anti-trump that's proved to be a tough business model in this era. >> all right. mike allen, great to have you with us, especially on that landmark tweet from the president on the active -- you know, "1 big thing." >> the tweet tease. >> we'll be reading it in a little bit. you can sign up at signup.axios.com. >> all right. that does it for us on a monday morning. i'm ayman mohyeldin with frances rivera. "morning joe" starts right now. good morning. welcome to "morning joe." it is monday, august 26th. with us we have msnbc political analyst and former chairman of the republican national committee michael steele. washington anchor for bbc world news america katty kay. columnist and associate editor for "the washington post" david ignatius. and "morning joe" economic analyst steve rattner.

what don't we have to talk about this morning? we'll begin with president trump's new comments this morning on the continued escalation of his trade war with china. speaking earlier this morning in france amid the g7 summit, the president said that beijing has signalled it wants to try and reach a deal. >> china called last night our top trade people and said let's get back to the table. so we'll be getting back to table. i think they have been hurt very badly but they understand this is the right thing to do i have great respect for it. i have great respect for it. this is a very positive development for the world. >> this comes after president trump on friday announced that he would be hiking tariffs on most imports from china following beijing's decision earlier that day to place new tariffs on $75 billion in american goods.

the white house says it will raise existing duties on $250 billion in products from china from 25% to 30% on october 1st. meanwhile, tariffs on $300 billion of goods will increase from 10 to 15% beginning this sunday. in addition to the tariffs, the president also announced that he is ordering u.s. companies to ship their production from china, saying they must look for alternatives immediately, advocating they consider moving operations back to the u.s. those moves sent wall street just crashing with the dow and s&p 500 shedding nearly 2%. and in morning the selling has continued with asian stocks finishing deep in the red. yesterday, white house economic adviser larry kudlow defended

trump's approach to china and blocking the u.s. companies from doing business there. >> he's asking american companies to take a look, take a fresh look at frankly moving out of china. going some place else. coming home to america. it will take years that is correct. that's why there's no immediate action here. look, i have heard him say this time and time again the couple years i have been working here. he said it in the individual business, he's asking them to come home. come back home to america. >> well, he's also said that we could use -- suggested we could use nuclear weapons to break up hurricanes. that's -- as jonah goldberg said, not only does that make the hurricanes angry, it makes them angrier but radioactive. i don't know exactly how we sort

through everything that the president said this weekend starting on friday, david ignatius, but i get the sense, i'm sure a lot of people got the sense into saturday that the president understood that he had well overshot his mark. he caused chaos in the markets on friday. that's why he struck a more conciliatory tone on saturday saying that he had second thoughts and then the white house backed off of that. you know, david, it had to be a pretty alarming -- to the president when he realized he's up for re-election next year. but president xi, he's president for life. and he's right now he's holding the stronger hand and he can wait donald trump out and we saw that -- in my opinion, we saw that anger that desperation and now the president's second attempt at retreating this

weekend. >> joe, there may be some dictator envy going on here, but my base line after watching the back flips and the scowls and the threats over the last few days that then end up with the president sounding like xi is his best friend, it's the politics, stupid. trump is running for re-election. if he had not made a statement like this, the markets would have fallen out of bed again this morning. it's begun in asia already overnight and i think trump is primarily focused on keeping enough of his accounts seeming to be successful. that he just doesn't -- he wants to sound confrontational to get the last bit of the deal. but i think he was looking at a continuing market hemorrhage. he didn't like what he saw. the language that he used this

morning in a tweet about a half hour ago is almost fawning. he talks about the calm resolution of president xi and he's impressed that they're willing to come and state the facts so clearly. it -- you know, it's a concession wrapped in flattery as near as i can tell. but he wants to calm the situation down because he knows that continued turmoil takes him over the edge. >> donald trump blinks and he keeps blinking, steve rattner, again, this is something you can see coming on friday when the president exploded after exploding he ordered companies out of china. he then claimed that he had authority to do that under the law and deciding the law going into saturday morning but again, what really concerned him was the fact that of course he never thinks ahead. that's the problem with the day trader. he didn't realize until this weekend that president xi is

holding all the cards because he's not running for re-election. he can just wait donald trump out. so now we have the president who's gotten us out on the cliff economically with tariffs and tariff taxes and he's going to have to crawl on his hands and flies to china to get out of this crisis he created. >> yeah. look, he has that exact problem. he's -- he's cognizant of the stock markets and every time he takes a tough stance with china china takes a tough stance with him which is what you saw on friday with the escalating rounds of tariffs throughout the day. the stock market reacts badly. the stock market also -- and business as a whole and we can talk about what's going on in the general economy which is really not good. but the stock market as a whole reacts badly to kind of indecisive leadership to waffling and flipping this way and flipping that way.

what you see is him trying to triangulate his way through a very difficult trade negotiation and also come out with something that he can defend with a straight face as actually a deal. and also do all of that without avoiding cratering the american economy which is on quite weak legs at the moment because of his own trade war. >> katty, all weekend people around here at least, mika and i and our friends were talking about the crazy tweets that donald trump was sending out and the random tweets. the happy birthdays to regis and sean connery, by the way, happy birthday, regis. and all of the distractions. i have been talking to all of the g7 leaders and they're all saying why is america so great but why is the press the enemy of the people? i mean, just absolute nonsense. it was so obviously a smoke screen. this all came back to china

getting the best of him. it all came back to the damage he's causing to america. and the world economy with tariffs. you even had that surreal moment where larry kudlow was being interviewed by i think it was ri anna keller. she played a clip of boris johnson saying we don't like tariffs. tariffs are bad. then you have larry kudlow accusing the cnn anchor of twisting words when all she had done was play clips. i don't think that was from the g7 we had a big g7 picture behind him. i mean, it was madness this weekend. it seems that trump understands he's completely isolated on tariffs and now he's again going to have to crawl begging to president xi to get a deal. >> by the way, larry kudlow who is the master of twisting words himself, he asked him to take a look at it, it was something he

wanted to put on the table and the president said i hereby order u.s. companies to get out of china, not exactly just taking a look at it. so that's something they have to sort out themselves. look, as the economy gets worse, as the prospect of a recession looms larger it seems to cause the president who has tied his open fortunes to the face of the u.s. stock market more and more stress. he looks around and one of the tools he has left in the tool box to really gin up the u.s. economy, not very many. i mean, you get perhaps jay powell who is under a huge amount of pressure to bring interest rates down a little bit. there's not much he can do on taxes, that would be very difficult for him. a trade deal with china would be the most obvious thing he could use to install confidence at least in the financial markets. when he sends out tweets like he did on friday he's undermining his own strategy, to try to get the economy back on an even

kilter or one of the things he could be doing to get the economy on the even kilter. it's a weekend of chaos and the asian markets think this is not the way we want it to go and they're down again. >> michael steele, i won't even ask where the republicans are anymore. i mean, lindsey graham just said you have to accept the pain. not really, because this is like donald trump taking a hammer and pounding the hand of consumers in america. you don't have to take the pain. the pain is self-inflicted pain. but, you know, let's just talk about the demise of the republican party that didn't speak out when donald trump ordered like a tyrant -- ordered american companies to leave china immediately. and then cited the statute that he said mistakenly gave the president of the united states

absolute power to interfere with free enterprise or we could talk about the republicans, ben sasse being quiet. joni ernst being quiet. susan collins being quiet. cory gardner being quiet. thom tillis being quiet. when the president of the united states called the fed chair an enemy of america for simply saying what republicans had always said about tariffs before donald trump became president of the united states. this is not a party that deserves a future if they can't even speak out against this madness. >> well, i think in large measure the party has abandoned that future long before this moment with this particular trip. there are too many other pieces of evidence that indicates starting with the fact that we're now faced with over $1 trillion worth of deficits by the end of this year. not to mention the explosion of

the debt itself by these same fiscally conservative republicans. so this is consistent. they have acquiesced, capitulated some key fundamental principles around the economy. around the issues like trade. around free markets. to the whims and we'lls of a president who doesn't deal with the particular issues and the question going into the g7 was what -- and typically in the past, joe, as you know, has been what's the strategic interests that the president is going to put out on the world stage that supports where america wants to go economically, militarily, et cetera. as this conversation has already indicated we have already been all over the map. and so folks at home, rational people are trying to figure out what to do with this and how do you digest it. republicans are basically saying that's my boy. and that's where we are.

>> wow. try to figure out what exactly is important to the members of the republican party. and what they hold dear but while we're on the subject of confusing events, david ignatius, iran's foreign minister showing up at the g7. explain the context. >> this is the man who came to dinner, what was he doing there? it's a bit of a mystery. we don't know if they discussed. he did meet with the french, german, british officials. he doesn't appear to have met with my americans and trump said something very interesting and telling it's not time for me to meet with him now, but it will be soon. soon it will be right to meet with iran and great things will happen because iran is a country that can do wonderful things. a trump phrase. he has wanted to open the

diplomatic channel for months. prime minister abe of japan went to tehran bringing a message from trump that so far as we know proposed negotiations. that was spurned by ayatollah khamenei. and involving the trade war with china president trump doesn't want to head into the election year about to go to war with iran. he knows that another war in the middle east is not what the american public wants so i think we're beginning a dance about the shape of the table. about under what circumstances we meet with iranians, what concessions would be necessary from the u.s. but you have seen from may since this confrontation in the gulf the u.s. desire to sound tough, continue to fight economic war, but to avoid shooting war. i thought this was the latest chapter. >> and to the story that joe referenced a few moments ago, hurricane season is here.

