tv CNN Newsroom CNN April 14, 2020 8:00am-9:00am PDT
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others, and that means not pushing to go back to work before he's ready. >> to me that puts other people in danger, so just to know that i have it so i can stay home and try to take care of this properly without infecting other people. >> nick valencia, cnn, atlanta. thanks to nick and thanks to all of you. we'll see you back here tomorrow. i'm poppy harlow. >> and i'm jim sciutto. "newsroom" with john king continues right now. this is cnn's continuing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. i'm john king in washington. we also welcome our international viewers watching around the world. this hour we expect to hear from president trump. he is in the oval office, in the cabinet room, we're told, as he welcomes patients who have recovered from the coronavirus. we're also waiting to hear from the former president barack obama. he will release a video today
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formally endorsing joe biden. politics a little later. here's the numbers where we stand on coronavirus. almost 590,000 cases worldwide. some of the hardest hit by the virus, they are loosening some violations to allow select stores to open. we know the president's chief of staff, mark meadows, is tasked with writing a plan to reopen the economy. the president ignores the constitution, boasts he calls the shots and he has the authority to tell states when and how to reopen. governors don't see it that way, to put it mildly. >> the president should not even think of going there. if he ordered me to reopen in a way that would endanger the public health of the people of my state, i wouldn't do it.
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>> the governor is going to make the determination of what's best for your state and we're the ones that have to enforce it. everyone knows it's the governors where the rubber meets the road. >> we'll have to make a decision, that's my responsibility, but we'll consult with the white house. ultimately the buck stops with me and stops with the other governors. the international monetary fund saying the global coronavirus recession could rival the great depression and could take a deeper toll than the 2008 financial collapse if there is not another more recorded way of keeping track. let's go to cnn medical correspondent dr. sanjay gupta. sanjay, how big a deal? >> we're used to hearing about
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the coronavirus test, the test being a swab which goes to the back of your nose, the back of your throat. if anyone described it to you, they described it as uncomfortable. there is also a need for people who are administering the test to wear personal protective equipment. as you know, in some places, john, those are at a premium, that personal protective equipment. this is a saliva test, just like you do for some of those ancestry tests, you're basically using saliva, collecting that in a little tube, and then possibly using that to be tested positive or negative for the coronavirus. first of all, this is ant at-home test still. it's a test that needs to be done with a health care provider. it has to be done in a clinic or something like that. the person doesn't necessarily need to be wearing the ppe, but it's not an at-home tests. there are a lot of tests we're talking about.
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understandably people want to get the type of test out there. this is one approved in isolation. they found that 100% of the time it was accurate, it showed the same thing the swab test showed. that's still a small sample size, john. just a word of caution, we are throwing these results in, but these are sample sizes. if the saliva test comes back negative, then that negative test has to be confirmed with the swab test. they're saying, yes, this looks like a potentially good test. yes, it could save a lot of good equipment but we still have to have the confidence and backup
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of the cdc. >> there is a question about how quickly can you scale it up and get it out to where it is most needed. >> i think we will have a better idea of just how useful this is going to be probably soon, because there is such a demand for these tests. but that is the point you're raising, john. they say they could use 10,000 tests a day, which is very good. keep in mind that the numbers we're talking about as we start to try to ease out of this curve and think about reopening things is more like hundreds of thousands, maybe close to a million tests a day. so this could provide some relief there, but it's not going to be the answer for everybody. and, again, there is no test that has been approved at home yet. that would obviously be a game changer for people to be able to do these tests at home, to get a result quickly at home, spaes especially when people are home, they're staying at home right
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now. in terms of the current scale, it could be a very useful tool, but it's not going to be the answer to the significant demand there's going to be, especially as we start to ease out of this curve. >> let's hope it's a useful tool. i'm a tad skeptical because we've had this conversation so many times and failed to see things move. let's have a little bit of hope today. a mounting case count and death toll yet also some glimmers of hope. what do the latest numbers tell us about what is working and what is critical to keep flattening the curve? a senior scholar at the johns hopkins center for health security, thank you so much for being with us today. let's focus on this. you hear from people like governor cuomo who says we are flattening the curve. we can show you just the hospitalization rate in the state of new york, something you look at to see are we getting ahead of this, are there fewer patients showing up in the hospital? if you look at the change in hospitalizations, you see that drop. when you look at a chart like
