february. as "politico" notes, there is now a different definition of accomplishment. to quote senator lindsey graham, the closer you can have it to 120,000 deaths, i think you can say you limited the casualties in this war. we're close to 90,000 to this day. good morning and welcome to "morning joe." it is friday, may 15th. joe will be back on monday. with willie and me this morning, we have the co-founder and ceo of axios, jim vandehei. former chief of staff at the cio and department of defense, nbc news national security analyst jeremy bash is with us. columnist and associate editor for the "washington post," david ignatius is with us this morning. good to have you all. we have a lot to get to this morning. an ousted vaccine official appears before congress and slams the trump administration's response to the coronavirus. dr. rick bright warned that the u.s. still has no plan.

we'll play for you his testimony. it is pretty riveting. we'll have the latest on the economic picture, as u.s. unemployment claims now total upwards of 36 million people. and the latest trump distraction. it's a big one. now asking republicans in congress to call former president barack obama to testify. it all might be a calculated campaign strategy, but it is a massive distraction. many believe that this president right now is trying to distract from the neverending dea ineverl of this virus, and using employs and conspiracy theories, and actually raising questions about president barack obama, only part of his massive distraction play. it is taking everything to a new level. we begin though with the cdc yesterday releasing previously withheld guidance documents on reopening american institutions, which appear to be a lot less

detailed than the draft recommendations sent to the white house for review last month. we've been waiting for a while for these recommendations. when you read them, you wonder what the wait was for. according to "politico," the new cdc guidelines provide brief checklists meant to help keep businesses and others operating in public open safely. in a one-page document, the cdc offers decision making tools for schools, workplaces, camps, child care programs, mass transit systems, and bars and restaurants. the "associated press" reported last week the white house previously shelved cdc advice, providing recommendations for safely reopening. willie, when you read them, they equivocate, by the way, and there's always a line that says, "if it's not possible, you don't have to do it," but these recommendations are so basic, we could -- anybody in america could write them, or is

practically already living by them. >> yeah. i mean, that reads like a cliffs notes version of the original 63-page document the cdc sent to the white house and said, "hey, can we get some feedback on this?" they were slow walked, slow walked, and now what we have is this very broad, one-page summaries of what you might do if you want to. effectively, like president trump wanted a ee eed and gets leaves everything up to the state. president trump visited a plant yesterday in allentown, pennsylvania, where he told the audience to urge their democratic governor to reopen the entire state. >> i say it's the transition to greatness. the transition is the third quarter. the fourth quarter is going to do very well. next year is going to be through the roof. we have to get your governor of pennsylvania to start opening up a little bit. you have areas of pennsylvania that are barely affected, and they want to keep them closed. can't do that.

>> pennsylvania governor tom wolf issued a strict stay at home order until june 4th. partly lifted restrictions in 37 counties across the state. officials in some counties that remain closed say they will defy the governor and reopen today, leaving local businesses scrambling for guidance. jim vandehei, i know you've been looking at this story closely, specifically in the state of wisconsin, where you have this tension between public health officials worried about opening too soon, with dr. anthony fauci chief among them, and people wanting to get back to work. in some cases, mayors and people who run businesses saying, "i can't stand this anymore. it is time to reopen." now, they have president trump the last several weeks encouraging them in that direction. >> the good news here is that most people, like almost every business, every hospital, every school is figuring out what is best for the people that are going to come back and work for them or go to school there. they're not going to act like

dopes and do things they think are going to put people at risk. every business is doing that. most people are listening to their employer, their school, their governor. they're not even looking to the federal government for direction on this. that said, obviously, president trump is now saying, "get back to work. get back to work. get back to work." in wisconsin, you had the state supreme court overrule the democratic governor and say, "all your restrictions are lifted." in the short-term, you have a real world, unfolding experiment of what happens if you can go back to work. you see some of the portraits and some of the pictures on social media. in some bars, people are crammed in there. they're doing shots. they're hugging. they're high-fiving. some restaurants are open. it differs between what county you're in and what city you're in. in a lot of places, people are being responsible. they're saying, "hey, i'm a republican, and maybe trump is saying this, but i'm listening to the health experts and i'm not going to go out." now, between what's happening in wisconsin, what already had been happening in georgia, florida, some other places, we're going

to start to see what happens if people go out in mass, start to resume living the way we all want to live. do you see a massive flare up in the number of cases and, therefore, the number of deaths? if we do, it's going to take a hell of a lot long fer for thin to reopen. you have to shut back down, figure out what you got wrong, and what is the right cadence for getting back to work. it is interesting, the clip you talked about in pennsylvania, where the president is now saying, "next year, the economy will roar back." remember about three weeks ago, it was the end of this year, things will be roaring back. they now realize that by election day, unemployment is definitely going to be in the double digits. that growth is going to be slower than we think. many more businesses are going to go out of business and not be able to come back into business. people that have job s or had jobs aren't going to have them. you see it every day. there is a disconnect between the market, which people are saying, "oh, looks like things are coming back," and the

reality on the ground. talk to any business owner. nothing is going to look like it did before, and it is all going to unfold more slowly than any of us hoped us. >> mika, this, of course, is an economic question, but president trump is encouraging, and also has a cultural question, a red state/blue state thing. he retweeted overnight a guy who was in a bar in florida, showing, "we're all in this bar. none of us are wearing masks," and sent that to a message of what he called blue states. the president of the united states retweeted that, sort of to underline that message. >> this is a president who is sending a message to people, that perhaps they can fly in the face and defy this virus and have that trump attitude toward this virus of, you know, who gives a damn, or whatever you. remember, on january 22nd, and, of course, if the president is watching -- i say if, putting it in quotes because he does all

the time -- but january 22nd, he said, we have it totally under control. one person coming in from china. it'll be fine. january 24th, he said, china has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus. the united states greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. it will all work out well. in particular, on behalf of the american people, i want to thank president xi. january 30th -- we're talking january here, where joe biden wrote this opinion piece, warning americans and this president that a global pandemic was coming. january 30th, we're working closely with china and other countries. we think it'll have a good ending for us. we're almost at 90,000 people dead. oh, february 23rd, we have it very much under control in this country. president trump, those were your words. that's what you told the american people. again, when you have 15 people, and 15 within a couple of days

is going to be down to zero, that was february 26th. we're in may and almost at 90,000 people dead. he said on february 26th, that was a really good job that we had done. february 27th, the next day, the next day, "it's going to disappear one day. it's like a miracle. it will disappear." february 27th -- we're in may, and almost 90,000 people are dead. march 7th, no, i'm not concerned at all. no, we've done a great job with it. now, the president is walking around a plant in pennsylvania, wearing no mask, even though every expert at the top of their field in epidemiology and in pandemics say masks protect other people from your droplets. that you may be carrying it. since the white house does testing every day, the president thinks he's virus free. the tests that are being used are often inconclusive. he's walking around a plant with no mask, close to people, not

even social distancing. he also gave this thought on testing. take a look. >> could be the testing is, frankly, overrated. maybe it is overrated. but whenever they start yelling, "we want more, we want more." you know, they always say, "we want more," paubecause they don want to give you credit. we do more. we have the greatest testing in the world. don't forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. why? we do more testing. when you test, you have a case. when you test, you find something is wrong with people. if we didn't do any testing, we'd have very few cases. they don't want to write that. it is common sense. >> no, wow. we would have booked a doctor for this segment, but it is so frighteningly obvious, that the president is uttering complete

stupidity and is flying in the face of everything that this virus can do to this country. when you have a test, yes, you have a case, and then you know about the case, mr. president, and you're able to isolate the case and contact trace the case. yes, when you test, you have a case. it seems to me, donald trump doesn't want to know about cases. donald trump doesn't want to know about cases in this country. perhaps those numbers make him look bad for his presidential second term ambitions. i don't know. willie, how do you explain this? >> i don't know how to explain it. i'm glad we didn't insult a doctor by bringing him or her on to try to em plain this. >> embarrassing. >> the quote again, if we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases. it's common sense. >> good lord. >> that's some ron burgundy stuff there. unbelievable. let's turn to the white house. senior white house reporter for nbc news digital, shannon

pettypiece. good to see you. let's talk about what the president is occuup to these da. he had a trip to arizona last week. a trip to pennsylvania. not the rallies he would like to be holding. is this more of what we're going to see here as he tries to conduct the presidential campaign in the middle of a pandemic? >> reporter: yeah, that's what white house officials are telling me, to expect more of the official presidential trips to key battleground states. we've essentially entered phase two of campaign in coronavirus. phase one were the press briefings, where the president would come out and use the podium for hours at a time. in some instances. getting his message out there. advisers told him it was a bad idea, doing more harm than they were helping. he proposed this idea of getting on the road, doing official trips. while these don't look like a campaign rally, there's not a stadium packed full of people, there are a lot of optics that are similar. for example, the soundtrack the president often plays at his

rallies, that played before the event in pennsylvania, in arizona. there were some people in the crowd in pennsylvania -- this is a crowd of workers -- who had "make america great again" hats. the motorcade routes outside of the facility were packed with supporters who had come out to see the president. they were holding campaign signs, you know, trump/pence flags, many without masks, packed into close quarters. there was almost a def facto rally going along outside the facility and along the motorcade route. all of this happening while joe biden is essentially stuck at home, in his home studio. the president is capitalizing on the power of the presidency, and the ability to travel on air force one to start taking his message to some of the key battleground states. >> and trying to change the conversation to president obama and general michael flynn. shannon pettypiece at the white house.

thank you. president trump in recent days ramped up his attacks against former president barack obama. now, he's calling on congress to have president obama testifying. president trump has accused obama of illegally targeting his associates in a long-running conspiracy he is calling obamagate. we'll note, there is no hard evidence to support the claims he is making. still, he tweeted yesterday, "if i were a senator or congressman, the first person i would call to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the usa by far is former president obama. he knew everything. do it, lindsey graham. just do it. no more mr. nice guy," writes the president, "no more talk." >> it was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. if i were a democrat instead of a republican, i think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago. i'm talking with 50-year sentences. it is a disgrace, what's

happened. this is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country. >> i think it'd be a bad precedent to compel a former president to come before the congress. that would open up a can of worms. for a variety of reasons, i don't think that's a good idea. >> i think what we're seeing here is the extent that donald trump will go to distract. it is very hard to distract from a virus and from 90,000 people dead and counting. most people who know trump very well know he will do anything, absolutely anything. that is the perilous position this country is in. the question is how far republicans will go with him. they seem to be willing to do anything. while senator graham says he doesn't plan on having president obama testify, he told reporters

yesterday that starting next month, he plans on having his committee hold hearings on the origins of the russia probe. this comes as senate republicans push for more investigations into the obama era. calls for new probes began ramping up yesterday after acting director of national intelligence, richard grenell -- think about that for a second -- acting director of national intelligence, richard grenell, sent congress a list of dozens of obama administration officials, who say they asked for documents that led to the identity of michael flynn being unmasked from intelligence reports between the 2016 election and president trump's inauguration. senator and homeland security committee chairman ron johnson told reporters, quote, we will start requesting interviews with those individuals. senator graham wants to bring in high-profile obama administration officials, including former fbi director

james comey, former deputy attorney general sally yates, and former director of national intelligence, james clapper. graham says he would like to have a report out by october, just weeks before the november election. david ignatius, i want to ask you your thoughts on this but, again, framing it, that this is happening in the middle of a global pandemic. that we are heading toward 100,000 americans dead. we don't have the testing we need. we don't have access to a virus any time soon. the country is on lockdown -- to a vaccine. the country is on lockdown. we are, many believe, careening toward some form of a depression. now, tell me your thoughts on these questions being raised about the obama administration. >> well, president trump's default answer to so many issues

