Former Mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani was interviewed Sunday morning (9/4) on CNN New Day by Jake Tapper. In the interview, the two discussed at length Donald Trump’s visit to Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Peña Nieto, Trump’s immigration policy speech in Phoenix Arizona, and Trump’s outreach to Black voters in Detroit, Michigan. Here is a transcript of the full exchange:
TAPPER: Trump is trying to make headway with minority voters, but he might have his work cut out for him if polls and the angry protests outside the church are any indication.
Joining me now to talk about this all is former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a supporter of Donald Trump.
Mr. Mayor, thanks for joining us.
RUDY GIULIANI (R), FORMER MAYOR OF NEW YORK: Hi, Jake. How are you?
TAPPER: Good. Thank you so much.
Donald Trump making an effort yesterday to reach out to African- Americans. It seems to have been welcomed by those inside the church.
But, I have to say, in interviews, many African-Americans say they are still troubled by Mr. Trump having suggested over and over, falsely, that the first African-American president was born in Africa, and thus ineligible to be president.
GIULIANI: You know, the interesting thing is, the first one that made that claim was Hillary Clinton.
TAPPER: Well, not her, her herself, people around her.
GIULIANI: Her campaign did.
They were the first ones that brought it up. And finally it was resolved after Donald Trump raised it. So, they maybe have a faulty memory there as to where that issue first came from and what first suggested it to them. It was the Clinton campaign.
(CROSSTALK)
TAPPER: That’s fair enough, sir, to say the people around the Clinton campaign brought that up.
But, as you say, it was resolved in 2011, when he released his birth certificate. Donald Trump, talking about this as recently as February of last year at CPAC, saying that he thinks the birth certificate is false.
Should he just apologize for this to let — if he really wants to reach out to minority voters?
GIULIANI: You know, if everybody apologized for all the things they said in politics, all we would be doing on television shows is apologizing.
Maybe a lot of the Democrats should apologize for calling Donald Trump a racist and calling him all kinds of terrible names. And it gets a little silly. Let’s get down to the basic issue here.
For years, people say Republicans don’t reach out to the African- American community. Well, he reached out to the African-American community. Maybe it isn’t the message of left-wing Democratic politics, which, in my view, having been the mayor of a city that was rotting when I took it over, on the front cover of “TIME” magazine as the rotting of the Big Apple because of years of liberal Democratic policies — New York could be Detroit, if I hadn’t turned it around, if I hadn’t lowered taxes, gotten jobs for people, gotten jobs for people on welfare, and straightened out a good deal of the education system, and moved away from dependency.
I moved 600,000 people off welfare, 500,000 people with jobs.
TAPPER: Right.
GIULIANI: So, now you compare New York to Detroit and Baltimore, and you look at the number of crimes in both of those cities and you look at New York, you look at the unemployment rates, you look at the economic opportunities, and you see that I think Donald Trump is the first Republican since Jack Kemp, and me, to go into minority poor communities and say, the Democrats have failed you for 50 years, and you are reflexively giving them your vote, and they are going from bad to worse.
[09:05:22]
Food stamps have gone up two-and-a-half times under — under — food stamps have gone up two-and-a-half times under Barack Obama. He should be ashamed of himself. Jobs should have gone up two-and-a-half times.
(CROSSTALK)
TAPPER: I take your point.
My only — my only point is that many African-Americans are still mad about Donald Trump having tried to invalidate Barack Obama by claiming he was born in Africa. But we’re obviously not going to get anywhere.
I want to ask you about Mr. Trump’s trip to Mexico, because you played a pivotal role in that.
GIULIANI: Right.
TAPPER: The Mexican president says that he began this meeting by saying that Mexico would not pay for the wall that Donald Trump wants to build. And according to “The Wall Street Journal,” you immediately jumped in.
What did you say?
GIULIANI: No. What I said was, it was off the table.
We had — we had ground rules for this meeting. And one of them was, we were not going to discuss paying for the wall, because that’s not something we’re going to agree about.
What we wanted to do was to find areas of common agreement. And maybe the president’s staff didn’t brief him on it. Maybe the president forgot it. But, I mean, he brought it up. It wasn’t right at the very beginning. It was sort of in a middle of a sentence.
And I just briefly said, that’s not on the table. And the reality is, they have a disagreement over that. But they found many areas of agreement. I will tell you one really interesting one is trade. Mexico is suffering from the same trade problems with China that we’re suffering from.
