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Inside Politics
Possible 2028 Contenders Attend Munich Security Conference; Civil Rights Leader Rev. Jesse Jackson Dead At Age 84; Trump Attacks State, Local Dem Leadership For Sewage Spill Response. Aired 12:30-1p ET
Aired February 17, 2026 - 12:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[12:30:33]
DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: OK, so the biggest sign of a future White House bid, it's usually a trip to Iowa or another first in the nation's primary state. But as Bill Maher joked with my colleague Elex Michaelson, this year a key presidential bat signal moved across the Atlantic.
Possible Democratic contenders for 2028 spent last week at the Munich Security Conference. Governors like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, Senators like Chris Murphy and Mark Kelly, House members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jason Crow faced questions about their futures and the future of U.S. foreign policy. President Trump took notice.
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DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Look, Gavin has destroyed California. And AOC, I never really got her to -- I never heard her speak very much. And they started answering questions. She had no idea what was happening. She had no idea how to answer, you know, very important questions concerning the world.
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BASH: Here's the AOC answer that he seems to have been talking about.
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REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D), NEW YORK: You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a -- this is of course a very longstanding policy of the United States. And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point. And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation. And for that question to even arise.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ambassador?
(END VIDEO CLIP) BASH: And my panel is back now. And just to kind of give a sense of how this was for her, somebody who is known as -- and became her -- became AOC as a master communicator, this is sort of clean up on Eil Achtung (ph) in Germany, because she went to a reporter while still in Germany, or maybe the reporter came to her, but she talked to a reporter.
And said, global democracies are on fire all over the world and established parties are failing to right -- falling to right-wing populist movements. Talking about the reason that she is there after that moment happened.
KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, that moment is a pretty stomach-churning moment with the long pauses and you're waiting to hear what it is that she is going to say. If she is in fact going to run, she obviously needs to start honing in on these answers, not for later when she's in a one-on-one with a reporter and she's had time to think about it, but actually kind of preparing for how she is going to take this message to a wider audience. And that seemed as though she struggled with that in that moment.
JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: I mean, running for president is hard. It's one of the reasons that there's not a long list of House members, obviously, who have done it successfully. But it's also long.
So every candidate that we have always covered, all of them including people who have gone to the White House like President Obama and others, President Trump has not always been that aware of the world, they get a second chance. But there's no doubt this is going to sort of remain. And it's a reminder that, you know, if you're going to be on the national stage, international stage, running for president, you have to have better answers.
So it's a teachable moment. I don't think it's a death knell for her --
BASH: Right.
ZELENY: -- ambitions by any means.
BASH: No, not at all and --
ZELENY: Embarrassing.
BASH: And obviously, needless to say, we don't know if she's going to run for president. She might run for Senate. She might run for the House again. We don't know. But what we do know is, as we mentioned, she was one of many potential 2028ers, and we'll put the list up on the screen, who went to the Munich Security Conference.
It's not unusual for senators and House members who are on the foreign affairs or services committees to go. I mean, many of them have been going for decades. But this crop of governors and House members like AOC, that was a bit new this year. TIA MITCHELL, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION: Yes, and it seems like this Munich Security Conference now is kind of shorthand for boosting your foreign policy bona fides. So that seems to be what some of these people, if not definitely running for president, at least trying to do some fact-finding and getting themselves out there to see if it feels comfortable enough to consider running for president.
[12:35:09]
And that's what I kind of get from AOC, that, you know, for her, it's like, why not go see what I can see, how my message resonates, make some contacts, quite frankly, and then she runs for president or not, you know?
BASH: Yes.
MITCHELL: But that definitely is one of those destinations now that I think is on the radar for people who are considering running.
BASH: All right, coming up more on the legacy of Reverend Jesse Jackson. We're going to speak with our own, my friend and colleague, Abby Phillip, who -- Phillips, excuse me, who wrote a phenomenal biography of the civil rights icon. And as we go to break, we're going to remember some of Jesse Jackson's impact on multiple generations, including an appearance on Sesame Street in 1972.
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JESSE JACKSON, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST AND FORMER SHADOW U.S. SENATOR, D.C. I may be small --
ALL: I may be small --
JACKSON: -- but I am --
ALL: -- but I am --
JACKSON: -- somebody.
