the president to go to war with the u.s. postal service because their efforts these days have been so historic, their workers have been so heroic. many of them have gotten sick. the president, though, ordered them cut out of that $2 trillion relief bill. but they have a lot of fans in congress and among the people, all those people at all those addresses where the mail got to delivered despite covid and tornadoes again today. that is our broadcast for this monday night as we start a new week. on behalf of all of my colleagues at the networks of nbc news, good night from our temporary field headquarters. happy to have you here this monday night. tonight, as we get on the air, we are getting interesting news out of the state of wisconsin. you'll remember the long voting lines in wisconsin last week following a decision by the state's conservative-dominated

supreme court to block the democratic governor's attempt to postpone that election because of the pandemic. the state supreme court blocked that governor's efforts. the election went ahead. it was a public health nightmare to have that many wisconsin residents out standing in line for an hour, two hours, three hours in proximate contact with one another just to be able to cast their ballots, but it went ahead. there were two big statewide races on the ballot in that election last week. one was the democratic presidential primary between former vice president joe biden and vermont senator bernie sanders. that race was essentially made moot after senator sanders dropped out of the race last week following the vote in wisconsin. it was made especially moot after senator sanders today formally endorsed vice president joe biden. they were doing a livestream broadcast today on the coronavirus and other shuz, and senator sanders endorsed vice president biden today.

and so that means that the wisconsin primary results from last week are not necessarily the most important thing in the world anymore, but wisconsin did start releasing their election results tonight from last week's voting, and those results show that vice president biden did in fact end up beating senator sanders handily in that primary. as i mentioned, that is not the big news in wisconsin. the big news is actually in the other big statewide race on that ballot which was for a seat on the wisconsin supreme court, the state supreme court. it's unusual that the, i don't know if it's unusual anymore. it's in my opinion unfortunate that judges are elected to that court, butthy hav they are. and these have been increasingly partisan and ideological contests. this race of the state supreme court pitted justice kelly, a sitting justice, backed by

conservati conservatives and donald trump against a democratic challenger. and that was the other big statewide race. other than the biden v sanders on the ballot last week. it appears that the democratic backed candidate has won that race. that makes this the first time in i think 12 years that an incumbent has lost a supreme court seat in wisconsin. but that has happened as of tonight. conservatives previously controlled that court with a 5-2 majority. now, tonight, with karofsky's victory and kelly being ousted, that margin will narrow by one. so we're going to have more on wisconsin and what that means later on in the show. but just getting those results in tonight after all of the consternation around the logistics of that vote, to get these results tonight is interesting. a couple of weeks ago, there was an unusual report out of california that we noted here on the show the night that it happened. this was the last week of march, so the national emergency had been declared by the president. the nationwide shortage and

irrational lack of access to protective gear for frontline workers was already evident. amid a flurry of stories that was coming out around that time about businesses donating masks and face shields to hospitals, places repurposing their production lines to create those things to donate to health workers and hospitals, also places you wouldn't expect like the national cathedral in washington, d.c. finding a stash of medical masks hidden in a crypt of all places, and the cathedral donate easy thothose . there was an usual story out of california in which the seiu, service employees international union, officials from that union said they had basically out of desperation taken it upon themselves to try to source

masks for california health workers and california hospitals. they just mobilized on their own. they started making calls. they started tracking down supplies in various warehouses and from various suppliers and seiu announced that last week in march that they had located 39 million masks, which was such a strange story but good news, right? i mean tens of millions of n95 masks that they found that california hospitals would now be able to buy in order to protect their frontline workers. it was a good story but an odd story from the very beginning. well, it turns out those masks never existed. the union officials who did go to work trying to source this stuff for california hospitals as well as a businessman who was helping them make contact with purported suppliers, turns out the union and the businessman they were working with were both apparently duped by people, by con artists who claimed to have this stuff and didn't.

