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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Fareed's Take, Are Democrats Making A Mistake On Immigration?; Al Gore On The State Of The Planet; Al Gore On America's Broken Politics; What In The World, The Proliferation Of Fake News; A Republican Revolt In Congress?; Far Right Tries To Take Down Trump Official; Trump's New Immigration Plan. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired August 06, 2017 - 10:00   ET

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

FAREEZ ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, FAREED ZAKARIA GPS: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.

Today, on the show, melting ice, violently powerful storms and ever more sweltering temperatures. Climate change - just how bad is it? Former Vice President Al Gore on the state of the planet.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AL GORE, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is for real. Were we not to take a hold of it and solve it, the consequences would be too catastrophic to even imagine?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: He will also weigh in on the state of American politics.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GORE: From my point of view, the worst of it is that it's producing constant distractions?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Will he jump in to fix the mess?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Wouldn't it make sense for you to run for president?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Also, the week in world affairs. Russia, Venezuela, North Korea.

And will America get a new immigration policy? I have a great panel to discuss.

Finally, an American red state taking cues from a much-derided socialist Scandinavian country. From the prisons of North Dakota, is there a lesson for all of America. I'll explore. But first, here's my take. In 1992, Pennsylvania's Governor Robert Casey, a Democrat dedicated to the working class asked to speak at the National Convention in New York City. He wanted to propose a pro-life plank for the party platform, mostly as a way of affirming his Catholic beliefs.

He fully understood that the motion will be voted down, but the Democratic Party refused to permit him even to his air his views. So great was his heresy.

In his brief, brilliant, forthcoming book, the Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla writes, "that sent a strong signal to working class Catholic and evangelical voters that if they did not fall in line on this one issue, they were no longer welcome in the party."

I wonder if today the Democrats are making the same mistake on immigration. To be clear, I think that the bill that the Republicans rolled out this week is bad public policy and mean-spirited symbolism, but that's not the issue.

Lilla acknowledges that he is, in fact, a pro-choice absolutist on abortion, but he argues that a national party must build a big tent that accommodates people who dissent from the main party line on a few issues.

In Lilla's view, there is a larger crisis within American liberalism. The movement has had two very different visions. The first was Franklin Roosevelt's. A collective national effort to help all Americans participate in the country's economic and political life. Its symbol was two hands shaking, an affirmation of the binding strength of national unity.

The more recent liberal project has been centered on identity, affirming not unity, but difference, nurturing and celebrating not national identities, but subnational ones - women, Hispanics, Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian Americans.

Lilla notes a recurring image of identity liberalism is that of a prism refracting a single beam of light into its constituent colors, producing a rainbow. This says it all.

Immigration is the perfect issue on which Democrats could demonstrate that they care about national unity and identity and that they understand the voters for whom this is a core concern.

Look at the Democracy Fund's voter survey done in the wake of the 2016 election. If you compare two groups of voters, those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016 and those who voted for Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016, the single biggest divergence on policy between those two groups is immigration.

In other words, there are many Americans who are otherwise sympathetic to Democratic ideas, but on a few key issues, principally immigration, think the party is out of touch.

And they are right. Consider the facts. Legal immigration in America has expanded dramatically over the last four decades. In 1970, 4.7 percent of the American population was foreign-born. Today, it's 13.4%. That's a large shift in a small period of time. And it's natural that it has caused some anxiety.

And the anxiety is about more than just jobs. In his 2004 book, Who Are We?, the Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington asserted that America had more than just a founding ideology. It had a culture, one that had shaped it powerfully.

Would America be the America it is today if, in the 17th and 18th centuries, it had been several not by British Protestants, but by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics, Huntington asked. The answer is no. It would not be America. It would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil.

[10:05:07] Democrats must find a middle path on immigration. They can battle Trump's drastic solutions, but still speaking the language of national unity and identity. The company's motto after all is Out of Many, One, not the other way around.

For more, go to CNN.com/Fareed and read my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

Eleven years ago, a move was released that woke many people up to the fact that the earth was warming and humans were to blame. The film was called An Inconvenient Truth and its star was the Former Vice President Al Gore.

