chocolate sales have soared. americans have bought almost $3 billion, up about 6% from this time last year. that does it for me. my colleague picks up next. >> good evening from new york. with coronavirus cases arising across the country. officials in some of the hardest hit states are sounding the alarm. more than 3.1 million americans have been infected with the virus. 134,000 cases were recorded yesterday and that drive is driven in large part in states

like california, alzheimer'rizo florida and texas. governor greg abbott warned next week's numbers will be worse. officials in houston warned their hospitals are becoming overwhelmed and facing a potential repeat of what happened in new york back in april. meanwhile arizona recorded 4200 more cases. this is the sixth consecutive day of more than 3,000 cases. and florida recorded 11,000 new cases. they also recorded a new record in hospitalizations, 435 of those. the president was in florida for a drug traffic briefing. he had no coronavirus specific events and made no mention of florida's spike in cases.

yesterday dr. anthony fauci said areas have seen improvement, but nationally it is not great. >> as a country, when you compare us to other countries, i don't think you can say we are doing great. we are just not. >> fauci attributed the surge to cases like arizona and florida to reopening too quickly. reports in those states along with texas and california, new beds are being added and special air flow as there are new records being set daily. today president trump was asked about the current situation nationally. >> is united states losing the war with covid? >> no, we are winning the war. it flared up in areas they thought it was ending, florida, texas and a couple of other

places. they will have it under control very quickly. >> i am joined by joe from los angeles and vaughn from tempe, arizona. welcome. vaughn, starting with you, reading through some of the statistics from arizona and other states. the situation on the ground in terms of this being a state that had a lot open, what is open in arizona? what is the trajectory and the expectation for what the next few days hold there? >> reporter: it's a struggle to hear the president suggest it will be under control quickly. it has been out of control for two months. only small measures taken to get a grip on the spread. you are still seeing record numbers of hospitalization and icu beds in use. you are continuing to see a testing system overwhelmed, a

demand for tests that cannot meet its own capacity. the governor held a press conference and there was a lot of conversation whether he would announce a new closure order or closure of dining services and malls. but there was only one rule, not to have more than 50% occupancy. mayors said they wanted to have the right to shut down local businesses. a twoeet last night, the republican governor posted a meme that said, quote, you learn not to take half measures. the moral of the story is i took a half measure when i should have went all of the way. i will never do that again. that may mean the governor is

taking small steps to get this under control, but right now it doesn't appear they are working. california is the largest state in the country. i remember in march and april looking at the statistics. and california relative to its size wasn't up there at the beginning, but that seems to be changing now. >> reporter: as the economy started to reopen in june, we saw the cases rise and hospitalization and now we see the increase in the number of deaths. a couple of days this week where more than 100 deaths were reported. that's one concern. but across the country, we are looking at the shortage of ppe, personal protective equipment. the big hospitals hit it their supplies are sufficient, but really, worries are about many other places around the country

like nursing homes, rural hospitals, home health care workers, school nurses getting ready to go back to class and doctors offices and specialists who were closed during the pandemic and trying to reopen saying they are having a hard time getting their hands on masks, gloves, gowns. the supplies are low, prices high. there have been some calls for the president to invoke the defense protection act, but right now no plan for that. >> thank you both for joining us. texas is another state hit especially hard as it continues to see a new spike in cases. the positive rate is now over 15% in the lone star state. texas is also seeing a surge in hospitalizations, 371% increase in the past month. i am joined by the mayor of austin, texas.