it's infuriating, right, that you'd have scam artists working this crisis as just another grift, right? just another opportunity to rip people off. it's enraging. i will tell you there is now a official criminal investigation under way into what happened there. neither the union for the businessman they were working with in pittsburgh is the target of the investigation, but a broker in australia and a supplier in kuwait now are both targets of a federal criminal investigation that's being run out of the u.s. attorney's office in pittsburgh. so it's infuriating to get that result from that story that we latched onto a couple of weeks ago and thought was such an interesting twist in the california health care wars. but we should also note tonight is how this particular official criminal investigation came about because like i said, these masks were supposed to be for california hospitals. california hospitals thought they had a bead on nearly 40 million masks and these masks

don't exist. so there's lots of local anger and local interest in what exactly happened here. that's why it's being reported out in the "l.a. times," which is why i can bring you this. check this out. quote, a california union that claimed to have discovered 39 million masks for health care workers fighting coronavirus was duped in an elaborate scheme uncovered by fbi investigators. u.s. attorney scott brady of the western district of pennsylvania said fbi agents and prosecutors stumbled onto the arrangement while looking into whether they could intercept the masks for the federal emergency management agency, for fema. quote, the federal government has been quietly seizing supplies across the country, taking the orders placed by hospitals and clinics and not pickly reporting where the products are being routed. but in this case there was no warehouse and there were no masks to seize. so hur ray for there being a

criminal probe against the scammers who were trying to sell these masks that didn't really exist to california health workers and hospitals, right? hur ray that that's now going to be a criminal probe. but the only reason the federal government found out about this scheme and found out the masks didn't exist is because when they thought the masks did exist, they were trying to steal them from california because the federal government is still doing that even now. i mean it's three months since the united states started fighting its own coronavirus outbreak, and ours is now, by far, the worst outbreak in the world. but this far into it, to the extent that we have a national response to this crisis, it's that the federal government is, like, reading the paper and watching news reports to find out if any states or cities or clinics or random union officials might have been able to find some gear somewhere and then the federal government is coming in and stealing that gear before it can get to the health care workers it was otherwise going to go to.

i mean the federal government, you will recall, the president, you will recall, told the states it was up to them to figure out where they could try to get critical medical supplies. hey, governors, go shopping. you guys figure it out. see what you can find. the federal government, under president trump, ran down the national stockpile of critical supplies that they did have control of by randomly sending those supplies out apparently according to who the president wanted to brag that he had sent stuff to, to the point where the national stockpile was now totally depleted. when the federal government did finally try to get stuff themselves, the way they got their stuff was by bogarting stuff that the states had found and sourced for themselves. and that is still their m.o. that is still going on, still today. that's what they're doing to the states. here's "the washington post." quote, some governors and lawmakers have watched in disbelief as they have sought to

close deals on precious supplies, only to have the federal government swoop in to preempt the arrangements. officials in one state are so worried about this possibility that they are considering dispatching police or even or the national guard to greet two chartered fedex planes scheduled to arrive in the next week with millions of masks from china according to people familiar with the planning. these people spoke on the condition of anonymity. they asked that their state not be identified to avoid flagging federal officials to their shipment, because they believe federal officials would steal it if they knew where it was coming. that's the status of our nation's response to the coronavirus epidemic right now. that's the leadership we've got from our government. with 579,000 confirmed coronavirus cases among americans, with more than 23,000 americans already dead. the federal government's big idea for supplies the nation's

health workers and hospitals, for obtaining critical medical supplies, is still to find out when states are buying stuff and then go take it and not say where it's going. good luck, america. i mean when the president said, i'm behind you on this, governors, he meant like in the form of a stick-up. one of the states that has decided that it doesn't need a stay-at-home order, at least where the governor has decided that her state doesn't need a stay-at-home order and the president has said that's fine, sure, that's fine -- one of the states that still does not have that kind of order is the great state of south dakota. the governor there is named kristi noem. she's a republican. the largest city in south dakota is sioux falls. here's some images from a drive-by protest, a socially distant protest by people in sioux falls who came out to show support for people who work at a local meat processing plant there. there's a facility in sioux falls owned by smithfield.

