it's good to join you on this special night. your description was perfect. what a confusing day. i am chris cuomo and welcome to this special edition of primetime. confusing why? i can't tell you with any degree of confidence what the situation is with our president. i cannot tell you with any degree of certainty that we know what his case is like. we know his condition. why? two main reasons. one, a lack of trust with his white house and conflicting messages and things that don't square with reporting that a source very close to this president. think what you want about the relationship between the president and the media. i will tell you this as someone would has been doing this a very long time. i have never had the kind of access to the presidency that we have with this president. people around him talk. now, here is the confusing part about where things stand tonight. i have never been hit with a flood of mismatched stories the

way i am getting from people who know the president and know people around him. it's mind boggling. they range the spectrum of he is absolutely fine, he really didn't want to go to the hospital but he had to, to they had no choice but to take him to the hospital. he was insisting he was panicking, they had him on oxygen, they wanted the remdesivir and they couldn't get except in the hospital. who do we believe? the doctor gave us something more code than it was being candid. we don't know. i hear stories about the videos that we're seeing. where does that leave us as journalists and citizens in we have to go with what makes the most sense based op what we are told. i have to start with this. i have never been in a situation where something this important is happening and we can't trust the information we are getting and, therefore, i don't know for sure what the true condition of the president of the united states is right now when it is a

very serious circumstance. he has a virus that can go anything from manageable over the course of a few days to a real battle. i am not talking about me and my battle. that is just an iota of our understanding. his physician is not painting as rosy a picture as he did just hours before when he told us the president was battling covid very well. trump himself seems uncertain, uncharacteristically uncertain of his fate. by the way, he should be. this is scary and uncertain, and all he can do is his best to rely on the treatment and let his body fight until he is better, and certainly, the one thing we know for sure, that's what everybody should want. i do. i want him to get through this. i want his wife to get through this. i want us all come together and start talking about what matters in a way we can do something

about this pandemic. our president being sick is a galvanizing point for this country. you can no longer debate whether or not coronavirus is real. whether this pandemic is real. whether it's dangerous. because our president, who has the best of everything and the best protection and has been telling you not to worry about it is now sick. sick enough to be in a hospital and be getting very significant treatment. so with that as context here is the newly released message from the president tonight. >> i am starting to feel good. you don't know over the next period of a few days, i guess that's the real test. so we'll be seeing what happens over those next couple of days. >> four-minute message to you tonight. is this the best sense of what's happening? i don't know. it's hard to know. it's hard to know when the tape was made. it's hard to know whether or not this is someone who doesn't want to cause panic or whether he is

being the typical kind of cautiously optimistic that people are when they are sick. let's bring in chief white house correspondent jim acosta and also cnn medical analyst dr. jonathan reiner. great to have you both so we can, doc, do the reporting side with me and jim and then the, what the typical protocols are and what makes sense and doesn't to you as a clinician at the same time. jim, i want a debrief from you. i know you and i are experiencing the same thing with this deluge of disinformation, stories that don't make sense from people who should all be on the same page. what is your best reckoning from your sources of where things stand? >> i think it flows on a couple different tracks. first of all, we have to say a doctor is supposed to do no harm, right? and i think today dr. sean conley, the white house physician, did a lot of harm today. he passed on what appears to be bad information to the american people when he painted a rosy

assessment of the president's condition earlier today only to be contradicted by an official who spoke to the white house pool there outside walter reed, we found out later through "the new york times" and "the associated press" that that white house official was mark meadows, the chief of staff. i also talked to a senior white house official earlier today who is contradicting what dr. conley said saying that the president's condition yesterday was very serious and that is why they got him over to walter reed. let me point out just in that vain, chris, looking at the president's physician's statement that came out tonight, it says that he remains fever-free and off supplemental oxygen. remember earlier today dr. conley was not really giving a definitive answer as to the issue of supplemental oxygen. we had to go through sources to confirm that the president was on supplemental oxygen yesterday and now dr. conley is acknowledging that in this statement. and i think anytime you have a