>> got a solution. >> yeah. president trump reportedly has an idea to keep the storms from causing damage to the u.s. -- nuclear bombs. nuclear bombs against hurricanes, according to axios trump has suggested multiple times to homeland security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the u.s. >> you know, mika, remember when we had warned everybody in -- i think it was july or august of the election year, 2016, that foreign policy people had gone in to talk to then candidate trump. >> yeah. >> and his solution to iran w was -- why can't we use nuclear weapons, north korea, why can't we use nuclear weapons against north korea and just generally asking -- being very frustrated, asking his foreign policy experts well, if we had built all of the nuclear weapons, why can't we use them? so now i guess -- >> he just wants a way to use

them. axios -- >> itchy finger. >> trump said, i got it, why don't we nuke them, according to one source who was there. that source continued to paraphrase the remarks claiming trump said they start forming off the coast of africa as they're moving across the atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. why can't we do that? the senior administration official responded to axios and to the axios report saying we don't comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team. all right. let's bring in the cofounder of axios, mike allen. and mike, i mean, it's an idea that we have heard before. it's not out of nowhere. just along with everything that comes with trump, it seems a little scarier. little more disturbing. >> we heard it was a long time ago and it was laughed off immediately, right, mike? >> well, joe, you know a few

things about a hurricane, and you can imagine these briefers. so the source in the room tells jonathan swan that the briefer said we'll look into that, sir. and they did. there's actually a memo that came out of the homeland security national security process that memorializes the president's bright idea about this. and you're right, this is a long discussed and long discredited idea. so it turns out it goes back to the eisenhower administration, some scientists thought about it then. noaa has a tropical cyclone myth page and this is on there and they explain that there's a couple of reasons this is a bad idea. in fact, the national geographic said that nuking hurricanes, the history of a bad idea. first of all, if you were to drop a nuclear bomb inside a hurricane, among the things that would happen is the fallout

would follow the trade winds, it would follow the path of the hurricane right to the land you're trying to protect. secondly, there's a shock wave from it that doesn't -- that does the same thing and third, a few practicalities about how much energy would be required to disrupt an actual hurricane. >> yeah. unbelievable. what are you looking at this week, mike, at axios? what are the stories that you all are going to be following? >> for sure we're looking at how the president gets himself oft on the corner where he wanted to go big against china. wanted to go even harder against him. we're told that his mood against china last week was fu, and it wasn't just spelled out. then we saw as david was pointing out you saw what the reaction from the markets would be. so how the president gets himself out of this corner. business is very worried about

these comments. the -- this is a time when the president's comments usually get laughed off. like the hurricane. but this is a place where they have a real world impact. >> all right. mike allen, thank you very much. and still ahead on "morning joe," we'll talk about the race for the white house and the new republican challenger to president trump. former congressman joe walsh is our guest straight ahead. you're watching "morning joe." we'll be right back. here's your buick sir. actually, that's my buick. your buick doesn't have a roof rack! this is my buick. how are we gonna fit in your mom's buick? easy. i like that new buick. -me too. i was actually talking about that buick. i knew that. -did you? buick's fresh new lineup is full of surprises. current eligible non-gm owners and lessees get 20% below msrp on most 2019 buick encore models.

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a new samsung note. click, call or visit a store today. brazilian president jair ball sonar row has global outrage over the widespread damage and his lackluster

response. brazilian military planes began to dumb water over the weekend and a few hundred of the promised troops deployed into the fire zone. the response comes as leaders of the g7 nations currently meeting in france expressed grave concerns over the fires and french president emmanuel macron said yesterday that the g7 was nearing a deal to provide technical and financial help to brazil and other countries affected by the fires. nearly 80,000 fires have been registered across brazil so far this year. the highest since at least 2013. there was gunfire in hong kong for first time since those mass demonstrations kicked off months ago. several officers drew their weapons with one firing a warning shot after officials say they were surrounded by

protesters. the police also used water cannons to counter the demonstrators. some of whom hurled bricks and gasoline bombs at officers. police say 36 people were arrested for crimes such as unlawful assembly, possession of an offensive weapon. and assaulting police officers. the protests have been running for 12 straight weekends. china state run press suggested that beijing has both the authority and the responsibility to step in and quell the unrest. steve rattner, what's at stake in the hong kong protests, not only for those who are cheering for democratic reforms there and across china, but also for the chinese government itself. not holding the strongest hand right now economically. what happens if hong kong turns out to be tiananmen square 20 years later? >> well, look, there are

enormous consequences for not just china, but for the world in terms of what happens in hong kong because hong kong is the financial capital of asia. and it has been a place where international companies international companies, banks have been able to do business under the -- and if they're emasculated from the role it will have enormous repercussions and for china itself which has been trying to be a bit more of a good actor in certain ways, certain ways, not a good actor in the world community, to create another tiananmen square would be disastrous for them. i think you can see in the way they're approaching it, they have used water cannons and they have the huge massive force across the border in shenzhen. but if they're thinking rationally at all, the last thing they want to do is go into

the hong kong in force. the last thing i'll say is that -- and we can talk about this in the context of trade and other things as well. the chinese -- for the chinese it's a lot about pride and face and about their rights and their standings as a world power in the global community. and it's a little bit like trade in that it's a little tough to see how these two sides back down. each of them getting enough to be able to say it worked out and not having it end in tears. >> david ignatius, give us your i think -- insights about the dilemma that china finds itself in. >> hong kong is really a symbol of globalization, of the blending of the chinese and western economies. hong kong is the place where they meet. you hear increasingly talk both from chinese and americans about the decoupling of that global economy. and that's one of the futures that we may be looking at. we'll have to see in the next days where president trump is,

but in his comment i hereby order american companies to stop business with china, that sounded like decoupling. when it comes to hong kong, we should think about taiwan. for china, taiwan is really the prize and if you have restless students risking their lives in the streets of hong kong to protest chinese policies to be demand greater freedoms, the chinese worry that something is ahead in taiwan which they regard as a rebellious province. they think the west's acceptance of taiwan will be the foundation stone of the process of modernization that goes back to deng xiaoping. look over the horizon to taiwan, the one reason they wouldn't want to go into force in hong kong it might trigger a strong counterreaction in taiwan. all right, coming up

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we have someone in the white house who we all know is unfit. someone who lies virtually every time he opens his mouth. and someone who places his own interests above the nation's interests at every single turn. we cannot afford four more years of donald trump. no way. my name is joe walsh. i'm a former republican congressman. i'm a conservative, i'm running because donald trump is not who we are. >> former gop congressman joe walsh of illinois is challenging president trump for the republican nomination for president. and he joins us now. welcome to the show. good to have you on board. welcome as a candidate here. >> mika, joe, great to be with you both. thank you. >> yeah.

so let me ask you, a lot of people who don't know who you are. let's go through an evolution. you obviously -- as you said yesterday you were a trump supporter. you were actually involved in birtherism. you said some very unkind things about barack obama that you later regretted but you said something fascinating in an interview and that was that it was looking at donald trump and his poor example that actually made you rethink some of the things that you had said. explain. >> look, i think i'm partly responsible for trump and that's kind of a scary thing to say. hey, joe, mika, i think two things got trump elected. the republican party establishment was out of touch with their voters. and trump took advantage of that. he touched upon this issue of people in this country illegally. the republican party ignored that issue, but then the other part that got trump elected was i was part of the tea party

class of 2010. and we went to washington in 2010 to raise hell about the debt and the deficits. but me and a bunch of people like me, we got ahead of ourselves and we engaged in this politics of personal destruction. we -- i speaking for myself, i would demonize my opponents. i would say bad personal things about president obama, about muslims. things that i regret and though -- those personal attacks that we got into too much, i think led to the personification of trump because joe, mika, that's all he is. he is one giant ugly personal attack. he can't engage in the issues so yeah, i feel pretty darn responsible for having him in the white house. >> so let's talk about the reason you got to congress as a member of the tea party for smaller government. same reason i ran in 1994. you look at the numbers now, the largest federal debt ever under

trump republicans. the cbo came out and said the deficits under donald trump are going to be unsustainable. over trillion dollar deficits every year. the biggest deficits in the history of this country in an expanding economy. you look at the budget that he just passed. the largest federal budget ever. even rand paul said it was the most reckless fiscal thing that the federal government had ever done. along with going after donald trump for obviously all of the terrible things he's doing, are you going to be talking about fiscal sanity again? a government that tries to balance its budget, a government that tries to be responsible with taxpayers money? >> yeah. by the way, joe, kudos to you, because this has been your issue. you have been talking about this almost every day for the last number of years. yeah. look, when i was in congress, we

screamed at obama every damn day for the debt and the deficits and now all of my former colleagues they haven't said a word because trump is their president. that's the shame. they're afraid of trump. here's the deal though, joe. look, i care about the debt and the deficits and the tariffs are stupid. this election is about trump, period. this election is a referendum on him, the man. he's unqualified. he is unfit. he's a child. he's reckless. he's erratic. he's a narcissist. he's mean. he's cruel, he lies every time he opens his mouth. i don't think you take on this fight. i certainly would never take on this fight, put myself out there unless i was making this a referendum on trump. he's unfit, joe and mika. if he's our nominee in 2020, the republican party is going to get spanked because young people don't like trump. women don't like trump and people who live in the suburbs don't like trump. i heard you earlier the

republican party right now is at a real crossroads because of trump they're in trouble. >> yeah. big trouble. and you can look at his numbers. you can look at the numbers in a lot of senate races. michael steele, you have run the republican party before. it's looking like another political tsunami is coming the republican party's way if donald trump is at the top of the ticket. >> yeah, it will be very hard for the president to sustain the races beneath the presidential campaign. the house with a deficit of 30 some seats, with retirements now on top of that. the senate while a lot of people don't believe it's in play, with the right alignment on the democratic side that could change. so i want to ask the congressman and it's good to see -- been a long time and the battles there. and you do raise a very interesting point revolving

around your candidacy and that is where you talked about the kind of constitutional, fiscal responsibility, some of the more traditional values of the party. can you walk through what changed for you that flipped the script to see someone like trump in 2016 as a better solution for the nation. not the party, for the nation. and then now as you look at your open presidential bid look at that ideal if you would of that's not where america needs to be. what was that transformation for you? >> michael, look, i voted for trump in 2016. i didn't love him. i didn't like him. he wasn't hillary. and to be honest at that time i figured trump was just a goof. maybe he'd hire a couple of good people and a couple good things would get done. he lost me pretty quickly in first year when it became clear

to me that almost every time he opened his mouth he lied and he lost me for in helsinki when he said, i believe putin and not my own people. that was it for me. and look, i wrote an op-ed in "the new york times" a few weeks ago. he is unfit. somebody needs to primary him and i'm stunned, joy, and michael, and mika, that no republican this year has stepped up to make the moral case against trump because most of them believe privately everything i say publicly about trump. >> right. >> yeah. >> so you have and -- you know, couldn't agree with you more on the things you have to say about president trump. but for those who are really thinking deeply about this and trying to figure out what to do with their votes, because this is such an important election, you know, we have to look at how we got here. and a lot of the ways we got here was the devaluation of the truth. and hate speech. >> yes. >> why should a voter pass by

the hateful talk that you have put out there? clear examples of it. why should they just turn the page on that? like why did you do that? >> well, mika, they have to decide that, but all i can is i can apologize for all the things that helped lead to trump. over the course of the last six years i have sent out 40,000 tweets. you and me and joe can find two to three hundred you'd have your head scratching and i have to own those and explain those. i felt like we were at the tip of the sphere when we went to washington. it was a fight for this country. and we let -- i let that fight get personal and ugly sometimes. i have to own that stuff. apologize for that stuff, mika. and to compare it to trump again, correct me if i'm wrong, this man's never apologized for anything. so here i am in front of you this morning. yes, raising my hands.

