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Inside Politics

Major Upsets As Establishment Dems Lose Primaries In Colorado; Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros Outs Rep. Diana DeGette In Colorado; Trump Made Over $1 Billion Last Year, Says "Everybody's Profiting"; Inside How Trump Helped FIFA Skirt Corruption Allegations; How Trump Team's Social Media Strategy Courts Celebrity Outrage. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired July 01, 2026 - 12:00   ET

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

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KHALIL ABDALLAH, SENIOR PHOTOJOURNALIST: The world is full of stories and it needs journalists to tell them, we must stay strong, we must keep the reporting alive. And to the people living in the shadows, you know who you are. We see you, we hear you, and you might not be in the headlines today, you might feel forgotten, but to us, you are not.

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PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR, THE SITUATION ROOM: What a powerful message. I've worked with Khalil for many years at the White House and abroad. He is one of the best in the business, as is Manu. Congrats to both of them.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN CO-ANCHOR, THE SITUATION ROOM: Among the best in the business. And to our viewers, thanks very much for joining us this morning. You can always keep up with us on social media @wolfblitzer and @pamelabrowncnn.

BROWN: We'll see you back here tomorrow morning, and every weekday morning at 10 am Eastern. Inside Politics with our friend and colleague, Dana Bash, starts right now.

DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: The anti-establishment tide is rising big time. I'm Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.

From New York to Denver, Democratic voters are sending an unmistakable message to Washington lawmakers. The status quo is not working. Last night we saw it in Colorado's first congressional district, where 29- year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros toppled 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette by nearly 10 points.

Now, I'm sure you all did the math there. Kiros wasn't even born when DeGette first won her House seat. Now, Kiros is the third challenger to oust a sitting House Democrat in only eight days.

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MELAT KIROS, (D) COLORADO CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: We will not wait to take the fight to Donald Trump and the oligarchy. We will not wait. We will not wait to abolish ICE and pass Medicare for all. We believe that fundamental change can and will happen if we fight for it.

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BASH: The anti-establishment wave was also clear in Colorado's Democratic primary for governor. Voters rejected longtime Senator Michael Bennet after State Attorney General Phil Weiser cast him as a Washington insider who hadn't done enough to stand up to President Trump.

I'm joined by a terrific group of reporters to talk about all of this today. John Berman, thanks for staying for us.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN CO-ANCHOR, CNN NEWS CENTRAL: Great to see you.

BASH: You too. What you mean, obviously, you've been -- we've all been following all of these races. Just on last night, in particular, what's your take on what it means?

BERMAN: Diana has been in Congress for 30 years, and she's a progressive. She's like on the left of the left of the Democratic Party right now. So, this just shows where the energy is. It's even left of that. Incumbents don't lose like this, not in these numbers. We see an incumbent go down every once in a while in a primary here or there, but not three within eight days without a scandal of any kind, really.

This is just Democratic voters saying we want something different. When we have members of Congress on in the morning, over the last three days, we've had, you know, Suhas Subramanyam, Adam Smith, Jimmy Panetta. They all are saying what they're seeing is that voters are saying they want fighters. They're rationalizing this by saying voters are saying we want fighters. I'm not sure the Democrats have come to terms with what voters may be saying, Democratic voters as we want people to the far left of the parties who are fighters, so they're still trying to, I think, process this.

BASH: Yeah. And I think all things can be true, far to the left and anti-establishment. Just to kind of drill down on who these two candidates are, Melat Kiros, who again is the one who won. She was born in 1997. She is a member of the Democratic socialist of America party. She's a former lawyer turned PhD student, and she was fired by a law firm for publishing a letter defending campus protesters who called for the elimination of the state of Israel.

Now, John, you mentioned that Congresswoman DeGette is -- she's not a moderate, like by any stretch of the matter of the imagination. She did enter Congress the year that that the victor in this race was born. She's a very key ally to Nancy Pelosi. She -- just to talk about the idea of fighting, she argued that she did fight because she helped draft the Affordable Care Act. She helped write key medical research laws. She was the cochair of Reproductive Freedom Caucus. In fact, she is known by somebody like me, who covered Congress for a long time, as one of the go-to people on abortion rights.

