very troubling picture for president trump. his approval marks among independents have cratered down 16 points in just one month. those numbers are straight ahead. so good morning, everyone. along with joe, we have national affairs analyst john heilman. former aide to the george w. bush white house and state departments, elise jordan. columnist david ignatius joins us, as well. and, joe, we begin this morning with that new polling that shows president trump's approval rating continuing to lover in the 30s. a new cnn poll shows only 36% of americans approve of the job that trump is doing. the quinnipiac puts it at only 31%. three polls last week put the approval rating at between 36% and 37%. trump's approval rating among

independents plunged over the last month dropping from 47% approval in august to just 31% today. and when it comes to trump's qualities, 32% say they are proud of him as president. the same percentage, less than one-third, see him as honest and trustworthy. back in the "q" poll when asked whether they felt the president was honest, 32% of voters said yes. his lowest grade for honesty since he was elected. so, joe, they're beginning not to believe him, whoever they are, the few americans left that would believe the lies and untruths -- >> well, you know, it's important to remember that donald trump actually had very low honest and trustworthy numbers during the campaign, even in 2016 he was down, my gosh, in the low to mid 30s most of the time. he happens to be running against an opponent who had even lower

honest and trustworthy numbers. so these numbers aren't so inconsistent from where he was when he was running for president. but john heilman, there has been so much coming at the american voters over the course of the past 18 months, the question to ask about this precipitous drop is what's happened in the last month that hasn't happened in the preceding 17 months? why hasn't he fallen into the mid 30s in five of the last polls that have been released? >> i think the question, joe, it's a good question, but i just reframe it slightly. i think what's happened here, you know, we've talked about this on the air a lot of times. he's been in the high 30s before and you and i have discussed it. it's usually been at the low points when things have gone worse for him, after helsinki or after the crisis at the border with the kids in the cages. we've had these moments where we say the high 30s, mid 30s is at

his irreversible core. what we're seeing here now as we get closer and closer to the midterm elections is the accumulated weight of 17 months of scandals and controversies and outrages and things that for a lot of the voters who make the difference between him being in the mid to low 40s and him being in the mid to high 30s is that the weight of all that, the gravity of it has finally sunk in over time and the reason it's sinking in is because we're getting closer and closer to the a decision point. we see this in presidential election years, sometimes in midterm election years, especially ones that are acutely referendum on the incumbent. i feel like that's what's happening here and there have obviously been things here in the last few weeks that have been bad for president trump. as voters turn the corner into labor day, the decisions they'll have to make in the midterms, he they're taking stock of the totality of trump's presidency and that is weighing him down.

>> willie, you, of course, had the president i think in his highwater mark at least from his inaugural week where he was at 33, 34, 35% in the spring, things seemed to be going pretty well for him. then you had the child separation policy. then you had helsinki. then you have a number of policies that have gone pretty well for him. michael cohen coming out, his long time fixer, you're talking about all the things that donald trump did improperly. then it's one thing if the media says it. it's another thing if democrats say it. you've had a jury of paul man na ford's peers and other judges outside the political relment delivering some verdicts that are pretty harsh towards donald trump's people, towards his

former campaign manager and toward donald trump himself. >> yeah. and you can't call these outliers any more. when you have five polls in the space of a week, the president and his white house say they were wrong before the election. when you have five polls showing pretty much the same thing, in the mid 30s, that is a trend and not an outlier no matter how much he's going to wave the poll. but if you look at the accumulation of recent events, at least, the book op-ed, the woodward book plus the op ed, it begins to explain some of the drops in the independent numbers. people who may have given him a try, perhaps walking away now. >> this is what i've been talking about a lot. during the run up to the election, we were talking to a lot of hold your nose voiters. so these were people who they really didn't want to vote for

donald trump, but they definitely weren't going to vote for hillary clinton. so they chose to vote for defendant defendant. the accumulation of 17 months of constant antics on top of the instability of international affairs and donald trump's pretty cavalier attitude towards things such as war, they -- i think this has started to sink in a bit. and this is something you're not going to go out of your way to defense if you weren't that strongly invested in the first place. >> and we have so many people like that who supported donald trump who still will tell you they support donald trump though they've offend dollars by his tweetes and by his behavior. basically, it is still a binary choice. well, you know what? he's not nancy pelosi, he's not hillary clinton, so i guess he's still our guy. it seems that the woodward book

as well as that op ed in the "new york times" certainly has a lot of people in that category thinking twice and starting to think, well, listen, maybe he's just not up to the task. maybe we look forward to a mike pence. or a nikki haley running this party and running this presidency down the road. >> i think you're right, joe. what is striking about these numbers is they come at a time when the economy is strong and is delivering on trump's promise to increase the rate of growth, to increase growth in particular in manufacturing jobs. so the numbers that trump would want are coming in and i think people feel them. but even so, there is this why. and my thought is trump's strategy is succeeding too well. he goes so hard for his base,

these raucous rallies around the country fulminating against democrats, but i think that's turning people off, that strategy. and just a final point. in the time these polls were taken, john mccain was in his last days and people watched a celebration of of what kind of normal sdpeent americ normal, decent politics is. there are a lot of people who like george w. bush and barack obama. president trump has his base, but that's all he's got. >> you have a article in "the washington post" this morning and it echos some things my

father was telling me before he passed away. you write in part this, trump is harming the dream of america more than any foreign adversary ever could in which he charts the course from bush to obama to trump and a country that went from a huge surplus to racking up unmreld deficits while squanderi squandering memorial leadership. 16 years have been of strategic missteps have been followed by the maniacal moves of a man who has savaged america's vital alliances, provided comfort to hostile parties. for those of us still believing islamic extremists hate america because of the freedom thes we offer to all people, the greatest threat trump poses to our national security is the damage done daily to america's image. as the "new york times" roger

cohen wrote, the month after twru trump's election, america is an idea, the rule of law, freedom, democracy, and what united states represents to the world and america itself is gutted. osama bin laden was killed by s.e.a.l. team 6 before he achieved that goal. the question for voters this fall is whether their country will move beyond this chapter in troubled history or whether they will move beyond a politician who has done more damage to the dream of america than any foreign adversary ever could. couldn't agree more, joe. >> i love that line, that roger cohen line that america is an idea. and if you strip america of its ideas, forget about knocking down buildings in the financial district, forget about running planes into the pentagon.

those are tragedies, but those tragedies bring us closer together. america is an idea. you gut america of an idea, that is when you do the most harm. roger cohen wrote that after donald trump was elected and across the world you have people looking at a country that is saying they want to ban people from coming to america because of their religion. you have just this week brett kavanaugh who wants to be on the supreme court refusing to answer whether people should be banned from coming to the united states because of their race. and his reading of the constitution. the accumulation of that, charlottesville, i can go on and on, what he said about the majority black countries, that is tearing more at the fabric of

america than attacks on the twin towers did. we became stronger because of that. but this seems to me a far graver threat to the idea of america. >> bin laden's calculation is always that he was going to divide us with those attacks 17 years ago. as you point out, he made us closer than ever. and david ignatius, donald trump's election was not an incident, it was an election. it was a free election and 63 million americans went out and voted for donald trump. he has capitalized on something that perhaps was beneath the surface for a long time and brought it up to the surface and sought aggressively in many ways to divide us. and he succeeded to some effect, but i would argue that he's brought out the best of america, that he's brought out people who are more vigilant now, people who know that they need to go out and vote, people who are aware that there's a divide in this country. so it's certainly not a lost cause.

i don't think joe or anyone else is suggesting it is. but he's changed the country in just 18 or 20 months. >> it is a different country on this 9/11 anniversary. we think about the qualities that pull the country together, this sense of resilience, unity, of commitment. i think people understood on a special way in this day in 2001 what america was. and trump, as joe said, has gone at some of those qualities that bind us together, make us a generous country, make us confident about the future. joe's -- i don't want to suck up to the boss here, but i thought, joe, you just hit it exactly right in saying remember what america was like on september 10, 2001, before this happened. remember the way in which we confidently were such a dominant force in the world.

not just because of donald trump. but other bad decisions, the decision to the invade iraq, we're a country that got disoriented and lost our way and now find ourselves in this place. but going back to this central event in most of our lives was helpful. >> david, i'm glad you brought that up. mika read the bunch line, but the column is about actually not just what's happened over the past 18 months, but unfortunately 16 years of missteps. you did have george bush's tragic overreach in iraq which elected barack obama and then barack obama believing putting us into a defensive crouch.

one mistake led to another mistake. on this morning 17 years ago, we had $135 billion surplus, our gdp was ten times that of china's. our gdp was 40 times that of russia's. and while we've been fighting wars and occupying countries for 16 years, the chinese have been making strategic economic end roads and asia in europe, in latin america, in africa. this has not been -- if you look where we were 16 years ago and where we are today, for a lot of reasons, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with donald trump, we have some catching up to do.

>> it's a baseline for us. something that ought to make us ponder, what is american strength and how do we rebuild it and rebuild it. i wonder what people are talking about today in the white house. i hope they're thinking back to that day. donald trump remembers it. it's a powerful moment for him as a new yorker, but it should be for all of us. >> we are going to be covering that throughout the morning as well as some of the other top headlines. this morning, it is a state of emergency from maryland to the carolinas as hurricane florence barrels toward the united states as a powerful category 4 storm. governors in north carolina, south carolina, and virginia have issued mandatory evacuation orders impacting at least 1 million people ahead of the storm's landfall. florence rapidly intensified between sunday and monday with winds jumping from 75 miles per hour to about 130 miles per hour. let's bring in bill karins for

more on this. bill is tracking it. bill. >> good morning to you, mika. it's hard to see how this would not be a multibillion dollar weather disaster in the carolinas possibly up through virginia. we're at 140-mile-per-hour winds. a very strong category 4. we are now about 975 miles away from the mouth of the cape fear river. so we still have a ways to go, roughly 60 to 72 hours until it makes landfall or gets close to the coast. 145-mile-per-hour winds thursday at 2:00 a.m. and friday at 2:00 a.m., 130-mile-per-hour winds. so a little slower as it gets towards the coast than this time yesterday. and here is the huge issue. once it gets close to the coast, it could stall off the coast. the hurricane center has it lingering in this area for at least 48 to 60 hours. our computer models, all these swigly lines are different spots where the eye could be. we're targeting wilmington towards the cape hatteras area.

but our european model is much further to the soukt towards wilmington and scary close to myrtle beach. so we haven't ruled out anything yet for georgetown, murlgdz beach. so it's still about two or three days to prep and get all your final preparations done, mika. it looks like thursday night and friday is when the storm will be doing its most destruction. bill, thank you very much. now to some of the other stories making headlines this morning. in a significant foreign policy decision, the trump administration is ordering the closure of the palestine liberation organization office in washington no later than october 10th. the state department said yesterday the plo, quote, wantd taken steps to meaningful negotiations with israel. also mistaking news this morning, the trump administration is set to make another rollback of obama era climate rules. the environmental protection

agency is proposing changes that would give drillers a year to do leak inspections instead of just six months and 60 days to the make repairs instead of 30. the proposal would allow energy companies operating in states that have their own state level methane standards follow those standards instead of federal ones. and finally, veteran "new york times" political reporter and editor adam climber has passed away at the age of 81. climber spent dick aids covering the white house, congressional intrigue, eight presidential campaigns. he died early monday of pancreatic cancer at his home in washington and we salute him. >> we certainly do. willie geist, adam clymer famously burst into the 2000 campaign in an incident, a whispered incident between george w. bush and dick cheney. >> big time.

