President Trump: "We Are Ready" For Hurricane Florence
ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: OK. Just want to give you a little look at what is happening 30 miles off the North Carolina coast. So you can see Hurricane Florence, the outer bands there in the distance. All of that sort of gray air churned up that meets the sea. And you can see the ocean getting very choppy and you can hear the ominous wind as Hurricane Florence move towards the North Carolina coastline. So, Hurricane Florence will be the Trump administration's biggest challenge from Mother Nature since the disaster of Hurricane Maria. President Trump is assuring the country that this time they'll be ready.</s>MIKE ROGERS, FORMER DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY: I thought there was an opportunity here that we could have taken advantage of. Now, he opted to go a different direction and that's certainly his right as the president, but I wish we had taken advantage of that opportunity. That could have sent a very powerful message.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Tremendous people working on the hurricane -- first responders, law enforcement, and FEMA -- and they are all ready. And we're getting tremendous accolades from politicians and the people. We are ready but this is going to be one of the biggest ones to ever hit our country.</s>CAMEROTA: We apologize. Admiral Mike Rogers was not talking about Hurricane Florence there. But we'll get into all of that when Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent for "The New York Times" and CNN political analyst joins us. Maggie, happy to see you safe and sound in the studio --</s>MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you.</s>CAMEROTA: -- as we look at the split screen there.</s>HABERMAN: We're lucky where we are, yes.</s>CAMEROTA: Yes, OK. So, let's talk about what's really getting a lot of attention and that is President Trump revisiting FEMA's response and his administration's response --</s>HABERMAN: Yes.</s>CAMEROTA: -- to Hurricane Maria, which was a disaster. I mean, an abject failure. Three thousand people died. Eerily, almost the exact same number as on 9/11. Yet, the president tweets this. "We got A-pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!" So, Maggie, look, we now know from the Bob Woodward book, from the anonymous op-ed, from your reporting for the past two years that the people around the president don't feel comfortable when he doesn't represent reality. It makes them uncomfortable. So what's happening now with his take on the Maria aftermath?</s>HABERMAN: When you talk to people who work in the administration you will usually hear some combination of recognition that what he is saying does not comport with the reality of what people experienced. Three thousand people dead. Remember, initially, the death toll was I think at 64 which the president was touting as a good, low number, which most people at the time said there's a zero percent chance it stays this way as a number. There is some recognition of that plus well, but there are other factors where it wasn't entirely the administration's fault or they did get X-Y-Z aspect of this right. It is true that conditions on the ground in Puerto Rico, in some cases, were problematic. It is true that there were impassable roads. This is a president who not only tries to create his own reality, but he doesn't deal in nuance at all. So everything is either up-down, black-white, A+ or an F. And again, he has a way of turning this into a referendum on himself. This was a storm during which 3,000 -- roughly, at this point, the estimate is -- Americans died. These are Americans. And that ends up not being where the focus is. Puerto Rico, which is a tiny island, has continued to get battered by storms since then. We are approaching the one-year and as often is as the case with Donald Trump, the notes that he is sounding are not empathetic. And I understand that they feel as if they take too much incoming and they feel as if they get too many attacks. You have to know that if you are talking about a storm where that many people died it is not going to -- people are not going to grade on a curve. And it's not really -- the A-pluses are not coming from anyone other than himself.</s>CAMEROTA: Maggie, you and I have talked in the past about his powers of persuasion --</s>HABERMAN: Right.</s>CAMEROTA: -- which I think are strong, except --</s>HABERMAN: Really?</s>CAMEROTA: -- in the occasions where people can see things with their own eyes. So, the inauguration crowd where people could actually see with their own eyes the overhead imagery. The Helsinki moment where he blamed America as he stood next to Vladimir Putin. And, the deaths from Hurricane Maria. When he goes so far from reality -- when people see the truth with their own eyes, what happens behind the scenes?</s>HABERMAN: Look, people try to get him to either not tweet or they try to get him to say a different version of X-Y-Z. But again, as I said, there are a lot of people within the White House -- yes, there are people who have been uncomfortable with things he does but they often find themselves trying to comport to his desires and how he wants things to be, at least to some extent. You had Sean Spicer try to accommodate his wishes on finding better pictures of his inaugural. You had Reince Priebus in a scene that was described in the Woodward book and that has been confirmed to me by other people, trying to accommodate the president's desire to get a statement saying that he was not under FBI investigation, and sort of a sense of anxiety when that was not forthcoming because it was going to mean the president was upset. There is -- I think one of the disconnects, frankly, with the Woodward book and I think where it does not paint a correct picture of what happens is there is not a chorus of people who are constantly standing there and saying absolutely not, sir. You cannot do this. That's just not true. There are people who are trying to work with the situation at hand and it usually involves something a little more nuanced than drawing a red line.</s>CAMEROTA: Maggie, I don't know if you have any reporting on this. It's just crossed from "Politico" that the head of</s>FEMA -- HABERMAN: Yes.</s>CAMEROTA: -- who obviously is very relevant today, Brock Long, is being investigated by the inspector general --</s>HABERMAN: Yes.</s>CAMEROTA: -- to determine if he somehow misused a car service that he would between his home in North Carolina and his office in Washington, D.C. The inspector general is looking into it. It's too soon --</s>HABERMAN: Yes.</s>CAMEROTA: -- to have any sort of determination so who knows if that is, in fact, true. But I think we can say that there has been a pattern of Trump officials and people around the president who seem very confused about the boundaries between taxpayer money and their own personal expenses, as though there is no rule book that is being given out on day one in the Trump administration.</s>HABERMAN: Or that -- and to be clear, I don't have reporting on this. I'm going off the "Politico" story, but I know the two reporters and I'm confident it's accurate. There are a lot of people who did not end up moving to Washington from where they live -- I believe that Brock Long is one of them -- and they end up looking for ways to justify certain commuting costs. Again, as you note, this is yet another alleged example of somebody misusing a government car. This has come up before. This was one of the things that John Kelly mentioned in getting rid of Omarosa was a misuse of a government taxi service, which is actually a thing. This would be yet another example. It is not -- I don't think it's that nobody is putting out a rule book per se, but I think there certainly is a sense extensively within the administration that you are not necessarily going to get called out the same way if you do certain things as you might have in previous administrations.</s>CAMEROTA: We just got a statement from FEMA that says that they are fully cooperating with the inspector general's investigation. So obviously, we'll wait to see what the inspector general comes up with. Maggie Haberman, thank you very much.</s>HABERMAN: Thank you.</s>CAMEROTA: Always great to see you. OK, let's go to John Berman who is there in North Carolina on the beach. I hope that's not John Berman right there. I hope that that is not John Berman swimming in the ocean right there. That is a surfer who should not be there and I hope that John is going to go drag that person out of the water. John, are you watching this?</s>JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: That is not me. There's a whole lot of flesh there so that is not me, I can assure you. What you're seeing right there -- you know, he's doing a good job riding that wave but it's dumb -- it's dumb. People should not be out surfing right now. The mayor of Oak Island, North Carolina, where I am, doesn't want even people to be on the island. There's been a mandatory evacuation order. People have been told to leave here on Oak Island, as they have up and down the Carolina coast. When we come back we're going to speak to someone who chose to stay.