CHRISTINA RUFFINI, CO-HOST, "BLOOMBERG THIS WEEKEND": Well, you know, I mean, I followed her around the Hill. You know, I'm terrible at the Hill, but every once in a while, I did get assigned to the Hill, usually I would just follow you. But I grew up in Colorado, and it's been a very interesting transition over the last couple decades, right? We've seen that that state go more and more purple, especially in places like Denver.

The thing, and when you -- when you go from a national view, every time we have a Democrat on our show, I ask, who is the leader of your party? From Hakeem Jeffries to Ken Martin, they cannot or will not answer that question. And I think that's becoming a problem because everybody seems to have their own idea of that, even voters, and when they're not seeing enough progress and enough action from the people who are in office, from the people who are the incumbents, they're going to go somewhere else and they're looking for energy.

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And look, Democrats also have a voter turnout issue, like everybody does right now, and it's about getting people out to the polls. You're not as excited to vote for a middle of the road incumbent, even someone who's more on the left end, as you are. If this is what you want to hear, you're going to go out and vote for that, and I think that's what they're running into in a lot of places, they're seeing these younger, more liberal candidates take hold.

BASH: And said, one of the things that I sort of have in my mind with Diana DeGette is her sitting in for Nancy Pelosi, sitting in the chair of the House of Representatives. And she was -- she did that and she was assigned to do that because she understood the way the House worked so well that she could be trusted to kind of navigate all the things that go on, you see her there. And so, that is the kind of thing that maybe in some eras is a plus, but obviously that kind of thing here is a negative.

Listen to what the chair of the DCCC. This is the congresswoman who is in charge of getting House Democrats elected, trying to take back the House, told our colleague Audie Cornish.

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REP. SUZAN DELBENE (D-WA): The types of districts we're talking about, bright blue districts across the country, whereas the path to the majority is through purple districts. We have 71 districts on our map, 45 where we're on offense that we think we can flip. That's the math to get the majority, and frankly, in these districts, in these swing districts, we have incredible candidates running because they are connected to their communities and focused on really appealing across their communities.

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ASTEAD HERNDON, HOST AND EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, VOX & CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yeah. I mean, there's different goals here that all kind of exist within the Democratic Party. I think it's fair to say is leaderless right now. The DCCC is focused on winning over the battleground districts that lead to them regaining the majority. And it is fair to say that those candidates are largely ones that you will more associate with the establishment with Democrats who have taken more moderate issues, but that's clearly where the energy is on the other side.

And I think we've seen that in these blue districts across the country, but even in Colorado, in their eighth district, which will be one of those frontline districts, you had a progressive win that race over the chosen DCCC candidate. And so, I think it shows that that is kind of stretching across a lot of areas, but I also think it's not just about a left uprising, but the hollowness of the parties themselves, like there's been a trust-loss that has been building since COVID.

I think, particularly after Democrats lost the last election, they lost their own electability argument. And a lot of Democrats feel as if your job was to stop Trump, we followed you through to that end, that did not see itself to completion. And so, they're looking for other sort of options, but it's not just the parties, it's the unions, it's those kind of traditional turnout groups that Democrats have relied on from the center. They aren't moving people anymore, and so what you have is a Democratic socialist and the left that are using those non-traditional methods and usurping them.

BASH: Yeah. I mean, and the story with Michael Bennet in Colorado is more of the -- you're not standing up to Trump enough, that was very successful with the Democratic voters, so much so that it wasn't just a loss, it was -- it was a big loss in his bid to become the nominee for governor.