>> would you like to share that understand or -- >> well, you know, then candidate bush referred to adam clymer using an epithet that we can't use on the air here. >> picked up by mikes. >> picked up by a mike and dick cheney could affirm them by saying yep, big time, about adam clymer. i will say the best thing about that story is that rather than being offended, rather than being chagrinned, rather than being upsed, he wrote that as a badge of honor. he said if you're going to be liked by everyone, you might as well be a driver for a good humor truck. >> and going back to what david ignatius said about donald trump on 9/11, it had to be a sober day for him. it was so sober that in an

interview, do you remember what he said? >> i do. he called into wwor and he said i guess my building is the tallest now. >> oh. >> as the twin towers fell, donald trump chose that moment to say, well, i guess my buildings are the tallest now. >> he was, of course, not only extraordinarily insensitive and borish, he was, as he had today, wrong. and we're going to be talking about that, mika, when we talk about donald trump and his booming economy. my gosh, this was the most booming economy, what, in a century, did he say? >> yeah. he's overseeing a booming economy. that's the economy he adopted. yet for some reason, he's still compelled to lie about it. why a senior white house official was forced to fact check his boss, the president of the united states, from the white house podium. >> and, boy, the -- and fox news, they had a tweet, a fascinating tweet that really

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the white house is clarifying a tweet by donald trump saying a portion of the facts the president wut out were wrong. the president tweeted yesterday, the gdp rate is higher than the unemployment rate for the first time in over 100 years. while the gdp and unemployment figures are correct, the 100 years part is not. in that time frame, the gdp rate has topped the jobless rate more than 60 times with the most recent being in early 2006. the administration was forced to correct the error with chairman of the white house council of economic advise hers, kevin hassette, telling reporters yesterday the statement likely

was the result of incorrect information being passed along to the president. >> the history of thought of how errors happen is not something i can engage in. from the initial fact to what the president said, i don't know the whole chain of command. but what is true is that it's the highest in ten years and at some point somebody probably conveyed it to him add ago zero to that and they shouldn't have done that. >> so, joe, what is a zero here or there or a tens place here or there? it happened 12 years ago and has happened many, many times and the ps resident is describing ts as a first. >> that's what politicians do, they exaggerate. >> a little closer. >> 4% or 4.1%, you usually don't multiply it ten times the amount, but that's what donald trump always does. and alesse, it always seem good

is just not good enough for donald trump. when he's doing poorly, he tells everybody he's the best ever, that his white house is running extraordinarily smooth, and same with his poll numbers. but even when things are going well, even when he's seeing the obama recovery continue into his term, he can't just let it go. he has to exaggerate ten fold. >> that's what is so baffling. donald trump right now has a strong economic story to tell. but instead, he creates these distractions through his own unforced errors and will continue to make such unforced errors as i'm sure the midterms approach. he's going to have to ex either a level of self-control as president obama begin toes appear more frequently back in the public eye campaigning for democratic candidates. and that seems to definitely pose a threat to any stability that he might actually possess.

>> and another note out of this story, john heilman, xwryesterd just sort of a media trump, fox news put out a correction on donald trump in realtime. recent quarters of gdp growth higher than tun employment rate and they listed 10, 12, a dozen or so times that that happened. it reminds me of a couple of weeks back when the florida candidate for governor talked about monkeying up the recovery there. fox news came on and distanced themselves from ron desantis' language. >> yes. that quote in "the washington post" after the anonymous op ed came out, the quote where he said the sleeper cells have awoken. apparently the sleeper cells have awoken at fox news. it's all good. nice to see them standing up and being counted and, again, might

signal the patience with president trump is wearing thin, even in some of the corners that previously gave him a pretty would it berth. >> i know this will shock everybody watching the show and certainly, willie, will shock you and mika. i'm going to dart off topic for a second. >> unprecedented. >> this is unprecedented random thoughts. >> i'm just curious, david ignatius, we talked about serena yesterday. i know you're a huge tennis fan. you're up at the u.s. open. the first day, reaction was a little mixed. two of the main articles in the "new york times" this morning blaming serena for ellipsiclips extraordinary moment to her opponent.

tipping the hat to the extraordinary nature of her successes, but saying that she's had a history of these sort of eruptions and they thought that it was in check. there seems to be a back and forth on whether it was the ump's fault, whether it was serena's fault. you are a bona fide u.s. open fan. what are your thoughts? >> well, i was at the u.s. open, although i wasn't there on saturday for the women's final. i think this is a moment where tennis fans are really kind of thinking about the sport. i'll give you a couple of my thoughts. the first thing to say is serena williams is the greatest woman, tennis player in history, period. there's never been anybody like her who dominated the game. and to watch her play is a joy. that's the first thing. second thing is it's true that there does seem to be a bit of a double standard in tennis between the way men are called

for language abuse, showing their tempers and the way women, especially serena in this case was called. the third point, and this is what navatralova said powerfully in the "new york times" this morning. serena was wrong to do some of the things she did. she hurt herself, but she hurt the game. if you smash your racket like that, you're going to get a deduction. it's just the way the game is. there's a lot of discussion about whether she should have been called for coaching. but her coach himself said, yeah, i was coaching her and you're not supposed to do that. so the consensus is it's unfortunate the chair umpire felt he had to impose himself on

the match in this way, but it's unfortunate serena lost it. we all feel wonderful for the new japanese woman who had a wonderful victory and nobody knows because of all the furror that surrounded the umpire and serena. >> right. and i think we will see much more championships from her. willie, i'm curious what your thoughts are because we didn't get a chance to ask you yesterday. i hate when an umpire in any sport makes themselves part of a match, part of a game, especially if you're in the finals of something like the u.s. open. and, i mean, you've got to control it. that said, again, regarding serena, yes, she should have controlled herself, but i can tell you when i'm playing sports or when i was a younger guy, i -- >> or yesterday. >> or yesterday, i mean, i'm fuel. you get out there and you get

into it and in some sports, you're kind of fueled by the aggression and that is okay for men. but it is not okay for women, i guess, according to these standards. and it was up to the chair ump to call her over and say, hey, listen, you've got to stop. if you don't stop, i'm going to penalize you. and he didn't do that. >> soft warning. >> i agree with you. i cannot stand when an umpire or a ref, whether it's tennis or a college football game or baseball becomes a story. the best ref or umpire is the one that you don't notice is there. it is great to say osaka is likely going to win the match anything. >> amazing. >> but as someone who doesn't follow tennis as closely as david, i don't get why it started. a coach can't coach? imagine if nick saban wasn't allowed to talk to his players from the sidelines. that is what started all this. that's why she got the deduction.

that's why she was furious. that's why she eventually spiraled into that anger and i would have rather the ump called her back and said be careful, i may have to issue a warning, i may have to take a point, don't make yourself a part of the match in the way that he did. but i will say again, osaka is a great player and probably would have won the match, anyway. >> and the thing is, again, as a chair ump, you call the player over and say, listen, i know everybody does this, but this is the final of the u.s. open. cameras everywhere. people are seeing this. they've gathered on split screens, actually. you need -- somebody needs to get a message to him, stop coaching you. and i get it. i get it. this is -- you're not cheating. everybody does this. but it's a stupid rule but it is still a rule. tell your coach to knock it off. and at that point, you diffuse the entire situation. but it did get ugly at the end

and that made me sad. but, willie, there was a bright note this weekend. >> oh, good, a bright note. >> there was a bright note. >> are you talking about vanderbilt's big win over nevada to go 2-0 as they roll into south bend this weekend? >> happy days are here again. i'm very excited about that. no, it was mika's mom's art show. >> oh, come on. >> art shows in northwest washington is what is fuelling this economy's rise. mika tell us about it. >> this is taking place right now in washington at the katzen arts center and you can go and see these exhibits. it's not just my mother. she went and did an event and it's called find aing a path. there's my daughter. she's adorable.

but the pieces are amazing. my mom is just about to turn 87 and she is still hacking away at her sklu sculptures. i'm so proud of her. >> and who czechoslovakian artists, immigrants working together. and willie, this time it's personal. >> forces to be reckoned with. i don't know what that means. it just seems like the thing to say. >> that's very cool, mika. >> talk about knowing her value. thank you. still ahead, the nation will pause today to remember those who lost their lives in the september 11th terrorist attacks. we'll be joined by jay johnson to talk about whether the united states is safer now than it was 17 years ago. "morning joe" will be right back.

