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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Trump Doubles Down on $5,000 Promise, It Will Happen; Trump Claims Golden Economy As Bad Headlines Grow; Report Finds Contractor Of Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Accountable For The Human Oversight, Not Vandalism; Trump Reposts January 6th Video As One Of His Allies Resigned Without Charging Anyone. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired September 11, 2026 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[22:00:00]
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Tonight, Donald Trump's golden age isn't aging well.
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: This has been the most successful two years financially.
PHILLIP: Why the president keeps telling Americans something they don't feel or believe.
Plus, the alleged bribe is getting messy. Why the administration can't get its story straight about the $5,000 promise.
Also, the president has spent months blaming his Reflecting Pool chaos on vandals.
TRUMP: They cut it very violently.
PHILLIP: Except now, his own handpicked contractor is blaming itself.
And Trump oddly reposts one of his most infamous videos.
TRUMP: This was a fraudulent election, but we can't play into the hands of these people.
PHILLIP: As the person he put in charge of prosecuting his foes quits without charging a single person.
Live at the table, Lauren Wright, Sawyer Hackett, Marc LoPresti, Yemisi Egbowole, and Brad Polumbo.
Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here, they do
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIP (on camera): Good evening. I'm Abby Phillip in New York.
Tonight, Donald Trump on the defense as he doubles down on his $1 trillion midterm promise. On Truth Social today, the president attacked his critics of the pledge, writing, when I say something, I mean it. The $5,000 dividend will happen because the people of our country deserve it. He added, vote Republican.
But, once again, Trump offered no details about how it would all work except that our country is taking in trillions of dollars in economic development investment and pure success. CNN reported last night that many top aides were blindsided by Trump's check gimmick, and they were left scrambling to fill out the details in the hours that followed. And now, days later, the plan still isn't entirely coherent.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
J.D. VANCE, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: We're taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the president of the United States is actually standing up to both foreign companies but also foreign countries.
KEVIN HASSETT, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: A logical place where something like that might happen would be through a reconciliation process where Republicans work with the White House to come up with a way to get some of the riches that have basically been pouring into the United States.
HOWARD LUTNICK, COMMERCE SECRETARY: This is key. This is not tax money. This is going to be non-tax money.
The Trump Platinum Card where people can extend their visa up to 270 days and pay us $5 million. We have a wait list of more than 100,000 people who want to come. That's $500 billion, right? We can earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Now, before we open it up to the table here, we want to invite you at home to join the debate. Go to cnn.com/abby, weigh in there. We'll get to some of your comments as we go throughout the show and the conversation.
I guess the question is, show me the money. If they think they've got it, where is it?
MARC LOPRESTI, CEO AND SENIOR MARKET STRATEGIST, MARKET REBELLION: Well, Abby, there's a number of places that the president and this administration can get the money. Of course, there's a long way to go from here to there. Congress has to approve this, and details remain sketchy. But the president's investments in companies like Intel, Trilogy Minerals, M.P. Minerals, have returned over 100 percent, the Intel investment alone over 120 percent, returning billions and billions of dollars --
PHILLIP: What's the amount?
LOPRESTI: -- to the government. I believe it's of over $40 billion currently. PHILLIP: Okay. We're talking $1.3 trillion.
LOPRESTI: I understand the latest number's around $1 trillion, but there are other pockets of money without increasing the deficit.
BRAD POLUMBO, INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST: Wait, are you pretending this is a thing?
LOPRESTI: I'm giving a few examples.
POLUMBO: Are you pretending these checks are actually a thing?
LOPRESTI: I just said it has to be approved by Congress.
POLUMBO: It will never be approved by Congress. Are you joking? They're going to double federal expenditures overnight?
LOPRESTI: Did I say that it was going to be approved by Congress? I started my conversation by saying we have a long way to go from here to there.
POLUMBO: There is nowhere to go.
LOPRESTI: And it would have to be approved by Congress.
POILUMBO: It's a fantasy. It's a lie. It's a hoax.
YEMISI EGBEWOLE, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF AND ADVISER, BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESS OFFICE: The mention of the reconciliation process I think is a little bit of a fantasy, and Thune has already said that we'll see if it comes to the floor. I don't think it will. There's a very finite amount of time before the Senate and the House possibly flip.
[22:05:00]
But you saw -- I've seen Bessent speak about this from Treasury, Howard Lutnick from the commerce perspective, Kevin Hassett from the National Economic Council. It feels like the holy trinity of all of the econ advisers, and no one seems to have a clear messaging point on this, Beyond where does the money -- it's -- is there a --
POLUMBO: It's almost like they're all making it up as they go along because President Trump just blurted it out, farted it out into the public without even discussing it with anyone.
EGBEWOLE: I would assume it was in the prompter and that there was some kind of cohesion there.
