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welcome to friday. it is "meet the press" daily. i'm chuck todd continuing msnbc's coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. full speed ahead is the message from the white house in the rose garden this afternoon. president trump formally announced the team in charge of fast tracking a vaccine. it's part of what is called operation warp speed. the white house claims it could produce and distribute a vaccine in a matter of months. usually, it takes longer than that. experts are warning that kind of time line may be overly ambitious and some have argued it's perhaps dangerous. but perhaps more pressing than that is how president yet again made it clear he is desperate to turn the page. >> i just want to make something clear. it's very important. vaccine or no vaccine, we are back and we are starting the process and, in many cases, they don't have vaccines and a virus or a flu comes and you fight through it. we haven't seen anything like

this in 100 and some odd years. 1917 but you fight through it and people sometimes, i guess, we don't know exactly yet, but it looks like they become immune or at least for a short while and maybe for life. but you fight through it. >> to give you a esense of the president's mindset he appeared to downplay the death toll which is under 87,000 and predicted to go higher. >> many of us have lost friends and we read that and that is what the news covers. it's a very small percentage. it's a very, very small percentage. i say it all the time. it's a tiny percentage. the vast majority, many people don't even know they have it. they have it or they have sniffles or they have a minor sign and they recover, not only recover, they probably have

immunity, whether it's short short-term, long term, but they probably have immunity. >> this caps off a week where the president has pushed for states to reopen. he downplayed the warning of his experts and he inaccurately claimed we prevailed on testing and as nearly every state begins implementing plans to ease restrictions, the publicly available guidance from the cdc yesterday to release everything from work places to schools and restaurants and bars includes a handful of checklists that have essentially been watered apparently at the white house's urging and to give you an example of the six pages to reopen the country, it takes 69 pages of guidance to reopen a mcdonald's dining room. mcdonald's has issued a longer reopening guidance than the federal government. that guidance is important. perhaps even more so right now because right now, the only part of the country that has seen a consistent decrease in cases is the northeast. check out these regional curves.

in the midwest cases appear to be on the upswing and vehaven't shown a decline in the west. to tap that off few cases that they have the contract tracing infrastructure it needs to competentently reopen right now. shaun i don't know piece is j-- my guests. let's delve in what we heard from the white house. shannon, we learned not just on operation warp speed, but we did get some indications about, i guess, a bit of rewriting of the beginning of this pandemic and

the beginning of this crisis. was there a playbook? wasn't there? did the trump administration have plans? did she shelf the plans that were left there by previous administrations? what did we learn today from that press briefing and kayleigh mcenany? >> she came out on the defense and rick bright accused the white house of not having a plan and not being prepared. she brought out crisis preparation plan they put together. i wanted to know one thing, you know, when i was pressing her on this fact of why wasn't the administration buying ppe earlier? that became such an issue and put a lot of health care work he's at risk, why they buying any ppe and refilling those, quote/unquote, bare cupboards in the administration before january of 2020? she said the administration was focused on this buy owner owe terrorism and stocking up on

vaccines than they were responding on a pandemic and purchasing that ppe. in the sense put the money elsewhere instead of a vaccine for something like smallpox or anthrax. >> shannon, you know, i guess the question is, you know, why did they insist -- what are they trying to insist on? is this all in reaction to rick bright's testimony? >> well, i mean, i clearly think this press briefing today and the comments she made yesterday when the president was leaving for the white house are in response to rick bright. all along they have been on the defensive as reporting has come out from "the new york times," from the a.p., from nbc, from others about why we weren't more prepared from this. they have been trying to push back. that has not necessarily been effective and so they have been trying to spin things forward. there is a vaccine briefing today. of course, we started the week talking about testing.

