MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript: "Racial resentment as campaign strategy."

Interview

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KORNACKI: For more, I`m joined by Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna of California, Maya Wiley, Senior Vice President for Social Justice at The New School, and Charlie Sykes, Editor-in-Chief of the Bulwark. Maya, let me just start with you. I`m curious what you make of this. We played the tape last night. The crowd got going. The crowd is chanting something that he himself started on Twitter a couple of days earlier. The crowd dies out and he continues. Today, he says he was conflicted up there on stage.

MAYA WILEY, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE, THE NEW SCHOOL: So it`s a lie, Steve. It`s a flat-out lie. The video shows it`s a lie. More importantly, he himself started the chant. He started it on Sunday with his Tweeting when he told them to go back to where they came from. A few days later, he doubled down on the message when he would not retract it, when he would not apologize for it. And he said people love it, and he doubled down and said, get out now. So that was the lead up to the rally. He essentially was the messenger who brought the message, and then as we saw in the videotape, straight-out contradicts the statement he made today. It was more like he got the talking points and decided to follow them after he had heard so many concerns, including from republicans who met with Vice President Pence to say, hey, this is not cool.

KORNACKI: Yes. Charlie Sykes, let me pick up on that point with you. What do you make of that? Because this is a president who -- this wasn`t an apology today, but this is a different course in public than he has been taking the last few days. You have that reporting there from The New York Times. Republicans are often concerned, we hear privately, about things he says and does. But, rarely, do you see him change his behavior at all? What do you make of the President`s new posture today and what`s going on there?

CHARLIE SYKES, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE BULWARK: Well, first of all, it is ridiculous to say that he was unhappy about it. I mean, he basically -- he lays a bonfire with sticks of dynamite, pours kerosene on it, lights a match and goes, whoa, I didn`t expect that to happen. But, obviously, despite the fact that he thinks that he`s winning, and he has said -- Maya is absolutely right. He thinks -- and he knows exactly what he is doing, and he thinks that this has been a big success. But I think you had a lot of republicans who were sickened by it. And they know that it was morally wrong, but even more important from their point of view, politically toxic. But interestingly enough, they wouldn`t want to -- they didn`t go public, but they did express their concerns to Vice President Pence. And even though the polls would suggest that most republicans are completely happy with what the President is saying, or at least they`re willing to say they`re happy about it, I think that there`s real anxiety among republicans. This is kind of a worst case scenario for a president who hemorrhaging support among women and the independents.

KORNACKI: Yes, more on that anxiety from republicans. North Carolina Congressman Mark Walker, he is a member of the GOP leadership. He was also at that rally last night. He Tweeted that he struggled, he said, with hearing the send her back chants, but instead of denouncing it on the spot, he went on to criticize Congresswoman Omar. And Congressman Ro Khanna, let be bring you in on this. Yesterday, before that rally, there was a vote in the House on considering a resolution to impeach the President over these Tweets in part, over his racial rhetoric of the past several years, and specifically, instigating that vote. It was offered by Al Green, one of your colleagues, these Tweets from a few days ago about your four colleagues there. You voted to kill that impeachment resolution. Why?

REP. RO KHANNA (D-CA): Well, I don`t think we should be focused on an inquiry like that on the Tweets. I think we need to be focused on Bob Mueller and the serious charges of obstruction when it comes to that. But let me tell you about this, Steve. The President is miscalculating on the politics. Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, he voted to condemn the President`s remarks on this. This is misfiring with suburban voters. It`s misfiring with independent voters. And he is underestimating the sophistication of those voters. They can assume that the President is wrong in his rhetoric against people like Representative Omar. That doesn`t mean that they assume that the Democratic Party agrees with everything Representative Omar believes in. So he`s overplayed his hand here.

KORNACKI: Yes. Charlie, let me just follow up with that, because I was talking to you a couple days ago, and I know you had the -- you believe that there was a strategic aspect to this on the President`s part, bringing it up. But let me just ask you how you feel than now and how that strategy looks now. Because one way of reading this is what Congressman Khanna was just suggesting there that, hey, okay, if the President`s goal was to make these four women the face of the Democratic Party, to elevate them, maybe he can help achieve that here, but at what cost? At what political cost?