PHILLIP: Well, to Brad's point, I mean, here's The Washington Post editorial board. They did some math on this. Trump said the revenue from tariffs would cover what he branded as a dividend, but the government refunded more money from tariffs than it collected illegally than it brought in from legal tariffs in May, June, and July.
The taxes on imports that are in effect are expected to generate less than $200 billion this entire year, and that sum was, by the way, paid for by Americans, so that is actually tax money, contra Howard Lutnick there. It's already factored into the deficit of more than $2 trillion. So, the president is -- said that he would earmark revenues from tariffs already. That would cover $6 trillion in other costs.
So, he's supposed to be bailing out the farmers, he's supposed to be giving rebate backs, he's supposed to be doing all these things with tariff money, and it doesn't add up to really anything.
SAWYER HACKETT, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Well, and funny enough, they want to make this election about socialism, and here they are claiming to hand out $5,000 to every American adult, paid for by tariffs that Americans are paying not foreign countries. American consumers are paying. Or paid for by the federal stake in a private company, in Intel, which is barely, you know, scratching $40 billion. But I hear your point. That's just a path that they're kind of laying out. This is a source of revenue to cover this.
LOPRESTI: We should do more of that, by the way. We should do more of that.
HACKETT: We should seize more private companies?
LOPRESTI: That's -- how is that a seizure? How is any of those examples seizures?
HACKETT: Because he's doing it by force.
LOPRESTI: Those were investments.
HACKETT: By force.
PHILLIP: Wait. But, Marc --
LOPRESTI: No. I completely disagree with that characterization.
PHILLIP: -- I'm actually shocked that you -- I mean, I don't want to --
HACKETT: Are you capitalist?
LOPRESTI: Yes. I know where this is going.
HACKETT: He wants to seize a federal stake in 35 companies.
PHILLIP: I'm just saying, like, typically Republicans, believe that you let the market -- do what the market does, and that the government shouldn't be taking stakes in companies, which kind of artificially props them up and reduces the risk to investors, which creates market distortions.
I thought that conservatives would be opposed to that, but you're saying more.
LOPRESTI: Well, what I'm saying is we're facing a $40 trillion deficit, okay? That was a very -- a milestone that I did not like to see us cross last week, okay? It was not created entirely by Donald Trump, notwithstanding what we might want to allege here. And it does call for measures, if you look at countries that have deployed programs where the government has had sovereign wealth funds.
EGBEWOLE: Social programs?
LOPRESTI: No, okay. If you look at the countries that --
HACKETT: We should emulate Saudi Arabia is what you're saying?
LOPRESTI: Like a Norway, it is not the kind of socialism that's being advanced and suggested right now. I totally agree with that.
POLUMBO: You don't need to take 10 percent of Intel to fix the national debt. These are two different conversations.
LOPRESTI: What would you propose we do?
(CROSSTALKS)
LAUREN A. WRIGHT, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY POLITICAL SCIENTIST: I think we're witnessing the major issue. We're witnessing the issue with Trump's tariff policy, which is it is totally antithetical to conservative economic beliefs. It is the single biggest thorn in the side of the administration since day one. Because you're right, Abby, this is -- this policy is totally backwards. It is revenue from tariffs collected from taxpayers indirectly, and then socialist redistribution of that taxpayer's revenue among Americans. And so it really doesn't make any sense.
And I think it's interesting that we're kind of arguing about whether it's going to happen or not. It's bad policy fundamentally.
PHILLIP: And it's also random, because it's like $5,000 to everyone. Whether you pay taxes or not.
EGBEWOLE: Whether you work or not.
PHILLIP: Whether you work or not, I mean, I guess --
EGBEWOLE: That was kind of --
(CROSSTALKS)
PHILLIP: Yes. So, here's a viewer comment from cnn.com/abby. It says, why not use this money to lower the deficit instead of giving it out to people?
HACKETT: What money? There's no money.
PHILLIP: There's no money.
HACKETT: What are we talking about? I mean, first of all, the sentiment of -- I get the sentiment of the point, which is that if there was this magical windfall, right, wouldn't the logical thing be to bring down that $40 trillion deficit as opposed to just handing out random checks that are going to be inflationary? But you're right, there's also no money.
POLUMBO: I will say -- okay, I will say I love this energy. I do expect it to come back out when we bring up the Green New Deal under the next Democratic president, $93 trillion, when we bring up Medicare for all, $40 trillion. I'm very glad everyone has rediscovered their fiscal conservatism now that it is Trump being profligate and wasteful.
This was unfortunately quite lacking during the Biden years. It's lacking now, but I hope we can remember some of these lessons.
[22:10:02]
Yes, when Trump makes it so absurd that it's obvious to everyone that we don't have the money for these spending proposals, but this is unfortunately not that far astray from how the government is typically run in D.C.
WRIGHT: It's actually not nearly as bad as the Biden years, not nearly as bad.
EGBEWOLE: Can you say that there is a difference between offering money if you win midterm elections and like the Green New Deal?
LOPRESTI: As opposed to elect me and I'll cancel your student loans.
