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Inside Politics

Trump and Allies Defend Mental Fitness; Stability Questions and the Midterm Elections; Trump on Dreamers Deal; Midterm Election Outlook for GOP. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired January 08, 2018 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:18] JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thanks for sharing your day with us.

Eleven days until the government runs out of money. Tough decisions to make about spending priorities, yet Washington consumed by a debate over President Trump's mental fitness.

Plus, Steve Bannon says sorry, sort of, for trashing the president's son in a new book. But forget about forgiveness.

And, Oprah 2020? Friends tell CNN that last night was no accident. She is actively considering, they say, a run for president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OPRAH WINFREY: What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.

I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon!

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: We'll get to that in a moment.

But we begin with decision time in Washington. A possible government shutdown a little more than a week away. A giant immigration fight front and center, not to mention several pressing global challenges. But, the back to work buzz this Monday isn't so much about the difficult policy choices here in Washington. Instead, it's about whether you see President Trump as he sees himself, as a very stable genius, or whether you see him as mentally unfit for the job.

Now, this debate isn't new, but the volume sure is. Here's how one of my colleagues, Brian Stelter, so cleverly puts it. "The tiptoeing is over. The whispers are turning into shouts. President Trump's fitness for office is now the top story in the country. That's partly due to Trump's behavior, partly due to Wolff's book, partly due to Trump's reaction to the book."

Now, that reaction included these weekend tweets from Camp David. "My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart." The president went on to say, "I went from very successful businessman to top TV star to president of the United States, on my first try. I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius and a very stable genius at that."

CNN's Abby Phillip is live at the White House. We start there this hour.

On this Monday, Abby, what are we hearing from the West Wing today, more talk of the president's state of mind, more trashing the book or can we possibly maybe get back to work, the agenda?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, it's the constant tug of war with this White House, palace intrigue or policy. With the president leaving just in a few minutes for Tennessee, where he's going to be talking to the American Farm Bureau, that's going to be a really policy-heavy stop for him. An opportunity for them to perhaps change the subject away from this book that has really consumed the White House and consumed the president's own time.

Now, the president, while he might be about to be talking about some truly -- sort of the broccoli of policy making, infrastructure and broadband Internet for rural communities, he's also keenly interested in his White House aides and his allies pushing back as hard as possible on this book. This is not a president who is one to let attacks go unchallenged and he's clearly looking for his aides and his -- and is outside advisers to go to bat for him on this book.

John.

KING: And as you mentioned, the president wants to see his allies, his aides, anyone who likes him on TV defending him.

We're learning a new term today from Axios, quote/unquote, executive time, to give the president time to check up on that. Explain that.

PHILLIP: Well, John, Axios got a hold of some of the private information about where -- how the president spends his time. The press and the public gets a sanitized version of that. The sort of short form version of his schedule. And what the private schedule shows is that between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., the president has been spending more time in the residence. Now, ,that time aides told Axios has been dedicated to the president watching television and phoning aides and outside advisers. Sometimes the White House notes he can be doing the work of governance here, talking to lawmakers, for example. But the fact that the president is in the residence a lot of that time has been spent watching television. And we know that in part because he's also spent that time tweeting, John.

KING: Yes, he does kind of do that quite a bit.

Abby Phillip live at the White House for us.

Abby, thank you so much.

Just moments ago on "The View," the talk show, Senator Lindsey Graham gave his two sends on this big debate. Take a listen. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE, "THE VIEW": Do you think he's like really smart and a stable genius?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: I think this, if he doesn't call himself a genius, nobody else will. Look --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: It's funny.

With us today to share their reporting and their insights, Margaret Talev of "Bloomberg," CNN's Manu Raju, Olivier Knox with "Yahoo! News," and Mary Katharine Ham with "The Federalist."

Stay on that shot. Can you guys drop the banner for me. Subtle. Subtle. Let's just get it out of the way.

MARY KATHARINE HAM, "THE FEDERALIST": Yes. Go Dogs. (INAUDIBLE).

KING: Go Dogs. All right. That's good. That's good.

Now I've been on executive time the last two weeks. Help me out in this conversation here. I've been enjoying my executive time the last two weeks.

I was actually watching as a consumer of news last week when this all started. And you had -- we know this from the week one of the Trump presidency. You k now, he's erratic. He's different. He behaves differently. He's impetuous. He's impulsive. But the idea that you would have a public conversation, a psychiatrist actually brought into brief members of Congress from Yale University making a diagnosis, I guess over the television, that the president is mentally unfit. There's great theater to that. It's great cable television conversation. What impact is it having on the town?