over the last three years has been to blame his predecessor, barack obama. this is a pretty standard approach for him. whatever it is, north korea, now the pandemic, it was the predecessor's fault. this talk of obamagate is just incomprehensible. he's never explained what he means, but he's clearly trying to make the country's move more partisan, to gin up an investigation. we'll go back to the points you and jim were making at the beginning. the dimensions of this virus, the pandemic, the consequences for our economy are still impossible to predict. but this is a country that's frightened. we're losing our jobs. our neighbors are in financial difficulty. we don't know when we'll be going back to work. we don't know when our kids will be going back to school. we worry about our parents and grandparents. president trump has to be careful, talking to a frightened

country. if he seems to be playing politics at a time when we're thinking about our health and the health of people we love, i just don't think that's going to play. if you look at the recent poll numbers, mika, they're telling you that the move away from trump by a few percentage points seems to be especially pronounced among older americans. those polled 65 and older have been moving away from trump in significant numbers. i think that's because those are the people who are most vulnerable, most in need of reassurance, steady policy. that's precisely when president trump has not seemed willing or able to offer you. he's preferred to let this be a free-for-all with the states and local governments taking the burden of responsibility. so my feeling is that if he keeps pressing the political

card, as through hearings on capitol hill, blaming obama, blaming predecessors, that may exacerbate his problems. it may exacerbate the feeling in the country. nobody is looking out for my health and safety. they're playing politics. that's going to hurt him. >> jeremy bash, let's remind our viewers that michael flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to the fbi. admitted to his crimes. this is a scandal, an invented scandal, that president trump doesn't even understand himself. he's been given opportunities to explain it. it's more of a campaign slogan, obamagate, with an exclamation point. he was asked again yesterday. he was asked a couple days ago during a white house press conference, what specific crime did president obama commit? he said to the reporter in the rose garden, he said, "you know what the crime is. it is obvious to everybody," without explaining it. as someone who worked in the intelligence community, can you explain unmasking, and what

exactly that is, how frequently it's used, and how it applies to this case? >> yeah, absolutely. whenever a u.s. person, an american citizen, is on a surveillance audiotape that the u.s. intelligence community is tracking, because they're listening to a foreign official -- so in the case we're talking about, if the russians were talking to mike flynn, mike flynn is obviously an american. whenever an american is on that audio, and it is disseminated in an intelligence report, the person reading the report, in order to understand the context and, oh, my god, who is the russian talking to, can make a formal request to the nsa. the formal term is unminimized. we're calling it unmask the identity of the american. it's been done 16,000 times during the trump administration. double the number that happened during the obama administration. it is a fairly routine process. it's happened so policymakers can understand, who is talking

to the russians about relieving sanctions? why is an american having these conversations? there is a well-established, legally overseen process by which this is done. the statistics are reported, and they are briefed to congress. it is a standard practice. i think, of course, what ric grenell, the acting director of national intelligence is doing, he's trying to weaponize the process. he is trying to selectively declassify information. putting out names of democratic officials. suggesting there was something nefarious. what was going on at the time? we had the russians clearly interfering in a u.s. election, attacking our democracy. russians were talking to senior americans. it was incumbent on the people defending the country to understand, who are the russians talking to? it was a very, i think, well overseen process. this is not a scandal any more than birthergate was. let's face it, trump began his political career about a lie with barack obama, that he wasn't born in the united states. this is an extension of that.

there's absolutely nothing here. >> it's only a matter of time, i suspect, before we're hearing, "lock him up" chants at future president trump rallies over this scandal that the president has invented here. we have, jeremy, a senate judiciary chairman in lindsey graham who pushed yesterday in a tweet, compelled now to hold hearings about general flynn, to hold hearings for the predicate of the mueller investigation. this will continue through the election, as president trump wants it to, because of a republican at the top of the judiciary committee willing to play along. >> yeah. willie, again, just to reiterate the point, with us approaching 90,000 deaths here, that's 30 times what we lost on 9/11. that's basically a 9/11 every day for a month. with that going on in our country, and with the complexities of this virus, asymptomatic transmission, a lack of transmission, the

inability to understand the implications for relaxation of social distancing, record unemployment not seen since the great depression. we have members of congress trying to understand the origins of the russia probe. the origins of the russia probe were the russians were attacking our election. of course, professional intelligence officials were trying to undertake counterintelligence and defensive actions against that. how could we let our guard down? i think the only impact of these republican-led hearings will be, number one, to distract from the real effort that the country needs to engage in, which is dealing with this coronavirus. more fundamentally, it is going to lower our defenses. it is going to potentially invite similar mischief, similar attacks from russia, china, and every other country that wants to do us harm. >> yeah. there's a lot of different ways we are being weakened, especially given the fact that families across america are at their knees. their children aren't in school. their jobs aren't working out. they're locked in their homes.

it is a spiraling situation, and we have a president deflecting on a massive level. jeremy pasbash, thaink you so m. ahead, more on nbc's brand-new reporting on the lack of any hard evidence to support the latest trump ally conspiracy theory involving president obama. we'll talk to nbc's carol lee. plus, eugene robinson's new column argues that the united states is a country to be pitied. gene explains that next. and up next, the economy is facing recession, or rather, a she-cession. steve rattner has charts on how women are being especially hard hit. you're watching "morning joe." we'll be right back.

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u.s. unemployment claims have now spent eight straight weeks in the millions. now totaling upward of 36 million. the department of labor announced yesterday that another nearly 3 million people applied for jobless claims last week. staggering. the amount of claims has been on steady decline as part of the country starts to reopen. the number of people receiving ongoing benefits is still 22.8 million. joining us now, former treasury official, morning joe economic analyst, steve rattner. you're looking at specifics here. you have some charts on the unemployment picture and who is getting hurt the worst. tell us about it. >> yes, mika. as you led in, the unemployment numbers are getting worse, and economists are accordingly taking down their forecasts. so you can take a look at a chart that shows you, from goldman sachs, what they did

earlier this week. they were projecting, if you look at the second bar to the left, as recently as a month ago, a 13.3% unemployment. that's the top of the gray bar. they're now projecting, in the second quarter of this year, 25% unemployment in this quarter. they've increased their projection for the third quarter to 18.5%. even when you get to the fourth quarter, which, of course, election day is going to occur, unemployment is likely to be around 10%. the right side of this chart, you can see over the coming three years, modest declines in the unemployment rate. even when you get to the 2023, we have 6.6% unemployment, which is well above the 3.8% we had before this started, and well above what economists think of as full employment. we're looking at a slow return to work for most people and high unemployment rates for a good while. let's take a look at how a couple of -- how this breaks down among a couple groups of

people. if you start with lower income workers, you can see that they are hurting the most. 39% of all workers who make less than $40,000 either lost their job or were furloughed back in march. that's obviously before even much of this hit. 39% of lower income workers lost their jobs. only 19% of workers with incomes between $40,000 and $50,000, and only 13% of workers with incomes over $100,000. needless to say, in these lower income areas, disproportionately, minorities being hurt the worse by what's happening on the unemployment section. now, you mentioned the she-cession, so let's talk about what's happening to women. if you start actually all the way on the left here, you can see, not surprisingly, that historically, men made up most of the labor force. 52% compared to the 48% in 2000. in the 2008/2009 recession, that

was a man recession. the share of jobs that went to men, the blue line, drops precipitously. the share going to women increased. for the first time in our history, women had more jobs than men coming out of the '08/'09 recession. then we went back to a more traditional pattern. on the right, you can see what's happened, literally, in just one month, which is far more women lost their jobs than men who lost their jobs. the share of the labor force going to men has gone up. why is that? that's because this is a very different recession than the last one. the last one was mostly about manufacturing, construction, jobs predominantly done by men. this recession, a pandemic recession, is about, so far anyway, leisure, hospitality, education, and even in some parts of health care, women represent a majority of the labor force, so they are being hurt the worst this time around. >> yeah. >> it is a different kind of a

recession, and one that, unfortunately, is hitting some of the people we least want to have hurt, people at the bottom of the income scale, minorities and women, disproportionately. as we start to get numbers from later in the downturn, april numbers and the may numbers and so forth, you should expect to see more of the same. >> steve, just on the point where women, the female labor force is being impacted so greatly, i've been looking at this a lot, at know your value. in fact, know your value is taking hits. the fight for equal pay, all these things which seemed so important before the pandemic hit, don't seem essential. you get a sense that companies are hanging by a thread. a lot of these issues that are important, in terms of evening out the work force, is now not seemed as an essential conversation. everybody is just trying to hang on. in terms of jobs that are predominantly held by women,

you're also saying that they are being hit far more than male jobs. >> yeah. so this is, again, simply the characteristic of this downturn. that the industries that are affected by people staying home, by people not traveling, by people not going to restaurants, are disproportionately women. as you suggested, in the context of a pandemic and 25% unemployment, we're not really in a position to turn the focus on groups like women, who have been adversely affected. the only way at the moment that we are going to reverse this and get women back their jobs is to simply improve the overall economy. that will reverse all of these trends that are going so negatively for so many groups. we have to get the economy going again. that, obviously, at the moment, is not happening. >> so, steve, on the question of getting the economy going again, the house will vote today on a $3 trillion stimulus package,

another $3 trillion. the senate says it is dead on arrival. they won't take anything up, probably, until after memorial day. now, we're looking out to june. given the fact we already have $3 trillion worth of stimulus that's been appropriated, approved, and sent out the door, on its way out the door, some of it, does $3 trillion bring numbers down in the graph, or is this problem too big for this injection of money coming out of washington? >> we have to keep at it, willie. there's no substitute for the government continuing to use its arsenal to try to combat this. it's not going to go away by itself. we need to do more. what's surprising to me at the moment is that the white house has been poo-pooing the idea of doing more. you have this -- i wouldn't call it a battle of words -- but chairman powell said earlier this week the economy was in tough shape and congress should think about doing more. the treasury secretary

immediately came back and said, "well, let's kind of wait and see how this unfolds." mitch mcconnell has been saying this, too. the government waits to see what happens, then we do something about it. we know what will happen. high unemployment and a deep recession we'll have for a long time, and the government has to do more. for example, the extra unemployment benefits from the stimulus package run out in eight weeks. people won't be back to work in eight weeks. what do we do about that? one last point, i think it's don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. that happened with the stimulus packa package. it was done fast, which was valuable and important, but now we need to be thoughtful. among the things we need to be thoughtful about is what i call rebuilding america. when this passes, not all the jobs are going to be there. some of these jobs have been eliminated forever, for various reasons we can talk about.

this is the time we have to be more thoughtful. that requires planning and getting to work now on another piece of congressional legislation, even if mitch mcconnell wanting to wait 30 days to see how the last one is working. we know it'll help a bit. absolutely, it helps. it's not going to keep unemployment or get unemployment back down to where it was before we started this. >> as i said, the house will vote today on a new piece of stimul stimulus, but the republicans saying it'll be dead on arrival when it reaches the body. jim vandehei, the devastating numbers we get every thursday at 8:30 a.m. eastern time, the report we got a week ago, this morning, about the jobless report in april, put the pressure on the president to say the things he's saying about open the economy. he's looking at all those numbers, not from a public health perspective but from an economic perspective and in

terms of his own reo-election, saying, "we can't go on loik th like this. we have to reopen." >> he's not wrong about the economic consequences of people staying at home. steve mnuchin said over the weekend unemployment could get near 25%. kevin hassett, economic adviser, said it'll be at least 20%. safe to assume a quarter of america is going to be out of work. as rattner was pointing out, a lot of the people aren't going to be coming back to work. when the paychecks stop, when the checks from the government stop coming, when your unemployment benefits run out, they'll need money. the question for republicans is will they do another stimulus? i don't think they will now, ol obviously. if the unemployment rate is that high, and people are coming back at a slower pace, they'll do more stimulus. they didn't hesitate the last couple times. my assumption is they'll do it again. the president is looking at the numbers, and he is panicking.

we doesn't want to go into an election with the economy not growing and 25% of people unemployed. it'll be the biggest challenge the country has faced in a long time. can some parts of the country start to go back to work? i guess another piece of the good news is we can look at china, look at italy, other places that were hit before us and start to get some guide in terms of how can you pull it off. almost every employer who is going to pull it off, they're not going to come back at full employment. in addition to being here talking like i run a company, we have 200 people, we froze 50 slots. i'm not going to bring the 50 slots back until probably for six to nine months, until i know that the economy is headed in a positive direction. i think that's true for every business owner. >> jim vandehei and steve rattner, thank you very much. coming up, our next guest says it was inadequate testing that brought about the national shutdown.