it's a pork processing plant. they process about 4% to 5% of the pork that is sold in this entire country. they've got about 3,700 employees at that one facility in sioux falls. that plant had its first employee test positive for coronavirus on march 26th. and when they learned of that first test, the other people who work in that plant were concerned, as you would be, in part because a lot of that work inside that plant is done in very close quarters. in a lot of cases, you are shoulder to shoulder with your fellow employees doing what can be very tough, physical labor. after asking for better conditions and protective equipment inside the plant and the community turning out to support those demands from the people who worked there, smithfield did close the plant down last week for three days. they said they wanted to give everything a good cleaning. they said they wanted to see what they could do about putting barriers between employees and supplying masks, anything else they could do to try to keep people safe. again, they had their first positive case on march 26th.

employees were upset. they got support from the community expressing what they were upset about. they had the three-day shutdown last week. they had their first positive case on march 26th. now, as of today they've got 293 positive cases at that one plant. and so now the plant is closed down indefinitely. now, i should mention that that 293 cases figure from that one plant, that was announced yesterday. the ar gus herald in sioux falls now says the number of cases associated with that one meat processing plant is actually considerably higher. it's now 350 cases. they've got 868 cases in the whole state of south dakota. 350 of them associated with one mate processing plant, with one workplace. the governor is not issuing a stay at home rule. the south dakota medical association has asked for a stay-at-home order. the governor will not do it. today the mayor of sioux falls asked governor noem to please do

it, please do it at least for the counties around sioux falls where they now know they have this very large cluster of cases. >> the window of time for mitigation is certainly dwindling right now. sioux falls area has seen a very rapid spike in the last several days and quite honestly we're growing increasingly concerned about the need to mitigate that spike before it overwhelms our hospitals. hospitalizations are low. yes, they are low. hospitalizations, though, are a trailing indicator of covid, okay? so you don't act once your hospitalizations get high. i want to share a little bit of data. these are some peer cities that we kind of look at in terms of population, in terms of -- some are geographically similar to us. you've got tallahassee to

laredo, texas. this is total number of cases, and this is the cases per thousand. sioux falls is highlighted in yellow. this should be concerning to our community. this keeps me up at night right now, this number. we are obviously the highest among all these peer cities. and so our time to act on this is right now. so on saturday i did send a formal request to governor noem to issue a shelter in place for mini ha ha and lincoln counties. i feel that based on this and based on a lot of other data that we have, the time to act is now. if we just take the average doubling rate of all those peer cities i just showed you, we'll be here. but we are by far outperforming in a bad way our peer cities. so if we continue the trend that we've been on the last four,

five, six days, we are going to be up here very shortly. this is a crippling number to our health care systems, okay? this is -- this is very bad. this is a very bad outlook. that is why a shelter in place order is needed now. it's needed today. >> it's needed today. that's the mayor of sioux falls, south dakota, where they just found a cluster of 350 cases among workers at one meat processing plant in that city. and, again, in south dakota there is no stay-at-home order. so everybody works at the plant is kind of, you know, in the wild, and they've got 350 known cases there already. governor kristi noem so far says, no, she won't do it. she doesn't see any need to have any sort of shelter in place, any sort of stay-at-home order. why bother? she did, however, announce to great self-promotional fanfare today that she's going to spend

a whoele bunch of state money t do a big south dakota clinical trial of that malaria drug that the president keeps promoting at his press briefings, the one for which there's no clinical evidence of its offensiveness and for which one other clinical trial was just halted this weekend because of serious cardiac complications for people taking this drug. but for some reason the president loves talking about that drug, and so does fox news, and so that's what the state of south dakota is going to do. there's going to have a big clinical trial of that drug the president likes while a large cog in the nation's meat processing capacity gets shut down indefinitely under the weight of hundreds of positive cases and there is not even a stay-at-home order in the state of south dakota. the mayor of sioux falls is asking for one for the counties around sioux falls, please. governor not interested apparently. it was one month ago today that president trump declared the coronavirus crisis to be a

