Return to Transcripts main page

CNN News Central

South African President Challenges Trump's Genocide Claims During Tense Oval Office Exchange; Trump Meets With GOP Holdouts Amid Tax Bill Impasse; CBO Says Trump Bill Would Raise America's Debt $3.8 Trillion in a Decade; Major Airlines Call on Congress to Take Bold Action. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired May 21, 2025 - 14:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:00:30]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Holding the line. Republican hardliners are not budging on President Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill as the Congressional Budget Office says the BBB would add $3.8 trillion to the deficit, what that could mean for Trump's agenda. And then later U.S. airlines have had it, calling the recent air traffic control systems outages and staffing shortages "unacceptable." What they're now urging Congress to do about it.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Plus, a federal judge tells the Trump administration it must maintain custody of migrants allegedly deported to South Sudan. We're following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to "CNN News Central."

SANCHEZ: Thank you so much for sharing part of your afternoon with us. I am Boris Sanchez, alongside Brianna Keilar in the nation's Capitol and we just witnessed an extraordinary clash in the Oval Office after President Trump repeatedly raises unsubstantiated claims of white genocide while sitting next to South Africa's president. But South Africa's president and his delegation pushed back.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CYRIL RAMAPHOSA, SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT: I would say, if there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my Minister of Agriculture. He would not be with me. So it'll take him, President Trump, listening to their stories, to their perspective. That is the answer to your question.

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Thank you, Mr. President. I must say that -- no, no, wait. We have thousands of stories talking about it.

RAMAPHOSA: Sure. And we have documentaries. We have news stories.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Yeah. He was talking about his Minister of Agriculture who is white and belongs to a party different than his because of the coalition government that they have currently in South Africa. That Minister of Agriculture also saying that these claims by President Trump are not accurate. That also a lot of black farmers have been affected by violence.

President Trump, though, before he was corrected by the Ag Minister, in a choreographed moment, called on his staff to play a prepared tape and that's what this is here. It's video showing a montage of unfounded propaganda footage. The lights were dimmed in the Oval Office for this to play. Trump was then handed a stack of printed news articles that he cited as proof of these refuted claims.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Look, these are articles over the last few days, death of people, death, death, death, horrible death, death, taking people's land away.

RAMAPHOSA: Wait, wait, we have not --

TRUMP: -- from them.

RAMAPHOSA: We have --

TRUMP: And those people, in many cases, are being executed. They're being executed and they happen to be white and most of them happen to be farmers. And that's a tough situation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: We do have reporters standing by to walk us through all of this. We do begin with Kristen Holmes at the White House. Kristen, the president is not correct here, but I wonder if his calculus is that when you have people fact-checking and debating over how bad these deaths actually are, that he's hoping that may mean ultimately he wins the news cycle.

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, clearly here, they were taking control of the news cycle. It's something that Donald Trump does best. He puts on a show, and this was a show. I just cannot state enough that this is not how these usual meetings go. Usually, it is two leaders, world leaders sitting there, they do a little wave. You do a couple questions possibly from the press. They say nice things about each other, the press leaves, and that's where the real negotiation and conversation begins.

We just watched this entire tense moment, this back and forth, a play out in front of the cameras. And there was a reason for that. That's what Donald Trump and his administration wanted, the sort of ambush of the South African President. As you saw, that screen was already in the room. He called for the lights to be dimmed. He called for them to play this video. And then he was provided with a stack of different articles in which he showed to the cameras. Again, as you said, he is putting on a show for the cameras, letting this all play out in front of the world. Again, usually things that happen behind closed doors.

[14:05:00]

And the South African president there really was trying to stay on message. He was growing visibly uncomfortable when he saw that video saying that that came from an opposition's political party. And the mood in the room was tense, according to the reporters in there. You could feel the tension between the two men as this began to play out. Then we heard from one member of the delegation trying to explain what was going on with farmers in South Africa. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHANN RUPERT, SOUTH AFRICAN BILLIONAIRE BUSINESSMAN: We have too many deaths, but it's across the board. It's not only white farmers, it's across the board.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: I'm not sure if you could understand what he was saying there, but essentially, he was saying it was not just white farmers who were being killed, that there were farmers being killed, but it was across the board in terms of racially across the board. But again, this was a really stunning moment between these two world leaders. And you could tell that the South African President came in here for a reset.

Not only did he say so, but you could tell by his affect. He was trying to ingratiate himself with Trump, talking about how great Trump was during ,COVID talking about golf. Even brought two of the world's greatest golfers who are South African with him as part of the delegation, which Donald Trump brought up. But he was clearly not prepared for this level of, again, almost an ambush here.