EGBEWOLE: There's like the motivation.
HACKETT: To Brad's point, this is not going to happen.
WRIGHT: It is like student loans, yes.
HACKETT: This is -- they have nothing to run on. They've launched a war in the Middle East, another intractable war. They've launched trade wars with all of our allies. They've destroyed our alliances, sky-rocketed prices and somehow Trump has gotten $2 billion richer --
WRIGHT: What I think what Brad is getting at is would you like it? Like would you like it if it happened? Your critique seems to be it's never going to happen, which is totally true --
HACKETT: We don't need to debate if I like whether it happened.
WRIGHT: Well, no, but do you like this policy, wealth distribution.
HACKETT: What's the policy?
WRIGHT: Taking taxpayers' money and redistributing it --
HACKETT: Or the president using a scheme where we seize property and federal companies, and then we --
WRIGHT: No, we know the scheme is not going to work. But if it passed through Congress, would you like the policy?
HACKETT: It depends on how it was structured. WRIGHT: Then it would be a redistributive policy.
HACKETT: It depends on how we --
(CROSSTALKS)
PHILLIP: There's also something very interesting about a policy that gives, you know, a working mom of four the same amount of money as it gives, you know, Mark Zuckerberg. Like a lot -- I think a lot of Americans think that's silly. That's not a good use of money.
EGBEWOLE: Yes. Like is it -- like would I like $5,000? Yes. I would just -- I would like $5,000 in my checking today, right now. Is it going to be helpful in the long-term? Does it help a family of four meet the monthly payments every month? I don't think so.
HACKETT: What would it do to Trump's inflation crisis?
EGBEWOLE: Yes.
LOPRESTI: Well, that's where the devil's in the details, right? Because it needs to come with some form of strings attached. It can't be $5,000 for all Americans who've been struggling.
EGBEWOLE: But that's what's being proposed.
(CROSSTALKS)
PHILLIP: The devil is absolutely in the details.
Okay. Let me just play this because this is interesting. I mean, Aaron Rogers, a kind of MAGA-friendly quarterback, he seemed to kind of be turning on Trump because of some of the way that Trump has governed via gimmick.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AARON RODGERS, NFL QUARTERBACK: There is no MAGA movement. There's no Make America Great Again movement because the guy you elected hasn't done any of his campaign promises. And it just realizes you think something's going to actually change, you know?
When Obama's president, you think that -- everybody's like, oh, there's going to be hope and change for a better world. Like has anything in the black community gotten significantly better? Is anybody better off? Did the Affordable Care Act make a major difference in the world besides being an extra tax, you know, for the rich? Is healthcare that much better in this country?
And then Trump's going to come in and drain the swamp and do something, and nothing happens, and nothing changes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: That's part of the problem, I think, politically for Trump, is that people see through this, and also how he governs versus how he campaigns, there's such a huge delta between those two things. The forgotten men and women was a campaign slogan.
But this administration has been great for the well-connected, wealthy CEO executive. It's a political problem is kind of what he's saying.
POLUMBO: I think, though, there's a dichotomy here where there's some things he ran on that he's done. Whether you like it or not, he's been hardcore on the border. He's pushed immigration enforcement. He has on some things really stuck to his guns. He ran on tariffs, by the way. He ran on mass deportations, by the way. So, whether you agree with it or not, I disagree with a lot of that, he's doing that.
It's the other stuff where he's totally off base, you know? No new wars turns into a new war and $4 gas. All of a sudden, you know, we're going to make America great again, we're going to get our economy going, turns into actually I'm going to sell access to the Oval Office to crypto donors, and we're going to have this kind of swamp that -- he -- I mean, really, he put fertilizer in the swamp. And so it's a bit of a whiplash, but there's enough there that if you squint at it, you can see what you want.
PHILLIP: All right. Next for us, the president is doubling down on his claims of a golden age in America, but is that the right message just weeks out from the midterms?
Plus, Trump blamed his botched Reflecting Pool renovation on vandals, but now the contractor says that the company is to blame.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:15:00]
PHILLIP: President Trump is selling a very different version of the economy than the reality that most Americans are facing.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: This has been the most successful two years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency.
Food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down.
It's like the golden age of America.
Tariffs are my favorite word.
It's making us much richer than we ever thought, but we're taking in trillions of dollars.
Our country has never done better. We're taking in trillions of dollars.
We're going to take care of the $40 trillion over a period of time through growth. We're growing at a faster rate than we've ever grown before.
(END VIDEO CLIP) PHILLIP: So, what does the president's golden age actually look like?
Well, in just the past few days, inflation rose again, setting the stage for a potential interest rate hike. Oil now costs more than $100 a barrel, and it's likely to climb higher. Diesel prices have skyrocketed past $6 a gallon for the first time ever. Bond yields soared to their highest level since 2023.
[22:20:00]
Mortgage rates have also surged, putting homeownership out of reach for many Americans. And consumer sentiment continues to sink.
