Transcript: Ronna McDaniel on "Face the Nation," February 2, 2020
The following is a transcript of an interview with Ronna McDaniel that aired Sunday, February 2, 2020, on "Face the Nation."
MARGARET BRENNAN: Joining us now is the head of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel. Good morning. Good to have you here.
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE CHAIR RONNA MCDANIEL: Good morning. Great to be here.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So President Trump will be the first American president to run for re-election after having been impeached. How do you turn that into an asset?
MCDANIEL: Well, we're already seeing it as an asset with our base. We've added 600,000 new small online donors since this impeachment began. We're seeing his approval ratings tick up. We're seeing independents come our way because the American people recognize this hasn't been bipartisan. This hasn't been held to the standard we've seen with past presidents. And they really view it as Democrats pushing their agenda against a president they never wanted to see elected to begin with. And they fought him every step of the way. And they want- and then they see the president signing the phase one deal with China, signing USMCA. He's governing while they're continuing to resist, and I think it's working in his favor.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you've been fundraising—
MCDANIEL: Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --off of impeachment, but the RNC is also picking up the tab, isn't it true, for some of the president's legal defense, his- his lawyers, how- how this is instead of creating some kind of fund like Bill Clinton did when he was impeached. Why did the RNC choose to do it this way?
MCDANIEL: Well, we do have a legal fund that is specifically for these types of things it's not taking away from our ground game or helping with re-election and our infrastructure we're building in the states. It's specifically for legal expenses. And guess what? We're paying for it and not the taxpayers. The Democrats are doing this on the taxpayer dime. They're not getting the things done that the American people want. And we're helping to pay for some of these costs because we don't want to see our president impeached. We think he should be re-elected. And that's what the majority of our supporters and investors feel at the RNC as well.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you know what the cost has been?
MCDANIEL: I don't know what the cost has been.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So I want to ask you about some of the polls.
MCDANIEL: Sure.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Your home state in particular out there in Michigan, an epic MRA poll shows that out there, President Trump trails all five top Democratic candidates. Who do you think is the toughest candidate for President Trump-Trump to beat? Joe Biden says you're scared to death of him.
MCDANIEL: Well, I'll just say this. Our internal polling, where we've been in all these states, our analytics, which is more accurate, shows the president in very good shape in all of these states. I am not concerned about any of them. Nobody has become the presumptive front runner. You're actually seeing more people get in the race. You're seeing an energy problem for Biden. You have a huge issue with his national security stances as vice president. And then with Bernie, he's gone way too far with talking about taking away people's health care plans and taking a government control of health care. So we're going to be good against any of them because we've a record that the president can run on of seven million new jobs, wages going up. And you see in poll after poll that you do see that people feel good about the economy. They know that they're better off than they were four years ago. And that's what we're gonna get to run on.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And you think that's your strongest argument? The economy?
MCDANIEL: It's a huge argument. I mean, people have more money. They feel better about their future. They can send their kids to college. Their kids can get jobs after college. These are things that the American voter cares about.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But President Trump has already tweeted quite a lot in the past 12 hours or so about Mike Bloomberg. He told Fox, as well, he would love to run against him. Michael Bloomberg's already spent a quarter of a billion dollars on his advertising around his campaign. President Trump has spent just slightly over 50 million dollars. How concerned are you, not just about Bloomberg himself, but what he's building in terms of an operation that he says he will hand off to any Democrat who wins the nomination?
MCDANIEL: Well, he's building an outside operation outside of the party, which is like a super PAC, essentially, once he's not a candidate. I'm not concerned about that. From a party structure, we're working with our state parties, our county parties, our district committees. We're able to coordinate directly with the candidate. It's not an outside group. And the RNC is already on the ground in 18 states. We've already trained 500,000 volunteers. We're going into 2020 with 200 million dollars between us and the- and the Trump campaign. So we are building the biggest infrastructure in the history of politics. I'm not concerned about what Bloomberg's putting out. And his ads, I see them all the time, I think they're terrible. "Mike gets it done." What does he get done? I don't know. I don't know anything about him. We're not seeing him talking to the voters at the level that I think you need to—
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.
MCDANIEL: -- to be competitive. And the president's not afraid of anybody. Let's be honest. He punches at everybody.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Fair. But Mike Bloomberg has tremendous spending ability here.
MCDANIEL: He does.
MARGARET BRENNAN: He's not putting limits really on what he's willing to do to defeat President Trump. He's worth 60 billion dollars, and he's going to hand this off even if it's not him.
MCDANIEL: Well, President Trump went up against Hillary Clinton, who had significantly more money than he did. We've seen candidate after candidate with these huge war chests come in and think they can buy an election. And the American people don't like that. And President Trump- if you look at the crowds that we're seeing, which are bigger than ever, a hundred and fifty thousand people signed up to come to a rally in New Jersey, in blue New Jersey. If you look at the fundraising, if you look at the—
MARGARET BRENNAN: But Bloomberg's modeling a lot of what he's doing around what Trump did. It's a lot of digital.
MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MARGARET BRENNAN: It's a lot of TV advertising.
MCDANIEL: He's modeling it, but he's not Trump. That's the big factor. Bloomberg is not Trump. He's not going to get a crowd like that. I'd like to see him do a rally and try and even get a hundred people to come. I mean, this is not the movement candidate, Bloomberg. And I think he's got a real issue with the Democrat Party. I mean, listen, they just changed their debate rules and their structure for a billionaire and they refused to do it when you had Cory Booker and Julian Castro saying, listen, we deserve more diversity on the stage representing our party, and they said, nope, we're not going to change the rules for you.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.
MCDANIEL: But this billionaire can buy his way into the debate. Bloomberg had every ability to change the way he was raising money to qualify for the debates. But they're changing the rules for the billionaire. And I think that speaks volumes about the Democrat Party.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to ask you, though, about President Trump's relationship with- I mean, he's reshaped the party, but there are still traditional Republicans who aren't entirely comfortable with everything he does, including your uncle Senator Mitt Romney, who voted for witnesses. He was one of only two Republicans who did so in this impeachment trial. The Conservative Political Action Conference has disinvited him from an upcoming meeting. And they're kind of- they put up this ad online. There are TV ads against him. I mean, do you think this is proper political retaliation?
MCDANIEL: I-I disagree that—
MARGARET BRENNAN: Are you comfortable with that?
MCDANIEL: --the president's changed the Republican Party. I think the president's strengthened our party. And if you look at things that he's done—
MARGARET BRENNAN: I don't know if you saw that ad, but it was your uncle's face there—
MCDANIEL: I haven't- I haven't seen the ad.
MARGARET BRENNAN: It says "disinvited" or "not invited."
MCDANIEL: Well, that's the grassroots part of our party, and they're upset. They're upset when people aren't supporting the president and supporting our party. And- and they think if you're not supporting him, you're helping a Democrat get elected. That's a very common belief among the grassroots of our party. But I will say, this president has stood for life. He stood for rule of law judges. He stood for tax cuts. He stood for deregulation, energy independence. These are Republican ideals.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But—
MCDANIEL: And he has made the RNC significantly stronger by supporting our party. And we will be stronger after him because of the investment he's put in data and digital and the things to make us strong beyond his presidency.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay, I understand you don't want to comment on your comfort and your uncle and the comments about him, but we do have to leave it there. Good to have you here—
MCDANIEL: Great to be here.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --in studio. We'll be back in a moment with a look at how the Democratic race is shaping up in Iowa.