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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Trump Toasts China, Which Is Helping Iran Target U.S. Sites; White House Blocks CNN From Trip On Air Force One; Republican Candidates Now Distanced From Trump On Iran War; Supreme Court Restores Mass Voter Verification Database. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired September 25, 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 HOST (voice over): Tonight, what did Donald Trump's party for China accomplish? Because the red carpet was rolled out for a nation that's helping Iran target American troops.
SEN. THOM TILLIS (R-NC): It's a WTF moment.
PHILLIP: Plus, as the president toasts a communist leader, the White House is once again playing pool games with the media tonight.
Also, they praised and pushed the war for months.
MIKE ROGERS (R), MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE: People say, what date is it going to end? It shouldn't be a date.
PHILLIP: Now, Republicans are changing their tunes just in time for the midterms.
ROGERS: The war with Iran needs to end.
And as reports surface of Trump plotting ways to take over elections, did the Supremes just green-light the potential purging of votes?
Live at the table, Charles Blow, Jason Rantz, Leigh McGowan and Pete Seat.
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, the American president is gushing over Xi Jinping's visit to Washington as we learn that China has been helping Iran target U.S. sites and troops in the war against Iran.
Now, Donald Trump calls the meeting one of, quote, friendship, strength, and success. Here's what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: We've had a tremendous visit from two spectacular people and we've really enjoyed it, and I think we've made tremendous strides. We've made great strides, very positive for both countries.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: What those strides are exactly remains to be seen, but he rolled out a lateral -- a literal red carpet for Xi that included a state dinner with billionaires and tech titans and other American business leaders, and all of that is quite an about-face from what Trump was saying before his presidencies.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: We have the president of China come a few months ago to Washington, and we give him a state dinner. Now, when people are screwing you, you don't give them state dinners. You don't do it. But our people don't have a clue. We give state dinners to the heads of China. I say, why are you doing state dinners for them? They're ripping us left and right.
We should make better deals with China and others. And forget the state dinners. You forget the state dinners. That costs, by the way, a fortune.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president of China is coming, a man named Xi Jinping.
He's getting a big dinner free at the White House, addressing the U.N.
If you were president, would you throw him a big dinner?
TRUMP: I would not be throwing him a dinner. We've had this conversation. I'd get him a McDonald's hamburger and I'd say, we got to get down to work.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Before we open it up to the table here, we invite you at home to join the debate. Head to cnn.com/abby. Weigh in there. We'll get to some of your comments as we go throughout the show.
Wait until Trump from 2015 finds out how much a military flyover costs. It's probably more than the state dinner, to be honest. Why is Trump making such a big about-face on China at the very moment that he's trying to argue domestically against communism? He's trying to argue that China is ripping us off on trade, and we don't really see any results from this summit.
PETE SEAT, FORMER WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Well, I'll answer his question of who hosts state visits for the Chinese leader. Presidents host leaders like the Chinese leader. Barack Obama did it twice. He had both Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao. President George W. Bush had Hu Jintao. I was there working at the White House at the time. Bill Clinton also had the Chinese leader. It's part of the job of the president of the United States.
And to have the world's largest economy and the world's second largest economy together talking about issues that matter to both of our countries and to the world sends a very strong message that even when you're in competition and sometimes in conflict with one another, that you can still have a dialogue.
I do want to make a point though. There's a lot of criticism that nothing came out of this.
[22:05:02]
Two points on that very quickly. One is sometimes the solution is to do nothing. And in, in the class that I teach on the American presidency, I asked Ron Klain, who was Biden's chief of staff, and Josh Bolten, who was Bush 43's chief of staff, is do nothing an option? How often is it an option for a president? And they said it's always an option. So, if do nothing is the best option, then let's do it.
And on that point too, for those people who think that Donald Trump can never do anything right, you should be glad that nothing happened because you probably wouldn't have liked whatever deal they came up with. So, cheer in the streets that there's no deal with China.
PHILLIP: I think people would like to see some progress, particularly on the trade issue.
SEAT: But they would be angry about the -- they're angry that nothing happened. They would be angry with what happened.
PHILLIP: The other thing that they would like --
SEAT: You're laughing, but you know it's true, Charles. You would be angry no matter what.
PHILLIP: The other thing that they would like to see --
CHARLES BLOW, THE LANGSTON HUGHES FELLOW, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Please don't pull me into it.
PHILLIP: -- is whether the president --
BLOW: Keep going, Abby. Ask a question.
PHILLIP: -- whether the president actually was going to stick up for the United States in terms of what China is doing in Iran.
And according to the U.S. ambassador to China, David Perdue, apparently, this came up just privately, not necessarily from the president himself publicly. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here's the front page of the Journal. That's what I was doing. Iran -- you know, all that great stuff you're saying, Iran has a secret weapon in the war with America, help from China. Can't they talk about that?