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that, what does it tell you about today and what is critical keeping that line going in the right direction? >> it shows us that social interventions are having an impact, that hospitals aren't going into crisis, and that's the most important thing we're trying to preserve, is hospital capacity. we have to continue to think about what are the most effective social distancing measures that we need to continue to do in order to keep us below that hospital capacity. what does hospital capacity look like and hospitalization is the key number that i look at to gauge that. >> hospitalization, one key number. if you look, new york obviously heading in the right direction. we could show you some other states, louisiana, new york and massachusetts. massachusetts is the big number on this chart. that's the testing. we'll move on to the coronavirus by state graphic. new york is the one on top, but you do see it flattening. at the bottom, louisiana still
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heading up, it's flattish. when you look state-by-sta by ss it mostly encouraging, is it a mix? >> it's mostly encouraging, and it's important to remember that these won't be synced until they look again. things look encouragely. but that's different in other parts of the state, like in philadelph philadelphia, i do a lot of qualitative talk, friends in seattle, and things look good. it doesn't mean we'll not have a
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hard road ahead, but it could be worse. >> people want to get back to work. people want to start selling things. when you look at the model, and you're feeling good and hospitals think they're in a place where they can handle this, everything that's said when you talk to a medical professional, we've got to have more testing. where are we? >> we still have tests that haven't been utilized. we still have issues with free agents, the materials you use to perform the tests, the swabs. when i decide if i'm going to test somebody, and they're going home and they're stable, i'm not going to necessarily test these
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individuals. we should be able to test everywhere and get a rapid result back that has a lot of accuracy. we need to do that so we can lift these economic restrictions and know where we are with hospital capacity. we need to know who has this virus and who doesn't. we need optimal testing. >> the president has been itching to reopen the country? do you think may is the time to do that, or do you think we're somewhat behind for some states to be at their peak? do you expect the president to say, we need to go today or we need another month? >> some testing is more stabilized. some have more drive-in clinics.
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have more of a layered response, and some may lift restrictions where they have that lifting and others don't, so i don't think it's going to be snycronous. >> dr. adalja, i appreciate your insights. the president says this authority rests with him, he alone at the white house, about reopening the economy. one month ago, president trump on his confidence about the u.s. economy. >> our country is in the best financial shape -- so different than in the past -- over the years, if you look at some of the real big crises we had, it was financial issues, we don't have the trade and other things
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president trump often tries to rewrite history to ignore or explain away things he says that turn out to be way, way off, like, no, coronavirus won't become a pandemic. or, the united states has 15 cases and will soon be down to zero. now he's also trying to rewrite the constitution. the president, he says, has total authority. >> when you say my authority, the president's authority. when somebody is the president of the united states, the authority is total. and that's the way it's got to be. does the federal government have the power? the federal government has absolute power. >> reporter: has any governor
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decided you have the authority to decide when the states reopen? >> no. you know why? because i don't have to. >> no president has total authority even at a moment of national emergency. governors on both coasts are moving ahead with regional talks now about how best to reopen, making clear they would welcome federal help but would put their states' interests first when making these big decisions. with me, dan balsas, chief editor for the "washington post," and the congressional editor for the "new york times." dan, i want to start with you. i've been at this a while. i spent 19 years covering the white house in the briefing room, and i've never seen anything like i saw yesterday. >> john, you've spent more time in that briefing room than i have, but i probably spent plenty of years around different presidents. i've never seen anything like it, either. he was as contentious, as
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aggressive, as angry as i've ever seen a president. go back to richard nixon at the time of watergate. he could evoke kind of a sense of self-pity. this was raw anger on the part of the president. this was lashing out. and to see that in a briefing room, and for it to go on as long as it did tells you something about the state of mind of the president right now. >> and to that point, julia, you covered the trump white house for quite some time. this president played a video, i call take propaganda video, selectively edited, some cherry-picking moments that they played in the video that left out the month of february when the president said things like this. >> by april, you know in theory, when it gets a little warmer it miraculously goes away. >> people are getting better. they're all getting better. >> we're very close to a vaccine. >> when you have 15 people, and the 15 people in a couple days
