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Trump Takes Questions Before Heading to GOP's Midterm Convention; OpenAI Says It Cracked 90-Year-Old Math Mystery in 88 Hours; Veterans Groups Urge Congress to Pass Take Care of America's Veterans Act. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired September 09, 2026 - 14:30   ET

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

[14:30:00]

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If they're slightly behind or slightly ahead or tied, but we don't have rooms for people that are 35 points up and don't need to be there. We said, stay back and campaign. Every politician that we've wanted to be there is there.

Go ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, are you sure this plane is safe to fly?

TRUMP: Yes, I am. Or I wouldn't be on it. What do you want?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, can you tell us about your conversation with President Putin?

TRUMP: We had a great conversation. He is wanting to make a deal. And if Zelenskyy is wanting to make a deal, that'd be very nice.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What is the hold-up?

TRUMP: The hold-up is two people that hate each other.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What gives you confidence?

TRUMP: I think, more than anything else, it's two people that hate each other.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So what has changed that gives you confidence in his progress?

TRUMP: Because I speak to people. That's all I do is speak to people my whole life I know about deals, and these are two people that are tired of fighting.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you going to try to set up a trilateral meeting?

TRUMP: It could happen. We had a good conversation. It could happen.

Too many people are dying in that war. 25,000 last month.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, are you pardoning Michael Cohen?

TRUMP: I haven't even been --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President --

TRUMP: I've never been asked that question.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He mentioned recently that he had recanted his testimony.

TRUMP: Well, he did. He recanted. He said it was a very -- it was illegal, what they did. What they put him through was incredible. You want to know the truth.

Nobody's asked me about a pardon. But what they put -- well, if he's -- if everything is checking out, it's something I would consider. Yes. I mean, what they did to Michael Cohen was a disgrace.

They forced him to say things that he didn't want to say and that he didn't believe. And I appreciate that at least he came out. Although late, he came out and rectified the situation.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, what do Republicans need to be doing that they aren't currently doing?

TRUMP: Just keep fighting and just keep explaining how well we're doing as a country. We're doing better now as a country than we've ever done before. Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Britain, France, and Canada have imposed sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. What's your reaction to that?

Is the U.S. opposed to it, or --

TRUMP: Well, I've just seen it, and I'll be speaking to Israel. I'll be speaking to them, and I'll find out what they -- what's their thinking.

I understand. I understand exactly what's going on, but I want to find out why all of a sudden has that happened.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're seeing a lot of attacks about the Strait of Hormuz between the United States and --

TRUMP: Well, the attacks are made by us. We've knocked out nine of their ships. I would say that the attacks are caused by us, yes.

And you're going to see a lot more. We've taken out about nine of their tankers. Many of them are gonzo.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President.

TRUMP: We're going to find out. Oh, I think the war is going to end immediately after the election. I think the war will end immediately after the election.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why?

TRUMP: Because they can't hold out any longer. They're desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon. All they want is a nuclear weapon, and if they had a nuclear weapon, the whole world is in deep trouble.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you still hoping for a nuclear deal? Secretary Wright said a nuclear deal might not be on the table anymore. Is that true?

TRUMP: I'm doing much more than a nuclear deal. There's a lot more than nuclear. We're going to have nuclear. That's 99.9.

But there's going to be a lot of other things on the table that wouldn't have been on the table three months ago.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Such as?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you expect that to restart at some point?

TRUMP: We're not looking for it, to be honest with you, Jeff. Originally, I wanted to make a deal. We're so far down the line.

They have very little country left right now. So we're not looking for it. Yes, a negotiation could possibly happen, but it's not something we're looking at.

This war will end immediately after our election. Thank you very much.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: We've been listening to President Trump at JBA. An odd appearance for the president after spending several unexpected minutes on Marine One before boarding the Qatari-gifted Air Force One. Apparently, the president's saying that there had to be a test on one of the inflatable slides, one of the safety slides.

It was deployed from the new Air Force One opposite -- you're seeing it there on your screen -- opposite the side where the president boards the plane. This comes, of course, as there has been concerns about this specific aircraft. You'll recall this was, again, a Qatari- gifted jet.

The security on board has been scrutinized in part because during a recent summit in Turkey, the president, you may recall, had to leave the plane, not tell reporters, seemingly doing it on a catering van to avoid cameras, to get on a different plane following an Iranian threat that apparently was made toward that aircraft.

[14:35:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: It goes without saying, as we look at these live pictures, that it is extremely uncharacteristic for the president to show up at Andrews Air Force Base in Marine One and then not get off pretty quickly. He waited for several minutes in Marine One before going to the plane, talking to reporters.

So why exactly was this deployed? He said they're testing it. Was this deployed accidentally?

We don't know. I will say, in 1994, I was going back, it happened to Bill Clinton. It happened to Air Force One as Bill Clinton was coming back from a trip to Germany.

So this has, before, historically, a slide has been deployed accidentally. We don't know the particulars of what has happened here, but this was quite the unusual scene. And at first, we couldn't see why Trump was spending so much time on Marine One because this is the pool shot and it's sort of, we're sort of at the mercy of whatever direction it is pointing and we couldn't see.