DAVID PERDUE, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO CHINA: We made it very clear to them weeks ago that w- you know, any help that they would give Iran, whether it be direct or indirect, whether it be intelligence or parts or military equipment, was totally unacceptable. President Trump made that very clear again yesterday.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: If it's unacceptable, what are the consequences for doing it? Because, I mean, they're doing it, and there haven't been any consequences.
BLOW: Right. So, I mean, I just -- you asked me why I was laughing, because that was laughable. Because I don't even understand how you twist yourself into all those pretzels to say doing nothing during a state visit was actually the best option and that people should be cheering that.
There is -- there are things on the table that are very real thing. There's A.I. We need to come to some sort of agreement on whether how we're going to move forward on that, particularly between China and the U.S. Nothing. We heard nothing. We heard nothing about Taiwan publicly. I don't know if they said anything behind closed doors.
We have this big, big issue of whether or not China is providing material support in the form of satellite imagery to target our troops who are fighting this war, and we heard nothing from the president, but we saw him having soldiers rolling out a red carpet while Xi Jinping was on the plane waiting for them to do it, like watching the soldiers on the tarmac before he climbed down the stairs.
How is that -- like how -- I'm just so curious, how is that okay with you as a person who made that argument just now, that nothing was perfectly okay and we should be cheering that?
SEAT: Okay. Let me ask you this. Do you trust --
BLOW: No, I want to -- I know there's two questions.
SEAT: Do you trust an 80-year-old man to make decisions that are in the best interest of this country on artificial intelligence?
BLOW: Do you?
SEAT: No. I'm asking you --
LEIGH MCGOWAN, PODCAST HOST, POLITICSGIRL: Is your argument, do you trust the president?
SEAT: Yes, I'm asking you.
MCGOWAN: So, it's better that our president completely did nothing? This is your argument?
SEAT: Do you think is incapable of doing the job? You want him to make the decisions that is going to --
MCGOWAN: Unbelievable.
BLOWS: I am really praying for your students, that you are teaching students, because that is a really horrible idea.
SEAT: They love my classes. In fact, it has very high ratings. You should take it. You might learn something.
BLOWS: I would probably get an A in it because if that's the logic, you can get -- anybody could get an A in that class.
PHILLIP: Wait, Pete, are you saying that Trump can't be trusted to talk to Xi Jinping about A.I.?
SEAT: Well, when it comes to A.I., I don't think any 80-year-old should be making decisions on artificial intelligence.
PHILLIP: Well, then we're in a --
SEAT: My generation, the Millennial generation, is going to suffer the consequences of it.
PHILLIP: If that's the case, we're in a world of trouble.
JASON RANTZ, SEATTLE RED RADIO HOST: I mean, did you expect that at the end of this there was going to be some substantive like finding on what to do with A.I.? And I know that people are all of a sudden saying that there's this huge threat, but it takes some time.
PHILLIP: No. I mean, certainly not on A.I. in terms of conclusions. But even what is a potential path forward? I mean, were there any deliverables at all that came out of this?
Actually, you know, so Tom Nichols in The Atlantic wrote that Trump should just stop hosting these summits all together because they're counterproductive. He says, in Donald Trump's White House, summits are hazardous excursions during which the interests of the United States are shoved aside by a president whose cringe-inducing admiration of dictators makes these meetings into rituals of American humiliation. The country would be better off if Trump stopped hosting them or attending them.
The grim outcomes of the previous summits with Trump, however, suggest that they are seat-of-the-pants affairs with little preparation or perhaps with preparation that was ignored by the president.
So, I mean, that's his take because reasonable people are asking, going into this, what was the point of this summit?
[22:10:05]
What were they trying to get to? What kind -- you know, even if it's an agreement to agree on something at a later date, was there anything of reasonable concreteness that came out of this? RANTZ: So, so first of all, Tom Nichols writing a piece that's critical of Donald Trump, not exactly breaking news. That's quite literally everything that he writes. But --
MCGOWAN: If I may say, though, Tom Nichols basically said exactly what Pete said, which was, do you trust this guy to make a deal?
RANTZ: Is that what you said?
SEAT: I take back everything I said.
MCGOWAN: He said, do I trust this guy to make a deal? That's pretty much exactly the same thing.
RANTZ: That's not what he said. But --
MCGOWAN: I think the bigger issue is here --
RANTZ: But the point though is -- just very quickly.
MCGOWAN: Yes.
RANTZ: You had, under the Biden administration, you had four summits with China, three of which came with literally nothing afterwards except, we're going to continue the conversations, and that's what we're talking about here.
It's not that you're saying literally doing nothing. It's about what comes in the immediate aftermath doesn't always have to literally happen the day after, that sometimes it does take a little bit of further conversations. A.I. is one of those examples I think that is reasonable.
