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CNN This Morning

Judge Blocks Any National Guard Deployment to Portland; How to Close the Divide That Threatens Democracy; Delegations Set to Begin Israel-Hamas Peace Talks. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired October 06, 2025 - 06:00   ET

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

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[06:00:05]

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR: The Trump administration just tried to make an end run around a federal judge, it didn't go well.

CNN This Morning starts right now.

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GOV. TINA KOTEK (D-OR): Oregon is our home, it is not a military target.

GOV. J.B. PRITZKER (D-IL): They are the ones that are making it a war zone.

CORNISH: A new ruling overnight blocks the president from sending guard troops to Portland. Between Iraq and a hard place, how Trump boxed Israel in to get a yes on his Gaza plan.

REP. MIKE JOHNSON, (R-LA) SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: They're not serious, this is not a serious negotiation.

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), MINORITY LEADER: Johnson doesn't want to discuss the real issue.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: The shutdown blame game, could it backfire on the GOP or Democrats? And an ex-NFL player, now analyst stabbed, why he now faces charges. And rural versus urban, the growing divide in America and how we might be able to fix it.

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KRISTI NOEM, U.S. SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY: We'll be all over that place.

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CORNISH: MAGA not letting up on its anti-Bad Bunny Bowl crusade, but Benito not fazed by the threats.

It's 6:00 a.m. here on the East Coast, here's a live look at Portland, Oregon, following that late night ruling from a judge on the deployment of National Guard troops.

Good morning, everybody, it's Monday, October 6th, I want to thank you for waking up with me. I'm Audie Cornish, and here's where we begin those new developments overnight.

So, as the president attempts to deploy more National Guard troops into U.S. cities that he deems war zones, a federal judge blocked two attempts by the administration to deploy California and Oregon's National Guard into Portland. The White House claims there are riots in the city.

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DAN RAYFIELD, (D) OREGON ATTORNEY GENERAL: What was unlawful with the Oregon National Guard is unlawful with the California National Guard. The judge's order was not some minor procedural point for the president to work around like my 14-year-old does when he doesn't like my answers.

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CORNISH: So, as that hearing was unfolding, the Trump administration activated a third state's National Guard. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a statement saying he quote, "fully authorized the president to call up 400 members of the Texas National Guard."

The plan is to send them to Oregon and also to Chicago, where the situation is growing more tense by the hour. Federal agents threw tear gas at protesters over the weekend. One woman was shot by agents after allegedly ramming her car into an ICE vehicle. The Department of Homeland Security also released this edited video promoting its raid of a South Side apartment complex last week.

The raid resulted in 37 arrests and separated four American children from their undocumented parents. Illinois governor says the raid was designed to create panic.

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PRITZKER: What kind of a country are we living in? And this -- this -- this raid at this building is emblematic of what ICE and CBP and the president of the United States, Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino are trying to do. They want mayhem on the ground. They want to create the war zone so that they can send in even more troops. Now they're claiming they need 300 of Illinois National Guard.

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CORNISH: Joining me now in the group chat, Sara Fischer, CNN Senior Media Analyst and Senior Media Reporter at "Axios," Stephen Collinson, CNN Politics Senior Reporter, and Sabrina Rodriguez, National Politics Reporter at "The Washington Post." You guys, thank you for helping me start the week. I know that was a

lot of jarring imagery, but I'm interested in it because Chicago was one of those cities where you saw a difference in voting patterns after the election.

Latino voters moved to drum. There were some black voters who stayed home. And now those very people right now are under threat, right? Based on what we're seeing from ICE. So, help me understand, Sabrina, what is it that the administration is trying to address here by drawing the National Guard from all these different places?

SABRINA RODRIGUEZ, NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Well, we've seen from the Trump administration, their playbook in recent months has been talking about deploying troops to cities that the president deems are unsafe, have high crime rates.

He sort of has painted this picture of these as very violent cities that, you know, the troops need to come in and get control. It, you know, is not a coincidence, of course, that these are Democratic led cities that he has long, you know, bashed the leadership of even prior to his second term starting.

CORNISH: But don't you just sort of elevate someone like Pritzker, right? Like now I feel like I see Pritzker every week.

SARA FISCHER, CNN SENIOR MEDIA ANALYST: Yep. Look what happened with Gavin Newsom. Part of his political career now has been his ability to push back on Trump and do it in a very national and visible way. I also think this is the same problem that we saw when they tried to do this in California, when they did this in D.C., which is that people who voted for Donald Trump, Latinos and others, a lot of them understand that immigration is a priority writ large. It's the way that they go about it.

