good evening from philadelphia. i'm ali velshi in for chris hayes. tonight later this hour, the president is holding an independence day celebration in south dakota at mount rushmore. it's an event where, as you can see from the moment the chairs were laid out earlier today, there's no real attempt at social distancing. the republican governor of the state, kristi noem, who's a trump ally, has said that while masks would be available to anyone who wanted one, quote, the event would not require social distancing or masks. the president is set to speak to thousands of people at mount rushmore later this hour, where there will be no social distancing and masks are optional. but this is not the first time the president has done this sort

of thing. back on june 20th, the president held his first rally in three months in tulsa, oklahoma, a state that was and continues to see a spike in coronavirus cases. the event was at an indoor arena which seats more than 19,000 people, so there was plenty of room to socially distance. but the president didn't want the appearance of social distancing. he wanted the rally too look packed, which is why trump campaign workers, as you can see here, were caught on tape removing social distancing stickers from seats at the event. and while turnout for the rally fell way short of expectations, thousands of people still showed up at the indoor event. and we now know that at least eight members of the campaign advance team on the ground tested positive for the coronavirus. and dozens of secret service personnel at the event were later told to self-quarantine. and just this week we learned that a trump surrogate who attended the event tested positive for the virus. former 2012 presidential candidate herman cain went to

the tulsa rally as you can see right there. didn't appear to socially distance or wear a mask. this week the 74-year-old stage 4 cancer survivor was hospitalized with the coronavirus. just days after the tulsa rally, the president went to a megachurch in phoenix, arizona, another coronavirus hot spot, and spoke to a group of largely unmasked people indoors. and this past weekend, the vice president, the head of the coronavirus task force, went to a church in dallas, texas, another state struggling with the virus, where he spoke to thousands of people and a choir and an orchestra that performed unmasked. at least five members of the choir and orchestra had previously tested positive for coronavirus though i should note those members weren't present while the vice president was there. and just yesterday, "the washington post" reports that another trip, another pence trip, this time to arizona, got postponed by a day because of confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases among secret service agents. and tonight, the white house is out with brand-new messaging

about the virus that we, quote, need to live with it. we need to live with the raging pandemic that is killing thousands and thousands of americans. the president and the vice president are operating as if we are not in a pandemic, as if we are not seeing a new surge of coronavirus cases across the country. there are nearly 2.8 million coronavirus cases in the united states. on wednesday, we hit a record in this country with 50,000 new daily cases nationwide. more than 130,000 americans have died. in fact, dr. anthony fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, warned just this week that if we don't change the path we're on, the united states could see as many as 100,000 new cases per day. but even as we see these huge numbers, the administration continues to dismiss the science behind fighting this disease with misleading arguments that we're only seeing more cases because we're testing more, and

continued resistance to the simple act of wearing a mask, not to mention the insistence on holding and attending dangerous events like tonight's rally or july h4th celebration i guess i should call it at mount rushmore. and now we're seeing the results of the reckless behavior all over the country. sky news went inside a houston hospital to understand what coronavirus is doing to the patients and the staff there, and i've got to warn you. some of what you're about to see is very graphic. >> reporter: the awful reality of coronavirus. >> fight it, fight it, fight it. >> reporter: a tube being inserted down his nose to relieve air and fluid in his abdomen. the medical team is facing multiple challenges every day, and now in texas, a surge in infections which many believe is the cost of lifting lockdown early. coronavirus kills you, he tells

us. for him, even survival feels like death. >> let's go in. >> reporter: this hospital in houston has set up isolation pods with negative air pressure to seal off the contamination. the number of cases in texas has nearly tripled in two weeks, and they're expected to soar again after independence day celebrations. b with the doctors frantic about how they'll cope. >> i don't have enough beds for you. just put it that way, okay? i don't have enough beds, and you will die. i mean it's simple as that. there is no more mr. nice guy, no more please don't do that. if you go out this fourth of july to a mass gathering, you have the potential of dying yourself or killing somebody else. >> reporter: and it only takes meeting one infected person to catch it. >> i isolated myself from everybody except one family, the family across the street. >> reporter: and he got infected. he's now bitterly critical at

the texas governor for ending the stay-at-home order. >> when you're staying at home and you're isolated, there's better management. but our governor went along with the president, so we got screwed. >> reporter: every health worker has a photograph of themselves around their neck to help connect with patients, and every movement between wards requires derobing and disposing of the old clothing. there's no shortage of protective equipment here. their rigorous hygiene control is part of a battle against the virus. >> more. more. more. that's classic. that's classic covid. >> reporter: with the chief medic determined he won't be beaten by it. >> we're fighting two wars.