i helped put trump in the white house. i'm ashamed of that. i feel terrible about that. i'm going to try to redeem myself about that. but most importantly the country can't let this guy get elected. we are -- re-elected. we are being run right now by a child and that's pretty damn scary. >> yeah. you know, i have said it before, time and time again. when i first got up to congress, there were a lot of things that i said that i regretted. that i wish i could have back. when i first got on tv, there were a lot of things i said that i regretted, that i could have -- that i had back. there are a lot of things i said in -- you know, i say every day that i regret and i wish i could have back. katty kay, the difference is having the ability as a congressman does and as most human beings do have toe look at what we have done in the past. realize we have made a mistake. apologize for that mistake. ask people's forgiveness.

and then move on. in donald trump we have somebody who's never asked for forgiveness and in fact even told an evangelical reporter that he's never had to ask for god's forgiveness because he's never done anything wrong. >> well, because for the president it's somebody else's mistake. if something goes wrong it's not his mistake and there's nothing to apologize for. we see that playing out every day when it comes to the state of the u.s. economy. it's somebody else's fault. it's jay powell's, google, media's fault. you just said now and you said before that the vast majority of republicans that you speak to think that the president is -- will say to you privately that the president is unfit for office. how does that square with the consistently high rankings he gets in opinion polls, 85 to 90% in the republican polls? they're telling the pollster

they like him and still want to support him, so they're not telling the truth to somebody. >> i think his support is soft. look our campaign slogan is be brave. here's the bet i'm making. i believe that most republicans privately believe what i say publicly about this guy. he is unfit. he lies every time he opens his mouth. he's tweeting us into a recession. look, i believe most republicans are just tired of his bs and his drama. the bet of my campaign i'm trying to get people to come out and be brave enough to say publicly what they believe privately. can i do it, i don't know. if you take on this guy it's about him. you have to make the moral case about him. he's a bad man who is unfit to be president. >> joe, let's talk -- let's finish up by talking issues. i want to go over the litany of issues that i talked about when i first ran that republicans have run away from. i'm wondering if you represent

what republicans have believed for years. first of all, let's get a balanced budget. i know it will take a long time to get the balanced budget but will you fight for balanced budget? >> i think the first bill i introduced was a balanced budget amendment, yes. >> let's talk about nato. the president is hostile to nato and has been fighting nato. we republicans have believed it's an alliance that helped us defeat the soviet union. would you steadfastly and strongly support nato? >> yeah. again, we have a president right now who gives a bear hug, a man hug to putin and kim jong-un and he still arms our allies. i think we need to flip that around a little bit. >> the president constantly attacks the intel communities. believing an ex-kgb agent and leader over the people that he appointed to run the fbi, the cia, national director of

intelligence, the united states military intel officers. we republicans used to criticize democrats for being too tough on the intel community. will you stand up for the men and women who work in the intel community every day? >> hell, yes. joe, when you and i were little boys, russia was our own enemy. donald trump has flipped this around. he's disloyal. this will be one of the most dangerous long term impacts of the trump administration how they have declared war on our own intelligence community. >> donald trump says that russia should be readmitted to the g7 despite the fact that they invaded ukraine, took over crimea and shot down a commercial aircraft. do you believe that russia should be readmitted to the g7? >> no. i still think putin must have something on him. i does not explain donald trump's subber is vie yents

behavior. >> and he steadfastly supports the tariffs and the passing of tariffs on to the working class americans. are you a protectionist or a free trader? >> i believe in free trade. donald trump lied, he said that trade wars were easy to win that's a bunch of bs. >> all right. well, tell you what that's a good start on what republicans have always believed. what republicans have always fought for, but republicans stopped fighting for once donald trump became president. hey, congressman, thank you so much for being with us. see you out on the road. >> thank you. >> we'll be right back with more "morning joe."

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steve rattner, rising concerns about the economy which seemed to come to a head this weekend. certainly friday afternoon with donald trump -- donald trump ordering companies to leave china and called the chairman of the fed an enemy of the united

states of america. what are we looking at? not just -- i don't really care what the market does today. let's talk long term. so much talk of possible slowdowns or recessions. what is your read and what's the smart money saying about the united states going into a recession over the next year or so? >> joe, it's not a coincidence that the talk about the economy occurred at the same time as we're talking about this trade deal. the two are inextricably linked. if you do back a year and half ago, the imf said that the global economy was poised for a period of consolidated ordered growth around the world. as good as we have seen in quite a while. and now the imf is saying that we are in a deep slowdown and they have been cutting their forecasts. why? it's all about trade. the trade war has been incredibly costly to the u.s.

economy. manufacturing output peaked last december. the jobs numbers are about to be revised down for the spring and in fact when you look at it trump's jobs creation numbers are actually -- for the first 2 1/2 years going to be worse than obama's for his last 2 1/2 years. so the growth rate is probably in the low 2 -- 1.5% for the rest of the year and you can lay almost of this on the back of the trade war, not on the back of the fed. the impact of the fed's interest rate increases is pretty modest. any economist will say this compared to the impact of this trade war. businessmen like consistency, they like predictability. they like knowing what's going to happen and you can see the cut backs in the business investment going on, declines in business sentiment going on. personally i think the most outrageous part of what's happened over the last few years are trump's attacks on jay powell and equating him as xi as an enemy of the people and

what's worst than that, steve mnuchin the treasury secretary went on fox news and he was asked a question of well, what & this all about the president calling jay powell an enemy of the people, and mnuchin said, well, president xi isn't such a bad guy and he never mentioned powell at all. >> wow. >> so even the treasury secretary wasn't willing to come to the defense of the chairman of the fed as a man of integrity, trying to do the right thing. and in the views of every economist a superb chairman of the federal reserve. and so when -- >> i want to just jump in, steve, ask you quickly, trump has a lot of tools still in his economic kit. i'm wondering if there are ways you think he could try to juice the economy as we head into the election year? there's been talk about a payroll tax cut. other things he could do that would try to flush more money into the economy. to help his re-election chances. what do you think of the

prospects of that? >> the reality is that he would need congressional approval for virtually all of his ideas. payroll tax, absolutely. he claims they can change the way that capital gains are formulated to make it more advantageous to those with capital gains. not how i would juice the economy but most would tell you he doesn't have the authority to do that. the spending bill was just passed and he can't spend willy-nilly. i think most economists would tell you that the fed increase of a quarter of a point or even 100 basis points over a period of time is not the game changer here. >> steve rattner, thank you very much and we're going to go live to france straight ahead after the president ordered companies to leave china. it's just one of a weekend full of mixed message from the

president at the g7 summit. this morning he has yet another message on the trade war. plus, "the new york times" jeremy peters will join us with his new reporting entitled "trump allies target journalists over coverage deemed hostile to the white house." "morning joe" is coming right back. >> well, chairman xi is not an enemy of the country, but you didn't say the same about fed chairman powell. >> well, i really wanted to comment on president xi. on powell, i think -- i don't think it was a literal comment that he's an enemy. but again, you know my position on the fed. t a chair. that a handle is just a handle. or... that you can't be both inside and outside. most people haven't driven a lincoln.

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imaginary world. like the tweets he sent out this weekend claiming that all of the leaders came up to him and said everything is going so great in the united states. why does the press -- >> not get it. >> nobody came up and said that. >> in fact, they make fun of him a lot. >> there's no suggestion that anybody at the g7 wants vladimir putin and russia back in the g7. other than donald trump. i think every other country believes there's certain steps that putin and russia have to take before that's even considered but donald trump is literally having conversations with himself. and then talking to the press about them. >> it brings up the question that joe walsh brought up, what do they have on him? welcome back, it's august 26th. we still have michael steele. washington anchor for bbc, world news america katty kay.

columnist and associate ed for for the "washington post" david ignatius. >> david, let's talk about that really quickly to clean it up off the top. there's not a mad rush for more allies in -- to have the russia readmitted and turn it into the g8. what would russian to have to do to move beyond crimea and the shooting down of commercial aircraft to be able to get readmitted into the g8? >> joe, the official position as i understand it is that russia has to address the issues that led to the expulsion from the then g8. the invasion and the annexation of crimea. that means resolving the ukraine crisis, so that's where it would have to begin. i talked to a number of people in government who think it also has to address the issue that has been driving our politics

crazy the last couple of years which is russian meddling in the u.s. presidential election in 2016. and the midterm elections in 2018. in some way russia needs to speak to that. it's obvious that donald trump in 2020 when he's the host of the g8 would like to when in the great ceremonial way would like to say i'm the guy who brought russia back. okay. if you want to be that, you need to think about what's the price of that. now, i don't think's a crazy idea that we should have full diplomatic discussions with russia again. it's not crazy, but there's a price. and trump as president has to communicate it starting now. i'm told that over the weekend that at dinner on saturday night he got some strong push back from the british and french leaders who said to him, basically, you know, you need to slow down on your russia talk and think about what the price would be. so i think we'll have some discussion of that.

it's not a crazy discussion. it's just people have to be clear what would it take, what would russia have to change? >> well, that's the thing, mika. again, if donald trump wants that to happen, he can't have imaginary conversations where people -- he says a lot of people are supporting it when as david just said there's a lot of pushback from our allies. but as david said not a crazy idea to try to figure out how to get russia back into the g8. but that starts and ends with russia taking steps as david said to address what happened. and how to move forward. because right now it -- donald trump is doing russia no favors. i'm sure the russians are smart enough to figure this out by just blustering around and leading with his chin on this issue. it is never going to happen. so long as trump doesn't do a lot of the leg work to try to make it happen. if it is in fact so important to

him. as you suggested before, the question still remains why is it so important to him? >> what do they have on him? >> maybe -- you know what? it may just be money. if you understand donald trump, money explains just about everything. as woodward and bernstein said during watergate, follow the money. it's out in the open. i think it was don jr. who said most of our money comes from the russians. there have been other quotes from family members. >> could be money. >> all of the money that russians have poured into their golf investments. at the end of the day, it's not a conspiracy so much as it is just the ever lasting pursuit of money by donald trump. >> "the atlantic" magazine describes the president's trip

overseas as trump's two g7 summits writing that the narrative stands in stark contrast to what's happening on the ground. the white house was blind sided when irani foreign minister sharif showed up, invited to continue talks about iran's nuclear program. french president emmanuel macron said the g7 supported new talks but president trump denied discussing a joint approach. trump said, quote, no comment when asked if he had planned to meet with zarif. meanwhile, he added more confusion to the continued escalation of his trade war with china this morning. claiming that beijing now wants to try to reach a deal after he threatened new tariffs on friday. >> we called our top trade people and said let's get back to the table so we'll be getting back to the table and i think they want to do something. they have been hurt very badly, but they understand this is the