so all things to try and reassure the public, reassure governors that we are prepared to move forward and open and look ahead rather than looking back. >> jonathan lamere, it does seem as if this is yet another attempt at sort of resetting the narrative about the handling of this. in fact, it was interesting to us that the president did an interview with the washington examiner and the question came at the president saying, hey, vice president biden thinks this whole obama gate and flint flynn stuff is a distraction and a distraction from the great job we are doing, he said. it does seem the latest attempt to sort of rewrite the narrative a bit. >> no question, chuck. they are trying to rewrite the narrative and they are on their defensive and been on their heels for months. the president likes to tout about hi restriction from travel to china which wasn't air tight. some still 40,000 odd people

were still able to travel from china but that was in january. he is yet to really account for the missing month. basically the month of february. the nation didn't do much of anything to prepare for the coming pandemic. we have seen from mark john, a lot of the country has been in lockdown. they know. the president knows. his white house staff knows. his re-election know this is a deep vulnerability in that stretch of time and a lot of this upcoming campaign against former vice president biden will be fought on those terms and fought on whether or not this president prepared the nation for this pandemic and what is he doing to try to stem the tide? yes, it's vaccines and he made some pretty hasty promises today. of course, it's also on the economy. which, of course, has been the president's focus increasingly so in recent weeks where he is desperate for these states to reopen and to try to reverse the slide what we are seeing in terms of those terrible unemployment numbers and job losses. >> very quickly, jonathan.

you know, the president today -- i want to get to the scientific aspect of this -- he is cheerleading this vaccine. a lot of people say he is overpromising. there are some, i'm told, are trying to get him from -- stop from overpromising too much and that they do worry come the fall voters are going to notice this. but that doesn't stop him. is there any way of talking the president out of his overly optimistic posture? >> no. that is the short answer. that has been his approach throughout. he is always someone to forge forward with, like, that glass half full point of view throughout his administration, whether it's about the economy, stock market, whatever it might be, relations with foreign leaders and now particularly this pandemic where he sent from saying in the ging he thougbegi he thought it would disappear and it hasn't. he is a cheerleader for his own economy and he says he has

promoted various medications proven to necessarily be helpful and now he maybe overpromising a vaccine which his advisers feel could come back and haunt him particularly if a vaccine even a hurried timetable might be a year or so away after the election. of course, if there is a second wave which a lot of health experts believe this fall and there is no vaccine yet, we may see death tolls really start to sara aga soar again. he is trying to do a smoke screen again and he is trying to change the subject and trying to change the narrative come is why we have heard him talking about michael flynn and other things. >> dr. poland, this event today, what should we take away from it, on the vaccine front? >> i think a couple of things. number one, all of us want a vaccine and we want it to be safe. we want it to get here rapidly.

but there is an irresolvable tension between speed and safety. if you hurry it up too fast, if you take too many short cuts, you ultimately cause problems with safety or safety issues and that has to be borne in mind. >> what is the biggest risk of rushing? what are the safety issue that would concern you the most right now? >> i think the one that we are most concerned about is what we saw in animal models with the sars and mers vaccine and something we saw two years ago with the dangue vaccine.

we have to study almost 40,000 people and that takes time and it takes time to do it well. >> dr. redliner, when you look at the regional breakdowns i showed you, we showed earlier and i don't know how much of it you were able to see on the screen but essentially when you break us into the four quadrants, only the northeast that is bending the curve down. you have the midwest it looks like the curve is still possibly even on the way up. maybe it's on plateau right now. south and west you can basically say plateau. what does that tell you? what is the status of this virus in america looking at these charts? >> well, chuck, what it tells us is that we are clearly not out of the woods yet. and this narrative of untruths or overstatements about where we are going is not helpful because it really creates a situation where people are expecting something that is just is not reasonable. dr. poland has it exactly right.

there is a very important limitation to how fast we can create a virus -- i mean, a vaccine without creating a situation where many, many people could be in very serious danger. so that is built in. we are not going to see and effective vaccine proven saving well into 2021, if then. another thing we should note about this is the idea of a second wave is really important. i don't know how the white house is processing this but they are going to have a lot of explaining to do if and when and most of us think it's just a matter of when, we get this second wave. but there is no question, chuck, you mentioned this earlier, that the president is creating a narrative that is designed around the election timetable. but, unfortunately, the reality of what happens with a pandemic is not going to succumb to this narrative. the other thing is, by the way, just as a side note, the president's response over the

