2020 Democrats, Trump face Second Amendment showdown in 2020

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2020 Democrats, Trump face Second Amendment showdown in 2020

2020 Democrats pushing gun control agendas; reaction and analysis from the 'Special Report' all-star panel.

This is a rush transcript from "Special Report," April 26, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT: I'm a champion for the Second Amendment, and so are you. It's not going anywhere.

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: It's under assault. It's under assault. But not when we are here. Not even close.

SEN. CORY BOOKER, D-N.J., PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: When I am president of the United States, we will bring a fight to the NRA like they have never, ever seen before.

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHANNON BREAM, ANCHOR: Two sides of the debate today. Let's talk about it with our panel, Matthew Continetti, editor in chief of the "Washington Free Beacon," Tim Farley, host and managing editor of "Morning Briefing POTUS" on Sirius XM Radio, and Tom Rogan, commentary writer for the "Washington Examiner." Welcome to all of you.

OK, so Matthew, the president speaking to the NRA today. He and Cory Booker see this issue very differently. How do you think it plays going into 2020?

MATTHEW CONTINETTI, EDITOR IN CHIEF, "WASHINGTON FREE BEACON": It's not just Trump and Booker who see it differently, but it's Trump and the entire Democratic field. And I think Democrats are making a huge mistake, Shannon. What they underestimate is the gun issue's effect in 2016. And I think a lot of those swing voters, a lot of voters who made up the margin in those key swing states, the typically independent or Democratic voters who swung for Trump, is someone who cares deeply about the gun issue. So the Second Amendment helps Donald Trump in 2020 and it hurts Joe Biden or the whole rest of the field.

BREAM: And we have so many people now in the field who are pulling it further and further left. There is a new litmus test every day, whether it's abolishing ICE or the Electoral College, or whatever it is. Where do you think Joe Biden will try to thread the needle on this issue --

TIM FARLEY, SIRIUS XM RADIO: Buy a shotgun. Wasn't that the thing he said?

BREAM: He said shoot it up into the air if you hear someone outside.

FARLEY: The one thing about NRA, they have been dropped a little bit in their membership dues. They don't give you numbers, but their dues have dropped in the last couple of years. Some of the polls show that they have lost a bit of popularity. But the one thing about it is for people for whom the Second Amendment is a big issue, it's a massive issue, it's very important.

For Joe Biden, he's a pragmatist in a lot of different ways. He comes from Pennsylvania. I know he centered from Delaware, but he's from Pennsylvania, a lot of people owns guns. Bernie Sanders, by the way, you remember he had a lot of problems with Hillary Clinton calling him out for NRA and what he did in 2016. And I think for Joe Biden it's not the most important issue for him. Cory Booker is saying it, Kamala Harris is saying it. They need to get attention, so they're pushing that issue really hard to show that they're strong.

Vice President Biden is just going to sit there and bide his time, I think, and just say I'll figure out a way to get these things done. But remember, he also had the chance under President Obama to try to get something done, this blue ribbon panel that he started. They came up with suggestions much of which were executive actions or just around the fringes. They couldn't get anything significant done.

BREAM: Today he made his appearance on "The View," part of his rollout now, Thomas, he's getting out there. And the president talking today about how he hopes he can take him on. He thinks he would easily, quote, beat him. Here are the two of them talking today about their youth and vigor.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I can't believe it. I am the youngest person -- I am a young, vibrant man. I look at Joe, I don't know about him. I think we beat him easily.

JOE BIDEN, D-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: That's the first time I've ever been referenced that way by anyone else. It's usually the other end, hyper Joe. If he looks young and vibrant compared to me, I should probably go home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BREAM: And Tom, for all of this talk within the Democratic Party this time around, they have young, they have diverse, they have all kinds of people in the field who offer something different than what they've seen before. But Bernie and Biden are at the top of all the polling for them, two older white men.

TOM ROGAN, COMMENTARY WRITER, "WASHINGTON EXAMINER": But the challenge, I think, for Joe Biden is to decide whether he skews to that line that Tim suggested, the more moderate, consensual, perhaps more populist in terms of being able to get centrist voters into his ticket if he were to be the nominee, which he clearly has a mind to -- he doesn't have to take those same risk that some Democrats have to take to move up the polls.

But the challenge for him is that he recognizes a political constituency in the Democratic Party, that activist base, that were some of these other candidates to drop out could suddenly galvanize either around someone like Kamala Harris or perhaps out of his corner into Bernie Sanders' ticket.

And so the next couple of weeks I think it will be very interesting to see whether his strategy is to try and skew to that more uncomfortable, I feel I can play and not take risks towards keeping that general election popularity, or whether he's trying to preach to that crowd. And of course, President Trump is banking on this being a long and brutal fragment where they all run to the left.

