G7 Leaders And Trump Clash On Russia
DON LEMON, CNN HOST: This is CNN TONIGHT. I'm Don Lemon. We're going to answer five big questions for you in the hour ahead, beginning with this. Why did President Trump repeatedly argue with G7 allies that Russia should be allowed back in the group, clashing with European leaders who are against it because Russia hasn't changed its aggressive international behavior? I'm going to discuss with Mr. Fareed Zakaria just ahead. Why is Attorney General William Barr booking a holiday party at Trump's Washington, D.C. hotel with an expected tab of $30,000? Is it even ethical? We'll get some answers tonight. Also, how is an industrious North Carolina teen getting people to register to vote when he is too young himself to cast a ballot? And I'm going to ask him what Popeye's chicken sandwiches have to do with it. And Tropical Storm Dorian, will it strengthen into a hurricane as it roars towards Puerto Rico? We're going to have a forecast for you. Plus how relevant is the new Netflix documentary "American Factory" which is backed by the Obamas? It explores the culture clash between Chinese management and American workers at a plant in Ohio.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where you sit today used to be a General Motors plant, and now there are over 1,000 employees working here.</s>LEMON: Well, let's turn to our big picture now, and that's the president at odds with his G7 partners. Here to discuss, Fareed Zakaria, the host of CNN's "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS." Good to see you. Doing OK?</s>FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: Yes.</s>LEMON: So, let's talk about this. There is reporting -- CNN is reporting that a huge fight or argument, I should say, that broke out at the welcome dinner in France after President Trump argued that Russia should be allowed back into the G7. President Macron of France had to step in to keep it from getting out of hand. Why does the president continue to promote Vladimir Putin's interests over our own allies?</s>ZAKARIA: Well, this has always been the central puzzle of the Trump presidency in some ways and certainly his foreign policy, which is Trump really doesn't like other countries. It's pretty clear, right? I mean his whole attitude is other countries take advantage of the United States. They beat us. We're always losing. He even thinks the Canadians beat us. Certainly the Mexicans, the Chinese. He doesn't like the European allies, except Russia. He has this strange soft spot for Russia and what is weird about it, he's coming 20 years late to this party. This conversation about Russia and where it should sit in the world was one we had a long time ago, and we tried very hard, and I was one of those in favor. I was arguing that Russia should be made part of the G7, which become the G8. This was all done in the Clinton and Bush administrations. But then Russia turned under Vladimir Putin. It became more repressive at home. It became more expansionist abroad. It invaded Georgia. It invaded Ukraine. It annexed Crimea, one of the rare cases of, you know, essentially gobbling up territory both by force. It's almost never happened since 1945. That's why Russia was expelled from the G7. And the weird thing is Trump goes on about how Russia outsmarted the U.S. under Obama and took Crimea where if he recognizes all that, why does he want to reward that behavior? So, I mean this is -- but, you know, the Russia appeals was part of an almost freak show of contradictions that Trump displayed at the G7 meeting.</s>LEMON: Yes. "The Washington Post" say its own reporting on the dinner and I'm going to read a quote from it. It says, "The discussion quickly turned even more fundamental. Whether the leaders should assign any special weight to being a democracy, officials said, most of the other participants forcefully believed the answer was yes. Trump believed the answer was no." I mean that's quite a startling image when you think about that. What does that do to our image as the beacon of democracy for the world?</s>ZAKARIA: Think about those people protesting in Hong Kong.</s>LEMON: Right.</s>ZAKARIA: You know, the two million, three million people who have come out on the streets. They look at the United States as the exemplar, the beacon of democracy around the world. And you have a president of the United States who is saying it doesn't matter if you're a democracy. It doesn't matter, you know, whether there is any greater legitimacy accorded to it. What's sad about this is, again, you think about how many times President Trump has taken President Putin's side or said something nice about him, said something nice about Kim Jong-un. He claimed that his wife had this wonderful relationship with Kim Jong-un, the most repressive dictator in North Korean, whom his wife has never met. Can you remember a nice thing Donald Trump has said about a democratically elected leader? It's very hard.</s>LEMON: Right.</s>ZAKARIA: Right? Angela Merkel, Macron, you know, it's just --</s>LEMON: The former president.</s>ZAKARIA: Yes.</s>LEMON: Yes. Can I go back to something that you said because you were talking about why Russia was booted from the G8, right? And then it became the G7 again, because everyone -- he said, you know, he outsmarted the former president. Everyone there, all of those leaders know that it is not true. I'm just wondering what does it do to our credibility. Do we have any credibility left with allies because they know they're like, this man is saying something that's totally not true, either he's doing it on purpose or he's ignorant to the facts?</s>ZAKARIA: So we increasingly have very good reporting that says a lot of President Trump's senior staff essentially manage him. I mean, I hate to say this, but almost like he's a petulant, you know, adolescent, somebody who has to be managed. You have to make sure he doesn't get too upset, he doesn't see certain things. It seems increasingly like that's how the world's most senior leaders are dealing with the president of the United States. I mean, there was very good reporting that said Macron's, the president of France's principal objective was not to get Trump to be too angry about various things.</s>LEMON: Right.</s>ZAKARIA: So, they didn't issue a communique at the G7, which is a completely routine thing, because they thought it would piss Trump off, but to recognize that everybody else agreed on issues like climate change and he didn't. So everybody is sort of stage managing and treating with kid gloves, the person who is meant to be the leader of the free world, the person who is meant to set the agenda. It's a kind of sad situation where we've gone from being the leader of the world to the toddler of the world.