white house physician saying that the president of the united states is not out of the woods medically speaking, that is concerning. i talked to a source familiar with the situation earlier this evening who said it is a very good thing that president trump is at walter reed tonight because his situation could go south very quickly and he needs to be careful, by the best out there and that's what they have at walter reed. >> well, jim, i got to tell you, that's the best read i have heard in terms of what makes the most sense from all these different threads. thank you for that. obviously, doc, you don't have to be a clinician to know that you don't come off something that you were never on, right? so logically, if he had come off s supplemental oxygen, that means he was on supplemental oxygen. when you treat a case like covid-19, if he is in the hospital and they have done the things to him that they have done, what does that sound like to you in terms of least common

denominator of what must be true about what they think of his condition? >> well, let's start with what is remarkably unusual about his treatment, which is that he received both the unapproved, still very experimental antibodies, and then a day later started a five-day course of remdesivir. i don't think the combination of the antibodies and the anti-viral remdesivir has ever been given to the same patient ever anywhere. so think about that. >> what does that mean? does that mean he is getting better treatment or more risky? give us some context for the lay people. >> think about this. they threw the kitchen sink at the president at the very beginning of his illness. so it means one of two things.

either the president was extraordinarily ill at the beginning of his illness or his team was extraordinarily panicked about the president at the beginning of his illness. they took an unprecedented step in medicine to combine those two therapies at the outset of the illness. the other wildcard is we don't though how panicked the patient was. so some of this, some of the cadence of his therapies may have been dictated by the patient. so that's very unusual, number one. and it would be incredibly unusual for the patient to be that sick literally the day he turns positive. and it's an important point because we really don't know when the patient, the president, turned positive. i think the best assumption is that he was infected at the september 26th scotus announcement where we now see a large outbreak and there is plenty of video of unmasked

non-social distanced -- >> let me stop you. we don't have to speculate. jim, you have reporting about when they believe he first tested positive, yes? >> we are hearing tonight from one senior administration official they believe at this point that this likely got started at that supreme court announcement event over here at the white house last saturday. i will caution, though, we are talking to sources who are also telling us that that is not definitive yet, that the white house medical unit is doing the contact tracing and doing analysis. not a done deal. as we know, chris, we have been talking about this over the last 24 hours, that has been the best guess, best theory all along because of the number of people infected with the coronavirus, tested positive for the coronavirus after going to that event. having said that, one caveat. chris christie, the former new jersey governor, kellyanne conway, the former white house counselor, kellyanne conway being at that amy coney barrett

event, they are part of the patient's debate team. i suppose there is the potential that perhaps the debate team, the debate prep team somehow got infected and perhaps that is how this got started. we don't know yet. it's being tracked down. one theory, yes, the white house is looking at, is that it started at the amy coney barrett announcement. >> go ahead, doc. make your point. >> i was trying to say we know he was positive on thursday, but what the white house has declined to tell us is when was the last negative test he had. the white house has been saying that the president has, you know, tested every day. i don't think that's true. i don't think the president is tested every day. and it's important for us to know when the last negative test was because it's sort of impacting how infectious he could have been on tuesday when he was in the presence of the former vice president during the debate. so i think from a public health -- >> and how much viral load --

>> exactly. >> in terms of his influence on others, that's one concern. with all due respect to everybody else involved, i think the biggest concern has to be his health and the more you know about the testing regimen, the better you can surprise what kind of time span a viral load build-up we are dealing with which gives a different understanding to how his body is dealing with the virus overall. the sooner it starts to hit him heavy, that means his body is having a struggle. and again this doesn't have to be dire. i got hit very hard early on in my exposure. so i'm okay now. i made it. yes, i'm younger than the president. but he doesn't get sick a lot. and many people in his age, most overwhelmingly make it through. doc, i want to do a different exercise. i want to take the video we have from him in chunks and go through with our reporting and our understanding of the right clinical disposition and we'll use this because we have to start moving from the to the we.