right thing to do. and i have great respect for it. this is a very positive development for the world. i respect china for doing what they have done to the united states over the years and you look at a guy like sleepy joe biden the fact he would with obama to do for eight years. what i'm doing with china should have happened 25 years ago. not just president obama. i mean, many presidents. you go back to bush and clinton. i mean, many presidents should have done something about this. they're taking out hundreds of billions of dollars a year, you know, intellectual property theft by the billions and billions and billions. it's not right. somebody should have done it. i'm not blaming china. i'm blaming our representatives. our leadership for doing a bad job. >> you know, first of all, david, we can all agree and

business owners, leaders, could all agree what donald trump said regarding china stealing our intellectual property for decades is true. i mean, we were yelling about it in the '90s. that the human rights violations, the intellectual property theft, and of course manipulation of currency. all of these things are true. but again, day trader donald trump shoots off some angry tweets on friday. causes the markets to tank. causes the chinese -- you know, the chinese to jump back in with even higher tariffs. but it -- but tell me if i'm reading this wrong and of course this is all opinion. so you may want to distance yourself from my opinion. but it's as if saturday morning donald trump woke up and realized he's in a tariff battle with a president who is in

office for life. and he's got to resolve this quickly or his 2020 prospects could be doomed and he's been furiously walking back his friday statements throughout the weekend lavishing praise on president xi and the chinese. >> joe, i think that's basically right. the financial market reaction to his comments which even by trump standards were pretty crazy. i hereby ordered american business to stop business with china, it was kind of a rant. and that doesn't play well with financial markets. here's the challenge for democrats. i think most observers of the u.s./china relationship would agree with the idea that we have let the chinese get away with too much in international trade. that they're stealing our intellectual property as you said a moment ago.

that there were too many people who hoped that free markets would lead to free chinese men and women and that's not happening. xi is a different kind of leader so trump has been reacting to that and it's just all over the map. one day it's this, the next day it's that. characteristic of trump and been very hard for people to see a coherent strategy. we saw that over the weekend, back and forth, up and down. the challenge for the democrats is to come up with a real china strategy that takes the rise of china, the potential threat to the united states from china seriously. that thinks carefully about new terms of trade. i mean, there's one thing that the democrats could try to do that would distinguish them from mr. isolation it's to have a clear, consistent policy on china. the issue itself is important. and, you know, let's give trump credit for having to say we have to do something different, he was right about that, but he's only made the problem worse i think by most people's accounts. >> well, joining us from the site of the g7 in france senior

white house reporter for nbc news digital shannon pettypiece. i want to sort of develop on the concept that the atlantic put out there of two summits going on. one, there and the other in trump's head. what are you seeing on the ground? >> he is really playing up this friendship and camaraderie and unity between the world leaders. we know that going into this, he was still attacking europe over their trade policies. he was threatening the french with a wine tax. he's been threatening germany with tariffs on their autos so we know there are these underlying tensions but yes he's been in his telling of the story of this g7 summit he's been treated beautifully. he gets along great with macron and there's no division between any of them. but of course in reality, even in public, we have seen divisions among these leaders on iran, north korea and in trade

and there's been a lot of head butting between the white house staff and the french including as you mentioned this visit yesterday by the iranian foreign minister, the president said he was aware of that and i was told and my colleagues, hallie jackson, we were told that even at the top levels of the administration they were completely caught off guard by the arrival of zarif. they felt it was the french playing games with them. and even increased tensions here. there's been a lot of complaints by the white house staff of the french. yes, there are the two dueling realities going on where everything is going on and then clearly as you hear from the other leaders and when you scratch below the surface the tensions and divisions also remain. i don't see any change on that front. >> every leader that there is has to be worried about the global of their own economy.

angela merkel said the german economy is contracting a little bit. say, listen, you cannot keep messing with the global economy, that's going to impact us pack at home as well. >> well, when you talk about the delegations the staff level, when you get past the president i think there are a lot of frank conversations. but it seems the rest of the world has figured out like most people in america have that president trump is the only one who makes decisions so they can have conversations with the state department and their counterparts and the administration all day long. and those people can carry that message to the president. but he's going to see things in his way and he's going to carry them out in his own way. i think that one of the reasons that the president may be so optimistic in his tone -- his tone might be so different from last year's g7 summit where he left early and then got in a twitter war with justin trudeau

is because the world leaders seemed to have learned how to talk to him, how to address him. you know, how to not poke him and make him feel good about themselves. there was an exchange that got picked up in the microphone between macron and boris johnson and he was congratulating macron on how he handled a tough situation at dinner. it is possible that he was referring to how you handled trump and how happy trump is leaving the summit. even a surprise visit by the iranian foreign minister couldn't throw trump off the optimistic, positive streak he is on today. >> yeah. katty kay, let me ask you about boris johnson. he is obviously walking a fine line in his relationship with president trump. how is that playing in britain, first of all, and secondly, how do you think he's playing his relationship with donald trump after saying in front of trump that the brits don't like

tariffs and in fact that it's damaging to the economy? >> yeah. it's interesting, boris in some ways has donald trump exactly where he wants him. i mean, having been quite critical of him during the 2016 campaign when he was mayor of london and saying rude things about donald trump, he's one of the few leaders who has come back from being rude in public about president trump to having this kind of cozy relationship with him. that's partly because donald trump thinks he can get something out of this relationship. he can get the fracturing of the european union which is something that he would like. he thinks that boris johnson is the person to do that and boris johnson at the same time wants to get the trade deal with the united states and he's got to be careful because he doesn't want to be seen as tony blair was with george bush as the puppy of donald trump. no british prime minister wants to be see as fully in the pocket of any american president. just not something they can do. and british audiences have some

problems with the kind of products we would need to take to have this great deal. the americans are happy to eat beef injected with hormones and british consumers won't accept that and british voters won't respond well to a prime minister who's signing us up for that kind of a trade deal. he has managed to figure out as sharon was just saying, many others have also done, how you image, it's like managing the truculent child at the party. how do -- you have to get along with, but not very easy. >> wait wait wait. so we americans eat chickens that are washed in chlorine? mika, did you know? we need a breaking news banner here. >> okay. >> one more reason to be a vegetarian. >> all right. let's close out with shannon here. what's on the agenda for today and also look ahead if you could

for us -- to the president's next trip next week to poland. >> so we have a press conference coming today, but the president has been very chatty already today. he's had three meetings that he took questions for quite a bit of time from reporters. so i'm sure there will be more questions that we have at the press conference, but he'll be addressing that in a couple hours. then yes, he comes back to washington for a few days and he's right back to poland. there's going to be a world war ii commemoration there, a lot of international leaders are going to be there. and of course he was planning on tacking on his denmark trip but that got canceled. if i can look forward to one more thing. the next year g7 summit is in the u.s. the u.s. hosts it and he said today that he's looking at having it at his doral golf course in miami. he went on and on about what a great location that would be. and another thing to note as the host he would be able to invite

vladimir putin as a special guest, even if putin is not a member. so certainly that is something we could look forward to potentially next year at this time. >> great. nbc's shannon pettypiece, thank you so much for being on the show this morning. now to the latest on president trump's ongoing attacks against the media. "the new york times" reports that a network of conservatives allied with the white house is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to the president by publicizing damaging information about journalists. four people familiar with the plan allege that the group has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country's most prominent news organizations. the research is said to extend to members of journalists' families who are active in

politics as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president according to "the times." only a fracture has been made public with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. let's bring in the co-author of this report. jeremy peters. jeremy, what kinds of information do they think they have, have, on journalists? and what do you make of this strategy here? >> well, mika, this is just the latest escalation under a president who has called the media the enemy of the people. and what -- what that has done is emboldened the president's allies the group of people who are connected to donald trump jr. to start looking at the online histories going back in some cases more than a decade of journalists who in some cases don't even cover this administration. and what they have done is they

have tried to pull embarrassing things, find unflattering things in the social media histories of these journalists and i'm talking about journalists at the nation's top news organizations like "the new york times," "washington post," cnn entities which have already been targeted by these conservative allies of the president. and what they do is they publicize unflatter things they found in the social media histories when they want to retaliate against an outlet for publishing a story that's unflattering to the president. what you have is something very different from what basic journalism is and a lot of allies of the president will say, well, this is no different from what news outlets do every day when they investigate the president, when they investigate members of his cabinet, members of his administration. but the fundamental difference here is that what news organizations like us do is not to cast an indiscriminate net and scrape up everything we can about people and then deploy it in a retaliatory fashion. what we do is we look at

individual targets who are relevant and publish those stories when they're ready to be published. what this is doing is publishing this embarrassing information about journalists in response as an attack for some story that the administration does not like. >> so jeremy, how is this different from what say media matters has been doing for quite some time and what news busters have been doing in defense of donald trump? >> it's a good point, joe. it's not really all that much different. in fact the people we spoke to, we interviewed them for the story, kind of uncovering the depth of this here told us that their template was media matters and kind of this exhaustive -- basically what's called opposition research that people do all the time. the difference though is that it's being deployed against very low level people in a lot of cases. i mean, if you look at what these guys have uncovered here and who it's hurt it's low level journalists at places like cnn.

a photo editor who had nothing to do with the coverage of donald trump. media matters would do after big targets at fox news, the anchors like sean hannity and tucker carlson. these guys that we have investigated here for our piece here will go after anybody no matter how low level or irrelevant to the coverage of american politics. >> hey, jeremy, michael steele here. the folks do realize that the difference between a donald trump or an appointee of his administration and you and others in the journalist profession is that they're elected officials. so the standard is a little bit different. how has this gotten conflated to the point that you have individuals in the organizations who are trying to make you and others -- yeah, you're public figures and you're known, on par with someone who needs to be

held accountable to the very voters who put them in office as opposed to someone who's covering how they behave, what policies they promote, et cetera. how is that conflation really made this a much more difficult thing for journalists to handle and to combat? >> it's a good point, michael. it's another example of the way that lines continue to be crossed in this -- under this administration. norms have been eroded, targets that used to be off limits are no longer considered off limits. that's exactly what you see going on here. individual journalists and their family members in some cases as we have reported are now targets of this operation. that's not something that is normal by any stretch. it's not something that i can ever recall or anybody that i interviewed or my colleagues interviewed for this piece has ever seen on this scale done to journalists who are working at

independent news organizations. journalists who are not opinion makers but just covering the facts of this administration. >> all right. jeremy, stay with us. as we go to break, here's a look at some of the developments from the 2020 campaign trail. senator bernie sanders called out mitch mcconnell in the majority leader's home state of kentucky. >> today i say here in kentucky that senator mcconnell stop blocking legislation from coming to floor of the senate. you don't have the rights to prevent debate and votes on the most important issues facing the working people of this country. stop your cowardice. have the guts to debate the issues. >> meanwhile, joe biden praised the beauty of vermont while campaigning in new hampshire.