war number one is the covid virus. war number two is stupidity because there are some people out there who just really -- i don't know how they're still alive. >> reporter: the infections in texas have spiked, but the mortality rate's much lower, and th medics are trying everything. they've devised one treatment here by mixing steroids, vitamins, and anti-coagulants, and they're getting results. t this is the cocktail of drugs which the doctors at this hospital have been giving their coronavirus patients and which they say is responsible for an astonishing 96% success rate. it costs just $100 a day, and they believe it's going to turn the corner in this fight against the deadly virus. they're going to need it to work with record numbers of infections daily in texas and grim warnings to other countries not to make the same mistakes as them. >> a lot of people are going to die being ignorant, and ignorance is never a defense. so they're going to die, and

they're going to be made the example for the rest of the country. and britain, england, africa, wherever, if they don't take this serious, they're going to die point blank. and they're going to get sick, and it's going to be bad. >> reporter: but even knowing the risks, it's no absolute guarantee. talia was a nurse in this icu a week ago but was infected by a patient and is now under the care of her colleagues. >> it's sad because these -- these patients, when they come in, if you don't hug your family member like right then, who's to say you're going to be able to hug them again? we don't know, and that's -- to me, that's probably one of the hardest things. >> reporter: the doctors here have opened a new wing for more coronavirus patients, and the next few weeks are going to be critical. sky news, houston, texas.

>> here with me now is someone who's been studying coronavirus and the path it's taken in the united states since the beginning of the pandemic. marc lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at harvard's t.h. chan school of public health. thank you for being with us. i think what we need to do is hear from more people like you on an ongoing basis to give us an evaluation of why we are where we are on july 3rd. we are seeing things in houston, in texas, in arizona and to some degree in florida and california that reflects what we went through 2 1/2 to 3 months ago in the northeast. why are we here right now? >> thank you for having me. i think we're here because many parts of the country have decided that they're tired of restrictions and that they're reopening, and they're doing that in a way that reflects understandable fatigue. we all hate these restrictions. nobody enjoys them, but that do not reflect the data and do not reflect a situation being under

control. in fact, some of the states that have been fastest to reopen are the ones where it never really was under control and was still growing when the reopening began. if you contrast that with almost every country in europe and almost every country in east asia and in fact a few of the states, we have some examples of responsible behavior in some of the northeastern states here. these are states and countries that have brought the case numbers down to a much more manageable level before reopening, and it's pretty much as simple as that. >> let me ask you, marc. not only is it frustrating, people are getting tired of being home, but it's economically very, very difficult. it's times like this when people like me, who don't know anything about this, have to rely on the expertise in public health experts. but the translation between people like you and people like me for these kinds of rules is government. and in these european nations and asian nations you talk about

and even in the states that have done this well in the united states, people trusted their governments to give them direction and generally speaking they followed that. what we have in the united states is a federal government that hasn't been on board with the idea that we'll give you the direction you need to make the difficult decisions. >> that's right. i mean there's been an incredible vacuum of leadership from the federal government. that's been true since january when this became an issue and for two months it was denial that this was a problem and it was going to go away in the spring like a miracle. then that fell by the wayside and new york and some other places began to visibly suffer, and we had some national efforts but, again, mostly led by state governors to slow things down. and it's very clear that the countries in europe and in asia that have had success, that have kept cases to a tiny fraction and deaths to a tiny fraction per capita of what we've had have done so because they had

