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Trump Takes Campaign Blitz To Battleground Georgia; Katie Zacharia Fired As White House Press Secretary; Reuters Reports Order To Limit Starshield For Ukraine Came From White House. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired October 16, 2026 - 13:30   ET

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

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[13:32:58]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Back now to our Breaking News.

President Trump has told Press Secretary, Katie Zacharia, this is what he's saying, by the way, he said that he's told Press Secretary, Katie Zacharia to reconsider her role as White House Press Secretary.

ERICA HILL, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Now, this follows her first press conference earlier this week that was widely scrutinized. It prompted further questions about past claims over her legal credentials and her qualifications for the job.

We're joined now by Joe Lockhart. He served as White House Press Secretary during the Clinton administration. Joe, thanks so much for being here with us.

Look, since we booked you to be here with us this afternoon, this has just developed in that what we're seeing the President say publicly, which is that he thinks maybe she should reconsider, again just reminding people of the timeline. She started Monday and the first press conference on Tuesday. How do you evaluate what we're seeing unfold?

JOE LOCKHART, FORMER CLINTON WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Well, I can tell you that probably the first rule as the White House press secretary is when the President's answering questions about you, you're in very deep trouble.

I remember coming in one day in the Situation Room and the executive secretary said you might want to read the transcript of the president's call last night. So what was he talking about? He said he was talking about you. And I thought I'm in trouble and I was in trouble, but somehow worked my way out of that.

It's impossible three days ago before that press conference for me to say I have any sympathy for this woman, but right now I do. The big thing here is she was put out there without time to prepare, whether it was a setup, whether it wasn't, it doesn't matter at this point, but it's just untenable, the position she's in. And I think as Brian was saying in the last segment, the Fox interviews signaled where MAGA world is and the president will follow that.

KEILAR: And actually, we have the sound in now of the president being asked about this, Joe. So let's go ahead and listen to what he said. Here it is.

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DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: (Inaudible) I've never seen anything like it actually.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You'll reconsider it?

[13:35:00]

TRUMP: And I said -- I said to her, honestly, if I were you, I'd reconsider. You think about it, but I would reconsider. She's got a beautiful husband and family. I met the family yesterday. Beautiful kids. It's like from a picture postcard.

And I said, you should reconsider because you don't want to go through that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do you want her to do?

TRUMP: I just want her to be happy. Look --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: All right, Joe. I mean, what do you think about that? He's blaming the news media for their treatment of her, even though those tough interviews that may have sunk her here came from Fox. And it's sort of this soft approach.

You know, if I were you, you may want to reconsider. You don't want to go through this. What do you think about it?

LOCKHART: Yeah, I don't -- I don't mean this to sound partisan or overly critical of the president, but she is, in fact, a victim here. She was thrown out there in a place where she wasn't prepared. And now the president, in the interest of her family and her picture postcard, wants her to reconsider. You know, he has basically thrown her under the bus -- threw her under the bus Tuesday by making her go out there or whoever made her go out there.

And today, rather than just standing up and saying this isn't going to work, he is blaming everyone but himself. And that happens every day in this White House.

HILL: And, Joe, look, you are someone who has stood at that podium. You know what it takes to prepare. You're talking about the lack of her time to prepare. You know what it takes to get ready to go and brief the press.

She explained her hiring process is this. Wednesday phone call, Thursday flight, Friday meeting, Saturday flight, Sunday flight, Monday Columbus Day, start work, once a brief, Tuesday morning. Help people understand how wild of an idea it is to say, OK, you who's never done this before, go out and do a briefing now.

LOCKHART: Yeah. Well, I mean, I can just tell you from my experience, I started doing this kind of work when I was 20 years old. So I had been in the business for 15, 16 years, was the deputy press secretary for two years at the White House, been there every day. And when I got the job, I took two months off to go to school --

HILL: Two months?

LOCKHART: -- to go sit with the national security team, to go sit with the budget team. And I wasn't going to go out, the president was going to let me go out. The staff wasn't until I was absolutely ready. And that's when I went out. She did this in a couple of hours. That is a recipe -- she was set up to fail and she has failed.