national emergency. that is a technical thing. that has consequences. that should have put agencies like fema in charge of coordinating the national response to that national emergency. but instead, who knows who's in charge or what they're doing. you might remember the actual optics of that declaration of the national emergency a month ago today. that's where everybody was crowded together in the rose garden like they were all taking a super tight elevator ride to nowhere. the president kept shaking everybody's hands and touching the microphone that they were all speaking and breathing into. that's where the president announced that there would be drive-through testing sites with major retailers like walmart and cvs all over the country. they'd be ubiquitous. they're just about to open. a month later there are less than ten of those operational in the entire country. the federal government was also, he announced, going to partner with target. you'd be able to get tested in target parking lots. how convenient is that? the federal government, it turns out, is not actually partnering with target at all, and you can't get tested in their

parking lots. the president also at that event brought up one ceo who, to his credit, did show the president how to elbow bump him instead of grasping his little hand. the president brought that ceo up to say that his company would be rolling out in-home testing for people getting at-home health services and for people in rural areas. that's just not happening at all. npr followed up on that big splashy announcement today. quote, npr called more than 20 of the company's sites in 12 states. none of them is doing in-home testing one month follow the rose garden address. employees said they lacked testing kits and the training to administer tests. but still the announcement sounded so good. that was the same rose garden announcement a month ago today where the president said that 1,700 engineers from google were all working on a nationwide online screening tool that would be rolled out soon. it would tell you whether you should get tested and where you

should get tested and then it would tell you your results. vice president pence said he'd have further details on that. the rollout on that would come within two days. google never actually worked on that at all. a related company did do something much smaller in conjunction with the california state government, but that's just for five counties just in that one state. literally month ago, there was the president and vice president in the rose garden announcing it was rolling out nationwide. npr also reported on a request that major testing labs made of the white house and of the federal government in conjunction with that same national emergency declaration in the rose garden. the testing companies asked the white house for three things now that this was a national emergency. they asked for government funds to build new testing facilities, national standards to prioritize who gets tested, and they asked for government support of the supply chain. quote, more than a month later, the diagnostic testing labs still have those three requests

outstanding because the government hasn't done any of those things they asked for. our testing numbers right now aren't even going up on a daily basis. the number of tests being processed each day in the united states is flat or even down within the last few days over the covid tracking project. i mean i've heard all this talk about opening things back up and what day we're going to be opening things back up. what do you need in order to open things back up? you need to have a whole bunch of stuff in place if you don't want to just go back to putting tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of american lives on the chopping block. i mean there's no way we can even start to think about opening things back up unless we've got a few things in place, right? you need to have robust nationwide testing in place, a robust nationwide testing system that allows for widely available, easy screening for this disease. you've got to have contact

tracing for people who do turn up to be positive. you have to figure out who else they've come in contact with who also needs to be tested, who also needs to have their contacts traced, who also potentially needs to be isolated. you need intense surveillance systems in place if you are going to reopen and you know this virus is still circulating among us. we have none of that, none of that. you can't talk about opening things up just because you want things open. you have to have the things in place that will allow you to open things back up without killing thousands of americans. we have nowhere near any of those things in place. and this is the crucial point. it's not getting better. it's actually getting worse over time because the federal government, over time, is not improving their response. we're not getting more testing. we have less testing. we're not solving the medical supply chain problem on the national level. the federal government is stealing stuff from the states.

that's -- that's their plan right now. that's a bad plan. the states are paying three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times what they used to be paying for some of these supplies. so they're spending that money and then the federal government is coming in and stealing them. that's how we're dealing with our medical supply chain crisis. republican governors still don't know apparently that they ought to be putting in place stay-at-home orders even when they've got huge clusters in their largest cities. they have no idea that means they should put in a stay-at-home order. instead the message they're getting from the white house is they really ought to try that malaria drug that the president has said has fixed everything or will soon. i mean it's not getting better. the federal government is not learning. the federal government is getting worse. the response is getting worse. we're going to focus the next few days on the people whose lives are most on the line because of it. we're going to focus on nursing

homes where the federal government is not even counting cases or tracking them, let alone making nursing homes get better at dealing with what is ripping through nursing home populations right now. they're not working on that part of the problem. they are not even counting or tracking those cases. that may cost more american lives than any other thing that's going wrong. we're going to focus on that over the next few days. we're also going to focus on what we can do if the federal government never does get better. some governors, particularly in hard-hit states, are now starting to realize that the federal government isn't going to spring into action here. and so states are starting to get together in small groups themselves to form slightly smaller subsets of the united states of america, basically to try to approximate, to try to artificially imitate what it might be like if there was a national response because there still isn't. one governor who is trying his

