CNN "Erin Burnett Out Front" - Transcript: "Interview with Rep. Chris Coons"

Interview

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SCIUTTO: All of these folks at home with a very reasonable questions as to what is the truth, what did the President mean to say. Abby Phillip at the White House. Thanks very much.

OUTFRONT tonight, Democratic Senator Chris Coons. He sits on the Foreign Relations Committee. Senator, we appreciate you taking the time tonight. As you know, this is the President's third G7 summit and clearly the U.S. remains at odds with its closest allies on virtually all of the country's major National Security issues. You look at China trade war, Russia and the G7, the Iran nuclear deal, climate change.

I want to ask you, is there any value to this summit for the U.S. or its allies under those conditions and those differences?

REP. CHRIS COONS (D-DE): Well, Jim, what was clearly problematic for our closest allies was they're trying to figure out how to work together around Donald Trump's erratic style. And as a visual metaphor for the ways in which Donald Trump and the Trump administration are missing in action on the world stage, that image of the empty seat assigned to the United States at a gathering of world leaders to confront climate change and in particular the crisis of the fires in the Amazon is a tragically perfect metaphor.

I think President Macron did a significant positive service in trying to move forward, multilateral efforts to contain Iran's nuclear weapons program. There was a lot of pressure for us to make progress in the China trade war between the United States and China. But in meeting after meeting, President Trump said things that were either directly opposite of what he'd said just a few hours before or whereas you just detailed factually inaccurate or were directly in contradiction to the positions of our closest allies.

We cannot stand four more years of this. I can't think of a better argument for why Joe Biden is the best person to serve as our next president, than the decades of senior foreign policy leadership experience he would bring to that stage and the very rapid restoration of our position in the world that he would make possible.

SCIUTTO: As you know front and center at this summit, the trade war, the growing U.S. trade war with China, Trump has been engaged with a tit for tat with China over tariffs. We saw that play out on Friday. Today, he pivoted, he talked about a call which may or may not have happened. I want to play for you how he talked about China's President Xi in that context, have a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: I have great respect and I like him too. He's a tough guy,

but I have a lot of feeling for President Xi, very outstanding in so many ways.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: I wonder given how forcefully he - and you might say with a little bit of anger impose those new things sanctions on Friday afternoon, now you hear those comments. Do you sense the President looking for a way out here having seen the market's reaction?

COONS: I would hope that the President is developing a strategy where he has an off-ramp for this escalating trade war with China. But the pattern you just described, a Friday Trump where he is excoriating the leader of China and a Monday Trump where he's talking about him in glowing terms is a pattern we've seen before with Kim Jong-un, for example, of North Korea where he was denouncing him in the harshest possible terms in the run up to what seemed to be a possible nuclear confrontation.

And then just a few weeks later professing his deep and undying personal love for him in ways that seemed completely inappropriate for a dictator of a country that has a terrible human rights record. President Trump has a pattern of going back and forth between berating and closely engaging with authoritarian leaders around the world that I think is quite troubling and suggests an uncertainty in terms of our pattern around the world.

[19:10:04] Jim, here in Delaware in the last couple of days I've met with and heard from retailers as well as manufacturers and farmers who are saying that this tariff war between the United States and China is causing real uncertainty, is raising their prices and they reminded me what I think many of us know, these tariffs are being paid not by China but by America's farmers, manufacturers and business owners.

SCIUTTO: Yes. The president lied about that again today claiming that the U.S. is gaining billions from these when the fact is Americans pay those tariffs, you got to call it out like it is. You talk about the back and forth, the pendulum swing between brutal comments about foreign countries and then friendly ones. You might be able to put Iran in that category today, because the President spoke positively about the possibility of meeting, perhaps with the Iranian President discussing with them.

And as you know there was an unexpected appearance at the G7 by Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron. Do you believe Macron was trying to set up a U.S.- Iran mini summit as it were at the G7 and do you think that there could be a positive outcome from such outreach?

COONS: I'm not sure exactly what President Macron's goals were but it was, I'm assuming, to advance a positive conversation about how do we move forward past this stalemate. President Trump when he was running as a candidate promised that he would tear up the JCPOA or the Iran nuclear deal and he's done just that and then imposed a tough new round of sanctions against Iran. The question is where do we go from here and it is, I think, a

positive even hopeful development if there is some path forward for negotiations between President Trump and the leadership of Iran. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. It is a great source of instability and violence in the Middle East and a country with which we have great differences.

But I think it's important that we try to find a way to work with our closest allies to manage the threat of Iran, to contain Iran and tearing up that U.S. Iran nuclear deal was one of the greatest ways in which President Trump has separated us from our European allies. Taking this opening that President Macron's given him could help heal some of that distance.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Another issue where after three summits the President has not moved his allies closer to his position at all. Senator Coons, we appreciate you taking this time on this summer Monday.

COONS: Thank you, Jim.

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