[12:05:24] MARGARET TALEV, "BLOOMBERG": This has been an absolutely explosive situation inside the White House. The president, as we can all tell from Twitter, but also in conversations behind the scenes of aides, has been irate about all of this. You saw the blowback in terms of the approach to Steve Bannon. And you saw it on Twitter this weekend with him declaring himself to be a genius and very stable.

But here's the flip side of it. They came into the new year with the passage of the tax package. They're heading into the next few weeks ahead of the State of the Union wanting to be on the same page with the Republicans on welfare reform, on infrastructure, to have a plan, a game plan and a strategy. It's going to be a tough midterm year. We know all the variables.

This has been the cloud hanging over all of this. And what you have now is just an intensification for the Republicans in Congress of the situation where it's like, do we publicly express our misgivings about the president or do we double down and support him, right? And the choice, as we saw at Camp David with that bizarre vision (ph) in front of that podium is, all of that Republican leadership in the House and the Senate, you know, as dismayed as they may be concerned by the revelations in this book, dismayed about the president's reaction on Twitter saying we're -- we've come this far. We need to stick by him and try to minimize the public fallout of it.

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it was also remarkable the fact that he tweeted about his mental state while he was at Camp David, in a time where he was trying to get his whole party on the same page, come up with an election year agenda, discuss their challenges running into the midterm elections. And rather than talking about the shared agenda, he's tweeting that he is a very stable genius, obviously diverting from that and then holding that news conference where, of course, the focus and the large part was about his mental stability.

You know for -- but Margaret is absolutely right, for the Republicans in Congress, they view a lot of this as noise. A huge distraction for sure. But if they can do what they can to get something else done, maybe they don't get anything else done, but at least they've got tax reform done. They can focus their re-election on that key issue, getting tax reform done, and hope that voters at the end of the day ignore some of that noise.

KING: Yes, noise. But if the president's approval rating stays here, if Democrats like this debate or are energized by this debate, and if Republicans aren't sure what to do, a Trump loyalist is all in for the president, other Republicans aren't sure what to do, that's a recipe -- it's only January -- but that is a recipe for a 2018 blowout.

OLIVIER KNOX, "YAHOO! NEWS": Yes, I mean this is a -- this is delighting a subset of the Democratic base, people who don't have a problem with long distance diagnosis.

KING: Right.

KNOX: You might want to go online and search for Terri Schiavo and tell me how you feel about long distance diagnosis.

KING: That's an excellent point. That's an excellent point. And the next president, whether Donald Trump gets two terms or whether there's a Democratic president, celebrate today -- celebrate today, prepare if it's you tomorrow.

KNOX: But it is -- it is an enormously explosive issue. And I was drifting down memory lane -- I know you love it when I do that -- but I covered two times when the 25th Amendment was actually invoked by a sitting president. It was George W. Bush's two colonoscopies in 2002, 2007.

KING: Right.

KNOX: And we've forgotten this but that White House worked enormously hard to portray it as a routine thing. Yes, Cheney will technically be in charge for a couple of hours, but it was announced casually during the briefing. And so the -- even under a perfectly understandable medial situation, this was considered explosive inside a White House that was functioning more effectively than this one. So I can only -- I can only imagine what the mood is like right now in the - in the West Wing as they contemplate this.

KING: That's an excellent point. I do love history. Don't -- don't -- don't give me that look. I do love history.

You were about to weigh in.

HAM: Yes, I think there's a couple things going on here. One, it's a vicious cycle where when he tweets, then TV talks about him tweeting about this particular issue and then he gets mad that people are talking about it again and then he'll probably tweet again. So that's -- that's sort of the issue.

I think something we're seeing more of now is even Trump supporters feeling a little bit like the fight in the sort of constant upheaval is a lot and maybe they just want a normal -- more normal functioning thing.

The other issues is, look, we went through a pretty rigorous process whereby we decide, as the American people, whether someone is fit to be president, right? And many people, despite having issues with is temperament, voted for him anyway. So he is the president and many of them will feel like this is just an attempt to sort of tear him down. Nonetheless, he continues to play into that cycle.