SANCHEZ: Kristen Holmes, live for us at the Wine House. Thanks so much for bringing us up to speed on that. Let's take you now to CNN's Larry Madowo because, Larry, you can give us some context on one of the videos that President Trump played in the Oval Office. He was claiming that there was a thousand roadside graves. Apparently, this is a video that had been of a political statement made by a specific political party in South Africa, but not of actual grave sites, just a political demonstration to highlight violence against farmers.

LARRY MADOWO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's correct. As the South African Ag Minister mentioned, they have a rural safety problem that affects both black and white farmers, and white farmers are unhappy about their security. If 1,000 white farmers died in South Africa, it would be impossible to hide that.

Having said that, one of the videos that President Trump showed was Julius Malema. He's the far-left opposition leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters. He was actually expelled from President Ramaphosa's party about a decade ago, and that's when he formed his own party. He has re-popularized this anti-apartheid song from the '80s that says, "Kill the boar, kill the farmer." And the way it was used in that context was as a rallying call against apartheid, this unjust system of white minority rule.

It has come back into the public domain again because Julius Malema likes to use it, and he sees it not as a physical literal call to kill the farmer, but as a system that advocates for expropriation of land without compensation. So the EFF, that's Julius Malema's party, would like to go a lot further than the law President Ramaphosa signed in January. That law allows the South African government to seize unused farmland, only if it is deemed to be just equitable and in the public interest.

President Ramaphosa brought his most diplomatic self. He's a skilled negotiator who once held brief for Nelson Mandela, but nothing could have prepared him for this multimedia ambush. A four-and-a-half minute video montage that shows videos taken out of context, printouts of debunked -- laundry list of conspiracy theories. This was overall a very good day for white supremacists in South Africa because they got the validation they could have never imagined from the highest office in the land, in the Oval.

And these are the talking points that President Trump repeated and brought before President Ramaphosa and his delegation, including very successful white South Africans, such as the Ag Minister, such as two successful golfers, and the billionaire Johann Rupert, who said there are murders across the board. And he helped negotiate this meeting with President Trump. He's a luxury goods magnate. He's behind brands like Cartier, and he was there in the Oval Office trying to shore up President Ramaphosa's point, but it fell on deaf ears.

SANCHEZ: Larry Madowo, thank you so much for giving us that update. In the next hour, we'll see a critical moment in President Trump's domestic agenda as he tries to barrel it through Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson and members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus are expected to meet with President Trump at the White House. This after hardliners declare that they would not support Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, saying that they want deeper spending cuts.

This comes after the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released its analysis, finding that not only would this bill add nearly $4 trillion to the deficit, it would also cut nearly $1 trillion dollars for Medicaid and food stamps.

KEILAR: According to the CBO, more than 10 million people would lose their Medicaid coverage over the next 10 years. And 11 million people, including 4 million children, could lose their help with food, to pay for food because of snap cuts according to the left-leaning center on budget and policy priorities.

[14:10:00]

CNN's Lauren Fox is on the Hill. Lauren, where'd a negotiation stand right now?

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, overnight, Speaker Mike Johnson was continuing to meet with lawmakers and all of these factions and had caught a tentative deal with some Republicans from high-tax districts in states like New York that would raise how much people could deduct from their state and local taxes. That was seen as a huge marker for potential progress. And then, over the course of several hours, one thing that we saw was that conservatives were starting to dig in. Now, those conservatives are headed to the White House. We're going to see whether or not the president can change their minds about this bill. Right now, they're really dug in saying that these spending cuts are not significant enough. They want to see more of them. They have additional demands about how quickly they can speed up work requirements and repeals of certain energy tax credits.

But, anything you do to make conservatives happy could potentially throw some backlash onto what moderates believe, right now, is a pretty good bill for them. So, a lot of dynamics playing out right now. This is a really critical meeting coming up at three o'clock.

KEILAR: All right, Lauren, thank you so much. We'll be keeping our eye on that. Today, there's new polling showing a hefty majority of Americans do not expect the economy to improve anytime soon under President Trump, A survey from Marquette Law School finds 63 percent of Americans expect inflation and the cost of living to increase over the next 12 months. On the economy, Trump's approval rating is at 42 percent. That's a bit lower than his overall approval rating, which is at 46 percent.

We have Business Journalist, Roben Farzad with us now. He's also the Host of Public Radio's Full Disclosure. Roben, it's so sad that everyone is so sad about the economy. I guess, the question is, are they right to be?

ROBEN FARZAD, HOST, PUBLIC RADIO'S "FULL DISCLOSURE": It's still a funky time. The inflation that visited us in 2022 still lingers. We're seeing dislocation in the bond market. So even if you're getting excitement from Capitol Hill and the White House over the BBL -- Big Beautiful Bill, sorry.

KEILAR: BBB is what I called it.