steve adler, your honor, thank you for joining us. you have five stages of alert. as i understand it, you are in stage four right now. are you close to any decision to move to stage 5? what would it take for that to happen? >> we are on the line, precariously poised. we said there would be a window in which we could move to stage five with triggers. we have already hit the lower end of that range. i had to go to my community two weeks ago and say if we couldn't change this trajectory, when we hit the low end of that range, we would have to take drastic action and perhaps go to a shelter in place. we are just on the edge and we are in danger of overwhelming our icus. we thought it would be physical

spaces, but now we are finding that so many of the health care workers in our hospitals are becoming infecting themselves. so our staffing levels are being changed. we are getting calls from the valley in texas to see if we can take patients that they don't have place for in their icus. we are on the edge in austin. >> in general we see these numbers getting very high. can you give us some specifics in terms of capacity. icus, where you are right now. how many of those -- are those primarily coronavirus cases or folks in the hospital for other reasons? what percentage of it would be coronavirus. >> in our city, recognizing there is an on going need for icu beds for those who are in car accidents or have heart attacks. we are about 60/40 ratio.

60% of the beds we are trying to keep over for covid patients. we were screaming with doubling every seven to nine days and the number of people we had in our icus. again, in this last 2 1/2 weeks, we are just now beginning to see perhaps a leveling off of our icu admissions. still too early to tell. i am still having the community by their behavior go beyond because we are waiting to see what happens. part of it depends on will our health care workers be able to stay healthy and will we be able to take folks from other places who are getting hit harder than we are. >> also and the city of austin

approving fines up to $2,000 who do not wear masks. you have a mask ordinance in place. first of all, how has compliance been with the mask ordinance? you have the option of fining them, but do you expect significant enforcement of this? >> the truth is, going back to march, there are not police officers or code enforcement agents to make something like this work by enforcing by giving out tickets. it has to be something that the community wants to do. it has to be a generally accepted culture of caution. that's been the problem. when the governor took away from us our mandated mask ordinance, it sent a message to the community that maybe it wasn't important anymore. people watching the president lead with the fact that masks

are not effective. so the message you send is oftentimes more important than anything else to get a community united. yes, we increased the fine to $2,000 as a statement how important this is and it is an enforceable tool. but the hope is we don't have to enforce it. the hope is that people will get the message this is serious. we have more people wearing masks today than three weeks ago. we can see that impact in our numbers, in our admissions and in our new cases. there is no question but that masking has a very real impact. you just have to look at the numbers. >> that's the other question. what is activity like, in general, outside of people's homes in austin, texas. you are not in this stage 5. are people behaving as if you are? are you seeing a lot of activity

outside? are you seeing a fair amount of business activity? what is the reality like? >> i think people are reacting in advance of where the government is and where our state is with respect to the orders they bring. that would make sense because they are watching what is happening around them and reacting to it. yes, right now we have more and more people in our community that are not going to restaurants regardless of what the occupancy level is. more and more people are staying away from groups even if they have the allowance. we are telling people the safest place they could be right now is at home and more and more people are staying at home. that is what is changing our numbers. >> mayor steve adler, austin, texas. thank you for joining us. i bring in dr. torres, the

msnbc medical correspondent. remember we talked about recomme remdesivir, a treatment for people sick with it. it was announced by gilead that it reduced the risk to patients by 62% compared with standard care alone. it sounds significant. >> it sounds and is significant, but this is their finding. it still needs to be peer reviewed and other studies to follow up. but what they are saying is it did cut down the chance of dying for those folks severely ill. up till now. d dexamethasone is the only medicine we had. this is one attacking the virus

trying to get the virus out of your body, but the virus leaves behind immune system issues. this is a one-two punch we are seeing which is important because it is giving doctors more tools. doesn't work for everybody and does not work across the board, but for those it does work, it is important, giving us more tools to use for more patients and we will keep adding as time goes on. >> that sounds like a key point. as we talk about massive surges, now some indication in states that the death rate is starting to particular up. florida and new york comparable in size. florida a little bigger. we are talking about this giant surge of cases in florida. deaths are about 60 deaths a day.

