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Breaking Down The Trump Interview; Report: Russian Airstrikes Hit ISIS Targets In Palmyra; New Report Examines Causes Of Extremist Violence. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired October 6, 2015 - 07:30   ET

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


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[07:31:33] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to NEW DAY. Moments ago Chris spoke with GOP presidential candidate, Donald Trump. I see you're hydrating after that.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: I wasn't really talking.

CAMEROTA: Let's bring in CNN's chief national correspondent, John King, to help us break it down. Hi, John.

JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.

CAMEROTA: Hi, John. So tell us what jumped out of you from Chris's great interview?

KING: Number one at the end, we get to the horse race part of it, how emphatic it was. He told Chuck Todd something he's actually said before. He said it before that, if I tank, I'll get out. Because that's getting so much traction right now, Donald Trump clearly wanted to make the point I'm not going anywhere.

He is down a bit in the poll, Chris rightly calling it contraction. He's still the leader. We'll test this. The next Republican debate is three weeks from now. Once that debate is over, we're inside 100 days until the Iowa caucuses so we are going to see.

Mr. Trump did drop a little bit after the last debate here on CNN. Let's see what happens after the next debate when we get to the horse race questions. We'll see if it's a relevant question, whether he continues to go down in the polls or he rebounds.

It's testing time for Donald Trump, but other points, Chris pressed him on gun control. He was very emphatic there. He does not believe in banning assault weapons.

That's a shift for Donald Trump from about 15 years or so when he was thinking about running in 2000 as the reform party candidate he did back the assault weapons ban. You can say people change their minds. People certainly do.

All of us have changed our minds or you could say he was running as an independent. Now he's running as a Republican. The first three states are big gun rights states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. That's for the voters to decide.

CUOMO: He seems pretty straight line on it. He believes that the bad guys don't go through these background checks and stuff to get their guns so minimize that, maximize the ability to protect yourself against those who would want to harm you with weapons.

That is a very controversial notion, John, talk about the idea of whether or not having a gun makes it better when you're in a situation where there is a gun.

[07:35:04] KING: This is a debate that has divided the political parties. It divides sometimes when you have conversations with law enforcement groups and the like. There's no question, the National Rifle Association and Hillary Clinton is trying to wage a political battle against the National Rifle Association has said give teachers guns. Put more guns out there.

As Donald Trump said the good people can rise up against evil in those situations. There are other people who say what a horrible decision that would be. You'd have more guns in a crowded theater or classroom. As you noted, more innocence could be shot and killed. This is a debate that you see across our society in politics right now.

There is no middle ground on this one. One point on that, though, if you listen to what Mr. Trump said, he does make the point that resources for mental health are in decline in this country. That's wrong in his view.

That's an area where you strip away some of the heated rhetoric of gun control, you do have people on the left and the right, if you could get them into a room, might be able to reach agreement on mental health resources.

The NRA will tell the conservatives don't go into that room because they'll bring up gun controls. The left will tell them, don't go into that room because they wouldn't give you what you want. If you could get people to say, let's try on this one issue, you might be able to get a consensus on mental health.

CAMEROTA: But John, did he go far enough on that? You pressed him many times about school shootings and mass shootings. He said school shootings are a mental problem, quote, "People will slip through the cracks," quote, "This has happened for thousands of years."

Is that the kind of leadership, John, that people are looking for on this issue? We keep hearing that level of resignation from some candidates. You know, stuff happens. There's nothing we can do about it.

KING: It's a position that puts him in sync with many voters in this country, especially the voters he is most desirable of right now, meaning conservative Republican primary voters. If you travel the country, this is an issue that -- this is no offense to anybody.

But if you're in Manhattan or Chicago or San Francisco, this is a very different conversation than if you're in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, or across Texas. Our good friend Paul Begala, a Democrat, comes in here from time to time. He's a hunter.

He would say, as Chris said, you can be for the second amendment and be for reasonable regulation. The problem with this issue is "A," people who live in urban areas or people who are strongly for gun control do need to respect the 99.9999 percent of Americans who own guns and are law abiding citizens.

My dad was a jail guard. He taught us at a young age how to use guns. I have complete respect for people who still have guns in their homes. The problem with this issue is people have become so polarized.

The right says Obama will knock at your doors and take away your guns. The left says these people are crazies. They want more guns on the street. Nobody will have the conversation that might get you some low-hanging fruit of middle ground that conversation we haven't even tried for a long time.