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welcome back to "morning joe." it's 6:41 in the morning in wrightsfield beach, north carolina. you look at the calm before the storm. hurricane florence, a category 4 with winds 140 miles per hour

well off the coast at this point but making its way toward that part of the country perhaps with devastating effects coming in thursday and friday. we'll be keeping a close eye on that all morning and all week. joining us now, former homeland security secretary under president obama jay johnson. mr. secretary, good to see you. >> thanks, willie. >> so this is the 17th anniversary of september 11th, a day that is your birthday, by the way. and i didn't realize this that you were in your office and watched the whole thing with your own eyes. >> correct. i was in my private law office on september 11th, 2001, my 41st birthday. i had been in the pent go eight months before as general counsel and someone said a plane just hit the world trade center. and i looked out the window and literately saw the whole thing before my eyes. >> we remarked on the front page of the new york post it's not a criticism, it's the new york jets and until the upper right

hand corner something that said remember 9/11. what memory of 9/11 should we keep alive? what's important to hold on to? >> i think that what's important, it's, of course, important to remember those who died, the heroism that occurred on that day, and it's important to remember not to let our guard down. and that what happened on 9/11 was beyond the comprehension of a lot of people. when i saw that tower collapse, it was beyond my comprehension. but it's important that we keep our guard up and that -- and this is what i used to called my people at dhs. we have to prepare for the next terrorist attack, not necessarily the last one. and the homeland security threat has evolved tremendouslily in my judgment over the last 17 years. and we have to keep our eye on that. >> mr. secretary, let me ask you, then, with that in mind, are we safer today than we were five years ago? are we safer today than we were ten years ago?

are we safer today than we were on september 10th, 2001? >> joe, i think the answer is yes in some respects, no in other ones. our homeland security department does a better job now ott detecting large scale plots from overseas against the homeland. our intelligence community now is able to detect in general those types of plots at theirelel earliest stag theirelel earliest stages. now we are vulnerable to smaller scale attacks and those are more challenging because they're harder to detect, they're people who self-radicalize here in the homeland. and then, of course, joe, there's cyber security. in my judgment on a day-to-day basis, cyber attacks are a

number one threat to the homeland. so the homeland threat has evolved tremendously since 9/11-01 and since the creation of my department, dhs. >> secretary, do you think this has evolved from a counter terrorism homeland commission to a law enforcement division? >> i think it has. it becomes more and more a matter of domestic law enforcement, the fbi opponents of dhs that are focused on what happens in the homeland, so it definitely has become more of a domestic law enforcement effort. >> what do you think as we show the video coming in, hurricane florence, as the coast prepares for what should be a -- or we're predicting is a big impact. what's happening inside the government? the president has been talking about this on twitter, he's been open about helping out and declaring a state of emergency. what levers or gears of motion

have been pulled right now? >> hopefully what is happening right now is fema is coordinating the prepositioning of assets on the coach in north and south carolina, meals, water, generators, other resources need to be prepositioned right now in the event of a disaster. and the general population has to listen to local officials when they say evacuate. a lot of people never do that. and so it's critical that people in the affected areas listen to their local officials do what they tell them to do and it's up to fema and state homeland security officials to preposition assets. >> let me ask you a question that i think might seem like it has an obvious answer, but i'm not sure it does. in a situation like this, you know, we have a giant bureaucracy or set of bureaucracies that deal with an impending disaster. how much does actual presidential leadership, not on the question of in the aftermath sympathizing or empathizing with victims, but in the moment, does

the president really matter that much or are these agencies so autonomous and so good at what they do that the president can kind of put them -- i don't want to say auto pilot, but you know what i mean. is he making game time calls that really matter in the moment? >> the answer is yes. the president has the authority and the responsibility to declare an emergency which unleashes federal funds and certain federal resources and that can be done before or immediately after a disaster. so the president, the white house need to be on top of the situation like this along with dhs, along with fema. it is a coordination of a federal effort and it's getting better and better all the time. but there is required presidential leadership in a circumstance like this, definitely. >> david ignatius. >> mr. secretary, i want to come back to the question of whether the country is safer. our safety, obviously, depends in part on communities in the u.s. and in particular the muslim community sharing

information that they say, sharing worries that they have with law enforcement, with the fbi. do you worry that that cooperation is weaker now because of the kind of rhetoric that has come out of this administration that may have weakened those interactions? >> david, i do worry about that. as you may recall, when i was secretary, i spent a lot of time in american muslim communities building those bridges, encouraging them to work with local law enforcement when they see someone going in the wrong direction. and that effort, i fear, has largely atrophied in this administration. and i think given the current homeland threat and the threat of self-radicalized actors, that's key to public safety. and it's something i spent a lot of time on when i was in office. i was the first secretary to address the convention of the islamic society of north america which is a huge gathering of american muslims every year in

chicago. and that has not happened since. >> hard to believe it's been 17 years. former homeland security secretary jay johnson, thank you so much for stopping by this morning thanks. >> on tomorrow's show, we'll be joined live by bob woodward talking about his new book "fear" which is out today. ( ♪ ) face the world as a face to be reckoned with. only botox® cosmetic is fda approved to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet and forehead lines look better.

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ignatius and eugene robinson. and political reporter for "the washington post" and moderator of washington week on pbs, robert costa. >> you know, mika, last hour we were talking about september 11th and talking about it from policy implications, but also, obviously, there's so many personal stories, so many tragedies that happened on that day. but you actually, that was one of your first days at cbs -- >> ah-ha. >> and tell us what happened that morning for you. >> well, we were covering it like any other story. i went running down there. ended up having to run down there in my bare feet because there was gridlock on the streets. i was actually standing next toby ron pit-- to byron pitts.

what we saw was unspeakable, people making that horrific decision of whether to jump -- >> you said in real-time, you just, your mind -- >> i couldn't get my mind around it. >> grasp exactly what was happening. even,000 saw it, just your mind didn't process that these were people that had chosen to jump from the top of the towers. also you told me before that when the tower, the first tower was falling, you just stood transfixed staring at it, and that it was byron who actually pulled you away and threw you under a truck as -- >> it just seemed so impossible that structure that was so big and so magnificent and so, obviously, strong and had so many people in it. it seemed so impossible what was happening right before our eyes,

literally we were so close we were craning our necks to see the top and then the top began to crumble down towards us. like so many others, we ran, we were covered with soot. we stayed down there for weeks and tried to get our arms around a story that was so close to us that in some ways it was very hard to connect with the reality for me. my brain saved me from actually terrible depression because i was so busy covering the story that i wasn't necessarily able to grasp it but i was also able to tell it in real-time. and then in the months after i think we all began to really suffer the ramifications of what happened to our country and to so many people here in new york city with us. >> willie, it's so hard, willie, for people new york at the time or didn't have the relationship with new york the way that you and your family always have to

understand what that area was like after september 11th. i always tell people that whenever you would go anywhere below it was like you were entering a okay they dral. complete silence, complete resevereve reverance. people going to work and trying to rebuild this country's spirit. >> i share mika's impression. i was working for cnn in atlanta. i didn't see it in my own eyes. jeh johnson just said the same thing. for the first time in my life i couldn't believe what i was seeing. i couldn't process what was happening. i grew up in a commuter town in new jersey across the river. we lost 12 people that day including my next door neighbor.

my sister-in-law was pregnant. she ran down 70 flights of stairs and got out. thank god. so we think about her always on this day and her now junior in high school son who was in her belly that day. i also think about the aftermath, the firefighters and police officers and the first responders who died that day. but the men and women of the military who were sent to afghanistan, 2400 of them dying. the men and women who were sent to iraq because of this, 4,500. more than 4,500 dying that day. i also think about the first responders who worked on the pile and now more than 2,000 of them have died because of respiratory illnesses and by the end of this year expected to have more deaths from that than people who died on that day. the ripples on this day continue to go out and will. heidi, you were in the white house that day on september 11th, 2001. what was it like from the

inside? >> well, i was actually swimming upstream to make it to the white house. i got a call after the pentagon was hit. two calls. one from my yart saying you need to get down there right way. another from my family saying don't go down there. we were getting briefings on the corner of lafayette square. i remember thinking how crazy this was that there was another plane missing and we knew it was either headed for us or it was headed for the capital. sitting there with my colleagues, positioning ourselves such that if there was projectile, whatever it was, that we would be far enough back from it. and, of course, the regular press pool workforce george bush on the plane and then they assembled the rest of the pool. we were taken to a secure location and i remember standing behind karen hughes somewhere in

a bunker in washington, just watching on replay the towers falling over and over again and knowing that the lifestyle that when he the freedom, the innocence in a way was never going to be the same. the second more personal hit for me was that a day later my mother called and my brother had just gotten through boot camp and said heidi, do you have a map? i said yes. she said your brother is in the indian ocean. do you know what that means? of course, we didn't hear from him for a while and later found out he was in the first battle group to be deployed. he was on an amphibious assault ship. to this day he's suffering from trauma taking pictures of dead bodies, dead taliban, dead u.s.

soldiers. the ramifications, the widespread effects this has had on a lot of families that demonstrates. >> of course, heidi was talking, david ignatius, about the capital and the white house being one of those two big targets. we, of course, remember also this morning those on flight 93 that saved those, lost their own lives but saved those who were working in the capital or in the white house, and there is a f fittifi fitting memorial to them in pence. thomas ricks, i remember my god six, seven, eight years ago i was listening to him on npr and he was talking about how a child born on september 11th or a child who was at a bus stop going into second grade on september 11th was now fighting in afghanistan. we continue fighting in

afghanistan and now you can say that a baby, not even 1, maybe 1-year-old at the time of 9/11 chances are good there are quite a few of those who are now 18-year-old men and women who are fighting this war still in afghanistan. >> the events of 9/11 had such a long tail, you know. we're still dealing with the wars, the anger in the world. i have a memory not of that day but of a few years later in iraq covering that war and going to the gym in the green zone where the american group was based and seeing on the wall a picture of the twin towers, and similar

mural in the dining room. and the message was we're avenging what iraq did to us on 9/11. well that was false. that was an idea that people allowed to, people deliberately spread. but iraq of not responsible for 9/11. and it's just one of the awful tragedies that we went into that war with so many americans thinking they were taking revenge for what had been done on 9/11, and entering a war that's had just such disastrous consequences for us, for iraq, for the region. a special regret for me. >> and, gene, we were talking about all the mistakes made by u.s. policymakers across the bush and obama administrations and, of course, now the trump administration. but, you know, the original sin actually in the response to

