The Daily - How Trump Withstands So Many Controversies

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

The word “treason” is being thrown around to describe how President Trump seemed to take Russia’s side during his summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin in Helsinki, Finland. But as with every major controversy that Mr. Trump has faced, it’s unclear if anything will happen as a result. Guest: Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the word treason is being thrown around to describe how President Trump seemed to take the side of Russia in Helsinki. But like every major controversy he's faced, the question remains, will anything happen as a result?

It's Wednesday, July 18th. You can bury me in the ground Or spread my ashes I don't care I'm not going anywhere I'm not going anywhere No, I'm not going anywhere You've been listening to Maggie Haberman No, I'm not going anywhere. You've been listening to Maggie Haberman on Smooth 95.2, The Soul of Washington.

Hi, honey. Hi. Hi, how are you? David Ramirez, well done. I love that song. Hello. Hi. I think we're going to just, we're kind of just kind of jump in. Let's do it. Maggie,

I just want to read you something that I wrote on October 8th, 2016, almost exactly a month before the presidential election in 2016. The headline on the story was Donald Trump's conduct was excused again and again, but not this time. And here's the lead of the story. Our country cannot be the victim of horrendous attacks. When Donald J. Trump promised to turn Muslims away from American shores... These are people who only believe in jihad. ...they wagged their fingers. Written by a nice reporter. Now the poor guy,

you gotta see this guy. Ah, I don't know what I said. Ah, I don't remember. When he mimicked a journalist for his lifelong disability. A lot of hand-wringing, a lot of phone calls going around saying how do we fix this? How do we stop it? They tisk-tisked. If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say.

She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. you tell me, but plenty of people have written that. When he mocked the mother of a valorous soldier killed in combat. Looked like she had nothing to say. A lot of people have said that. They threatened to walk away from him. Now, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of many Republicans distancing themselves from Trump's comments,

issuing a statement praising Captain Kahn, calling him a true American hero. But Republican leaders never did. They justified his behavior. They minimized his offenses. They excused his insults. So why this? I gotta use some Tic Tacs just in case they start kissing. Why did a decade-old three-minute video

provoke a sudden revolt by party officials against their nominee? An uprising that could very well destroy their chances of taking the White House. Do you remember that moment? I do. It was the now infamous Access Hollywood

tape. A recording of Donald Trump made more than a decade ago has surfaced. It is lewd, it is vulgar, and we caution you, you won't want young children to hear it. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet.

I just kiss them. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the... I can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the d***. I can do anything. That appeared like it was going to be landscape changing at the time.

There was a minimum requirement of morality, of decency, of human empathy, of behaving like an adult. Nobody's going to defend this. The biggest, most powerful names in the GOP now blasting Donald Trump. You had people like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell called on Trump to, quote, apologize directly to women and girls everywhere. He said, quote, these comments are repugnant and unacceptable in any circumstance. Let me just start off by saying there is a bit of an elephant in the room. Paul Ryan, the House speaker. And it is a troubling situation. I'm serious, it is. Said he was, quote unquote, sickened by the words.

I'm out. I can no longer, in good conscience, endorse this person for president. I think it's degrading to our women, to our daughters, our granddaughters, to future generations. It was him appearing to boast about sexual assaults in his own words. Republicans rushed to condemn the comments, calling them inappropriate. Unacceptable. Indefensible. A new low. Disgraceful.

Disqualifying. Outrageous. Demeaning. Offensive. Vile. Disgusting. Inexcusable. The list goes on and on.

That was the line, the red line, for a lot of Republicans. And a number of them walked away from him. Right. And so there were kind of two ways of understanding what was happening there. One was that a moral line had been crossed. The other is the assumption by Republicans that voters are not going to tolerate this, that politically it will cripple Trump, and we better bail on what's looking like a sinking ship. Look, in any typical election, that kind of tape would have been the end of a candidate.

And it was a pretty safe assumption that it was going to be the end of Donald Trump's candidacy. Right. That is what all of those Republicans assumed. And you were covering the Trump team at the moment. Did they see it that way as a candidacy-ending moment? Initially, you know, I've had this described to me very vividly. He had been preparing for a debate that was going to be two days later in St. Louis, and he was preparing at Trump Tower.

And Hope Hicks came in and said the Washington Post was about to run a story describing this old audio. And they had emailed a transcript of what they said that Donald Trump had said. And Trump said to the people in the room, that doesn't sound like me. I wouldn't have said that. And then they posted the audio a short time later on the Washington Post website. And Trump said, uh-oh, it is me. And they then realized pretty quickly that they had to say something. He doesn't like to apologize.