[06:05:05]

And when you see this type of dramatic imagery being shown on national television of parents being separated from their children, of people being rammed into cars, that does not, you know, support what most people in any city want to see.

CORNISH: But does it support the idea that ICE needs to be protected and therefore you have to send more people in?

STEPHEN COLLINSON, CNN POLITICS SENIOR REPORTER: I think it supports the idea that what the president is doing is trying to impose power everywhere through the states, in cities. It makes him look good to his supporters, which is mostly what he's done throughout the span of his two presidencies. It's interesting how the administration seems to reserve a lot of its more authoritarian moves for weekends when people aren't watching.

So, you have all these court battles unfolding late at night at a weekend. You have this Trump-appointed judge, first of all, saying you can't federalize the National Guard in Oregon. Then the administration decides, OK, well, we'll just send some troops from California there. The same judge had to come out on a Sunday night and have a hearing and was pretty exasperated because she was arguing the conditions for the deployment of federal troops in a state that there is some kind of rebellion against the federal government are not in place here. So, I think the question is, does the administration keep trying to push this? You saw the troops from Texas. Does it move a step further and invoke the Insurrection Act, which would create an even bigger --

CORNISH: Right.

COLLINSON: -- legal battle and potentially constitutional crisis?

CORNISH: Which is what Pritzker is arguing, what they're doing. I want to show you guys a recent polling on this. As always, I'm sort of interested in where independents are. But they were asked, how do you feel about Trump deploying National Guard to U.S. cities? I think partisan, it's pretty locked in to what you would expect. But the overall total is now at 58 percent.

And for independents, that number is 67 percent. There's one other I want to show you. Trump administration focus on troop deployments to U.S. cities. Just the idea that they're focusing too much on it. This is cruising past 50 percent now. So at a certain point, does your promotion say, you know, and I sort of posting imagery as a good thing, is the public receiving it that way?

FISCHER: I don't think so. And by the way, on the concept of crime, one of the things we've found is that crime is an issue that people really care about. The challenge is, this is not how people want the government to be going about tackling crime, particularly when the troops came here in D.C. One of the things that was people were very vocal about is the places where we have crime, we need you to work with local law enforcement. Don't unilaterally send in the National Guard troops.

And so, I think when you see independents that are pushing back like this, it's not broadly because people think that tackling immigration is a bad idea. That's why a big reason why Trump won the election. It's just the way that he's going about it. And the images that are being sent all over social media are not sitting well with people.

CORNISH: OK, I want to pause for a second. We're going to have a lawmaker here to talk about this, somebody who had served in the military. We're going to talk a lot this hour.

But coming up in CNN next, we're going to hear from a Green Beret. That's Pat Harrigan. It's a congressman from North Carolina. Also of note, trapped on Mount Everest, hundreds of hikers are waiting to be rescued. And Bad Bunny's got a message for all us critics ahead of the Super Bowl.

BAD BUNNY, MUSICIAN AND 2026 SUPER BOWL PERFORMER: (Speaking in foreign language) If you didn't understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.

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[06:13:09]

CORNISH: It is almost 15 minutes past the hour and here is your morning roundup. A former NFL quarterback and Fox Sports analyst, Mark Sanchez, pepper sprayed and stabbed multiple times over the weekend. It happened after an altercation in an Indianapolis alley.

But now, Sanchez is facing battery charges. Police reports claim he was drunk and accosted a delivery truck driver and threw him to the ground. The driver said that he was scared for his life, which is why he claims he pulled a knife and stabbed Sanchez.

An FBI agent disciplined after refusing to participate in a perp walk for James Comey. That's according to a source familiar with the matter. The former FBI director was indicted last week after reports of the agent being disciplined surfaced. FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted, "follow the chain of command or get relieved." Comey is expected to be arraigned this week.

Hundreds of hikers stranded on Mount Everest after heavy snow pummeled the Himalayas. 350 people have been rescued so far, but around 200 still remain trapped. And this weather is very unusual for this time of year. One guy telling "Reuters" that he's never seen snow like this in October.

And after the break on CNN This Morning, Congress pointing fingers. But can the blame game backfire the longer the shutdown lasts?

Plus, it's a growing divide in politics, rural versus urban. How can it be fixed? And good morning to Chicago. The Cubs gearing up for a critical game two tonight against the Brewers.

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[06:18:556]

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, let's go to my house, which is five miles up the road. I have different representatives at my house at that point because of the way they gerrymander.