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will be down close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. we're going substantially down, not up. we have it so well under control. we really have done a very good job. we're testing everybody that we need to test, and we're finding very little problem. you treat this like a flu. >> he came into the briefing room with some grievances, julie, and on some of these things he might actually be right. but to run a video like that and then to essentially ignore his own history tells you what? >> he was just being incredibly defensive, and that video to me really played like a campaign video, a sort of highlight reel, it seems, of things he's proud of and things he wants his supporters to know, but it did, as you say, ignore several weeks, a couple months, really, of the president wanting to play down the threat from this virus. the president characterizing people who were trying to sound the alarm and criticizing his
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attitude as partisans who were engaged in some sort of a hoax. and so he really was, i think, focusing more on casting blame on his own rivals than he was the actual response which is supposed to be the point of these briefings, to give people information about the government response. this really turned into a real extraordinary display of the presidential sort of grievance and defensiveness. >> we've seen this before, and i'm going to stick with you, julie. i'll come back to you in a second, dan, on this point. i've seen this before, and you tell me if i'm right, the president doesn't like to be questioned by strong women. kaitlan collins asking him tough but very fair questions, and paula reed is the one who watched that video and said, yes, mr. president, guess what, you did invoke that travel restriction in january. then you skipped to march. mr. president, what happened in
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february? >> you borrowed some time, you didn't use that time to ramp up testing. more than 6.6 million people are unemployed. >> zero cases, zero deaths on january 17. i said in january. >> reporter: you have a complete gap. what did your administration do in february after you had made a travel ban? >> a lot. a lot. i'll give you a list. >> she was dead on. february was missing from the video, and his response was, you are a disgrace. >> yeah, it's really been striking to see some of my colleagues in the press corps, women in the white house press corps, really question the president pretty sharply on some of these inconsistencies, and she did get right to the heart of the matter there, which is that no matter what you think of the response since the president started talking about social
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distancing and all the rest, there was a lost month or six weeks where he was being told, we now know, that those measures, those mitigation measures need to be taken, and he was reluctant to do so. >> and, dan, we've known from day one this is a very different president in the sense that he's not idealogical, he's not a traditional republican, his presidency in 2016 was a hostile takeover from the republican party. but we know the president is going way over the political lines. liz cheney was one of those after listening to the president yesterday who said, no, mr. president, the federal government does not have absolute power. she went on to include a quote from the united states constitution saying many of the powers are delegated to the states. that's the way this country was built. amash tweeting, people of the
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federal government deserve another option. he said, thanks, i'm looking at it very closely this week. dan, the constitution is quite clear. the president was wrong. if you could add in justin amash now being more serious. a lot of issues are front and center right now in the middle of this pandemic. do we believe he's more likely to run, and what would that mean? >> well, i don't know about that, john. go back to the point about the president's assertion of absolute power. you are not going to see, i would suspect, a lot of pushback from republicans because they fear his wrath and they don't want to get in the middle of a fight with him. liz cheney, who is a rare voice on something like this. we see this from time to time, someone will speak out or take issue with the president. but in general the party as a whole, the leaders as a whole have been quite timid in doing
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that. i think, as you talk to republicans about all these issues, they acknowledge that the president is in no way a traditional conservative, yet they recognize also that he has completely changed the nature of the republican party and they are, in a sense, hostage to the takeover that he exercised in 2016 and continues to exercise now. i think that tension is going to continue. we will see it in a variety of debates coming out of this in terms of what kind of spending is called for and what kind of programs are advocated. we'll see it in the fight over the deficits that are being created here and where the president is probably in a different place than many traditional conservatives. they are kind of stuck, frankly, in how they deal with this, and we have seen nothing over 3-plus years to suggest there is going to be systematic or strong pushback from the traditional