MADISON FERNANDEZ, POLITICO REPORTER, CO-AUTHOR, "NEW YORK PLAYBOOK": It seems increasingly, so that being associated with D.C. at all is more and more toxic. I mean, I'm getting echoes of the Dan Goldman and Brad Lander race from last week. You know, immigration was a big issue there, and Goldman would also, you know, sort of jab at his opponent, saying, well, you know, he's out there getting arrested and saying he's putting his body on the line, but I'm the one who's in Congress, you know, passing this legislation, doing this oversight, and voters didn't care.

I mean, I guess they do want to see people put their body on the line in these ways that might not have been as effective in past cycles. But the other thing is that, you know, voters are just looking for, like we said, these fighters, and it kind of raises the question of what is enough for those folks who are still in Congress.

BASH: Yeah, no, it's true. I just want to quickly turn to the Senate, because The New York Times and CNN put out a list of some of the most critical Senate races. These are GOP seats that Democrats are hoping to flip, and certainly to do enough of it in order to take back the Senate, which was unthinkable not that long ago. And you see there it's a little hard to read, but the gist is that -- and this is from their site, the gist is that from North Carolina to Maine to Texas to Alaska to Iowa to Ohio, it is in the realm of possibility right now, however many five months out, that it is -- that some of these are flippable.

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HERNDON: The glass half full for Democrats is, you see, Iowa, Ohio, and Alaska in the New York Times polls being very close in play. That's the glass half full. Oh, we're within striking distance there. The glass half empty view is, you just finished, or maybe finished, or at the end of a very unpopular war. Inflation has been a problem, but that might be getting better, maybe is this the best it's ever going to be for Democrats is the problem they have to face.

And the real problem you look at all those states is Maine, which is basically tied. If you look at the New York Times and the Fox poll out today, and it's hard to get to four seats without Maine for Democrats. They'd have to basically have an inside straight with Iowa, Ohio, Alaska, and North Carolina, which is the only one of the flips that seems to be outside the margin of error right now.

BASH: Yeah. It's just -- we're going to have an interesting few months. OK, don't go away, because after the break, inside the White House strategy to pick fights with singer Olivia Rodrigo, you heard that right. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are going to be here to talk about all the fascinating details in their blockbuster book on the Trump presidency. Plus, planes, trains, and politics. President Trump just took his first flight on a brand-new Air Force One, gifted from Qatar.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, your financial disclosures show that you had a very lucrative year, last year. What message does this send to average Americans, especially those who may be struggling now financially?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: You know, I don't get involved in my personal, we have funds that run my money.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To critics who say you're profiting off the presidency, Mr. President?

TRUMP: Well, you know, why I'm profiting because the stock market is going up, everybody's profiting.

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BASH: Everybody's profiting. You heard that the president and giving his answer to a question about the money that he has made in office. Not everybody is profiting at all, and certainly not to the tune of a billion with a b-dollars just last year. That's according to the president's own financial disclosure documents. He made $1.2 billion to be exact in 2025 and that's just via his family's cryptocurrency ventures, including the company owned by his sons, who you saw in the back there when the president was speaking.

World Liberty Financial is the company. Politicians getting richer while in office certainly isn't unprecedented. The scale of this, and you know, the fact that he made so much money, it certainly is. And it's one of a number of ways this administration is unlike any other in modern history, including Trump's first term.

All of that is chronicled in a new best seller, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. And it is written by two of the most dogging Trump reporters, or I would even take out Trump, any reporters out there in the world, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, join now. Congratulations to both of you. I'm so happy for you that this is getting the success that it deserves, because it's -- it's really remarkable.

Maggie, I'm going to start with you. just on what we heard from the president, his reaction to the big news about the financial disclosure.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CO-AUTHOR, "REGIME CHANGE": Well, everybody isn't profiting, as you said. His immediate reaction was to say, well, I don't get involved in that. Other people handle my money, and it's true, they handle some of his investments. But one of the things that Trump's advisers for years have talked about is how closely he follows what's happening with his businesses. Again, he may not be running them day-to-day, but he clearly knows that he has made vastly more sums of money than he's ever had in his life before. I mean, that is one of the astonishing facts about his net worth now.

