New Chief of Staff to be Sworn in After Shake-up
SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R), MAINE: General Kelly will do a good job. He will bring some order to the West Wing.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The White House looking to reset in the wake of a failed health care bill.</s>DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I said from the beginning, let Obamacare implode and then do it.</s>SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: It seems incomprehensible that we have a president that wants to sabotage health care in America.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the White House's view, they can't move on in the Senate.</s>GOV. JOHN KASICH (R), OHIO: We don't make it as a country when we spend our time fighting all the time.</s>MIKE PENCE (R), VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Russia's destabilizing activities are unacceptable. The president will sign the sanctions to reinforce that.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Russian President Vladimir Putin now confirming the staff at U.S. diplomatic missions will be cut dramatically.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This retaliation is long, long overdue.</s>ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota.</s>ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And we want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is NEW DAY. It's Monday, July 31, 6 a.m. here in New York. Chris is off today. John Berman joins me.</s>JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: What could possibly happen next?</s>CAMEROTA: What could go wrong? Great to have you here. Here's our starting line. President Trump hits the reset button after one of the most chaotic weeks of his presidency. In just hours, the president's new chief of staff, General John Kelly, will be sworn in. Now President Trump will finally come face-to-face with his embattled attorney general, Jeff Sessions, after repeatedly attacking Sessions. So what will happen when they meet at a cabinet meeting today?</s>BERMAN: That will be super comfortable. The president also launched a flurry of statements about health care, casting blame for the failure of the repeal efforts squarely on Congress, not him. The president is threatening to cut off payments to insurers, which could be a serious blow to low-income Americans. And now the president is even threatening the plans belonging to members of Congress. Then, there are new threats from overseas. Russia has ordered the U.S. to cut its diplomatic staff by more than half in retaliation for new U.S. sanctions, while the Trump administration increases pressure on China after North Korea's new missile test. We have to all covered. Want to begin with CNN's Sara Murray, live at the White House. A busy day, Sara.</s>SARA MURRAY, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right and John Kelly's first day here at the White House. As you guys noted, he will be sworn in this morning followed by that cabinet meeting. But everyone has the same question on the top of their minds: Can Kelly really bring order to this very wild West Wing?</s>TRUMP: Reince was a good man. John Kelly will do a fantastic job.</s>MURRAY (voice-over): President Trump turning to retired four-star general John Kelly for help rebooting a stalled White House agenda and reigning in a chaotic West Wing. That's after Reince Priebus became the latest in a string of high- profile Trump officials to be pushed out in the first six months.</s>MICK MULVANEY, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET: I think the president wants to go a different direction, wants a little bit more discipline, a little more structure in there.</s>MURRAY: It remains unclear how Kelly's appointment will impact the chain of command at the White House and if the former homeland security chief will exert any influence over the president's own behavior, including his use of Twitter.</s>COREY LEWANDOWSKI, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN CHAIRMAN: You have to let Trump be Trump. Anybody who thinks they're going to change Donald Trump doesn't know Donald Trump.</s>MURRAY: The president remains at odds with many in his party over his repeated public attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions.</s>JEFF SESSIONS, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well, it's kind of hurtful, but the president of the United States is a strong leader.</s>MURRAY: The two men are expected to come face-to-face today at the president's cabinet meeting. Trump also turning to health care this weekend, blasting the Senate's failed efforts to dismantle Obamacare, tweeting, "Unless the Republican senators are total quitters, repeal and replace is not dead." Despite the fact that it would have had no impact on Friday's defeat, the president also urging GOP leadership to change the Senate's rules so legislation can pass with a simple majority, saying that Republicans "look like fools who are just wasting their time."</s>TRUMP: I said from the beginning let Obamacare implode and then do it.</s>MURRAY: Trump also threatening to end subsidy payments to insurance companies and even eliminate some health benefits for members of Congress if the bill is not passed.</s>MULVANEY: What he's saying is, look, if Obamacare is hurting people, and it is, then why shouldn't it hurt insurance companies and more importantly, perhaps, for this discussion, members of Congress?</s>MURRAY: Senator Susan Collins, one of three Republicans who voted against repeal says Trump's threats wouldn't change her vote.