SYKES: Well -- and I think he is absolutely right about that. I think the miscalculation was he pushed it too far. Look, this is a president that wants to run against, you know, radical socialist democrats. He wants to make the squad the face of the Democratic Party. Interestingly enough, he`s not leading chants about Bernie Sanders. He`s not leading chants about Elizabeth Warren. He has selected these four minority women as his targets. So there is no question about his cynicism feeds the ugliness of his strategy. But I think what happened is he got out ahead of his skis on this. You know, when you have a that kind of a chant, it offends the conscience of Americans. And it was interesting last night, even people who have been willing to carry water for Donald Trump just saw the ugliness of it. Now, of course, it doesn`t apply to Lindsey Graham who apparently has no limits, whatsoever, but I do think that he pushed it too far and that was the message he got from republicans today.

KORNACKI: And, again, those chants last night, the send her back chants, they were certainly reminiscent of the lock her up chants you heard at Trump rallies during the 2016 campaign, referring, of course, back then to Hillary Clinton. Here is then candidate Trump when confronted with those chants at the republican convention back then.

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CROWD: Lock her up. Lock her up. Lock her up.

TRUMP: Let`s defeat her in November.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: And just as the President said today that he didn`t like last night`s chants, he said the same thing back in 2016 after those cries of lock her up started.

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REPORTER: What about the lock her up that was repeated over and over again at the convention in Cleveland? Do you agree with that?

TRUMP: Well, they also screamed that, as you know, during the speech I made, the big speech. And I said don`t do that. Now, I didn`t do that for any reason. I really -- I didn`t like it. And they stopped. Not one reporter said that I said that. They all said that they started screaming, lock her up, lock her up. I said don`t do that. So I think it`s a shame that they said it, but a lot of people would say that should happen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: So there was Trump saying he did not like those chants. But then only two days later, he seemed to embrace them.

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CROWD: Lock her up. Lock her up. Lock her up. Lock her up.

TRUMP: You know what? I`ve been saying -- I`ve been saying, let`s just beat her on November 8th. But you know what? You know what? I`m starting to agree with you, I`ll tell you.

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KORNACKI: Maya, it didn`t take much in 2016 for the President to warm back up to those chants is the same thing that happened here?

WILEY: Well, I think he was always warm to those kind of chants that we heard in North Carolina. Remember, this is the candidate Trump who called Mexicans rapists, who promised a Muslim ban by virtue of people`s religion. This isn`t new. And he frankly has a long history with the black community in particular from housing discrimination. There were, you know, employees who had overheard him making comments about a black employee he had that were quite racist. It`s not as if Donald Trump ran for the presidency and pretended that he didn`t espouse stereotypes and say very offensive and racist things against people of color. So all we`re really seeing here is a continuation. Donald Trump blew up the southern strategy when he ran for president. Remember, the southern strategy, which Richard Nixon perfected, which was sort of wink, wink, nod, nod, we`ll use coded language, but we`ll be very polite because we don`t think racism is okay to say aloud. So we`ll wink and we`ll nod. He threw the wink and the nod out already in 2016. He is not going to stop. And if his strategy is to stick to a strategy that says I will just win my base to win election, there is a debate amongst republican strategists about whether that can work, I will say that I think that the test for this country is whether or not we are the country that Abraham Lincoln fought to preserve or not.

KORNACKI: Well, it`s interesting too because this point has been made in the last couple of days, and Congressman, I`ll ask you about this, that Trump, we talk so much about the base and the base that he had certainly was a big part of his success in 2016. There were also those voters who didn`t like either candidate. They didn`t like Donald Trump, didn`t like Hillary Clinton, and broke -- I think it was a two to one margin, about a 30-point margin, they broke for Donald Trump. The question it raises I guess in part is any democrat who runs against Trump in this era just automatically getting into this sort of atmosphere and going to end up as unpopular as Hillary Clinton was or is that something more specific to her in that campaign?

KHANNA: I don`t think so. I think people are sick of the President`s tactics and divisiveness. You know, I remember, I went to the President`s inauguration out of respect for the process, and I was horrified that you actually had republican members of Congress at that inauguration chanting lock her up when Secretary Clinton walked on to the platform. That`s what this country is fed up about. And I think the President is going to be in for a rude awakening when we have our nominee, because the nominee is going to talk about jobs, about healthcare, about bringing this country together. He is going to talk about the squad and our nominee is going to say, look, I don`t agree with everything that the squad says, but I believe every American ought to be treated with respect and racism has no place in this country. And I think the President is going to say, wow, I`m not running against the squad. I`m running against someone much more reasonable in the middle of the country. And he is going to have a big problem.

KORNACKI: All right, Congressman Ro Khanna, Maya Wiley, Charlie Sykes, thank you all for being here.

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