BREAM: And the thing is, former vice president has decades worth of public service, so there's a lot of his record for his opponents, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, to pick through. And so now he's having to talk a lot about the 1991 confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill. "The New York Times" says they had a private phone conversation. He reached out to her. She said she wouldn't even characterize it, Matthew as an apology. He was asked about it today on "The View," so here he is today versus 1991.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: I'm sorry the way she got treated. I never -- if you go back and look at what I said and didn't say, I don't think I treated her badly.

It is appropriate to ask Professor Hill anything any member wishes to ask her to plumb the depths of her credibility.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BREAM: Matthew, the world has changed a lot since then, the Me Too movement. It's a different conversation he's going to have to have now.

CONTINETTI: A synonym for experience is baggage, and Joe Biden has a lot of it. He was saved, Shannon, this afternoon by the announcement that he has raised more in the first 24 hours than any other candidate --

BREAM: I think we have those numbers that we can put up so people can see.

CONTINETTI: Because the truth is that "View" interview was a disaster for him. He came in. He spent five minutes talking about how the Charlottesville riot was, which is something I think most of America agrees with. And he spent the rest of the show, 45 minutes, apologizing for various infractions he has made over the years, culminating in this extended discussion of a Supreme Court hearing that happened 28 years ago, which was 20 years after he was elected to the Senate in 1972, 19 years, almost his 20th anniversary. Biden is weighed down by his 40 years in public life, and it's going to be a big problem for him to turn from the past to the future, which is what presidential elections are all about.

FARLEY: Can I just speak to one other thing. We've heard a lot about Clarence Thomas and also the crime act that was signed under President Bill Clinton. A lot of people might've not remembered that it was Joe Biden who talks about his foreign policy chops, it was Joe Biden who suggested to President Obama, advised against the bin Laden raid.

BREAM: There are other things he talked about, breaking things into thirds.

ROGAN: The Iraq partition.

BREAM: The Iraq situation that a lot of people, they had problems with some of these suggestions.

FARLEY: Robert Gates said that Joe Biden was wrong in every foreign policy, the former secretary of defense said he was wrong in every foreign policy issue he ever decided on.

BREAM: But a lot of people who like him, they look to that as a --

ROGAN: And that's why I still think he's the Democrats' best opportunity, because they have got to -- whatever they think about -- and it is fascinating to see this run to the left on the identity politics issue and the expansion of the state, the federal state, but ultimately all the strategists know you've got to get those 2016 votes back in the Midwest. If you don't do that, what's the point?

BREAM: So far for him, great polling and great fundraising numbers, so we'll see as this rollout continues if they sustain.

OK, next up, the Friday Lightning Round, the big GDP number, Cuban immigrants escape, plus winners and losers.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Our economy is now the hottest anywhere on the planet earth. Just this morning, we learned that the GDP smashed expectations, with the economy growing at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BREAM: OK, we are back with our panel on this big economic news. Tim, the White House says, listen, we're not doing a happy dance because we expected this all along.

FARLEY: And it obviously is a good thing for a president to have. Caveat, we are 557 days away from the election. Things can happen. Absent, though, any other problem with the economy, that's usually number one issue. And international incidents sometimes bring us together, sometimes tear us apart. The war in Iraq brings us together. Jimmy Carter with the Iran hostage crisis tears us apart and hurts the president. But 3.2, that's a good number.

BREAM: Real Clear Politics average on how potential voters feel about the Trump economy, 51.6 percent approve, 42.6 percent disapprove. So Tom, he's got a nine-point advantage on a very important issue going into the election.

ROGAN: And he does. And we saw in 2016, he is a very effective campaigner. And I think one of the things he'll be doing, the White House campaign strategy, will be to say, look, look at Democrats in terms of their policy suggestions. Look at what that has meant in France in terms of the biggest state, more generous welfare. A lot of the similar things. Youth unemployment there, unemployment here, GDP, the unemployment rate is twice as high and the GDP is about half. And so there's a narrative he could skew to.

BREAM: But Matthew, there are a lot Democrats who are saying these things look good on paper, but we are out here with the average man and woman every day who say it's not translating for me. I'm not feeling it in my household yet. And that's their plan to say that it may look good on paper, but it's not affecting middle-class Americans.

CONTINETTI: But that's belied by the polling that you just said, which is this overwhelming approval of Trump's performance on the economy. It is his biggest strength, and it's something that the Democrats are going to have a lot of trouble contending considering the fact that at every step along the way they have opposed his economic agenda. From Election Day in 2016 when Paul Krugman in "The New York Times" said that the Wall Street indexes would collapse, to Nancy Pelosi calling the Trump tax cuts Armageddon. They have all been proven wrong. And so Trump needs to make that case again and again in the election.