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conservatives in the republican party. >> but that's an excellent point. many of these questions being raised, whether it's absolute authority, whether it's spending, so on and so forth, will be with us for some time with this what happens to be an election year. julie and dan, thank you both. i appreciate your insights. paul manafort wants an early release from prison, citing his risk to the coronavirus. his attorney demanding he serve the rest of his 7.5-year sentence at home. he was put in prison for violating lobby laws. up next, a very busy week for joe biden. at&t has created a $10 million dollar fund to support distance learning tools, curriculum and resources to help educators and families keep school in session
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very big news today in the 2020 presidential race. cnn has learned the former president, barack obama, finally plans to weigh in today on the formal endorsement of joseph biden. the obama endorsement coming one day after senator bernie sanders offered former vice president biden backing for his election.
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>> i'm asking all democrats, i'm asking everyone to come together for this campaign to come together for your candidacy. >> you've been a powerful voice in this election. it's a voice like yours that allows us to accept what is. you've refused to accept that we can't change what's wrong in our nation. >> with me to share their insights, mr. jeff zeleny and ms. seung min kim. gin up fundraising, gin up excitement among democrats. >> reporter: no question about it, john, this is part of the
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choreography of how this rollout was going to go, and barack obama is a big part of that. i am told he is going to release a video message that is going to be actually quite long. it's going to go over a variety of things, not just a simple endorsement of his long-time friend and former partner in the white house. he's going to, of course, endorse joe biden, but he's also, i'm told, going to speak to americans and say why the biden leadership is needed at this moment. he's going to, of course, address the worries and fears that people have right now about what is going on in the country and, indeed, around the world. he also, i'm told, is going to speak directly to progressives. he's going to praise their movement, he's going to praise bernie sanders by name. we should point out barack obama has been talking to bernie sanders a lot over the past month or so, and his ability and willingness to stay on the sidelines is one of the reasons that bernie sanders was doing the endorsement yesterday, and it's one of the reasons that they do believe that this will be a smoother process. but make no mistake, i'm told the former president will also reach directly out to progressives and say, look, now
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is the time, or some point in the next six months is the time to get behind joe biden. it is needed to defeat president trump. it's a multi-layer conversation in this video message. but certainly, john, he is going to play a critical role here in unifying the party. it's one of the main reasons he stayed on the sidelines throughout the process here. so now he believes he is the one that can unify the party. we'll see if it's that easy, john. >> the see if it's that easy, part, jeff, is what's critical. going back to 2008, president obama has been a trailblazer in politics, in social media. that is the world we find us. normally you would see biden with sanders, doing rallies around the country, doing union rallies, trying to create some excitement. can't do that now, but we do know if you look at former president obama's tweets saying we need to keep the jrudicious
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system in place. both in the politics arena, we know he's itching to get back in. i guess this opens the gates. >> this very much is the new reality and the new world of campaigning during the coronavirus pandemic. typically when you are rolling out such a significant endorsement like this one, you would hope to have a big rally. you would really hope to bring in your supporters and create a moment out of such an endorsement. obviously joe biden is not in a position to do that right now because campaigning for all intents and purposes had simply come to a halt because of -- >> i'm sorry to interrupt. the governor of new york, andrew cuomo, doing his daily coronavirus briefing out of albany, new york. >> -- basically flat, technically a tick down, which is probably the first tick down,
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so that's a good sign, but basically flat. so we think we are at the apex on the plateau. the number of hospitalizations went up, flattened, continuing to flatten. good sign. technically the number is down a tad. statistically irrelevant but better than being up. the net change in total hospitalizations, if you look at the curve, which is what we look at, the curve is down. when you do the three-day average, which is more accurate than any one day, because remember, this reporting mechanism is new. we just put it in during this situation, so i wouldn't bet all the chips on any one day. but when you look at three days, you look at the overall curve, we think it's indicative. the three-day average is down. the change in icu admissions is
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down. the icu admissions i take with a grain of salt since hospitals are no longer what they were and they're basically all icu wards. intubation is a real number. about 80% of those people will not come off of a ventilator. so when you see the intubations, that is proportionate to the number of people we will lose and that's what we've been watching all along. people going to the hospital, most are treated and get discharged. some are not discharged. if they're intubated, about 80% of the people who are intubated will not come off the ventilator. the number of new people going into the hospital per day is also down, but we still have 1,600 new covid cases yesterday.