september 11th was iraq, and it was documented that members of the bush administration knowing that saddam hussein had nothing to do with september 11th were still planning an attack on iraq immediately following september 11th, even though they had nothing to do with it. secretary of defense, current secretary of defense, james mattis was called to prepare for a war in iraq in early 2002. his response was are you out of your mind? and the fact is, yes, there were some policy people in the bush administration who strategically were out of their mind. >> yeah. and think of the implications. think of all that has changed in the world because of the decision and it was a decision

to use 9/11 which had nothing to do with iraq as an excuse, as an occasion to take out saddam hussein's regime and to change the world. think of all that's happened since. you know, four days after 9/11 i dropped my oldest son off at college, at the university of chicago, and which was just this wrenching thing. >> oh, my gosh. >> they have a ceremony there, sort of an invocation of students and parents, of course gather in the rockefeller chapel and it was on the saturday after, and they -- you know, it's a program. i remember the dean saying that

parents always remember the week they drop their child off at college, but that no one would ever forget the week that you students started your college careers, and at the end of the ceremony you walk up the street and there are student monitors and they send students one way and parents the other way and that's the last you see of your kid. and i just remember tears rolling down my cheek as i drove 12 hours home listening to the coverage of radio coverage of the aftermath. just never forget it. >> well, and to bob costa, this next story will go to you because now we get to where we are today, the new polling that shows president trump's approval

rating continuing to hover in the 30s. new cnn poll showing 36% of americans approve of the job that the president is doing. a quinnipiac university poll puts it at 38%. last week the approval was between 36 and 37. in cnn trump's approval rating from independents dropped from 47 approval in august to just 31 today. and when it comes to trump's qualities, 32% say they are proud of him as president. the same percentage less than one-third see him as honest and trustworthy and back in the q poll when people asked if he was honest, 32% said yes. lowest grade for honesty since he elected. bob costa string it back together as we look back at terrible moments in our history and misstep by leaders but here we are with trump and there's a

lot of reasons why he is the president. it appears people are slowly beginning to lose faith in him. >> the numbers show that. people inside the white house, mika, these are troubling numbers. at the same time they continue to tell reporters that it's not 2020, it's 2018. and their point is this is a base turn out election for both democrats and republicans in their view and they believe they can emphasize the tax cut and judge kavanaugh's nomination and confirmation of neil gorsuch on to the supreme court and flying his agree vance politics on all these different front on immigration and different issues that republicans will turn out for president trump, even if they can't win the moderates and suburban voters that are crucial for a national coalition. >> john heilemann, it just doesn't work that way in off year elections. if you have a president with approval ratings in the low 40s, that stacks up terribly for the party in power, even if a

president is doing fairly well. his first off year election historically has been terrible. you start getting down in the 30s, well maybe those inside the trump white house aren't worried about it, but a lot of people with rs next to their name on ballots across america are. >> if you look at the historical precedence presidents with approval ratings in the 40s who go badly for the in power party. we've never seen a president in first mid-term that had ratings in the mid-30s and that's where president trump is now and, again, as willie pointed out in the first hour, seems we've seen consistent polling in the last week to two weeks that put the president in this kind of high, mid to high 30s and the trajectory is in the wrong direction. on this trend line we can see the about an approval rating of

35, 34 by the time we get to election day. bob, i want to ask you this question, costa that is. obviously, everybody as we head into a mid-term election, both parties try to highlight what their argument for how it's not going to be as bad, if there's negative forecast or great if it's's it's a positive forecast. to make an argument in a mid-term election that the base, it will be a base election would be conventional wisdom. unfortunately, for this white house, if you look at every piece of data over the course over the past 18 months, every special election, the 2017 off year election, there's not a single piece of data that suggests that the republican party is not in deep trouble. if you look at democratic enthusiasm, you look at the closing of margins in places where donald trump won in 2016, how do they confront that data because there's now a lot of data that suggests the

democratic base is so fired up, way more so than the republican base. >> that data is all accurate. it paints a bleak picture for the republican party. i wouldn't say based on my reporting it's wishful thinking inside the white house but look at the map. senators like joe donnelly red state democrats who are running somewhat supportive of the president's immigration policy, aspect of the border security agenda and the border wall and they see senator heidi heitkamp and senator joe manchin and they could be under pressure with the kavanaugh nomination. they think maybe the senate is not going to tilt as far to the left as democrats hope, but the house, it seems to be pretty tough picture for republicans right now because the white house's whole play up the base approach is not helping people in the suburbs of philadelphia or columbus, ohio or those kind of swing districts around los angeles. >> let me follow up. do they not recognize -- it's one thing to say we might hold

on to the senate but destined to lose the house. losing the house is pretty close to a cataclysmic scenario for trump. the new democratic chairman, issuing subpoenas, moving towards impeachment not like well the glass is half empty or glass half full. democrats taking control of the house is a pretty close to a okay cataclysm for donald trump. >> there's no ability to modulate. they bought in with president trump. he does bring out parts of the base, significant parts at times but he does not have an ability to even make a pitch to the center. this idea that the president is somehow going to change in anyway politically is not true. republicans acknowledge this who are running for office. they are all trying to hunker down and run their own races.

but they know president trump is so dominant of his own party and the party has lost its identity beyond president trump that they are all in survival mode and hoping he brings out that core trump voter. there's no other play here beyond that because they really are realistic, there's no play. this is not a normal presidency where you can start to position yourself on different issues. >> at least five polls telling same story. 36%, 36, 36, 37, 38 all within the last week. if you look at the number we put up, he lost 16 percentage points in one month. he went down from 47 to 31. that's a third of support. do you hear what i hear from independents but also from traditional republicans which is that look i didn't like hillary clinton, i like southeast economic stuff he's done the reregulatior deregulation and the tax bill. i didn't sign up for the rest of it. >> that's what i hear from the

hold your nose voter for trump. the number i'm watching most closely is the generic ballot that came out last week and that's up 14 for democrats. that's a pretty big divide for the democratic party. i don't see how a wave isn't avoided at this stage and it just feels a little bit like 1994 which joe can certainly speak to with more authority, but joe, does this remind you of the months in the run up to the '94 election? >> it did. and it does. it's interesting, bill clinton, though, had some successes leading up to '94. but one of the ways it reminds me, i think the most of '94 is that the economy was in good shape. all of us that were running against bill clinton were running against bill clinton

saying that he was out of touch culturally. he was out of touch socially much the same way that people are running against donald trump right now. that there was an overreach. so i mean we never talked about the economy. and we won 72, 73, 74 seats. i'll say this also that we had no idea how big it was going to be. i remember going out after they announced that i had gotten elected and that was a big enough shock for me and, unfortunately, for my district, people that i represented in my district. but i won big. it was supposed to be a 50-50 race. i got 62% of the vote. and then when i went out somebody yelled hey, we took over the house. i said you and insenate? they said, no, the house.

and i said gene robinson i said no way. republicans don't control the house of representatives. it doesn't happen. and i remember going to washington, d.c. looking at that dome, that was a wholly owned subsidiary of the democratic party and i couldn't even imagine even after we won that the republicans had actually won the majority and it really showed just like 1980, just like 1974 that when a wave hits, man it sweeps everybody out of the way. this is a wave election, then yes, the democrats are going to take control of the house but they won't hold serve in the senate. if it's a wave election you're going to see a lot of republicans just like you saw a lot of democrats let's say in 1980, senators just swept away. >> yeah. i mean that's what happens in a

wave and that's really a difference between a genuine wave election and a normal mid-term in which the party, the president's party loses seats, right? that's what almost always happens except in extraordinary circumstances. you take that as a given. when you talk about a generic party number of, you know, 14, a gap of 14 democrats over republicans in that generic number then you are potentially getting into wave territory but that number will fluctuate between now and november. and it is hard to predict really until you see it happening that a wave like 1994 or like 2010 is happening. so, you know, it's hard. you don't bet the ranch on it,

but if you had to play a hand right now, you really want to be playing the democratic party's hand going into these mid-terms because it looks like very substantial gains taking control of the house seems likely and it looks like the senate is in play. >> again, you never know. we all can say that right now. you never know how these things are going to turn out. i do remember that night when it had me at 60, 61, 62%. i actually had somebody call the tv station and ask, hey, are you sure those numbers are right? we don't think -- >> not a lot of self-confidence. >> let's just say i always ran scared. always ran scared. still do. heidi, do the republicans in the house understand that they are facing -- most likely they will

be facing a brutal fall and a tough election. are you still hearing them say hey if this breaks a certain way and that breaks a certain way we may just be able to hold on and maintain the majority? >> joe, i think they 100% understand it. i had lunch a couple of weeks ago with a top republican consultant who knows a lot of the house highway patrol and he said it's at a point where a lot of these guys are looking for jobs in lobbying firms that aren't hiring because lobbying firms expect there to be a shift. i have one spoiler alert that 60% number on dishonest, i was looking at "usa today," two years ago in august of 2016 we did a poll showing guess what? 60% of americans thought that donald trump was dishonest. so that's the same today as it was then. but the big difference is this. it's the intensity gap. now i spoke with a democratic consultant last week and he said here's our turn out model. if you look at the gap between

the number of people who strongly approve of donald trump and those who strongly disapprove, that's the big margin. the strongly disapprove there's like between a 20 to 30-point gap. that's our turn out margin. you look at the history of presidents losing seats in the mid-terms that's on democratic side. you took at the number of retirements in the house, staggering. the most since 1930. 42 open seats. we all know the methodology there it's much easier to take an open seat than to knock off an incumbent and now you have folks like charlie cook saying we've seen time and again with waves that between the summer and november the waves either maintain or they get stronger and so that's where we are today. >> that's where we are today. and, you know, mika, heidi brings up a great point. in mid-terms it is all about intensity. of course, the congressional

ballot tests, those are important. but it comes down to the intensity because people are far less likely to vote in mid-term elections than they are in presidential elections, and if you're somebody who just voted for donald trump because you didn't like hillary clinton or because you don't like nancy pelosi or you don't like the "new york times" or you don't like "morning joe" or because you don't like this or you don't like that, that doesn't drive you to go vote in an election. you have to be driven by candidate and liking a candidate and liking a president and right now i think that's probably the biggest challenge for the republican candidates that they have a president that even nick mulvaney says is unlikable. >> was he talking about the president or ted cruz? >> both. >> eugene robinson and robert costa thank you both. now to the state of emergency from maryland to carolinas as

hurricane florence barrels towards the united states as a powerful category 4 storm. governors in north carolina, south carolina and virginia have issued mandatory evacuation orders impacting at least 1 million people ahead of the storm's land fall. let's bring in bill karins for more on this. >> this has all the elements to be a harvey type situation and irma. strong winds and storm surge plus on top of that rainfall that could be like 30, 40 inches of rain. so here's what we're looking at. still about 1,000 miles away from north carolina. 140 mile-per-hour winds. we still have about 60 to 72 hours before we see the real bad effects get into the coast. the hurricane center has that friday at 2:00 a.m. 130 mile-per-hour winds. somewhere between myrtle beach and cape hatteras. then the problem is the storm will stall for 24-48 hours somewhere in eastern north carolina maybe off the coast or maybe just on the coast. here's the problem. tropical storm force winds.