resolve. they had very quick action, not all of them as quick as they should have been, but quick action. then they held it in place. they held the restrictions in place not until people got sick of it but until the illness receded, and that's a very different behavior. and it's all about leadership. >> earlier today i spoke with peter navarro, and he's talking about hydroxychloroquine. he said there's a new study out indicating it lessened symptoms in people who have this. he said we need to start thinking about using therapeutics and ultimately waiting for a vaccine. that seems to be messaging coming from the white house now. we need to live with this. is that what experts like you would recommend, or are the basics like masking and social distancing even if we go back to work the way to prevent the spread of this virus? >> so we just saw in houston people are having to try to live with it, and more are living because of medical innovations. but this is not a good situation, and there are ways to

stop it. there are ways that individuals can take with really reliably wearing masks, really reliably distancing, not going to bars. there should not be bars open in states that are really in any state in the united states right now. there should not be other crowded, unventilated places. this is just how the virus transmits, and we've seen example after example, and it's a mixture of state leadership because the federal government just isn't providing it, and then individual action to do what their states are telling them in the case of places like massachusetts and new york or what they're not bothering to tell them in a shortsighted effort to reopen prematurely in places like texas and los angeles. >> marc, is there -- what do you see as the trajectory? the cdc says we may have 160,000 deaths by the end of the july. is there some way to obviously slow this down right now? i assume there is because i look

at the charts. the seven-day rolling averages of new infections in other industrialized countries, and most of them have. >> there are -- is example after example of how to slow it down. it's very hard to completely get rid of it, especially in a globalized world and in a country that has lots of land borders between jurisdictions that are doing different things. so it's going to be with us. we're not going to get rid of it, but we can bring the number of cases down. it's happened in massachusetts. it's happened in new york. it's happened in countries all over the world, and it is very possible. it is painful, and what i think we have to remember is that shutting down in crises is even more painful because you first of all don't solve the problem because you've already had -- by the time you have a crisis, you're going to live with it for several more weeks while the control measures take effect. but also it's much more disruptive to shut down in a

crisis and a much more first reimposition of control measures in places that are growing, and then very, very cautious reopening of the sort that's happened in other places is the only way forward. i think a lot of us would like to think about a september where our kids can go back to school and have real school. >> yeah. >> for all sorts of reasons. a lot of us would like to see this pandemic stop taking the toll that it's taking on everyone, especially on disadvantaged people, especially on people of color. that's been underreported. it's universally true in this country. and we'd like to return to some kind of normalcy, and the way to do that is to get it under control now. as some colleagues of mine wrote in "the washington post" a few days ago, if we want to see our kids back in school, we're going to have to give something up and maybe bars and gyms are the sorts of things we give up to try to reduce our transmission now, reduce cases, so that by

september we have a fighting chance of having a more normal life. >> marc, thank you for your expertise and for sharing it with my viewers. marc lipsitch is a professor of epidemiology at harvard. coming up, china's trying to quell hong kong's autonomy, but president trump doesn't seem to want to do anything about that either. why that's a big deal after this. can my side be firm?

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as the united states focuses on defeating the coronavirus

within its borders, there are still crucial events happening across the globe. yesterday the senate voted unanimously, which is a rare think these days, to impose sanctions on chinese officials trying to strip away hong kong's autonomy. but despite the overwhelming and veto-proof support, the white house has not said whether it would support the legislation. last month trump's former national security adviser john bolton shared this about the president's reaction to massive protests in hong kong. that's a big deal, he said. but he immediately added, i don't want to get involved. we have human rights problems too. those massive protests are continuing in hong kong, and nbc news chief foreign correspondent richard engel has more. >> reporter: while much of the world was watching covid, china this week passed a strict and sweeping national security law. illegal now, any act of sedition, treason, terrorism, and secession, charges open to a wide interpretation. hundreds of activists have been arrested since the law was implemented wednesday, and a new