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CORNISH: Location, location, location. How your politicians show up for you often comes down to where you live. From gerrymandering to the president's latest move to consider a $10 billion bailout for U.S. farmers hurt by his trade war. And it's not just politics, health care outcomes, education, poverty vary sharply by zip code as well. And poverty for Americans living in rural areas is actually three times higher than those living in urban areas. And it's a growing gap that experts warn could have some serious consequences for all of us.

And that's the focus of Rural Versus Urban. It's the growing divide that threatens democracy. That book is out now and we're here with its author, Suzanne Mettler.

Thank you so much for being with us this morning.

SUZANNE METTLER, CO-AUTHOR, "RURAL VERSUS URBAN: THE GROWING DIVIDE THAT THREATENS DEMOCRACY": Good morning. I'm really happy to be with you, Audie. Thank you.

CORNISH: So, I feel like politicians have always tried to pander to one group versus another. But in the book, you write that in the 90s, that is when this divide came to be as we know it. What was the accelerator?

[06:20:04]

METTLER: Yeah, this rural-urban divide really did not exist until the 1990s. And we find that what happened then was that there were all of these changes going on in the economy that particularly hurt rural places. So, you had, from the 1980s on agricultural consolidation, loss of family farms. You had the loss of jobs in mining and other extractive industries. And then deindustrialization actually meant that a lot of jobs were lost in rural places.

We find that rural counties that were either losing population or were losing jobs were the most likely to move toward the Republican Party in voting. And over the same period of time, the urban areas, which is, you know, the most densely populated ones, had long been in the Democratic Party. But other urban areas and suburban, which is all part of urban for us, became consolidated in the Democratic Party as well.

So, you had this growing gap. And since then, it's become exacerbated with real resentment brewing from rural areas toward urban areas that generally seem better off. And then there is --

(CROSSTALK)

CORNISH: And is that wrong? I mean, when you think about where wealth has accrued, is there something to that?

METTLER: Well, you know, there are certainly a lot of people who are struggling in urban areas as well. But the perception of a lot of rural people has come to be that the Democratic Party is run by elites who are -- live elsewhere and aren't really -- don't really understand their communities and their needs. So, that's where resentment has built in the sense of us versus them, which is so dangerous for our politics.

CORNISH: Is there a way out of it?

METTLER: Well, we think there is. We think in the United States, given our electoral institutions, it has always been important to build political coalitions that span geography. And that's really what existed in the past, where each party had some real supporters in both urban and rural places.

And so we think the way to get out of it is to try to build those coalitions again. And it means reaching out. It means listening. It means long-term organizing. And so, for the Democratic Party, this means, you know, reestablishing itself in rural areas that, you know, for such a long time, from the New Deal right up through the 1980s, a lot of rural people really thought of the Democratic Party as being there for them. And then they ceased feeling that way in the 90s onward.

CORNISH: I want to ask you about one more thing that's occurred to me as we're talking, which is you are now having the president call National Guard from red states or more rural states and sending them to urban environments and cities. Does this kind of contribute to that us versus them kind of mentality?

METTLER: Yes, I think it really does. I think that portraying cities as, you know, the center of crime and all kinds of illegal behavior really exacerbates the rural-urban divide. And, you know, we really need political leaders to be trying to bring people together. It's so important. Rural areas, you know, share so much with urban areas. We find that when it comes to people's views about policy issues, on most issues there's not a significant difference between rural and urban people and their views.

On some issues like abortion and guns, there's a small gap, but it's not large and it's not growing over time. Rather, the rural-urban divide has emerged through these processes over time, starting with the economic factors that I mentioned. But what it illustrates is that we can bridge these divides and that coalition is waiting to be built.

CORNISH: Okay, Suzanne Mettler is the author of Rural Versus Urban. You can pick that book up now.

METTLER: Thank you so much.

CORNISH: And straight ahead on CNN This Morning, ceasefire talks underway right now. Is President Trump forcing Israel's hand?

Plus, California's redistricting threat now in the hands of voters.

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[06:29:16]

CORNISH: Good morning, everyone. I'm Audie Cornish, thank you for joining me on CNN THIS MORNING. It's half past the hour and here's what's happening right now. New overnight, a federal judge blocks the Trump administration from deploying any National Guard troops to Portland. The ruling came down late last night after the president ordered troops from out of state to go there. Texas National Guard troops are also being sent to Chicago.

Voting starts today in California on new maps that could swing control of the House. The congressional maps would dramatically reshape adding as many as five Democratic seats. And the new maps are a response to Texas maps which would add to the Republican side of the aisle.

And in the coming hours, delegations from Israel, Hamas, and the U.S. are set to begin key peace negotiations in Egypt.