high risk. this means power outages in this region. then we'll have storm surge, wherever it makes landfall to the right of that could be as high as 12 feet. picture a lot of houses on stilts. a lot of us up. a lot of destruction with storm surge. the rainfall, again, isolated totals could be up to 30 inches. wouldn't surprise me if somebody gets three to four feet of rain. the destruction will go right through the weekend into the beginning of next week. a stalling major hurricane on the east coast of the united states has almost never been seen before and we anticipate destruction that we haven't seen in that region before. >> all right, bill, keep us posted. the prayers begin now. still ahead on "morning joe" the fate of scotus nominee brett kavanaugh could depend on susan collins. can she afford a political gamble? law approach sore jonathan turley joins us with his take. the president tweeted this

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yet of who was responsible for the medical mystery that sickened 26 u.s. diplomats and intelligence officials in cuba. the main suspect of the intelligence agency now is that russia did it. in a mystery for more than a year, who or what caused american officials living in these havana homes and several hotels to suffer headaches, dizziness and in some cases more serious brain injuries similar to a concussion. last year cuban investigators in havana and former u.s. national security officials suggested to nbc news it could be russia. according to three current u.s. officials and two others briefed on the investigation, evidence they say backed up by highly secret communications intercept collected during a lengthy and ongoing investigation involving the fbi, cia and other u.s. agencies. also pointing to russia their massive intelligence presence in cuba. a hold over from the cold war.

>> that's not new that russia is in cuba or involved with cuba. russia has been the lifeline for them in many ways. >> reporter: russia has microwave technology that the u.s. suspects may have been used against americans. u.s. officials also tell nbc news the attacks were most likely not accidental. for instance from faulty listening devices. instead investigators now believe the americans were deliberately targeted. >> officials say there's no weapon previously known to the united states that could cause brain injury without any blast to the head. that has the u.s. government looking for new types of technology that could cause brain injury from afar. >> reporter: to solve the mystery trump administration has turned to the air force, testing various devices to see if they can duplicate the effects. according to trump administration officials congressional aides and others briefed on the investigation. why would russia possibly with inside help from some rogue cuban hard-liners target american diplomats and intelligence officers. the leading theory to disrupt

president obama's opening to then cuban leader raul castro. officially the state department says the investigation is ongoing and they made no determination as to who was behind the attacks. if russia did want to get the u.s. out of cuba they succeed because since the attacks the trump administration has all but broken diplomatic relations with havana. nbc reached out to the kremlin which so far has not commented. more recently a similar incident has also been confirmed against one u.s. official in china as well. mika, back to you. >> andrea, joe here. let me follow up. it's likely an attack in britain, it seems to be extraordinarily to be something you would not even expect sky master old kgb to do. again an attack is just not worth the consequences.

>> reporter: let's just pause that it's russia working in havana. russia is very active there and since the trump administration ordered this withdrawal of just about all of the u.s. diplomats and intelligence officials from havana for their safety but also trump administration policy to cancel the obama opening. basically blind. basically very, very few if any officials now working and we don't have a great intelligence apparatus in havana at all. so what they've done is they've basically taken over the space and they, if this is one of the theories and let's point out it's not proved what the motive is at all, but if they had the motive to get the u.s. out at a time when the obama administration was finally after, you know, decades and decades had reached out and normalized relations and

economic relationship was growing by leaps and bounds they accomplished that because there's almost no activity now between the u.s. and havana, officially. >> wow. andrea, thank you very much about your report. we have live pictures now from the 9/11 memorial in lower manhattan where today the names of thousands of americans will be read out loud one by one. joining us now from lower manhattan a member of the intelligence and homeland security committee republican congressman peter king of new york. very good to have you on the show this morning. congressman, i guess we should begin looking back and remembering all those who were lost on 9/11. by also looking ahead and asking exactly how much safer we are today and if this administration has increased our safety or decreased it around the globe. >> first of all, it's an honor to be here today to come back

and realize the tremendous heroism and bravery that day and to mourn for those lost. we are in this country bipartisan going back to 2001 to president obama and now president trump. here at home and also the coordination overseas with the allies. the fact is even at the height of the iraq ware the french and the u.s. were contacting the intelligence agencies. here we have homeland security, cia, fbi, here in new york working with the nypd, state police all working together joint terrorism task force and our allies. again this is unabated since 2001. it's safe to say that 9/11-type attack could never happen again.

having said that the enemy won't stop. so we have to try to stay ahead of them all the time. so every day 24/7, 52 weeks a year all these intelligence agencies, all of the overseas friends, allies we have, try to head off the next attack. but we don't know when it will happen. we have many officers since back 9/11 several people operating out of a cave in afghanistan. we have isis, al shabaab all these various agencies. we have the internet. all of this is still an ongoing challenge. the threat is still there. the good news is much more coordination and a 9/11 type attack we heard is very difficult. we have to look out for.

nuclear attacks. but, again, we're aware, alert much more than we were in the days leading up to 9/11. >> congressman king it's willie geist. you've been a leader in taking care of the first responders who worked on that pile for weeks and months after the attack of september 11th. we talked a lot about the victims that day. i want to talk about the victims that came afterwards, some 2,000 first responders have died because they got sick breathing in that toxic air as they worked to look for remains, as they unpeeled all that steel and glass. by some estimates, congressman, there could by the end of this year, just a few months from now could be more deaths to that group of people than the take that day. what more does this country need to do to take care of those men and women? >> well we have to do everything we possibly can. this is one of my most unfortunate experience in congress that it took us so long, since 2001 to the end of 2010 before this 9/11 health

fund was set up. then we had to re-authorize it again in 2015. was only created for fire years. we have it extended out for the next 75 to 80 years. funding will be there. i encourage anyone who was at ground zero, anyone who was near ground zero during those days to sign up. there's a registry with the illnesses and diseases that these people have gotten from 9/11. they are very rare in so many cases. and they are, some of them are late and it's only now that some people realize they have a 9/11-type blood disorder or cancer or tumor. so many lung diseases. we go through the list of rare diseases. everybody who was there, they have special doctors now who are treating these illnesses. we have an obligation to make sure that every one of them gets the medical assistance they need, the families are

compensated. again young men and women and people in congress -- it's terrible. >> congressman king this is david ignatius in washington. one of the things we remember on this anniversary and especially in the spot you are at ground zero is how unified america was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. i want to ask you as a leading member of congress what is it that congress could do, what is it that this white house could do to bring more of a sense of unity to the country 17 years later? >> yeah. i would say let's talk to the white house, let's talk to congress. both parties in congress. we have to find ways, areas we agree on and emphasize that so the american people will see where we disagree there are honest areas of disagreement not

just fighting for the sake of fighting. not appealing to the narrow bases of our party. what happened with ronald reagan and tip o'neill on social security, on other issues where you had the most conservative president ever, maybe the most liberal speaker at that that there was coming together that you forged a compromise. they fought hard. went against each other when they had to. they also knew the importance of finding common ground. that would show the american people that we're not just in this to get partisan gain but we have tint of the country at hand. there are real disagreements. right now it's hard to tell what's real and what's not. we fight over everything. i would ask the president, i would ask members of congress, the senate, the house to find areas where we agree and then fight over areas where we don't and those areas where we don't try to fine some sort of common ground. >> congressman peter king, thank you very much for being on the show this morning.

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committees based in maine have raised nearly $1 million so far for the non-existent opponent of senator susan collins if she votes to confirm supreme court nominee bret kavanaugh. the "daily beast" reports the groups along with progressive activist have come together to crowd funding support of a senator's democratic opponent in 2020. the group states that kavanaugh's potential votes on issues such as abortion, abortion access and health care are quota threat to every day matters mainers like us if collins does, in fact, vote against the supreme court nominee the group pledges to

return the funds to its donors. joining us now law professor at george washington university jonathan turley, his newco aluminum on the hillis entitled can susan collins afford political gamble to back the right to choose. also with us, washington bureau chief for u.s. today, susan paige and commentary writer for the "washington examiner" tom rogan. great to have you on board with us this morning. and jonathan turley i think i'll start with you, just about the brett kavanaugh's positions versus the votes that may come in for or against him. has he expressed exactly where he stands on some key fundamentals even per typing our constitution? i was listening to his testimony and trying have an open mind but i can't figure out where he stands on basic? >> that's it. the confirmation hearings have been reduced now to virtually no substance at all. essentially we take nominees

like kavanaugh and turn them into sort of gardner of being there where they say yes, charles, roe v wade is an old case, it's a case in the books. it's a law law case. everyone says, wow, okay. colin says, that's very reassuring. it's all a rather weird exercise where we do this. quite frankly, if this is what confirmation hearings are going to be about, why do them? they're now just basically there for the senators and we learn nothing, because the senate has taken this ginsberg rule where the rule says the nominees don't have to discuss cases that come before them and they have ripped out virtually all the content of confirmation hearings. you're supposed to vote on a nominee who will not discuss in any detail his interpretive approach to the constitution. >> susan collins has been a pro

choice republican for some time now. it's been an issue that's identified her with a lot of people in maine and allowed some moderate democrats to support her in at least their own mind. how important is this kavanaugh vote and why does it seem that she is headed towards supporting him when he's brought up a lot of things during the hearings that would cause great concern to those who believe his vote would overturn roe v wade? >> i think senator collins has indicated she's persuaded by the idea that roe v wade is settled law although judge kavanaugh has refused to say whether he thinks it was correctly decided. there really haven't been signs that she's going to vote against judge kavanaugh. that means that republicans likely are able to confirm him on their own. it also means that it clears the way for a couple conservative