security service answerable to beijing, not the local government in hong kong, is responsible for enforcement. l has been eviscerated. >> reporter: a chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded saying beijing cares more about territorial integrity than foreign relations. until now, hong kong has been ruled by a policy called one country/two systems with hong kong enjoying more freedom of expression and autonomy. those days are over. nathan law, a protest leader, recently escaped hong kong. speaking to nbc news tonight from an undisclosed location. >> the government has been proposing that certain slogan is oppressive. so if anyone is chanting those slogans, they will is prosecuted. >> reporter: the british government has offered to take in as many as 3 million hong

kong residents as an act of protest. china has denounced the offer, and british officials admit there's not much they can do if china won't allow people to leave the city in large numbers. >> that was richard engel reporting. joining me now for more on hong kong is jane harman, former democratic congresswoman from california, now the director, president, and ceo of the wilson center focused on global issues. jane, good to see you again. thank you for being with us. i want to talk to you about the u.s. and china right now. earlier today i had a conversation with peter navarro, the president's adviser, who suggested to me that the chinese communist party spawned the coronavirus and then dispatched hundreds of thousands of people to the west and weaponized the coronavirus. it's a crazy, outlandish view, but actually where it matters with respect to things that china needs to be reined in on, this white house is silent. >> well, there's some truth. i mean coronavirus did start in

china, and other corona illnesses also started in china, and they should have had a better handle on it, and so should we. but this is different. this is an aggressive act by china to basically destroy the gorgeous, beautiful, independent city of hong kong. it is one china/two systems, but now it's one china/one system, and i don't know that hong kong will ever come back. my heart breaks for the people there and for the future of not just hong kong but let's now add taiwan and others possibly to this list. i hope not. >> so, look, we have lots of examples in recent history, in recent memory of things where -- times when there are critics who say the united states should have stepped in when something was going wrong. we think about it in dricrimea, syria with the kurds when we abandoned our relationship with them. now we think about it in hong kong. what's the consequence?

to people sitting at home suffering from coronavirus and the social unrest, what's the consequence of us not stepping up for these things? >> i think we will step up. i don't know what peter navarro said, but congress just unanimously passed this bill by voice vote, but it was unanimous. as you pointed out, it's a rare thing. that bill imposes additional economic sanctions, including regarding the swift system, on china. now, the problem with that is there's no strategy behind it. we keep imposing economic sanctions. china seems not to care. china's playing a long game. we're playing a short game. we call china a strategic competitor, but we don't have a strategy to compete with china. so my hope is that congress -- let's imagine this -- and the president realize that we're going to get whooped if we don't think this through on a longer term basis. it has political consequences for him too because the first phase of the trade bill is

meaningless if they won't implement it. and if we keep having this tit for tat, they win. >> so what does the strategic response look like because you think about this all the time. we have a complicated relationship with china. we have remarkable reliance on them for certain things and you can understand the american consumer is puzzled as to what success is supposed to look like. they buy our goods. now they don't buy our goods. if we have sanctions and duties on them, we pay more. what does a strategic response to china look like right now? >> let's talk about what it doesn't look like. what it doesn't look like is pulling out of the tpp, the trade agreement we negotiated with most of the asian countries, which would have benefited us but also set the rules of the road going forward. we're no part of that anymore. china is moving in on all of that. it doesn't look like what we're doing on 5g, just condemning them but not having an alternate

that would be better. and it sure doesn't look like economic sanction after economic sanction, which as i just said, according to the scholars at the wilson center could move china, russia, and others to abandon the swift system and come up with a different banking system, which means our currency is not the international currency. i don't get where we're going. >> is there some hope, jane, that we will have a plan in this administration, or are we just too far gone for this now? >> well, our foreign policy isn't strategic. we do, you know, one-offs all over the place. press releases are not a foreign policy. bashing china is something congress is really good at. i remember back in the day, my nine terms, a lot of people did it. i actually voted for most favored nation status for china, which was unpopular with some folks in california where i now am. but i thought it was the right thing. we thought that china's economy was going to be like ours and

letting it into the wto would make china and us stronger. we would be the stronger of the two. now i don't know what our play is other than another set of economic sanctions. i think that congress will be tough here, and i think after the bolton book, trump doesn't want to look like an appeaser, so i'm betting he will sign this bill even though he tried to prevent it from being passed. >> well, we are in the space normally occupied by rachel maddow, so as rachel would say, watch this space. jane, good to see you as always. thank you very much. >> lovely to see you, ali. >> thank you. just ahead, we're exactly four months away from the general election and the efforts to undermine the american vote are under way. we'll talk about that next. rday. pain happens. aleve it. aleve is proven stronger and longer on pain than tylenol. when pain happens, aleve it.