last four months of degrading the national representation of the cdc and national public health infrastructure will come back to haunt him also. it's a very difficult situation that i don't think the president is going to be able to talk himself out of responsibility for, although he is certainly going to try. >> dr. redliner, it's our understanding a more detailed set of guidelines is to come. are you concerned because this got so much attention that the sort of more detailed guidelines will be ignored? >> i'm very concerned about that. why put out something that is so watered down and so ridiculousically inappropriate as guidelines for governors to open up their states? i spoke recently with the mayors of augusta and atlanta, georgia, both mortified that governor

there decided to open up a couple of weeks ago. it's showing results of increase case rate and case fatality. something off kilter with everything that they are doing to approach this pandemic, it's hard to know where to start. >> dr. poland, the logistical challenge i think that frankly is world is going to have but, in some cases, is it prudent to be starting the logistics now because figuring out how to distribute 300 million vaccines, assuming you don't have to be a booster or it isn't two per person, we are seeing how much trouble the government had ramping up testing and all of that. how much of a hurdle is this? >> you're right, it's a major hurdle. we don't know if it will be one

dose or two doses or periodic seasonal doses. we don't have enough manufacturing capacity in the entire world to provide a dose of vaccine for everybody, much less two doses of vaccine. now there is a bright spot here. nih and its partners have put together what is called active, which is attempting to do exactly that, put into place the pillars this are needed so that we can test these vaccine candidates well and quickly and safely but the idea that this can be sped up, again, i want to stress i don't think is practical. if we want to release a vaccine that we can say to the public we are convinced this is safe and this is efficacious, it takes time to do. >> well, we already have a public -- there are people in the public nervous about vaccines in the first place, so i would assume rushing, missing protocols, you don't want to add any more anxiety to the

situation than you already have. thank you all. i appreciate you getting us started this hour. up ahead, the messy process of opening america with each state going its own way. things are already getting complicated. we will take you to some of the places that are starting down this road. later, the massive threat coronavirus poses behind bars. thousands of prisoners are infected and the risk doesn't stop at the prison walls. but that doesn't mean you're in this alone. we're automatically refunding our customers a portion of their personal auto premiums. we're also offering flexible payment options for those who've been financially affected by the crisis. we look forward to returning to something that feels a little closer to life as we knew it, but until then you can see how we're here to help at libertymutual.com/covid-19. [ piano playing ]

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welcome back. most states are starting to reopen at least partially at this point. take a look at the map of reopenings. only connecticut, massachusetts and d.c. have active stay-at-home orders in place right now. it includes large swaths of new york hit hardest by the virus and does not include new york city or its northern suburbs where the virus first appeared on the east coast. in arizona, even water parks are

starting to welcome guests. that is where we find our von hilliard this evening and correspondent katie beck is in virginia where the county is taking a county-by-county approach and the governor is being criticized about its testing counts. let's start in arizona. it's been about four hours since we checked in about the opening of this water park. von hilliard, i'm curious how much traffic is there? are people comfortable enough to do this? >> reporter: it has been a couple of hours. today, they expanded their water park operations. they opened slides. they opened up the wave park. there has to be at least a couple of hundred folks making their way through here. to give you an idea this is the backdrop. 52 reported states by the death of arizona and 193 new positive cases in the last two days. you're asking what the scene is here. i wish we could take you all around the park here.

this is the wave pool. for folks never to arizona, i remind you we don't have an ocean and currently the waves are not operating here. if you stick around a a couple of minutes you'll see the waves start to pick up. you can see a few dozen folks here. you've been seeing several dozen more here when the waves are actually going. this is a situation here, chuck, that i honestly haven't felt in arizona in the last two months. in terms of folks that are going on out, essentially most of the state is open, outside of movie theaters and bars, but you have retail. you have your restaurants. you have places like the swimming parks and gyms open again. when you're coming around here, folks aren't wearing masks. i know that these owners, the same thing with the retail and restaurant owners, they are doing everything in their power. these folks, they had precautions set up in order to keep folks socially distant's this is a strug in the federal and state governments i've heard from a lot of these businesses and they feel the onus is put on them by government to keep

