Trump's Campaign Message; Campaign Blitz for 2020.
KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Barbara, really appreciate it. And thank you all so much for joining me today. "INSIDE POLITICS" with John King starts right now.</s>JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you, Kate. And welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thank you for sharing your day with us. Tougher words from the White House today, aimed at Saudi Arabia, but still no clarity on what the president means by severe consequences, as he waits now for the royal family report on the apparent murder of a Saudi journalist. Plus, the next campaign is front and center in this campaign. A half dozen Democrats mulling 2020 presidential runs are out today making friends and urging big blue turnout in the 2018 midterms. And the president makes his midterms closing arguments. Hi facts, sketchy sometimes. His lead issues, all about the base.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This will be an election of Kavanaugh, the caravan, law and order, and common sense. That's what it's going to be. It's going to be an election of those things.</s>KING: And we begin right there with the president defaulting to his go-to message just days now before a midterm test most predict Republicans will lose. The president's old campaign rallying cry, that illegal immigration is a danger to the country, is now the new centerpiece for the Republican closing argument.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And remember it's going to be an election of the caravan. You know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about. A lot of money's been passing through people to come up and try and get to the border by Election Day, because they think that's a negative for us. Number one, they're being stopped. And, number two, regardless, that's our issue.</s>KING: That's our issue, you heard the president right there. In poll after poll, most voters say health care is the issue that matters to them most, maybe the economy, when people are thinking about their vote. But the president believes immigration, especially his the fact-challenged, often conspiratorial version is still the jet fuel for the Republican base. Today, what the president's referring to, of course, thousands of Honduran migrants now near the Mexican border.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: A</s>KING: With me this Friday to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Abby Phillip, Michael Shear of "The New York Times," Jackie Kucinich with "The Daily Beast," and Karoun Demirjian with "The Washington Post." This is the president's reflex. He trusts his reflex. He trusts his instincts. I don't think who's paying -- who's paying the people in the caravan to come to the --</s>JACKIE KUCINICH, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, "THE DAILY BEAST": Oh, it's Soros, just like he paid for the women's march, as well as Kavanaugh protesters. This is something that we've seen the president and some of his more conspiratorial followers go back to that well. And it seems to be an explanation for people who don't agree with them, and people who are apparently out to get them, or out to get the United States, as he's casting the individuals who are in this caravan, which, of course, is organized to call attention to some of the issues that are in Latin America right now, drug violence, which a lot of these people are fleeing.</s>KING: And will it work? Will it work? We know this has been the president's go-to. It worked for him gangbusters in the Republican primaries in 2016. It worked for him, especially in red states, in purple areas in the 2016 general election. He's been president for almost two years. If there's a problem enforcing the border, yes, the Democrats wouldn't give him his wall money. The Republicans wouldn't give him his wall money, let's be honest. But he can do other things. He has executive powers. He can move things around. If there's a problem with the border, isn't it his problem?</s>ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I think that's why this is such a multifaceted issue for the president, why it gets under his skin so much because it's both an opportunity potentially to motivate his base, but also in some ways it kind of speaks to a political weakness, that if he can't control the border after two years, if he can't get the money for his wall after two years, that looks like a promise made but not kept. And that's one of the reasons why it's bothered him so much. But I do think that it can be a very potent issue, which is why you see so many Republicans running on it in an effort to consolidate that base. It's potent for people who need to bring in the Trump tribe into their base in order to win. Maybe not so much for people in purple states or purple districts, but for Republicans who are have a Trump -- a hard time channeling Trumpism, this is a pretty easy, straightforward, direct way to do it.</s>KING: It's a great point because the midterm is always a referendum on the president. In other ways this is also a referendum on the Trump playbook if you will. Did -- what -- will what worked in 2016, being Trumpy, can other people do that in 2018, including the president? To your point, this is Marsha Blackburn, Republican congresswoman, running against the former governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, in a very close Tennessee Senate race. She's playing the immigration card.</s>REP. MARTHA BLACKBURN (R), TENNESSEE SENATE CANDIDATE: Because of loose immigration policies, every state's a border state and every town's a border town. When Phil Bredesen was governor, he issued valid state-issued taxpayer-funded driving certificates to 51,000 illegal aliens. He made our state a magnet for illegal aliens. And people in Tennessee remember that.