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Trump Arrives in China for Critical Talks with President Xi Jinping; American Doctor in Biocontainment Unit After Unclear Test Results; Sam Altman Testifies in Landmark OpenAI Trial. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired May 13, 2026 - 09:30   ET

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

[09:30:00]

HARRY ENTEN, CNN CHIEF DATA ANALYST: Or in fact the increase in the cost of living.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Now none of this might matter if people didn't think that prices were a big deal.

ENTEN: Yes, I mean, yesterday, obviously, Donald Trump had that, you know, little press conference, you know, the little huddle going on outside in which he essentially said when it came to Iran, you know, the financial concerns aren't for me, right? It's not something I'm thinking about. Well, for the American people, they are absolutely thinking about economy and the cost of living, and they are thinking at it much more so than they did back in January.

In January, it was just 42 percent. Now look at this, the majority of Americans say the top issue is, in fact, the economy and the cost of living at 55 percent. And more than that, it's majorities of those who lean Democratic as well as those who lean Republican.

Republicans, Democrats united on this. Majorities of both lean Democrats and those who lean Republican agree that, in fact, the economy and the cost of living is issue numero uno. And if Donald Trump can't wrap his head around it, well, in their minds, the American people's minds, he is making the dopiest decision of all time.

BERMAN: We just talked about the rise, the huge jump of the producer price index. What are the prediction markets saying about where they see some prices of key things headed?

ENTEN: Yes, look, when we're talking about, you know, these sort of aggregate numbers, right, it's because a lot of things underneath are making up these numbers. And this is one, to me, that's very interesting. Chance of the cost of fertilizer per ton in 2026.

Fertilizer, very important for farming, very important for the cost of food. Gets above $1,000. We're talking at this point, according to the Kalshi prediction market, a 61 percent chance.

In 2025, the high was only $612. And now we're talking nearly double that, a majority of chance happening. No wonder, no wonder Americans are feeling the pain right now and taking it out on Donald Trump on the polling, because you're just seeing it all across the map.

BERMAN: Some grim numbers for him as he travels overseas and his mind might be elsewhere. We will see if he addresses any of this in the next couple of days. Harry Enten, thank you very much.

ENTEN: Thank you. And he better for his political future.

BERMAN: Got a lot of news this morning. We'll be right back.

[09:35:00]

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BERMAN: All right, the breaking news this morning. President Trump just arrived in Beijing for this highly anticipated summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. You can see the red carpet, they rolled out literally for him there. He was greeted by 300 children waving American and Chinese flags there.

With us now from Beijing, CNN national political security analyst David Sanger of the New York Times. David, it's always great to see you and even better to talk to you on subjects like this, which you've written about so much over the last few years.

You know, President Trump delayed this trip to China because of the war in Iran. Do you think that war is where he wanted it to be when he delayed it the first time for these talks?

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, certainly not, John. And he delayed it because he thought that by the time he got here in mid-May, that the war would be over. The Iranians would be turning over their nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz would be open.

None of those are true. And as a result, this is going to just sort of hang over the rest of the discussion. And they have a lot of other things to discuss.

And, you know, the president will do the standard stuff. You know, there'll be a lot of purchases of soybeans and Boeing airplanes and Boeing parts and, you know, other American goods. But all the hard questions, the nuclear expansion in China, the AI competition with China, the fundamental argument between a rising power and a status quo power like us, where the Chinese believe they're on the verge of taking over as the biggest economic, military, and cultural power.

Those are all the critical things he's got to deal with. And he may not get to them.

BERMAN: So the last U.S. president to visit China was Donald J. Trump in his first term in office.

SANGER: That's right. BERMAN: David, how has the president's -- it's almost like two different presidents, though, in some ways, going to China, because as you know, the way he talks about China is different now.

SANGER: It's wildly different now. He came in 2017, and it had been just after the administration had turned down a national security strategy that basically described China as a rising predatory state. If you look at the national security strategy he published at the end of last year, it's almost China as a partner, and the biggest problems are in Europe and elsewhere.

So he is on a sort of rapprochement kind of approach here, similar in some ways to what Nixon was doing when Nixon came to China, but under radically different circumstances in which we're worried about Chinese military growth, we're worried about the AI competition in ways that we really were not when he was here in 2017.

BERMAN: David, some of your colleagues who, as you've been traveling to China, have been writing more about Iran, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, and others, with an article out about an intelligence assessment about Iran's missile capability, suggesting that they've reconstituted and have access to a whole bunch of the missiles that they had originally, even after all of this conflict. Again, how do you think that will shape the president's discussions with Xi Jinping?

[09:40:00]

And what, realistically -- the president says he doesn't want anything from China, doesn't need anything from China on Iran, but what could he get from China on Iran?

SANGER: Well, he does need some things from China on Iran. Look, the Chinese are unhappy about both Iran and Venezuela, two virtual client states of the Chinese that the U.S. has attacked and China couldn't do a whole lot about it. But at the same time, the president very much wants the Chinese to use their influence with Iran to reopen the Strait, and the Chinese have a great interest in doing that, where more than 30 percent of their oil moves through the Strait in some way or another.