>> bold move. >> i love this place. i -- look, what's not to like about vermont in terms of the beauty of it and what a neat town. what -- i mean, this is sort of a scenic, beautiful town. >> also in new hampshire, mayor pete buttigieg unveiled the plan to tackle mental health and drug addiction. his estimated $300 billion initiative aims to prevent 1 million deaths of despair involving suicide or drugs over the next years. you're watching "morning joe." we'll be right back. ning joe." we'll be right back. you've tried so many moisturizers...

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beyond fast. all right. we wanted to continue the conversation we were having on friday's show about the lack of federal domestic terrorism statutes on the book. and what that means for law enforcement and prosecutors. back with us is state attorney for palm beach county, dave

aronberg, and vice president for the national security program mika oyang. nice to meet you. good to have you in the shot. and watching you over the past few months going i can't wait to have her on. same name. but let's start with dave aronberg. the lack of a statute on the book, when we have had stories in the past six months of journalists being targeted and analysts and nothing can be done. it seems to make no sense. any headway from a prosecutor's point of view of a way to get around this? >> mika, there has not been headway in passing the needed domestic terrorism law, but the state of florida did pass a red flag law about a year and a half ago after the parkland massacre. that law is being used by law enforcement to take -- to get a judge to take away guns from someone who is deemed to be a threat to himself or others. it's been used about 2,500 times

in the state of florida in the past year and a half. that's five times a day and it seems to be a model for the national folks if joe's buddy the senate majority leader would ever call it up for a vote. >> well, what would that take? i mean, it seems that would be something that would make a lot of sense for joe's buddy. what's in the way of it? >> yeah, well, it's politics. you know, you have nra politics. the politicians in washington, d.c. have been cowed by the national rifle association. and they need to have some courage and to start addressing an issue that nearly every america seems to support. some reasonable gun safety laws. one thing that i find encouragement of is we have seen much better cooperation at the local, state and federal levels when it comes to combating terrorism.

and at the south florida level, we have a fusion center that has 132 different agencies working together to swap information and perform joint training exercises and it's been focused on international terrorism when the focus has shifted to domestic threats. that's a sign of the times. >> all right. mika from a national security perspective, what is your take? >> well, on international terrorism it's much easier to work with other nations and their connections to overseas terrorist groups. when we talk about domestic terrorism we have a more complicated legal situation involving the first aemgt rights. the republicans are really unwilling to look at the ways in which right wing extremists language is driving people to violence. in fact, in the obama

administration, when they put out a report on domestic extremism through dhs, they had to rescind that. so you see a lack of will to really focus on this problem which is a far greater situation and barrier than the lack of a domestic terrorism law itself. >> all right. we have the a.p.'s jonathan lemire with us with a question for mika. >> hi, mika. walk us through what this would mean if the bill would come into law? how would it make the prosecutors' job easier, how can it help the law enforcement on the ground? what kind of difference would this make for everyday americans knowing they can sleep safer at night? >> one of the things that this law would allow to do is to allow the federal prosecutors to plan the attacks. the challenge is it requires a political motive and people are trying to intimidate the population. it's very hard to disaggregate

the motive from the hate crimes and domestic terrorism. they just hate a particular group of people? so it would help a little bit in addressing some of these challenges, before an attack goes off. but it's not the be all end all solution to solving this problem. >> david aronberg, you're looking at the ransom attacks on cities an towns. we have 22 happen in texas alone. explain these and what's being done to combat it. >> there are more than 40 of these attacks this year alone to municipalities and local governments are being targeted because they don't have the resources that big corporations or big cities or states have because local governments especially the smaller ones are on shoestring budgets. and they're less likely to invest in something today that will reap benefits long after the politicians are gone. but that needs to change.

they need to invest in cyber security and firewalls. they need to bring on consultants. maybe they can bring on john podesta as a consultant about how not to open up emails with a strange attachments. they need to fix this and fast and the fbi says that most of the attackers come from overseas. and so the fbi is doing their part. it's time for the governments themselves to build up the defenses now. >> and mika, what is your take? it just seems like nothing gets done on some of the most important issues of our time. >> yeah. this is a very frustrating situation because we're in the middle of a cybercrime wave where we see as many as one in four american households hit by the kind of crimes. the ransomware rates are through the roof. what's challenging about this, you can spend all you want on defense. but we know and i know this from

my work in the intelligence community a determined attacker will always get through. some of the attackers are nation state hackers from iran and north korea but not all that sophisticated. and unless we are good at going at that human attacker on the other side, unless prosecutors are figuring out who that person is and arresting them, we will never make a dent in this program. right now we are all defense, no offense. >> all right. mika oyang and dave aronberg, thank you. come back soon. great to have you both on. and we'll be right back with much more of "morning joe." ch m.

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we have white house reporter for the associated press, jonathan lemire with us. can you name one foreign trip that trump has gone on that hasn't been an utter pr disaster of mixed messages, gaffes and pictures just streaming all over twitter of things that are unbecoming? >> i think he had dinner once at the eiffel tower with macron and he was in town for 24 hours and that was about it.

but you're right. it's continuation of a pattern of all the trump trips where he relishes playing the role of the bull in the china shop. he doesn't stick to the normal rules as a president, it's all about confrontation and not cooperation. we have seen a president who seems to be flailing a bit under the pressure of the signs that the american economy is starting to slow down and the negative ramifications of the china trade deal. he's misrepresenting the state of negotiations just in the last few hours he said he had a constructive call with the high level official to restart talks and the chinese have no record of such call. they're not sure that that happened. what he's talked about. and we have seen him skip the meeting on the climate change which is the most existential threat that the nation faces and french president macron said he won't ask him to rejoin the paris climate agreement.

that ship has sailed in his estimation. now we'll hear from the president again and he'll wrap up the summit where again he seems to be on the outskirts. he appears to have a friendly partner now. maybe in boris johnson, although there's a break between them on trade. johnson said we want trade peace and the president finds himself increasingly isolated on the world stage as he continues to have pressure mounted back home about the economy as we are over a year with where he faces the voters again. >> maybe feeling the squeeze. up next, a brief guide to tend of the world. that's the title of the next guest's new book and it has nothing to do with donald trump. "morning joe" is coming right back. d trump. "morning joe" is coming right back ancestrydna can reveal where in the world you're from.

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i'm not saying you can't be part trendsetter, but i am saying you need to be all girl scout. the end of the world might seem like a theme for sci-fi blockbuster films but our next

guest has a warn about real existential risks threatening humanity and what we can do to stop them. former foreign correspondent reporter and editor for "time" magazine brian walsh joins us now. he's the author of the new book "end times, a brief guide to the end of the world." i guess we should carry this with us everywhere, brian. thank you for being on the show this morning. okay. so what are some of the key possibilities for the end of the world coming before we know it? >> well, i sort of break it down into the ones that are natural, things like asteroids, volcanoes that have been with us. and then sort of man-made risks that are really approaching us now. nuclear war, climate change. what is really scary the ones that are coming in the near future. these are from biotechnology, even artificial intelligence and you put all of those together and you're in a state of greater existential peril than before. i think it will only get worse

from here on in. >> i was wondering we have always assumed that some of the things that seemed they're out of sci-fi and then the idea of a super volcano that can blow up seems improbable, but you're saying these things could actually happen? for all the times we have been narrowly missed by an asteroid it hit us? >> yeah. a super volcano, it's one in 14,000 chance with yellow stone but we're not prepared for that at the same time. the consequences are so much greater than anything we have ever experienced before. world war ii, flu pandemic, black death. the consequences would be just unimaginable and that's something we have a hard time preparing for. we used to risk that you know are manageable on a year by year basis, aviation crashes. this is totally outside our

realm of understanding and really hard to take seriously and then to prepare for as well. >> hey, brian, i get the natural disasters that can occur and how you can't and the preparation question you raise is a good one in terms of how prepared are we to sort of manage and deal with those. but let's look at the ones that are manmade from artificial intelligence to what we're doing in the bio industry certainly with the genome and all of that. is there an imperative there that we pay attention to what we're doing, sort of couple that with some moral or ethical underpinnings to help guide us away from some of the potential dangers that could lead to our own annihilation. >> you've got it absolutely right. we have these new technologies that are coming from us. whether it's artificial intelligence or biotechnology. how they play out will be entirely up to us. a volcano blows, a volcano blows, but this is in our

control. ethics is the right kind of word. we need to think about how to guide the development of these technologies that gets the benefit of them. they both bring tremendous benefits but sort of averts that risky course. that's not easy to do because you have to predict how they're likely to develop. but as long as we're at least thinking about this now and having that in the back of our minds as we develop them, we'll be in a somewhat safer space at least as this future comes upon us. >> hi, bryan. i wanted to ask you about this interesting aspect of your book which gets into human nature and how we aren't really able or willing in many cases to see beyond our own experience, our own lifetime so we put out of our minds these big existential threats, whether it's a super volcano or asteroid or something a little bit more likely to happen like an earthquake in a part of the united states that hasn't had a catastrophic earthquake in hundreds and hundreds of years. is it your sense that we're getting any better at preparing

or at least thinking about what to do if something like that strikes, say, an earthquake off the coast of washington state that creates a tsunami that wipes out seattle, something like that? >> i'd like to say we are but i don't see a lot of evidence of that. the example you use is a good one. we know that risk is real. it's happened before, you know, on a longer time frame than our recent memory, but certainly not something vast like a super volcano. and yet not a lot of steps have been taken. we are just not very good at getting beyond the beat of the news, our own past human experience, to prepare for those things that are unlikely but, you know, will happen eventually over a long enough time frame. when they do, the consequences are going to be really great. it doesn't have to be something necessarily existential. that example of the cascading earthquake is a great one, it's going to happen. nothing is being done about it. i think that has to do more with psychologically about how we

don't comprehend those just outside the frame risks and leaves us really unprepared when the worst does happen. >> hey, bryan, it's jonathan lemire. i wanted to ask you about greenland. president trump has been trying to purchase it but beyond that we know that it's a marker, a real indicator about the effects of climate change with glacier melting and a recent visit showed it's melting much quicker than anticipated. how much time do we have to roll back to prevent climate change before that is what brings about the end of the world? >> absolutely. what's happening in greenland, what's happening in the amazon as well shows that climate change is a threat that's unfolding right now. it's different than all the other ones in this book because unlike ones that are going to happen, this is actually taking part right now. i think seeing greenland melt so quickly, it really reminds us this is not a problem for the future, this is a problem for right now. you know, we need to create both the political and even more so

the technological solutions that we're going to need to get out of it. otherwise we're really locking ourselves into a future that's going to get worse and worse. this is just the beginning of that, i think. >> all right, the book is "end times." a brief guide to the end of the world, out tomorrow. bryan walsh, thank you very much for being on this morning. still ahead, we'll continue with the end of the world theme this morning. the president is denying he suggested nuking hurricanes to keep them from reaching the u.s. plus, president trump said this morning that trade talks with china will now get serious. what's been happening this entire time? we'll discuss that all ahead on "morning joe." you've had quite t eer. yeah, i've had some pretty prestigious jobs over the years. news producer, executive transport manager, and a beverage distribution supervisor. now i'm a director at a security software firm. wow, you've been at it a long time. thing is, i like working.