BREAM: Another case he likes to make is about the wall. He talked about that today, about how they're going to make progress in the next year. But also we have this story today on the issue of immigration, about 1,300 or so Cuban migrants who were being detained at the southern border in Mexico, their southern border, who escaped, walked away, left somehow this detention facility. Tim, we are told that many of them have been gathered back in, but this administration is very tough on Mexico in saying, listen, if you don't help us with this problem, we're not going to help you with some --

FARLEY: I do not think we are going to build a wall on the southern border of Mexico.

BREAM: I don't think that's part of the current plan.

FARLEY: I just think it's just another story, and it's a lot of these stories about people trying to go somewhere else, either through Mexico or to the United States. And until there is an issue like this that's something that brings the two parties together, it's not going to change much. I will say that it's a great issue for President Trump, it's a great issue for Democrats because they can raise money off it. Although I think he's got a better case now that there's an acknowledgement there is an overwhelming number of people trying to get in this country form the southern border. But it's just another point, it's just another story about how bad things are.

BREAM: Tom, a lot of people saying Cuban immigrants, why were they going through Mexico versus trying to come to Florida as many have done, and you touch U.S. soil and you get here, it's a different way of doing it. It adds to the conversation about what people are really doing in escaping as they go through Mexico.

ROGAN: True. It could be the sharks in terms of the water there, in terms of there's obviously, very tragically, a lot of risk coming through. But I think to Tim's point, the political expediency for Democrats here is fundraising. The political expediency for President Trump actually in terms of people like Jeh Johnson backing up the idea of a crisis at the border, really it is flipping in Trump's political favor, I think.

BREAM: I want to make sure we get to everyone's winners and losers, our Friday tradition. Matthew, we'll start with you.

CROWLEY: My winner is James Holzhauer for his amazing "Jeopardy!" run. He's a professional gambler who is the fastest to reach $1 million in winnings, and he's just getting started. He's turning "Jeopardy!" into the World Series of Poker. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but it definitely makes for good television.

My loser is Kamala Harris for her flip-flop of sorts related to whether we should give the Boston Marathon bomber voting rights, like Bernie Sanders is advocating. Kamala does this unusual thing where she sidesteps difficult issues by saying we need to have a conversation about them. I think she needs to have a conversation with her staff about her lackluster performance in the polls.

BREAM: Tim?

FARLEY: I hate that word, "conversation." Sorry. I'm not really a big follower of the NFL draft, but I think the winner is Kyler Murray, Oklahoma, number one draft choice. He was number in the MLB draft, stayed another year at Oklahoma, had an amazing year, won the Heisman. And this all despite some controversy about tweets, or things that he had written, homophobic comments he made when he was a teenager, understanding that he's not much older than that now. But I still think it's a great story.

And the loser of the week is words, maybe the English language, because we had the Webster's dictionary words like "stan," "buzzy," "gig economy," "cubit," "garbage time." And I think they do it just so people have to go online to Webster's and find out what they mean.

BREAM: Very quick, Tom.

ROGAN: Yes, Kim Yong-chol is my winner of the week, the righthand man, the chief hardliner for Kim Jong-un, basically playing games. Putin, you see the meeting there, prevaricating against President Trump's strategy.

My loser of the week is Joe Biden. "The View" performance was not exceptional. With someone with his experience you would have expected him to have a better run out. Not a great start apart from the fundraising.

BREAM: Ready to nail some of these questions. All right, panel, thank you very much.

When we come back, "Notable Quotables."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BREAM: Finally tonight, "Notable Quotables."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Three packed churches were targeted on Easter Sunday.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, radical Islamist terror remains a threat.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS, I-VT, D-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy, yes, even for terrible people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, my God!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are at 28 vehicles involved. That number is significantly higher than what we had last night.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The investigations and all the speculation that has happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple Facebook ads.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's kind of strange to spend two years on that, and then speak with a tone that's reminiscent of Pinocchio in the movie "Shrek 3."

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They don't want to get to the truth. They want to get to the president.

REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., HOUSE SPEAKER: There are some people who are more eager for impeachment.

BIDEN: I'm announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, COUNSELOR TO PRESIDENT TRUMP: Old, white, male career politicians like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden is not exactly what the Democratic Party had in mind for 2020.

TRUMP: I am a young, vibrant man.

REP. ALEXANDRA OCASIO-CORTEZ, D-N.Y.: I don't want to go backward. I want to go forward.

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR, D-MINN., PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: That's when you guys are supposed to cheer, OK.

TRUMP: Never take drugs. Don't drink alcohol. Don't smoke. Enjoy your life.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BREAM: There you have it. That is “Special Report” for tonight. I'm Shannon Bream in Washington. I will see you back here tonight at 11:00 p.m. eastern for "Fox News at Night."

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