democrats in tough senate reelection fights to vote for him as well. i think it is entirely likely that this is a confirmation that will move forward on at least a modestly bipartisan basis and that we expect, barring some any disclosure, for him to be on the court when the supreme court reconvenes on the first monday in october. >> there was a lot of sound and fury over the last week, a lot of document dumps and i am spartacus moments and parsing of e-mails from 15 years ago. is there any chance that kavanaugh will not be confirmed here? >> unless we see something substantial in terms of previous records that haven't been released, no, i don't think so. two reasons. first, it is the effective unity of the republican caucus in materials -- terms of support for kavanaugh. it's also the numbinfluence of number of democratic senators who are likely to vote for

kavanaugh. as we move into the midterms, this is an easy win for them with the deserconservative base. there is a lot of momentum to resolve this issue and push back against democrats where democrats rightly are asking for more documentation. >> steve schmitt had a really tough tweet a couple days ago about susan collins, basically saying that her support -- said the point about collins and murkowski's votings for caes fo expose them as titanic frauds. you really do have to ask if they have branded themselves as a different kind of republican, the as pro choice republicans. it seems to me that you can say, i believe in deferring to the president on supreme court picks, or you can say, you know what, i can't vote for him

because i don't think he'll uphold roe v wade. but these two don't seem to be choosing door one or door two. it sounds a bit murky in both of their cases. >> right. they seem that they want to have it both ways. or it seems like they want to have plausible deniability. they want to be able to say they're pro choice. they want to look for something kavanaugh has said to project the notion that they feel assured on this matter, even though there's not any concrete reason to think that we know where kavanaugh is. professor, i'm not a lawyer and not a constitutional scholar, but i did note that someone yesterday made the point that in the course of these hearings -- i wanted to talk about roe in popular because it's so much the cornerstone for the democrats to try to stop kavanaugh. made the point that ka nvanaugh

suggested that his view about unenumerated rights, which include the right to privacy, that the test he would apply would be related to a supreme court case called gluxberg. he had given a speech a year earlier in which he suggested that roe v wade and casey did not meet the gluxberg standard. i'm a little confused about why this hasn't become a bigger issue. did he not sort of tip his case that he's basically saying i don't find a right to privacy that would cover roe? >> what you get from the hearing and the writings and findings before is that he clearly is hostile to roe v wade. if you look at his interpretive approach, he clearly agrees with

r renquist's approach about unenumerated rights. that's one of the disconnects about the position of collins and murkowski, that it now appears that nothing short of a confession is going to really trigger that pledge made to support roe v wade. they're not going to wheel in a nominee like hanibal lector and say i'm going to eat roe v wade with a chianti. the supreme court once it gets a majority can flip the result. in favor of kavanaugh, there are plenty of lawyers and judges who believe that roe was wrongly decided. i think he's likely to take an approach that will be hostile to roe. >> do you think that it's more in the democrats' best interest

to move beyond the kavanaugh nomination and to understand that it's pretty likely to happen and that the longer they spend contesting the nomination and fighting the nomination, that's less time spent working on their wave election? >> no. because i think the two go hand in hand. we were discussing this this weekend. the issue is that you have a real passion on the part of democrats, regardless of their views of president trump, quite frankly, in terms of the political organization of the democratic party to oppose any prospective change to roe v wade, any undercutting of that. in opposing brett kavanaugh in the runup to this midterm election, in the same way that the republican party confirming cavanaugh is beneficial, i think the two go hand in hand. it is a way to mobilize that agenda even if it's firing shots in the dark with very little chance of hitting anything.

>> thank you. still ahead, the white house says president trump got a warm letter from kim jong-un requesting another summit. >> how nice. >> we'll talk to a member of the house armed services committee about whether a second meeting is a good idea. plus, last week a slew of polls showed president trump's approval rating hovering in the 30s. new polls this week show things haven't really improved for him. we'll dig into those new numbers next.

good morning. it is tuesday, september 11th. this morning we mark the 17th anniversary of the terror attack on the united states of america. plus, a state of emergency, a potentially catastrophic hurricane is closing in on north and south carolina. we'll get the latest track from our weather center in just a few minutes. and new polling paints a very troubling picture for president trump. his approval marks among

independents have cratered down 16 points in just one month. those numbers are straight ahead. good morning, everyone. along with joe, willie and me, we have national affairs analyst for nbc news john hailman, elise jordan. columnist david ignatius joins us as well. joe, we begin this morning with that new polling that shows president trump's approval rating continuing to hover in the 30s. new cnn poll showing 36% of americans approve of the job that trump is doing. a quinnipiac university poll puts it at 38%. three other polls last week put the president's approval between 36 and 37%. in the cnn poll, trump's approval rating among independents plunged over the last month, dropping from 47%

approval in august to just 31% today. and when it comes to trump's qualities, 32% say they are proud of him as president. the same percentage less than one-third see him as honest and trustworthy. back in the q poll, when asked whether they felt the president was honest, 3 2% of voters said yes, his lowest grade for honesty since he was elected. joe, they're beginning not to believe him, whoever they are. the few americans left who actually would believe the lies and untruths this president tells us. >> it's important to remember donald trump had very low honest and trustworthy numbers during campaign. he just happened to be running against an opponent who had even lower numbers. these numbers aren't so

inconsistent from where he was when he was running for president. what's happened in the last month that hasn't happened in the preceding 17 months? why has he fallen into the mid 30s in five of the last polls that have been released? >> i think the question, joe, it's a good question, but just reframe it slightly. i think what's happened here, you know, we've talked about this on the air a lot of times. he's been in the high 30s before. it's usually been at the low points when things have gone worst for him, after helsinki or after the crisis at the border with the kid in ts in the cages. the high 30s is his irreducible core. that's when he's at his worst. as we get closer and closer to

the midterm elections, we see the accumulated weight of 17 months of scandals and controversies and outrages and things that for a lot of the voters who make the difference between him being in the mid to low 40s and him being in the mid to high 30s is that the weight of all that, the gravity of it is finally sort of sunk in over time. and the reason is because we're getting closer and closer to a decision point. we see this in presidential election years. we see it sometimes in midterm election years, especially ones that are acutely referendum on the incumbent. there obviously have been things in the last few weeks that have been bad for president trump, but it feels more like as voters turn the corner into labor day and look at the decisions they have to make in the midterms, they're taking stock of the totality of trump's presidency and that is weighing him down. >> willie, you of course had the president i think at his high

watermark, at least from his inaugural week at 45% in the spring. then you had the child separation policy, then you had helsinki. then over the past month you've had a barrage of legal proceedings that have gone very poorly for him, michael cohen coming out, his long time fixer talking about all the things that donald trump did improperly. it's one thing if the media says it. it's another thing if democrats say it. you've had a jury of paul manafort's peers and other judges outside the political realm delivering some verdicts that are pretty harsh towards donald trump's people, toward his former campaign manager and

toward donald trump himself. >> and you can't call these outliers anymore. when you have five polls showing pretty much the same thing in the mid 30s, that is a trend and not an outlier. if you look at the accumulation of recent events, the book op-ed, the woodward book plus the op-ed painting a picture of a white house in chaos, it begins to explain some of the drop in those independent numbe numbers. people who may have given him a try perhaps walking away now. >> during the runup to the election when we were doing focus groups, we were talking to a lot of hold your nose voters. these were people who they really didn't want to vote for donald trump, but they definitely weren't going to vote

for hillary clinton. so they chose to go ahead, vote for donald trump. the accumulation of 17 months of constant antics on top of the instability of international affairs and donald trump's pretty cavalier attitude towards things such as war, i think this has started to sink in a bit. it's something you're not going to go out of your way to defend if you weren't that strongly invested in the first place. >> we have so many people like that, david ignatius, so many of my friends that supported donald trump who still will tell you they support donald trump, though they're offended by the tweets, they're offended by his behavior. basically it still is a binary choice. well, he's not nancy pelosi, he's not hillary clinton, so i guess he's still our guy. it seems that the woodward book as well as that op-ed in the "new york times" certainly has a lot of people in that category

thinking twice and starting to think, well, listen, maybe he's just not up to the task, maybe we look forward to a mike pence or a nikki haley running this party and running this presidency down the road. >> i think you're right, joe. what's striking about these numbers is that they come at a time when the economy is strong and is delivering on trump's promise to increase the rate of growth, so increase growth in particular in manufacturing jobs. so the numbers that trump would want are coming in and i think people feel them. but even so, there is this point back. why? my explanation would be that since trump's strategy is succeeding too well, he goes so hard for his base in these rallies. these raucous rallies around the

country fu country. i think it's turning people off, that strategy. in the time these polls were taken, john mccain was in his last days or his funeral had taken place. and people watched a celebration of what kind of normal, decent american politics is. watching that funeral, i thought, you know, there are a lot more people in america who like george w. bush plus barack obama than like donald trump. it's that simple. maybe that's what we're seeing in these numbers, is yeah, trump has his base, but increasingly that's all he's got. >> joe, you have a column in the "washington post" this morning that really looks at the gravity of the situation from 20,000 feet. it echoes some things my father was telling me before he passed away. you write in part this. trump is harming the dream of

america more than any foreign adversary ever could in which he charts the course from bush to obama to trump. this is your writing, joe. and a country that went from a huge surplus to racking up unparalleled deficits while squandering moral leadership. here is the column. 16 years of strategic missteps have been fooled by the maniacal moves of a man who has savaged america's vital alliances, attacked our intelligence and military communities and lent a sympathetic ear to neo nazis and white supremacists across the globe. for those of us still believing that islamic extremists hate america because of the freedoms we guarantee to all people, the gravest threat trump poses to our national security is the damage done daily to america's image. as the "new york times" roger cohen wrote the month after trump's election, america is an

idea. strip freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law from what the united states represents to the world, and america itself is gutted. osama bin laden was killed by seal team 6 before he accomplished that goal. other tyrants who tried to do the same were consigned to the ash heap of history. the question for voters this fall is whether their country will move beyond this troubled chapter in history or whether they will continue supporting a politician who has done more damage to the dream of america than any foreign adversary ever could. couldn't agree more, joe. >> so willie, i love that line that roger cohen line, america is an idea. and if you strip america of its ideas -- forget about knocking down buildings in the financial district, forget about running planes into the pentagon. those are tragedies, but those