But it shouldn't be surprising. And there ought to be a little bit of sympathy here for her that she was not given the ability to succeed here.

HILL: All right, Joe Lockhart, thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.

LOCKHART: Sure.

HILL: President Trump is currently on his way to Georgia. We just spoke to the Republican he's there to campaign for. More about that when we come back, it's next.

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[13:41:49]

KEILAR: Happening soon, President Trump taking his campaign blitz to a ruby-red county in battleground, Georgia. And today, he's hitting the rally stage with a Republican who is banking on a boost in a critical Senate race. New cash numbers out today find incumbent Democratic Senator, Jon Ossoff raised more than $33 million in campaign funds last quarter. His challenger, Mike Collins just $2.8 million.

CNN's Ryan Young is live about an hour and a half northwest of Atlanta in Dalton, Georgia, where the president will soon arrive. Ryan, what can we expect?

RYAN YOUNG, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You can expect a lot of energy so far. I can tell you, there is a line just to get into this place that's pretty large, and this is a very hot day. Some of the people here have been waiting for hours to get a chance to see the president talking to a few folks on the way in. They said they're really energized by the idea the president would come here. And just in the last hour or so, I was able to talk to Mike Collins as he was making his way toward the stage.

I asked him about this bruising campaign that he's on, and he told me the thing that matters the most right now is people getting out to vote. He really believes that the people here can mobilize and get out and get five or six of their friends to go vote. They could turn the numbers around, and that's what he's hoping from a rally like today.

We also know the governor's race is pretty close here, Rick Jackson versus Keisha Lance Bottoms, so there's conversation about both of those races, though. There's a lot of energy in this room, so you have a lot of the top Republicans from across the state here in Dalton, Georgia, which is known as the carpet capital of the world, a really hard-working community that, of course, that Marjorie Taylor Greene represented for so many years. And talking to the people here, they were saying that they wanted to see some relief when it comes to gas prices.

They also talked about how expensive things were getting, and they believe these candidates will be the one to turn it around. And, of course, one lady pointed at me and says, you guys are always trying to make it Donald Trump's fault. It's not.

And so, you can feel the pressure in terms of people here really believing in Donald Trump as he arrives here. And if you look at the crowd behind me, they've been waiting here for quite some time to hear from him. Mike Collins, again, once again stressed the fact that he needs people like this here to go out and help get the mobilization for vote.

I think he starts to realize, though, there's been a lot of momentum on the other side, because as you drove here and coming up from Atlanta, you saw the signs go from blue to red, so you understand this is definitely Trump country.

KEILAR: All right, Ryan Young, thank you so much.

HILL: And we do have Breaking News. We've now learned White House Press Secretary, Katie Zacharia has, in fact, been fired.

KEILAR: Just minutes ago, President Trump had told reporters he told her to reconsider her position. CNN's Kristen Holmes is live at the White House. So that was sort of him, I think, softly telling us about this. But tell us what you're learning officially here, Kristen.

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, I specifically asked if he was considering firing her, and he kind of hesitated and worked around the question. He kept saying how nice Katie was, how she didn't deserve to be treated like this. We are told that he did fire her before leaving for Georgia. Unclear exactly what that conversation looked like.

President Trump was kind of outlining some of that, saying that he told Katie, you know, this is a lot on you, that you don't deserve any of this, maybe you should reconsider, this is not the life you want.

[13:45:00]

And he went further than that during our back-and-forth. Essentially, at one point I asked, OK, so who's on the short list now for the next press secretary? And he said there's a long list of people that want this job. I mean, he wasn't saying, you know, Katie's still in the role. But we did learn after that exchange that she had been fired. Of course, what we did see was this widely panned briefing. That was roughly 14 minutes with three preplanned questions. Then we saw both of those interviews on Fox News, which most people were criticizing her for. There had been a lot of conversations behind the scenes about whether or not she was ready for prime time.

The big question had been whether or not Trump was actually going to go through with firing her, given the fact that he had chose Katie Zacharia on his own, with his own gut intuition. We had been told that he grew enamored with her in recent weeks on Fox News, looking at her various appearances, and then decided that he wanted her to be the press secretary during a brief phone call between the two of them.