And the -- one last thing. I do think there is a danger of confirmation bias here because a lot of people in this town had these concerns about the president before he became the president. I was one of them. And now because he is an eccentric man and they are an eccentric family and operation, you can believe almost anything if you're inclined to that someone puts out there and I think we should be really careful about vetting exactly each of these stories and not sort of taking what we want to believe.

[12:10:02] KING: Right. And the interesting part is, to the point everyone's made, is that very -- this is a very important 10 days. Keep the government open. Decide on spending priorities. Some other related decisions to make about that. Then an immigration debate that could carry over until the end of February, I guess, where most people thing, if you're going to deal with it, try to deal with it, as part of the spending bills in the next 10 days, and yet the president's cabinet, or the president's supporters, go out on the Sunday shows. Maybe they'd like to talk about spending levels. Maybe they'd like to talk about North Korea and South Korea are actually going to talk tomorrow. There's a big decision to come out the Iran deal. What are you going to do about that? Are you going to blow it up? Are you going to try in some way to change it instead? As part of the -- they get to some of that, but right off the top of the conversation, they deal with this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NIKKI HALEY, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.: No one questions the stability of the president.

REX TILLERSON, SECRETARY OF STATE: I've never questioned his mental fitness. I have no reason to question his mental fitness.

MIKE POMPEO, CIA DIRECTOR: President Trump is completely capable of working alongside of us and leading us.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: And I've enjoyed working with him. I don't think he's crazy. I think he's had a very successful 2017.

STEPHEN MILLER, SENIOR POLICY ADVISER: The reality is, is the president is a political genius.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: It is remarkable. I mean, you know, with the exception of Stephen Miller, I don't think anyone else woke up Sunday morning wanting to have that conversation.

TALEV: It's January 8th of the -- it's not even the second year. We're coming right up on the one-year anniversary of the inauguration. And that's what's so startling to me about this is that of course there's some hyperventilation among some people who already have decided that the president should be discredited. Of course there are issues that can and should be raised about this book.

But the White House's approach, which is to -- criticizing some of the author's history or individual parts of the book that they think can't be validated doesn't change the fact that a tremendous number of people inside this White House saw fit to talk to this author very openly. Sometimes they thought it was off the record, but what have you, about their misgivings. And these broad stroke themes about chaos, about division, about questions, about temperament, about Russia, about the internal massive strife and division over how to handle the Russia meetings, and now the Mueller investigation, all of that bears out. We knew about all of it to some extent before. The book amplifies it. And these are problems that the president takes with him like chains around his ankles going into the new year.

KING: Right. And I think Olivier's point about long-distance diagnosis is a very important one. But everybody at this table has heard from people who work, as close as we are at this table, to the president of the United States, about questions about his temperament, questions about his rashness, questions about, you know, his lashing out, questions about his not putting the phone down and thinking maybe for 20 or 30 successes before he does this.

The interesting question for me is, how does it play out? Now, it's an election year. You mentioned the pressure is on Republicans. Do you just try to avoid these questions? Well, you can't.

Listen to Charlie Dent. Now, he's a moderate. He's been anti-Trump from the beginning. He's retiring from Pennsylvania. But there are a dozen, two dozen, somewhere in the ballpark of congressmen like Charlie Dent, and congresswomen, running for reelection in tough districts, in a tough year who are going to get asked this question. Do they say this?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. CHARLIE DENT (R), PENNSYLVANIA: If you have to stand up and say that you're stable, I guess that raises questions about your stability. I'm going to leave it to the mental health professionals to determine his fitness, but I certainly think some of those comments and some of the behavior has called into question his fitness for sure.

KING: If you're trying to preserve your House majority, which means you have to win in districts like Charlie Dent's, that doesn't help.

RAJU: Yes, that's hard. And it's also, for -- even for Senate Republicans who are running in -- may have primaries and then have to worry about their general elections, you have -- do you side with Trump in the primary and how do you deal with the general election.

Dean Heller, for one, in Nevada, has a primary opponent from the right who is latching himself very closely to Trump. If he wins that primary, he's going to face a general election where he's going to have to distance himself from the president. How do you deal with it when you especially have all these questions about the president's fitness? It's going to be fascinating to watch these -- this balancing act play out.

KNOX: And this is -- this is a bit of a footnote to this whole debate, but whoever gave Axios a schedule, the secret schedule, the real schedule, I would say, that shows a diminished -- that supposedly shows that he's doing less work --

TALEV: Yes.