tragedies bring us closer together. america is an idea. you gut america of that idea. that's when you do the most harm to america. roger cohen wrote that right after donald trump was elected. unfortunately, 18 months later, across the world you have people looking at a country that is saying they want to ban people from coming to america because of their religion. you have just this week brett kavanaugh who wants to be on the supreme court refusing to answer whether people should be banned from coming to the united states because of their race in his reading of the constitution. the accumulation of that, the retweeting of neo nazi videos, charlottesville, i mean i could go on and on, what he said about majority black countries. that is tearing more at the fabric of america than attacks on the twin towers did. we rebuilt from that. we became stronger because of

that. but this seems to me a far graver threat to the idea of america. >> osama bin laden's miscalculation that he was going to divide us with those attacks 17 years ago and he made us closer than ever. donald trump's election was not an incident. it was an election. it was a free election. 63 million americans went out and voted for donald trump. he has capitalized on something that perhaps was beneath the surface for a long time and brought it up to the surface and sought aggressively in many ways to divide us and he succeeded to some effect, but i would also argue that he's brought out the best of america, that he's brought out people who are more vigilant now, people who know they need to go out and vote, people who are aware there's a divide in this country. so it's certainly not a lost cause. i don't think joe or anyone else is suggesting it is. he's definitely changed country in just 18 or 20 month. still ahead on "morning

joe," president trump doesn't seem to have a problem misrepresenting numbers on the economy. his top economic advisor apparently does and corrected the record live on tv. that surreal chain of events is next. first, an update on that dangerous forecast off the carolina coast. a huge storm bearing down and the impact could be catastrophic. let's go right to bill karns for that. >> 130 miles an hour winds. yesterday up to 140. right now it's undergoing an eye wall replacement cycle. the predictions are for it to be a category 4, slowly weakening as it approaches the coastline in the middle of the night friday toward friday morning. one of the trends has been to slow down the landfall and a stalling system or a very slow major hurricane on the east coast of the united states, that's painful.

our european models targeting more the wilmington area. the american model is more towards the outer banks. a lot of the other models are further to the north than the european model. the european model is typically the most accurate. we'll continue to watch it. we've still got two days. then we'll tell you who's going to get the most extreme winds, storm surge and everything else. in virginia, you should be preparing for the possibility of a major inland flood event. wrightsville beach, north carolina, is one of the spots where the worst weather could be about 72 hours from right now. david: "life is complicated. choosing a health care provider doesn't have to be." molly: "that's why i choose a

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clarifying a tweet by president trump on the state of the economy, saying a portion of the facts the president put out were wrong. the president tweeted yesterday the gdp rate 4.2% is higher than the unemployment rate 3.9% for the first time in over 100 years. while the figures are correct, the 100 years part is not. the gdp rate has topped the jobless rate more than 60 times with the most recent being in 2006. the administration was forced to correct the error, telling reporters yesterday the mistake likely was the result of incorrect information being passed along to the president. >> what is true is that it's the

highest in ten years and at some point somebody probably conveyed it to him adding a zero to that. >> what's a zero here or there? obviously as i said, it happened 12 years ago and has happened many, many times in the period the president described as being the first. >> this is what politicians do. they exaggerate usually. >> get a little closer usually. >> a little closer. you don't usually go, well, unemployment is below 4%. you usually don't multiply it ten times the amount, but that's what donald trump always does. it always seems good is just not good enough for donald trump. when he's doing poorly, he tells everybody he's the best ever, that his white house is running extraordinarily smooth, same with his poll numbers. even when things are going well, even when he's seeing the obama recovery continue into his term,

he can't just let it go. he has to exaggerate tenfold. >> that's what's so baffling. trump right now has a strong economic story to tell, but instead he creates these distractions through his own unforced errors and will continue to make such unforced errors, as i'm sure the midterms approach. he is going to have to exert a level of self-control as president obama begins to appear more frequently back in the public eye campaigning for democratic candidates. and that seems to definitely pose a threat to any stability that he might actually possess. >> an interesting note out of this story, john heilemann, yesterday just sort of a media watch moment. fox news put out a correction on donald trump in realtime. it was quite a stinging rebuke. recent quarters of gdp growth

higher than the unemployment rate. they listed a dozen or so times that happened. it reminds me also a few weeks back when the florida candidate for governor talked about monkeying up the economy there, the recovery there. fox news actually came on and distanced themselves from ron desantis's language. >> yes. that quote from the "washington post," joe, after the op-ed came out, the quote where the person said the sleeper cells have awoken. apparently the sleeper cells have also awoken at fox news. it's all good. nice to see them standing up and being counted. again, might signal that the patience with president trump is wearing thin even in some of the quarters that previous gave him a pretty wide berth. coming up on "morning joe," two big stories this morning, each with a tie to national security, the anniversary of

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welcome back to "morning joe." joining us now, former homeland security secretary under president obama, jeh johnson. mr. secretary, good to see you. >> thanks, willie. >> this is the 17th anniversary of september 11th, a day that is your birthday, by the way. i didn't realize this until we were talking to you just beforehand, but you were in your office and watched the whole thing with your own eyes. >> correct. i was in my private law office on september 11th, 2001. my 44th birthday. i had been in the pentagon eight months before as general counsel of the air force then. someone said, hey, a plane just hit the world trade center. i looked out the window and literally saw the whole thing before my eyes. >> we remarked on the front page of the new york post that time marches on. it's the new york jets and in the upper right corner it says remember 9/11. what are your thoughts on this 17th anniversary and what memory of 9/11 should we keep alive?

>> it's of course important to remember those who died, the heroism that occurred that day, which in my judgment was quintessentially american. it's important to remember not to let our guard down and that what happened on 9/11 was beyond the comprehension of a lot of people. when i saw that tower collapse, it was beyond my kpre henccompr. but it's important that we keep our guard up. this is what i used to tell my people at dhs. we have to prepare for the next terror attack, not necessarily the last one. the homeland security threat has evolved tremendously over the last 17 years. we've got to keep our eye on that. >> let me ask you, with that in mind, are we safer today than we were five years ago? are we safer today than we were ten years ago? are we safer today than we were on september 10th, 2001? >> joe, i think the answer is

yes in some respects, no in others. i think that our government, particularly our intelligence community, does a better job now than it did 17 years ago of detecting large scale plots from overseas against the homeland. our intelligence community now is able to detect in general those types of plots at their earliest stages. where we are challenged and less safe is when it comes to the self-radicalized actors, the smaller scale attacks, the san bernardino, orlando, chattanooga and events like west side highway last year. these are more challenging because they're harder to detect. they're people who self-radicalize in secret right here in the homeland. and it requires a whole of government approach. then, of course, joe, there's cyber security. in my judgment, on a day to day basis, cyber attacks are our number one threat to the homeland. the homeland threat has evolved tremendously since 9/11 and

since the creation of my old department, dhs. >> secretary, do you think we're at the point where this should shift from more of a counter terrorism mission to a law enforcement mission 17 years after the initial attack? >> i think it has, because so much of domestic terrorism is home based. it becomes more and more a matter of domestic law enforcement, the fbi, components of dhs that are focused on what happens within the homeland. so it very definitely has become more and more of a domestic law enforcement effort. >> what do you think as we show the video coming in, hurricane florence as the coast repairs for what we're predicting is a big impact? what's happening right now inside the government? the president has been talking about this on twitter, he's been open about declaring a state of emergency. what is happening right now? >> hopefully what is happening right now is fema is

coordinating the prepositioning of assets on the coast in north carolina, meals, water, generators, other resources need to be prepositioned right now in the event of a disaster. and the general population has to listen to local officials when they say evacuate. a lot of people never do that. so it's critical that people in the affected areas listen to their local officials, do what they tell them to do. and it's up to fema and state homeland security officials to preposition assets. >> jeh johnson, thank you very much. up next, we talk to a senior member of the armed services committee about the new nbc news reporting on north korea's ongoing nuclear program. "morning joe" is coming right back.

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while president trump continues his praise for north korea on its commitment to

denuclearize, three senior officials tell nbc news that the latest intelligence suggests north korea could produce five to eight new nuclear weapons this year and is building new structures to hide them. while the officials say north korea's recent actions have the administration looking for ways to bolster its pressure campaign, the white house says it's preparing for a second summit between the two leaders following a letter from kim jong-un requesting another meeting. joining us now is senior member of the armed services committee congressman john garramandi of california. >> it is.

it's certainly negotiations are the only avenue that will lead to any success. a war on that peninsula is just a horrendous situation. however, the president has to be very very clear eyed. kim jong-un is no good person. he is a bad guy. he and his father before him have hidden their nuclear ambitions for decades and they're going to continue until there is some sort of a settlement and a settlement is actually possible. >> are you concerned with the continued talks, the president talking about setting up another summit? or do you have confidence in people like secretary mattis, secretary pompeo and others around him and actually john bolton, a real hawk on north korea, that they will make sure those talks move forward in a way that protects our interests? >> first of all, it's pretty clear from all the writing, all the articles and books, that the president doesn't really listen to anybody. in this case, he's looking for

love in all the wrong places. he's not going to find love from kim jong-un. those men that you discussed, they are, i think, competent, capable and the negotiations should be in their hands. it's not going to be easy, but there is a path forward. but the president really cannot continue to just expect kim jong-un to be nice. he's not going to be nice. he's going to do everything he can to protect his interests, his family's control over north korea. and we need to be very much aware that the neighborhood, china, japan, south korea and others, need to continue to put pressure on them. then when the president is out there starting a trade war with people that we have to have work with us, we get ourselves into a real problem here. >> you know, we have the possibility of another summit on the heels of, as you mentioned, books, articles, anonymous op-eds where people inside the