MCGOWAN: You know what? I agree with you on that. I think that's incredibly reasonable. For me, I wasn't expecting some big deal on A.I. to come out of this meeting. What concerns me is that what I hear from the Republican Party, which is Donald Trump's party all the time, is the horrors of communism, that the Democrats are communists, and communists are ruining America, and communism is the biggest threat America has to face.
And then I watch the red carpet be rolled out for the biggest communist dictator in the world, who is currently funding the destruction of our own bases in an active war zone. And we're supposed to say, well, here's my painting, and here's my pictures, and here's my this, and isn't this hilarious from the other president? It was all buddy-buddy.
And you say, how can communism be the biggest problem we face when we had just had the biggest party for the biggest communist? I watch Fox News all day talking about communism, communism, communism. Every single one of them got dressed up to go to that dinner. I see the Republican representatives doing it. I see the Supreme Court justices at that dinner last night.
That is telling us a totally different story than they didn't make a deal on A.I. It's why are we hosting the biggest communist dictator in the world while he's actually attacking American soldiers through his own money.
RANTZ: Fair point, and I think that some people will ask that exact question.
MCGOWAN: They should.
RANTZ: And I think they should point to President Obama doing literally the exact same thing. And the reason was you want to have these conversations and relationships with folks. You do have to talk with people who are your direct enemy, especially when you've got --
MCGOWAN: Well, you would have to talk about the actual issue, though. You wouldn't show them off all your cool stuff, right?
RANTZ: They do not do that publicly, and you know that they don't do that publicly.
MCGOWAN: Yes.
RANTZ: The conversation's are private --
MCGOWAN: But what we've heard from my friend here is that we don't want Trump making those deals anyway. So, what we see publicly --
RANTZ: Well, you don't want Trump making those deals.
MCGOWAN: Neither does Pete.
(CROSSTALKS)
MCGOWAN: What matters is why did we just spend this much taxpayer dollar to hold up a communist leader when we've been told that communism is the biggest problem we have?
RANTZ: Well, it was about the relationship and what will come after that. Look, I mean, you sometimes have --
MCGOWAN: Yes, but the relationship should be pretty hostile right now considering they're funding the Iran war.
RANTZ: You have relationships --
SEAT: And so those hostilities would just lead to escalation.
PHILLIP: Okay. So, another making the point that Leigh's making is actually Republican Senator Thom Tillis. Let me just play what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TILLIS: Whatever's changed had to have been at a confidential level because I haven't seen any public basis for the sea change that we see right now in our posture towards China. You got to have a relationship with them, I get that. But when you have world leaders looking at this reception compared to the way maybe President Zelenskyy's been received, or some of the nations that are our long steadfast partners, that they've had men and women die on the battlefield, satisfying the Article 5 obligation in Afghanistan, you go like, you know, it's a WTF moment.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: I mean, can you argue with that just on the facts that Trump has embarrassed and lambasted our allies in ways that are historic and he has not a cross word about Xi Jinping to say?
SEAT: Yes. And I think it's part of the game of diplomacy. I think part of this was the pageantry behind it. Jason is correct. You have those difficult conversations behind closed doors. You don't necessarily put a spotlight on those.
I don't like the way he treats our closest allies. I absolutely don't. I don't like the way he talks to NATO allies, to Canada. I don't like any of that. But a lot of the worst things that were predicted that would happen, I mean, how many times have we been told that NATO would no longer exist? How many? Like a million at this point, and guess what? It's still there. And some would argue, including the secretary general of NATO, that it's stronger than it's ever been because allies are finally paying their fair share.
MCGOWAN: Pete, can I ask you -- as someone who was born and raised in Canada, you said you don't like the way that he's treating Canada. I don't think there's a single American that voted, including voted for Donald Trump, that said, I really hope that we make Canada and Europe our enemies, and we make China and North Korea and Russia our friends.
[22:15:05]
Because Donald Trump keeps calling them his great friends, and he absolutely demeans like the prime minister of my home country. He absolutely demeans European leaders.
So, what does that say to the world when he says, these are my greatest friends, and he mocks people like the Canadian prime minister?
SEAT: Again, I'm not here to defend it. I don't like the way he treats our closest allies and --
MCGOWAN: But I think you are defending it. And so I'm asking, like how does that how is there a voter in America that voted for that?
SEAT: Don't make that comment. Where did I defend it? Just tell me where I defended it.
MCGOWAN: I believe your position is, I don't like the way he does it --
SEAT: I don't like it, so how is that a defense?
MCGOWAN: -- but we also have diplomacy. But diplomacy is he's saying, this is my greatest friend, Xi Jinping. We've had the best meeting. And then with Mark Carney, he's basically like these people have cheated us. They should be the 51st state. We are the number one trading partner with Canada. That is our actual number one trading partner in the world, and we treat them like garbage right now. How is that what any Americans voted for?