people safe. i am constantly told we are not people who understand how a pandemic works but we need business and we want to keep our people safe at the same time. people turn often towards our government officials. i want to bring up arizona governor doug ducey who signed those executive orders this week here, he was just at a restaurant yesterday pita jungle without masks. oftentimes when you're going around, i would say i know the folks here are encouraging them but 90% of the folks don't have a mask and you see that generally everywhere. sometimes people are turning towards our leaders and this is a situation here you here right now. >> von hilliard reporting on the ground in mesa, arizona, which is maricopa county, the greater phoenix area. let's go to katie beck. virginia is starting to do some reopening. essentially cutting northern virginia and richmond off from some of the other plans. but there is a bit of a controversy. virginia has been shockingly low

on testing per capita. it has been surprising to see compared to d.c. or maryland or frankly the rest of the east coast. you got a little bit more explanation to that yesterday. what did you learn, katie? >> reporter: well, according to johns hopkins, chuck, virginia ranks 48th in the country right now in terms of testing. and governor ralph northam has been questioned about that ranking multiple timings and has not been able to provide a very solid answer as to why that is. furthering the controversy about that ranking, we have learned that antibody testing has also been included most recently the last few days in the numbers. it's been sort of muddying the data as well. now governor northam has walked that back and said once he learned they were adding in these antibody tests into the overall testing numbers, he asked them to separate that out. but it has caused sort of more public distrust as to how valid these numbers are.

positive tests in the state overall is about 10% and northern virginia it's more like 20% and 15% in the richmond area. hence the two areas are closed. virginia has significant questions surrounding how valid their testing process is. >> the governor of that state is a medical doctor which i'm sure adds to some of these head scratching here a little bit. on the opening up, what are you seeing? are crowds coming? if you open, will they come? >> in mineral, virginia, where we are at, emphatically, yes. we are in a state park on the lake. since 11:00 this morning this place opened it's boat after boat and slip after slip filled out and people coming to eat

outside. the restaurants has been keeping strict social distancing between the tables but pretty much full capacity as of today. i think the good weather is certainly encouraging people to be out and be outdoors and i think people are excited in parts of virginia to have the option, frankly. >> von hilliard in arizona and catie beck in virginia, thank you bong. the house is set to vote on a massive $3 trillion relief package. if it passed, it would be the largest spending bill passed ever. for now, it's a nonstarter in the senate but could it pave the way for a new plan? we will get the latest from capitol hill next.

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this evening, the house is voting a $3 trillion relief bill one that president trump called dead on arrival one because of mail-in voting provision. senate majority leader mitchell mcconnell says it's a democratic wish list. you're watching debate on the house floor where the debate is under way. it includes aid to states and governments and another round of checks to some americans and extension of unemployment benefits. the voting on this bill is going to take a longer period of time because they are going to try to practice some social distancing. our capitol hill correspondent is with us now. garrett, it seems as if you've got progressives that are cranky if this is a liberal wish list

they didn't get some of their wishes on this list. then you have some republicans, a few who are worried that the senate republicans aren't acting fast enough and may not like this bill like peter king but he wants to gloat them along. what should we expect with this vote on this bill tonight? >> reporter: i think you'll see democrats lose a handsful of votes at the margins on the progressive side who think this bill doesn't go far enough and particularly in helping direct money to individuals and keeping peep on payrolls. you'll lose joe cunningham from south carolina who announced he is opposing this bill. not even so much what of what is in it but the fact it was never negotiated with republicans in and of itself doesn't have a chance of becoming law. as best i can tell, it is only pete king of new york among republicans who are going to vote for this. he said he is voting for it because he doesn't think new york city can survive without the kind of immediate aid to the city and to the state of new york that this bill would provide.