And they want the Chinese to stop providing the intelligence that Iran was using to target American bases and the Gulf countries. And some of that was coming from Chinese firms, which got sanctioned last week by the U.S. Treasury. That is not certainly a place that the president wants to be either.

The question is, how much does he push the Chinese for that? And what do the Chinese want in return? My guess is they want some change in wording about Taiwan in return, among other things.

BERMAN: Which is a quid pro quo that I think has a lot of people nervous, both in Asia and in the United States.

SANGER: Yup.

BERMAN: David Sanger, great to see you. As I said, thank you for staying up for us all the way over there in Beijing -- Kate.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: So, a wild moment. A plane clips a car as it's forced to make -- oh, my God -- an emergency landing on a highway. I'll tell you how this all went down.

And it's one of the messiest, bestiest traditions ever. The Naval Academy's annual monument climb underway right now.

[09:45:00]

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SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: As health officials monitor dozens of people in quarantine over the Hantavirus, there are some new concerns about testing. A U.S. doctor who is in biocontainment in Nebraska says that the lab test may not be easy to interpret. Dr. Stephen Kornfeld says his nasal swabs tested in the Netherlands came back with two different results. Take a listen.

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DR. STEPHEN KORNFELD, STAYING IN BIOCONTAINMENT UNIT AT UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA MEDICAL CENTER: They did it in two different labs. One lab was negative and one lab was faintly positive. So, I was told the test was intermediate.

But I think since it wasn't a negative, it's sort of being looked at as a potential positive. And the Dutch authority communicated these results to the CDC, and here I am.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: Dr. Kornfeld is one of those 16 passengers at that Nebraska facility. Two more Americans are being monitored in Atlanta.

Joining me now is Dr. Megan Ranney. She is an emergency physician and the Dean of Yale's School of Public Health. Thank you for being here with us this morning. Just out of curiosity, what do we know about why the lab test seems hard to interpret?

DR. MEGAN RANNEY, DEAN OF YALE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: We're currently investigating what's going on, what happened in that situation. But the analogy that I will make is to a pregnancy test. Any of us who have had children know that you can have one pregnancy test that is negative and another that is positive, simply because it was taken a certain amount of time apart.

Maybe the antibodies weren't present or the virus wasn't as present in the first sample versus the second. Maybe the type of test was a little bit different. I do agree with the abundance of caution that once there is a positive test, you treat it as a positive, just as you do with a pregnancy test.

We're in the middle of doing a lot of science around this investigation and figuring out exactly what is spreading and how. Time is going to give us many more answers for the folks who are in quarantine, for their families, and most of all, for the public.

SIDNER: You have mentioned before that this is kind of becoming a waiting game around transmission and compliance. I'm curious if the quarantine is voluntary or mandatory for the people who were on the ship where Hantavirus turned deadly.

RANNEY: Every country is having slightly different interpretations of how they're quarantining, but every one of them is requiring that the folks who just got off the ship do quarantine for that 42-day period, sometimes at home, sometimes in facilities. Those of us on the outside of the government are all watching and waiting here in the United States for some clarification from the CDC about what the procedures are going to be for us.

Right now, of course, all of those passengers who just disembarked are being kept in either Nebraska or Emory for quarantine or for isolation if they've been tested positive, but we've not received clear direction yet as the public as to what comes next.

This, to me, I think, is a reflection of the fact that we have lots of empty positions at the head of CDC that are slowing down both decision-making and public communication.

SIDNER: Communication, as we remember, was key during the pandemic, and there was a lot of frustration with some of the communications over the long haul as to whether we got good information in the beginning or not. I do want to know what indicators you're going to be looking out for over the next few weeks. We now, as the public, have learned that it has about a six- to eight-week incubation period.

What will you be looking for?

RANNEY: There's a couple of things. The first is watching for that 42- day period to see who gets sick, if anyone, 42 days from the first exposure, when people could have first been infected on land, 42 days from when people disembarked in St. Helena in late April, 42 days from when everyone was just disembarked from the plane and flown back to their home country.

[09:50:00]

Each of those time periods matter, and we're going to watch each of those. In parallel, we're going to be watching the science. The genomics of the virus as it is identified, the gum shoe or shoe leather epidemiology, figuring out how this has passed between people. That's going to help us make better predictions about what happens next, how to prevent outbreaks like this in the future, and will help us hopefully better reassure the public that this does not have pandemic potential.

SIDNER: I like the sound of shoe leather epidemiology. It just makes you think of people on the ground just finding all the decisions and getting us good information. Dr. Megan Ranney, thank you so much. Appreciate it -- Kate. BOLDUAN: So it is one of the U.S. Naval Academy's best and messiest and most celebrated rites of passage, and it is underway right now. The annual monument climb for the class of 2029 is happening this morning. It's that decades-old tradition where the freshman class work together to climb a 21-foot monument covered in Crisco, courtesy of the upperclassmen, of course, who are also spraying the freshman with water while they attempt to climb.