SEAT: I don't think that -- and I don't know that's entirely accurate, unfortunately. There are some Americans who don't like what they believe is fleecing on the part of our allies across this world.
MCGOWAN: But they like the Chinese government who is paying for the Iranians to destroy our bases in the Middle East.
SEAT: They want us to fight against China. They want us to make sure that we win the economic fight.
MCGOWAN: Well, we were not fighting against China last night. We were cheering. So --
PHILLIP: All right.
SEAT: And so did Barack Obama, like he said.
PHILLIP: All right. Next for us, we've got more breaking news tonight. The White House has once again attacked the media, blocking CNN from traveling on Air Force One tomorrow.
Plus, they praised the war, and now they're calling to end it. Why Republican candidates are doing an about-face ahead of the midterms. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:20:00]
PHILLIP: Breaking tonight, the White House is blocking CNN from flying on Air Force One tomorrow to cover the president in the press pool. CNN had been scheduled to fly to Tennessee on Air Force One when he attends the college football game against Texas. The latest escalation after a judge ruled that the White House must allow CNN and other banned outlets back into the White House.
So, because of this, Trump will not be getting what he loves the most, which is television pool coverage of his trip. It is actually kind of like the paradox of him doing this. He wants to ban the media really badly, but he's not getting the coverage that he might want. A lot of his visit with Xi Jinping this week, for example, a lot of Americans didn't see because there was no television pool. All the rest of the networks chose not to cover it. And in this case, he is clearly going to this game because he wants coverage. He's not going to get it in the way that he likes.
MCGOWAN: I know. It's -- I mean, look, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say. I mean, a woman got under his skin, and he's punishing the whole network for it. I think the thing is it feels a little bit like dealing with my child when he was young. It's like if you give someone -- you give a little kid a toddler a thing and he throws it on the ground, and then he can't have it anymore, and then he's upset he doesn't have the thing that he threw on the ground. And that's what I feel like I'm watching our president do, and the man loves a camera. So, if he's not going to have a camera because he banned the cameras, he has to go somewhere where a camera will be there.
RANTZ: Well, they are broadcasting the game, so he will be seen during the broadcast, which I think is the reason why he's doing it.
MCGOWAN: I feel like the American people should exactly --
RANTZ: I agree with you. I agree that like I'm against this. The legal argument, they did not cover this on Ally McBeal, so I don't know what the legal case is. But my guess is because of the pool aspect of it, he thinks he can get around the ruling.
I think, ultimately, this is the wrong decision. I think he would be better served to just go at media outlets he doesn't like and engage in conversations. I think the base likes when he does that anyway. I don't know if he lost that much in not getting coverage for China, because I don't think the average person cares about that --
PHILLIP: Well, the only -- the reason I brought it up is because the Chinese apparently, according to our reporting, were not happy about it. They were frustrated about the limited coverage of the summit, and Chinese state media sent more than 100 staffers to cover the summit. A Chinese foreign minister adviser told CNN that it had been regrettable that more footage had not been made to the American public. Because, yes, I mean, they want the press too.
RANTZ: Sure. I'm not mad that the Chinese government is upset that they didn't get coverage here. That part doesn't bother me all that much.
PHILLIP: To the point of coming to a state visit, right, is to make a big show out of it.
Well, here's another aspect of this, Charles. I mean, this administration is really giving into Trump's instincts in all the ways, right? And, interestingly, Peter Thiel, who's a billionaire tech guy who's a backer of Trump and Vance, et cetera, he was speaking this week at an event on a -- I'm sorry, on a podcast. And here's what he said about the difference between Trump version one in the first administration and Trump version two.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PETER THIEL, CO-FOUNDER, PAYPAL AND VENTURE CAPITALIST: And I think the two administrations kind of made opposite mistakes. You know, the first administration brought in all these people who couldn't agree, and it was just all this internal fighting. The second administration, I think, had all these -- they overcorrected for the mistake of the first term with all these loyalty tests. You got sort of, you know, an administration staffed by not very smart but very loyal people.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: That's about as candid as you're going to get from somebody who probably did a fair amount to help Trump get elected, not very smart, but very loyal people who are letting Trump basically do what he wants.
BLOW: Letting him do whatever he wants.
[22:25:00]
And I think the bigger press point here, I know we were like saying maybe it's not that big of a deal, I, as a person who's been in media my whole life, it's a huge deal. Like his contempt for the press is a big deal.
And I believe that everything that he came into this, this administration with, this idea that, you know, the press, that this is all fake news. Well, in fact, he had trained himself that the news could be fake, because for two decades, he had been feeding New York City tabloids lies, and they had printed them. And so from his perspective, it could be fake. You can make it fake. You can -- they could -- they'll print whatever you tell them to print.