the president being sick matters beyond trump. it matters for the entire country. here is the first chunk. >> i want to begin by thanking all of the incredible medical professionals, doctors, nurses, everybody, at walter reed medical center. i think it's the finest in the world for the incredible job they have been doing. i came here, wasn't feeling so well. i feel much better now. we are working hard to get me all the way back. i have to be back because we still have to make america great again. we have done an awfully good job of that. but we still have steps to go and we have to finish that job. and i'll be back. i think i'll be back soon and i look forward to finishing up the campaign the way it was started and the way we have been doing, the kind of numbers we have been doing. we have been so proud of it. but this was something that happened and it's happened to millions of people all over the

world and i am afighting for them, not just in the u.s. i'm fighting for them all over the world. we are going to beat this coronavirus, whatever you want to call it, and we are going to beat it soundly. >> a couple of quick things. jim, when do we believe that this video was made? i know the offering is to suggest it was made tonight. but can we know that for sure? >> well, like everything around here, we may not know for sure because we're trusting officials who haven't always given us the best information. hearing from a white house official this was taped today, and the chief of staff, mark meadows, my understanding gave an interview this evening saying it was done a few hours ago. so we believe it was done today and that is our best information as of this moment. i do think, just looking at the video, you could tell that the president is sick. he does not seem himself. he seems sluggish. there is a political element to

this. i think he is trying to assure his supporters he is still, you know, doing okay and fighting on. he is saying i'm fighting for everybody else out there. but, i mean, this is the president of the united states hospitalized with the coronavirus. there is just no way to spin this in a positive way. i think they are trying to make the best out of a terrible situation. >> look, he seems good enough. of course, it would require they got redressed into what he had when he went in there. that's possible. it would be unusual protocol. this is an unusual situation. now, doctor, he says, you know, this just happened. no, it didn't. it happened because of what he wasn't doing. no matter what the testing protocol was, he wasn't wearing a mask, he wasn't social distancing, he was putting himself in lots of positions that you guys say we absolutely should not be in, and that's important for people to understand. this was not inevitable, certainly not for the president of the united states. fair point? >> right. and we have been saying this for

a long time, that the president has been extraordinarily cavalier with his own protection. the president, you know, has not insisted that, in fact he has discouraged his staff from wearing masks around the white house. the president has steadfastly and famously refused to wear a mask in public. the president has tons of people in, business leaders, all kinds of meetings, all the time. you know, what i tell my patients if you want to survive this pandemic and not get infected, make your viral footprint smaller. go to the store once a week. don't go every day. and what this president should have done from the beginning and what his staff should have insisted is that he only meet with people on a really needed basis. they needed to minimize -- >> that's a good point, doctor. it takes us the next part of the message. takes us to the next part of the message i want to play and i will have you guys go on your way. i really appreciate this, jim,

the way you are grinding it around the clock, and on a saturday night. this goes to what the message is that the country has to hear from the president right now. >> i had to be out front. this is america. this is the united states. this is the greatest country in the world. this is the most powerful country in the world. i can't be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe and say, hey, whatever happens, happens. i can't do that. we have to confront problems. as a leader, you have to confront problems. there has never been a great leader that would have done that. so that's where it is. >> now, doctor, i think this is an important moment. what he did by confronting the problem is he didn't confront the problem. he denied the existence of the problem and invited people to do things that proved his point that you didn't have to be worried when he really should have been shut up into the oval

office, shut up into the white house, and showing people this is the way we do business right now until we get through this. it's a really important distinction. even with him in the hospital and again wishing him well, people need to get the right message about that, don't they, doctor? >> exactly. look, the president is an essential worker. the same way physicians are and nurses are and grocery clerks are and bus drivers are and school teachers are. and they are not locked up in their house. no one told them to be locked up. what they do is the right thing. they put a mask on. they social distance. they take hand sanitizer and they do their best and take care of themselves and they get the work done. and that's what the president should have done. but he did not do that. he did not do that. instead, he went out, discouraged mask use and then held mass gatherings of unmasked supporters. he created the environment, you know, culminating in that september 26th event in the rose