There was a huge debate about what that apology would be like. Would it be a videotaped statement? Would it be a paper statement? Could they get a video crew to Trump Tower? There was all kinds of confusion. This was going on, I remember sitting in the newsroom dealing with this up until I think 11 at night or so was when they finally released this video.

I've never said I'm a perfect person nor pretended to be someone that I'm not. I've said and done things I regret. And the words released today on this more than a decade old video are one of them. It was essentially an if I did it version of an apology. I've said some foolish things, but there's a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday. So after the apology, he was furious. He was angry, uncomfortable. And he had Republicans who were calling for his head. And at that point, it was really a question of candidacy survival.

And he was getting various opinions from people. The most dramatic was from Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, who was then a top advisor, described basically a meeting where everybody gets into this room and there's this scene where they're all debating what to do. Reince started off and Reince said, you have two choices. You either drop out right now or you lose by the biggest landslide in American political history. I'm struck in particular by the fact that in Bannon's account, at least, the one person in that room who's thinking, well, clearly the campaign is over, is the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, a party insider, a traditionalist, who operates by the standard assumptions of

politics and thinks, that's it, it's over. And you could tell, I could tell from the incoming of politicians, and I could tell from some of the politicians that were there, is that the natural inclination of politicians are to be so overwhelmingly stunned and shocked by how the media comes on you. But Trump wasn't that. And I told him, as he went around,

I was the last guy to speak, and I said, it's 100%. You have 100% probability of winning. The one person who I know says afterwards that he was emphatic that Trump should stay in a fight was Steve Bannon. Billy Bush Saturday, to me, is a litmus test. Billy Bush Saturday showed me who really had Donald Trump's back. All you had to do, and what he did,

was go out and continue to talk to the American people. People didn't care. They knew Donald Trump was just doing locker room talk with a guy. And they dismissed it. USA! USA! USA! Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. Sorry to keep you waiting.

Complicated business. Complicated. Thank you very much, everybody. Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. Complicated. Thank you very much. I've just received a call from Secretary Clinton. So at least on some level, Bannon was right. Even after additional women came forward and said, actually, this wasn't just locker room talk. He'd actually done this.

Right. He's elected. Right. Look, the retribution for the tape was going to be a renunciation of his candidacy. And instead, he was elected. She congratulated us. It's about us on our victory. Maggie, what do you think that the Republican Party learns in this moment,

when Donald Trump is elected despite this video and their expectation that he will lose? I think for the Republican Party, it was that they might not be in precise touch with their own voters, because for many of them, there was a backlash. Republican lawmakers quickly learned that a fair percentage of the GOP base was made up of Trump diehards, and they needed those backers to vote for them as well. So for a lot of Republicans, it's kind of like, why speak up? Because maybe your voters don't even want you to. And in fact, your voters may completely disagree with you if you do that, and they might turn

on you. This is the balancing act that they have had to do time and again. Access Hollywood might have been the first of this kind of red line moment, but it was not the last. This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies. You had the firing of the FBI director, James Comey. That when there is a investigation that reaches near the president of the United States or the leader of a non-democracy. They fire the people who are in charge of the investigation. You had the president's statements.

Painted white nationalists and members of the alt-right as victims of what he described. After the protests and a death in Charlottesville. When you're watching it here in person, you're not just seeing a press conference go off the rails, you're watching a presidency go off the rails. You had the president. The president of the United States is tired of so many black people coming to this country. Quote, why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Describing immigrants from quote unquote shithole countries. You can't dance around it. Those are the words of the president of the United States.

It brings back to the fore the suggestion he is not only contemptuous, but racist. And the list goes on and on. It's hard to believe, but new government figures out tonight show nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border from mid-April through the end of May. However...

Trump's going after law enforcement, the FBI, even the Democratic opposition as treasonous, that's his word, and top Republicans sit silently. Again, we keep rising to this edge, and then the tide recedes, and that has happened every time for Trump. Where are the Republicans warning President

Trump? Is it because it's a Friday? Is it because the president is overseas? Or is it because so few people were actually surprised by this news? Right, and each time one of these things happens, Republicans seem to learn the same lesson each time. The Republicans are looking towards their primaries. They know that Trump is still very powerful. And what every member of Congress wants is to get reelected. And if they think they're going to be primaried from the right or from the populist side of the party, I don't think they're inclined to speak out.

They've learned that they have to balance maintaining their own jobs and their own offices and their own ability to get elected with speaking out. With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia. I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. Maggie, the reason why we're talking about this Access Hollywood video with you right now is because of Trump's decision to take Putin's word over his own intelligence agencies when it comes to the Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

And it feels like this is kind of a new line in the sand moment, a new Access Hollywood moment. And once again, people are wondering, is this the moment where things actually change? What strikes you as similar about these moments? Look, both instances, these were self-inflicted, right? This is not like Charlottesville, where he was commenting on something that had taken place and he caused himself damage, but it was an external event. These are both self-inflicted and incidents that were on tape. I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer.