And so his concept of media is very different from our concept of free press that tries to get the facts right and publishes that. And if they get it wrong, they correct it. All the things that we operate in journalism, the way we operate in journalism. That is not the way this man sees it.
And he sees -- he's very much contemptuous of the idea that he cannot control the big media that is impacting his presidency, and it pisses him off, and he's doing everything he can do to hurt that media. And that is a big --
PHILLIP: Even if it means hurting himself.
BLOW: Yes, even if it means hurting himself. He -- because he can't stomach the idea that he can't control it.
SEAT: So, there's always an inherent tension between the press and the president. When done right, though, I think it's a mutually beneficial relationship. I absolutely agree with that.
I do want to point out just one process piece here. This is very specifically targeted at CNN because MS NOW is not part of the television pool rotation. CNN is. ABC is, CBS, NBC, Fox, there's five networks that are part of it. MS NOW is not. So, with this ban, he's making it very clearly just about CNN.
PHILLIP: Well, I mean, I'm not totally sure what you're -- what you mean by that, but the ban applied to CNN, MS NOW, and Politico.
SEAT: Right, but I'm saying -- but the Air Force One ban can apply to MS NOW because they're not part of the rotation. PHILLIP: This particular thing tomorrow doesn't apply to MS NOW, but the broader attempt to ban and control the media applies to news outlets, whether they're on T.V. or not.
I do think the T.V. part is more -- the reason we're spending a lot of time on that is because that's the thing that he cares about.
SEAT: Yes, he cares about it.
PHILLIP: He cares about being seen.
SEAT: But here's why he cares about it. It's because it's distracting the media from talking about gas prices and the economy and the conflict in Iran. He won last week, hands down.
PHILLIP: I don't think it's -- I don't think that's true at all, because we talk about the economy.
(CROSSTALKS)
SEAT: He sees them fighting against the media.
PHILLIP: We talk about the economy, we talk about the gas prices, we talk about the war in Iran. I mean, I don't buy that argument. I've heard it said at this table many times this week. I do not buy the argument that this is an elaborate distraction, because it is doing nothing to actually distract from the reality.
SEAT: And I think that's why he's bound, and to be fair, I disagree with this.
PHILLIP: Every day, there is new polling that shows that he is at historic lows, and we continue to report that. That's what he doesn't want us to report.
MCGOWAN: And I think that is to Charles's point. I think the thing is that these little mishegoss moments are not the important point. The important point is we have a commander-in-chief who thinks he can disregard the First Amendment because he doesn't like what certain outlets are saying.
Now, the president has the ability to say, I choose you to be here, and I choose you to be here, and I choose you to be here. But just to blanket, you're not allowed, this network that is printing something that I don't like about me, that is very much closer to a communist- fascist government than a government that we should have here in America.
And I think that really should upset people. Whether he's winning or not winning, he shouldn't be banning the news that he doesn't like, whether it's from Politico, CNN, MS NOW, or someone else.
PHILLIP: Well, speaking of news that he doesn't like, coming up next for us, more Republican candidates are calling on Trump to end the war in Iran ahead of the midterms, the same one that they've been pushing hard for and praising in the last few months. We'll play the tape (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:30:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: Tonight, the number of Republicans distancing themselves from President Trump is growing, particularly when it comes to the war with Iran. Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers was very open about his support for the war shortly after it began, but now he's campaigning against the pain that it has been causing for Americans.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MIKE ROGERS (R), MICHIGAN SENATORIAL CANDIDATE: People say, well, what date is it going to end?
It shouldn't be a date, it should be conditional. This is why Americans need to stop for a minute, come together and say, let's get this done, get it done right.
HUGH HEWITT, HOST OF "THE HUGH HEWITT SHOW": What do you make of the war that we're in?
ROGERS: Well, it's probably long overdue. This is the best opportunity for peace in the Middle East I think I've ever seen in my lifetime.
We're not going to do this forever. I think this is the right thing to do. I do think it will be over quickly.
Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life. Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down.
The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Now that is an unfortunate setting for that campaign ad, given this is what he said about grocery prices when he was running in 2024.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROGERS: This is your grocery cart under a Trump economy. This is your grocery cart under a Biden-Harris economy. Take note, November.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[22:35:05]
PHILLIP: Yikes, Jason. I mean, that's a huge turnaround for him to go from, you know, he supports the war, best opportunity for peace, to we need to get out right now.
JASON RANTZ, SEATTLE RED RADIO HOST, AND AUTHOR, "WHAT'S KILLING AMERICA: INSIDE THE RADICAL-LEFT'S TRAGIC DESTRUCTION OF OUR CITIES": Yes, I mean, to be clear, you can hold both of those positions. They're not entirely in conflict with one another, where you could say that this was an important war that should have been conducted, while also saying it has to come to an end.
PHILLIP: Although I will say he did say, and we played the clip, I don't think you should put a timeline on it.