CAMEROTA: Isn't that the role of the leader and of a politician to try to bring those -- a solution. People are looking for solutions.

CUOMO: Right now, you're trying to galvanize a base.

KING: I do think it's interesting when he brings up the mental health part. The challenge is, if you could get a Michael Bloomberg and a Donald Trump into the same room, they wouldn't agree on hardly anything when it comes to guns.

If they could say let's stop about the other stuff, let's start on mental health, maybe if they made an agreement on that, they would learn to actually respect each other and then go on to the next conversation. You have to take it one step at a time. Our political system doesn't support that right now.

CAMEROTA: There you go, John, on that note of conciliation, let's leave it there. John, thanks so much. The first Democratic debate where this is sure to come up, hosted by CNN and Facebook, one week away, be sure to watch one week from tonight, October 13th at 8:30 Eastern right here on CNN.

Do you have a question that you'd like asked of the candidates during the Democratic debate? Head on over to CNN's Facebook page or record a short video for Instagram using the #demdebate.

CUOMO: That's good. That's good.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: I see what you did there.

One thing that's sure to come up is Russia. Russia's military buildup in Syria is a growing concern obviously for the United States. How should the west respond to Vladimir Putin?

We'll ask this gentleman, the former British prime minister, Tony Blair. I don't think I ever stood this close to a former British prime minister before, sir, an honor. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:42:55]

CUOMO: News out of Syria, Russian air strikes reportedly hitting ISIS targets in the Syrian city of Palmyra near the region of ancient ruins. This is amidst new signs that Russia is taking bolder steps towards what?

That's the big question, what are they really doing there? Let's talk to a man who has great perspective on this and many issues facing our country, Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and the founder of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

That word, faith, key, we'll talk about its role in all of this. The latest news, what Russia is doing there? What do you believe is the right level of skepticism of the motives of the Russians?

TONY BLAIR, FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: I think the motives of the Russians are absolutely clear, to protect their interest. That means protecting the regime of Assad. This is action designed to do that. And this is all about what happens after the conflict ends, when it ends, if it ends.

And the purpose of what the Russians are doing is to increase leverage to make sure they get the outcome they want. Therefore, what's very important for us, because there is no future for Syria if Assad stays in place, is to signal our intent.

And to increase our leverage to make sure the outcome of those negotiations is one which can stabilize the country and give us some prospect of the country being brought back together.

CAMEROTA: But now that Russia is bombing sites, what is the U.S. and British leverage?

BLAIR: Well, our leverage really depends on what we intend to do. Look, if you go back several years, it's been clear right from the very beginning, if we want to say in the outcome of what is happening in Syria, we have to be prepared to commit.

Personally, the British parliament played a significant and, in my view, adverse, part in this two years ago when we didn't take action on the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

For several reasons that I understand, it was more difficult to signal that we were prepared to I have a stake in the outcome. We can give greater weapons to the opposition that we support. People look at Syria and say why should we support anyone there?

[07:45:05] Aren't they all as bad as each other? The answer is that there is a majority of the country that probably does want a stable and religiously tolerant outcome to this.

But they're caught between these twin evils, essentially, a regime that's barrel bombing and starving and beating its population into submission.

And then ISIS and some of these other extremist groups who are trying to take as much territory as they can in order to establish some sort of caliphate there.

What is important is that we arm those groups that are actually fighting on the side we wish to come out on top on this. We can do things like create enclaves where the Syrian opposition can congregate and where we can arm and train people.

We can make it clear to the Russians that we're not prepared to tolerate a situation where they are bombing effectively, people that we are supporting because a lot of the air strikes that they've been doing so far have not been air strikes aimed at ISIS.

They are air strikes that are specifically. We in Europe by the way, we can see what we got at stake in this. We've now got hundreds of thousands of refugees in Syria coming to Europe. We have a refugee crisis, we frankly don't really know how to handle.

Turkey has 2 million refugees, Syrian refugees, inside its country at the moment. The surrounding countries are being destabilized. Acting is difficult but inaction is also a problem.

PEREIRA: We've seen the humanitarian, struggle of trying to deal with the refugees that are fleeing that war-torn country. It brings many he to the work that your foundation is doing, the Faith Foundation.