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could be the testing, frankly, is overrated. maybe it is overrated. whenever they start yelling, "we

want more, we want more." you know, they say, "we want more," because they don't want to give you credit. we do more, and they say, "we want more." we have the greatest testing in the world. don't forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. why? because we do more testing. when you test, you have a case. when you test, you find something is wrong with people. if we didn't do any testing, we'd have very few cases. they don't want to write that. it's common sense. >> i just have to point out that the president talking about "they," saying, "we want more," are you talking about the american people who want more tests so they can map out and understand where this virus is? because it sounds like you're talking about a bunch of babies who want pie. i mean, this is -- the lack of understanding from this president, and the lack of empathy, but moe important st i the lack of understanding as to what is needed in the united

states of america to save lives, and to stave off this pandemic which is killing people by the day is consistently staggering. joining us now, the director of the harvard global health institute, practicing physician, and also a professor of medicine at the harvard medicine school. gosh, i feel silly to ask you to comment on this, but there is sense among the president, that if you have testing, then you have more cases. why would that be a bad thing, doctor? >> good morning, mika. so we're going to have cases either way. testing doesn't give you cases. the virus gives you cases. what testing does, it lets you identify who is infected. then if you trace their contacts and isolate people who are infected, it lets you slow down the outbreak. this is outbreak 101, disease outbreak 101. testing doesn't cause cases. the virus is doing that.

testing is helpful in identifying and isolating the cases so other people don't get infected. >> hey, dr. jha, it's willie. you testified at a congressional hearing. you talked about the importance of testing. you said it's the cornerstone of our approach, for us to get our arms around it. some republican members on the panel said you were being partisan by saying testing is important. how did you take that criticism? what'd you understand that to mean? >> yeah, so i was a little puzzled by it, willie. again, i don't know any public health person, any physician, anybody who is at all knowledgeable about this, who thinks testing is not important. the white house thinks it is important, right? they're testing their folks every day. so i was a little puzzled. i think they saw it as a critique of the white house. i was saying that we have not had the kind of testing response we need to keep the american people safe. it has contributed to shutting down the american economy. i think that's common sense.

my sense is that pretty much everybody agrees with that. i was puzzled that it was somehow partisan. >> as you say, that comes directly from the white house task force, as well, that testing is important. doctors fauci and birx among them. we got the new cdc guidelines out yesterday, dr. pared down version of the original 63-page document. how should a governor, municipality, the principal of a school, for example, interpret that? >> yeah, it was disappointing, the latest thing out of the cdc. there is nothing wrong with it. it is just really vague. it's really broad. it's not really an actionable plan. again, i don't know why it's important to prevent the american people from benefitting from the expertise of the cdc. the initial 63-page report was

really good and detailed. it talked to restaurants and bars and schools about what to do and exactly how to implement opening. if we all want to open up our economy, which we do, then those detailed guidelines are really helpful. the six pages, they're fine, but they're not nearly enough. >> david ignatius has a question. david? >> dr. jha, i want to ask you a question that i think so many of our viewers are wondering about. that is, how soon do you think therapies, vaccines, the kinds of medical breakthroughs that will make this pandemic manageable, will allow us greater comfort in reopening our economy, how soon do you think those will begin to be available? >> yeah, so david, i'm on the optimistic side of things when i look around and look at other experts and what do people think. again, i'm on the very optimistic side. my belief is that we'll have a

lot more therapies by the fall, late summer or early fall, we'll have more treatments. we have one right now that seems to be work in really sick people. the vaccine, it's very hard for me to see how we have one this calendar year, in 2020. i'm hopeful. it's really about -- keeping my fingers crossed here -- having one in early 2021. maybe by mid-2021, it'll be widely available. you have to ramp up and produce hundreds of millions of doses. if everything goes well, next year at some point, we would have a vaccine that's safe and effective. >> dr. jha, i'm curious about masking, if the entire population did it, would it help keep the virus from spreading? i mean, there is an understanding that the droplets usually come from one's mouth. there's other ways. they stay in the air for quite some time, and that masking could protect -- if you're wear wearing a mask, you're

protecting other people from yourself. once again, we had a situation yesterday where we watched the president walking around a plant in pennsylvania. everyone was wearing a mask. he was not. he was definitely close to people. he was not 6 feet away. i know he claims that he takes this rapid test every day and, as a result, he doesn't have it. there he is kind of focusing his droplets toward people. is it possible that he absolutely, positively does not have it? back to masking, how effective is it if everyone does it? >> so this is one where i have changed my views in the last six weeks, as the science has changed. the science really is changing on this. more and more, every day, we're seeing evidence that masking is very important. if there was universal masking, if all people when they were outside wore masks, it could substantially decrease the

transmission of the disease. it could potentially substantially decrease the severity of the disease people get. the size of the kind of inoculum, the droplets you inhale can make a difference in how sick you get. i have really now come to believe that the evidence is pointing pretty clearly toward universal masking. it'd be great if our political leaders followed that and modelled that behavior. when they model it, other people feel more comfortable doing it. i'd like to see all our political leaders do that much more often. >> dr. jha, thank you very much for your candor and expertise. we really appreciate your coming on this morning. coming up, ron klain coordinated the u.s. response to ebo ebola. now, he's weighing in on america's fight against covid-19. the former obama adviser joins us straight ahead. plus, president trump is pushing obamagate in the middle of a pandemic. records fail to back up his

claims about his predecessor. nbc's carol lee joins us with that new reporting. "morning joe" will be right back.

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david ignatius, before you go, in the middle of something like a global pandemic, many countries often will look to the united states for leadership on a number of levels. that's what america's role has been in the past. is that what it is today? >> mika, i've been talking to european thought leaders this week in berlin, paris, bucharest, and i keep hearing the same question, which is, where is america? there's tremendous cooperation going on between american ngos and ones in europe, our scientists and university researchers are sharing information, trying, together,

to find cures for this terrible covid disease. but the level of government response, people really are shocked. this is the first big crisis since world war ii in which america generally has been absent from some of the international efforts to find solutions. our european friends just don't understand it. they're realizing this is a new world, that american leadership is not something you can expect or count on. it's painful for them because they want our help. they're looking for it, waiting for it, and it's not coming. >> wow. david, thank you very, very much. have a great weekend. coming up -- a safe one -- we'll hear from the ousted vaccine expert who says the u.s. still lacks a comprehensive plan to address the coronavirus pandemic. plus, mitch mcconnell does something pretty rare in washington. admits he was wrong. we'll explain that when "morning joe" comes back in two minutes.

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the pandemic is once every hundred years. what if it is no longer true? >> right. >> we want to be really ready for the next one. clearly, the obama administration did not leave, to this administration, any kind of gamepl plan for something like this. >> senate majority leader mitch mcconnell walking back his claim from earlier in the week, that the obama administration did not pass on a pandemic playbook to the trump's team for reference. it's a walk back that likely is going to be addressed a few times today. we want to welcome our next guest, former senior white house aide to presidents barack obama and bill clinton, ron klain. he served as the ebola response

coordinator and chief of staff to vice president joe biden. also joining us, pulitzer prize-winning columnist and editor of "washington post," eugene robinson. senior writer at "politico" and co-author of "the playbook," jake sherman, political contributor. along with willie and me. joe will be back on monday. i want to ask you, ron klain, i mean, mitch mcconnell tried to sort of clean it up here. was there very -- i mean, the white house is pushing back, saying the obama administration left nothing. what they left was very little. it wasn't workable. is that the case? >> well, of course not. we left behind a document that was said, in big red letters on the front, "playbook." no doubt it was there. 69 pages long. included on page nine a reference to the threat of new, emerging respiratory diseases, including coronavirus.

so the plan was there. the plan was detailed. the plan included this particular threat. more important perhaps even than the plan, we left behind an office on pandemic preparedness, in the national security council, with pandemic preparedness experts that john bolton disassembled in 20 l 18. we had a plan and a team. the white house ignored the first and disassembled the second. >> the plan and the team, how clear would have that been to an incoming president? i actually mean that seriously. with all the different things coming at him, and the election behind him, to have a pandemic playbook, a plan, and a team, like, can you give us a sense of what a blaring red light that would have been, compared to everything else that was coming his way? something you'd be aware of because you were dealing with these things with the president who, of course, had many other things on his plate. >> yeah. look, this is a threat. i mean, experts have been

warning about this. we know in addition to what president obama and our team warned president trump of, he had an oval office meeting with bill gates in 2017, where bill gates said, face-to-face, "hey, this is the number one thing that could kill millions of people around the world in an extra way that you need to be prepared for." the warning lights have been flashing on this for a long time. the white house, for the first few months, said, "no one could have seen this coming," yet every expert saw this coming. dr. jha, who you had on in the last segment, i've been at a number of conferences with him where he and i warned this was coming. the president was on notice. his team was on notice. the decision to ignore the obama playbook and disban the pandemic prevention team has had ramifications for the slowness of the response, the disorganization of the response, for the ignoring science in the response. all of these things were predictable mistakes, that ignoring the plan and

preparations have led to. >> willie? >> hey, ron, it's willie geist. good to have you on the show. they ignored the plan. there was a playbook. it's clear. there is no wiggle room. it said "playbook" on the front, but it was ignored. we are where we are here in the middle of may. as you led the obama administration's response to ebola, what can you say constructively, sitting here on a friday morning, that we could do as of today to continue to mitigate this a little bit and to continue to get the numbers down? and despite the fact we lost three months by twiddling our thumbs, what can we do today to fight this? >> willie, it is a great question. the answer is really straight forward. i find, again, this is just perplexing in terms of where we are. if you want to reopen the economy, the two things that the president should be pushing is testing and masking. why? because if you want me to go into a store or go into a restaurant, what i want to know,

do i have it? does the person next to me have it? that'll increase the confidence i'm going to have in going out into the economy. instead of being out there saying, "oh, i don't know about testing. testing is no good," the white house should be doing everything to promote more testing. that will leave consumers and workers more confident in the safety going out there. then we need universal masking. again, as mika said in the last hour, a mask doesn't so much protect me if i wear it, but it protects you if i wear it. you wearing one protects me if you're wearing it. again, we can go out in the economy much more. i mean, the public health and the economy aren't at odds with one another. they work hand in hand. the more you do things to make me feel safer, the more i'm going to go back to work. the more i'm going to go back to stores. the more i'll go back to restaurants. trying to tell me that there's nothing to worry about, that's not a strategy. it's not going to work. the american people are going to see through that. so we have to do these basic, simple things, that the