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with exactly four months before the presidential election, it seems that the goal right now from the lowest to the highest levels of leadership is

to undermine americans' right to vote. in mississippi, it was revealed this week that an election commissioner posted this rather stunning comment on facebook. quote, i'm concerned about voter registration in mississippi. the blacks are having lots of events for voter registration. people in mississippi have to get involved too. in an interview earlier this week, that election commissioner said she thought she was sending a private message, but the comment was shared publicly on facebook. the blacks. and just yesterday in a 5-4 decision, the supreme cold frur allowed the state of alabama to restore voter restrictions. i'm joined by the executive director at the advancement project, a multiracial civil rights organization. and ari berman, a senior reporter at mother jones and author of the book "give us the ballot." welcome to both of you. judith, what's going on? we've got four months to go, and a conversation that should have been settled a long time ago is

still hot in america. the idea that while everybody in theory has the right to vote, not everybody can vote easily. >> well, our country has never wanted everyone to vote, and so we're right back at it, fighting off voter suppression. what we saw in mississippi is a person who is in charge of running elections. she's one of the commissioners, and she's making blatant statements about the fact that black voters somehow have some advantage and she's worried about that. but that's what trump is also saying. trump repeatedly keeps talking about vote by mail because he doesn't want fair, safe, access to the ballot because he knows if more people win, especially people of color, that he will lose. and so this is what we see every election year, is that the voter suppression playbook gets wiped off by the republican party so that black people and brown

people have a harder time to vote. this time it's complicated by the pandemic because states are now fighting about safety. you know, in florida, we have a lawsuit where we're trying to have safe voting for people, but the state is fighting us tooth and nail. >> ari, talk to me about this. you've got a book called "the modern struggle for voting rights in america." i don't know whether you predicted that this is where is it would be, that this would be the impediment because obviously as judith says, with the pandemic, some people are going to make the choice not to vote. and if we make it harder for them to vote in absentia or by mail, it will have the desired effect some people want of not having people turn out. >> yeah, there has been a longstanding strategy of voter suppression in this country. that's not new. we're seeing things like strict voter i.d. laws and cutbacks to early voting and closing polling places, all of those things. then what you've done with the pandemic is you've exacerbated all of those issues and really

put voter suppression on steroids in many states. and so what the supreme court did in alabama, for example, is they said that to be able to get a mail ballot, you had to have a copy of your voter i.d. plus two witnesses or a notarized affidavit accompany your ballot. well, that's a difficult restriction in normal times. but imagine how difficult it is to do those kind of things at a time of social distancing, at a time of rises cases of coronavirus. and the fear here is there were four really bad decisions in voting rights in the past week in alabama, in texas, in florida, and wisconsin. and the fear is that the republican party is getting more desperate. they're going to do everything they can to try to make it harder to vote and that the courts, the republican-dominated courts could essentially give a green light to those efforts even at a time of unprecedented public health crisis right now. >> judith, in texas the supreme court, the headline in the texas tribune is that the u.s. supreme

court won't fast track texas democrats' bid to expand mail-in voting during the pandemic. the stuff ari is talking about, affidavits, i.d.s, witnesses, things like that, that's out of the old playbook for suppressing voter rights. but what's the problem? why should a republican in this country really believe that greater access to voting is bad for them? >> well, they think that because they know that the shifting demographics in this country where the browning of this country means that there are people who may vote against them because they have stood for all things that are anti-civil rights. and so they have a concern. and so what they want to do is continue to make sure that it's harder to vote for people. and we're saying this year, especially in november in the midst of a pandemic, no one should have to choose between their health and their right to vote. and so we want to make sure that people have lots of options around voting so that it's not

