Trump Is Furious At W.H. Chief OF Staff Meadows
ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.</s>BRIAN STELTER, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to a special edition of RELIABLE SOURCES. I'm Brian Stelter. We are standing by for another medical briefing from Walter Reed Medical Center. We are expecting the president's doctors to provide an update on his condition. We hope there will be questions from reporters to get to the bottom of some of yesterday's confusion. We don't know exactly when this press conference will begin. We know the White House pool, the small group of reporters that travels with the president, they have arrived and they are setting up outside of Walter Reed. So we are standing by for that press conference. Let's start with the big picture of what we are all covering this weekend. We are covering a possible cover-up about the health of the president of the United States, a possible cover-up that's being led by the president from his hospital room because he is so sensitive about being perceived as weak. Well, real strength begins with telling the truth. So, let me tell you who we have standing by to talk about al this in the next few minutes. David Gergen, Masha Gessen, Susan Glasser and many more. This is a critical moment. It's day three of the president's hospital stay and there is a lot we don't know. What we have seen the president in the past 24 hours are two photos, this video and a handful of tweets. We've also heard from many Trump campaign staffers but we are not hearing from Trump White House officials. They are declining interview requests this Sunday morning. There is an information vacuum right now. You know what they say about nature and vacuums? What's filling the void is guesswork and speculation and even conspiracy theory. But all of that should be resisted right now. Let's stick to what we know as seen on these front pages from across the country today. Let's assess the information the best we can. This conflicting information that we've been receiving. It is clear now that the president was much sicker than the White House admitted on Friday. His aides misled the public on Friday. On Friday morning, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told reporters Trump was experiencing mild symptoms after testing positive, but by Saturday, sources told CNN and other news outlets that Trump had received supplemental oxygen on Friday. And then Meadows told Fox something closer to the truth. Meadows saying, quote, he has made unbelievable improvement from yesterday morning when I know a number of us, the doctor and I, were very concerned. Meadows essentially admitting that what he said on Friday was untrue. So who can we believe right now? What can we believe? Obviously, this administration does not have credibility. Lying is a central tenet of the Trump story. I don't want to waste our time rehashing all of that. But I do want to say this: the American people can handle the truth. But, first, we need to hear it. Second, we need to have reason to believe it. Credibility has to be earned. And Team Trump keeps giving everyone reasons to disbelieve what they are saying and that is destabilizing. This crisis is bigger than President Trump. Everyone wishes him well. But it's about the institution of the presidency. It's about American leadership. So, as we stand by for this press conference, let me bring in my first set of guests. Media columnist for "The Washington Post," Margaret Sullivan, staff writer for "The New Yorker" and author of the book, "The Man Who Ran Washington", Susan Glasser, former chief political correspondent for Fox News, Carl Cameron, now political journalist for FrontPageLive.com, and staff writer for "The New Yorker" and author of "Surviving Autocracy", Masha Gessen. Masha, what do you see happening in America with a country unable to know what to believe with the president's health?</s>MASHA GESSEN, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: Well, you know, Brian, there have been a lot of comparisons to the soviet union the last couple of days. I think they are not unwarranted. The particular period I am thinking about is something I have written about a lot. The some days of Stalin's death watch when the foreign correspondents and the domestic correspondents such as they were all knew what was going on. Nobody was giving them information. Everybody was expecting the final call, right, and the planet filled with rumor. And the thing is, it's not so much what we are being told by White House officials or by the doctors. You could actually create a reasonable narrative from all of the things that they have put out there. It is the palpable sense that people are not speaking, that they are withholding information. And, of course, the sense of total lack of credibility that has been established the last four years.</s>STELTER: Right. And that's the backdrop for all of this. Margaret Sullivan, much of what we have learned is from leaks. We learned about Hope Hicks testing positive from a leak to Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs. There have been many leaks since then. Is that a good or bad sign that there are so many leaks coming from the administration?</s>MARGARET SULLIVAN, MEDIA COLUMNIST, THE WASHINGTON POST: Brian, thank you. Leaks are what we have right now because we are not getting any credible information from the White House itself. And thank goodness we have these leaks. I mean, thank goodness, really, that Jennifer Jacobs of "Bloomberg News" broke the news that Hope Hicks was sick. I wonder when we would have found out about President Trump being ill and all of these other things that have come to pass since then. So, yes, I think at this point leaks are very good, but I also think they have to be handled with care, and I worry about the kind of anonymous sourcing that allows government officials to say a lot of things off the record or on background that then turn out not to be the case.