ALL: -- somebody.
JACKSON: I may make a mistake --
ALL: I may make a mistake --
JACKSON: -- but I am --
ALL: -- but I am --
JACKSON: -- somebody.
ALL: -- somebody.
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BASH: Reverend Jesse Jackson's impact on American politics went far beyond his two presidential campaigns. Joining me now is CNN's Abby Phillip, who spent time with Jackson while she wrote her fantastic book. It's a biography of Jackson, "A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power."
Abby, thanks for coming up early for you. Your show is not for many, many hours, but it's really, really special to have you here because there's so many different areas to mine and to kind of uncover for people who don't know as much as you do about Reverend Jackson. And I think just starting big picture about the idea that his place in American history is even bigger than his activism.
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR, "NEWSNIGHT WITH ABBY PHILLIP": Yes, and Dana, thank you again for having me. You know, I think that when we think about Reverend Jackson, people, depending on their age perhaps, have lived through all kinds of different chapters of his life. But when you take the full scope of it, some 60 years in public life, this is a man who started out as a disciple of Dr. King in the 1960s, but he continued on to do so many other things.
He spent a lot of time on this issue of economic equality, of fairness in the economic space. He worked incredibly hard to try to make sure that businesses were represented in black communities, that they were -- that black people were represented in the highest ranks of American business. And then, of course, he ran for president.
He had two groundbreaking campaigns for the presidency, and those campaigns really laid the groundwork for the next three decades of Democratic politics in many ways, not just Barack Obama becoming the first black president, but also the people who make up the Democratic Party establishment. So many of them have their ties to Jesse Jackson.
He was an international figure. He went overseas and brought prisoners who were abroad back to the United States. So there is such a broad picture of who he is.
BASH: Yes.
PHILLIP: And I think that it's hard to capture it all, but that is just really the scope of this man and the many decades of public life that he has had.
BASH: Yes, I mean, I actually first met him when he was a colleague. He used to work at CNN.
PHILLIP: Yes.
BASH: He had a television show both sides with Jesse Jackson. So add that to his very lengthy biography, including, and you just mentioned it, negotiating the release of a Navy lieutenant from Syria, meeting with Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein to help release American prisoners. But I do want to bring it back to American politics and to President Obama and read a little bit from your book about the night President Obama was elected. You write, quote, "On the night of Barack Obama's election as the first black president, Jesse Jackson stood in the thick crowd on a frigid Chicago night. The tears that streamed down his face became an iconic image, representing decades of struggle, both personally for him and also for his people.
What was behind those tears was not just joy or even the pain of the long struggle of his people. Jackson stood in awe that he was witness to Dr. King's dream long deferred finally coming to pass. His own failures and his resentment over not having been the one to accomplish that dream were also there."
A lot of conflicting feelings that you write about there.
PHILLIP: Yes. Yes, a lot of human feelings. And I think a lot of people that want to distill that relationship between President Obama and Jesse Jackson into one hot mic moment, as I'm sure many people remember during the 2008 campaign where Reverend Jackson said something disparaging about Barack Obama, you can try to make it just about that, but it's not.
It's much more complex. And their relationship goes back even further than the 2008 campaign. And what I would say is that those tears that night, Dana, were very real. And they were the tears of a man who lived through decades of struggle, who had gone through that political process that he just witnessed Obama go through.
And he actually had not been the beneficiary of an American electorate who had the benefit of even seeing a black man ever doing the things that he had done.
[12:45:08]
And not only that, but he was there on the day that Dr. King was assassinated. He was just feet from him in the courtyard of the Lorraine Motel. And so to watch from the audience as the first black man is elected and his family comes out on the stage and to see that Obama was able to do that and live to see that day, or to tell the tale, I mean, I think that was a profound moment for him.
I don't think people understand how deeply scarring it was for people of his generation to know that living a long life was not promised.
BASH: Yes.
PHILLIP: And so I do think that there is so much complexity there and there is real emotion and real joy and love in addition to the knowledge that it was difficult for him when he tried to do the same.
BASH: Yes, it's so well said, Abby. I know we've talked a little bit earlier in the show around this table about President Trump and I know you have some insight into Jesse Jackson and Donald Trump's relationship. He -- the president, current President Donald Trump, has put out a couple of statements including one that said, "Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a racist by the scoundrels and lunatics on the radical left, Democrats all, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way."