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so we have 1,600 people new coming into the hospital, some being discharged, and the net is what we've been watching, but it's also interesting to note that you still have 1,600 new people walking into the hospital or who were in a hospital and then diagnosed with covid. so the volume is still high, and that's why the hospitals are still working very hard. we have been watching for growth outside of new york city, long island, worcester, rockland. those have basically been flat. there have been a few hot spots here and there. the department has been very good about jumping on those hot spots and tamping them down. test, isolate, trace. and you see the numbers by region across the state.
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proportionately, obviously, downstate new york, which is what we've been talking about, but looking for growth along long island, rochester, rockland. proportionately upstate is very, very low to everything else in the state. this is something we're watching. this is the number of deaths in nursing homes. and the nursing homes have been an increasing issue. the nursing home issue was flagged by the first cases we had in the state of washington, because that is the vulnerable population in the vulnerable place, and we've been worrying about nursing homes from day one, as we saw in the state of washington. but you see the percentage of loss of life is getting higher in the nursing homes compared to the hospitals.
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lives lost yesterday, 778. that number is up and to me that is the most painful number. it has been the painful number every day, and those new yorkers are in our thoughts and prayers. you look at the past few days and the number of lives lost, it's basically flat at a devastating level of pain and grief. but it evidences everything else we're seeing which is basically a flattening at this level. the statisticians will say number of lives lost is a lagging indicator, which is a nice scientific term, but it doesn't mean it is not just terrible, terrible, terrible news and nothing we can do about it. although many new yorkers are doing everything they can to save people's lives on a daily basis at great personal cost to
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themselves. total number of deaths is 10,834. what we have learned through this process is that our actions determine our destiny, and that's actually good news. we changed the curve. every projection model, white house, cdc, coronavirus white house task force, columbia, cornell, gates-funded group, every projection had a higher rate of infection, higher rate of death. cdc was talking about over a million people. cdc was talking about projections that would have swamped the nation's hospital system. that didn't happen. why didn't it happen? because of what we did. and that's important to remember
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and realize. we changed the curve. a better way to say it is we are changing the curve every day. we have shown that we control the virus, the virus doesn't control us. and this is a big deal. look, we could have been in a place where we couldn't stop the spread of the virus. we could have done this whole lockdown, close-down, shutdown, and you still could have seen those numbers going up. that would have been a frightening place. we should take some comfort in the fact that we have demonstrated that we can actually control the spread of the virus. now, tremendous, dramatic pain to do it, shut down everything. but thank god we can control the spread. can you imagine how bad a situation it would be if we did all of this and you still saw
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those numbers going up? you lock up your family, you protect them, but somehow the virus still infiltrated the house. that would have been frightening. so there is good news in this. but there is also a caution flag. we are in some ways artificially controlling that curve. we've taken all these extraordinary actions and we are reducing the rate of infection. that means whatever we do today will determine the infection rate tomorrow. it is total cause and effect. so you stop doing what you're doing or you behave differently and you will get a different result. that's important to remember as we talk about reopening. everybody is anxious to reopen.