garden. that's what he did. hopefully, now -- >> go ahead. jim, last word to you. >> i was going to say i have been to so many rallies. i was at the rally wednesday night. you know, the folks who cover him on a regular basis like myself, we have been saying to each other, when is it going to happen? he keeps having potential superspreader events. as my mother used to say, you make your bed, you lie in it. they are lying in it at this white house tonight. not only is the president wistrk with the coronavirus and in the hospital, the first lady has the coronavirus, multiple administration officials, senators, members of the press are getting the coronavirus because of the irresponsibility that we see here on a daily basis. there is no other way to put it, chris. >> jim acosta, dr. jonathan reinhardt. thank you. for everybody at home, we can keep two thoughts in our head at the asame time. i hope the president wows us with his resilience and comes

out in a quarter of the time that others do. great. but at the same time let where he is right now and how he is be a message. there can be no more debate about the right thing to do to protect ourselves from the virus. the message he was giving was wrong for him to give. now, we got to keep pressing for answers. why? we only have one president, and if the white house is continuing to not play it straight with us, we have to dig because we all need the information. what should we believe and from whom? more great minds on this true credibility crisis next. sale one sleep number 360 smart bed. you can both adjust your comfort with your sleep number setting. can it help me fall asleep faster? yes, by gently warming your feet. but can it help keep me asleep? absolutely, it intelligently senses your movements and automatically adjusts to keep you both effortlessly comfortable. will it help me keep up with mom? you got this. so you can really promise better sleep?

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thank you. [doorbell chimes] bravo. careful, hamill. daddy's not here to save you. oh i am my daddy. wait, what? what are you talking about? once again we are in unchartered waters. doctor says one thing. chief of staff says another. president wasn't on any oxygen. president is no longer on any supplemental oxygen. when you can't get a straight answer you get nervous fast when you are dealing with the commander and chief and president of the united states. let's get to the bottom of that clarity crisis. susan glasser and staff writer for "the new yorker" and peter baker, chief white house correspondent for "the new york times." they are also the authors of a book "the man who ran washington," a biography of former white house chief of

staff and secretary of state james baker. thank you for joining me tonight. >> thank you. >> thanks, chris. >> all right. so only one question. what do you hear and what do you believe? susan, i start with you. >> i heard a lot of different things. i don't know about you today. i am exhausted from three different statements from the white house chief of staff, mark meadows, a press conference from the president's doctor that didn't exactly lead to a lot of confidence inspiring, to say the least. so i think already we are finding out that the situation on friday was much more grave than the white house led us to believe. you know, it seems to be kind of a full-blown credibility crisis already and we're only barely two days into what we know will be a long haul for the president in terms of this illness. >> peter, do you think it's just as likely, and again obviously in disrespect to susan, i rely

on her all the time and i'm hearing the same things. the other version is they are throwing everything at him because they can, because we only have one president. they took him to the hospital not because he wanted to, he hates the way that looks, but wra why not? let's get him through as fast as possible. >> yeah, i think they would be more aggressive than this patient than the average patient. they would go out of their way to avail themselves to every possible avenue for treatments. this is a patieresident who alr experimented on his own, when he wasn't sick he took the hydroxychloroquine. he would be open to that kind of aggressive kind of action. it was interesting. the most recent comments by mark meadows after three different sets of comments on fox tonight was to say while the president is doing better, he did admit he was doing really badly on friday, worse than the white house told us at the time, his blood oxygen level dropped rapidly. that's the word he used,

rapidly. you could imagine, what we are told anyway, how frightening or unsettling anyway that would be the for the president. i think he was willing to go to the hospital at that point. at that the hospital not only can monitor you better, but it can also respond better to shortness of breath and the kind of trouble he seemed to be having. >> listen, i have lived it. it can get scary fast. it's one thing when, you know, a journalist gets panicky about their own condition. the only people who hear you is whoever within earshot of my basement. it's another when it's the president of the united states and you have to do everything you can. why is this a tough call for us, susan? have either of you ever dealt with a white house that is as inconsistent with the truth and consistent with disinformation as this one? >> well, that's right. i mean, look, it's in a crisis, of course. you have to deal with whatever the weaknesses are of the system as you find it.