Gore, who had been shouting from the rooftops about climate change for decades, was finally getting heard. The film was awarded the Oscar for best documentary and Gore himself won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

Now, Gore and the filmmakers are back with a sequel, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power was released nationwide on Friday just two months after President Trump announced America's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

This week, I talked to Gore at an event hosted by the think tank New America and he begins here by talking about the state of the climate right now.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GORE: Here, in the US, in just the last seven years, we have had 11 once-in-a-thousand-year events. And they're now fairly commonplace.

In one year, last year, Houston, Texas had two one-in-500-year events and one once-in-a-1000-year event.

And the increase in air temperatures, India just set its all-time high temperature record. The hottest year ever measured globally was last year, the second hottest the year before, the third hottest the year before that, 16 of the 17 hottest have been in the last 17 years.

And every night, on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. And though the scientists have long connected the dots, the carbon polluters have mounted this lavishly funded rearguard action to pretend there's still a debate.

But again, mother nature is piercing that veil and convincing people that whether they want to use the terms global warming or climate crisis or not, they can see for themselves, with the evidence of their own senses, that things are really changing for the worse.

ZAKARIA: What are we seeing when we - we watched that very dramatic Greenland footage -

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GORE: In April of this year, the temperature over Greenland was much higher than normal. An engineer on one of the helicopters took a video during this temperature spike. Those are parts of the glacier just exploding with the high temperatures.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: What exactly are we watching and why is it so important?

GORE: Well, the land-based ice on Greenland would, if it all melted, raise sea level worldwide about 20 feet. The most threatened cities in the world by population are Kolkata, Mumbai, Guangzhou, you can go down the list many of them in Asia and South Asia.

By assets at risk, the number one city in the world at risk is Miami. I saw fish from the ocean swimming in the streets of Miami Beach on a sunny day simply because it was a high, high tide.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GORE: Kind of hard to pump the ocean.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GORE: Bangladesh, of course, has tens of millions of people in the low-lying delta areas. Some of them got used to rebuilding their lives every 20 years, now it's once every six or seven years. And so, the climate refugees moving northward have caused India to complete the largest steel fence in the world on their southern border with Bangladesh.

And the migrants from the hard-hit drought areas, climate-related droughts, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean, but in large regions of the Middle East and North Africa, right now, according to the United Nations, 20 million people are at risk of starvation, the largest humanitarian catastrophe since 1945 according to the UN.

In Iran, a couple of years ago, one of their cities had a heat index, the combination of heat and humidity, of 74 degrees Celsius/165 degrees Fahrenheit. And no human being can live for more than five or six hours outdoors in those conditions.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that, when you look at the future, you are able to maintain your optimism given the kind of pretty bleak picture of what you're describing happening right now and the reality that a large amount of this pollutant is already up there?

[10:10:10] GORE: Well, nothing compared to what would be up there if we don't stop it now, if we don't cut way back on it.

There was a famous economist who you may have known, Rudi Dornbusch who once said, things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen much faster than you thought they could.

We've seen that with these technology deployment curves. A decade ago, when my first movie came out, the solar deployment curve had a long flat line that was just beginning to slope upward. Now, it has shot way up.

The same thing happened with cell phones, the same thing has happened with other technologies.

That pattern also describes some political and social revolutions. I grew up in the south when the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum. Believe me, the resistance to civil rights was at least as ferocious as the resistance to the climate movement and solving the climate crisis.

In the anti-apartheid movement, Nelson Mandela once said it's always impossible until it's done. And we are right at that tipping point where the climate movement is concerned.

And the agreement 18 months ago in Paris was a truly historic breakthrough. Virtually every country in the world agreed to go to net zero global warming pollution by mid-century or soon thereafter as possible.

Since the Paris agreement, we've seen that powerful signal sent to investors, to industry, to business.

India, again, just announced, two months ago, that in only 13 years, 100 percent of their new cars and trucks are going to have to be electric vehicles. That's faster than what the United States is doing.

And we're seeing dramatic changes like that, driven by economics and driven by the awareness dawning on millions more people every day that this is for real. And we have an obligation to our kids and to ourselves because it's beginning to affect us.

This city, here in New York City, in the first movie, the single most controversial scene perhaps was the prediction from the scientists that the World Trade 9/11 Memorial Center would be flooded by the ocean water with a combination of sea level rise and storm surge.