So, it's no wonder that Americans are souring on Trump. A new poll finds that 32 percent of voters approve of how he's handling the economy. That is the lowest rating on the issue in Quinnipiac polling history.
This is kind of what we were discussing at the end. It's when you promise people to make things better and then things get worse in your tenure, that's going to be a problem for voters. And that's exactly what Trump is facing.
WRIGHT: Yes. I actually think this is the central problem, is that he overpromised on the campaign trail. Now, I'm on the record with how much I hate the tariffs. I think they're terrible policy. I think they're not conservative. But what he inherited was Biden's policies that caused large-scale permanent inflation. Every Clinton and Biden and Obama economist worth their salt told him, do not pump $6 trillion into the economy through COVID relief and the Inflation Reduction Act. It's going to cause inflation, and it did.
And this is the thing about presidents. They can cause, through policies, huge problems, but they have a very limited toolkit to fix them. And so when Trump came into office and said, I'm going to lower prices, I'm going to get rid of the inflation, he didn't have the toolkit to do that.
He is, in his own mind, trying to turn around the economic ship through long-term growth policies. He's trying to increase productivity. He's trying to, you know, protect us from bad actors in our economy, China, Russia, whoever's dumping products into the United States. I don't entirely agree with it. He's trying to lower taxes and boost employment.
But he can't lower prices. He just -- he promised something he simply cannot do.
POLUMBO: Well, he didn't have to get gas prices up to $4 a gallon.
PHILLIP: I think there was also an option for him to not do anything at all, and he probably would've been better off.
WRIGHT: Yes, he has done things that have made it worse.
PHILLIP: Yes. WRIGHT: But there are some promises he made that Biden made terrible decisions on that he simply cannot undo that.
POLUMBO: But isn't that his fault? I mean, for example, President Trump --
WRIGHT: Yes, and I've blamed him for that.
POLUMBO: -- on the campaign trail said that he would actually lower prices, which any economist will tell you --
WRIGHT: Yes, which presidents cannot do.
POLUMBO: Well -- but even if he had been able to flatten out the inflation curve, prices were still always going to increase by 2 to 3 percent. But he set the standard that, when I'm in office, prices are going to go down. And that has never really happened.
WRIGHT: And these public opinion numbers, just if I could say very quickly, are exactly the same as they were under Biden. It's the same -- if you look at the Pew polling across time --
PHILLIP: Here's the problem, is that they're worse.
WRIGHT: People feel the same about the economy right now as they did about Biden's economy.
PHILLIP: They feel -- they actually feel worse, because we -- we don't have it today, but we've used this statistic before. There was a poll that showed that people's sentiment about the economy is worse than it was during the worst part of the Biden economy, which I think says a lot.
I mean, there is a part of the psyche of Americans right now that is about Trump's distractedness, the feeling that he is not focused on what matters to them.
WRIGHT: And they didn't think Biden was distracted? He couldn't even make a speech.
PHILLIP: Well, look, I mean --
WRIGHT: I mean, some of this is partisanship.
PHILLIP: I'm talking about what is he focused on in the job, right?
WRIGHT: I agree.
PHILLIP: And Trump -- you know, say what you will about the Biden economy and inflation was terrible in the Biden economy.
WRIGHT: And he caused it.
PHILLIP: When Trump came into office, we were at 2.9 percent inflation, okay? Wages were outpacing inflation. Now, we are at 3.4 percent and wages are not outpacing inflation. WRIGHT: Because of tariffs.
HACKETT: And we were the best performing economy coming out of that COVID recession.
WRIGHT: Which is why we did not need the massive stimulus unlike any other country did.
PHILLIP: Well, I mean, that's -- it's a bit of a chicken or an egg because the Biden people would argue that we came out of it --
WRIGHT: Biden was the chicken and the egg for inflation.
PHILLIP: But the Biden people would argue that we came out of it better than the other economies because we managed it better. That's a good argument.
LOPRESTI: We came out of it better because we're the United States of America, right? We're the most powerful, the most productive, the most innovative economy regardless of who's at the helm in the White House, is my frank and humble opinion.
And I think the problem that President Trump has right now is there's a disparity between the campaign promises, which politicians on both sides of the aisle make very lofty promises to get into office, and setting then expectations that are perhaps unrealistic because of something you said.
You used the ship analogy. You know I use that on the show all the time. The economy moves like a battleship, not a speedboat. The types of policy changes that the president has enacted and continues to work towards will show benefits, unfortunately, most likely beyond his term. He will not get credit for it now.
And people, as my friend James Carville said once, it's the economy, stupid. People vote with their wallets. They care what they pay at the pump and what they pay at the grocery store, and nothing else matters, unfortunately.
PHILLIP: This is Mike Johnson, the House speaker, talking about this very question of, what are voters supposed to make of the fact that they're paying $4 a gallon now for gas when Trump promised them to lower gas? Listen.