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thank you. necessity is the mother of invention, but so is incompetence as we are finding out as we live through a black hole of any coherent national response in the face of this global pandemic. absent even the most basic break

glass in event of emergency plan from the federal government, today small groups of governors across the country started teaming up to form mini me versions of the united states of america. one in the northeast, another in the west. states trying to figure out together if they can coordinate their own responses as regions, trying to rationalize supply concerns and to share lessons learned, planning for the future, working together, working together as small groups of states if there isn't going to be a federally led effort. the hardest hit state in the nation continues to be new york but new jersey is nipping at its heels. 64,000 cases in new jersey. more than 2,400 deaths in new jersey thus far. and in terms of those two states being part of a northeast consortium working to the, one of the interesting differences between the two states is that new york was able to scale up its own ability to test lots of people. what it revealed was terrifying numbers of infections in new york. but new jersey has had a ton of

trouble ramping up testing. there's a two-week backlog of testing in new jersey right now. and firsthand accounts of what it takes to even get you a test will keep you up at night. this is from "the new york times." quote, the lines start forming the night before as people with glassy eyes and violent coughs try to get tested for the virus. in the darkness they park their cars, cut their engines and try to sleep. two weeks ago at the bergen commune college in paramus, a drive-through fema testing site in new jersey, residents had to arrive by 3:00 a.m. to get a spot. within days they were told to show up at 11:00 p.m. the night before. you see that string of cars in that line there? that's an aerial shot of the cars at that testing site in new jersey. people waiting hours and hours and hours and hours just to try to get tested. new jersey governor phil murphy says the backlog for coronavirus testing in new jersey is, quote, unequivocally worsening. joining us now is governor phil murphy of the great state of new

jersey. sir, i know that you are still really in the belly of the beast. thank you for making time to come back and talk with us tonight. >> honored to be with you, rachel. thanks for having me. >> i want to talk to you about some of these challenges, some of the new ways you're trying to move forward working with other nearby states. the last time you were here last week, you said the models were you looking at for your state indicated that new jersey might be two or three weeks out from an apex in terms of patient demand on the hospitals. that was as of last week. i just wanted to ask for an update. is that still the time line you're expecting? >> yeah. i mean we look at probably four models most regularly, and we're right in the thick of it right now. so i'd stick with what i said to you last week, rachel, and that is the next couple of weeks feel to us as though that's the hottest period. that's not to suggest may is going to be a walk in the park, but i think we're right in the middle of it as we speak. >> tell me about the testing challenges that you've got in new jersey. my partner's family is from new

jersey. i have lots of friends who live in new jersey, lots of people who work on the rachel maddow show live in new jersey and have connections there. i know anecdotally that the inability to access tests and then to get your results if you have been able to get a test is causing just a huge amount of anxiety. it really just feels like a crucial bottleneck in your state's ability to handle this. tell me what's going on there and what your plan is to try to get around that. >> listen, in a perfect world, we've been screaming for universal testing from day one. we just haven't been able to get the materials to either take the swabs on the intake side or the personal protective equipment necessarily to protect our health care workers. there's a little bit of good news and a lot of challenges. so i think we're the fifth most amount of tests of any american state, and we're the 11th largest state population-wise. so i guess at one level that looks good. on another level, you look at the videotape that you're