But yes, he has continued to have a problem understanding or showing that he understands that the average voter is not profiting or at least doesn't feel like they're profiting. And so, this is something that and we show this in reporting in our book, and confidential memos that we got our hands on from inside his team. His own advisers have said that the White House and the GOP needs to be honest. The word honest was in caps in this memo about what is happening with an affordability crisis, and this is really not necessarily the way to go. As you say, he's not the first politician in history, but the scale of this is unprecedented.

BASH: And Jonathan, just to continue on this, and specifically what you all write about with the president's fascination with crypto, and his family's success in that space. You write for Trump, building a fortune had always been straightforward, something physical, something you could see and touch. Now he seemed mystified by the vast riches coming his way from crypto. He did not know how crypto worked. He would admit, but his sons did, and it had his attention. In the early months of the administration, advisers came to meetings prepared for the president to ask them what was the latest value of his crypto tokens. I mean, that kind of says it all, Jonathan?

JONATHAN SWAN, CO-AUTHOR, "REGIME CHANGE": It does, and people forget now, but Trump used to call crypto a scam, you know, years before he got involved in the business. And we're now in this unprecedented situation where crypto is this overwhelming source of wealth for the Trump family, for the Witkoff family, one of his key advisers, Steve Witkoff.

At the same time that Donald Trump is overseeing the regulatory apparatus that is regulating this industry. And in private, as we have in our book, reporting Trump has sort of almost been mystified by this world of crypto, you know, with all these zeros attached, you know, how does this all kind of work, and like you said, he's used to dealing intangible physical property, but he's become richer than he ever was in real estate by orders of magnitude because of this.

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I think one thing that's really important as reporters and just as citizens to understand is we only know a fraction of what's going on. I mean, this financial disclosure does not account for a lot of the money that's going into the Trump family through different mechanisms, through the children and other business ventures deals overseas. We don't -- I don't think we've begun to scratch the surface of understanding all the different ways that money is flowing into the Trump family throughout this presidency.

BASH: Yeah. That's a very important point. I want to turn to another part of the major theme of your book, is how radically different, even some -- in some ways unrecognizable, this second term is from his first term. And how much, not only President Trump, but those around him spent four years out of office learning from what they experienced and preparing for a next term.

Stephen Miller, you say he had learned from term one that finding the right lawyers was the key to everything. He talked in private about hiring and promoting attorneys with the stiffest spines, no more of what he saw as weak-kneed types who would report back quickly that the president's orders were illegal, or who were unwilling to stretch the law to achieve Trump's goals. I mean, we just saw some of the limitations of the president's power at the Supreme Court, barely by one vote. But a lot of their really ambitious uses of executive power are surviving legal challenges, Jonathan?

SWAN: It's one of the most underreported aspects of this presidency. It's something that we've really tried to explore in this book, something that we also did in the New York Times with our colleague Charlie Savage. Stephen Miller understood that putting in a new cast of lawyer would be essential for them to push the envelope to be very aggressive in the way they use power.

I'll give you one example, it's by no means representative of all of it. There's big and small ways this -- this matters, but Donald Trump determined himself that fishing boats carrying cocaine traffickers were enemy combatants, essentially wartime combatants. And that he had the authority, which he decided because of this designation that he could just blow them up. There was no trial, they're not arrested, you just blow them up.

They were -- that was validated by the legal infrastructure of the Trump administration. And you only get that by putting the right people in place from their perspective, the right people who are going to put the rubber stamp on the most aggressive formulations of power. So, it's having real world consequences, and in that example, it's not like there's a backsies, you know, when you blow someone up and their body parts are scattered at the bottom of the ocean, it's not like they can appeal that decision that you made, so it's highly, highly consequential. I don't think people have really focused their minds on that.