president seems to want to reject. every expert says they're the things to do. >> okay. so i got two points on that. the first is this, the testimony from the former government doctor who says that he lost a key post last month after opposing the president's push to use an unproven drug to treat coronavirus. rick bright, who was in charge of the federal agency, ron, that develops vaccines, told house lawmakers yesterday, there was no plan at the start of the outbreak, and that there is still no plan today. let's take a listen. >> our window of opportunity closing. if we fail to improve our response now, based on science, i fear the pandemic will get worse and be prolonged. there will be likely a resurgence of covid-19 this fall. it'll be greatly compounded by the challenges of seasonal influen influenza. without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history. first and foremost, we need to

be truthful with the american people. americans deserve the truth. the truth must be based on science. we have the world's greatest scientists. let us lead. let us speak without fear of retribution. our nation was not as prepared as we should have been. as we could have been. some scientists raised early warning signals that were overlooked. pages from our pandemic playbook were ignored by some in leadership. i believe, with proper leadership and collaboration across government, with the best science leading the way, we can devise a comprehensive strategy. the time is running out because the virus is still spreading everywhere. people are getting restless to leave their homes. >> when you look at the first fore months of this year, would you describe the government's

and the administration's response as a success or a failure? >> i believe we could have done better. i believe there are critical steps that we did not take in time. >> do you believe if your suggestions were implemented, lives would have been saved, and the severity of the pandemic might have been lessened? >> i believe lives would have been saved if we had proper medical protective equipment for our health care workers, yes. >> so people died because you weren't listened to? >> people died because they didn't have appropriate protective equipment to save their lives and protect them from getting infected. >> there was a visit to the cdc on march 6th. at that visit, the administration said, anyone who wants a test will get a test. was that true then? >> there still are not enough tests. >> so even this week, as we're being told, "anybody who wants a test can have a test," is that true in the united states of

america? >> no. >> it's just painful. secretary azar, ron, said everything in the testimony had been met now, calling them benchmarks. the president called him disgruntled. your reaction? >> i know dr. bright a little bit. i worked with him on the ebola response. he is apolitical. he is a professional. he cares only about the science and about promoting vaccines and other therapeutics, other drugs that could help fight this disease. you know, the question that the trump administration still hasn't really answered is why was he removed from this post? if it wasn't for the reasons that dr. bright says, which is that he opposed the politicization of science, opposed the white house's plan to shove hydroxy down people's throats, though it wasn't proven, he wasn't listened to when warning of the lack of protective gear.

why was he removed? we haven't heard a good answer on that. his warnings, whether he was removed or not, look, his warnings are crystal clear and seem obvious to all people. the last point you showed, him talking about the fact, the president saying on march 6th, everyone who wants a test can get a test, we still have people in all parts of the country, all sectors, saying that they want to be tested, can't get tested. they need to be tested and can't get tested. i think that part of the testimony speaks for itself. >> so, ron -- >> ron, also, rick bright -- oh, sorry. go ahead, mika. >> go ahead, willie. you take it. >> i was just going to say, he also poured some cold water on some of the optimism around a vaccine. the president is talking about having something by the end of the year. other doctors are saying, maybe the beginning of next year. he said the 12 to 18 month window may be too optimistic. he also added, the window is closing to address this pandemic. do you agree with that, that the window is closing to address the

pandemic? what does that mean, exactly? if the window closes, then what? >> i think what dr. bright is talking about is -- obviously, it's too late to save the 80,000 plus lives we've already lost. that forever will be something we should look at and say, "what went wrong with that?" i think what he's saying is this, we still don't have enough test. we still don't have enough protective gear. we still don't have enough preparations. as dr. jha just discussed, we still don't have meaningful guidelines from the cdc on reopening. yet, we're about to proceed, all over this country, with reopening this month. the window that's closing is the window to get ready for the resurgence of cases that will come in late summer or early fall. the problem with that is, we saw this way back in 1918 with the spanish flu. turned out, the second wave of the spanish flu was worse than the first wave. we don't know if that'll be true here or not, but we do know that if this disease hits hard, not in spring, like it has now, but

in fall or winter, when hospitals are already filled with flu cases, it's going to be a double whammy for our country and for our health care system. we need to get ready for that now. i think that's what dr. bright is referring to. >> so, ron, given the fact that you were involved and knew well of an office that was set up, a team that was in place, a playbook that went in depth about emerging respiratory viruses, inclouding the coronavirus, and we have up to 90,000 dead to this day, and a president who seems to be focused on rage tweeting and on conspiracy theories about joe that are cruel to the people he talks about, now he appears to be going after president obama during this difficult time for the country, difficult to say the least. i guess i would ask, in terms of helping people understand how

safe they are, to understand the reality of the leadership they have, how would you characterize our response so far? negligence, avoidance, criminal, just a severe lack of ability to process? how would you characterize the way this white house and this president is responding to this pandemic? >> well, i think it's been focused on all the wrong things. i think that there's been this obsession with trying to protect the level of the stock market. that's really what's driven the president's reaction to this. it's why he spent all of january and february denying the existence of the virus or denying it was going to be serious, or saying it'd be under control. it's why he sent larry kudlow on tv to talk about it late february, opposed to tony fauci. i think there's been an effort to try to protect the stock market from the fall that came. the problem with that, mika, is not only did the president really deny this was happening, but his denials really punished

the experts who spoke up in his own administration. dr. nancy messonnier, a career official at the centers for disease control, issued a stark warning in february about what was coming. according to reports, the president called up secretary azar afterwards and said, "you need to fire her. her advice has been put to the side." she's the head official on respiratory disease at the center for diseases control. she's been shuttered to the side during this whole thing. that sent a signal to the experts, don't speak up. people like dr. bright who spoke up. there was a chance in january and february to do something about it. the president rejected that, denied that, and i think that set us behind. now, we're still, i'd say, on that plan, to some extent. the president still kind of refuses to fully embrace masks. indeed, even as scientists race to get a vaccine, the president said the other day, i'm not sure i'll take it when it is available, which also inflamed the anti-vaccine sentiment in

this country, that we'll have to tame if, when we get a vaccine, we're going to have people take that vaccine. we've seen a failure of leadership from start to finish here. it is not just a backward looking statement. that plagues our response right now. >> ron klain, thank you very much. just a note to donald trump before you tweet and undermine what ron was saying about your denial in january and february, just keep in mind, your quotes are there for everyone to see. in january, you said it was totally under control. january 24th, you thanked china for everything. on the 30th, you said you're working closely with china. you thanked them again and said it'd be a good ending for the united states of america. february 23rd, you said, "we have it very much under control in this country." that is a complete denial of what is going on today, with 90,000 dead. february 26th, "oh, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to go down to zero, that's a

pretty good job we've done." nope. not a good job. it's not 15 people. we're close to 90,000 dead and more more to come. february 27th, you said, it is going to disappear like a miracle. it will disagree. march 7th, "no, i'm not concerned at all. no, we've done a great job with it." backing up ron klain's point, that the president himself, with his own words, denied and rejected the reality of this virus which is ravaging this country. willie? >> ron klain, another expert, underlying testing is the key to getting our arms around this. the president yesterday in pennsylvania saying testing is, quote, overrated. let's turn from the public health side of this to the economic side. jake sherman, as you cover capitol hill, the house will vote on a bill to put $3 trillion of stimulus into the economy. another $3 trillion of stimulus.

the senate, republicans in the senate, have said it is not a serious proposal, that it is dead on arrival. they won't even entertain anything probably until after the memorial day recess. where does that leave us? are republicans open at all to more stimulus in the economy? >> they're going to have to be. unemployment is going to reach, most analysts think, close to 20%. it is already quite close. states are going to have to start laying people off, furloughing municipal employees. mitch mcconnell has said, in various ways, that he believes there should be more stimulus. now, there's a lot of questions, willie, about what this will look like, and it won't look anything like the house democrats' $3 trillion bill that will pass today. the big question is, as i said, state and local funding, money for states and local governments that have been hit really hard by the loss of tax revenue and just funding the response to the coronavirus. mitch mcconnell has a red line. he wants to shield employers from lawsuits after the

coronavirus world -- after the regular world gets back into effect. on the other side, nancy pelosi does not want to do that. she has some red lines of her own, which are just going to be tough to reconcile. again, we are, i would say, at this point, the white house believes they are between four and seven weeks away from another bill. we'll see if that can hold. i mean, the politics of that are quite difficult. this vote today, in the house of representatives, is going to be a tough one for democrats. there are a lot of democrats from trump districts, willie, that are just not eager to vote for a $3 trillion package, which republicans are already describing as a liberal wish list. >> yeah. republicans have said, "let's see how this looks when we get the previous $3 trillion into the economy before we appropriate another $3 trillion." >> right. >> i want to you about senator richard burr temporarily stepping down as chair of the intel committee over in the senate because of these questions around his stock sales and coronavirus and this

pandemic. his phone was seized by the fbi. he turned it over as the fbi exercised a search warrant. senator kelly loeffler has submitted documents to the ethics committee and the sec. how is all this playing out inside the senate, and what are the implications of senator burr stepping down temporarily as chair of the intel committee? >> we're seeing something relatively remarkable. the government is cracking down on members of the senate for stock trading. this is not only senator burr but senator diane feinstein, long-time democrat from california, who once chaired the intelligence committee, said she answered questions from the feds, from the fbi about her husband's stock trading. kelly loeffler turned over information, and richard burr has had his cell phone confiscated. you're seeing a broad swath of members of congress who are not under investigation, per se, but are being looked into by the federal government. now, the implications of richard burr stepping aside, he'll

remain on the intelligence committee. he's not up for re-election. but it does highlight, as my colleagues write this morning, it does highlight that it is relatively strange, that members of congress who routinely get information from the government, are able to trade in equities and stocks with little restrictions. there's long been questions about whether they should put their assets in a blind trust. i think this will revive the question. i wouldn't be surprised if you see tightening of these rules in the coming weeks and months and perhaps a year. >> gene robinson, your column, you talk about how america is a country to be pitied. please explain. >> well, mika, good morning. >> morning. >> during our lifetimes, i think we've talked about the phrase american exceptionalism. that means different things to different people in the country, around the world.

you know, in my lifetime, certainly, america has been a country to be admired by many people, to be feared internationally by some people. never to be pitied. right now, given our response to the coronavirus, our inadequate and tragically inadequate response to the coronavirus, our essentially checking out of international efforts to coordinate a response, our now efforts to reopen the economy clearly sort of haphazard and in patchwork ways that don't look like a good idea to anybody, you know, to people in europe and the people in the rest of the world. and i just have heard from

people who are looking at the united states with a kind of pity, saying, you know, we're so sorry for you. a lot of it has to do, of course, with president trump's lack of leadership. his denial of the threat. his many mistakes in handling it . continued denial for the need of testing when, in fact, we need something close to universal testing if we're really going to open up the economy. i also think it is deeper than that. you know, you look at the centers for disease control and prevention, which i think of as the greatest public health agency in the world. maybe it still is. it had an opportunity. it took the opportunity to try to develop a coronavirus test early on and totally failed.

just missed the opportunity. we were blind in the first months of the virus as it spread around the country. this is a problem that we'll really have to look at after the november election. >> yeah. i totally agree with you. you see the arc of this presidency, gene. i don't know if you remember the video we showed here. it was shown around the world, of world leaders just laughing and mocking president trump standing in a circle. just laughing their heads off at what a joke he was. an international, global joke. now the mockery has turned to pity, and that is staggering. still ahead on "morning joe," president trump is ramping up the attacks on his predecessor. president obama is hitting back with a simple response, "vote." we'll talk about trump's

decision to focus on a long-running conspiracy in the middle of a pandemic. you're watching "morning joe." we'll be right back. >> the pandemics only happen once every hundred years, but what if it is no longer true? >> right. >> we want to be really ready for the next one. clearly, the obama administration did not leave, to this administration, any kind of game plan for something like this. >> you said that the previous administration didn't leave a plan. they pushed back against that. >> i was wrong. they did leave behind a plan. i clearly made a mistake in that regard. as to whether or not the plan was followed and who is the critic, all the rest, i don't have any observation about that because i don't know enough about the details of that. effortless is the lincoln way. so as you head back out on the road, we'll be doing what we do best. providing some calm amidst the chaos. with virtual, real-time tours of our vehicles