RANTZ: Well, he says specifically an end date, as in we should be out by a certain date.
PHILLIP: Now he wants an end date to be today.
RANTZ: No, he's saying it should come as quickly as possible. I think that the context, if he were to explain it a little bit more, would be that he believes we've accomplished a lot of what we set out to accomplish, and I think he would be accurate to say that, specifically when it comes to their air superiority, their military apparatus, and the fact that their nuclear capabilities are obviously not what they once were.
Is he pivoting for political? Yes, of course.
It's shocking, I know, that politicians will start to change their positions. I mean, Democrats for the longest time, and there's been criticism from other Democrats of pretending that the border wasn't wide open before then finally saying, yes, now it's time to close the border. The pivot was because of the polls, and the pivot here is because of the poll as well.
PETE SEAT, VICE PRESIDENT, BOSE PUBLIC AFFAIRS GROUP, AND FORMER WHITE HOUSE SPOKESPERSON UNDER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, AND SUBSTACK AUTHOR, "RIGHT ON CUE": Well, by ABC News' accounting, it's up to 17 candidates right now, and they all share one thing in common. They are in competitive district races or competitive statewide races. I think it's a five alarm fire when we start hearing from candidates in non- competitive races.
If they start to draw that contrast on the Iran conflict, then it's a major problem. These candidates are doing it because they read polls, they're listening to their constituents, there's an anger about this conflict, people want it to come to an end, whether it's because they don't think we're winning or their gas prices continue to go up, people are upset about it.
I think to what Mike Rogers was saying, though, at the beginning, I think there was a lot of optimism because of how Operation Midnight Hammer went in June of last year and how precise and decisive of a victory that was for our American military.
They thought this would be not necessarily as swift, but that it wouldn't drag on as long as it has, and the longer it drags on, that's a drag on polling numbers for people like Mike Rogers, and they're looking at a calendar, they know there's an election in 40 days, and they want to win that election.
PHILLIP: This is why it's a mistake for President Trump to do it, right?
CHARLES BLOW, THE LANGSTON HUGHES FELLOW, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, AND SUBSTACK AUTHOR, "BLOW THE STACK": I just find it very offensive to pass it off as just cold political calculus, that everybody does it when we have all of these troops in the arena, people being shot at, people on bases that are being bombed, service members who are dying, not to mention Iranians who are dying, and the only thing that gets you to change your mind is like, oh, I'm an anti-racist, I'm down in the polls. That's gross.
It's gross. I think American people see that and they think of it as gross. What do you mean? You're six months out and all of a sudden you got caught religion and became dovish on a war that you've been backing all this time, and all of our kids are there?
You know, they're families that send their kids, young men and women, to war. And we say, oh, that's fine. He was capricious.
He got up one night and said, I want to start the war, and he did it. Didn't explain it to us in any real meaningful way. Still has not.
It cost us a tremendous amount of money, depleting our stockpiles, and all of a sudden this is perfectly fine because it's political calculus. They looked at a calendar and they said, oh, it's not a big deal that they changed their position at the last minute because that's just politics.
And, oh, Democrats did something similar on the board. What are we talking about? There are people being shot at.
(CROSSTALK)
LEIGH MCGOWAN, PODCAST HOST, "POLITICSGIRL", AND AUTHOR, "A RETURN TO COMMON SENSE": I think I will also say, if I could add to what you're saying, I think also we need to remember that, yes, there's an election in November, but the Republicans control the House and the Senate right now. If they don't like the war, if they think the war should stop, they have had ample opportunity to stop it.
SEAT: We don't have filibuster proof in the Senate. You always gloss over that.
MCGOWAN: I'm not glossing over it. They have taken multiple votes. You don't need the rule of filibuster.
(CROSSTALK)
BLOW: All the Democrats will vote with that.
MCGOWAN: They say they want to stop it, but they're not doing it when they have all the power to stop it. So what it says to me is they're just saying they want to stop it to win an election, and then they'll do whatever Trump says because the first rule of Trump Club is don't talk against Trump, right?
So the irresponsibility of knowing what a bad decision this is from the jump and then allowing it to continue going badly with Pete Hegseth in charge when they know he shouldn't be in charge and our men and women in uniform are over there and people in Iran are over there and people in Lebanon and all the other places that are around there that are getting hurt.
It's irresponsible, and now they're trying to kind of shaggy it. It wasn't me. I didn't want it in the first place, and I think that's problematic.
PHILLIP: One of the other things Trump keeps saying is that after the election, I'm going to solve it, which is very reminiscent of what he said when he was running in 2024, and he said, oh, as soon as I'm elected, I'm going to solve the war in Ukraine.
[22:40:09]
I'm going to solve the conflict in the Middle East. It seems like voters do not agree. They don't believe him because he doesn't have a great track record on that.