FARZAD: That was wrong,

(LAUGH)

FARZAD: Even if you're getting excitement -- even if you're getting excitement over that, the bond market is worried that it's going to blow such a hole in the deficit. And so, we're being punished in the treasury market where you've been seeing a big sell-off.

KEILAR: And this 90-day temporary pause in the so-called reciprocal tariffs, so that now you have the 10 percent still. That isn't pausing price hikes from big companies, Subaru, Walmart, Target, even some at Home Depot, which initially said it wouldn't pass costs on to consumers. What does that tell us?

FARZAD: Any way you could get cloud cover in this environment for price hikes, you take them and that's inexorable. We've seen it from fast food. We've seen it from Walmart where the White House tried to jawbone them into not hiking prices. How do you not hike prices when you are this entrepreneur? I mean, Walmart by itself would be one of the world's largest trading partners.

So, you're bringing all this stuff in from Vietnam, China, Bangladesh, Mexico. Are you supposed to eat it? Take it out of corporate profits? Take it out of shareholder dividend and stock buyback? Some way you have to kind of square the balance sheet and it's not working out right now. So companies, especially publicly traded companies, they have to push the price hikes through.

KEILAR: Yeah, we know they don't usually take it out of executive pay. That's clear. So, on the Trump agenda bill that's in the house, the BBB, from what we know right now about it, what is the most likely impact when you're talking about the bottom line of just everyday Americans?

FARZAD: Not really for everyday Americans, if you believe in trickle down, if you believe in extraordinary wealth creation from capital owners, from people who take significant state and local tax deductions that get that relief, if you believe they're really going to go out and open their pocketbooks and hire people and keep hiring landscaping companies and home building. But there's a lot of pain and suffering and difficulty in the middle class, in the lower middle class with inaccessibility to affordable mortgages, affordable home prices.

I mean, if this then benefits capital holders, it shouldn't necessarily be a tug of war between labor and capital. And if it becomes inflationary on balance at a time when the Fed is worried about inflation and is not in any mood to bring rates down quickly, like many people romanced to begin this year, then it hurts everyone.

KEILAR: And CBO looked at this, they find the bill would increase the deficit by a lot, almost $4 trillion over the course of eight years. Why does that matter?

FARZAD: We've just been putting it on the tab for the longest time. Go look at the deficit going back 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.

[14:15:00]

There're always extraordinary measures. There's a global financial crisis. There's TARP, there's PPP, there's things where you have to nationalize for emergency reasons. But then, when you do things by choice, such as the 2017 Trump tax cut and the extension here, you're effectively putting it on our children's tabs and somebody's going to have to pay for this. I mean, the American exceptionalism of always having cheap interest rates, of always being the destination, the readout for safety, you can't necessarily take that for granted if you have just kind of fiscal prophecy across the board on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

KEILAR: On the other hand though, Roben, I mean people have gotten used to that, how that feels to put something on their kids' tab, right? And they don't necessarily think about it like that. They just think, Hey, this is what I'm on the hook for, for taxes or not. So since that has been in place since 2017, if they aren't extended, that's something people will feel. FARZAD: You feel it one way or another down the line. There was a time, when we had treasury market punishers and bond vigilantes and the like that are called for the longest time that I can remember, at least in my adult economic investing lifetime. We just have not been punished for being kind of spendthrifts there. There's bound to be a reckoning. There's bound to be another crisis and you're not just going to be able to maneuver yourself out of it and hope that the Fed takes rates down to zero.

You used to have budget hawks. You used to have people out there that it's not about punishing people on Medicaid. It's actually about balancing Washington's books and the fact that that discipline is not there anymore and it was completely lost, both in MAGA and in the Biden administration, I think worries Wall Street and the globe.

KEILAR: Always great to have you, Roben. Roben Farzad, thank you so much for being with us.

And still to come, the problems at Newark Airport are not a one-off, they aren't new. A CNN review has uncovered dozens of reports of air traffic control equipment failures at control centers nationwide with some resulting in near misses. Plus, the Trump administration dismissing lawsuits and ending police reform agreements following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. What the decision means.

SANCHEZ: And later, new details about President Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis that could help explain how the disease was able to go undetected long enough to spread to his bones. That and much more, coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:21:43]

KEILAR: Nine major U.S. airlines are sending a warning. They're calling on lawmakers to take what they call bold action to fix America's aging air traffic control system. It was an open letter to Congress today that they're out with, it's calling for serious upgrades amid staffing shortages and also those recent communication blackouts at airports, not only in Newark, but across America. They say those problems are unacceptable and are "eroding the margins of safety."

Airlines are also bracing for lackluster summer with fewer people expected to travel over safety and economic concerns. And to some foreign travelers, skip flights to the U.S. amid changing political tides. But problems like what we've seen at Newark's airports, including blackouts, radios going silent, near misses as well, appear to be more widespread than we initially knew. CNN Aviation Correspondent Pete Muntean is here with more. what are we learning about all of these issues?