KNOX: Did the president zero favors.

KING: At this moment.

And, again, for those of you out there who say this is just the mainstream media, think about what Olivier just said, somebody who has access to the president's private schedule, meaning somebody in the president's inner circle shared it, so it's --

TALEV: A trusted adviser.

KING: A trusted -- yes, a trusted -- yes, right.

KNOX: I mean it's a document that's secret enough that in the past couple of administrations, at the end of the day it ends up in what's called the burn bag --

KING: Right.

KNOX: Which is where the classified documents go. It's that -- it was that sensitive. I don't know if it still is for these guys. Clearly at least not to one person.

KING: And it tells you this conversation is -- yes, they're having an interesting day at the White House trying to track that one down. Up next, the president says he wants Congress, that means you, to pay

for his big, beautiful wall as part of any deal to protect the dreamers. Will Democrats give in or could they actually force a government shutdown?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:18:55] KING: Welcome back.

The same president who says let's be bipartisan now says this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We want the wall. The wall's going to happen or we're not going to have DACA. We want to get rid of chain migration. Very important. And we want to get rid of the lottery system. In addition to that, we want some money for funding. We need some additional border security.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, the complications, if you've been paying attention, to getting a spending deal are many, but a fix for the so-called dreamers is -- dreamers -- there's a little Boston accent for you -- is the bright red dividing line. Both Democrats and Republicans seem to think a DACA deal is the domino that will topple all the others. The problem, the two sides very, very far apart. Divisions inside the two caucuses remain unsettled. Sketches of a bipartisan deal have been rejected already in the House. And the dealmaker president's opening bid may drive Democrats away from the negotiating table.

CNN's Phil Mattingly with the latest from Capitol Hill.

Phil, do the president's comments this weekend at Camp David, with the Republican leaders around them, do they help or did they hurt?

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: They didn't help necessarily. Look, I think what came out of Camp David that was beneficial is Republican leaders kind of coalescing around the idea that they don't have time to waste. This I s something that's going to have to come by January 19th if, as you noted, they want to get a spending deal, if they want to deal with CHIP, if they want to deal with the 702 reauthorization, DACA isn't something that can wait until March. So there's an agreement upon that.

[12:20:12] And there's also agreement upon the fact that whence this deal is made, that Democrats are very clearly going to have to be involved. But, John, if you listen to what the president just said there, whether it's the wall, whether it's family migration or, as he calls it, chain migration where legal residents petition to have family members come over, whether it's the visa lottery, all of those things are significantly problematic for the Democrats that are in the room right now.

The reality is this, there are places where a deal can be made. Even on something like the wall, that Democrats could probably agree to. But the White House signoff here is crucial for Republicans to be able to move forward and that means the president, in at least some level, is going to have to back off to some degree those demands he made at Camp David, John.

KING: And, Phil, as you well know, beyond any policy calculations, every decision made over the next couple of weeks, in the next couple months, will be made in the context of November 2018, the midterm elections. You have some great reporting on the majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, laying out a reality check while up at Camp David on this year's elections. Give us some of that.

MATTINGLY: Yes, all of the participants this weekend were giving various presentations, whether it was Paul Ryan on welfare reforms, the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy giving presentations on kind of the state of the political map. And I think one of the things that was brought up to me by people that were in the room was that they were reality-based. That the discussions were constructively, but they were also looking at the fact that the numbers are bad, the headwinds are real, the history for a first term president going into the midterm shows that things are going to be very problematic.

Now, one of the pitches from the majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was that they're recognizing this early. And he's somebody who understands this quite well. Remember, he was a key player, a key architect in putting together the 2010 Republican group that ended up taking the majority from Democrats. So what he's saying is there are lessons to be learned here. And one of the key elements here is, what's the president's role here He's not going to be wanted or necessarily needed in every single race, in every single district, in every single state, but he can help on the fund-raising side. For some people it will be campaigning.

So what you saw was Republican leaders trying to lay out for the president specifically how they can help, how they can try and turn aside what at this point everybody is willing to acknowledge will be a very difficult map. A lot of head winds going into that November election, John.

KING: Great reporting. Phil Mattingly live on Capitol Hill.

Phil, appreciate it.

Let's come into the room. It will be interesting. I want to talk first about the immigration debate. It will be interesting, when the president's told, we don't want you here. We don't want you there. We don't want you there. Does he just say, OK, I get it, that's the way it works? Both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, I go back to the Clinton days, they get it. Will this president?