just vote by mail but that they can show up with early voting, with lots of opportunities to cast ballots because we know that this is one of the most important elections of our lifetime. >> ari, what's your sense of it? will the energy around voting overcome these restrictions that are still in place because one of the issues right now is the degree to which people are confused about how they're going to vote in november. >> yeah. i think that's really the purpose of trump's massive disinformation campaign is to dissuade people from participating, make it seem like there's something scary or dangerous about voting by mail even though states like oregon have done universal vote by mail very successfully for many years now. and so i'm concerned about states closing polling places, how difficult it could be to vote in person. i'm concerned about stating being equipped for vote by mail, that people are going to get their ballots, that ballots are going to be counted. the good news in the primary is

we have seen very high voter turnout. people have been motivated by the threat of voter suppression to turn out in record numbers. people are seeing what's happening and are saying if voting didn't matter, why would people be trying so hard to suppress certain communities. so i'm afraid of voter suppression, but i do think it could spawn a backlash and we could see higher voter turnout as a result. >> judith, the same question to you. what's your sense of what the net effect is going to be in the november election? >> well, voting rights lawyers like myself, we're going to be fighting back. but i think that the energy in the streets across this country to end white supremacy and racism is going to mean that we're going to have a surge at the polling places, and then our duty is to make sure that people know the rules of the road, that we fight back against the suppressors. but i think that people know. they're connecting the dots.

they understand what this is about, and they also understand that it's not just about trump. but there are down-ballot races like sheriffs, for example. there's over 150 up for election in november and 66 in florida. so i think we're going to see a surge at the polling places and we're going to make sure that voters are protected and that their rights are enforced. >> it doesn't matter who you support, what party you're with. you should be in support of the ability for everybody in america to vote easily. thank you for the work that you do on this, both of you. thank you for making time tonight to talk to our viewers. coming up next, we're going to check back in with cal perry in south dakota as the president prepares to address a tightly packed crowd at mount rushmore. and ask your doctor about biktarvy. biktarvy is a complete, one-pill, once-a-day treatment used for h-i-v in certain adults. it's not a cure, but with one small pill, biktarvy fights h-i-v to help you get to and stay undetectable.

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[ engine rumbling ] [ beeping ] [ engine revs ] uh, you know there's a 30-minute limit, right?

tell that to the rain. [ beeping ] for those who were born to ride, there's progressive. any moment now the president is scheduled to speak to a crowd of the thousands at an independence day event at mount rushmore in south dakota. people have been gathering for hours, mostly ignoring social

distaxi disdancing with very few opting to wear masks. cal perry is live in keystone, south dakota. that is where some people have been protesting. it's about as close as you can get if you're covering this from the outside. what's the story, cal? >> reporter: yeah, we moved down the road about a mile from where we were. the situation has sort of wrapped up. there was some ceremonial arrests, people who decided to remain were arrested and taken away in handcuffs. we saw sort of a standoff that lasted almost 2 1/2 hours with the police. they were able to clear out some of the people on their own. then as you can see on the right-hand side of your screen there, they moved in and then took those folks away. they gave them a warning. they said in 30 minutes if you're not out of here, you'll be arrested. now we sort of turn our attention to the live pictures of the president and the lack of social distancing. i'll remind our viewers we heard from the governor of south dakota saying that they were not going to socially distance at this event, that if you didn't

want to come, if you weren't comfortable coming and you weren't comfortable not social distancing, you could basically stay home. that has concerned a number of people here, including those native american tribes that we've been covering for the last 24 hours. these are folks who have been disenfranchised at a different rate than the rest of the country. these are folks and communities that do not have the resources to battle the coronavirus. a lot of the lakota reservations are about three hours south of here. in talking to the leadership, they said, we don't have hospitals nearby. we don't have running water. we don't have doctors. we just don't have the ability to fend off the coronavirus. so you see check points being set up on native american resvations here in south dakota. that has been a point of friction with the governor as has the live event we're going to see here tonight, ali. >> cal, there's some interesting language around this because you and i have been covering protests around this country now for several weeks. this, according to the people who are trying to block the road, is not a protest because