And they said that's ridiculous. But when Super Storm Sandy came from the Atlantic, it crossed ocean waters that were 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal and it became very powerful, very broad, filled with moisture, and the World Trade Center site flooded many years ahead of predictions. (END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: So, those were Gore's thoughts about the Earth's climate. What does he have to say about the political climate in America today? He doesn't hold back there either. When we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:17:25] ZAKARIA: Why are America's politics so broken? Is there a single cause? Are there solutions? Former Vice President Al Gore has some very blunt words about Washington's dysfunctions and corruption.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: There are a lot of people who look at the Trump administration and say, you know nothing is getting done, there's incompetence, there's chaos, but it has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, Pruitt, the energy -

GORE: EPA -

ZAKARIA: The EPA administrator has said that he intends to rollback as many of the Obama era regulations as he can. We don't quite know what the Department of Energy, but apparently they're also making efforts.

How significant is this rollback that is taking place under the Trump administration? Does it worry you?

GORE: Yes, it does. Some of it is being stopped by the Congress. The so-called methane rule is defeated in the Senate. States are countermanding a lot of this and local governments are as well.

But they're trying to codify some of these destructive changes to eliminate environmental regulations.

Pruitt just announced that he wants to lift the rule preventing mercury and other pollution in waterways that feed drinking water supplies. It's really almost incomprehensible.

But here is the good news, Fareed. There is a law of physics that often operates in politics as well. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

In reaction to Trump and his cadre of "rogues" gallery of climate deniers, there is a reaction now that is producing the greatest upsurge in climate activism and activism for better healthcare and so forth that I've ever seen.

And we're seeing all over the country, mayors step up and say, no, we're still in the Paris agreement. In the president's speech withdrawing from Paris, he said he was the president of Pittsburgh, not Paris, the next day, the mayor of Pittsburgh said, no, we're still in the Paris agreement and announced a goal of going to 100% renewable energy.

ZAKARIA: What do you make of the chaos in the White House? Have you ever seen anything like this?

GORE: Never. Never. And from my point of view, the worst of it is that it's producing constant distractions from big tasks that we have before us. And, of course, the biggest of all is solving the climate crisis.

[10:20:08] Look, this is this is for real. This is for real. Were we not to take a hold of it and solve it, the consequences would be too catastrophic to even imagine.

ZAKARIA: You were a politician for many, many years. It feels like American politics is broken. It's so polarized, but also so dysfunctional. Nothing gets done.

When you look at it and you think about your time in American politics, what do you think has happened?

GORE: Well, I think that our democracy has been hacked by big money long before Putin hacked our democracy. And I think the change is connected to a dramatic transformation in the last third of the 20th century, in the nature of the information ecosystem in which our democracy lives.

In the last third of the 20th century, television eclipsed the printing press, gaining more adherents in the early 1960s and then by the middle 70s. It was so thoroughly dominant that politicians had to begin devoting the majority of their time to begging special interest for money, so they could buy the 30-second TV commercials.

And these 30-second television ads are not the Federalist papers, they're emotion-based hot button appeals, most of them negative. And it has really had a destructive effect on America's political culture and on the operations of our democracy.

Now, there is another transition now underway toward Internet-based media and social media. This year, for the first time, aggregate advertising revenue on the Internet surpassed advertising revenue on television in the broadcast satellite cable forms.

The big advertisers still prefer television, but that too is beginning to change.

ZAKARIA: So, you think social media might provide a way out of this bind?

GORE: I do. One of the reasons why the Republican healthcare legislation failed, of course, we credit John McCain and Senator Collins and Senator Murkowski, OK, fine.

But I think the real reason that failed - it was a bad legislation by my lights, but the real reason it failed was that there was a popular uprising.

And it was a complicated set of issues. But these groups that organized on the Internet and then crucially met up together physically and - you have to have clicks and bricks as they say in the business world. You can connect with people on the Internet, but you have to have that physical contact where people form the deeper longer-lasting ties.

They moved the political sentiment in this country to the point where it was political suicide to vote for that legislation.