All the same complaints that you hear from Donald Trump, President Pena Nieto would say exactly the same thing, the same kind of dumping, the same kind of violation of a lot of the trade rules and regulations.
And they’re bringing cases against Mexico and against China, and they’re going nowhere. So, one of the things we have said we could do is, we could join together in an alliance between the United States and Mexico and see if we could bolster ourselves in terms of fair trade with China.
We also found common ground in illegal immigration. They have a tremendous amount of illegal immigration into Mexico from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Some stay in Mexico, creating a problem for them.
And then a lot of the people coming across the Mexican border are not Mexicans. They’re people from the countries I just mentioned.
TAPPER: Right.
GIULIANI: In some cases, ISIS has made clear they’re going to take advantage of that open border to bring terrorists there.
And on the question of the wall, basically, the president of Mexico said, that’s your decision to make. You know, it’s your decision whether to put up a wall or not.
TAPPER: So — so…
GIULIANI: So, it was mostly — it was mostly a very good, very productive conversation.
I think — I think Donald Trump learned a lot of what he probably knew anyway , but it reinforced a lot of what we knew about trade and what we knew about areas in which we can agree. And, look, like with all of our allies, we’re going to have areas of agreement, we’re going to have areas of disagreement. And I think what Donald Trump displayed was his ability to be a president.
TAPPER: So, and a lot of pundits, even those who are skeptical of Donald Trump, seemed to give that meeting very high marks.
There are reports that you and Governor Chris Christie, among others, have been internally in the Trump campaign pushing Trump to do things more like that, more presidential in tone, for want of a better word.
But later that day, Trump went to Arizona and he gave an immigration speech that was perceived as so harsh, that even the Republican National Committee scrapped plans to praise that speech.
In a way, sir, did your side of the struggle within the Trump campaign win the morning, but lose the night?
(LAUGHTER)
GIULIANI: No. We won both. And both sides won. And there aren’t two sides.
I think if you — you have to read the AP story that came out of that speech. The AP story says Donald Trump retreats on mass deportation. It is true the speech was delivered in, I would say, a dramatic style, because it was a rally audience.
But if you read that speech carefully, that speech is consistent with what he said in the past, and it leaves a very big opening for what will happen with the people that remain here in the United States after the criminals are removed and after the border is secure.
And he says in a very, very important sentence, which everybody seemed to ignore but AP, he says there that, at that time, when America is safe, we will be open to all of the options, meaning that Donald Trump, as he expressed in one of his interviews recently, would find it very, very difficult to throw out a family that’s been here for 15 years, and they have three children, two of whom are citizens.
And that is not the kind of America he wants. His main focus of that speech, and I think the reason for the emotion in it was because of all of those mothers who came up whose children were killed by illegal criminal immigrants.
[09:10:15]
TAPPER: Right. But…
GIULIANI: And all of the policies, all 10 policies are largely directed toward criminal illegal immigrants, which the Obama administration releases into the streets of our city.
TAPPER: So, let me just…
(CROSSTALK) GIULIANI: Which is actually — they have an insane policy. I was a prosecutor most of my life.
TAPPER: But, Mr. Mayor…
GIULIANI: Called catch — catch and release.
TAPPER: But, Mr. Mayor…
GIULIANI: They catch criminals, and they release them.
TAPPER: I just want to — I just want to understand what you’re saying here.
So, Mr. Trump will not be trying to kick out the dreamers, he will not be having a deportation force, and he no longer wants to get all 11 million undocumented immigrants out of this country?
GIULIANI: What he — what — what he said in the speech is, after we secure the border and after we remove the criminal illegal immigrants, to a large extent — you’re never going to get to 100 percent — then and only then can we look at this in a very rational way in which we can look at all the options and be open to all the options.
TAPPER: And he doesn’t want to separate families, as you say?
GIULIANI: Well, I would say that would be one of the things that would be pretty clear.
There are other options too. I mean, it’s going to depend on the person. Some of these people could have been on welfare for the last 30 years, or taking benefits or cheating. And maybe some of them have to be thrown out, but not necessarily all of them.
And that’s the point that he was making in the speech. And I agree with you, that point got lost to some extent in the emotion of the moment. And the emotion of the moment were the 12 mothers — I think 10 mothers and two fathers who came up who have been killed by illegal immigrants released because of the incompetent policies of the Obama administration, which Hillary Clinton is just going to continue.
TAPPER: All right. Mr. Mayor, thank you so much. We appreciate your time, as always.
GIULIANI: Thank you.
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