that is a key question here. as the surges in question play out, are there enough treatments, enough best practices in place that even with a huge surge in cases, as bad as the deaths are, they are not going to get as bad as they did in new york in march and april or could it get up there? >> the honesty of the situation is there will never be enough treatments. just four or five months into the pandemic, we are learning more about this virus every day. but simple things like putting patients on ventilators. as doctors we would put them on as a knee-jerk reaction. now we found out with coronavirus we don't want to do that. we want to let them breathe on their own even with low oxygen

levels which is counter intuitive. there is decxamethasone and now remdesivir. on top of that we are seeing a surge of cases which is different than new york. in new york it was more the elderly population. here it is more younger population. but we do know that death lags the cases. so as cases go up, deaths will follow. hopefully deaths won't get to the level. i am pretty optimistic they are at that stage right now. >> dr. john torres, always good to talk to you. and coming up, the debate over schools, when to reopen, whether to reopen and how to

open. >> i am confident if you do walmart, home depot, these things, if you can do those, you can reopen schools. >> what if teachers get sick. and the president calls off a campaign rally scheduled for this weekend it. polls show him in a far worse situation than he faced in 2016. could he still win? and if so, how? we have much more to get to. stay with us. # with us usaa is made for what's next no matter what challenges life throws at you, we're always here to help with fast response and great service and it doesn't stop there we're also here to help look ahead that's why we're helping members catch up by spreading any missed usaa insurance payments over the next twelve months so you can keep more cash in your pockets for when it matters most and that's just one of the many ways we're here to help the military community

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now it's time to be open, to stay open and we will put out the fires as they come up. we have to reopen the schools. it's so important to reopen the schools. we have to get our schools open and stop this political none sens.

-- nonsense. >> president trump has sparked a debate on the safest way to do that. he has threatened to take away funds if schools don't reopen. the american academy of peed at particula -- pediatrics said this pediat now school superintendents are left to assess a sensible school forward taking into account parents, teachers and

staff. i am joined by the former secretary of health and human services. thank you both for joining us. i see experts with different advice on this. you want expert input but this is a public policy choice that school officials and the like will have to make. if we go from the starting point that every one would like to see schools reopen, the question becomes what is the standard that should be applied here for making that decision? let me get you both to weigh in on that. congresswoman, i will start with you. >> the president of the united states doesn't have the authority to order the school systems in the united states to open up. the constitution is very clear. education is a state function and the states have allocated it, for the most part, to school districts. he doesn't have the authority to

cut off the money. that money he is talking about is about 9% of the school budget. that's what the feds provide. that is for low income schools, schools that have large numbers of minorities and for special education. that's the last thing we want to do. of course we want to open the schools safely. i would leave it to local school boards to work it out. we have some very good guidance, but we can't open up in places that are still at great risk. florida has not hit this coronavirus with a hammer. at the moment the virus is out of control. it's hard to open schools under those circumstances. and let me give you one more fact. there is a study out today from the henry j. kizer family foundation that says that one-quarter of all of the teachers are in the high risk

category which means they have underlying health conditions, which is about the same as the workforce. higher education is probably a higher number. those teachers will be at risk unless we do this carefully. there is lots of good advice. the cdc has good advice. there is an excellent white paper. i know that the school districts of this country and the parents will be very careful about when they open and how they open. lonny, what do you think the standard should be here? what do you think school boards, school officials across the country should be looking at this? >> steve, this is not going to be a one size fix all solution. what we see is that the virus is in various states in various parts of the country. but the presumption for most

school districts has to be what can we do to ensure there are a maximum number of school days when children are receiving instruction in person. what we know about the virus, is that it's far less harmful to children than, for example, influenza, so we know based on cdc data that a school age child is seven times more likely to die from flu than covid-19. second of all, there are ways to blend online education with in person education to make this work. the presumption needs to be let's do all we can to maximize in classroom time. at the end of the day there are grave consequences to kids not being in school. social isolation and morbidity

from behavior. so it is good to try to get the schools reopened as quickly as possible. there are risk factors for teachers and administrators. you could see the higher risk teachers engaging in online learning. children are poor carriers. kids don't necessarily transmit it to adults or to each other. it is important to take all of this into account. >> let me read what the american academy of pediatrics wrote. they said the goal should be to get every person back in school.