and let's be real. many white houses have not been truthful with the american public when the president falls ill. you know, in our new book about baker, reagan's assassination, they really did not tell the american public how close reagan was to death until after he was starting to be out of the woods. the problem with this white house is it has a pre-existing condition of not being truthful with the american people to an epic scale. i think we have already seen today and yesterday just an enormous amount of contradictory information. you know, leaking things to people. this could be studied as a worst-case scenario for how to handle getting ahead of a crisis. it is the opposite of good crisis management. >> now, peter, the irony is, and again, as i say, i am going to say it every block of this show and every hour of television i do, we must hold two thoughts in our head at the same time. i hope the president wows us with his resilient, comes out

showing nothing can take me, not even covid, dealt with it in a fraction of the time as the average person. beautiful. this is absolutely a crystalline truth. his status is proof positive that the messgage he has been putting out was the wrong one to put out? >> those are two important thoughts to have at the same time. you're right. as americans we have to hope that our president recovers as speedily and quickly and fully as possible. you're right also. we have to look how this happened and how this happened was because you had a president who was in denial about the severity of this crisis and taking, now, the kind of steps that everybody told him not to take. huge events, no masks, no social distancing. i was at one of the rallies in pennsylvania not that long ago. i looked around and thought, it's going to be amazing to see in one week what happens here. in that case, it didn't happen. as jim told you there waiting f

the day it was going to happen and now it seems to have arrived. >> the good news is today i came into a couple of guys who had their trump flag flying and they had masks on. the bad news is they called it to my attention and said we have to now that everybody is trying to kill the president. again, messaging matters. we have to wear masks and wear it for the right reasons. the president is sick. we hope he gets better. the way we all avoid getting sick is by wearing masks. susan glasser, peter baker, thank you to both of you. good luck with the book. it is the right time to read it. "the man who ran washington," all about jim baker. worth the read. all right. in this uncertain time the vice president, got to talk about him, right? now, what is he going to do? he is going to go out and do campaign events just like trump was doing. how can that be the right message? why is the president where he is?

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our only good choice right now is to play the president's situation to advantage for him in terms of his health and us in terms of our health, all right? the message is so clear. we have to take the right precautions, okay? the president, the vice president now must understand the risk that they were posing to themselves and, as a result, to the republic. there is no other way to explain how the vp is still thinking about going out and campaigning except to say he knows the message and he is ignoring it. people like mark meadows, ivanka and jared trump, they are still going to work. the treasury secretary is still meeting with congressional leaders. the ag is putting the doj at ald willing they stay that way. science willing they stay that way. the guidelines are clear. you are supposed to stay home

for 14 days. being negative in one moment does not mean you are negative period. it takes time for this virus to build. i was negative and i was positive two days later. you don't have to believe me. nobody understands this better than the doctor. a pleasure. >> thanks for having me on. >> speak your truth, brother. what is the, first of all, the bottom line in terms of what you are supposed to do when you have been around somebody who you know has the virus in kploclose proximity for extended even if you get a rapid test that dings negative? >> this is not a close call, chris. the cdc guidelines are very clear on this and they are very accurate on this. you are supposed to quarantine yourself for 14 days. now, people say, well, what if i have a negative test? can i get out of quarantine? the short answer is no, and the reason is because there is an incubation period for the virus.

and the typical perp migip pert seven days, but it could last ten days. you could be negative five or seven days out and still turn positive. so it's critical if you have been around somebody infected, quarantine 14 days. >> right. and just so we are clear about this, i had symptoms. i thought i had a sinus infection, okay? here is sanjay's map. i got a test. i was negative. two days later the symptoms were much worse. i was positive and then i went right downhill. you see there incubation period. you see the green spots? that's you are exposed to the virus. now incubation means it's growing in your body, okay? the infectious period is once it gets to a point and your body where you are contagious, but that doesn't mean you are feeling the symptoms. then comes the symptomatic period. obviously, you are still infectious. then you have that last level,

presymptomatic, but infectious, which means what i said before. you don't feel like crap yet, but you can spread it. that's when bettwe are talking t a superspreader, doc, right? somebody who has so much viral load that they are very contagious. they don't know it yet by how they feel? >> absolutely. so one of the things that we have been worried about, for instance, is that if the president started feeling badly on thursday, or even wednesday, but felt okay on tuesday, he was probably contagious on tuesday, which is why we have all been worried about vice president biden and whether he has gotten infected or not. i am sure whoever came to the party on saturday night at the rose garden who then spread it to a large number of people probably felt fine. but unfortunately they did superspread this and, of course, a lot of people ended up getting infected. >> yeah, important perspective to have. part of contact tracing is some people don't want to tell you. they are nervous, embarrassed.