white house appear to be admitting to containing the president and even going against him without him knowing. how dangerous would a summit be with this type of atmosphere and especially with the track record he has so far with previous summits, like for example, helsinki? >> certainly helsinki was a major disaster when he refused to stand up to putin and basically kowtowed to him. similarly, at the singapore summit, trump wants it all to be hov an love and nice. kim jong-un is not nice. he's a very cagey smart person who's out to protect his interests. the president needs to understand that. there is a path forward. the president of south korea wants to have a peace treaty with north korea. the president has not moved forward with that request. that's an angle and that's a

path that should be pursued. at the same time, we need to make sure that these sanctions are working and they are not. there's clear evidence that china has backed away from its commitment on sanctions. quite possibly others are. we're trying to deal with the shipping issues. all of those are important, but that requires the cooperation of china and now we're in the midst of a trade war with china. what kind of cooperation could we expect? ten years ago and seven years after the 9/11 attacks, presidential candidates john mccain and barack obama suspended their respective campaigns for the white house to spend the morning together at the site of the world trade center in lower manhattan. in many ways, that feels like a throwback to an entirely different era of american politics, an era that shined

through, if only briefly, at mccain's funeral services earlier this month. let's bring in historian john mitcham. he is author of the book "the soul of america." joe? >> john, let's talk about the time period between september 11th 2001 and today. if you go back to september 10th, it's almost like november 21st, 1963, a dividing line between an old and a new age. how have we changed since that day? >> well, it was what president bush called a day of fire. it clearly set off nearly two decades of a perpetual perennial

war that is largely fought in the shadows. but as we all know, also has its hot incarnations around the world. i think there's a cliche in commentary and in history about losing innocence, but in many ways we only had two serious foreign attacks on our soil in american history from 1812 forward. one was the attack on pearl harbor on the 7th of december, 1941. the other was the attack on new york city, washington, d.c. and the skies over pennsylvania on september 11th, 2001. it took an america that since the end of the cold war, since the fall of the berlin wall, since the end of the live possibility of armageddon which we had lived with from the 1940s forward, it took that and it ended that period of relative

peace and prosperity and put us into an anxious and, in fact, more partisan time. i think these things are related. i think our politics have been shaped by our anxieties about enemies that are both seen and unseen. >> we're going to go to a moment of silence in just a couple of minutes. forgive me if i have to cut you off. i was thinking back as you watch the coverage that morning on the today show, tom brokaw sitting in the chair watching the smoke that covered lower manhattan and just saying in that moment, this country is forever changed right there in realtime and how right he was about that. we've talked this morning about the victims, to the people in the buildings, to civilians in iraq. how was this country changed? >> this country changes dramatically, of course, beside the morning of the loss. it's raised a lot of issues. it raised islam and muslims in this country in new ways that it

wasn't before. you have the rise of women wearing hijab as a political protest. you have political tension within the country of the muslim ban as a consequence. but as we reflect on this day, we also have to reflect on how do we respond and the consequences of our response. not only did we go to two wars in iraq and afghanistan, we have destroyed an entire country of iraq. millions of lives have been destroyed. in afghanistan, the taliban are actually still winning and we are negotiating with them. so we have to reflect how best to respond learning from world war ii, actually, in a way that is productive and not only destructive. >> you're looking at live pictures from ground zero, where nearly 3,000 americans lost their lives 17 years ago today. two moments of silence, the first at 8:46 a.m. when the first plane struck the north

tower, the second at 9:03, the moment of the second strike. then vice president mike pence and defense secretary james mattis will be at the pentagon memorial for an observance ceremony. later just after 10:00 a.m., president trump and the first lady will lead a moment of silence in shanksville, pennsylvania. the ceremonies begin in lower manhattan including the names of those killed in the attacks. let's listen. ♪ of the brave

>> right, march. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> that moment of silence again at 8:46 a.m. when american

airlines flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the world trade center. we follow in about 15 minutes at 9:03 with a moment of silence for united flight 165 with 65 people aboard crashing into the south tower. 17 years later, these moments never lose their impact. >> they really don't lose their impact for anybody that walked around ground zero and walked around the financial district in the weeks and months after the attacks. you would go past so many fences that lined churches, trinity down in the financial district. you would see pictures of the missing and lost souls that families were desperately searching for. and, sadly, despite all of our

hopes in those first moments, those first few weeks, none of those people survived that were inside the towers. mika, we showed a shot of rudy giuliani standing next to u.n. ambassador nikki haley, and we of course, see him through a different prism today. ov i can say that for millions of americans in the hours and the days and the weeks after september 11th, rudy giuliani was america's mayor, and he provided leadership that many saw lacking initially from george w. bush. it's hard to remember now. it took president bush a little while until he got on top of that rubble at ground zero to find his voice. but before he did, rudy giuliani

did step in and filled a valuable leadership role for a broken city and a hurt nation. >> yeah. and a city broken by the loss of so many men and women who were inside the the sacrifice of those men and women on that day. new york city's finest and bravest. i'll pass it to susan page next as we remember the images, the moments of 9/11, and also i just, i love the way that we mark this anniversary, never forgetting every single person who was lost.

susan. >> it's a reminder that we look to elected officials at moments like this to lead us. to bring us together over things that don't make any sense. they are moments of great unity. this has become also fractious. 17 years later, we are still dealing with the consequences of that terrible terrible morning. >> and, you know, there's an image, willie, that -- so many images from this day that stay with us so many years later. following up on what mika said about those firefighters who gave their lives, gave their all, going back into the tower. one firefighter in particular just staring back in a daze as somebody snapped his picture.

going up those stairs, knowing -- well, knowing his fate. but he went up anyway to save fellow new yorkers because that was his job. >> you ask anybody who was walking down the stairs that morning. as i said, my sister-in-law was pregnant. the firefighter going up the other way. they were going to walk up to the fire which was the 90th floor and above. they were walking up to put out that fire. we know now 343 members of the new york city fire department died that day. >> extraordinary heroism. i want to just talk to jon meacham. i had lived in london in the early 1990s when the i.r.a. was bombing every couple of weeks. i was astonished by how stoic and resilient people were,

dealing with bombs that went off on a weekly basis. people would said immediately after 9/11 the country would never be the same. and that the world would never be the same. that new york city would never be the same. i now live two blocks from the world trade center, from what the memorial is. jon, i want to ask you to reflect on that real briefly. i know heidi has some things to say too. 17 years later, what amazes me more than anything is just the extraordinary resilience of the people in this city. people were shell shocked but it wasn't that long before new york was back in business. the city had not forgotten but in a kind of show of resilience was ready to move on. i watch people go to that memorial. the tourists who come. the locals. it is a real testament to the spirit of the city that the city was not destroyed. the way of life here was not

rendered fundamentally different from the way it was in the year 2000 or september 10th, 2001. >> also the unity of america. americans came together in one voice. this unity, we need to remember today. we need too remember how to get together for the country. >> jon. >> the word jon uses is exactly right. the resilience. it is remarkable how the city responded. it rose to an unimaginable occasion. the country did too. even in those first days, i remember -- i was living in new york then. i remember the restaurants were all empty but the bars and the neighborhood places were all full. people wanted to be with each other. it was a reminder of -- that we held something in common. and st. aagustine once said the

daily love. we don't remember the common objects of our love enough. i think it was a genuine testament to american characteristics. one was a fighting spirit. we wanted to get in the arena. we wanted to make the people who, as president bush said who knocked those buildings down pay for it. a totally natural human response. and the other was we are not going to be captive by the past. we're not going to be captive to what's happened before. we're going to press on. we're going to move forward. and i think the country has done that in a remarkable way under not just leadership at the top but that was a collective decision. that was a decision by citizens

that we were going to move forward. >> new york city did show an extraordinary resilience and, heidi, something else happened on that day. new york had always been viewed with great suspicion, even going back to revolutionary times. people didn't want the capital in new york city. and across the deep south, there was utter contempt for new york for the better part of two centuries. i remember going to a memorial in northwest florida at fort walton beach and actually the loudest applause line was i love new york. and the entire stadium leapt to their feet with people waving american flags. it was as if in that moment new york, everybody suddenly realized, was on the front lines of our war against terror.

>> there was that love that was felt all throughout, if we look back, revitalization under the subsequent mayor, in terms of investment pouring into the city. i want to speak on this issue of unity. we all have our own powerful anecdotes about how we experienced that and i happened to be with george bush when he came back to washington and toured the wreckage of the pentagon and i have to say that there were no lines between us, you know, there was the tension between the president and the media, just like there was with every other president. he called us the filter. but on that day, we were all one. we all walked together as one in the wreckage of the pentagon. but later, joe, i want to say that we need to also use this moment to learn and take lessons for the future in terms of the

free press because i was also part of that free press, joe, and we watched this case being built in the aftermath of september 11th for a preemptive strike on iraq, which has in so many ways defined what was talked about in terms of all the lives that have been lost and let us look to that as the free press and not be intimidated. if we face another moment like this in the future. if we are attacked again or if we face another preemptive strike, let us not be fearful or intimidated to immediately put on our journalistic hat and ask those tough questions. we owe it to the american people. >> thank you. it is because it's hard to engage constructively in the world. we have russia with 300,000 troops. we have division in the world. we have the rising of the right

wing. as america reflects at its leadership role, we need to look at engagement that improves the lives and brings people to us rather than isolate them from us. >> you know, willie, i like to think that -- to 9/11 of course is a tragedy that did bring us together and did show the best of america. that when pushed to the wall, we do let our partisan differences fall to the side. it's happened before. and i believe, i hope, i pray, it will happen again. >> i would just like to say as much as this is a national and international tragedy, there are a lot of families today for whom it's a very personal tragedy. kids who don't have their fathers or mothers anymore. parents who don't have their sons or daughters. there were kids in diapers on 9/11 who will be walking patrol today in afghanistan. let's think about them today.

>> for willie, joe and me, that wraps up our coverage. chris jansing continues the coverage. >> mika, thank you. i'm chris janicing in for stephanie ruhle. this morning, taking aim. hurricane florence strengthens to a massive category 4 and has its eyes set on east coast. more than 1 million people in four states already ordered to evacua evacuate. >> this is a serious storm and people need to take heed. >> we are preparing for the potential historic and cat st t catastrophic and potential life threatening flooding. >> get ready now. >> meet the press. the white house holds an official press briefing. first on the agenda, a fact check on the president by his own people. >> and at some point somebody probably conveyed it to him. they shouldn't have done that. >> and vce