and i think that sets up what is the ultimate question here which is what is going to be in the bill that ultimately does get associated here, right? we have heard from the republican leaders in both house and senate in the last 24 hours saying they think there will be a bill. but not anything about what is going to be in it. and so i think that becomes the next challenge here. republicans have made very clear what they don't like in this bill but much less clear how they would handle this and how they would address what i found from my reporting in texas over the last month too, is a very real need on the ground for states and localities to get more money or more flexibility to spend the money they have already been allocated. >> where is the senate republicans stomach on direct checks? are we goes more of that? i think you're going to see a compromise on the aid to states. you made that point. even too many red states that have other revenue problems. state of florida, no tourism and

we can keep going here. is there a stomach for the direct checks? >> i think every member in the republican senate voted for the last round of the direct checks. if not all of them, i think it was pretty close. you've had proponents of direct aid that including mitt romney whose nobody idea on fiscal issues. you have other lawmakers on the republican side speaking out in favor of that. it may be the most direct way to get money into people's pockets. in contrast to what the president has proposed, which is payroll tax cut is another way to try to get money into pockets. with 35, 40 million people, however many we are going to have by the time something gets done about this out of work a payroll tax cut doesn't help you if you are no longer on a payroll. so that may ultimately be, despite how far it is from what we might think of as traditional, conservative orthodoxy here the effective way

to get the money to people who need it most. >> garrett, when the president said dead on arrival, it was specifically having to do with the provision of mail-in basically that the democrats have put into this bill to increase mail-in balloting and sort of what i recall set him off saying, "well, that is dead on arrival!" is that one of the things not make it into the final package or do you think some money for mail-in voting will make it? >> reporter: democrats have trite to insert more money for vote by mail into every version of the relief bills as they have come along and every time they do so, they get pushed back, pushed back. time until november, until there isn't, right? so democrats have this as a very high priority. i guess it's up to speaker pelosi to decide when she wants to make an item she won't budge on, right? it's all going to be a negotiation. >> right.

it is. i have a feeling that is what the rest of may and a little bit of june is going to be about, at least on capitol hill. >> i think you're right. >> thank you with the latest there. ahead the unprecedented danger of imprisonment during a pandemic. g a pandemic ♪ we hope you find our digital solutions helpful to bank safely from home. deposit a check with your phone or tablet. check balances, pay bills, transfer money and more.

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welcome back. the supreme court has declined to step into a case brought by two texas inmates asking for their prison to take protective measures to mitigate the spread of coronavirus. despite the court not getting involved, the state of texas is taking some action and planning to ramp up testing in prisons. the coronavirus has hit incarcerated populations hard there. according to report from the texas tribune, as of wednesday the state only tested 2% of inmates and staff but 72% of tests came back positive. 72% of all tests in prisons came back positive! we are seeing similar numbers all over the country. the marshall project a nonprofit journalist organization that focuses on criminal justice has been tracking these outbreaks

and it's reporting that there are now over 25,000 cases of covid among prisoners. "the new york times" has found that 6 out of the top ten outbreaks in the u.s. are prisons. the 11th? a prison. the 12th? another prison. we have been talking about the meat processing plants as one way of hot spots. you're seeing another reason, closed-in quarters, things like that. joining me now are two people reporting and tracking on the covid outbreaks at the marshall project. tom mai rerks ar and katie litt. tom, let me start with you. just basics here. describe this situation right now in our prison system across the country. >> right now, chuck, the numbers continue to grow every week. we started this in mid march, wanting to know what actually is happening and how many people are getting infected and how is it spreading?

it's grown week-to-week to week. this week we are up to more than 25,000 cases nationwide. that is 25% growth from the week before. we are seeing the infection rate in prisons overall is about 3 1/2 times higher than the nation. so of those who are infected, it's much higher than we are seeing outside. it continues to spread. in texas, other states we are seeing as well. >> katie, how confident are we that the numbers you are accurate or how confident states are reporting what we are seeing in prisons accurately? >> we are confident in our reporting, but, unfortunately, the knowledge that we have about the prevalence of the virus in prisons is very dependent on the availability of testing in prison facilities. so we have seen a handful of states begin to mask test prisoners, so testing everyone who is in a facility where there are known cases, but in a lot of

cases, states are testing prisoners at a lower rate than the general population. to give a sense of kind of the importance of the volume of testing, ohio is one of the states that is now conducting mass testing and they saw their numbers jump from 250 cases to more than 3,500 in just the span of a week. . but what that tells you is is not necessarily -- that doesn't necessarily mean that ohio is an outlier, per se but in a lot of prisons that aren't testing near as high of a level, it's likely the virus is circulating undetected. >> tom, is there any -- have you discovered any prisons right now that have figured out a best practice yet of figuring out how to keep the population as safe as possible? >> it's hard to say.