And as it panned over, we then saw what appeared to be the backside of this slide and then the pool note confirmed it. But it is the door opposite the one that Trump normally goes in, one before that they've used for those catering trucks.

SANCHEZ: That's right, the president saying that they wanted to make sure everything works perfectly. We should know he's on the way to Dallas for the Republican midterm convention, a bit unorthodox approach for the party in a midterm election. The president asked about oil prices.

He said that they're going to fall after the midterms. He said it may take longer, but they will get to $2 a gallon. He promised more U.S. attacks on Iranian oil tankers.

Also saying he thinks the war is going to end after the elections, saying that Tehran is attempting to interfere in U.S. elections by getting, in his words, weak people elected so that Tehran can eventually get a nuclear weapon.

KEILAR: Yes, he was trying to project some strength though with what the U.S. has done militarily, but certainly this is a difficult point in the Iran war as it drags on now several months for the president. We'll continue to monitor this. It does appear that they've made a bit of progress here.

The slide largely, and again, we're on the opposite side of the plane from this, but the slide, the emergency slide that had been deployed appears to, at least from this side, be back up. The president said it would take about 15 minutes. We don't know exactly how long it will take.

It has been a little bit of time now, so we'll keep our eye on this. The emergency slide deployed on Air Force One, the Qatari-gifted Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base. We'll be right back after a quick break.

[14:40:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: So OpenAI says its artificial intelligence technology has cracked one of the millennium problems. The millennium problems are seven famously difficult, still unsolved math questions that have stumped even the brightest humans for decades, even centuries. But while OpenAI touts the achievement, its AI model is facing a very human dilemma, questions of possible plagiarism.

Let's bring in CNN's AI correspondent, Hadas Gold. Hadas, before we get to the controversy first, let's wrap our heads around this 90- year-old problem that AI allegedly solved in fewer than four days.

HADAS GOLD, CNN AI CORRESPONDENT: Now, disclosure, I'm not a mathematician, but this problem was about the mathematical properties of how fluid moves. It's called the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness. It's about what happens when fluid moves through and around objects and things like that, and whether there can be any sort of glitch in the mathematical formula people believe and mathematicians have long believed exist when fluid moves.

Now, OpenAI said that they have solved it, and they have found the glitch, and they said they used this with the help of AI, with the help of ChatGPT, their GPT models. Now, humans had a lot to do with this. It wasn't the AI working on its own.

The company said that the effort began after September 1st when they got word through the rumor mill that one of the problems had been solved and had an idea for a different way to approach it. They say that they used an unreleased model, unleashed 10,000 agents on it, 88 hours of work. They said the cost of solving this problem when it comes to the compute was something in the millions of dollars in order to try and solve this, and they say they have come up with a solution.

Now, they say they will not accept the $1 million prize, but it is a fascinating example of some of the positives of AI that if you really dedicate a lot of compute to something, you can solve things that were seemingly unsolvable in the past, and we are seeing this also be applied to things like rare diseases, where you would normally need hundreds of scientists working thousands of hours doing research and doing experiments trying to find a solution. Well, now you have AI agents who could do that on your behalf and can find these solutions in a number of hours instead of years.

SANCHEZ: Yes, but there are concerns about potential plagiarism on behalf of OpenAI.

GOLD: Yes, so this controversy strikes at a question of trust when it comes to AI, because another group of mathematicians, one of them is an NYU professor, one of them actually works at Anthropic but was working on this problem in a personal capacity, in just a few hours before OpenAI made their announcement, they released a statement saying that they believe they had also solved either this exact problem in a similar way or in a slightly different way, but they brought up a lot of questions about OpenAI's behavior going into this. They even said that they had had interactions with OpenAI researchers about this. There were some suggestions about removing the Anthropic researcher from a paper on this to avoid a sort of conflict of interest.

[14:45:00] But one thing in particular that is interesting is that these other mathematicians, including the NYU professor, said that they used OpenAI's models to help them in the creation of their theory and in writing their paper. And they wondered whether their using of an OpenAI model in some way helped OpenAI, because whenever you're working and talking with an AI, it is using that data to help train itself again.

It's kind of a cycle going back and forth. And OpenAI has not been able to say definitively whether their AI model did not in some way learn from these other mathematicians and their work in a way that could have helped OpenAI solve this problem.

SANCHEZ: That's part of the concern, especially when we talk about these existential issues that there isn't a fine tooth comb going through everything these hundreds of agents are doing. So who knows what's happening inside that mystery box of AI. Hadas Gold, thank you so much for the reporting.

Still ahead, the push to make sure America's veterans have what they need from healthcare to counseling. After the break, we talked to a former general helping to lead the charge to get Congress to act now.

[14:50:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: On today's HOME FRONT, taking care of our veterans. A coalition of groups is urging Congress to pass the Take Care of America's Veterans Act. The bill combines 60 pieces of legislation, many of which have bipartisan support but have been stalled in Congress for years and it touches on several issues critical to supporting American veterans and military families.

Things like benefits, healthcare, and counseling. It would also expand support for family caregivers and extend grants for a suicide prevention program. The Military Officers Association of America is one group that is calling on Congress to pass the bill, and I'm joined now by the president and CEO of that group, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Brian Kelly.