[22:25:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gas is almost a dollar more today than it was at this time last year. Diesel prices are at an all-time high. That's driving up prices everywhere. How do you message around this issue between now and November 3rd? Because this, just like during the Biden years, is going to be a big issue.
REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA): It is, of course. It always is. Gas prices are always a big factor, and we don't message around it. We just share the simple facts. We put in place all the economic conditions to grow the U.S. economy, and the growth rate has been exponential.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: I'm sorry, the growth rate has not been exponential, okay? That's not true. And so you can't tell people -- they know that that is not true. They are looking at the numbers. Look at the growth rate for the last year of the Biden administration. It was higher than it is now.
WRIGHT: Are you talking about GDP growth?
PHILLIP: I'm talking about GDP growth, yes.
EGBEWOLE: I think the problem with the economy is that it doesn't matter how low -- it doesn't matter. As long as people feel like the economy is not working, that's the message. And we can move like a battleship, but we've got until November 3rd for the midterms. So, really, Republicans only have a finite amount of time.
This midterm convention was supposed to do what? It was supposed to raise enthusiasm and make people feel secure about the economy. I think the question is, did it actually accomplish that goal? I don't know if the president and his team -- I'll give credit in putting together a convention in two days, but I don't know if the outcome of the convention actually matters.
POLUMBO: But can I just say, as to your point about how Americans feel, I feel like at some point we should also acknowledge that Americans might feel a certain way about the economy is, but it's all just vibes. They really know essentially nothing about how our government works, about what the federal budget is. They constantly misunderstand and estimate incorrectly about all sorts of things. They don't know what the inflation rate is. They don't know what the unemployment rate is.
(CROSSTALKS)
PHILLIP: I actually disagree with that. I don't think it's all vibes. I think the American people are experiencing an economy, and they're experiencing an economy that actually is frankly different from what the macro numbers show.
POLUMBO: You told us they feel more negative now than the worst under Biden. That's delusional.
PHILLIP: Okay, listen. That's --
POLUMBO: It's better today than the worst under Biden.
PHILLIP: That is about how they feel the president is handling the job of the economy. And I think there are probably good reasons for them to believe that because they're looking rightly at the fact that Trump was actually handed a pretty strong economy and probably mismanaged it through tariffs, war, you name it, right?
But on the point of what are Americans feeling, this is an economy that is being propped up by high-tech A.I. investment, okay? And that is driving a lot of productivity. It is driving growth. It's driving construction jobs. The people who are not a part of that economy are feeling a very different economy. That is not vibes.
WRIGHT: Yes. And Democrats are rooting against that, by the way. They're rooting against the data centers. They're rooting against A.I.
EGBEWOLE: Well, no. I think data centers --
WRIGHT: It's the only sector of our economy that's growing.
(CROSSTALKS)
PHILLIP: But it's not the solution to the problem for the majority of the people in the economy. Yes, it is good that the A.I. economy is driving growth but people still have to pay their bills.
WRIGHT: It is creating tax revenue and lowering taxes in areas surrounding the data centers.
EGBEWOLE: There are Trump districts that are against data centers. Effingham County in Georgia was Trump plus nine.
WRIGHT: Yes. But because they're not plugged into the grid and now Republican governors are creating policies to stop it --
LOPRESTI: Well, the polling on data centers is terrible across the board.
EGBEWOLE: That's bipartisan. Everybody gets to own that.
LOPRESTI: Let's be fair, though, Abby. There have been -- okay, technological innovation, right, from the turn of the century has taken people en masse out of poverty, right? So, it is not something that we should decry and say oh my God, it's just the A.I. billionaires and Mark Zuckerberg. That just propagates this false Wall Street, Main Street narrative.
PHILLIP: Listen, I don't want you -- don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying we should decry it. I'm just saying if you want to understand why many people in this country don't feel what the numbers might be showing in some parts of the economy, it is for that reason.
LOPRESTI: Fumigate energy.
PHILLIP: Yes, because the things that they need in order to survive are not becoming more affordable.
LOPRESTI: I agree with that.
PHILLIP: So, until that starts to trickle down to the rest of the economy, I think you're going to start to see -- you're going to continue to see this divergence between what some of these macro numbers say and what real people are actually experiencing. That is the true problem.
POLUMBO: But the ballroom was almost done.
PHILLIP: All right. Everyone, next for us, Trump tried to prosecute alleged vandals for the Reflecting Pool failures. Well, tonight, the president's handpicked contractor is disproving his claims.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:34:20]
PHILLIP: Tonight, finally an answer to what caused the liner of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to peel away. A new report finds that the contractor itself admits that it was responsible for that failure, not vandals like President Trump and the Justice Department had originally claimed.
In documents, the company blamed, quote, "human oversight," but more importantly, a failed plan to include two chemicals in that liner that turned out to be incompatible. Now, that is wildly different from what the DOJ and Trump had originally said, and that they had said that they had found proof that knife-wielding vandals were responsible.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEANINE PIRRO, U.S. ATTORNEY FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA: They took a sharp object and cut for many feet along the pool.