ZAKARIA: So, using this extraordinary new social media and appealing to people on the basis of this - the most pressing issue that you believe faces the world and the United States, wouldn't it make sense for you to run for president?

GORE: Well, I'm a recovering politician. No longer I go without a relapse, the less likely one becomes.

ZAKARIA: But, surely, you must think you're - you're spending your life trying to make these - to have this impact. You'll have more impact as president of the United States?

GORE: You're pressing your argument. I'm flattered, thank you. But I'm doing what it feels to me that I'm supposed to be doing and I'm grateful to have found a way to serve the public interest outside of the political system.

ZAKARIA: Al Gore, pleasure to have you on, sir.

GORE: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Gore's new film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power opened Friday around the US.

Now, I have another documentary to tell you about. Mine. My latest special, Why Trump Won? Will premiere on Monday at 9 PM. It's my account of all the signs that all of us missed, including me, in the run up to the 2016 presidential election. Don't miss it.

And we'll be back in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:28:38] ZAKARIA: Now, for our What in the World segment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is fake news.

CHUCK TODD, MSNBC ANCHOR: Fake News.

DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: They have been fake news for a long time.

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Come up with a sturdy example of fake news.

TRUMP: The fake news media -

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Lambasting real news outlets as fake news -

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: The fake news peddlers -

TRUMP: You are fake news.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Well, here's the real bad news. You ain't seen nothing yet. A big data analysis of online media released this summer by three communications professors shows that the production of fake news articles has been rapidly growing.

Now, to be clear, fake news is not news you don't like. It is content that is intentionally created to mislead the public and is untrue.

And the researchers come to a chilling conclusion. When news organizations take the time to fact check fake stories, they just draw more attention to them.

The authors argue that rebutting fake news doesn't work and newsrooms could better use their resources covering other more important real news stories.

But it gets worse. If we can't always believe what we read online, at least we can still believe what we see, right? Wrong.

In July, three computer researchers working at the University of Washington used artificial intelligence to generate a fake video of former President Barack Obama.

The researchers processed 17 hours of high definition footage of Obama's actual presidential addresses and created this remarkably photorealistic video. The words are Obama's, but can you tell which of these four videos is fake.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[10:30:14] BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The results are clear. America's businesses have created 14.5 million new jobs over 75 straight months.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Actually, all of them are fake.

Back in 2016, another group of researchers created a powerful algorithm, which allows actors to create real-time facial reenactments of any public figure.

Their stated goal was to create fake videos in a photorealistic fashion, such that it is virtually impossible to notice the manipulations. The results are striking.

Here's George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. In these examples, actors make facial gestures which are animated in real-time with results that are almost seamless. What this all means is that we are rapidly approaching the point where a public figure could be made to say anything.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: Most of us don't get our healthcare through the marketplace.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: The ability to create fully convincing fake videos brings up some important questions for consumers of news. On the plus side, I suppose it could lead to a healthy suspicion about all the media we see, which until now we've taken for granted.

But let's be clear, it will soon become so easy to make a fake video that they may always be some doubt on all videos, even authentic ones.

As "Business Insider" notes, even if a video isn't fake, a politician caught in a lie or, say, on an Access Hollywood bust making obscene statements could make the argument he's a victim of a fake video.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Grab them by the (EXPLETIVE DELETED). You can do anything.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: There are some technical solutions being floated, including adding digital watermarks on videos to track the true origin of the media, but ultimately I hope that this makes the public more aware that the credibility of the source matters.

The media organizations like CNN and "The New York Times" and the "Washington Post" that have standards and checks perform a crucial public role as gatekeepers sorting through facts and fakes.

In the meantime, you'll need to be evermore wary of that article your crazy uncle sent you or that video your college roommate posted on Facebook.

Up next, what happened in the rest of the world this week. We'll be back in a moment to discuss with a terrific panel.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:36:43] ZAKARIA: All right. Yet another news-filled week in the world, so there is much to talk about with today's panel. Gideon Rosen is the editor of "Foreign Affairs"; Dan Senor is a cofounder of the think tank The Foreign Policy Initiative; and Julia Ioffe is a staff writer of "The Atlantic".