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it was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. if i were a democrat, instead of a republican, i think everybody

would have been in jail a long time ago. i'm talking with 50-year sentences. it is a disgrace, what's happened. this is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country. >> president trump deflecting from the pandemic with ramped up attacks against former president barack obama. now, he's calling on congress to have him testify. trump is accusing obama of illegally targeting his associates in a long-running conspiracy he has dubbed obamagate. there is no hard evidence to support the claims. still, he tweeted yesterday, "if i were a senator or congressman, the first person i would call to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the usa, by far, is former president obama. he knew everything. do it, lindsey graham. just do it.

no more mr. nice guy. no more talk." while the practice of unmasking is routine in government, it may now be a centerpiece to president trump's re-election efforts this fall. the "washington post" reports that in the case of michael flynn, trump and his allies used the his of names to claim obama, biden, and others sought to sabotage the incoming trump administration. according to the paper, two people involved in trump's re-election campaign said the effort was designed not only to weaken biden but tarnish obama, who is likely to be a visible surrogate for biden this fall. obama had the highest approval rating at 60% of all living political figures tested in a recent republican national committee poll of voters in 17 battleground states. biden and pence tied for second at 47%. here we go. joining us now, former justice department spokesman, now

justice and security analyst, matt miller. distinguished professor of global affairs at the johns hopkins school of advanced international studies, hall brans joins us. and nbc news correspondent carol lee, who has reporting on how trump allies pushed obamagate, but the records fail to back them up. carol, i'll start with your reporting on that. what'd you find? >> reporter: well, what we found is there's essentially two threads to this accusation, that there was some sort of conspiracy among obama administration officials, to take down president trump and, specifically, michael flynn. the first is that they knew in advance of an fbi investigation into michael flynn, and particularly knew that the fbi intended to interview flynn. second is this unmasking issue. if you look at that, unmasking is a routine process. if an official gets an intelligence report of intelligence gathered on a foreigner, and there is the name

of an american there there, it is redacted. they can request to have the name given to them to further understand the intelligence. in the list of officials that the director of national intelligence unclassified and disclosed, there's a number of obama officials in there who made those requests, and the name of the person happened to be michael flynn. also in the disclosure was a letter from the director of the national security agency, who said that these requests were made, cleared by the nsa, and were justified. that's the unmasking piece of that. then if you take the fbi's -- the idea that the fbi, its interview of flynn was previously known by obama administration officials -- and, remember, the fbi's interview took place four days after president obama left office. that claim centers around this january 5th, 2017, meeting between president obama, vice president biden, sally yates, who was then the deputy attorney general, and james comey, who was then the fbi director. if you look at sally yates'

sworn testimony to the special counsel, she says in the meeting, obama said, "we've learned some things about flynn. i don't want to know anything else, but i need to know if we should withhold any accepsensit information, giving his relationship with russia, when briefing him during the transition." comey's answer is classified, but we're told that flynn was fully briefed on everything he needed to know. they didn't hold anything back. yates also testified that she didn't learn about the fbi's interview of flynn until the day of. that suggests that wasn't discussed in the meeting, as some of president trump's allies charged. that testimony is backed up by another justice department official, mary mccord. all of this is being used to try to attack vice president biden. he's given some confusing answers, frankly, in answering whether or not he knew of an investigation about flynn while he was vice president. last night, mika, he tried to

clear that up in a town hall with msnbc. let's take a listen to that. >> i was never part or had any knowledge of any criminal investigation into flynn while i was in office. period. not one single time.miller, you spokesman for the justice department. we'll ask you again what we asked in our last hour of jeremy bash. is there anything exceptional, is there anything extraordinary here about what happened in the intelligence committee in terms of unmasking? for those who don't quite understand what unmasking is and how common it may be, if you could just lay that out, as well. >> sure. there's nothing at all unusual or inappropriate about unmasking someone's name. it happens every day in this administration, just as it happened every day in the obama administration. the thing that is so nonsensical about this attack is that, by definition, you could not target someone by unmasking them. when you give an intelligence product in front of you, it says

"u.s. person one," which is what it says, if you asked to see the name of that person, you don't know what the name is going to be until it comes back to you. the idea that you could go and target mike flynn by asking for the names of u.s. person one to be unmasked just defies common sense. and i think the thing that worries me more here is, look, the scandal is not what happened in the obama administration. the scandal, to me, is that the president has finally been able to get full control of the intelligence community and of the law enforcement apparatus in this country and is now using it to target a political opponent. that's the takeaway of the last few weeks. you see ric grenell, on top of the intelligence community, politicizing intelligence the way that bill barr politicized law enforcement at the justice department c department. joe biden has to run against trump and the trump campaign and the weight of the american intelligence community and law enforcement apparatus.

that is a very scary proposition in a country that has always, you know, believed itself to be a beacon for the rule of law. >> for those who say maybe this isn't political in any way, and might be thinking that the president is on the to something here, just keep in mind, this fits a pattern. he spoke openly about being okay with getting dirt on a political rival from a foreign leader. he also told joe and me on the campaign, which we reported on the show, that the birther thing about president obama that he was peddling, that, yes, he agreed with us it was terrible. he agreed with us that he should stop it. but then he said, "you know, it works." he admitted that he was doing that to sow doubt about president obama and try to undermine his campaign. with that, hall bran brans, welo the show. not sure you could imagine

yourself commenting on a situation like this. president trump calling for an investigation of president obama and vice president biden. your reaction to the context in which this is happening, and is there any historical precedent? >> so i think there are two contexts to keep in mind here. the first is that the president has established a pattern of going after what he and his supporters refer to as the deep state, and implying or simply stating that there's some nefarious campaign under way by elements of the national security community, to undermine his legitimacy and his administration. this has been a theme of the president's going back a number of years. i think we can continue to expect this through the campaign and through 2021 and after, if, indeed, he's re-elected. the second piece of this ties into u.s./russia relations. so it's been clear for a long time that the president would like to have a very different

relationship with vladimir putin than the united states has today. he has been constrained a bit during his first term by the momentum of u.s. policy, by the frictions in u.s./russia relations, and by the fact that most of the rest of the national security community in the united states takes a much tougher line on russia. what this flags for me is that if the president is re-elected, i would expect to see him to double down on poboth these thes in a second term. both attacks on the policy and national security, and efforts to reset in a fundamental way the u.s. relationship with russia. >> willie? >> we have fired up our nashville bureau and pulitzer prize-winning historian and, more important, vanderbilt professor jon meacham joins us now. good to see you, my friend. >> morning. >> let's talk about precedence here. you're look at looking at the long time line of history. you had, yesterday, president trump in a tweet calling for

president obama, his predecessor, to be called before congress to testify in this alleged scandal he is pushing out there right now. have we seen that before? there's, of course, always a fight during a political campaign. many presidents, the bushes, in particular, who you've written biographies about, basically said, "i'm not going to talk about what's happening right now. i'll stand on the sidelines." he did get some pickup on it. president trump sent a message to lindsey graham, who said, "well, i think it is a bad precedent to call president obama, but i will hold hearings about what they believe happened to general flynn. i will hold hearings about the predicate of the mueller investigation." have we seen a sitting president though call for his predecessor to be pulled before congress to testify? >> no. as ever. >> that's why he won a pulitzer right there. >> there you go. i could go on, and i will, but that's the fundamental answer.

you know, as ever, the president has, the incumbent president, has exacerbated some elemental human forces that most people have kept in check. by and large, have been kept and managed in check for going on two and a half centuries now. he just has rejected that civilized veneer, that civilized screen that separates us from the political state of nature. he's just taken us straight into a kind of hobbsian world of anything goes. the last president to testify before congress was gerald ford in -- about the pardon of president nixon. he did so voluntarily. before that, i think i'm right about this, no one had gone up

to congress since george washington. he'd gone once, hated it, and nobody ever went back. now, former presidents get deposed. they are absolutely within the rule of law. it's one of the things that makes america, america. the weaponization, the coinage of this term, which i'm not going to say, but the coinage of the term is an absolute -- i can't call it apocalypse, because that would suggest the height of something -- but it is the full manifestation of the trump era. it is grabbing at nothing and attempting to mislead just enough people by demonizing his predecessor, that he can make hay out of that. it is another -- it is another

blow against the role of fact in america. >> back to hal granbrands. no president, bar none here. questions that come to mind, is there any type of in-real-time oversight arm to deal with something like this? any way to hold the president accountable? we are in the middle of a pandemic. up to 90,000 americans have died so far. many more may die, as well. some argue that the president's focus on conspiracy theories is hurting the american people in the middle of this pandemic. actually causing more deaths because our eye is off the ball of working on dealing with it. hal, you brought up our relationship with russia. how would you characterize the relationship with russia right now, the potential for more interference in the next presidential election, and what are the questions americans

should be asking about that relationship? >> so i think the -- it's more of a certainty than a possibility, of russian interference in the next election. all of the reporting that we have seen indicates that the russians are preparing to do in 2020 exactly what they did in 2016. why wouldn't they? because if the purpose of the interference in 2016 was to destabilize american democracy and to tarnish the image of america's electoral process, then they have certainly succeeded. they have been aided in that by the president and many of his allaya al allies, as well. so until the russians have some reason to believe that their interference in american democracy isn't working, or is backfiring, we should expect it to continue. with respect to u.s./russia relations, there is an incredibly odd dichotomy here. at the level of day-to-day relations, the relationship is

basically in a deep freeze. the united states and its european allies have put relatively harsh economic sanctions on russia since the invasion of ukraine in 2014. the united states has been working with its nato allies to strengthen the alliance's defenses in eastern europe, so on and so forth. at the level of political leadership, you have a much different relationship, where you have a president who has repeatedly sided with vladimir putin over his own intelligence agencies and over the consensus judgment of the west. so i think what you should be asking from a voter's perspective is what would we see in a second trump term? would we see additional efforts to repair the relationship with russia at the expense of western solidarity? would we see additional efforts to establish relationships with vladimir putin, ignoring, essentially, putin's repeated efforts to interfere in american politics on behalf of president

trump? >> hal brands, thank you very much for coming on this morning. willie? >> matt miller, i want to ask you about the flynn trial. it's actually not over yet, despite the fact the justice department wants to withdraw its case against general flynn. despite the fact he pleaded guilty twice to lying to the fbi. the judge in the case has now appointed a former federal judg the point of view that says, wit wait a minute, maybe this shouldn't be withdrawn by the justice department. how common is it to appoint a former federal judge like that, and what does it tell you about this case? >> it is very unusual. this is, of course, a very unusual case. i think there are two questions for the judge going forward. one is what he does with michael flynn. two is what he does with the justice department. with respect to flynn, i think at the end of this process, the charges are almost certainly

going to be dismissed against him. it is difficult to see the judge, you know, continuing to insist that flynn be sentenced and be forced to plead guilty after the prosecutors in the case said they don't want to bring charges. he's raised the idea that maybe he could hold him in contempt for lying when he came in and said he did lie to the fbi. something he now says he didn't do. i think that's even a difficult thing for the judge to do. i suspect, ultimately, he won't do that. i think there is a second question here, too. what does the judge do to the justice department? he is clearly troubled by the justice department's actions. i think rightly so. it is obviously there is political interference going on, when you see the career prosecutors walk away from the case. they're unwilling to stomach what the leadership of the department is doing. in the past, when i was at the justice department and we dismissed a case in judge sullivan's court against senator ted stephens, he appointed an independent prosecutor to report directly to him, to investigate

the justice department, and see if people there ought to be held accountable. i don't think it's out of the realm of question he does more than write an opinion about what happened in the case, but he does further inquiry into the actions of the justice department, either on his own or appoint someone like he did in the stephens case. >> thank you very much, matt miller. carol lee, thank you for your reporting. jon meacham, stay with us, if you can. hold china accountable for coronavirus but don't scapegoat them. that's the advice from richard haass on how to handle that country. richard joins us next on "morning joe."