REPORTER: Do you have pictures of that?
[22:35:04]
PIRRO: Well, when I file a charge, I'll be happy to show you a picture.
REPORTER: Are the contractors who did the initial work with the reflecting pool, are they to blame for the current condition?
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: No vandals. You know, we have 100, we have a, I think, 290, 300 foot slit right through it, probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind.
REPORTER: Do you have proof of that?
TRUMP: Yes.
REPORTER: Do you have photos or videos?
TRUMP: Well, let's put it this way. When you have a 350, I think it's 350, not 250, a 350 foot slit from one end to the other. Do you think that's proof?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: The Justice Department changed their tune after speaking with the contractor, but Trump has not. And a quick reminder, the government agreed to pay them $14.7 million for this work, and they're repairing the pool, which is apparently under warranty. So I guess good for the government here. Look, the real story here is
about a President who is so insistent on covering for himself, and he is willing to believe something that is completely unbelievable, that somebody took a box cutter and slashed the pool for 250 feet, and then charged an American with a crime to make himself feel better.
EGBEWOLE: Yes, Sophie Denison Gibby was charged with a misdemeanor. She's a veterinarian, was walking by, saw a piece of litter, wanted to pick it out because the little duckies swim there, and was arrested in front of everybody, charged with a misdemeanor. It was obviously dropped, but what a shame to visit American monuments and to be treated like a criminal, one, when you're taking care of it, and then two, to see it turn into what it's turned into.
We know about the 14.7, but there was also 1.7 for the algae treatment, and that was given to somebody that had donated over $300,000 to a PAC since 2016. And look, I know no contract bids, and I know sliding something here and there to a friend is Washington and the swampiest of all, but when it involves monuments that we all get to participate in and visit, and then when people are treated like criminals, I think it's just a larger conversation about the respect for the place.
WRIGHT: They have video of people touching the pool, but not doing anything like what they're currently describing, unfortunately.
HACKETT: I love how deep this story's reporting was about the individual compounds and how they don't work together.
WRIGHT: Yes, it's very scientific.
HACKETT: Anyone with a brain and two eyeballs knows that that was a shoddy job by a no-bid contractor who was handed out this money to do a rushed job for Trump's little parade, and of course they messed it up, and of course Trump's going to blame vandals, but somebody got indicted over this.
We all know it. Somebody got indicted.
POLUMBO: We're kind of used to Trump just saying whatever and being delusional. I'm more worried about, at this point, as bleak as that is, the Department of Justice, it actually matters when they say something. It actually matters when they put out a press release.
The American people should believe that the top law enforcement officials in this country, when they lay out a charge or they put out a public statement accusing somebody of wrongdoing or suggesting that a certain criminal act has happened, that that should mean something.
That should be a trustworthiness.
WRIGHT: Well, that's why they removed it. I mean, Jeanine Pirro, to her credit, did not just do whatever Trump wanted.
EGBEWOLE: There was no evidence. PHILLIP: So David Hearn, who's the Olympian who was charged here, his
attorney, Norm Eisen, was speaking about this today and basically said that the DOJ is actually technically still keeping this hung over David Hearn's head. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NORM EISEN, ATTORNEY FOR DAVID HEARN: What could be more corrupt, Nicole, than a President who is responsible for this fiasco looking for a scapegoat and attempting to blame an innocent person, drag them through the criminal justice system?
Incredibly, the government wants the right to bring the case again. They say, no, dismiss it without prejudice. And when the judge confronted them, they admitted they had no proof of wrongdoing, and yet they want that sword to continue to dangle over Davies' head.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LOPRESTI: Well, fortunately or unfortunately, I mean, that is common, right? I practiced law for a while. I don't currently, just for full disclosure, but that is typically what a prosecutor will do, whether at the state level or the federal level, in dismissing charges. They will ask the judge at first to dismiss them with the right if additional evidence comes about.
So I don't think that's unique to this particular case. It's unfortunate. I think it's something that's indemnitly wrong with the justice system, both at the state and federal level.
POLUMBO: But isn't it wrong that they're doing it when they know for sure?
LOPRESTI: It happens all the time. I'm just going to say it happens all the time.
POLUMBO: That entire thing was under surveillance, too. The entire reflecting pool was under surveillance, and they have not released the footage of anything happening, of any crime taking place.
[22:40:00]
PHILLIP: But you've got to believe that the one person who probably still believes that this was vandalism is President Trump.
WRIGHT: Yes, he probably thinks, like, maybe some video will come out of nowhere, and I'll be right after that.
PHILLIP: Yes, I mean, just not that long ago, he was really pissed off that Jeanine Pirro dropped these charges. Here's what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Jeanine Pirro made a mistake. It was vandalism.