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i get it. i want to reopen. carla and kayla went out of the house. they love me, i love them, but they are sort of done with the entire experience. that's universal. people need to get back to work. the state needs an economy. we cannot sustain this for a prolonged period of time. everybody agrees. but everybody will also say how you reopen is everything, because of the first point which is we are now keeping down that rate of infection. and if you start acting differently, you will see a corresponding increase in that rate of infection. and the worst scenario would be if we did all of this, we got that number down, everybody went to extraordinary means, and then we go to reopen and we reopen too fast or we reopen and
Documents
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there's unanticipated consequences and we see that number go up again. well, you're being hypercautious. really? go look at other countries that went through exactly this, started to reopen and then they saw the infection rate go back up again. so let's at least learn from past mistakes. we've laid out a way to reopen, coming up with a comprehensive plan first that is regional in nature. we have seven states that we're working with. the virus doesn't understand state boundaries, doesn't understand that it needs a passport. it defies all of our norms. so how do you put the best minds together in a seven-state area? come up with a regional strategy because the virus can get on amtrak, the virus can goat a pla -- get on a plane, the virus can
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get in a car and travel on i-95. because no one has done this before, let's think together and let's plan together. if we can't come up with a common plan, let's see if we can come up with a plan that's not contradictory. let's see if we can goat a what connecticut does, that's not what we do for the state of new york. al i did this graphic because no one got when i went like this yesterday, and i said the gears have to mesh. this is what i was saying. i could see, nick, that you did not get what this meant. so that's a clarifier for you personally from yesterday. we also have to be clear on who is responsible for each element of the opening. the president said last night
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that he has total authority for determining how and when states open. that is not an accurate statement, in my opinion. governments have to be smart, because what government is doing is determining how this goes. it's literally determining in many ways life and death. we have to be smart about it. the federal-state relationship is central to our democracy. this has been a topic discussed since our founding fathers first decided to embark on this entire venture, right? this is basic federalism, the role of the states and the role
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of the federal government. and it is important that we get this right. our founding fathers understood, and we have to remember today that the balance between the state and the federal, that meticulous balance that is evidenced in our constitution, is evidence of our democracy. we don't have a king in this country. we didn't want a king. so we have a constitution and we elect the president. the states, the colonies want the federal government. it's the colonies that seeded certain responsibility to a federal government. all other power remains with the states. it's basic to our constitution and that federal-state relationship. hamilton, who in many ways was
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representative of this discussion of the balance of power, state governments possess harrowing advantages which will forever give them influence and ascendancy over the national government and will set aside encroachments by the state. that someone can overrule the federal government is repugnant. there are laws and there are facts even in this wild political environment. what do we do? we do what we do. because we are tough, and tough is more complex than what people think it is. within that word tough is smart, united, disciplined and loving.
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they are not inconsistent to be tough and to be loving. let me make a personal point, not necessarily a factual point. the president did his briefing last night, and the president was clearly unhappy. the president did a number of tweets this morning where he's clearly unhappy. did a tweet about mutiny on the bounty and governors are mutineers. i didn't follow the exact meaning of the tweet. but the basic essence of the tweet was that he was not happy with governors and that this was a mutiny. the president is clearly spoiling for a fight on this issue. the worst thing we can do in all
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of this is start with political division and start with partisanship. the best thing we have done throughout this past 44 days is we've worked together, and we haven't raised political flags, even in even though the power is so intense. we said not here. not in this. this is too important for anyone to play politics. it is a no-politics zone. this is about doing the right thing and working together. we have to stay there. we are all in a little bit of a reflected mood. i am in a reflected mood.