</s>KING: Every state's a border state.</s>KAROUN DEMIRJIAN, CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": It's as well a slogan, right, especially if you're trying to drill that message home in places where maybe you don't have a national inclination to be very revved up about immigration issues. Although it's a lot of internal middle of America states seems to care about this issue a lot more than you see it fairly -- they're bluer states towards the border because these are people that live among them and they're part of their communities. But, look, this is effectively a drive out the base sort of a message, right? That people came out to vote for Trump because they love Trump. Trump's not on the ballot this time. He needs to transfer that down to the congressional-level races to keep his majorities in Congress. For that, he needs to rev people up. And this is the sort of issue that will rev up the people that were already with him to actually make sure that they get out on that -- you know, on Election Day to actually cast their vote. I don't know if it really draws anybody from the middle because this sort of sloganeering -- it's sloganeering, really, and if people have a more nuanced view of issues and people in the middle tend to vote more on economic issues, not necessarily the red meat sort of stuff, they may not work there. But if it's a numbers game and usually you have low turnout in the midterms anyway, why not?</s>KING: He could, by the way, he could have more construction of his border wall. He could have had the money if he cut a deal with the Democrats that they offered him on DACA. He won't get that if the Democrats win the House this time. He could have had a deal on DACA and gotten some border wall money. He did not want that deal. It is largely, most Republicans are agreeing with the president, that this is a good issues for them closing -- most Republicans. This is Maria Salazar running for an open Republican held now Florida congressional seat. She is the Republican candidate, Maria Salazar, former television anchor, who looks around her district, looks at what the president is saying about this caravan, and says, no.</s>MARIA ELVIRA SALAZAR (R), FLORIDA CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: You have to understand that Honduras is the most violent country in the hemisphere. And you would do it, too, if your -- if your daughter is facing to be raped or your son to be part of a -- and I'm not condoning -- I understand that we need to protect our border. And I am a Republican and I believe that we need to have a very strict border security. But you also have to understand that our neighbors are desperate. The overwhelming majority of those people are facing death. They're under the threat of death.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. Maria.</s>KING: The president says they're bad people. She says the overwhelming majority are anything but bad people.</s>MICHAEL SHEAR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": And you won't get a lot of Republicans taking that line. That's obviously a particular case. I think what you have to understand, for President Trump, this is not only a sort of political calculation, this is a -- this is very personal for him because what you've seen over and over again is the president becoming really passionate about his failure to do what he said he was going to do. When we hear stories -- you just heard one yesterday about a screaming match between the chief of staff and the national security adviser over this issue. We've heard previous times when the president has just berated his homeland security secretary over this issue. It comes up again and again inside the White House when the president is shown evidence that despite his efforts, despite all of the things that we've heard of, the executive orders, the travel bans, the efforts to restrict -- to increase enforcement and restrict other ways of coming in, people are still coming in. And he gets handed documents that say, look, it's actually higher this month than it was last month, and it's higher this year than it was last year, and he goes into a rage. And so part of what's happening is that the politics is following -- is sort of flowing from his own personal anger on the issue.</s>PHILLIP: Yet he's taken a lot of heat from it, from his conservative base on television. The president watches a lot of TV. And the people that he watched talk about this issue all the time and they say, where's the border wall? Why are these caravans coming? They're showing the images of people walking up through Central America, through Mexico. Look, this is how the president views the world. He's watching these images and he's watching people that he listens to tell him that he needs to do more. And he's going to his aides, like Kirstjen Nielson and like John Kelly and saying, what is going on with this? And they are -- they're -- they're approaching this the way a lot of administrations do, which is that you have to work with these countries. You have to work with Honduras and Guatemala in order to help -- to get -- help them help you. But the president is not interested in that. He wants to cut the spigot off, in his view.</s>KING: It's going to be a fascinating test. You see, you're right, the candidate, Salazar, she's not a congresswoman yet, she's a candidate, she's an exception. Most Republicans are with the president. But Montana yesterday, you could sell that message. He's in Arizona and then Nevada, where there's certainly a Trump base in both of those states, but there's also a risk that he alivens and wakens the Latino community in those states, two key Senate races there, fascinating to watch as we play this out. Up next, the president changes his approach, or at least his tone, over the apparent murder of a journalist.