RANTZ: Again, I'm going to upset you for a moment here.
Literally every politician says, when you put me in office, I'm going to do this day one, and I think most people understand. You might have the best of intentions, but ultimately it takes a long time to do whatever it is they're making a promise.
I think the President set himself up in a way for sure because of the way that he talked about this war from the beginning, but I also think, and I think you make a good point in that they're choosing not to truly end it. I agree. It's because I think they believe it.
I believe it. I think this was the right decision to make.
PHILLIP: You believe what?
RANTZ: That this was the right move to take.
PHILLIP: But you said earlier that the objectives have been met, so why isn't the war over?
RANTZ: Because now there are new objectives. I mean, that's the reality.
PHILLIP: What are the new objectives?
RANTZ: Well, the new objective right now is to ensure that we have complete and total nonstop control over the Strait of Hormuz.
BLOW: So it's not going to be a war forever. How are you going to maintain complete, as you said, complete control of the Strait of Hormuz without having troops there forever?
RANTZ: I don't think we have to have troops there forever, but I do think that ultimately that's their end goal.
There are some who don't care if Iran has a threat over the Strait of Hormuz.
MCGOWAN: Wasn't the Strait of Hormuz open before the war?
RANTZ: No, it was under the control of Iran. That is factually accurate.
MCGOWAN: We didn't pay them the way we're talking about doing it now. It wasn't like that.
BLOW: Not in this way.
RANTZ: But they could have, at any point, attacked any vessel that they wanted to.
MCGOWAN: Sure, but the point of us going in wasn't because of the Strait of Hormuz. We were told the point of us going in was either to liberate the Iranians, which we never planned to do, or we were going to get rid of nuclear weapons, which they didn't seem to have, or we were going to get rid of all their missiles.
RANTZ: No one said they had nuclear weapons, to be clear.
PHILLIP: Wasn't this a kind of mission creep that Americans do not like?
RANTZ: I agree.
PHILLIP: When we look at why is this so unpopular, it's because you are changing the goalposts on the American people and then asking them to suffer in the interim.
RANTZ: It's the last part is why it's unpopular. If we weren't suffering at the pump, people would not be taking the exact same position that they're taking now about this. The end result, the consequences of this that people feel, it's not a great argument, even if I think it might be accurate, to say sometimes it's worth the pain because in the long term, we're going to see X, Y, and Z.
That's not a great message when you're feeling pain. There's no doubt about that. That's true of any decision that's made by a Republican or a Democrat, and you live with the political consequences of it, and they might be living with the political consequences of it in 39, 38 days.
PHILLIP: All right, next for us, we are learning tonight that outside advisers to the President are telling him to declare martial law in the midterm elections as the Supreme Court hands him a big victory on voter rolls.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:45:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: Tonight, new fears that Donald Trump's wish to nationalize elections is getting closer to reality.
The Supreme Court handing him a victory after lifting restrictions on a controversial database to review voter rolls ahead of November. The high court's emergency order allows states for now to use a revamped online tool to vet a voter's citizenship status, but opponents say it has wrongly flagged eligible voters as noncitizens. In addition to this, "The Atlantic" is reporting that outside advisers are urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms, and CNN reports that the feds are plotting to blanket polling places with monitors all across the nation.
This is all coming to a head after a lot of headlines over the last couple of weeks, but this one is interesting because it actually isn't that the Supreme Court disagreed that people could be misidentified. They just didn't think it was sufficient to overrule the federal government's desire to use this system, and they basically said, well, voters can just cure the issue. They can provide proof of citizenship, but we are just weeks away from this election, and so that's why it makes such a big difference.
BLOW: Right. Listen, the majority has ruled the way they ruled. I read through the entire decision, but I also read Ketanji Brown's dissent -- Jackson's dissent, and she makes some really strong points about whether or not the majority got it right that this particular executive order and the law underwriting it overrides the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act that are implicit, that are supposed to be protecting the Social Security information that this new system kind of accesses.
And, you know, they're going to go back and forth about that. They're going to go back to lower courts and try to figure this out, but the Supreme Court is already putting their thumb on the scale saying we believe that it overrides it, so if that's the case, we're already there. They're going to let them use the system.
The question then becomes whether or not it will interfere with enough people's votes to make a serious difference. I think any person's vote that is disenfranchised is a problem.
[22:50:10]
Any one person is a problem. But also, we're not at issue scale.
The Supreme Court said because we already have a law that says you cannot do it on a mass scale 90 days out, we're already within that window, it's not that big of a deal. But they then said you can still use it for individualized checks.
What will that mean? I don't even know what that's going to mean.
PHILLIP: As a practical matter, we were talking about this yesterday. DHS said that there were 16,000 wrongfully registered voters, it got whittled down even more. Then it was 185. They checked all 185, and they were all citizens.
So the administration right now is getting it wrong. I can imagine that problem is going to get worse.