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to help protect yourself from a stroke. ask your doctor if it's time for xarelto®. to learn more about cost and how janssen can help, visit xarelto.com. good morning, and welcome to "morning joe." it is monday, august 26th. with us we have msnbc political analyst and former chairman of the republican national committee, michael steele. washington anchor for bbc world news america katty kay. columnist david ignatius and former treasury official and "morning joe" economic analyst steve rattner. what don't we have to talk about this morning? we're going to begin with president trump's new comments this morning on the continued escalation of his trade war with china.

speaking earlier this morning in france amid the g-7 summit, the president said that beijing has signalled it wants to try and reach a deal. >> china called last night our top trade people and said let's get back to the table, so we'll be getting back to the table. i think they want to do something. they have been hurt very badly, but they understand this is the right thing to do. i have great respect for it. i have great respect for it. this is a very positive development for the world. >> this comes after president trump on friday announced that he would be hiking tariffs on most imports from china following beijing's decision earlier that day to place new tariffs on $75 billion in american goods. the white house says it will raise existing duties on $250 billion of products from china from 25% to 30% on october 1st. meanwhile, tariffs on $300

billion of goods will increase from 10% to 15% beginning this sunday. in addition to the tariffs, the president also announced that he is ordering u.s. companies to shift their production away from china, telling them they must start looking for alternatives immediately, advocating they consider moving operations back to the u.s. those moves sent wall street just crashing with the dow and s&p 500 shedding more than 2% while the nasdaq lost 3% of its value. this morning the selling has continued with asian stocks finishing deep in the red. yesterday white house economic advisor larry kudlow defended president trump's approach to china and his order seemingly blocking u.s. companies from doing business there. >> he's asking american companies to take a look, take a

fresh look at, frankly, moving out of china. going someplace else. >> that takes years. >> coming home to america. it will take years, that is correct. that's why there's no immediate action here. he just put that out there. look, i've heard him say this time and time again the couple of years i've been working here. he's said it to individual business, he's said it to the big business groups. he's asking them to come home. come back home to america. >> he's also said that we could use nuclear weapons or suggested we could to break up hurricanes. as jona goldberg said, not only does that make hurricanes angry, it also makes them radioactive. i don't know exactly how we sort through everything the president said this weekend, starting on friday, david ignatius, but i got the sense, i'm sure a lot of people got the sense into saturday that the president

understood that he had well overshot his mark. he caused chaos in the markets on friday. that's why he struck a more conciliatory tone on saturday, saying that he had had second thoughts and then, of course, the white house backed off of that. you know, david, it had to be pretty alarming to the president when he realized that he's up for re-election next year, but president xi, he's president for life. and he's right now, he's holding the stronger hands and he can wait donald trump out. and we saw that, in my opinion, we saw that anger, that desperation and now the president's second attempt at retreating this weekend. >> joe, there may be some dictator envy going on here, but my baseline after watching the back flips and the scowls and

the threats of the last few days that then end up with the president sounding like xi is his best friend, it's the politics, stupid. trump is running for re-election. if he had not made a statement like this, the markets would have fallen out of bed again this morning. it's begun in asia already overnight. and i think trump is primarily focused on keeping enough of his accounts seeming to be successful that he just doesn't -- he wants to sound confrontational and get the last bit of the deal, but i think he was looking at a continuing market hemorrhage. he didn't like what he saw. the language that he used this morning in a tweet about a half hour ago is almost fawning. he talks about the calm resolution of president xi and he's impressed that they're

willing to come, state the facts so clearly. it's a concession wrapped in flattery as near as i can tell. but i think, joe, he wants to calm the situation down because he knows that continued turmoil takes him over the edge. >> trump blinks and he keeps blinking, steve rattner. and again, this is something you could see coming on friday when the president exploded. after exploding he ordered companies out of china. he then claimed that he had authority to do that under the law and was even citing the law going into saturday morning. but again, what really concerned him was the fact that of course he never thinks ahead and that's the problem with a day trader. he doesn't realize or he did not realize until this weekend that president xi is holding all the cards because he's not running for re-election. he can just wait donald trump out. so now we have the president

who's gotten us out onto a cliff economically with tariffs and tariff taxes, and he's going to have to crawl on his hands and knees to china to try to get out of this crisis that he created. >> yeah. look, he has that exact problem, and what he's also very cognizant of, the stock markets. every time he takes a tough stance with china and china in turn takes a stuff stand with him which is what happened on friday with these escalating tariffs throughout the day, the stock market reacts badly. the stock market also and business as a whole, and we can talk about what's going on in the general economy, which is really not good. but the stock market as a whole reacts badly to indecisive leadership, to waffling, to flipping this way, to flipping that way. and so what you see is him trying to triangulate his way through a very difficult trade negotiation and come out with something that he can defend with a straight face as actually

a deal and also do all that without avoiding cratering the american economy, which is on quite weak legs at the moment, largely because of mr. trump's own trade war. >> katty, all weekend people were, around here at least, mika and i and our friends were talking about the crazy tweets that donald trump was sending out and the random tweets, the happy birthdays to regis and sean connery, by the way, happy birthday, regis, and all of the distractions. i've been talking to all the g-7 leaders and they're all saying why is america so great but why is the press the enemy of the people. i mean just absolute nonsense. it was so obviously a smoke screen. this all came back to china getting the best of him. it all came back to the damage he's causing to america and the world economy with tariffs. and you even have that surreal moment where larry kudlow is

being interviewed by i think it was brianna keilar. she played a clip of boris johnson saying we don't like tariffs. tariffs are bad. and then you have larry kudlow accusing the cnn anchor of twisting words when all she had done was play clips. then he said i don't even think that was from the big g-7 and we had the big g-7 picture behind him. it was madness this weekend. it seems that trump understands he's completely isolated on tariffs and now he's, again, going to have to crawl begging to president xi to get a deal. >> and by the way, larry kudlow, who is the master of twisting words himself this weekend, when he said, oh, well, he just asked them to take a look at it. it was something he wanted to put on the table and the president on friday said i hereby order u.s. companies to get out of china. not exactly just taking a look at it, so that's clearly something that they have got to sort out themselves.

as the economy gets worse, as the prospect of a recession looms larger, it seems to cause the president, who has tied his own fortunes to the fate of the u.s. stock market more and more stress. he looks around and one of the tools he has left in his toolbox to really gin up the u.s. economy, not very many. he can get perhaps jay powell, who is under a huge amount of pressure, to bring interest rates down a little bit. there's not much he can do on taxes. that would have to go through congress. that's going to be very difficult for him. a trade deal with china would be the most obvious thing that he could use to restore confidence at least in financial markets. when he sends out tweets like he did on friday he's undermining his own strategy. he's undermining the one thing he could be doing to the economy back on an even kilter or one of the things he could be doing to get the economy back on an even kilter, so it's just been a weekend of chaos. understandably we wake up this morning and asian markets think, hey, this is not going the way

we want and they're down again. still ahead on "morning joe" two very different approaches from president trump when it comes to dealing with natural disasters. one option is to toss paper towels at the victims of hurricanes. there you go! all fixed. or you can just simply drop a nuclear bomb on a storm system. >> suddenly the paper towels don't look like a bad option. >> perhaps there's an approach in the middle? we'll run through the new reporting from axios, next on "morning joe." that a handle is just a handle. or... that you can't be both inside and outside. most people haven't driven a lincoln. it's the final days of the lincoln summer invitation event. right now get 0% apr on all lincoln vehicles plus no payments for up to 90 days. only at your lincoln dealer. run with us on a john deere 1 series tractor.

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welcome back to "morning joe." hurricane season is here, and president trump reportedly has an idea to keep the storms from causing damage to the united states. nuclear bombs. >> oh, wow. >> nuclear bombs against hurricanes. according to axios, trump has suggested multiple times to homeland security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the u.s. >> you know, mika, remember when

we had warned everybody in i think it was july or august of election year 2016 that foreign policy people had gone in to talk to then candidate trump. >> yeah. >> and his solution to iran was -- why can't we use nuclear weapons against iran, north korea, why can't we use nuclear weapons against north korea and being very frustrated, asking a foreign policy expert, well, if we have built all these nuclear weapons, why can't we use them? so now, i guess -- >> he just wants a way to use them. >> he just wants to use them. itchy finger. >> during one hurricane briefing at the white house, trump said i got it, i got it, why don't we nuke them. according to one source who was there. that source continued to paraphrase the remarks claiming trump said they start forming off the coast of africa. as they're moving across the atlantic we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. why can't we do that?

a senior administration official responded to axios and to the report saying we don't comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team. all right, let's bring in the co-founder of axios, mike allen. and, mike, it's an idea that we have heard before. it's not out of nowhere. along with everything that comes with trump, it seems a little scarier. >> we heard it a long time ago and it was laughed off immediately, right, mike? >> well, joe, you know a few things about hurricane and you can imagine these briefers. so the source in the room tells jonathan swan, the briefer said we'll look into that, sir. and they did. there's actually a memo that came out of the homeland security, national security process that memorializes the president's idea about this. you're right, this is a long

discussed and long discredited idea. it goes back to the eisenhower administration. some scientists thought about it then. noaa has a tropical cyclone myth page and it's on there. they explain there's a couple of reasons this is a bad idea. in fact "national geographic" wrote about this and said nuking hurricanes, the history of a bad idea. why is it a bad idea? first of all, if you were to drop a nuclear bomb inside a hurricane, among the things that would happen is the fallout would follow the trade winds, would follow the path of the hurricane right to the land that you're trying to protect. secondly, there's a shock wave from it that does the same thing. and third, a few practicalities about how much energy would be required to disrupt an actual hurricane. >> yeah. unbelievable. what are you looking at this week, mike, at axios?

what are the stories that you all are going to be following? >> for sure we're looking at how the president gets himself out of his corner where he wanted to go big against china, wanted to go even harder against them. we're told that his mood against china last week was f you. it wasn't just spelled out. and then we saw, as david was pointing out, you saw what the reaction from the markets would be. so how the president gets himself out of this corner. business very worried about these comments. this is a time when the president's comments usually get laughed off like a hurricane, but this is a place where they have a real world impact. >> mike allen, thank you very much. coming up, former congressman joe walsh is challenging president trump after supporting hem during the 2016 race.