Frankly, I think she choked, because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her, and went after her department.
And I guess she choked. I don't know what the hell happened.
And I was disappointed with Jeanine Pirro. Really disappointed with Jeanine Pirro. She folded like an umbrella.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LOPRESTI: Wow.
PHILLIP: This is the part that he was not interested in the truth then. I would not be surprised if he wasn't interested in it now, but the unfortunate thing, again, they were trying to charge someone with a crime for this.
EGBEWOLE: And living in D.C., I have to say, there are some beautification projects, like the fountain outside of Union Station, that I've not seen cleaned and on in a very long time, that are appreciated. It's always that he takes it to ten times the extreme. Something that could be a very nice idea to do for the District of Columbia is taken to almost illegal limits.
And I'm sorry Jeanine Pirro was the casualty of that, because I also think that Secretary Doug Burgum also played a role as Secretary of the Interior.
POLUMBO: You can continue.
Can I ask just a question? A moment ago you said, you brought up Natalie. What's the implication there? We keep hearing this from Democrats.
HACKETT: That she confirms all of his opinion, all of his maligned opinions about anything, including things like this, where it's completely deranged to believe that somebody took a box cutter.
PHILLIP: We've got to leave it there. We have more ahead.
Next for us, it was one of the most infamous moments of his two presidencies. So why is Donald Trump reposting his January 6th video, just at the same time that his hand-picked revenge ally quits?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: Tonight, President Trump resurrected a video of himself urging January 6th rioters to go home after they violently stormed the U.S. Capitol. He posted it to social media with no explanation.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: This was a fraudulent election, but we can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home.
We love you. You're very special.
(END VIDEO CLIP) PHILLIP: The White House says that the post is a reminder of what it claims Democrats did to weaponize the Justice Department against Trump.
Now, in the meantime, at the DOJ, the prosecutor that Trump picked to oversee a conspiracy investigation into his political foes just quit. Sources tell CNN that Joe diGenova resigned following clashes with top agency officials over the pace of this probe. DiGenova, as you might remember, is a longtime Washington lawyer, a Trump loyalist, who was tasked with chasing the President's targets, but had failed to come up with anything in these last 18 months or so.
I don't know. I happen to wonder if those two things are related. If the President is so eager, itching, to get at some of the people that he claimed weaponized the government, that diGenova's departure is a signal that he thinks it's gone too slowly.
CNN's reporting is that the pressure to bring cases came from the top. Trump himself expressed his frustrations about the slow pace of bringing charges against foes he believed were unfairly targeted -- who unfairly targeted him in the past, and he's expressed his discontent on social media, but also in meetings with department leaders.
HACKETT: We've seen this before, right? Other Trump officials have been fired, resigned, whatever, because they did not follow through on prosecuting Trump's enemies. That's what happened with Pam Bondi.
That's why Todd Blanche is now our attorney general and is leading efforts to overturn the next election. I think that we've seen, obviously, Donald Trump has perverted our justice system by subverting the DOJ, by appointing these crackpot judges, by sacking the Supreme Court, and yet at times the courts have still been able to block him by, you have to put evidence in front of a grand jury to indict somebody, to convict them in a court of law, and they have not been able to do that, whether it's the sandwich guy in D.C., or the guy they're trying to blame for slashing the reflecting pool, or James Comey, or any of these people, the people who have stood up and fought back against Trump, who have taken on that courageous stand to fight back against Trump, have prevailed in the courts because they don't really have anything and they're just throwing, you know, crap at the walls and seeing what sticks.
POLUMBO: Can I just say, why did it have to be today, right? Today is 9/11, like one of the most somber days in American life where we're supposed to remember our fellow citizens, and he had to repost the 2020 election video today?
He couldn't take a single day off, the partisan, delusional, conspiratorial brain rot on his social media, he couldn't put the phone away for a day, there's no one in his circle who could tell him, sir, come on, not today, it's just shameful.
[22:50:02]
WRIGHT: Because he doesn't care about the polls, he doesn't believe in the polls, I think he's honestly betting, heading into the midterms, that Democrats have so many problems, it does not matter, I can post a video advertising that I tried to stay in office after I lost an election, and it doesn't matter. He thinks his people will come out for him, he thinks it's going to be enough, and I don't know, I mean, it might be, but yes, it's super shameful.
HACKETT: I agree 100 percent. Everything they're doing right now is base play, whether it's Hasan Piker, socialism, this reflectivity --
POLUMBO: That's so true and real, Democrats are doing.
HACKETT: What I'm saying is their focus on these things are base play, the $5,000 base play.
PHILLIP: But I also think so much of it is personal to Trump, it is all about what he is interested in, who wronged him, when you look at the list of people that he has sought to target, they're all people who, this is not about the broader American public, this is about Donald Trump personally feeling put upon by these people for all kinds of different reasons.
LOPRESTI: Look, I think we know that the President and his family members feel that they were unwillingly persecuted, I mean, Trump's sons wrote a book about it, of course, but I do question the wisdom of putting out something like that today, right?