they claim it's their land. >> it is their land according to the u.s. government, according to the united states supreme court, which ruled in 1980 that the original laramie treaty of 1868 was not held up by the u.s. government. the u.s. government did not hold up their end of the bargain. that treaty ended a lot of the conflict in the northwestern part of this country. it wasn't even fully formed at that point, but this black hills, these black hills were given to the lakota people, and it was less than ten years later when people searching for gold came across these hills and the lakota people were starved and killed and run out of these hills. ever since then, they've been on reservations and been fighting for their land back. so you had this ugly and frankly sad scene where as folks were being taken away, you had trump supporters yelling at them, go home, go home. and you had these native american protesters yelling back, this is my home. this is my land. i think there's not a common

understanding between the two groups of each other. there was just these very ugly scenes, just vitriol being thrown back and forth by the two groups. you know, i say sad, ali, because there's not a common understanding here. there's just two completely different points of view. you have supporters of the president, and then you have the folks who live here. i have to say you were out there covering these protests in minneapolis and around the country, and we saw a heavy-handed police action. what i saw out there today was a very respectful police action by the south dakota authorities, and i think part of that is they understand. they understand what's at stake here. they understand what is in people's hearts here. so they were giving warnings about being arrested, and they allowed the elder members of the tribe, some of the more senior members, some of the folks who lead the community here to gather themselves together, to make that stand, to sit in the road and to be arrested peacefully. it was not what i saw in louisville. it was not what we saw in the past sort of few months. this was a peaceful action, and i think the protesters were able to get their point across in front of the tv cameras, which

was very important to them. >> and then people are watching that right now. they're watching the arrests. we're playing that back. cal, just to be clear, i want to underscore a point i heard you make, that in 1980, the supreme court of the united states actually sided with the sioux nation. >> reporter: and they put a trust in place, $100 million of a trust because it's hard to return this land now. so they put $100 million of trust in a bank for the lakota nation. they've always said we don't want to touch the money. word is that trust is now worth over $1 billion. but the sioux nation has stood their ground and has said we want our land back. we want this memorial to be shut down, ali. >> cal perry, thank you. i know you're going to continue to be out there through the course of the evening. coming up next, the president's lagging re-election campaign and the growing number of polls that show joe biden has the lead. sam seder and christina grier join me right after this. - [narrator] did you just reward yourself

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all right. americans will be heading to the polls to vote in the presidential election in exactly four months. it's obviously been the strangest election year ever, but right now national polling

shows joe biden leading donald trump by more than eight points in the realclearpolitics average of polls. and across the key states that hillary clinton lost in 2016, wisconsin, pennsylvania, and michigan, joe biden leading by six or seven points each. another several states that donald trump won he's lagging in now. joining us now to discuss the 2020 election is sam seder, host of the podcast majority report and christina greer, an associate professor of political science at fordham university. thank you for being with us. christina, what do you make of these kinds of numbers four months away from the campaign? some people say, oh, it's only four months to go. and other people say, it's four months to go. >> right. i'm cautiously optimistic but we have a president who has said explicitly that he intends to call on russia and china to assist him in winning this election. we've seen him denigrate the u.s. postal service knowing that we might need to use absentee ballots en masse based upon his failure to prevent the

coronavirus spreading throughout the united states and we have over 130,000 americans who have already died. so depending on how americans feel they can turn out to vote, some may have to vote absentee. the president is adamant that he does not want that to happen because there's a certainly level of security through voting in that means. however, we have seen in places like florida and georgia in 2018, the ways that ballots can go missing in particular districts and also how absentee ballot and affidavit ballots can be allocated in racialized ways in black neighborhoods especially. so i think this is the first time we're seeing the president on the defensive. joe biden definitely needs to motivate and mobilize democratic voters. he'll probably do that with his vice presidential pick. but he needs to also maintain a message more than donald trump has been abysmal for american democracy. he needs to continue to put forth a message as to what he