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visit xfinity.com/prepare. it is the fifth and final day of richard haass week on "morning joe." joining us now, the president of the council of foreign relations, richard haas. he has a new book out this week entitled "the world, a brief introduction." boy, our world is in a very different place today, richard. so let's start there. you've advised presidents. what does the u.s. need to do and also need to avoid doing as we move through this pandemic? >> thanks, mika. look, we have to understand first of all that this is a global challenge. we can't ignore them. we also can't meet it alone. so it means that we have got to work with others, whether economically and making sure the world can recover from this.

we should be jointly working with others to produce a vaccine and anti virals rather than opting not to join international efforts. we obviously have to do some things for ourselves in terms of testing. there is no substitute for it in terms of essentially providing for our own economy. national security is always a mixture of what we do in the world and what we do at home. this pandemic is no exception to that. >> hey, richard. you talk about and you write about today holding china accountable but not making it the lone scapegoat for what is happening here in our country. obviously we have outlined in this show repeatedly all of the failures, the silencing of doctors, the lack of transparency from china. yesterday in an interview the president said he's looking at cutting off ties with china. he says he doesn't even want to speak to president xi. what do you make of his approach? who knows, he will say something different today. it may have just been words in

that particular interview, but what are the dangers of that approach? >> look, the president blows hot and cold on china and president xi, but neither one makes for a serious or sustainable foreign policy. i would say two things. one, here at home we have got to put ourselves in a position so we can compete with china over the long term. that means among other things increasing the amount of money the federal government puts into basic research. it means improving our infrastructure, improving our k-12 education, changing our immigration system so the most talented can come here and stay here. we need to do all of that for ourselves, but then internationally swree g internationally we have got to compete with china with our partners called allies. this means rather than beating up on our allies in asia, the south koreans and japanese, we should work with them militarily, diplomatically, economically. in the first week of the presidency president trump decided the united states would not join with our major trading partners in asia and the

pacific. we could have done that, the trans-pacific partnership, and set up a set of standards. we could have gone to china with our partners and allies and said, here are the rules, china, if you want to have access to our markets here are the rules you have to play by. instead we "on the money"opted . >> john meacham. >> richard, what is your sense of our standing in the world on a basic level of competence. i suspect the markets are fairly secure, as secure as they can be, but our authority in the world ebbs and flows, our reputation. where wow rank us given ould yo our response to the pandemic in the last 30 to 40 years? >> well, john, the arch answer -- and it is really hard to say -- is our standing has

gone down significantly. one is the pandemic. anyone who looks at how we responded shakes our head at our lack of competence. we don't look good compared to singapore, japan, australia. it shows democracy can respond effectively to a crisis like this, and we have essentially chosen not to. but beyond the pandemic, i think when the rest of the world looks at the united states they don't think just about american foreign policy. they think about america. they think about the quality of our democracy, the quality of our economy, the quality of our society. when we show that we can change and reform in peaceful ways and innovate, you know, everyone lines up around the world traditionally. why? they line up around our consulates so they can come to the united states and study. we want to be that america again that others respect and others will want to emulate. we have moved away from it, but that's in our power. we have the power once again to become the america that others will respect and want to

essentially model themselves after. >> all right. the book is "the world, a brief introduction." richard haas, thank you. i hope that is the case, that we have the power to do that and we will be able to do it. coming up, one of our next guests argues the administration had a chance to contain the coronavirus, but now it appears the u.s. is giving up as more people are dying. we'll explain that. plus, the cdc unveils scaled-back guidelines for safely reopening the country. after the white house held back previous guidance it deemed too prescriptive. you are watching "morning joe." we are back in two minutes. - [narrator] meet the ninja foodi air fry oven.

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when you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. >> that was how president trump defined success back in february. as "politico" notes, there is now a very different definition of accomplishment. to quote senator lindsey graham, the closer you can have it to 120,000 deaths, i think you can say you limited the casualties in this war. we're close to 90,000 to this day. good morning and welcome to "morning joe." it is friday, may 15th. joe will be back on monday, but with willie and me this morning we have the co-founder and ceo of axius jim vandehei.

former chief of staff at the cia and department of defense, nbc news national security analyst jeremy bash is with us. calmness and associate editor for "the washington post", david ignatius is with us this morning. good to have you all. we have a lot to get to this morning. an ousted vaccine official appears before congress and slams the trump administration's response to the coronavirus. dr. rick bright warned that the u.s. still has no plan. we'll play for you his testimony. it is pretty riveting. we will have the latest on the economic picture as u.s. unemployment claims total upwards of 36 million people. the latest trump distraction, it is a big one. now asking republicans in congress to call former president barack obama to testify. it all might be a calculated campaign strategy, but it is a massive distraction and many

believe that this president right now is trying to distract from the never-ending death toll of this virus and using ploys and conspiracy theories and actually raising questions about president barack obama, only part of his massive distraction play but it is taking everything to a new level. we begin though with the cdc yesterday releasing previously-withheld guidance documents on reopening american institutions which appear to be a lot less detailed than the draft recommendations sent to the white house for review last month. now, we've been waiting for a while for these recommendations, and when you read them you just wonder what the wait was for. according to "politico", the new cdc guidelines provide brief checklists meant to help key businesses and other operating-in-public reopen safely. in a separate one-page document the cdc offers decisionmaking tools for schools, workplaces,

camps, child care programs, mass transit systems and bars and restaurants. the associated press reported last week that the white house previously shelved cdc advice providing recommend acations fo safely reopening. willie, when you read them, they ee kwif indicate by t ee kwif indica have equivocation by saying unless you don't want to do them. >> yes, that reads like a cliff notes version of the original 63-page document the cdc sent to the white house. >> exactly. >> and said, hey, can we get feedback on this. they were slow walked and now we have this very broad one-page summary of what you might do if you want to but effectively like president trump wants and got his way leaves everything up to the state. meanwhile, president trump visited a medical equipment

plant yesterday in allentown, pennsylvania where he told an audience they should urge their democratic governor to reopen the entire state. >> i say it is the transition to greatness. the transition is the third quarter. the fourth quarter is going to do very well, and next year is going to be through the roof. we have to get your governor of pennsylvania to start opening up a little bit. you have areas of pennsylvania that are barely affected and they want to keep them closed. you can't do that. >> pennsylvania governor tom wolf has issued a strict stay-at-home order until june 4th but partly lifted restrictions in 37 counties across the state. officials in some counties that remain closed say they will defy the governor and reopen today, leaving local businesses scrambling for guidance. so, jim vandehei, i know you have been looking at this story closely, specifically in the state of wisconsin where you have tension between public health officials worried about

opening too soon, dr. anthony fauci chief among them, and people wanting to get back to work, in some cases governors an mayors and people who run businesses saying, "i can't stand this anymore, it is time to open." now they have president trump for the last several weeks encouraging them in that direction. >> the good news here is that most people -- look, almost every business, every hospital, every school is figuring out what is best for the people that are going to come back and work for them or go to school there. they're not going to act like dopes and do things that they think are going to put people at risk. so every business is doing that. most people are listening to their employer, their school, their governor. they're not actually even looking to the federal government for direction on this. that said, obviously president trump is now saying, "get back to work, get back to work, get back to work." in wisconsin you had the state supreme court overrule a democratic governor and basically say all of your restrictions are lifted. at least in the short term you have a real-world unfolding

experiment of what happens if you can go back to work. you see some of the portraits and some of the pictures on social media where in some bars people are crammed in there, they're doing shots, they're hugging, they're high fiving. some restaurants are open. it differs between what county you are in and what city you are in, but in a lot of places people are being responsible. they're saying, "hey, i'm a republican and maybe trump is saying this, but i'm listening to the health experts and i'm not going to go out." now between what is happening in wisconsin, what had been happening in georgia, florida, other places, we will see what happens if people go out en masse, start to resume living the way we all want to live. do you see a massive flare-up in the number of cases and therefore the number of deaths? if we do, it is going to take a lot longer for things to reopen because you will have to shut back down, figure out what you got wrong and what is the right cadence for getting back to work. it is interesting, the clip that you played or talked about in pennsylvania where the president is now saying, "next year is

economy will roar back." remember, three weeks ago it was at the end of the year things will roar back. they now realize by election day growth will be in the double digits, growth will be slower than we think, many businesses will go out of business and not be able to come back into business, so people that had jobs won't have them. you see it every single day. there's a massive disconnect between the market which people are looking at and saying, "oh, looks like things are coming back" and the reality on the ground. talk to any business owner. nothing is going to look like it did before and it is going to unfold more slowly than any of us had hoped for. >> mika, this, of course, is an economic question but president trump is encouraging it also as a cultural question, sort of a red state/blue state thing. he retweeted a guy in a bar if florida showing we're all in this bar, none of us are wearing masks and sent it to a message to what he called commies in

blue states and the president retweeted that to sort of underline the message. >> you know, this is a president who is sort of sending a message to people that perhaps they can fly in the face and defy this virus and have that trump attitude toward this virus of, you know, who cares or whatever, you. but remember on january 22nd, and, of course, if the president is watching -- i say "if," i put that in quotes because he does all the time. on january 22nd he said, "we have it totally under control, it is one person coming in from china, it will be fine." on january 24th he said china has been working hard to contain the coronavirus. the united states greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. it will all work out well. in particular, on behalf of the american people i want to thank president xi. january 30th -- we are talking january here. this is when joe biden actually wrote this opinion piece warning

americans and this president that a global pandemic was coming. january 30th, "we are working closely with china and other countries. we think it is going to have a very good ending for us. we're almo we're almost at 90,000 people dead. february 23rd, we have it very much under control in this country. president trump, those were your words. that's what you told the american people. again, when you have 15 people and 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to zero, that was february 26th. we're in may and we are at almost 90,000 people dead. he said on february 26th, that was a really good job that we had done. february 27th, the next day, the next day, "it is going to disappear one day, it is like a miracle." it will disappear. february 27th, we're in may and almost 90,000 people are dead.

on march 7th, "no, i'm not concerned at all. no, we've done a jat of gregrea it." now the president is walking around a plant in pennsylvania wearing no mask even though every expert in the top of their field, in epidemiology and pandemics saying masks protect other people from your droplets and you may be carrying it. even though tests are done every day in the white house and the president thinks he's free, but tests are inconclusive. he is walking around a plant close to people, not even social distancing, no mask, and he gave this thought on testing. take a look. >> could be the testings, frankly, overrated. maybe it is overrated, but whatever they start yelling, we want more, we want more. she always say, we want more because they don't want to give you credit. we do and they say, we want more.

we have the greatest testing in the world. don't forget we have more cases than anybody in the world. why? because we do more testing. when you test you have a case. when you test you find something is wrong with people. if we didn't do testing, we would have very few cases. they don't want to write that. it is common sense. >> no. wow. we would have booked a doctor for this segment but it is so frighteningly obvious that the president is uttering complete stupidity and is flying in the face of everything that this virus can do to this country. when you have a test, yes, you have a case, and then you know about the case, mr. president, and you are able to isolate the case and contact trace the case and, yes, when you test you have a case. it seems to me donald trump doesn't want to know about cases. donald trump doesn't want to know about cases in this country.