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, first, this new letter to members of Congress from these nine largest airlines really paints the picture that help can't come soon enough for airlines when it comes to overhauling air traffic control. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants a massive overhaul of the air traffic control system nationwide by 2028, but only if he can get all the money from Congress upfront.

This letter to lawmakers from these nine big airlines and the head of the airlines top lobby really puts it bluntly. It says, aviation remains the safest form of transportation in the U.S. but for it to remain so, serious upgrades need to happen now. This dovetails perfectly with a new reporting just coming out from the CNN investigative team and the CNN investigation found dozens of reports submitted by air traffic controllers and pilots over the last three years, along with hundreds of alerts of equipment issues, painting a picture of dangerous outages that are far more common than we previously knew.

A CNN analysis of the FAA's own advisories warned of radars and radio frequencies being out of service or facing issues once nearly every other day last year. I asked the head of the union of air traffic controllers what the traveling public should think about this, these problems extending --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NICK DANIEL, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS: Not going in and modernizing the system, not supporting the plans and working with Congress to ensure that the funds are available. This will continue. This will begin happening in more and more facilities around the country, impacting more airports and the time for action is now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MUNTEAN: CNN's investigative team also looked at anonymous safety reports by FAA control (inaudible) . One report from September 2021 detailed a failure at the busy Miami Center facility as weather was rolling in. It sounds a lot like the outage at Newark. The controller wrote, if these type of events happen once, it's one too many. The very same scenario occurred in the same spot in February of this year. And in that new case, the controller wrote, this is a systemic issue. We don't even have a backup system in place.

This is something that is very alarming and we're finding out from these new reports that it's not just Newark. This is happening coast to coast, and it's really sort of bringing attention to all of the upgrades that need to happen in air traffic control nationwide.

[14:25:00]

KEILAR: And every other day, I mean, that's wild and unacceptable as they say. Pete, thank you so much.

MUNTEAN: Anytime.

KEILAR: Boris?

SANCHEZ: Let's discuss further with Aviation Analyst and former NTSB Managing Director, Peter Goelz. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. So, you think that we're simply relying too much on good luck to keep planes from colliding?

PETER GOELZ, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, Boris, you're absolutely right. This is a decrepit system that's been decrepit for decades, and it is stretched to the max. We got a little bit of a breathing room during the COVID period because flights were back down, the airspace wasn't as crowded. But now, that we're back exceeding pre-COVID flights, we are in serious trouble.

SANCHEZ: I think there's a perception problem too, because a lot of folks weren't aware that all these things were happening. One CEO, I believe it was Delta CEO, says that more passengers have become worried about flying and that (inaudible) ticket sales. Would you say that there's a crisis of confidence in the airline industry?

GOELZ: Well, I think we're bordering on a crisis for confidence on the part of the consumers. The air carriers hold the highest standards of safety. They're not going to put their passengers or their employees in jeopardy, but the customer is fearful that the system simply can't handle the load factors that they're facing. And the idea that Secretary Duffy has pulled together a pretty extraordinary coalition, but the biggest challenge he's going to face is from his own former colleagues on the Hill.

Will they give him the massive amounts of money upfront, so that this reform and this rebuild can take place in a timely manner? I'm not sure that the appropriators will do that.

SANCHEZ: Especially, in an era where slashing government spending seems to be a top priority. Who would you say bears fundamental responsibility for these issues?

GOELZ: Well, this, the responsibility goes back over decades. You know, when Secretary Duffy was in Congress, he voted here (ph) along with another 175 Republicans. So, the FAA has been a kicking boy for years, and they have never been given the money upfront to do the big changes that are necessary to get the job done, to keep us safe. Now, we're at an inflection point.

Secretary Duffy has got the support of the carriers, the unions, the suppliers. Let's see if he can deliver and we can get the money and the breathing room to get this job done.

SANCHEZ: Airlines are cutting back on flight routes for the rest of the year. What's that going to mean for consumers?

GOELZ: Well, it means it's going to be -- planes are going to be crowded. The load factors, how many people are on the plane are going to go up into the 90s. I mean, at Newark, they're back down from 78 to 50 flights per hour. So, there's just going to be fewer aircraft in the air, which means fewer seats in the air, which means consumers need to plan ahead. They need to make their decisions early. Last minute travel is going to be a challenge.

SANCHEZ: Peter Goelz, great to get your perspective. Appreciate you joining us.

GOELZ: Thank you, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Of course. The Trump administration is facing more criticism and legal scrutiny over its deportation policies after allegedly sending Asian migrants to South Sudan. Those details after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)