showing and you look at a two-week wait to get your result back and it's unacceptable. in fact, we have from moment one focused only on symptomatic folks for probably obvious reasons. again, it's gotten better, but it's not where it needs to be, and it certainly isn't where it needs to be if we have any hope not just in new jersey but as a country to actually have the confidence to begin to reopen our economy and reopen our society. we're going to need masks, scaled, rapid return testing. as you suggest, contact tracing, all the things that go with that before we're going to have the confidence to reopen. >> i imagine in the absence of widespread testing and with the number of cases that you do know that you have, even without great access to testing, that the hospitals in your state essentially have to be operating on the assumption that even when they can't test people, they have to be assuming that everybody's positive. i know that seven new jersey hospitals are on what they call

divert status. today you said that most of the hospitals in north jersey are reporting that they are at or near capacity. how worried are you about running out of capacity, and how much flexibility do you have to move patients between different sites? >> so, listen, as i mentioned last time, we're in a war with two fronts. one front is for the 9 million of us to keep pounding the heck out of that curve and lowering the amount of infections, therefore lowering hospitalizations, icu hospitalizations, need for ventilators, and please, god, fatalities. on the other front, it is a 24-hour a day, every single minute to build out health care capacity -- beds, ventilators, ppe, health care workers themselves. we have a three-region strategy in the state, north, central, and south. as you suggest, rachel, the north is really up against it. it has been up against it, and

you know, since january, we're trying to stay out in front of this, but it is a struggle. it is an absolute struggle day in and day out, particularly right now as we are feeling like we're in the hottest period we're going to be in right now. >> let me ask you about some of the people i'm most worried about, and this is true nationwide. it's true in new jersey too. i know that you made a decision to call in the national guard to assist at a veterans home in new jersey where a number of veterans had died. a new jersey state official said today that basically the state is working on the assumption now that the coronavirus is present in, quote, most if not all of new jersey's nursing homes. veterans homes, long-term care facilities, nursing homes, congregant facilities, particularly with elderly and fragile people, it's just incredibly dry tinder for this virus.

do you have a plan in mind, do you have a vision of what can be done in terms much state resources with trying to protect those people? >> yeah, we do, but it is without question -- and you you've raised this consistently, and hats off to you for doing it. it is, i think, the most critical, highest concern we have, long-term care facilities as a general matter. we have three veterans homes. two of them have been ravaged. he was on with the secretary of veteran affairs today talking about getting staffing to come in and helping us plan through this even more aggressively. you've got the reality of staff getting sick or self-quarantining. so you've got a whole mass of challenges coming together. i mentioned last time and we're continuing to try to do this, to break the patients as well as employees into cohorts of covid,

non-covid, again, patients as well as employees. but that's a fragile reality given the population that we're talking about here. that includes transporting folks around from perhaps one facility to a next, not just one wing to another wing. and it's not just a new jersey frustration. it's a weakness right now in this war that we're battling around the country. but, again, separating folks, getting more staff, getting more help from the feds in particular to come in to help us man particularly these veteran homes. it's a whole -- it's going to be a whole mix of steps, but it's really hard, rachel. there's no question about it. it's really hard. >> it's really hard and really important, and it's just -- i have said it before. it keeps me up at night. i know, governor, that it keeps you up too. but you've got a lot to do that right now, a lot competing. i appreciate you helping us understand what's going on in new jersey. come back and talk to us whenever there's stuff that we need to know, that you need

people to know nationwide, but we're all pulling for you. >> thank you so much for having us. >> all right. governor phil murphy of the great state of new jersey. the state's dealing with the second most cases in the country after new york, and that testing bottleneck that they've got is really bad in terms of them getting their arms around this problem. all right. we've got lots more to get to tonight. stay with us. that my grandfather was a federal judge in guatemala. my grandfather used his legal degree and his knowledge to help people that were voiceless in his country. that put a fire in my heart. it made me realize where i got my passion for social justice. bring your family history to life like never before. get started for free at ancestry.com you ever wish you weren't a motaur? sure. sometimes i wish i had legs like you. yeah, like a regular person.