Dan, I've got to start with you. You are better plugged into the Congressional Republicans than almost anyone. Look at all the things that have happened and it does feel as though you are beginning to see a Republican revolt. That is, senators and congressmen - particularly senators feeling they can defy Trump and not pay a price. DAN SENOR, CO-FOUNDER, THE FOREIGN POLICY INITIATIVE: Yes. You see it in legislation. So, the sanctions bill that was primarily focused on Russia was extraordinary.

I mean, for years, Congress has been passing sanctions bills, but they always give the president - going back 40 years, really, they give the president some flexibility, some sort of presidential waiver because he's in charge of implementing foreign policy and you want to give the president flexibility to waive the sanctions or pull back from the sanctions.

What the Congressional Republicans said is we don't trust you, President Trump, to actually make that decision to run your own foreign policy with Russians. So, if the president wants to lift the sanctions, he has to go back to Congress. It's in the legislation. Nothing like this has ever been passed before that kind of constrained.

President Trump started to talk about Jeff Sessions over the last ten days and how he should go. A Republican Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Charles Grassley put out a tweet said, if you get rid of Sessions, there's going to no confirmation hearing for a new attorney general.

There's the intelligence committee hearings - investigation. There is the Judiciary Committee investigation. They have the president's son in conversation with the committee under threat of subpoena.

This is six months into the presidency. This is the party that is in power in the White House and they're putting these kinds of constraints on the president.

So, rhetorically, Republicans have not been out front as much as I would like them to be over the last few months in terms of calling out Trump. But if you look at what they've done legislatively and structurally, there's a real sense that they're boxing him in.

ZAKARIA: But he's going to West Virginia to remind people, I still have my base.

SENOR: Right. He and a number of people around him believe he's more in touch and more connected with the base of the Republican Party are - the base of the Republican Party than members of Congress.

ZAKARIA: Is that changing?

SENOR: I think that's changing. Just you see it in the approval ratings going down. I still think he has a deep bond with these voters, but I think that's sustainable only for so long. And again, as these numbers come down, I think Republicans are feeling more and more comfortable challenging him.

ZAKARIA: When you look at the Russia policy at this point, does the United States have a Russia policy because it does feel like it's totally paralyzed. Trump is boxed in. A bunch of Congressional hawks are running the policy with the Democrats gleefully joining in, simply to constrain Trump?

JULIA IOFFE, STAFF WRITER, "THE ATLANTIC": Well, but then you have Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying that he's not going to tap the congressionally allocated funds counter Russian ISIS propaganda.

He wants to scrub democracy promotion from the State Department's message, which is great for Russia that that kind of stuff has always been a major irritant for Russia. They believe that democracy promotion is just a fig leaf for regime change, which they've always been afraid of.

So, it just feels like it's people fighting over the wheel and there's no one policy on anything. It depends who in the administration on North Korea, on Iran, on Russia on any given day of the week.

[10:40:01] ZAKARIA: On North Korea, for example, Tillerson said something remarkable. For the first time, I can recall since the Clinton administration, he said we're not trying to depose the regime, we don't want regime change, we want to talk to you, we're just interested in your nuclear weapons.

IOFFE: But then, two weeks ago, you had CIA Director Mike Pompeo at the Aspen Security Forum saying that regime change was on the table.

So, I don't know - and it certainly - there's is not a policy message coming from the commander-in-chief. I don't think he - again, it's what - who is the last person to talk to him and to convince him of a certain position.

ZAKARIA: Russia policy, what do you think?

GIDEON ROSE, EDITOR, "FOREIGN AFFAIRS": Well, this is this very strange period in American foreign policy history because you have an administration at the top that's essentially like a pirate crew that's come in, a skeleton crew running a big booty ship, big prize ship they've taken over, but the ship is going in a certain direction and they want to reverse course, but they can't control the ship because they don't have enough people. So, the pirate acting at the top in the White House is sort of sitting there, raging, saying, we're going to do this and the rest of the ship's crew is either sitting around stalling or going in the same direction.

So, you have Trump in the White House and the government. The American foreign policy is going on in autopilot regardless of the White House. That's what Mattis and McMaster, to some extent, and to Tillerson trying to do.

But Trump is up there talking. The question is, there's no - it's like the dollar bill. There's a little eye at the top of the pyramid, but it's not connected to the actual thing.