we have seen some states that are -- best practices in terms of testing and some places doing uniform testing across their facilities. it's really state-by-state. some places are having a hard time finding ways to quarantine people who are ill. we are hearing stories in our reporting of people who are being -- are sharing -- still share a cell with somebody who is not affected while they are testing positive. it's hard to see what the best practices really are here. i think a lot of prison systems are struggling to figure that out. >> katie, what kind of hospital care or health care in the average prison? does the average prison -- how many icu beds might they have and how many ventilators might they have? >> well, a lot of prisons, when they have medical facilities, we are looking more at clinics or nurses office style facilities. so in prisons where there isn't

that kind of material to offer intensive care, prisoners will be transported to the nearest hospital. >> tom, we have seen that there has been some movement at trying to get some prisoners released either home confinement based on age, maybe based on medical conditions. are you seeing that pick up across the country or is this still sort of scatter shot at how many states are trying to thin out their prison population to try to protect some of the most vulnerable? >> it is a little scatter shot. we are seeing some states that are -- who are people within a certain amount of time until the end of their sentence, they might be eligible for early release. some states are offering a furlough of sorts saying we will let you go home on home confinement now but at some point we will bring you back. the numbers are still relatively small. missouri states are releasing in

the hundreds of people. kansas is one instance where they have released about six people before they stopped their program and pulled it back because they were concerned about an outbreak at one of the main state prisons there and that spreading back into the community outside. so it is still very early days and a lot of prison systems have not released large numbers of people yet. >> tom, final question. i had somebody ask me this. at what point do you think some prisoners would make a claim that their eighth amendment rights have been violated here? that this becomes cruel and unusual? >> well, there are a lot of lawsuits being filed right now seeking early release for people. and i don't think many prisoners have gotten to the point of considering that constitutional claim. i think many advocate and attorneys are really trying to help as much as they can on the front end and get people released as they are available

now. but i haven't heard of any constitutional claims with that at this point. the other thing we should mention it's not just the prisoners at stadium here. there are also many prison staff members, thousands of them who are infected as well. >> that's why what i was going to ask. i'm curious. i got to think that a lot of these prisons are suddenly having a lot of staffers going, whoa, i don't know if i want to come to work. are we seeing shortages? are we seeing people not want to go into work? >> we have seen a lot of -- >> we don't really have -- >> we have seen that in many states about this. >> sorry about that, kate. go ahead. >> i'm sorry. we haven't really been able to get staffing levels from a lot of prisons, but what we did see is that staff cases began increasing actually in the weeks before we started seeing most cases among prisoners. so it's easy to think of prisons as being closed off from the outside community but staff are

traveling in and out, so there is the ability for the virus to spread from the outside community inward and back and forth. >> tom and katie from the marshall project, thank you both for coming on and telling us about what you're up to and the data you found. we will keep following it. thanks very much. up next, a little 20/20 vision no one saw coming. 20/20 vision no one saw coming utual.c. [ piano playing ] i've been involved in. communications in the media for 45 years. i've been taking prevagen on a regular basis for at least eight years. for me, the greatest benefit over the years has been that prevagen seems to help me recall things and also think more clearly.

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welcome back. president trump says he remains focused on attacking the coronavirus but his campaign is also focused right now on attacking his presumptive opponent in november joe biden. this week the trump campaign launched its the former vice president. the ads on facebook pages and his mental state and more prominently, accused him of being soft on china. >> for 40 years biden has been wrong on china, supporting trade deals that destroy american jobs, giving china most-favored nation status, letting china walk all over us. >> today the biden campaign said voters will reject what it calls a desperate strategy by president trump with his chief strategist telling reporters today in an extensive briefing that trump is desperate not to have this campaign be about his failure on central issues in front of the country. and i think it's going to be real hard to change that subject in some ways. i think the public is going to