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this is from the senior medical adviser at the department of veterans affairs public health office. this is from back in january, january 28th. quote, the projected size of the coronavirus outbreak already seems hard to believe. any way you cut it, this is going to be bad. you guys made fun of me for screaming to close the schools. now i'm screaming close the colleges and universities. one thing i'm checking each day is the availability of respirators on ebay.

that from an official calling to close schools and colleges as of january, that's from a long chain of emails first report the on by kaiser health news in "usa today," a chain with the subject line "red dawn," which is a reference to a ridiculous cult favorite movie from 1984 about a band of american teenagers trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. but now "the new york times" has published 80 full pages of the red dawn emails alongside a blockbuster piece of reporting on the many ways in which president trump failed to see the crisis that was right in front of him. "the times'" eric lipton describes this email chain as, quote, an extraordinary conversation hatched among an elite group of infectious disease doctors and medical experts in the federal government and academic institutions around the nation. as the emails progress from late january to early march, they show, quote, the experts' rising sense of frustration and then anger as their advice seemingly

failed to break through to the administration, raising the odds that more people would likely die. the emails also show top trump administration officials playing catchup. here, for example is the top disaster response official at hhs appearing to learn for the first time in late february that the virus was being transmitted by people without symptoms. quote, is this true? if so, we have a huge whole, misspelled, whole on our screening and quarantine effort. here's president trump's former homeland security adviser tom bossert reacting in incredulously when trump banned travel from europe last month. he says, quote, can anyone justify the european travel restriction scientifically? seriously, is there any benefit? i don't see it, but i'm hoping there is something i don't know, to which the group responds to him. no, there is nothing you don't know. this is pointless now that the virus is already here. others go on to bemoan the fact that the president didn't announce social distancing measures or any plans to protect

health workers since that's actually what needed to be done, and instead he announced that this was some problem in europe but only among countries whose leaders he didn't like. one infectious disease expert who worked in the bush and obama white houses wrote this. quote, we have thrown 15 years of institutional learning out the window and are making decisions based on intuition. pilots can tell you what happens when a crew makes decisions based on intuition rather than what their instruments are telling them. and yet we continue to push the stick forward. eric lipton and his colleagues have detailed how these warnings failed to make their way to president trump or when they did, how he just ignored them. it is damning, and it is important. and eric lipton joins us next. (baby sounds and cooing throughout)

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♪ saturpain happens. aleve it. aleve is proven stronger and longer on pain than tylenol. when pain happens, aleve it. all day strong. here's the headline. quote, he could have seen what was coming behind trump's failure on the virus. "the new york times" got access

to 80 pages worth of emails from an email chain among top medical experts including those inside the government in the run-up to the coronavirus crisis in this country. in this reporting, you can see page after page of health experts, including current and former government officials as early as january just hair on fire, sounding the alarm that the trump administration wasn't doing enough and that this was going to be very serious. quote, the president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy, and batting away warnings from senior officials. joining us now is eric lipton, investigative reporter at "the times," lead author of this report. thank you for making time to join us tonight. i appreciate it. >> thanks for having me. >> i feel like we are living through the consequences of the slow and random and unfocused response from the federal government. it does not surprise me to read detail about how slow it was.

i was very surprised in your reporting, though, to learn that there were so many people inside the administration that seemed to know that's what was going wrong and how big a deal it was, but for whatever reason they just couldn't get through to the president that it was a problem. is that a fair takeaway from what you and your colleagues discovered? >> i think that there was a group of, you know, physicians who work for the federal government, whose job is to prepare for pandemics, who were comparing notes starting in january as they were trying to figure out just what needed to be done. and they became increasingly concerned over the need to shift from attempting to contain the virus to moving to mitigate the effects of it. and they felt as if the switch should be flipped to mitigation by the middle of february. and the date in which you flip that switch, you have a week or two, and the consequences are enormous. the number of people who will get sick or die if you don't