</s>LEMON: You made me think of a conversation I had with a friend and you know I will tell you this. He wants his kid -- when he wants his kids to come out of their room, he has this device that limits the Wi- Fi in the area where they are, and inevitably they all show up, you know, in the family room.</s>ZAKARIA: That's a very interesting way. So, if you wanted President Trump to listen to the presidential daily briefing --</s>LEMON: Right, you cut the Wi-Fi.</s>ZAKARIA: -- if you cut the Wi-Fi --</s>LEMON: There you go.</s>ZAKARIA: -- you can't tweet.</s>LEMON: Right.</s>ZAKARIA: Maybe you might as well just come down and hear what the damned head of the CIA is telling you what's going on in the world.</s>LEMON: He would come down to the residence for, you know, for executive time.</s>ZAKARIA: But you wouldn't be able to wish Sean Connery happy birthday, which is obviously a more pressing issue.</s>LEMON: Let's take a listen to this Democratic Congresswoman, Jackie Speier, what she said tonight.</s>REP. JACKIE SPEIER (D-CA): Frankly it was the G6 plus the United States because all he did there was pitch his country club, Doral -- not his country, but his country club, and pitch Vladimir Putin coming back into the G7 to make it G8.</s>LEMON: Is she right? Is the U.S. isolated now and everyone is just moving on and working around the U.S. at this point until there is someone else in office?</s>ZAKARIA: Yes. I mean, and if you put aside the absurdity and the grotesqueness and the vulgarity of pushing your own hotel. The point you're making, Don, you could see it in the discussions with Iran, where the rest of the G6, the other countries are trying to find a way to keep the Iran nuclear deal alive. Because they have recognized how important it is to keep Iran on a track that it was on, which was non-nuclear which was to ensure with inspections that they never did get nuclear weapons. And so what you've done is you've created this weird wedge between the United States and the other leading powers of the world, which Iran is frankly exploiting right now. The Iranians are finding enormous diplomatic leverage in trying to play the rest of the world against the United States because the truth is the rest of the world doesn't agree with America. So, after Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran went to the G7 on the invitation of Macron, he next headed to China, where he was going to talk to the Chinese about how to, you know, maintain and strengthen Chinese-Iranian relations. His stop after that is America's closest ally in Asia, Japan. So, what we have done is we have created this rift between the United States and the world. Everyone is taking advantage of it. The Iranians are just particularly clever. But, you know, it recognizes a reality, which is we're the ones isolated.</s>LEMON: Okay. So, you know, you talked about Macron and he's getting praised really for his performance and for managing this president. Does this -- so there's a vacuum there, I would think, of leadership and he is stepping in and maybe others. Is his lack of leadership opening up for others because usually it's about the U.S. and the U.S. president, and you have the communique and what have you? Now, Macron seems like the world leader instead of Trump.</s>ZAKARIA: Well, what you're seeing is that episodic and it's an issue by issue. Nobody can quite take the place of the United States because no country is powerful enough. But what you're going to see is a free fall. Everyone is going to freelance. Some people are going to step in on certain issues, others on other issues, and it's all entirely self- inflicted. This is what they call in soccer an own goal, right? I mean, this is -- there's no reason for the United States to be sitting on the sidelines when the fate of the world is being discussed, when the fate of security in the Middle East is being discussed, the fate of the world with regard to climate change is being discussed. But we're, you know, absent from the table because it puts President Trump in a bad mood to attend a session on climate change.</s>LEMON: Yes.</s>ZAKARIA: You know, somebody needs to tell him, even if he doesn't attend that session on climate change at the G7, the climate is changing.</s>LEMON: It's going to -- the climate is going to deal with itself.</s>ZAKARIA: Yes, Mother Nature is going to do what it's going to do regardless whether Trump attends that meeting.</s>LEMON: One leader though that openly backed the president was Italy's prime minister. President Trump praised the prime minister on twitter, of course, today saying, "He represented Italy powerfully at the G7, loves his country greatly, and works well with the U.S." So, do you have to agree with this president in order for him to work with you or to work with him?</s>ZAKARIA: Well, it seems like that, but even then half the time he changes his mind. I mean, what does it mean to agree with this president? This is a president who said, you know, on one day that President Xi is the greatest enemy of America. Then the next day he said he was a great leader. He said he was going to order American companies to stop, you know, doing business in China. The next day he said to them, they have a great future in China. So, I think anyone who thinks that their future lies in their warm solidarity with President Trump should keep in mind he's going to get up the next morning and he may have a very different view.</s>LEMON: I kept thinking as I was watching you that, you know, people would be talking like (inaudible) and then, oh, here he comes. Oh, hi. Hello, Mr. Trump. How are you? You know, it's like, here he comes. Let's stop talking about him, right? That's the sense of that.</s>ZAKARIA: That's the world right now. It's not just, you know --</s>LEMON: It's not just at the G7. Thank you.</s>ZAKARIA: Pleasure as always.</s>LEMON: Appreciate it. Fareed Zakaria. Make sure you tune in to Fareed Zakaria in CNN's Special Report. He's going to investigate the deep reasons why white supremacy is showing its face. "Special Report: State of Hate: The Explosion of White Supremacy." It airs Sunday morning at 10:00. And of course, at "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS" on as well. And with all of the chaos of this administration, there is the president's trade war with China. A new tariff on goods like sneakers and clothing set for September 1st, right around back to school time. What will it all mean for Americans? We're going to dig into that, next.