will do if and when he's elected and sort of what january 21st, 2021, will look like in a biden presidency. >> sam, this is an interesting point christina makes that this campaign by joe biden has been relatively low-key since the end of the primaries. i guess anybody would be low-key compared to donald trump. but the vice presidential pick may be motivating. it may be something that derives some energy. what are your thoughts on that? >> yeah. i mean i think to the extent that biden has some liabilities, it's with, you know, perception that he is low energy, if you will, and i think he is not -- you know, i think to a certain extent, the pandemic has, you know, allowed him to maintain that low energy, if you will, without it being sort of out of place in the context of a presidential election. i think you'll see a vice

presidential pick that will be a little higher energy and that will, you know, maybe work up for some of his deficits with younger people. i mean, you know, biden's doing very well with senior, far better than i think might have anticipated. i think part of that again is from the pandemic. that's the thing is that this election is being shaped so dramatically now by what is going on on the ground with coronavirus that i think it's almost hard to sort of predict where we're going to be two or three months from now because we don't really now just how bad things are going to be in that respect. >> it's hard to predict where we're going to be two or three weeks from now or two or three days from now. christina, what does, aside from a vice presidential pick, what does joe biden have to do because he's actually avoiding even normal missteps that people would make because he doesn't have to make them because donald trump is making them all. donald trump is complaining about how he's running his campaign from his basement. seems to be working just fine for joe biden at the moment. >> well, we know that joe

biden's gaffes aren't seen as the same as donald trump's. i mean donald trump makes about six or seven a day, ask they're just not reported on in the same way. i think with his vice presidential nominee, there will be a nice sort of complement to one another where they can articulate a vision. and i think, you know, there are many qualifications that joe biden has. obviously he has over 40 years of public service to this nation, something that the president does not have. but i think a key element in his governance in the past and what he's putting out for the future is that he actually has compassion and empathy. so as sam just said, we have no idea how many more hundreds of thousands of americans will be lost due to the ineptitude of the president and his administration. we're going to have families grieving. we already know that one in three black americans know someone who has died of covid. so there are going to be so many more families and communities who have lost people, and that's where really joe biden does really well.

i mean he understands loss, but he also respects the institutions of not just the legislative branch but also the executive. so i think the level of leadership that he'll bring and the level of clarity and quite honestly a lack of drama is quite welcoming to many american citizens. >> sam, what does donald trump need to do? i don't know if he's tuning in to get your advice on what he needs to do to claw back, but he doesn't seem to be taking anybody's advice at the moment except for his own instincts, doubling down on a narrowly increasing fringe audience. >> to be honest with you, ali, i don't know that he can do that. you know, i suppose if there was an attempt for him to do it, i guess it would have to be that he began to take the pandemic seriously. i guess on some level -- i mean, look, his whole strategy from the very beginning, before any of this started, was to depress

the turnout for joe biden, and they have been unable to find that thing that will resonate with any specific cohort in the broad democratic base and voting coalition that would do that. i mean just their attempts to say that he's, i guess, you know not cognitively present or something, it falls on deaf ears because donald trump is just a very bad messenger for that. i think frankly, i think they are doing more work on trying to undercut the legitimacy of the election. and like we both said, we don't know where we're going to be in two or three days with this coronavirus. so i think they're trying to set up an opportunity to really question the legitimacy of the election if donald trump loses by anything other than a huge, huge margin. >> but i think you have underscored the important point. the effort here is to undermine the legitimacy of the election as much as it is to win an election. sam, good to see you.

thank you as always. sam seder, christina greer, always great to see you. that does it for me tonight. but not for msnbc. i'm going to be back tomorrow morning, 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. with the very latest news with my great friend ari melbourne. >> ari, you know why they call you the james brown of news, the hardest-working man in news. >> thank you, my friend. have a good night. >> you too. have a great night. i want to wish you a good evening because i'm coming to you here with our live special coverage continuing, and we have great experts and journalists covering a range of topics tonight. we will also be covering a presidential appearance tonight which critics call down right unsafe. president trump speaking at mount rushmore in south dakota. at other times, let's be clear, this could be a simple, normal, regular observance of independence day. but th