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we have someone in the white house who we all know is unfit,

someone who lies virtually every time he opens his mouth, and someone who places his own interests above the nation's interests at every single turn. we cannot afford four more years of donald trump, no way. my name is joe walsh. i'm a former republican congressman. i'm a conservative. i'm running because donald trump is not who we are. >> former gop congressman joe walsh of illinois is challenging president trump for the republican nomination for president and he joins us now. welcome to the show, good to have you onboard. welcome as a candidate now. >> mika, joe, great to be with you both. thank you. >> so, congressman, let me ask you, there are a lot of people who don't know who you are. let's very quickly go through an evolution. you obviously, as you said yesterday, you were a trump supporter. you actually were involved in

birtherism. you said some very unkind things about barack obama that you later regretted. but you said something fascinating in an interview and that was that it was looking at donald trump and his poor example that actually made you rethink some of the things that you had said. explain. >> look, i think i'm partly responsible for trump, and that's kind of a scary thing to say. hey, joe, mika, i think two things got trump elected. the republican party establishment was out of touch with their voters, and trump took advantage of that. he touched upon this issue of people in this country illegally. the republican party ignored that issue. but then the other part that got trump elected was i was part of the tea party class of 2010. we went to washington in 2010 to raise hell about the debt and the deficits. but me and a bunch of people like me, we got ahead of ourselves and we engaged in this politics of personal

destruction. we -- i, speaking for myself, i would demonize my opponents. i would say bad, personal things about president obama, about muslims, things that i regret. and those personal attacks that we got into too much, i think led to the personification of trump because, joe, mika, that's all he is. he is one giant ugly personal attack. he can't engage in the issues so, yeah, i feel pretty darn responsible for having him in the white house. >> so let's talk about the reason you got to congress as a member of the tea party for smaller government, the same reason i ran in 1994. you look at the numbers now. the largest federal debt ever under trump republicans. the cbo came out and said the deficits under donald trump are going to be unsustainable, over a trillion dollar deficits every

year, the biggest deficits in the history of this country in an expanding economy. you look at the budget that he just passed, the largest federal budget ever. even rand paul said it was the most reckless fiscal thing the federal government had ever done. along with going after donald trump for obviously all of the terrible things he's doing, are you going to be talking about fiscal sanity again, a government that tries to balance its budget, a government that tries to be responsible with taxpayers' money? >> yeah. and by the way, joe, kudos to you because this has been your issue. you've been talking about this almost every day for the last number of years. yeah, look, when i was in congress we screamed at obama every damn day for the debt and the deficits. now all my former colleagues haven't said a word because trump's their president. that's a shame. they're afraid of trump. here's the deal, though, joe. look, i care about the debt and the deficits.

the tariffs are stupid. this election is about trump, period. this election is a referendum on him, the man. he's unqualified. he's unfit. he's a child. he's reckless. he's erratic. he's a narcissist. he's mean, he's cruel, he lies every time he opens his mouth. i don't think you take on this fight. i certainly would never take on this fight, put myself out there, unless i was making this a referendum on trump. he's unfit, joe and mika. and if he's our nominee in 2020, the republican party is going to get spanked because young people don't like trump, women don't like trump, and people who live in the suburbs don't like trump. i heard you earlier, joe, the republican party right now is at a real crossroads. because of trump, they're in trouble. >> yeah, big trouble. you can look at his numbers, you can look at the numbers in a lot of senate races. michael steele, you've run the

republican party before. it's looking like another political tsunami is coming the republican party's way if donald trump is at the top of the ticket. >> yeah, it's going to be very hard, joe, for the president to sustain the races beneath the presidential campaign. the house with a deficit of 30 some seats, with retirements now on top of that, the senate while a lot of people don't believe it's in play, with the right alignment on the democratic side, that could change. so i want to ask the congressman, and it's good to see you again. it's been a long time since 2010 and the battles there. but you do raise a very interesting point revolving around your candidacy, and that is where you began talking about the kind of constitutional conservatism, fiscal responsibility, some of the more traditional values of the party. could you sort of walk through what changed for you that

flipped the script to see someone like trump in 2016 as a better solution for the nation. not the party, for the nation. and then now as you look at your own presidential bid, look at that ideal and go that's not where america needs to be. what was that transformation for you? >> hey, michael, look, i voted for trump in 2016. i didn't love him, i didn't like him, he wasn't hillary. to be honest at that time i figured trump was just a goof. maybe he'd hire a couple good people and a couple good things would get done. he lost me pretty quickly in that first year when it became clear to me that almost every time he opened his mouth he lied. but he lost me for good, michael, in helsinki over a year ago when he stood in front of the world and said i believe putin and not my own people. that was it for me. look, i wrote an op-ed in "the new york times" two, three weeks ago. he's unfit. somebody needs to primary him.

i'm stunned, joe and michael and mika, that no republican this year has stemmed pped up to mak moral case against trump because most of them believe privately everything i say publicly about trump. >> congressman, thank you so much for being with us. i'm sure we'll see you out on the road. coming up on "morning joe" when it comes to the breakdown of women in congress, the party divide isn't even close. there are just 21 republican women in the house and senate compared to 106 democratic women. now the gop is looking to change that. that conversation is straight ahead. n is straight ahead.

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hey, welcome back to "morning joe." the 2018 midterms were a record-breaking year for women in politics, as you know. specifically for democrats. but as the 2020 race heats up, a group of republican women are hoping to take on washington as well. nbc news white house

correspondent kristen welker has that story. >> reporter: valerie is running for congress, an investment manager from the chicago suburbs, she has never run for office before. she is part of a surge of republican women across the country planning to run for the first time for everything from school board to congress. >> when i looked at our elected officials, i looked and said too many people look the same and don't have a background like mine or a voice like mine, so i think this is the time. >> reporter: the disparity between republican and democratic women in office is stark. at the state level, twice as many democrats as republicans and in congress just 21 republican women in the house and senate compared with 106 democrats. that may be about to change. >> there are even fewer women in congress -- >> reporter: patty russo has helped run the women's school at yale university for 20 years. >> are you expecting to see a wave of female republican candidates isn't 2020? >> we're already seeing it.

we're seeing a lot of energy on the republican side like never before. >> reporter: demand is so great that recently the women's campaign school held its first-ever training specifically for republican women, covering the basics of running for elected office, from fund-raising to messaging. >> they bought into the narrative that we're the party of angry anti-women, and it is just not true. we're the party of opportunity. >> reporter: the women told us they were motivated by everything from the kavanaugh hearings to the need for new policies on health care and immigration and many worried the gop was failing to appeal to critical female voters. >> so many of us are republicans in hiding. >> that's a bold statement. you say republican women have been in hiding. why? >> it's kind of hard to get behind sometimes with some of the stuff that's happening. >> i have found i've often had to say i'm socially moderate, fiscally conservative republican. >> almost all of you. how would you define yourself,

laura. >> a fiscal conservative but really pro-life. >> i think that's a good point. i think that there's room for all of that in the republican party. and what i'm finding is that there seems to be a litmus test. if you don't pass these certain things, which don't match up to what traditional republican values are, then you're not considered a republican anymore. >> how will you answer questions about how president trump has at times spoken about women? >> you know, comments on things goes back to his tone or how he was raised or his family. i don't judge people on that. >> he has said some dumb things and i'll say it just like that. if my 5-year-old and 9-year-old can't be listening to the news because of comments that are being made, that should be an issue. >> it is disparaging but it's not going to dissuade me from running. there's more of a reason to show that there are women that will stand up and be in the republican party. >> the disparity between democratic women and republican women in congress, how does that hit you? >> what we saw in the 2018 elections was there was a lot of

republican women who didn't make it through the primaries. the republican women aren't getting the support they need, training, financial support. the other thing i'm running into, the committees are picking favorites before the primary. >> that was the message i was getting from a lot of consultants who said you'll be seen as a troublemaker within the republican party. >> troublemaker. >> if you don't succeed because you forced a primary when there wasn't a need for a primary. >> let me ask you broadly about some of the things we've heard from some of your colleagues that want to run. they have been told we don't run women because we don't want to play identical politics. >> i've heard that as well. what's disconcerting is the republican party sees women as just an identity and not as equals within the party that can run neck to neck. >> i see it as an opportunity now going forward. we're bringing awareness to this. we're hopefully bringing more people out of the shadows. >> i think that there's a void and we're here to help fill it. but i do hope that i can one day

look down and see the republican party as diverse as the democratic party and still stand for the corrie republican value. >> our thanks to kristen welker for that report. what a fascinating report and one that i think a lot of republicans actually would cheer, that more women are talking about getting out there and running and hopefully winning primaries and getting in congress. hey, with us now is house senator for the cook political report, david wasserman, katty kay, michael steele, jeremy peters and jonathan lemire still with us as well. dave wasserman, it's so good to have you back. i want to ask you what your current state of the race is. we'll start with the presidential race. it's hilarious, about a month ago democrats were setting their hair on fire, jumping from windows saying all is lost, all is lost, donald trump is going to be re-elected. last week they're sitting back

smoking a cigar and drinking a martini saying, yeah, we got this in a cake walk. i suspect they were wrong both times. how do you have -- looking at the polls, looking at some of the dips in donald trump's approval ratings, where do you have the race right now? >> look, joe, ordinarily a president with a 42% approval rating would be toast. but the reality is there's a lot of ways this could still go wrong for democrats. one of them is simply the geography of the country. democrats have to figure out what their coalition is going to be. are they going to win enough of those key six states in the electoral college. and right now the states that i think are going to decide this at the tipping point are probably wisconsin and arizona. but also do democrats nominate a candidate who's broadly appealing? right now i think there are real questions about whether a coastal nominee like elizabeth warren or kamala harris can be that candidate. >> let's say it's biden and even if we put pennsylvania and

michigan into the democrats' hands, obviously it's still a long, long way to go. even if you assumed that the democrats won that, you still have wisconsin. jonathan lemire was saying to me yesterday that a lot of people are looking at wisconsin actually as the democrats waterloo. the best hope for donald trump to actually hold on to his 270. which of course for an old republican like me is shocking, because wisconsin was a state where people like john kerry would go get 100,000 people in madison the last week and always blow the doors off of republican candidates. but no more, huh? >> well, look, wisconsin is actually a fairly rural state compared to a lot of the emerging battlegrounds for democrats in the sun belt, like arizona and texas, which are becoming highly urban states. and so wisconsin and michigan in particular over the long term, they have headed in the wrong direction for democrats. but the bigger concern for democrats is that donald trump