RANTZ: I don't think it's going to get worse for a number of reasons. Number one, this is a voluntary program that any state can choose whether or not they're going to use it to cross-reference their own voter rolls.
The state of Oregon, for example, has come out and said we're not going to do that. And they don't have to do that.
BLOW: Some states voluntarily submitted to the DOJ's request to get all their voter data. So those states are probably going to do it.
RANTZ: And to get off of a voter roll in any state in this country is not merely I'm putting it up against this federal database. That's not how this works.
So when you have someone who is a suspect, someone who is suspected of being ineligible to vote, shouldn't be on it, it goes to the county auditor's office first for investigation. Then it goes to a prosecutor who will then look at it individually.
And if at that point they believe someone is on their voter roll when they're ineligible, then they start a process to remove that person, which includes contacting the person so that they actually have the right to say, no, I'm actually suspected. It's a very hard part.
BLOW: That's precisely the point that the censors were making, which is that you don't have time. You literally don't have time. The process you just described, now you multiply that by all the people that they're going to do this with, and you figure out you have time to do all of that in addition to prepare it.
I'm sorry.
RANTZ: They're doing it now. Every single state looks at, right, I mean, that's part of this argument that they let this set.
SEAT: -- ballots all the time.
RANTZ: This is happening literally right this moment. Different database.
BLOW: Different database.
RANTZ: Exactly. This is the new database --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIP: Go ahead.
BLOW: This particular database has proven to be problematic because they got false positives.
MCGOWAN: Yes. This is the same flawed database that was used when Markwayne Mullin stood up in front of everyone and said, we have these absolute cases and facts don't lie and people lie, and then it turned out every single one of the cases he was talking about was wrong. So as Abby has said before, the facts didn't lie.
None of those people that he said with absolute certainty couldn't vote were correct.
RANTZ: But they weren't hurt. That's my point.
MCGOWAN: To Charles' point, the point is what happens when you do that with 16,000 people two days before the election? They will never get through it.
And what this does is it makes it far easier to mount a propaganda war after the election to discredit results that you don't particularly like. And I think we have to keep in mind that Donald Trump has done absolutely everything leading up to this midterm, trying to pass through the SAVE Act, weaponizing the USPS, trying to privatize voting information, talking about putting ICE at polling places.
Now we're talking about martial law. He's done absolutely everything he can because he knows that the midterms are a referendum on the President.
And he knows that the President is not doing well. And so he has done everything he can to make sure that now we have one more thing for him to do.
PHILLIP: A quick last word from you on this.
You know, the President is obsessed with voting. He is much less obsessed with persuasion. Is that the right move?
SEAT: He's obsessed with voting because there should not be a single illegal immigrant voting in our elections. Sure.
PHILLIP: We all agree on that. And we also are.
SEAT: If you agree on it, then you shouldn't be opposed to something like this.
PHILLIP: We all agree on it. But do you acknowledge that Trump wildly overstates how much voter fraud there is in the country?
SEAT: A politician exaggerating?
PHILLIP: I'm just asking you a straight up question. Does he exaggerate it?
SEAT: Yes, he has.
PHILLIP: Does he overstate it?
SEAT: Hold on.
MCGOWAN: The Heritage Foundation itself said in their own report that illegal voting was 0.01 percent.
SEAT: So how much are you willing to tolerate? MCGOWAN: How many votes am I supposed to tolerate of people being
disenfranchised?
SEAT: 100, 500. Aren't they disenfranchised when an illegal immigrant is voting?
BLOW: Voter suppression always shows up dressed as integrity.
MCGOWAN: Thank you.
BLOW: Always. I'm writing a book now about voter suppression in the 1800s. It always shows up the same way.
Somebody says we have to purify the ballot. There's a problem. And we need to make sure that we make sure these particular people don't vote.
There's a problem, it has been poisoned. The ballot has been poisoned.
It always shows up the same way. But the objective is always the same, which is to get people off the ballot and not let people vote who don't want to vote. And that is exactly what --
RANTZ: I don't want to seek illegal immigrants to vote off the rules.
[22:55:03]
PHILLIP: Next for us, we're going to react to your feedback from cnn.com/abby. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIP: And now a little viewer feedback from cnn.com/abby.
This viewer says, essentially, why is it okay for our leader to say negative and mean things to the media when they ask tough questions and say negative things? It's a problem.
[23:00:07]
The reporters are only doing their jobs.
A few people with some comments about the so-called media ban from President Trump.
Thank you very much for watching "NewsNight" tonight. Tomorrow, be sure to catch "Table for Five" at 10 A.M. Eastern, right here on CNN.
And don't forget, you can stream both shows live or watch on demand anytime with an all-access subscription. Scan that Q.R. code at the bottom of your screen or go to cnn.com/watch to learn more. "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.