</s>COLLINS: We need to go back to committee, to the Health Committee and the Finance Committee, identify the problems, carefully evaluate possible solutions through hearings, and then produce a series of bills to correct these problems.</s>MURRAY: Now, on top of the domestic agenda and organizational challenges, John Kelly, of course, will be here at the White House as they're confronting a number of foreign policy threats, including escalating aggression in North Korea and the U.S. relationship with Russia. We are waiting to hear when exactly Trump will be signing the Russia sanctions bill. Back to you, guys.</s>CAMEROTA: OK, Sara, thank you very much for setting all of that up for us. Let's bring in our political panel. We have here CNN political commentator Errol Louis, CNN political analysts John Avlon and David Drucker all in the house. This is a fun morning for us. Let's start with you, Errol. General John Kelly, what is likely to change with him as chief of staff?</s>ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Probably not as much as people would think. The reality is, if you already have General Kelly, General McMaster, General Mattis, at very high levels of the administration. They have not exercised any restraint that anybody can see. So I think people should disabuse themselves of the notion that simply having a general walk into the White House into the highest levels of the administration is going to set everything right. I suspect that one thing that will change is that he is going to get an education. He, General Kelly, is going to get an education. He has spent most of the last couple decades of his life having people stand up and literally salute him when he walks in the room. That ain't going to happen anymore. He's going to be, I think, probably a little surprised at how people are inclined to, I think in White House parlance leak, from our point of view, simply sort of conduct a public dialogue and sort of have discussions broadly across the government and with the press. I don't -- I don't think we're going to see as much change as people would like to see.</s>JOHN AVLON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I'm going to push back on my friend a little bit, maybe the triumph of hope over experience. But look, the military members of this administration have been the most effective, in part because they've been working in concert, trying to contain the president. Now chief of staff is not going to supplant the president's own chaos, his own lack of discipline. But Reince Priebus clearly didn't have the confidence of the president, and this chief of staff is a difficult job. You're not going to have, literally, Anthony Scaramucci reporting to this chief of staff. That seems to be a declaring problem. The president's daughter and son-in-law don't really report to the chief of staff. But if anyone can make this work coherently, it's going to be a general working within the White House in concert with the other military members. Now, that raises other concerns, but Kelly has got a good reputation; and maybe he can get this administration working.</s>BERMAN: You know, John Avlon, to control this president, in case people were asleep for the last six days...</s>CAMEROTA: Or just forgotten.</s>BERMAN: Or just forgotten. Let us remind folks...</s>DAVID DRUCKER, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Six days? What about 48 hours?</s>BERMAN: Let's remind people what happened last week. Right? Let's walk people down memory lane. On Monday, the president attacked the attorney general on Twitter and then he went to the Boy Scouts and gave a speech to the Boy Scouts later had to apologize before. On Tuesday, he said he could be more presidential than any president but Lincoln; and he also attacked Jeff Sessions to the "Wall Street Journal." And he talked about him in the Rose Garden. On Wednesday he tweeted new military policy, apparently without talking to the actual military of the United States of America. And that's when the new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, started saying things about Reince Priebus behind his back. On Thursday, this whole West Wing war went incredibly public, with our friend Ryan Lizza printing words we cannot speak out loud and writing about things that humans cannot do. And then on Friday -- on Friday, health care went down in the Senate, and the n his chief of staff got fired. Now, any one of these days... CAMEROTA</s>BERMAN: They're bad monopoly pieces. Or maybe Clue, or maybe Clue, and someone is about to get whacked, because Reince Priebus did. But David Drucker, any one of those days, enough. You know, a month's worth, a year's worth of problems in an administration; and they happened every day last week. There's a short-term problem for John Kelly as chief of staff right now. He's got to stop any of those things from happening.</s>DRUCKER: Like a yellow brick road to hell you just described there for this administration. Look, I think that both Errol and John make some good points about Kelly. There are two kinds of people that President Trump respects, people who have made a lot of money, made a lot of money, and generals. And so Kelly comes in with an opportunity and a possibility of commanding the president's respect where Reince Priebus never could, because the president thinks political people are dopes. He just doesn't think they know anything and -- or are good for anything. The problem is that it isn't Priebus' fault that he couldn't contain a president who won't be contained. Twitter, policy that veers left, right and center at any given time, for any given reason. Look at the six sides of the Obamacare issue that the president has been -- you know, on any given day. And so I think the question here is not so much can Kelly bring order to the White House staff? I think he can. And I know from talking to Republicans that the president really likes John Kelly, that he has been consulting with him over the phone about things outside of his portfolio at DHS. And so they've developed a relationship. But the real question here is will Donald Trump, will the president empower Kelly to bring order, and will he participate in that so that when Kushner or his daughter or Scaramucci walks into the Oval with a question and he says, "Hey, did you talk to my chief of staff about it?" And they'll say "No, I'm coming directly to you," will he say, "Turn around. Good to see you. Go talk to the chief, let him bring it to me"? That's what's required here.