could lose by three points nationally or even four points and still conceivably have a path to an electoral college majority. the inverse is not true for democrats. they could need to win by as many as 4 points in the popular vote. >> yeah, it's pretty incredible, michael steele, how just a few years ago we kept hearing about that blue wall. there's a blue wall in the electoral college that will forever guarantee that democrats are elected president of the united states. that blue wall has shattered. but dave's talking about a state like arizona, which went for trump last time. but man, states like arizona are in play, states like nevada, which were in play, are looking more safely democrat right now. things could change. but you look at -- you look at arizona, you look at georgia, and, yes, i will say even texas, even though i think that's more of a 2024 battleground states,

but there are republican states that also may be in play for democrats. >> no, there are. and i don't subscribe to the view that we've cracked the code on the blue wall on the republican side with trump. i think there are more systemic issues that relate to why that wall is still a problem for republicans and will be in 2020 as well. i think it has to go to kristen welker's story that she presented. i love the fact that i'm hearing these women, these republican women, joe, step into the space and push this old male republican mindset aside. oh, we can't do identity politics. oh, my god, we can't run women. that is such incredible bs. we looked at this a long time ago, hit the ground running in 2010, and elected some pretty impressive women. susana martinez, governor of new

mexico. oh, nikki haley, remember her? heard of her? and there were an incredible array of women across the political spectrum who won offices in 2010 and who began to re-establish the ground, if you will. so i'm curious, david, as you talk about and look at what's to come in the next cycle, how significant a role can women play, generally speaking, but specifically republican women in reshaping the battleground for republicans in some of these very, very important states? >> republicans know they have a problem. a decade ago, 60% of house democrats were white men. today that number is 39% and it's plummeting. but on the republican side a decade ago 87% of house republicans were white men. today do you know what that number is? it's 90%. it's actually going up. republicans are doing a reasonable job of recruiting women for congress in 2020. we have former home depot

executive lynn homerich, michelle park steele in orange county, california. the question is can these women make it through their primaries? what we've lenders is democratic primary voters believe the best way to send a message to president trump is to send a woman. in 2018 when they had a choice between at least one man and one woman in a primary, a woman won 70% of the time. but that motivation to make congress look more like america is just not as powerful on the republican side. and just a month ago we had a primary in north carolina where all 13 incumbent house republican women endorsed a woman, joan perry, in the runoff. she lost. the question is can they actually get these women to the general election ballot. >> katty, the numbers in every poll are so dismal for donald trump when you talk about women, you talk about educated women, even women with high school degrees or less are now breaking

democratic, which is a real change from 2016. this gender gap, which we've always -- r-i republicans have always had to face, is suddenly becoming an extraordinary obstacle. >> yeah, and listening to kristen's piece was so interesting because i think we've always thought it was donald trump was the republican party's problem with women, right, with suburban women who were turned off by donald trump. but actually it's maybe that the republican party has an inherent problem with women. when these women are being told things like you don't want to be a troublemaker for doing a primary, or it will be identity politics, that kind of dismissive attitude. you wonder if the problem isn't more deep rooted than just trump. there is something in the language that women are hearing from the republican party that is causing them to hemorrhage to the democratic party in these suburbs. i was going to ask david, though, on this issue of wisconsin, the key seems to be a

candidate -- if wisconsin is going to be the waterloo, the key is going to be the candidate that can increase african-american turnout in the suburbs of milwaukee, which hillary clinton didn't manage to do, while also winning back some of those democrats that went to trump in 2016. is there an obvious candidate -- if you were going to see this as just a map and you had to fix that puzzle, is there one candidate that can square that circle in wisconsin? >> it's a terrific question. and right now the hesitation i have in saying that donald trump is an underdog is i don't know if i see one democratic candidate who's capable of uniting the party into battle. you know, i spent three months on a college campus this spring, and there was not just a lack of enthusiasm for joe biden, but there was active disgust towards him from a lot of young, liberal voters. but on the other hand, in a state like wisconsin, if you're nominating an elizabeth warren, who in massachusetts ran behind

hillary clinton's margin in 2018, which was the best possible year for democrats, how can she appeal to middle america? i'm not saying she can't. i'm not saying she can't be trump. but i do think there are ways for republicans to portray her as out of touch, as an ivy league academic in a way that won't play in a state like wisconsin. >> as joe mentioned about wisconsin, it's also the state the republicans and donald trump feel most confident about. they fared well there in 2018 than some of the other blue wall states. but dave, one of the things not worrying the white house is the candidacy of joe walsh. do you see any scenario -- let's not talk with him winning the nomination, but could he be a thorn in his side? could he bother the president and wound him going forward? >> just as there are places in america in 2012 where a convicted felon got close to 50%

of the vote against barack obama in the democratic primary, namely west virginia, you will see pockets of the country where joe walsh gets a considerable share of the vote or bill weld does against trump. but nationally i would expect hem to top out in the high single digits. president trump has an approval rating among republicans that's still at or close to 90%. and typically the presidents who have the hardest time winning re-elections are the ones that are damaged in a long primary like george h.w. bush, gerald ford, jimmy carter. i don't expect that to happen here. i covered joe walsh when he was a member of congress. i really do think this is a guy who couldn't stay relevant as a trump cheerleader or conspiracy theorist and discovered that a former trumpian who has seen the error of his ways, that's something the media has an appetite for.

>> jeremy peters, let's talk about the senate for a second. we've been talking about the white house. when i talk to democrats and also talk to political strategists, it seems too many are willing too quickly to dismiss the possibility of democrats winning back the senate. but you look at hickenlooper now in colorado up 12, 13 points in the first almost a flash poll, so we have to see how that looks a month or two from jody earn thom tillis, there are a lot of challengers out there. you look at mitch mcconnell writing an op-ed talking about the importance of the filibuster and sudden ly you start thinkin why is he writing about that? is he worried about 2020? but also i'm wondering why so many people are so quick to dismiss the possibility of democrats winning back the senate when a wave election, as

we saw in 1980, as we saw in, you know, 2008, a wave election pushes a lot of people over the top for the winning party? >> true, it does. i'm glad you brought up the senate. it is something almost nobody talks about and they should. to reinforce that point, a republican i was talking to the other day laid out something that i think democrats would find very clarifying about the stakes here. that is that by the end of a donald trump second term, you could have six of the nine justices on the supreme court be trump appointees, just those appointed by trump. that would basically leave you with a 7-2 conservative majority on the court. i don't hear a lot of democrats talking about that. i didn't hear any of the democrats during the debates talk once about the supreme court. in fact. but, you know, as you lay out, joe, there are certainly a number of pickup opportunities for democrats in the senate. i think it gets a little hard because you have states like

alabama where you have senator doug jones who is going to have a really tough fight there. and states that are kind of on the bubble. north carolina. it's going to be hard to knock off tom tillis though he is a vulnerable guy. susan collins as well. that will be a really tough race. it really is where republicans from what i'm hearing are putting all of their resources. it is their firewall especially if they lose the presidency. >> all right. thanks so much for being with us. we always appreciate it. >> thanks, joe. coming up, another run-in between the trump administration, civil rights, and the supreme court. we'll explain the latest headline. heliadne my joints... they hurt. the pain and swelling. the psoriasis. cosentyx treats more than just the joint pain of active psoriatic arthritis. it even helps stop further joint damage. don't use if you're allergic to cosentyx. before starting, get checked for tuberculosis.

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thanks so much. what is your organization's response to this? what ales the possibility of turning it around? >> unfortunately, this is just another attack from the trump administration. the trump administration has been attacking lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people for the past two and a half years. we expect to fight back. we are mobilizing our troops all across this country. in fact, i traveled over the past two and a half weeks visiting cities and towns across this country and i can tell you that lgbt voters, 10 million across this country, are energized and we have a message for donald trump. we are coming for him and we are going to beat him in the 2020 election. lgbt people are entitled to protections, entitled to equality, and the trump administration has simply been trying to erase us from the books. >> it's katty kay here. when we were talking about the makeup of the supreme court, donald trump already has two

justices. there is a chance he could get a third, possibly even a fourth if he wins a second term. what is your biggest concern going forward looking at the makeup of the supreme court in terms of legislation affecting lgbtq rights? >> one of our most significant concerns of course is the court is responsible for interpreting the law and if we have elected officials advancing legislation that eradicate lgbtq rights and we have a judiciary not supportive of lgbtq rights we have a problem. we are focusing not only on electoral races but also on how we can beat donald trump. if we have a supreme court that is going to interpret the law in a way that strips away protections lbgtq people need we need to make sure we have elected officials that can change the law. that is our focus. we have more than i said 10 million lgbtq voter and millions more in allies across this country that are mobilized to make sure we elect pro equality

candidates. >> it's jonathan lemire on that very issue about elected officials the trump campaign of course is going to be using these as cultural wedge issues going forward. let's go to the other side, the democrats. is there particularly a democratic presidential candidate or two you feel is particularly strong on this issue or others you feel their platforms are lacking? do you anticipate offering endorsement? >> the human rights campaign will be endorsing a presidential candidate. we are in the process of reviewing all of their platforms and our objective is to make sure that any candidate that the human rights campaign endorses is really going to be a pro equality candidate. we have to remember that lbgtq people are under attack in this country. the transgender woman who is worried about leaving her home because she might be killed, we have 16 murders, 16 transgender women, women of color have been murdered in this country alone this year. last year was 26.

i'm focused on the black gay man with hiv in the south who is concerned about where he can find healthcare. i'm concerned about the latin ex-immigrant who is leaving his or her country and coming to this country because they were suffering from persecution. and they're facing just horrible conditions at the border. so i need to make sure we elevate these stories because lgbtq is more than just a label. lgbtq reflect real people that need protection and we need to make sure that equality under the law includes lgbtq. >> jeremy. >> if you defeat donald trump you still have the very likely possibility that the republican senate will be there. so you need a scenario with a democratic -- you could have a scenario where you have a democratic president not able to appoint any candidates for the supreme court. where are you looking to try to

beat republicans in the senate? >> we are focused on state legislative races but also as you said on both the house and senate. in last year we invested $26 million and we targeted key senate and house districts. we were responsible in large part working with our coalition partners for securing a house that is democratic and pro equality. we are going to be focused on the senate and trying to flip the senate where we're targeting key districts, looking at certain parts of the country to make sure we have a democratic majority in the senate. >> all right. president of the human rights campaign, alphonso david, thank you so much for being with us. we greatly appreciate it. that does it for us this morning. thanks so much. i am chris jansing in for stephanie ruhle. it is monday, august 26th. here's what's happening. we are looking ahead to a fascinating split screen in about 30 minutes. president trump will hold a press conference to cap