BASH: Yeah. That's a very descriptive way of explaining it, and it is very important, and maybe under reported. So, thanks to you guys for changing that. World Cup fever is everywhere, Maggie, and you also write about FIFA, and specifically the way that the president helped FIFA President Gianni Infantino. You say that FIFA had been dealing with a lot of corruption issues over the past years, and the president intervened to help them evade issues here in the U.S.

The executive order that he wrote and pressure on the DOJ, this is from your book. He told an adviser, speaking of the World Cup, they're coming here. Why do we care about some bribery charge involving Qatar?

HABERMAN: So, what we know is number one, as you say, Infantino and Trump have a very long relationship. Infantino worked on that relationship very hard. The first ever FIFA Peace Prize was awarded to President Trump. Infantino has, you know, done his Trump personal and interpersonal politics pretty effectively. There's a long history of this relationship. Trump was very clear with advisers, and again, there's much about this anecdote -- this episode that we still don't know.

But what we do know is that Trump's views that this -- these corruption charges, which some in the DOJ did think it was not worth continuing to try to fight for because they thought they'd lose at the Supreme Court. So, there were valid reasons not to continue with it, but the top ranks of the DOJ were also aware that President Trump had a view of this case, which was, as we write, you know, they're coming here. Why do we care about some bribery charge in Qatar?

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There was a last-minute effort to not continue, trying to push the Supreme Court to take up this final lingering case that was being fought out of Brooklyn and the (inaudible) of the Eastern District of New York, which is in Brooklyn. And you know, again, I think it is another matter that we will learn more about and what the president was doing and saying, but it was one of many striking moments to us in our reporting.

BASH: Sure. I do want to ask about social media and what you kind of really -- we know that the administration and the president himself is obviously very, very has a deep understanding of social media. But the way that they engage at a level that I don't think we have seen before, and the way that they do it to provoke outrage intentionally, even with videos about deportations as part of the strategy.

You write to intensify the provocation, the administration's digital creators set the raids or immigration raids to backing tracks of liberal artists who protested the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda. Previous governments would have been mortified at the first hint of denunciation by these pop stars. The Trump administration courted such reactions, knowing that the conflict meant more online engagement.

HABERMAN: Yeah. That's the entire Trump ethos, frankly. I mean, you know, that controversy elevates message. This is elevated to the nth degree in this administration. It's not just some little fraction of Trump's world that is interested in doing this. It is central to their comms strategy, and we write about how Steven Cheung, the communications director, in particular, who is as much of an online and real-life brawler as Donald Trump is. He really embodies this whole ethos, and he helps lead this strategy, which is, how do we get people to be looking at, we're doing -- what we're doing online.

Life gets set to essentially a video game, and it becomes almost indistinguishable looking at these videos sometimes, at least for some viewers. What's real? What is, you know, some kind of a, you know, I can't even think of what the name of that war video game is, but -- Call of Duty, thank you, -- but everything starts to resemble some kind of a fantasy online thing.

BASH: Yeah. I mean, and Jonathan, before we let you both go, you know, the idea that -- I just -- the concept of putting Olivia Rodrigo, for example, in these videos, knowing that she and other very big pop stars would complain. And then that would give the video or the social media posts more life. It is vintage and classic Donald Trump, and the fact that he has his comms department stacked with people who are like-minded really tells you a lot.

SWAN: It's also another thing, which is that in the first term they were lot worried about being de-platformed from some of these social media companies --

BASH: And they were.

SWAN: -- they have no such concerns this time, and they were. Well, Trump was certainly after January 6, of course, they have no such concerns. And that's actually another thing we get into in the book, which we don't have time to say here, but how those titans of big tech have become allies where previously Trump saw them as enemies.

BASH: Yeah. Well, I'll give a little teaser. When you read the book, viewers at home and watchers online. Check out the part about Jeff Bezos and Sydney Sweeney. That will give you something to think about. Maggie, Jonathan, you're the best. Congratulations on this book. Thank you for joining us.

HABERMAN: Thank you.

SWAN: Thanks, Dana.

BASH: We'll be right back.

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