</s>STELTER: Right, right. Susan Glasser, let's play the sound bite if we can of what the president said on Thursday before his diagnosis was announced. This is a comment that he made in a prerecorded speech that he was giving. Control room, can we play that clip from Thursday.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I just want to say that the end of the pandemic is in sight.</s>STELTER: Thursday. That's what he said on Thursday. Cases are rising across the country. Tens of thousands of people are getting sick every day. Many are being hospitalized every day. This pandemic, we are heading into a winter that is quite frightening and now it's quite frightening that the president is one of the many affected. Susan, do you think this looking back at a past, playing the president's denialism, is that appropriate in this time or is it inappropriate?</s>SUSAN GLASSER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Absolutely. You know, accountability doesn't, you know, check out when the president checks into the hospital, but quite the opposite. This is a situation, in fact, where his personal and political disinformation have converged, and in fact he has been running that campaign against his own government and public health measures and endangering his own safety as well as that of the American people for the last six months. So, obviously, the convergence between his lies to the American people and his own personal health now suffering as a consequence of that. I mean, we used to joke in college, but it's not really a joke. You are really in trouble when you start lying to yourself and believing it. Did Donald Trump believe these things that he was saying to the American people about the pandemic? Because now, there are 200,000 dead. I do believe it's very important to keep that in mind. President Trump is one person who has the best medical care that America can give him. He is being very aggressively treated. The doctors are helping us to understand what that means, to the extent they're giving information. But there are millions of Americans who have been infected with this, and they don't have that privilege. Many of them have died. So, yes, we have to keep on the story and the accountability.</s>STELTER: Yeah. Let's, as we talk about this, and we await this next briefing, I don't want to lose sight of what happened the last seven days. It's felt like a year. Let's go back to Monday's front page of the New York sometimes. The title here, President's taxes chronic losses, major income tax avoidance. Then the debate. Yes, the debate was this week. Look at Thursday's front page of "The New York Times," Trump escalating his push to erode trust in the election. Saturday's headline about the president in the hospital. This morning's front page says, confusion and concern while the president ails at Walter Reed. Carl Cameron, I think the question here is, do you have any advice for the journalists trying to keep up with all these stories? Frankly, Carl, any advice for the public trying to keep up with all of this news?</s>CARL CAMERON, FORMER CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, FOX NEWS: Yeah, we have to take a close look at what's happening today and then just rewind it to the campaign of 2015 and 2016 in which most Republicans voted for somebody else during the Republican nomination race in the various different states up until the very last moment where Trump won a plurality of Republicans for the Republican nomination. And what we have now is a prima facie evidence of a person who became president by gaslighting the public, hiding his own failures, his lack of capacity and ability, and now finds himself in Walter Reed Hospital with a virus that he essentially convinced a good portion of the country was not a threat to their lives. This is the collapse of a democratic republic because of his leadership and his dishonesty. The media has plenty of problems, but journalism and news hinges on facts, and too often the media, whether it's on the internet or in entertainment, is considered actual news. And in that way people get misled. So reporters, journalists and the news has a responsibility to lay bare all of the problems of any politician. And pat them on the back with had they get it right. We just haven't had a lot of that lately, Brian.</s>STELTER: No, we have not. Carl, you used to be at Fox News for many years. I'm thinking about your former colleagues now getting tested for COVID because they were there at the debate Tuesday night. Chris Wallace, many others as well. It goes further than that. You know, this apparent super spreader event at the White House Saturday before last, the Supreme Court announcement, Pete Hegseth was there from Fox, Laura Ingraham was there. There are all these Fox personalities and executives who have to get tested because they don't know if they have been infected as well. It's just a small example of how widespread this virus is and how had this White House outbreak is affecting so many people, so many corporations, so many families. I think everybody -- Carl, go ahead.</s>CAMERON: I think that the journalists need to remind everybody it's entirely possible this began at that Supreme Court announcement. And as a consequence of that, public policy has been corrupted by the failures of personal health policy at the White House.</s>STELTER: Carl, thank you. And, everybody, please stand by. It's a fluid show as we await this medical briefing at Walter Reed. We don't know the exact time, but we believe it will take place this hour. We have the president of the White House Correspondents Association standing by as well as the man who briefed the press after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. That's right, David Gergen is next. Stay with us.