It is unclear. She was planning on moving her entire family to Washington, D.C. Just a reminder, she is based in California. I will say I also asked him if he was disappointed about the fact that Katie had not disclosed that she had not passed the bar, that she was not technically, in many eyes, an actual lawyer or attorney. And he brushed that off, saying he wasn't hiring her to be a lawyer or an attorney, that he was hiring her to be the press secretary.

We also asked if he would find another role in the administration for her, and he said yes, kind of, a very soft yes, you know, there will be something for her, potentially. I'll note that she came from Trump's orbit already. She was working for the media company at the time. I mean, this is an incredibly short tenure, but it is kind of an interesting, if you take a step back and look at all of this, we've obviously been talking about the reporting about Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles not being fully read in on the hiring of Katie Zacharia, which led many people around the Trump orbit to think maybe Wiles was on her way out.

Maybe people were believing they could work around Wiles. President Trump not only distanced himself from Katie Zacharia during our exchange, he also full-throatedly defended Susie Wiles, saying she's not going anywhere for a long time, that he respects her, that he leans on her. And I will tell you, in the last couple of days, I've talked to a number of people who say he goes to her for everything.

Well, one thing he didn't go to her for was choosing Katie Zacharia as Press Secretary. And now that has been pushed to the side. She is no longer press secretary, although it really did seem as though Trump was going to try to figure something out for her, not necessarily in the White House, but figure something out for her down the road based on our exchange.

But this is a, you know, roughly week-long tenure. Is it today, Friday? I think it was announced on Friday --

KEILAR: Yeah.

HOLMES: -- that he had chosen Katie Zacharia. So we are literally at one-week mark here. HILL: Right, and she only started officially, I think, on Monday, so quite a short tenure. Kristen, we did just talk to former White House Press Secretary, Joe Lockhart, who was a Press Secretary in the Clinton administration. And he said that really he views her as a victim here, that she was essentially set up to fail.

In your talking with your sources and what you're hearing from coming, what you're hearing from inside the White House, is there any thinking like that within the White House? How are they seeing this?

HOLMES: Not that I've heard. Everyone I've spoken to says the same thing. She's very nice, but she wasn't quite ready for primetime, which became clear during that briefing. I will note, a lot of people want -- wanted this to work out. They wanted her to be the next press secretary. They wanted a press secretary who could kind of be the face and the voice of the administration.

Yes, there were knives out for her because there were certain people within the administration who thought they might get the role or be considered. They didn't understand how it came from this person who really did come from left field, other than being a Trump commentator. She wasn't somebody who was in the orbit. And one of the things to keep in mind about all of this is that most people around Donald Trump during the second term are loyalists.

They know everything about Donald Trump. They know how to work with Donald Trump. They know what he likes, what he doesn't like. They are in all the meetings, as was Karoline Leavitt. So when you're talking about this victim mentality, yes, there were people who said she should have been up there doing a murder board for two weeks before she actually took the podium. She should have been in the job getting a feel for it for quite some time.

And President Trump did ask her directly to brief her second day. He asked her previously, but he said he wanted her to brief on her second day. And while to many or to Joe Lockhart or to others, it might seem as though, you know, everybody thinks she was set up for failure, the people that I've spoken to kind of just say this is how Trump world is, that your feet are thrown into the fire, that, you know, this is how he operates.

[13:50:00]

He makes these sporadic decisions and then you're out there and you're doing it, and neither are you going to sink or swim. And now, I think traditionally, certainly, this is completely different from any other press secretary that we have seen in terms of getting them ready, prepping them, making sure they have all the material, making sure they understand the principle, all of that.

But that's not really the voice that I -- voices I'm hearing from inside the White House.

KEILAR: Yeah, I think what's clear is that for someone to succeed here as they're sort of, you know, thrown in the deep end, in a way, as you're describing the situation for whoever takes this role, they need to be undeniably effective for President Trump. I think, obviously, people within the White House think that Karoline Leavitt was that.

She certainly was effective for him, Kristen. But I wonder, it's such a critical time for President Trump. Who now is going to be able to do that, to serve that place?