It's interesting because the idea of preventing radical extremism, right, it's sort of this elusive thing that so many nations are struggling with and especially when you think about all the refugees fleeing countries.

There is concern that among those refugees could be a person that will have those feelings foment within them when they struggle to adapt to their new environment. How do you counteract that?

BLAIR: Absolutely. You've got hundreds of thousands of refugees, potentially millions coming into Europe. Within those numbers of refugees, there will be people whose ideology we don't know and whose position we don't know.

Some of them may well be people who are prepared to commit acts of terrorism. We simply can't be sure at this point in time. That's why you have to deal with the source of the problem, which is the conflict in Syria.

And the whole purpose of what we do in our foundation is to say religious extremism is a major part of this issue. And you can't really deal with it unless you deal with the issue of religion in its own terms.

It means that you accept this perversion of Islam is the source of the problems in the Middle East. You have to have a concerted effort to attack the religious basis of this extremism and you've got to go to the education systems of countries in the region and elsewhere. Because it's not just in the Middle East by the way, it's in Africa, millions of people displaced in Africa at the moment, Central Asia, the Far East, this is a huge problem.

You have to go to the education systems in those countries and we have to use our negotiating power and might with these countries to say you have to reform the education systems that are educating millions of young people day in and day out to the view of the world that as narrow-minded.

CAMEROTA: You put out a new report this morning, "inside the jihadi mind." You have studied this and you have recommendations for regular people on how to deal with it as well as governments.

Let me read the recommendation that you give to governments. You say, "Political leaders must not shy away from identifying ideology and warped understanding of theology as a cause of modern terrorism. The King of Jordan and British Prime Minister David Cameron have led the way."

You don't mention President Obama in there. Do you think he's handling this right?

BLAIR: No. I think he actually held the conference the other day on violent extremism that David Cameron was speaking at. The point I'm making is there's no point in tackling the violence unless you tackle the ideology of extremism behind the violence.

One of the things we do, we say if you survey people in majority Muslim countries, many of them at least, you will find large proportions of those populations share a lot of the basic thinking. They don't share the violence.

A lot of them would criticize the violence. For example, three- quarters of people in many of those countries believe that it's their job to stand up for an Islamic society against what the United States is trying to do.

So you've got these broad ideological strands that lie behind a lot of the extremism. If you take, for example, some of the organizers in the Middle East, some of the clerics putting out the most extreme stuff.

[07:50:03] They'll have Twitter followings that go into millions of people. These people are saying things about Jewish people, even those within their own religion that are different that we would regard as completely unacceptable and it's that -- it's those waters of extremism in which the violent extremists can swim.

CUOMO: What is your advice to what's going on in our presidential election?

PEREIRA: The smile on his face already.

CUOMO: Look, this issue has -- weighed in several different ways. What is your advice to the American electorate as they're assessing where to be vis-a-vis is it just Islam or is it Islamic extremism and whether the idea of whether a Muslim could be president of the United States. These are all debatable issues in this country right now. What's your advice?

BLAIR: First of all, I have enough problems in British politics without offering you advice about American politics. I think the important thing is to realize, the majority of people within Islam do not support either the violence or the ideology.

What we are talking about, however, is a radical Islamist way of thinking that results in extremism by small numbers of people but that thinking is shared by larger numbers of people and you've got to attack both, the violence and the extremism, the thinking behind it.

And in the end, you know, people look at the Middle East. I know this having gone through this in government. They say, well, who are the good guys? Who do we back in this? Here is some good news in amongst all this turmoil.

There are -- there is a majority of people within Islam who actually do support rule-based economies and open religiously tolerant societies and we've got to support them in a long process of transition, where they throw out old dictatorships.

What comes next? That's the question. A battle between those that have a very Islamist view of the way society should function and those who want to live like us.

CAMEROTA: Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, we always appreciate having you on the program. Thanks so much for being here.

BLAIR: Thank you very much.

PEREIRA: All right, an update on South Carolina, dams breaking there, submerging entire communities. Thousands are without power. Many are without clean drinking water. We'll speak with the mayor of one of the hardest hit cities to ask how the citizens of his community are coping, and if there is relief in sight.

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PEREIRA: The Coast Guard is focusing its search now to find survivors from that container ship that sank after being stuck in the middle of Hurricane Joaquin. The vessel's owner now shedding light on what may have happened. You'll get details on top of the hour.

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