react pretty negatively to it. with me now deputy editorial page editor and msnbc contributor, maria teresa kumar and an msnbc contributor. and what i wanted to discuss with the both of you today is -- how biden should respond to the growing calls among some of his supporters and among some democratic constituency groups that he needs to do more or figure out how to campaign more effectively from his basement. maria teresa, first of all, nice to virtually see you. it's been a while. >> nice to see you, yes. nice to see you. >> one of those constituency groups is latinos. and biden had a problem before the pandemic. how concerned are you that he is in the basement too much? >> i have to share with you. so full disclosure, voto latino officially endorsed biden. it was the first time we ever endorsed a presidential candidate. and part of it is we wanted to make sure our constituency started to understand what needs

to happen in order to bring back some normalcy in the latino community come november. but that said, we've also been pushing biden, even though we endorsed him, we've been pushing him to come out and talk to latino communities specifically. he won arizona. he won texas markedly compared to bernie sanders, chuck, but he didn't win those two states that he is going to need to among the latino voters. and so there is still a lot of work to be done. i'm heartened by the fact that he brought in aoc, that he has brought cristobal alex into the fold, but he needs to be able to are conversations directly and meet the moment. the covid epidemic has broken clear the systemic discrepancies and inequities among the latino community in 40 days. we're talking about the health and wealth of a constituency that he is going to need come november, especially when we're talking about battleground states. these are all states where young people have aged into the voting process, and he is going to need to figure out how to mobilize

them so he can win the white house in november. >> you know, ruth marcus, as different as this campaign looks lightright now, this onslaught from trump against biden looks familiar to me, right? obama did it to romney. clinton did it to dole. bush did it to kerry. it's what incumbents do to their opponent. they want to try to define them before the opponent has gathered up enough resources to fight back. and the question is did you fight back soon enough? dole never did there has always been arguments that kerry didn't do it and romney didn't do it. how is biden handling this right now in your mind? >> well, i want to answer that question but i want to mention another way in which it feels very similar. it also feels similar to 2016 in terms of the context, in terms of trump tried to define hillary clinton as old, as doddering, as feeble, as lacking stamina. and now he is trying to do the same thing to vice president biden. look, i think the vice president

has a challenge that no other candidate has faced before, to campaign effectively from a basement, and to do it in the face of a pandemic that and an economic crisis that is capturing everybody's attention. they want to think about their own well-being. they don't want to think about the presidential race. so first of all, he's clearly got to up his technological game and be able the pull off these campaign events without technological challenges. but i also think that democrats who are really anxious and understandably so, because the stakes this election are so high about what the vice president is doing now just need to cool their jets a little bit. it's a long way to election day. yes, those experiences of those candidates in the past have suggested that the onslaught can be problematic. but there are questions about that. and there's not been an onslaught by a sitting president

who has been, first of all, this unpopular even going into the pandemic, and second of all, facing the headwinds of this pandemic. so i would suggest everybody take a little bit of a chill pill. >> yeah, well, you know, there is always the democratic hand-wringers, or as david plouffe has a different name for them. maria teresa kumar, what do you make so far of what you have seen publicly of how team biden has handled the veepstakes? there is two ways to do veepstakes. there is a figuring who your candidate is, and then there is simply you try to build up lot of people while you go through the process. as we saw with stacey abrams. >> that's exactly right. i think he is doing the latter of what you're sharing with us. you also had senator harris and senator klobuchar, for example, introducing really -- this really ambitious modernization of electoral work for the 2020

election, and it was an opportunity for both of them to audition for the role of saying, look, we're really trying to fix the system. you have val demings coming out of florida who is also being flirted with whether or not she is going to be the candidate. he has been doing a lot of work not only with stacey abrams very visably, but also with elizabeth warren. so this idea is he is trying to temperature check folks, but also saying look, i'm taking a measured approach and i'm introducing you to all the candidates that i'm really thinking about. >> ruth marcus, maria teresa kumar, we haven't done much politics in a while. >> i miss it. >> while we didn't do a lot, we did. so i think a lot of us political junkies do. but bigger things are obviously facing us all. ruth marcus, maria teresa kumar, thank you for coming on, and that's all we have for you tonight. thank you for trusting us this week. if it's sunday, it's "meet the press." we'll look at our split screen nation. my guest will be peter navarro,

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