I don't like any form of politicizing today, I lost my uncle on September 11th, I ran from the first World Trade Center as it fell behind me on September 11th, I lost family that day, this is a day that should be unifying, that should be for remembrance, that should be somber, it should be bringing people together as it did then, and that's what really makes me sad, I mean, we saw togetherness after 9/11 that we haven't seen since then.
EGBEWOLE: And I think people, the base doesn't really respond to 2020, we were talking about Georgia during the break, I mean, Fulton County, Georgia Republicans, they have moved past that. This isn't even the thing to energize or connect with people that I believe really are his base, and January 6th in general, most Republican electeds don't want to talk about that.
WRIGHT: I do think this is the silver lining, is January 6th, of course, was a massive, embarrassing failure for Trump, he was checked by his own party and his own Vice President protected the election and protected our country. He is checked all the time, by his own Congress, by his own Supreme Court, by his own party, we do not have a fascist in the White House, we do not have anything resembling an autocracy, his appointed people don't even do what he says some of the time, and so I think we can at least take this --
HACKETT: That's what it is, that this is not an autocracy?
WRIGHT: Yes.
HACKETT: That Donald Trump wants to do all these things --
WRIGHT: Yes, that's called the normal functioning of government.
HACKETT: That is insane to me, first of all, I mean, Donald Trump has acted like an authoritarian at every step of the way --
WRIGHT: What has he done that's been authoritarian?
HACKETT: He has set up an entire financial system in which the U.S. government takes in money that's not appropriated by Congress and he spends it however the hell he wants, that is authoritarian.
WRIGHT: That's not true, the courts have checked him at every turn on that, Congress has refused to implement his policies --
HACKETT: And yet now we're promising $5,000 checks to everybody, it's on that money.
WRIGHT: Can you give me one example of exactly what he's doing?
POLUMBO: That's just a partisan promise, the Supreme Court blocked his tariffs and he was forced to comply, so he was at least being checked, is the point.
WRIGHT: Yes, the Supreme Court, you guys say, should be replaced by whoever you want, like a twenty person --
POLUMBO: Democrats call it a MAGA court, that's delusional.
WRIGHT: It's literally preventing Trump from implementing his preferred policies.
POLUMBO: They blocked his biggest policy of decades.
PHILLIP: I mean, the funny thing is that Trump would like it to be MAGA.
POLUIMBO: It's not, though.
PHILLIP: He would like it to be, he would.
There may be a difference between what Trump would like to do and what his instincts are and what he is able to do. That is why he is so frustrated by this.
LOPRESTI: But that's Lauren's point, that is demonstrating that the government is functioning with checks and balances, that it's founding bodies.
PHILLIP: Well, I guess it is that the government is working, but Donald Trump is not, he's not expressing the values that most American presidents. That's the difference.
HACKETT: And deported hundreds of people.
WRIGHT: Yes, and Obama promised to close it.
PHILLIP: Thank you very much. HACKETT: No, not to Guantanamo.
PHILLIP: Thank you very much to my panel tonight. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:55:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: "Have I Got News For You" is back to make comedy out of the week's biggest headlines. Here is a sneak peek.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROY WOOD JR., "HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU" HOST: President Trump posted 60 times in less than 11 hours, or as the "New York Post" put it, "Trump floods social media with A.I. images annexing two countries, renaming a state, and claiming ownership of the moon."
So he's right about the moon, that's our (expletive) moon.
MICHAEL IAN BLACK, "HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU" TEAM CAPTAIN: We got there first.
AMBER RUFFIN, "HAVE I GIT NEWS FOR YOU" TEAM CAPTAIN: A hundred percent. 99 percent of what this man says is dribble-drabble. This 1 percent? That is our (expletive) moon.
JON LOVETT, COMEDIAN AND HOST: And I've got to tell you something. This may not be politically correct.
RUFFIN: Say it anyway.
LOVETT: I will. I see a flag of another country on my (expletive) moon. There will be no expense that will not be worth getting some more dudes up there and women for once.
RUFFIN: That's right.
LOVETT: To rip that flag out of the ground.
RUFFIN: Good night moon was written by an American.
WOOD: This is blasphemous, didn't Neil Armstrong not get out on the moon and say one giant leap for mankind? He didn't walk on the moon and go, this is our moon, bitch.
BLACK: It was implied.
LOVETT: I don't remember them putting the U.N.'s flag up there.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[23:00:03] PHILLIP: Be sure to join Roy Wood Jr., Amber Ruffin, and Michael Ian Black for the season premiere of "Have I Got News For You." It's tomorrow night at 9pm on CNN and streaming the next day with an all- access subscription.
Thank you very much for watching "NewsNight." We'll see you tomorrow morning. Be sure to catch "Table for Five" at 10am eastern right here on CNN.
"Laura Coates Live" starts right now.