HOLMES: It's certainly back to the drawing board. And one of the things that, you know, we've been reporting out was this idea that for such a long time, President Trump didn't seem to have any urgency to fill Karoline Leavitt's role, that he thought he could do it. He had people on television. But in the recent weeks, he had started kind of growing antsy, this idea that people weren't out there, you know, hammering home his message.

He didn't have a face of the administration, other than his own face. And he can't be everywhere defending himself. And so that was kind of the impetus that led to Katie Zacharia's rise. Now, I asked him specifically, you know, who's on the list here. He said, oh, there's a lot of people who want it. But one of the things that we know is that it is increasingly hard to find somebody, one, who can do this role, and two, who wants to do this role.

Even when you were -- when I was talking to sources around our own CNN Commentator, Scott Jennings, there were people telling me that he did not want to push for this role because he wasn't quite sure. Now, obviously, I don't have any insight into how he might feel now. I haven't talked to those sources.

But they have been spending a lot of time really trying to find the right person. And then, again, Katie Zacharia came in from left field, got the job, and now is out after a week.

HILL: All right, Kristen Holmes with the very latest from the White House. Thank you so much for breaking that down for us. We've got more Breaking News straight ahead.

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[13:56:45]

KEILAR: The deteriorating relationship between the Trump administration and Ukraine appears to be accelerating. Reuters now reporting that in order to restrict the Starshield satellite network, Ukraine uses to coordinate its military came from inside of the White House. When asked, two U.S. officials did not deny the orders to CNN, but did tell us that it did not come from President Trump.

HILL: That revelation is only increasing concerns. President Trump is trying to turn the screws on Ukraine more than four years into Russia's invasion. Besides the Starshield slowdown, Ukraine says the U.S. has also stopped sharing intel about incoming Russian strikes. That's a claim the White House also denies.

Sources also tell CNN Ukraine has run out of U.S.-provided missiles, critical to defending itself against those Russian attacks. And at the same time, President Trump announced that diesel deal with the Kremlin following years of sanctions. And during a new interview last night, he also said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Does that war end before you leave office?

TRUMP: It should end soon. I think they actually both would like to see it end. But I think -- I find Zelenskyy to be more difficult to deal with than Putin.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: Let's bring in CNN International Correspondent, Fred Pleitgen, who is in Berlin. And Fred, is it still accurate to describe the U.S. at this moment as an ally, supporter of Ukraine?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, certainly. I think the Ukrainians would say that the United States is still a supporter of Ukraine.

If you listen to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president at the European Union summit earlier today, he did say that he believed that the majority of the American public was still very much on Ukraine's side and still backed Ukraine's effort to defend itself against what the Ukrainians are calling that Russian aggression, against what the Russians are calling -- still calling their special military operation in Ukraine.

But of course, there were also those voices from the Ukrainian president, from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling those other European leaders real leaders and seemingly also being very critical, as you've already pointed out, of that diesel deal that the Trump administration has done with the Russian Federation. Ukraine's president, in a press conference, actually went into more detail about that.

He said that he doesn't believe that it's actually going to move the needle as far as global diesel prices are concerned, neither in the United States nor around the world. But he did say what he does believe it will do is it will bring additional cash for the Kremlin to continue what they call the special military operation in Ukraine, obviously that war that's been going on for such a very long time.

He also said, and I thought this was a very interesting bit of nuance, that he believes that this could be a precedent or set a precedent for possible sanctions relief for the Russians in the future. He said he believes that all this might start with a diesel deal but then, for instance, move to a gas deal in the future and that it could be what the Ukrainians believe could be a dangerous precedent for them.

At the same time, there was that whole complex around Starlink and Starshield where the Ukrainians are saying that those services are coming back online, are getting faster, but are still not at the speeds that they were before, which obviously, for the Ukrainians, brings them into a very dangerous situation.

The Ukrainians are saying they don't need Starlink to attack Russia, to fly drones, for instance, into Russian territory, but they definitely need it to detect Russian drones flying into Ukrainian territory, especially those jet-powered drones that are extremely fast, extremely dangerous, and, of course, have been doing a lot of damage in Ukraine over the past couple of months, folks.