here maybe a little scared. don't be. if you don't know you're sick, you can't be held responsible, especially in our testing environment where nobody is getting tested enough so you can't know. when you get tested, too often it's the wrong kind of test. the big question, which is actually a no-brainer. the idea of the vice president going out and doing trump-had li -- trump like rallies when the president is in the hospital from doing trump-hlike rallies, the definition of insanity? >> the bottom line is that right now we need to protect the vice president. he is obviously next in line. and if the president were to get sicker, he may not be able to carrie out his duties and we need the vice president healthy and ready to take over at any moment. the idea he is going to do rallies is incredibly dangerous,

not cautious, not focused op what is good for the country right now. >> yeah. just what do you care about? whom do you care about? at some point you have to surrender the interest of me to the we, especially in their positions. doctor, thank you as always for keeping us on the straight path. appreciate it. again, the news 'all know and regret. the president is in the the hospital. same virus that's killed more than 208,000 of us in this country. he is still upplaying how much we've rounded the corner, even as reality has smacked him and his family and the rest of us in the face. one of his great biographers is here to slice through the fiction to the core of where it's all coming from with this president next. water? why?! ahhhh! incoming! ahhhahh! i'm saved! water tastes like, water.

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we're learning tonight that white house aides pushed the president to go to walter reed. now, when i say we are learning tonight, this is one version of what's being put out in terms of what led to the hospitalization. i have to qualify it because i have heard from multiple sources that he wanted to go as well. the remdesivir is something that really portends your needing to be in the hospital. so why would he be against going to the hospital?

that's an obvious right? because of optics and what that would suggest to us and the fear of panic on the practical side, right, and image. this idea of invincibility. and the question becomes hubris. are you too worried about how you are seen and not enough about how you have to act? someone who understands this better than most, good friend, membership or, timothy o'brien, author of "trump nation," somebody bo has been reporting on this president with me i don't want to say how long. over 15 years. so, tim, i know that you have been working sources as well, and there is this confusing flood of crossing stories about what's going on even as you get closer to the trump circle. how do you explain it? >> you know, in a world that we're in right now, chris, which

is an other-worldly news cycle, when you think about the events of this week and the extent to which, in a series of significant events, trump gets essentially exposed, his tax returns coming out, and hard numbers show he has never been the businessman he claims to be. he goes into a debate on wednesday and a man who is fomented bigotry and racism and is a racist himself, cannot say in the middle of a debate he will disavow white supremacy. then we roll into the wee hours of friday morning and a president who has been denying the severity of the most epic public health crisis the country has ever faced comes down himself with the very illness that he has claimed on different occasions was a hoax. and he presides over a white house that essentially is a cult of personality. everyone lives in fear of, as you correctly put your finger on it, the optics. they care about how things look

more than how things get done, than how other people feel. they care more about how things look than the good of the country. and no one there operates publicly without getting signed off by a very tiny handful of people. and they air only goal is to ma the president look invincible. and the problem you have -- >> so -- >> it's an escalating series of events that make him not only look weak, but possibly morbid. >> cheats on his taxes. has problems with separating the ugly from the passionate in terms of his followers. we know these things. you and i certainly knew them. now everybody knows them. and suspected them when it comes to his money and business acumen. but now you have an existential crisis. god willing he blows this virus away and comes rolling out in no

time, but they can't get their stories trastraight. the doctor says one thing. mark meadows says another. he is a pro, okay? two different stories about how he got to the hospital. two different stories about how he is doing. >> when he was diagnosed. we don't know actually. there has been conflicting stories about the diagnosis. oxygen, at who point did he go on oxygen? dr. conley in the beginning of the presser first said no oxygen, no oxygen today, then he said no oxygen yesterday when pressed by reporters, but he wouldn't say if trump was on oxygen at some point. and we now know from reporting out there of course he was on oxygen at some point. why not tell us -- >> by the way, we weren't being picky. saying he is no longer on oxygen by implication suggests he was. why would they lie about that? we don't want to worry you. what is the line for you, tim, between perception and reality in terms of what kind of message must be truthful for the