flip that switch within that one or two-week period, it's enormous. it's the difference between what's happening in california and what's happening in new york. and they were growing increasingly concerned, particularly as the middle of february came and they saw all the signs that it was time to flip the switch, to go to mitigation full steam ahead. >> and the reason that they didn't remains a little fuzzy. i mean you and your colleagues report that they did -- this group of i have influential, very important advisers comes to that conclusion that it's time to flip that switch as you say. they make a plan to present this to the president, to talk to him about mitigation, to talk to him about all the stuff that we all learned would ultimately need to be done. but it seems to get derailed. the president gets upset that a cdc official makes a public warning before he was willing to say anything that stark. there seems to be some confusion in terms of when the president is actually supposed to talk to these advisers. >> right. well, the president was in india on a very short trip at the time

that his top medical advisers had reached the consensus that it was time to go now for this flipping of the switch. and so they decided, you know, they would wait until he got home because they wanted to present this to him in person. in the interim, a cdc official spoke at a press conference and said, we're going to need to, you know, consider closing schools and interrupting society. and as soon as she said that, the stock market began to tank. president trump was getting on a plane at that moment on his way to come back to the united states, and he was furious because this was the beginning of the major decline in the stock market. and by the time he got home, he was railing out, you know, the head of the health and human services, angry at what had happened. and then that result was there was a three-week delay before the united states -- before the president stood there and said, it's time for social -- it's the 15 days to stop the spread, that whole campaign. and that two weeks of delay is really consequential in terms of the number of people in places like new york. and of course it's the governors

who have the power to make those calls, but they need the leadership from the federal government, from the president who gives them the cover to say, we need to make this move. our health experts have concluded that now is the time to go. and instead what happened was different governors made different choices, and those choices had enormous consequences. >> eric, one of the things that i'm worried about is i feel like the federal government is not learning and that their response is not getting better over time, and they're talking about things like opening the country back up and all these things that afford another chance basically, another sort of decision point where the wrong decision could cost thousands of american lives. do you have any sense from your reporting both for this piece and overall as to whether or not the president is taking better advice or getting better advice or listening to advisers who actually know what to do in a more systematic way as time goes on? >> i mean there's no question

that the determination as to when they were supposed to flip the switch is something they've been studying for 15, 20 years in the united states, and there was a failure in this instance. now, question as to when you reopen, that's something that there clearly is a very sensitive one, and i believe that they are consulting with medical experts. the last thing that trump probably wants is to have a return of an outbreak just before the election again. and i'm hoping and we're all hoping that they're going to take the medical advice and not just take the advice of people who are concerned about the economy. we're concerned about both things. at a certain point, you can be causing many deaths by having the economy shut down. but i do think that they are -- they're looking for a valid way to evaluate how broadly the virus is still prevalent in community by community. that's the way you have to make she's decisions. it is not going to be a national reopening. new york city and new york state are going to take longer. new jersey is going to take

longer because the percentage of people infected is much higher. in other places where they mitigated earlier and so therefore there was not as much spread. so not only is the deaths and illnesses worse in new york, but i think it's going to take a longer time to open in new york than in other places. >> eric lipton, investigative reporter at "the new york times," thanks for being here. i appreciate it. >> thank you. >> all right. we'll be right back. stay with us. with us renovate , from inspiration to installation. like way more vanities perfect for you. nice. way more unique fixtures and tiles. pairing. ♪ nice. way more top brands in sinks and faucets. way more ways to rule your renovation. nice! on any budget, with free shipping. wayfair. way more than furniture.

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that is going to do it for us tonight. thank you for being with us. now it's time for a special hour here on msnbc. it's life in the time of coronavirus hosted by lawrence o'donnell and dr. zeke emanuel. that starts right now. social distancing, flattening the curve in some places. >> it is because of the hodging practices and social distancing that that is the case. >> while coronavirus hot spots flare up in others. >> we are bending the curve of the infection rate and the deaths are still rising in the city. >> and heroes on the front lines working to save every life possible. >> we have no vents, we literally have to decide who lives and who dies and you're literally playing god at that point. >> lawrence o'donnell and dr. zeke emanuel on how long americans need to stay home and wear face masks in our global health war. >> if we don't continue to follow social distancing, everything that we've done to