</s>CAMEROTA: Yes, let's talk about Jeff Sessions's future. It will be very interesting to see what happens this morning at their first cabinet meeting, where they come face-to-face. And do you think, Errol, that this is all just one big sort of chess game where, now that John Kelly has been moved out of DHS, that that's a natural fit for Sessions and that that's where he'll be headed?</s>JOHNS: There's some interesting commentary around that, the notion being that Sessions gets moved to DHS as a way -- a less confrontational way of getting him out of the way, all as a prelude to trying to sort of stop the investigation, fire Mueller or some other kind of chaotic possibility. I wouldn't put anything past this president when it comes to the Justice Department, when it comes to the probe. There's almost nothing, it seems, that sort of sways Donald Trump, although he goats in a lot of different ways on a lot of different issues. He's been straight as an arrow on this. He doesn't want the investigation. He doesn't want a Justice Department that's going to look into it.</s>BERMAN: You think actually -- Republicans are nervous about this. They don't want this to happen, and they think this is a possibility.</s>DRUCKER: Yes, they do. Look, I talked to them last week about the possibility of Sessions being fired or pushed out. And they were super concerned. It wasn't, "Hey, just kick him around. Stick him in a different office." They're worried that pushing Sessions out of the A.G. post could be effective and where he belongs. It could be a prelude to going after Mueller. That would force them to get off the sidelines and confront the president. This is what they told me. And the signals they're sending is leave Sessions alone. And that's one of the big reasons they're worried about this.</s>AVLON: And this is also like idiot cunning, you know: "We'll move him over and not fire him and maybe nobody will notice." Like, everyone will notice, because it's really transparent what you're trying to do. You're trying to move him so you can fire Mueller. And the Senate's already said they've got a problem. In addition to the fact that it's a functional demotion in terms of the portfolio of power. The Senate has been really clear about this from Chuck Grassley on down, that if you remove the A.G., we're not going to be falling all over ourselves for a confirmation. And those confirmations hearing, if they were to occur, would be incredibly tough. The president needs to recognize it. They're setting up a constitutional crisis if they move down this path, one way or the other.</s>CAMEROTA: OK, last, health care. Where are we today, Errol, with health care?</s>LOUIS: If you talk to members of Congress, they've moved on. They're thinking about tax reform. They're, in some cases, in think, trying to sort of hunker down because some of their adversaries who managed to defeat their repeal effort have actually mounted a public campaign. Even after winning, they're going to hit the road. They're going to target some of the marginal congress members, that they think they they can sort of make this stick on. And they're going to go and say, "Why did you vote for repeal?" So there's a handful of members that are going to have a problem. The rest, I think, are more than willing to move on. They're going to have, of course, a math problem, because it was supposed to be the savings from repeal that was going to fund the tax cuts that are central to their tax plan. So they're kind of stuck right now. But they are going to move ahead with tax reform.</s>BERMAN: And it is a very real decision the president, Kellyanne Conway claims the president will make this week, which is whether to continue the subsidies to insure $7 billion that actually goes towards helping low-income people pay for their insurance, John Avlon. Do you think that the president really will take this money away?</s>AVLON: I mean, look, you know, the president's rhetoric has been let it fail on its own. If he were to take this money proactively away, this is an arsonist complaining about a fire problem. And it does run against the basest obligation on a president to -- to actually help people. Let's not forget, I mean, this is the existing situation. A president shouldn't proactively make it worse to score political points. What's heartening is that there's a pushback in the House. There are 40 centrist members, both parties trying to find a reform package to at least keep the system solvent. That's the kind of thing that needs to be supported. But the fact that the president is considering sort of pouring, you know, this sort of fuel on the fire is a sign of someone who's not thinking about the national interests as much as self-interests.</s>BERMAN: All right, guys. Stick around. We have two international crises confronting the president, the nuclear threat from North Korea and Russia retaliating against new U.S. sanctions. How will the president respond to these issues? We'll discuss that next.