone on.

And maybe the political climate that we're in right now changes with a tradition that we've seen. And maybe we're in a little bit of unchartered territory at this point, which is, again, the division and the political climate isn't what we were looking to have here. It was really about healing and coming together.

CAMEROTA: Well, look, if the community of Squirrel Hill could be a model for the rest of us, that would be a wonderful, obviously, silver lining to come out of this tragedy.

And so Rabbi, I know that you, too, are grieving. You knew these victims. Tell us how your thoughts are this morning.

RABBI YITZHAK HUSBANDS-HANKIN, LED SERVICE IN SYNAGOGUE FRIDAY NIGHT: Well, I -- I felt that -- that there was an exacerbation of the pain and a deflection of the grieving by the president's coming to the city right now.

And it's -- I understand that there's an expectation that a president would come to a place of tragedy, and that's appropriate. What's inappropriate is the years, actually, of a cultivation of a certain mindset that could draw a very unstable person to conclusions about immigrants and anti-Semitism and all kinds of divisive ways that the president has really cultivated an environment where this was not actually a surprise in many ways. It was a tragedy that seemed inevitable in terms of the trajectory of the president and other, I have to say, particularly Republican leaderships' cultivation of the environment that's hateful.

CAMEROTA: And so -- I mean, Rabbi --

HUSBANDS-HANKIN: We saw it just before this --

CAMEROTA: I'm sorry to interrupt. You -- so you know there's a debate about this going on right now in the country, but you see a direct line, or you draw a direct line between the president's often heated rhetoric and violent actions taken at the synagogue?

HUSBANDS-HANKIN: I can't place direct responsibility on the president for this specific tragedy. I can say that I haven't heard him condemn white nationalism, and he has done a lot of whistle-calling to cultivate a mindset that really is not far from leading to this tragedy.

So I don't know how aware he is on a personal level of the dangers of his speech -- in general, his speech, but I sense that it's -- a lot is done for political expediency, that really is really is an indulgence in an amazingly dangerous set of views that perhaps are being utilized for political expediency and gain.

It's -- I don't know how shocked he was about the incident here, this tragedy. When he used words like "infestation" of refugees, words that have traditionally been used to target specific minority groups, it's not a far leap to this tragedy here.

[07:25:22] So I do -- I hope that he will be speaking in a different way going forward, and that's what could be the redemptive piece of this is, is that if he really is shocked, really is shaken by this incident, to see how, in such a peaceful neighborhood and such a sacred place, violence could come to worshippers.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

HUSBANDS-HANKIN: I hope that he will change his tone. CAMEROTA: Rabbi, just on a personal note, I know you were supposed to

be at the synagogue on Saturday morning but you over slept and you were running late, and I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about the fateful nature of that?

HUSBANDS-HANKIN: Well, that's a very difficult question for me to wrestle with. I led services Friday night as a guest rabbi for Dor Kadash, one of the congregations that met in the Tree of Life Synagogue. And I wasn't expected Saturday morning.

But my practice has been whenever I'm in Pittsburgh -- I live in Oregon, but whenever I'm in Pittsburgh where I grew up, I attend Saturday morning Torah study and services.

So I woke up a few minutes after 10 a.m. and realized I was late. And then I got a call almost immediately from my friend's wife, telling me not to go to the synagogue, because there was an active shooter in there.

So I don't know what to make of it, why -- why I wasn't there at that time. I know that my heart was there, because my dear friend was in the building, my dearest friend over the years. And I don't know why -- I guess I'll find out why as I reflect on this in the coming weeks, months, perhaps years.

CAMEROTA: Yes. Well, again, we're so sorry for both of your loss. Thank you both very much for taking the time this morning to talk to us. Rich Fitzgerald, Rabbit Yitzhak Husbands-Hankin, thank -- we're thinking of you and the entire community. Thank you.

FITZGERALD: Thank you.

HUSBANDS-HANKIN: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: If you would like to make any sort of contribution to the families and victims there, you can go to CNN.com/impact.

BERMAN: So just what is the closing argument from the Democrats to voters six days before the election? We're going to ask a key Democratic congressman on the campaign trail. Seth Moulton joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)