perhaps those numbers make him look bad for his presidential second term ambitions. i don't know. willie, how do you explain this? >> i don't know how to explain it. i'm glad we didn't insult a doctor by bringing him or her on to try to explain this. the quote, again, "if we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases, it is common sense." >> oh, lord. >> that's ron burgundy stuff right there. let's turn to senior white house reporter for nbc news digital, shannon petty. good morning. good to see you. let's talk about what the president is up to these days making comments like that out on the road. he had his trip to arizona last week, a trip to pennsylvania -- not exactly the rallies he would like to be holding. is this more of what we're going to be seeing here as he tries to conduct the presidential campaign in the middle of a pandemic? >> yes, that's what white house officials are telling me, to expect more of these official presidential trips to key battleground states. we've essentially entered phase

two of campaign in coronavirus. phase one were the press briefings where the president would come out and use the poetd y podium for hours at a time to get his message out there. his advisers told him it was a bad idea, doing more harm than helping, but they proposed the idea of getting him back on the road doing official trips. while these don't look like a campaign rally, not a stadium packed full of people there are optics that are similar. for example the soundtrack that the president plays at rallies played before the event in pennsylvania and arizona. some people in the crowd in pennsylvania, a crowd of workers who had "make america great again" hats. the motorcade route outside the facility were really packed with supporters who had come out to see the president. they were holding campaign signs, you know, trump/pence flags. many of them without masks, packed into close quarters. so there's almost a sort of de

facto rally going on outside of the facility and along the motorcade route. all of this is happening while joe biden is essentially stuck at home in his home studio, but the president's capitalizing now on the power of the presidency and the ability to get out there and travel on air force one to start taking his message to some of the key battleground states. >> nbc's shannon pettypiece. thank you very much. still ahead on "morning joe," our next guest says let's call it like it is. the u.s. is retreating on the pandemic. dr. leana wen joins us straight ahead. you are watching "morning joe." we will be right back.

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president trump in recent days has ramped up his attacks against former president barack obama. now he's calling on congress to have president obama testify.

president trump has accused obama of illegally targeting his associates in a long-running conspiracy he is calling obamagate. we will note there's no hard evidence to support the claims he is making. still, he tweeted yesterday, if i were a senator or congressman, the first person i would call to testify about the biggest political crime or scandal in the history of the usa, by far, is former president obama. he knew everything. do it, lindsey graham. no more mr. nice guy, writes the president, no more talk. >> it is the greatest political crime in the history of our country. if i were a democratic instead of a republican, i think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago, and i am talking with 50-year sentences. it is a disgrace what has happened. this is the greatest political scam, hoax in the history of our

country. >> i think it would be a bad precedent to compel a former president to come before the congress. that would open up a can of worms, and for a variety of reasons i don't think that's a good idea. >> i think what we're seeing here is the extent that donald trump will go to distract. it is very hard to distract from a virus and from 90,000 people dead, and counting. but most people who know trump very well know he will do anything, absolutely anything, and that is the perilous position this country is in. the question is how far republicans will go with him. they seem to be willing to do anything. while senator graham said he doesn't plan on having president obama testify, he did tell reporters yesterday that starting next month he plans on having his committee hold hearings on the origins of the russia probe.

this comes as senate republicans push for more investigations into the obama-era. calls for new probes began ramping up yesterday after acti acting director of intelligence, richard grenell -- drink about th think about that for a second. sent a list of officials they say asked for documents that led to the identity of michael flynn being unmasked from intelligence reports between the 2016 election and president trump's inauguration. senator and homeland security chairman ron johnson said, we will start requesting interviews with those individuals. senator graham wants to bring in high-profile obama administration officials including former fbi director comey, former director general sally yates and former director

of national intelligence james clapper. graham says he would like to have a report out by october, just weeks before the november election. david ignatius, i want to ask you your thoughts on this. but, again, framing it that this is happening in the middle of a global pandemic, that we are heading toward 100,000 americans dead. we don't have the testing we need. we don't have access to a virus any time soon. the country is on lockdown -- to a vaccine. the country is on lockdown, and we are, many believe, careening towards some form of a depression. now tell me your thoughts on these questions being raised about the obama administration. >> well, president trump's default answer to so many issues over the last three years has been to blame his predecessor, barack obama. this is a pretty standard approach for him, whatever it

is, north korea, now the pandemic. it was the predecessor's fault. this talk of obamagate is incomprehensible. he has never explained what he means, but he is trying to make the country move more partisan to jin up an investigation. i think we go back to the points you and jim were making at the beginning. the dimensions of this virus, the pandemic, the consequences for our economy are still impossible to predict, but this is a country that's frightened. we are losing our jobs. our neighbors are in financial difficulty. we don't know when we will be going back to work. we don't know when our kids will be going back to school. we worry about our parents and grandparents. so president trump has to be careful talking to a frightened country. if he seems to be playing politics at a time when we are thinking about our health and the health of people that we

love, i just don't think that's going to play. if you look at the recent poll numbers, mika, they're telling you that the move away from trump a few percentage points seems to be especially pronounced among older americans. those polls of 65-and-over have been moving away from trump in significant numbers. i think that's because those are the people that are most vulnerable, most in need of reassurance, steady policy, and that's precisely what president trump has not seemed able or willing to offer. he really has preferred to let this be a free-for-all with the states and local governments taking the burden of responsibility. so my feeling is that if you keeps pressing on the political card as through hearings on capitol hill blaming obama, blaming the predecessor, that may exacerbate his problems, it

may exacerbate the feeling in the country, hey, there's nobody looking out for my health and safety, they're playing politics, and that's going to hurt. still ahead, is the new root of covid-19, quote, we're no longer trying to eliminate the virus, instead we're accepting that americans will have to live with it and die from it? we'll read from the new column in "the washington post" coming up on "morning joe."

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u.s. unemployment claims have now spent eight straight weeks in the millions, now totaling upward of 36 million. the department of labor announced yesterday that another nearly 3 million people applied for jobless claims last week. staggering. the amount of claims has been on a steady decline as part of the country continues to reopen, but the number of people receiving ongoing benefits is still 22.8 million. joining us now, former treasury official, "morning joe" economic analyst steve ratner. steve, you are looking at specifics here. you have some charts on the unemployment picture and who is getting hurt the worst. tell us about it. >> yes, mika. as you led in, the unemployment numbers are getting worse and economists are accordingly taking down their forecasts. so you can take a look at a chart that shows you from goldman sachs what they just did earlier this week.

they were projecting, if you look at the second bar to the left, as recently as a month ago a 13.3% unemployment, the top of the gray bar. they're now projecting in the second quarter of this year 25% unemployment in this quarter. they've increased their projection for the third quarter to 18.5%, and even when you get to the fourth quarter when, of course, election day is going to occur, unemployment is likely to be around 10%. then if you look to the right side of this chart, you can see that even over the coming three years only modest declines in the unemployment rate. even when you get to 2023 we still have 6.6% unemployment, which is well above obviously the 3.8% we had before all of this started and well above what economists think of as full employment. so we are looking at a very slow return to work for most people and very high unemployment rates for a good while. now, let's take a look at how a couple of -- how this breaks down among a couple of different

groups of people. if you start with lower income workers, you can see that they are hurting the most. 39% of all workers who make less than $40,000 either lost their job or were furloughed back in march. that's obviously before even much of this hit. so 39% of lower income workers lost their jobs. only 19% of workers with incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 and only 13% of workers with incomes over $100,000. needless to say in these lower income areas, disproportionately minorities being hurt the worst by what is happening on the unemployment section. now, you mentioned the she-cession. let's talk about what is happening to women. if you start to the left here you can see, not surprisingly, historically men made up most of the labor force, 52% compared to 48% if you go all the way back to 2000.

in the 2008-2009 recession, that was a man recession. you can see that the share of jobs that went to men, the blue line drops precipitously, the share going to women increased. in fact, for the first time in our history women had more jobs than men coming out of the 08-09 recession. then we went back to a more traditional pattern, but all the way on the right you can see what has happened literally in one month, which is far more women lost their jobs than men who lost their jobs. so the share of the labor force going to men has gone up. why is that? that's because this is a very different recession than the last one. the last one was mostly about manufacturing, construction, jobs predominantly deny by meon. this pandemic recession is about, so far anyway, leisure, hospitality, education, and even in some parts of health care where women represent a majority of the labor force, so they are being hurt the worst this time around. so it is -- >> yeah. >> -- a different kind of recession and one that,

unfortunately, is hitting some of the people we least want to have hurt, people at the bottom of the income scale, minorities and women disproportionately. as we start to get numbers from later in the down chart, the april and may numbers and so forth, you should expect to see more of the same. coming up on "morning joe" -- >> globalists, you know what a globalist is? they want the globe to do well but they don't care about us. now we want everybody to do well, but we have to take care of america first. it has to be america first. >> that's president trump railing yesterday against globalism. up next, we will talk to jeffrey sachs who happens to have just written a book on the subject. "morning joe" is coming right back.

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we're committed to keeping you connected. for more information on how you can stay connected, visit xfinity.com/prepare. . i believe americans need to be told the truth. i believe that the best scientific guidance and advice was not being conveyed to the american public during that time. i believe by not telling america

the truth or being fully transparent regardless of where the information was coming from, people were not as prepared as they could have been and should have been. we did not forewarn people. we did not train people. we did not educate them on social distancing and wearing a mask as we should have in january and february. all of those forewarnings, all of those educational opportunities for the american public could have had an impact on further slowing the outbreak and saving more lives. we do not still have enough personal protective equipment to manage our health care workers and protect them from influenza and covid-19. we still do not have the supply chains ramped up for the drugs and vaccines and we still don't have plans in place in how we distribute those drugs and vaccines and we still do not have a comprehensive testing strategy so americans know which tests do what, what to do with the information, and we know how to fight this virus and trap it and kill it. there's a lot of work we still have to do.