The goal here is to get a white hat known as a Dixie Cup from the top of the monument and put an upperclassman's hat in its place. All of this to mark the end of their first year, the first year of that grind. Last year, it took the class of 2028 two hours, 27 minutes.

The record for the fastest climb was the class of 1972, one minute and 30 seconds. But they did not have to grease as part of that one, so it's a totally different category.

Berman looks concerned. You should see his face.

Let's look at this, though. Dashcam video shows a small plane going down on an Arizona highway right in front of a family of four. Just watch this. Plane, you can see, making a hard landing. The wing goes right directly over the top of their heads.

The propeller then hits the back of the truck. View from the truck's rear camera shows that the plane continues down the highway until it hits a sign and comes to a stop. No word on what caused the plane to go down, but everyone, including the pilot, is OK.

Here's the takeaway from the mom in that pickup truck.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KRISTAL EWING, PLANE CRASH WITNESS: It feels like I should go buy some lottery tickets, which I did.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: I would say so. And then there's this. I always love to hear about a Chapter two when it comes to people's careers. And boy, is this one. Setting the scene for you, a multimillionaire given it all up to become a priest. Scott-Vincent Borba was the co-founder of e.l.f. Cosmetics, the wildly successful and almost ubiquitous makeup brand.

Borba says that with that success, he became a poster child for the luxury lifestyle of fame and fortune and excess. Think partying with the Kardashians type of lifestyle. And Borba says that he found himself at a glamorous event one night wondering what it was all for.

And so he prayed for clarity and it came. He decided to give it all up, give his fortune to charity, become a deacon at the California -- at a California seminary. Now he's been studying for the last few years in the place that he calls home, a small little, tiny room and with very few belongings, saying he has never been happier.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SCOTT-VINCENT BORBA, FORMER E.L.F. CO-FOUNDER: Once you have the grace to give away big chunks of your estate, you feel this the sense of freedom to help others, especially the poor. And I just -- he gave me the grace just to give it all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: And now with all that, he's going to officially become an ordained Catholic priest on May 23rd -- John.

BERMAN: What an accomplishment that is.

All right, closing arguments expected tomorrow in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others. Musk wants a judge to order OpenAI to scrap its plans for an IPO and return to being a nonprofit. Altman took the stand, telling jurors he believed Musk wanted to have long term control of the company and that there was a morale boost when Musk left.

CNN's Hadas Gold has been covering this case from the beginning and joins us now. Getting close to the closing arguments, Hadas.

HADAS GOLD, CNN AI CORRESPONDENT: Yes, final day of witnesses today before closing arguments come tomorrow. But the big news was yesterday. Finally, Sam Altman, his name hadn't been invoked hundreds of times in this three week trial so far, but he had not yet spoken.

The judge and the jury had not heard his voice until yesterday when he took the stand for several hours. Where, for his part, most of his testimony was about how he believed Elon Musk actually just wanted to control OpenAI the whole time. He says that at one point, Elon Musk even pushed for a for profit element of OpenAI. He even talked about folding OpenAI into Tesla, offering Sam on a board seat.

But that when that ultimately didn't work, he left OpenAI, stopped donating and then eventually, of course, created his own AI company xAI. He did, Sam Altman, say that there was a morale boost when Elon Musk left OpenAI. He also said something that was really interesting about control.

He said something about what would happen if Musk died.

[09:55:00]

And I'll read you this quote, Sam Altman said, "A particularly hair- raising moment was when my co-founders asked Mr. Musk, if you have control, what happens when you die? He said something like, I haven't thought about it a ton, but maybe I should pass it to my children." Sam Altman saying that he didn't feel comfortable with that and he was trying to paint it as this was just Elon Musk really wanting to have control.

He said that his advisors had, that Musk's advisors had told Sam Altman that Elon Musk had vowed that he would never work at a company that he did not completely control. And that all plays into OpenAI's defense in this case.

But they say this case is not about Elon Musk being deceived. They say this case is about Elon Musk just failing to gain control of a company that is now successful and is now a competitor to his own AI company.

Musk's attorneys, for their part, they spent their time trying to talk about Altman's characters. They went through a laundry list of allegations from former OpenAI board members and former OpenAI executives that have accused Sam Altman of deceiving them, of lying. Their first question to him, the moment they got their hands on being able to ask him a question was, are you completely trustworthy?

But of course the question is whether allegations of Sam Altman's character for the jury will translate into Elon Musk's accusations about what OpenAI did and whether they improperly deceived him because he helped fund and co-found OpenAI with $38 million. And whether he was deceived when they transitioned OpenAI from having a full non- profit to its current for-profit structure overseen by a non-profit foundation.

BERMAN: Hadas Gold for us out there in Oakland watching the case. Thanks so much, Hadas.

SIDNER: And thank you for joining us at CNN NEWS CENTRAL. "THE SITUATION ROOM," up next.

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