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everything we do here is so important. everyday is so important. i was thinking after the president made his comments and looking at the remarks reminded of a poster i saw when i was in grade school. queens, new york, catholic school. red shirt and tied with the hook and you had to put the hook on and it looked like you had a real tie which i never understood. the hook was harder to do. you had the hook and you had to adjust the band which was harder how to teach the kid how to tie a tie would have been easy. i was in grade school and there was that poster that came. suppose they gave a warning and nobody cared. i was looking at the poster and
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i didn't get it. how could that happen then you would have a war. that's the point. what would happen if people refuse to engage. they just refuse to fight. sometimes it is better to walk away from a fight than engage it. sometimes it takes more strength to walk away from a fight than engage it . the president will have no fight with me. i sat here for 44 years asking new yorkers to remember this is not about me. it is about "we." i understand your personal
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inconvenience. i understand you are frustrated and stressed and anxious and pain. think about "we." get pass yourself and think about society and think about family and interconnection and act responsibly for everyone else. it is not time for politics and no time to fight. i put my hand out in total partnership and cooperation are the president. if he wants to fight, he's not fwoing going to get it from me. period. this is going to take us working together. we have a real challenge ahead. just because the curve is flattening, there is no time to relax, we can lose all the progress we made in one week if we do it wrong.
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we have a number of challenges ahead. we have to figure out how to do this. how do you have a public health strategy that works in economic strategy and nobody had done this before. how do you increase the number of essential workers and how do you learn the lesson of the past? how do you start to do the massive testing that we are going to have to do here. we don't have the capacity to do today. we can only get about 60,000 tests per month. that's not enough. we'll do the antibody testing but that's not enough either. how do we do this and put together this whole testing system and do it in a matter of weeks. how do we use technology, apple and other companies are using
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technology to track. how do we do that? how do we do it fast? how do we take this nation's collective strength and figure out how to do those challenges? 50 years this week, apollo 13 gets damaged 230,000 miles from earth. how do they figure out how to get a spaceship back 220,000 miles 50 years ago? that's a miracle. okay. figure out how to do testing. figure out how to use technology to do tracing. that's what we have to work on. we have to do as a government of what our people have done, right? sometimes political leaders can learn best from finding people who are ahead of the
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politicians. look how people have been selfless and put their own agenda aside for the common good. can't their leader be as smart as they are. i look forward to working with the president in partnership and cooperation. he has no fight here. i won't let it happen. unless he suggested that we do something that would be reckless and endanger the health, our welfare and the people of our state then i have no choice. i put my hand out to say let's
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do this together. questions? >> governor. you are talking about making peace with donald trump with the president but you went on television four times and when asked about it and you called him a king and his press briefings were a comedy sketch. why didn't you say no comment when you tried to make peace with him. first point is he does not have total authority. i am a governor of a state. the statement that he has total authority over the states and the nation can't go incorre un-corrected. it is a statement that's wrong. there are many things you can debate in the constitution because they're ambiguous. this is not one of those things that's ambiguous.
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that statement can't stand. it is not only violates the constitution but the country. this is the first battle do we want a king or a president so that statement can't stand, period. >> calling him a king and a sketch. >> his proclamation is he would be king. that's what a king is, a king has a total authority. that statement can't stand. the whole mute any and the boun and whatever the rest of the theory was. i am not going to fight and get into that fight.
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i work very hard to be in partnership with the federal government this past month. i work very hard to stay away from politics. he's right. i did call and say i need federal assistance. i did call and say i need possible over flow beds. he's right that he did move very quickly to get us javits and the uss come fort worth. comfort. i said that repeatedly and i praised him for his action. he was right there. the federal government is an important role. i was a cabinet in tsecretary, d it for eight years. i know how powerful they actually could be in being of assistance and i don't think
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they were powerful as they could be. the federal government has tremendous capacity that we need now. yes, he's right on all of that. he's right we asked for cooperation and assistance and he's right that he delivered and i said this all along. this mutanier can't exist. >> there is no action item to talk about. >> it would be pleasure to speak with him but we don't have anything that's -- do we have anything pending? i did speak to the white house this morning about a hospital matter.
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