>> there was a visit to the cdc on march 6th, and at that visit the administration said, "anybody who wants a test will get a test." was that true then? >> there are still not enough tests. >> so even this week as we're being told, "anybody who wants a test can have a test," is that true in the united states of america? >> no. that was ousted whistle-blower dr. rick bright testifying on capitol hill yesterday. joining us now, emergency physician and public health professor at george washington university, dr. leana wen. she previously served as baltimore's health commissioner. she is also now a contributing columnist to "the washington post" opinion section. also with us, "morning joe" chief medical correspondent dr. dave campbell and columbia university professor economist dr. jeffrey sachs. he is author of the frorgt

coming book entitled "the ages of globalization, geography, technology and institutions." >> lena wyndr. leana wen, i wil with you. you have a piece in "the washington post". are we really giving up? >> it seems that we are. we have come a long way for us to give up now, but, look, we had a strategy, mika. we had the strategy of reducing the number of cases while we're building up our capabilities to do testing, tracing, isolation. that was the whole point. we were talking about containing the virus, but we have come a long way and people have made all of these sacrifices, but by reopening too soon and not having the capabilities in place we're basically saying it is too hard to execute this strategy that so many people have given up so much for. if that's the case, then at least we should call it what it is and be honest and say we're not going to do containment anymore and we're just going to live with this virus, in which

case we should switch to a strategy we know in public health to be harm reduction. if you are going to have a risky behavior lie going to the salon, to restaurants, if schools reopen even if it is not entirely safe to do that, at least do everything we can to reduce the risk of people getting ill. >> well, there is definitely concern, a desire i think on all fronts to reopen the economy. nobody wants to stay on lockdown. i think that is safe to say. but in terms of how, the president yesterday speaking at a plant in pennsylvania, wearing no mask even though everyone else was, said that testing was overrated. that if you get a test, you get a case. exactly what do you make of that comment? >> you know, i have a toddler who is 2 1/2 and even he knows that if he covers his eyes, it doesn't mean that the scary thing in front of him is gone. it just means that he can't see

it. that's what it sounds like the president is saying, that, oh, if we don't do testing we just won't see the numbers, but the cases are still going to be there. in fact, that's what we've seen all along, that when we don't test there is explosive spread that's happening right in our communities. we don't find out until there is a huge outbreak that's really challenging to contain at that point. i'm really afraid that we keep on going on this trajectory where we're not anticipating what's ahead. i mean i worry too about even if we have the vaccine developed at some point, which would be wonderful, but even if we had the vaccine we're not anticipating all of the shortages that we might have of we don't know if we have enough syringes and needles and vials to admin strister the vaccine. unfortunately, these tragedies could have been prevented if we had the national foresight to

predict what is to come. >> dr. sachs, you have been in touch with health experts across the world where they've done a better job containing the coronavirus. granted, their populations are much smaller but still we are talking about good-size countries. what lessons can we take, what lessons can governors, mayors and school districts take from what has been done in asia and some of the more successful cases? >> really it is the fact that more than 2 billion people -- 2 billion, many times more than the u.s. population, live in countries that have stopped the epidemic. there are still some small outbreaks but nothing like the mass deaths and spread of disease in the united states, in china, taiwan, korea, japan, singapore, vietnam, australia, new zealand. the virus essentially has been suppressed.

yes, sporadic outbreaks but not mass death. we're in a situation of all of the worst. we have mass deaths. we don't have a recession. we have a depression, and it is going to be a depression as long as this epidemic is not in control. when trump talks about looking at america first, he has put america into the worst disaster in our modern history, the worst disaster since the civil war i would say. it is unbelievable whether it is on the economics, on the health. this man knows nothing, learns nothing, is vulgar, attacks and has put our country at the greatest risk we have ever been in, certainly from a national leader of this kind. so the answer is this is a controllable epidemic and it is being controlled in many, many

countries of the world, but our leadership is so blind and repressive that even when we have wonderful experts like dr. bright who knew it from the start, he was repressed by these political hacks starting with a vicious know-nothing president and then going with a crony who heads the health and human services department till today so that the professionals are unable to speak in this country. >> so i think a lot of economic -- i know economic experts and health experts believe that this president is putting the united states at risk of a societal collapse, as close as we have ever been to one. dr. dave, there is one way to end this and that would be a vaccine. dr. bright yesterday in his

testimony definitely poured cold water on the potential that a vaccine would be ready in less than a year. there are some studies, the oxford one that showed there is real promise in the fight, in the investigation to get a vaccine, but do you agree that it is a year away? what do you know about certain vaccines? there's one that uses gene therapy to help fight the virus. how does it work? how is it different than others, and are we a year away? >> most experts are telling us that it is a year away or more. there are now over 100 companies engaged in developing vaccines of different types from attenuated to an activated viruses to little particles of viruses to this new, rather exciting gene therapy method using an associated virus, which is a cold virus. all of this is wrapped around

the concept that we are going to decrease the number of cases eventually in the united states with a viral vaccine. this question of globalism though, i can't help but get to that, mika, if you would allow me, because we are going to reach 100,000 patients soon that die in the united states. the bill and melinda gates foundation is recommending that we consider the more global indirect effects on very young children in low income countries. 250,000 kids in that age group, up to a million will die based on some modelling out of canada in six months from indirect effects of this pandemic, from lack of antibiotics, lack of oral rehydration therapy, lack of enough food. they will die of a slow, wasting starvation. so it is important to know that there are viral methods in place that use cold viruses, that will perhaps allow us within months

or a year or two to have a vaccine. but i would challenge all of us that we can look a little more expansively across the globe and realize we have it bad, but poor countries with lots of kids that are starving to death with disrupted health systems, they have it worse, mika. >> yes. willie? >> dr. wen, you as we mentioned ran the health commission in baltimore. the cdc put out new guidelines yesterday finally. they were revised, put through the white house and pared down as we said earlier, sort of a cliffs notes version of the original proposal. it was a checklist basically for businesses, for schools, for mass transit systems and things like that, here are broad ideas that you should consider when you are deciding to reopen. what does a city like the one you lived in and work in, what does a state, what does a governor, what does a mayor do now with the information from the cdc because it is so broad,

and effectively what the white house and cdc guidelines are saying, it is up to you? >> yes, that's exactly right, willie. this is not what we're used to seeing from the cdc. look, i went to the cdc website every day in the middle of the zika epidemic, when we had measles outbreaks, ebola. we saw guidance from the cdc all the time. what we look for from the cdc is specific, direct information. we don't have this -- i am not used to seeing this vague, waffling language as what was produced yesterday. i mean yesterday the guidelines were things like, encourage social distancing, encourage the use of masks. that's not helpful. i have businesses in the city and around the country that are asking me exactly what should we do. if we are reopening a restaurant, how far away should the tables be? should there be partitions of a certain height? if museums are going to be open, which galleries should be open and which ones should be closed? if we are changing our

ventilation system, what is it we should be looking for? businesses need this information. schools need that specific guidance. also, individuals want that, too. how do you know which businesses are safe to go into, which schools and daycare are safe to use? that's what the cdc is really good at. they can translate that scientific research into actionable information. somehow the cdc is not doing that anymore, and i fear that it is because of political interference. and if we ignore the science and don't let scientists speak, then unfortunately we are going to see more infections and more deaths that are easily preventable in this case. >> so, dr. jeffrey sachs, the white house has lied repeatedly about the previous administration's preparation and work on these issues. they blew off the playbook given to them that actually had specific mentions and warning about the coronavirus in it. they blew off and fired everyone

in the pandemic office. they did not take any of the warning that came their way including one from former vice president joe biden in january, and they've pitiful pamphlet of common sense recommendations as to how to get through this. what advice could you give to governors and mayors who actually want to lead their constituents through this crisis. >> it's hard with the death of the federal government. we have turned everything over to local action in a country where people move around, where the infections spread. where state and local governments don't have cdcs. so we really have the death of the federal government right now. and as a president, we basically, the only analogy i can think of is if joe mccarthy from the mccarthy era had become

president, this man in his venom and paranoia makes claims, waves papers, says worst crimes. he's such a despicable human being, but he's actually blocking the capacity for national action. what i would say to governors and mayors is, you've got to trace every case, every day. people who are confirmed should be called. are they safe at home or do they need to be moved to quarantine? the number of mistakes, by the way, being made at the state and local level is also shocking. putting infected people from hospitals into nursing homes in my own state. it makes you cry because thousands of people are dying unnecessarily. we're so unequipped, and we have

this vulgar fool who is blocking all the action at the national level. we can't really do this without a national government. trump has to stand aside and let there be a serious response so that this country doesn't have a great depression and this calamitus death toll. they go together. there's no economic health trade-off. that's the biggest lie. unless this epidemic is controlled, our economy will stay in depression. >> drs. leana wen, dave campbell and jeffrey sachs, thank you for being on. graduation ceremonies across the country are canceled, but now the class of 2020 will be treated to a special commencement speaker, former president barack obama. we will explain more, much more about that. we're back in one minute. wayfair has way more ways to renovate your home,

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i asked you to vote today on who should be the keynote speaker. unfortunately, barrack and michelle obama said no, as were your next five choices which were axl rose, murder hornets, the limu emu, that dude from '90-day fiance" who looked like a hedgehog and the elon musk grimes baby. so i moved on to your eighth choice receiving one vote, president donald trump. >> here i am. here i am. people applauding. they're applauding. thank you. thank you very much. >> no, thank you, sir. >> that's "snl's" take on a virtual graduation. millions of high school seniors this year will have a commencement unlike any other in recent memory due to the coronavirus. unlike any other ever actually, but now thanks to the xq institute which works with communities, schools and entire

school systems to rethink the high school experience so that every student graduates, ready to succeed in life, along with a lebron james family foundation and the entertainment industry foundation, the class of 2020 will be celebrated with a primetime commencement special featuring former president barack obama, lebron james, the jonas brothers and many others. the one-hour commercial-free event "graduate together" america honors the high school class of 2020 will air tomorrow at 8:00 p.m. eastern on more than 30 networks and streaming channels, including right here on msnbc. a really great idea. joining us now, former assistant secretary for civil rights, the department of education in the obama administration, xq institute co-founder, ruslyn ali. tell us more about how this came

together and what's the void you were hoping to fill here? >> thank you, mika. it's wonderful to be here. this came together really from the call of principals and educators around the country. shortly after the quarantine began, one of the most phenomenal leaders i ever met, stacey king, the president of washington leadership academy, called to talk about what would happen in this time-worn rite of passage where so many young people would be missing it. together we and the entertainment industry foundation, the lebron james foundation and so many others alongside the emerson collective are working to provide young people and honor them with the opportunity to celebrate, to have america joined in solidarity and unity, to celebrate and reward their grit and their resilience and to have the country come together for

them. >> really. >> russlynn, it's willie geist. such a good idea. what a cool night this is going to be. people can watch it on msnbc or nbc or nbc news now at 8:00 eastern. the lineup, president obama, lebron, kevin hart, jonas brothers, alicia keykeys, shaquille. the list goes on and on. it's a great platform for your institute, xq institute, which sort of helps high school kids get ready for the world in a more practical way. can you talk more about the work you all do? >> yes, thank you. we work to rethink the high school experience, to provide communities with the tools and the information they need to dream big and help them turn those dreams into reality. what we see is a hunger and thirst across the country to make sure high schools in particular are the hub of their community, to make sure they provide young people with the

tools, the skills they'll need to succeed in life after high school. and high schools, as you know, haven't been changed in nearly a hundred years. this time, this covid experience has given the country more impetus than ever before to rethink the experience of high school, to make sure young people have relevant and rigorous learning experiences and to make sure schools become the hub of their communities to make sure that young people are ready for life after high school. >> all right. graduate together, america honors the high school class of 2020. it will air tomorrow at 8:00 p.m. eastern on nbc, msnbc and nbc news now. russlynn ali, thank you so much. finally this morning, willie, the president refuses to do one of the things that are fundamentally believed to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, and that is wear a

mask. and some might say that as a result, several people in the white house have come down with the coronavirus. they have not been able to keep it out of the white house, and the president, for quite some time, up until a few days ago, didn't allow others to wear masks. urged them not to. they're now wearing them, but the president refuses to wear a mask. there he is in the plant yesterday in pennsylvania, not wearing a mask. and the reasoning confuses me is it a sign of weakness, is its makeup getting messed up? showing leadership is doing the right thing and showing people that you want to keep them safe, that's strength. so mr. president, please wear a mask. please do not endanger the public servants that you are surrounded with in the white house. mr. president, we know you watch. we just ask for one thing. could you wear a mask? willie, any idea why he doesn't?

>> well, it's been reported that, as you said, he views it as a sign of weakness. he wants to project a signal to the country that we've moved past this that it's time to get back to business. you can still open up businesses and wear a mask in the process while you go into those businesses. those two things are not mutually exclusive. >> it's not red state, not blue state. it's public health. do the right thing. that does it for us this morning. stephanie ruhle picks up the coverage right now. >> hi there. i'm stephanie ruhle. it's friday, may 15th. a big day across the country. and here are the facts this hour. as of right now, roughly 87,000 americans have died from coronavirus. more than 1.4 million cases have been reported. the house will vote on a $3 trillion bill which would give new money to state and local governments but senate republicans say it is too big and it will not