But let -- I want to start with this immigration issue. It's a defining issue of the Trump presidential campaign. It is also an issue on which the president has sent mixed signals. He wants to protect the dreamers. He says he has a heart. He says he has compassion. And originally he was going to cut a deal with the Democrats that didn't include the wall. Now he says he has to have the wall and he has to have an end to chain migration and then to the draft lottery. Can they -- is that a deal that can be made?

RAJU: No. Absolutely not because he needs Democratic support in the Senate and they have 51 senators right now. They need nine -- Republican senators. They need nine Democrats to vote for something.

KING: Right. Let me interrupt. I don't mean to. But the Democrats wouldn't go for the tax cut, but are Democrat -- are Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly. The immigration issue plays well, especially out in the Midwest and out --

RAJU: Sure.

KING: In the mountain west.

RAJU: Maybe they can pick off one or two of those, but there are nine.

KING: Can't get enough.

RAJU: Certainly not nine. And Democrats are saying already that this $18 billion demand by the president to help fund the border wall is a non-starter in their negotiation. They're saying that they will not go for this as part of the deal. Dick Durbin, who is taking the lead of sorts for Senate Democrats say that the president, and he put the -- pointed the finger at the president and said the president is moving towards a shutdown if he goes this route.

Now the other thing the president suggested too is, you know, getting rid of chain migration, for instance. In order for the Democrats to give in on that, they're going to need other things. They're going to need a pathway to citizenship for the people who are here in this country illegally, beyond just the dreamers. So that would require a big immigration deal. And we all know how that has played out. So immigration politics, incredibly difficult. Divisions in both conferences. I'm very skeptical that they can get much of anything by this deadline.

KING: And in a year where again, every conversation, some of these policy issues are incredibly important and I don't mean to insult the policy issues for those of you watching at home who want the Children's Health Insurance Program funded, who want the dreamers protected. But the politicians are politicians. Everything they do, they're going to think about, what will it -- how will it impact November?

Listen to Ann Coulter here, who's a conservative activist, often a friend of the president's, sometimes a thorn in his side, raising a very legitimate question, if the president cuts a deal that allows the dreamers to stay probably a path to status, not citizenship, a lot of conservative Republicans call that amnesty. Will that impact 2018 if those activists are mad at the president?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANN COULTER, CONSERVATIVE ACTIVIST: I can't get over that we're even having a debate about what we're going to trade to grant amnesty. The one thing Trump should remember, especially now that he's under attack, I mean more than I think ever before, is his -- he has the power to overcome all of this. I mean he could -- he could sell Ivanka merchandise from the White House. He could refuse to be in the White House. He could govern from Mar-a-Lago if he would just build the wall and deport illegals starting with the dreamers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[12:25:17] KING: You can sell that in some conservative House districts, but you can't sell that in northeast conservative districts that Hillary Clinton carried in the race for president now held by Republican members of Congress.

HAM: Right. And this is the danger is that she's -- she's sort of the canary in the coal mine for voters who really care about this.

But the dreamers, I think people are more lenient about. I don't think Trump is ideologically all that against doing this. The Obama unilateral temporary measure put them in a very bad position. I don't think Republican leadership is all that against doing something like this.

But this is basic politics. The ask is high from Democrats. They're going to have to give something to enforcement to get -- guess what you get, DACA. That's what you get. You get the permanent solution that you did not get under Obama. And if they actually want that for those people, then they have to play a little ball on this because he will suffer with his own voters if there is not the enforcement part.

The other thing is, I do think, look, this is all very farfetched but there has always been a weird scenario in which Trump could be Nixon to China on comprehensive immigration reform because what you're missing with the right side of this country, and I mean right politically, is trust that the federal government would actually enforce the law. And that is -- that trust is broken with good reason. But they trust him on this, but they stop trusting him if he doesn't put some of this in this deal.

KING: All right, an interesting point. Everybody sit tight. Coming up, flash back to the conversation perhaps between two future presidents.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OPRAH WINFREY: And I know people have talked to you about whether or not you want to run. Would you -- would you ever?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Probably not, but I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off.

WINFREY: Why would you not?

TRUMP: I just don't think I really have the inclination to do it. I love what I'm doing. I really like it. I --

WINFREY: Also doesn't pay as well.

TRUMP: No, it doesn't. (END VIDEO CLIP)