History is going to look at this period and say there was a weird time when Trump was in charge in the White House, but then there was American foreign policy before and after. And there's going to be no continuity.

ZAKARIA: Why this going after McMaster?

ROSE: Right. Which is -

ZAKARIA: National security advisor.

ROSE: It's amazing that he has now become the focus - everyone over the last few days said John Kelly's first test was Scaramucci. What's he going to do about Scaramucci. That wasn't his first test.

His first test is McMaster because he and McMaster are very close. John Kelly knows McMaster is eminently qualified for this position. And the idea that he is being attacked from within - make no mistake about it. What is going on right now, the social media campaign against the Master is being ginned up by people very close to certain power centers in the White House.

ZAKARIA: Steve Bannon.

ROSE: Yes. And Kelly's challenge is going to be - it's one thing to take on Scaramucci. It's another thing to take on Steve Bannon. And this tension between the two, as I think, is really important to get sorted and get sorted quickly because if it doesn't it's going to be a huge blow to Kelly.

ZAKARIA: Quickly. Venezuela, seems to be imploding. Is there any lesson to be learned from the Venezuela?

ROSE: Venezuela is what happens when you have Donald Trump without James Madison, right? When you have an authoritarian demagogue by personality, but no constitutional structures keeping him in place. So, we should all be thanking the founders for the system they set up, which is proven -

SENOR: Ingenious.

ROSE: It has proven to be so amazing. If men were angels, you wouldn't need a system like this, but we know men aren't angels and that's why we have the system we have.

IOFFE: It's been six months.

ZAKARIA: Just to know one thing, that is not a Gideon Rose quote, that is actually James Madison's Federalist Papers.

Donald Trump asked in West Virginia if there were any Russians over there. Well, I'm going to ask that same question because Julie Ioffe came to America from Russia. So, we actually have a Russian in the house and we're going to talk about Russia, but also immigration, the new immigration plan when we get back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:47:40] ZAKARIA: And we are back with Gideon Rose, Julia Ioffe, and Dan Senor. Julia, you are, in fact, a Russian. Sort of. You're an American, but of Russian origin. What did you make of Trump's immigration plan? IOFFE: It's kind of more of the same in slightly different packaging. It's the same thing that he's been promising to his base since he started running two years ago. It's a very restrictive - in one shape or another - immigration policy. They've been going after Green Cards and H1B visas also since the beginning because of people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

It's interesting because Melania Trump was here originally on an H1B visa. In fact, she worked illegally under a tourist visa at first. But that doesn't seem to matter.

And when you ask Trump supporters, they don't care because she's a different - she's the right kind of immigrant. She is a beautiful white woman from Europe and we like those, even though she doesn't have a college degree. I don't know how she would have done under this point system.

But I think a lot of this stuff is trying to find kind of a formula that will provide the right kind of demographic engineering for this base.

ZAKARIA: Gideon, what strikes about it is, nobody I think would object to a shift in the composition of immigration that is more skills based, less family unification. It's probably too lopsided.

But this is achieved by dramatically cutting back on immigration at a time when everybody thinks that the great advantage United States has compared to Europe, for example, compared to Japan is. We have young workers. And the reason we have young workers is because we have immigrants.

ROSE: Yes. You can make a good case actually. Canada has a very successful immigration policy that's based on somewhat different principles than family reunification for the main thing. You can make a case there's a good policy reason for considering alternate ways of structuring your intake your immigrants.

But reducing them dramatically for the legal immigrants is a different question from the illegal immigrants and it's one that doesn't seem geared towards successful economic future and dynamic thriving future for the country.

On the other hand, politically, as your column points out, it might actually make some sense.

IOFFE: It's also - I have to say there is a moral question here because part of this proposal, like all past proposals or executive actions, drastically cuts down on the number of refugees, which is, I would argue, a moral and cruel, especially if you're pursuing kind of isolationist foreign policy and you're not going out into the world and trying to help these countries fix the situations they're in, so that they're not creating these massive refugees.