PHILLIP: Well, look, I mean, I think it's no surprise that President Trump would make a statement about Jesse Jackson's passing more about himself, but I think just so people understand, I mean, there is truth to what he says in terms of their relationship. It goes way back, at least through the 80s, when they encountered each other on numerous occasions.
There are photos of them just like that one there, socializing. There's one scene I read about in the book where Donald Trump invites Jesse Jackson to take a tour of one of his casinos during a boxing match and there was such a scrum of media around the two men who were really two of the most famous people in America at the time that they were going down the escalator and the escalator stops working. It just lurches, and everybody lurches forward because there's so many people clamoring to see them.
These were two men of a certain era and yes, they did spend time with each other. Donald Trump hosted Jesse Jackson's Wall Street project in the 1990s in New York and that project was about bringing diversity to Wall Street and to the business community. So they do go way back.
I think the president, though, is somebody whose political life Jesse Jackson very much did not agree with --
BASH: Yes.
PHILLIP: -- and so both things can be true at the same time.
BASH: Yes, the complexity of a human being who also happens to be an icon and a trailblazer and all the things that you write about. And again, thank you, Abby, for being here to help us remember Reverend Jackson and everybody should get your book because it's really fantastic. And don't forget to tune in to see Abby tonight where she is every night. CNN's NewsNight is on at 10:00 p.m. Eastern right here on CNN.
PHILLIP: Thank you.
BASH: Up next, President Trump is blaming Maryland's governor for what could be a historic environmental disaster. But is the federal government really in charge? We're going to explain and you're really going to want to hear what that disaster is here in Washington.
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BASH: It's an ecological disaster with a side of toxic politics. Almost a month after the Potomac River sewage spill, just upstream from Washington, D.C., complicated repairs haven't even started. And according to President Trump, it is the Maryland governor, the Virginia governor, and the Washington mayor who are responsible. Quote, "If they can't do the job, they have to call me and ask politely to get it fixed. The federal government is not at all involved, but we can fix it."
That after saying overnight that he's sending federal authorities to manage the issue. And just in case it's not entirely clear what is going on here, Kristen, the Potomac River is filled with sewage. And just to give you -- and we're going to try to be -- you see what the map shows there. And I'm going to give you one piece of data that will put it into context.
The E. coli levels at the spill site, 256 times greater level of E. coli than what is deemed safe. Ew.
HOLMES: That's disgusting. And I was just reading this NPR article that said it translates into 368 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of sewage, which just in case you like those kind of graphics. Now, it's not surprising. What do these people have in common? That President Trump is blaming they're all Democrats.
Obviously, Wes Moore has gotten under President Trump's skin of late. He wasn't invited to the governor's meeting at the White House, and Moore was outspoken about it. It's also very clear that Moore might be a contender for 2028. So he's clearly making this into some kind of political thing.
Just to be very clear, the federal government has already been on site. Like, they've already put out resources to help with this. We know that there were different agencies that were assessing and looking into this. So a lot of this right now is President Trump, unsurprisingly, putting on a little bit of a show.
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BASH: So here's what Wes Moore's office said in a statement. "For the last four weeks, the Trump administration has failed to act. Apparently, the Trump administration hadn't got the memo that they're actually supposed to be in charge here."
MITCHELL: Yes, I mean, I don't think Mayor Bowser or any of the state or local elected officials would be mad to receive more federal resources to address this problem that is still ongoing, that clearly is challenging. But the Environmental Protection Agency actually does have oversight and always did alongside the D.C. Water Department. So they should have been there from day one.
And I think it's one of those scenarios where President Trump, going after his political opponents, now it looks like either he was not informed or ignored the fact that his people were supposed to be on the scene all along.
ZELENY: I mean, it extends beyond politics. Infrastructure is a massive problem, aging infrastructure across the country. So this has certainly become political because the president has made it so, but it's a serious environmental issue. So this is what the federal government is tasked with doing, is helping governments clean things up. But the bottom line, it's disgusting.
BASH: It's -- what did the president say? Gross mismanagement? That's kind of funny.
OK. Thank you for joining Inside Politics today. CNN News Central starts after a quick break.
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