american people in a context like this? >> they have to be absolutely trans parmt and they have to stick to the facts because this is not just an issue of donald trump's health. it's an issue of national security and it's an issue of the faith the american people have in the word of the federal government at a time when it needs to be pristine. and the problem again is that you have a white house that has routinely operated byspinning or lying about any event that they think reflects poorly on it, and this now has landed on them like an anvil and they are still falling back on their own ways. it's incredible to me. the press conference was supposed to begin at 11:00 today. it was 40 minutes late. i think they were figuring out their line of argument and they still blew it and mark meadows was at odds with what they were saying at walter reed. you know, it's more than just the gang that couldn't shoot straight. these are incredibly fourth rate

people brought into the oval office who is ill to lead and they are all shooting in opposite directions. >> i tell you why it matters beyond the politics and the character analysis. they say now that he got his first positive result thursday. so does that mean he wasn't tested between saturday and thursday? was he tested before and negative? when? they won't tell us. >> and recall -- >> understanding the progression of the disease, but also the nature of keeping our president safe. tim, i got to go. i am out of time. i appreciate you, especially objeon a saturday. you are always here for us. i appreciate you, brother. you and the family stay healthy. >> thanks, chris. >> . >> all right, now, more implications, what else ask going on? where did it start? theoretically at a rose garden ceremony for his supreme court. now have you two or three

senators sick who may be necessary for a vote. is it going to slow the process? should it slow the process? what does it mean for the process? let's go through the permutations of thought. because these are all big issues. we have to be on the same page of what matters as we can. breaking news coverage continues live from capitol hill next. the men and woman of the united states postal service. we are here to deliver your cards, packages and prescriptions. and also deliver the peace of mind knowing that what's important to you-like your ballot-is on its way. every day, all across america, we deliver for you. and we always will. ♪dy-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, eh♪ ♪dy-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, eh♪ ♪dy-na-na-na, na-na, na-na, eh♪ ♪light it up, dynamite ♪shining through the city with a little funk and soul♪

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what a difference a week makes, right? a week ago, out now, republicans were having a parade, yay, we didn't get merritt garland is, now we can change our narratives. they got amy barrett, the nomination. the rose garden. now they are facing uncertainty after three republican senators tested positive at their gloat parade. what does that mean? phil mattingly, the operative day is october 19th? what are they thinking? does it clear up by then? does it clear up the calculus or is it a waiting game? >> it's a little of all three. i'll extend, this, chris, a week ago, this nomination was on

cruise control. they knew they had the votes and can move in before the election. they knew they could get this done in a matter of weeks. that is the intent. mitch mcconnell saying they are full steam ahead. now things are very, very fluid. two of those senators sit on the senate judiciary committee. they are set to start hearings october 12th. that's nine days from now. the expectation is it is still planned and scheduled. and even though senators have tested positive, they can attend virtually. now the majority leader delayed senate action until october 19th. when can those jurors return? they have to be physically present. once it gets out of the committee, senate majority mitch mcconnell has a narrow margin when it gets the votes to confirm amy coney barrett. two senators said he could not go along with it. they can only lose one more.

that means he needs the senators healthy. >> as long as it's just about the quarantine period. they're find as long as it doesn't shift politics. what are we learning? the only lesson, we keep learning, it doesn't sink in, at least for me. you never know what will happen next. phil mattingly, thank you for helping us. especially on a saturday night. appreciate it. we'll be right back.

. welcome back to a special saturday night special coverage. i'm chris cuomo. you know me from cuomo prime time. i'm with you this saturday nate because we got big situations going on that demand our attention. we have more information open the president's health. it's trickling out. but there is a lot of inconsistent information and it is hard to know what to believe. as a result, i cannot with confident tell you we know for sure how president trump is doing with coronavirus. let's listen, he told us, himself, he'd tell us tonight this video was made. here it is. >> i just didn't want to stay in the white house. i was given that option. stay in the white house, lock yourse