[10:50:22] ZAKARIA: I've got to just mention your tweet, which I loved, which was, you said, when I came to this country, I couldn't speak English; now I get paid to write it. IOFFE: Right. But that was one of the proposed qualifications that if you come to this country as an immigrant, you have to speak English. English is a pretty easy language to learn. I think most people could pick it up in a few months.

ZAKARIA:

ZAKARIA: You think we're actually seeing a lot more bipartisanship than people realize.

SENOR: It's extraordinary. On policy matters, with the exception of the Russia sanctions bill, on policy matters, there's fierce partisanship. But on constraining the Trump administration, there is incredible bipartisanship, like we've never seen before.

The idea that the chairman - the Republican chairman and the Democratic ranking member of the intelligence committee, the judiciary committee are locking arms and they're bringing up Comey to testify and they're bringing up different officials from the administration to have conversations about isolating the president.

McConnell and Paul Ryan could shut these investigations down tomorrow if they wanted to, but they're not. They are working closely with Schumer and Pelosi and Hoyer on these. I think it's encouraging. The system is working.

ZAKARIA: Are you encouraged?

IOFFE: I'll believe it when I see it. I think we're starting to see some of it, but a lot of this conversation I think is, to me, redolent of 2016, of Paul Ryan saying this is textbook racism, but or I don't endorse him, but I'll vote for him.

So, the only reason that the Senate healthcare bill didn't pass was only three Republicans peeled off. That's not a lot for a bill that was scored to show that it was actually quite a cruel bill, would deprive a lot of people of health insurance that already have it. Despite its lack of popularity, only three Republicans peeled off.

So, we're some of it - hold on. We're seeing some of it and it's encouraging, but I don't know how it's going to continue playing out, especially if the Republican Party became very anti-establishment in 2016. And then here they have the establishment locking down the guy, who is anti-establishment, how is that going to play with the base.

SENOR: Every effort President Trump has made to impede these investigations of him have backfired. Every single thing he's done. And it's largely because Republican leaders in Congress have been a check on him. I mean, that's more - that's something.

ROSE: The clock started ticking when Mueller was appointed. Trump is a big tree. Robert Mueller and his team are small axe sharpened to cut him down and that's what's going to happen over time.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS. An American red state is taking lessons from a so-called socialist Scandinavian country. I will explain. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:57:02] ZAKARIA: Seventy-two years ago today, an American B29 bomber dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The world's first use of an atomic bomb came less than a month after such a weapon was first tested on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexican desert.

This brings me to my question. When did the United States last test a nuclear weapon? 1962, 1983, 1992 or 2003? Stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer.

I don't have a book of the week today because I want to tell you about my latest documentary, Why Trump Won? It will premiere right here on Monday night at 9 PM on CNN and CNN International.

Trump's victory shocked the world, including me. So, how did we all miss the signals.

(VIDEO PLAYS)

ZAKARIA: How did he win? That's what I dig into on Monday night 9 PM in Why Trump won?

And now for the last look. Prison cells like dorm rooms, guards happily chatting with inmates, prisoners wearing civilian clothes. No, this is not some Scandinavian fantasy prison. It is right here in the United States in North Dakota.

This is the Missouri River Correctional Center, fenceless minimum- security prison near Bismarck, North Dakota known as the farm. In fact, all three of the states run prisons are experimenting with similar strategies to improve outcomes for all, while also improving quality of life.

As Mother Jones reported, the number of inmates in solitary confinement is down by two-thirds. And with that decrease, inmate violence has dropped. The Dakotans were inspired by Scandinavia - Norway, in fact, which is known for the most humane prisons in the world.

Looking for a way to slow the growth of their prison population and deemphasize solitary confinement, a group of North Dakotan prison officials visited Halden, Norway's open-air maximum-security prison in 2015, and incorporated many of its features and philosophies.

Here at GPS, we often look to other nations for solutions to crises from gun control to education. Indeed, loyal viewers may remember our segment on the very same Halden prison in Norway in 2015.

Maybe North Dakota, a state that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, will end up showing the president and all of us a way to really make America great again.

The correct answer to my GPS challenge question is C. The US last conducted a nuclear weapons test in September 1992 at an underground site in Nevada. The United States had performed over 1,000 nuclear tests, while the Soviet Union performed more than 700 since its first one in 1949.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.