General, thank you so much for being with us. We're going to talk about timing here in a minute because I know you're a little worried Congress isn't going to act on this but let's first talk about how significant you see this bill being for veterans.

LT. GEN. BRIAN KELLY (RET.), PRESIDENT AND CEO, MILITARY OFFICERS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA: Yes, Brianna, I think this is a really unique, significant piece in time. 60 different pieces of legislation that have earned bipartisan, bicameral support on their own individually but now they're put together in an omnibus where you have an opportunity to do a ton of good for tens of millions of veterans, their families, caregivers, survivors in one opportunity. And each of these on their own has not been doing very well, right? Has not been able to get across the line but now you have an opportunity to put them all together and that's what's in the Take Care of America's Veterans Act.

KEILAR: If you talk to veterans or you talk to Gold Star spouses, you talk to military families, it's very eye-opening, the issues that they're dealing with and sometimes the benefits that they're not getting. One of the things that I think non-military connected people wouldn't realize is that there are a lot of outdated rules. One, for Gold Star spouses who become widows, for instance, their service member spouse dies in service and then if they get remarried, they lose their benefits that they got from their spouse, right, from being a military spouse.

Can you talk more about that?

KELLY: Yes, I think if you think about that right now, the rule, which as I said, you said, it's outdated, right? It's almost archaic. If they get married before age 55, the benefits that they earned as a result of their spouse making the ultimate sacrifice for the country, right?

They're a survivor, they're a Gold Star family. They don't get to keep those benefits if they remarry. Why is that?

Those benefits were earned for those folks, and they should be able to keep them. That's just one of the many things that are in the Take Care of America's Veterans Act.

KEILAR: There's also the Major Richard Starr Act because right now, combat wounded veterans who have to medically retire. So they're wounded, they can't continue to serve, they're medically retired, before 20 years. They actually see their retirement pay reduced or offset dollar for dollar when it comes to the disability benefits that they receive.

This would end that. What would that mean for the lives of those veterans?

KELLY: Yes, those veterans, again, who are combat wounded ought to be the first in line for us to take care of, right? They've given this big sacrifice. They have been waiting for nine years for this offset to happen.

We've been fighting for this for nine years. They earned their retirement, they earned their disability, two different things. The fact that those are offset to each other while others are allowed to keep both of those things is really unjust, particularly if you think about who's most deserving and why wouldn't we as a country say those at the front of the line ought to be those who are combat injured?

KEILAR: There are concerns in the veteran service organization community about the way this bill is paid for. Talk to us about that.

KELLY: Yes, I think you guys cover here in D.C., and you know how hard the environment is. You never get a perfect bill, right? You always have to have a way to pay for things and this bill has a pay for that's controversial. There are groups who don't like that pay and I understand that, but there's 23 other groups like MOAA, folks like the Elizabeth Dole Foundation who work on caregivers, folks like the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors who care for those survivors, those Gold Star families, American Legion, the Wounded Warrior Project, the Medal of Honor Society, who have all looked at this and said, look, in totality, when you look at what we're looking at here, the pay for in this case that's required, it's law to have a way to pay for these things. You have to have offsets.

Other things that we've gotten like the Dole Act were paid for by offsets to housing. There has to be a way for pay for these things. I wish it wasn't.

I wish in an ideal world-

KEILAR: What does it do? Tell us.

KELLY: Yes, you have to have a way to pay. In this case, what they're going to do is they're going to look at ratings for disability ratings at the Veterans Administration, in this case, sleep apnea and tinnitus, and they're going to change the way they offer those things. They're still going to provide service to anybody who has sleep apnea and tinnitus and serve those.

They're not going to get turned away. They're not going to get thrown out in the street, but they could look different.

[14:55:00]

What we look at that, and the rest of these organizations, 23 organizations in total, American Legion, another one, is that this is worth it.

KEILAR: OK, 23 organizations in total. This has really widespread support in the community.

KELLY: It does.

KEILAR: How worried are you that it's not actually going to get through Congress? Is that a reality? Is that a real possibility?

KELLY: Yes, I think you guys cover every day the difficulties of getting legislation through Congress, right? We're coming up on an election, and we know the midterm elections are coming. It's possible that even despite support, and many of these acts on their own had gotten bipartisan support, bicameral support in the past, only to get stopped at the finish line.

So we're concerned that it won't happen now when Congress comes back. We thought there would be a vote, or maybe even after the midterms, we hope there would be a vote. But the worst thing that could happen is no vote before this Congress goes out.

If that happens, everybody's back to square one. They got to go back to reintroduce all this legislation and all the waiting that's continued from the early '90s for some of these things. Some of these things haven't been updated since 1993.

Other things have been fought for the last nine, 10 years. You'll be back to square one if there's no vote. So we're all looking and counting on the Congress to take politics out of this, take emotion out of this.

And if you put the veteran at the center and you make this veteran- centric, you have a vote.

KEILAR: General Brian Kelly, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

KELLY: Thanks, Brianna.

KEILAR: And a new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts after a quick break.

END