He offered to have... And earlier today, ahead of this conversation that we're having on air, you and I, Maggie, were talking about the similarities between these two situations. And you noted that a few months after the Access Hollywood tape, the president came out and said, you know what? I'm not even sure that was my voice. I'm not sure it was even me. And 15 minutes after talking to you, the president held a press conference about this news conference in Helsinki, where he basically did the same thing. That's true. He did a version of I didn't say what you heard me say. Now, I have to say, I came back and I said, what is going on? What's the big deal? So I got a transcript. I reviewed it. I actually went out and reviewed a clip of an answer that I gave. And I realized that there is a need for some clarification.

He invited reporters into the cabinet room where he was meeting with members of Congress. And he was reading from a statement. And his explanation for what had happened in Russia was that he actually does accept the findings of the intelligence community. In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word would instead of wouldn't. And that he had meant to say when he said he didn't know why Russia would do that, meaning Medellin, the U.S. election, he meant to say he didn't know why wouldn't Russia do that. The sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't or why it wouldn't be Russia. It isn't really even a sentence that makes sense if you play it back to yourself. Sort of a double negative. So you can put that in.

And I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself. And why is he doing that if the lesson is that everything doesn't really matter anyway? There is no enormous consequence. Why is he even bothering to say that? Well, because he's getting a lot of criticism in the media, particularly media that really likes him. Well, and you're standing next to Vladimir Putin, whose ultimate goal in life is to undermine our democracy. So it was that one moment that you had to stand up for your own country, to stand up for your intelligence community. And as we've said this morning, he did not do that. He has tweeted out his friends on Fox and Friends in the morning.

And I will say this to the president. When Newt Gingrich, when General Jack Keane, when Matt Schlapp say the president fell short and made our intelligence apparatus look bad, I think it's time to pay attention. They were pretty tough on him speaking directly to the camera. Nobody's perfect, especially in 10 intense days of summits, private meetings. Knowing that he was watching, most likely. But that moment is the one that's going to stand out unless he comes out and corrects it. He's very, very susceptible to that criticism. He's incredibly attuned to media coverage.

And in both cases, the media coverage was savage and intense, and he was aware of it. So in both cases, he did a course correction to try to change the media coverage, change the media narrative. Maggie, can we expect anything meaningful to change after the president's extraordinary remarks on Monday and the backlash that's ensued, given everything that you have just described, the lessons of the Access Hollywood video? of a meaningful change could be at two points. And one is going to be the vote on the Supreme Court, where I don't anticipate this is going to influence it very much. And the other is the midterm elections, where it might. Whether it will end up mattering, I don't know. But I think it's too soon to say whether this one has legs or doesn't. So I wonder if one way of thinking about all this is that this series of events, the Access Hollywood tape comes out, Republicans feel like they have to speak out against it, and then still Trump is elected. I wonder if that deeply

unsettled Republicans into feeling like they don't really understand their own party and voters, and that controversy after controversy since then, that sense has only gotten stronger, that they've not quite been sure how their voters are feeling about what's going on, and that the midterms may be the moment that they're waiting for to find out. I think that's definitely true. I think that absent any new information, I think that this lather-rinse-repeat pattern we have seen of Trump does something extraordinary, other rinse-repeat pattern we have seen of Trump does something extraordinary, the party walks up to the line of doing something dramatic but doesn't, and then life moves on, will continue. I think that Republicans continue to be disoriented and unsure of where their voters are.

They know where Trump's voters are, but that doesn't mean that they know where the broader Republican Party electorate is. And I think they are going to continue sort of groping their way through. And they're going to wait to see what the midterms tell us about where voters are. Maggie, thank you very much. Michael, thank you. Michael, thank you. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today? The Times reports that President Trump's reversal on Tuesday came after intense private pressure from congressional Republicans, as well as his own advisers and allies on Fox News. Do you feel like there's trust with you and with the Republican conference with how the president has approached Europe, how the president has approached Russia over the course of the last 10 years. Look, I'm not here to critique anyone else. I'm here to speak it for myself, and you've heard from others. Publicly, however, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continued to refrain from criticizing Trump directly, but told reporters that Russia is no friend of the United States and warned that Congress would take measures against it if it continued to meddle. I think the Russians need to know that there are a lot of us who fully understand what happened in 2016, and it really better not happen again in 2018. And it really better not happen again in 2018.

Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, called that approach insufficient. So now the question looms. What will the Senate do in response? Republicans seem to be shrugging their shoulders, some of them claiming they've done all they can. claiming they've done all they can. Statements are not enough. We need action. And we cannot act unless our Republicans join us in bipartisan action. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.