congress woman, it seems they raise the topic of the possibility of other health implications. we talk all about covid, but of keeping kids away, american academy of pediatrics say, wait a minute, there could be dire consequences there, too. how do you balance those two? >> that's what the schools are going to have to balance. there is no question that there are emotional issues here. it is not just covid. by the way, this blending of the school year that some people will do it online or some classes will be online. we have to be careful about

that. any parent that needs to go to work, particularly if they are a low income parent wants to know how long their kids will be in school. this is a tricky business, it has to be left to educators and health officials. we have to get politics out of this. we all want the kids to be back in school, particularly the younger children. maybe the older children can learn online, but the younger children. we also have to worry about the safety of the staff at the same time. i don't think there is huge disagreement. we have to get the politicians out of the way and let the educators figure this out so we protect our children. just think about a school you went to, high traffic, small rooms, people clustered together. these are big challenges for our school. i wish we had more outdoor areas to teach in.

that would be helpful as part of the overall strategy. i want to leave this to the educators and public health leaders and get this out of the way. but we have to take into account what the needs of the parents are, too. parents will be very wary unless these are pretty detailed proposals, they know their children will be safe. >> let me leave the politicians for one more second. there is one more area i want to address, lonny. that's the money. there was an article in "the new york times" about the cost, if you want to reopen schools, maybe you need to repurpose facilities, maybe you need to hire monitors, talks of having temperature check stations. the costs can get up there fast. when you look at these cash strapped school districts around the country, is that something

the federal government should be looking at, providing support there? >> i imagine in the next round of coronavirus relief, this will be one of those topics, how to support schools around the country. we have had a conversation for the last couple of days about guidance from the cdc. i think some of that is outdated. i think some of that will drive schools trying to reopen in a way that is more costly than it needs to be. we need to get as much assistance as we can, but also recogni recognize there are ways to economize. >> i apologize. we are fresh out of time. i enjoyed the discussion. i appreciate you both being part of it. up next, a presidential race that looked like one thing a couple months ago. it looks different.

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it would seem be -- we need to say to those like the president, that when we defend these statues, this is not what makes america great. making america great is living up to what america is supposed to stand for. there are two topics that have really dominated the public conversation for the last couple months. we have new polling on how the country thinks the president has handled both of them. there is the coronavirus, the president's response to

covid-19. this has been being tracked. there have been significant changes from june until right now. let's break this down by party. among democrats who approve of the president's performance on coronavirus, no surprise, minimal, it's up a statistical 1.6, up to 7%. and how about independents. a month ago 41% said they approved of the way the president was handling it. now it is down to 33%. among the president's fellow republicans it was 90% who said they approved of his handling of the coronavirus a month ago. it is still high at 78%. but what does movement like that add up to.

overall last month just over 40% of voters approved of how the president was handling it. a 33% approval on the most pressing crisis. two topics, coronavirus and the other is race relations. from this same poll, there is a strong disapproval of the president's handling of race relations. among african-americans, 92% say they disapprove of the way he has handled it. hispanic voters, 83%. among white voters, 57%. remember in 2016 the president won solidly. now solidly they are disapproving. two out of every three voters in

the country say they disapprove of how the president is handling race relations. the president has very, very poor numbers on these questions. what does that add up to? this is the real clear politics polling average. an advantage of nearly 9 points for joe biden over donald trump. you did not see him ll ri clint having this kind of lead for the length that joe biden has. this is a significant lead. you can see what is behind it. the president's performance on the two topics. those two topics do not appear

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welcome back . eager to get his campaign back on track, he traveled to florida. florida reported its highest day of hospitalizations in a single day. the escalating crisis there is complicating plans for the republican convention in jacksonville and could jeopardize the president's

winning the case in november. "the new york times" said the canceled rally is the third time in less than a month that the president's relaunch of his campaign rally haven't gone as planned. now new reporting suggests that the recent news is taking a toll on the president. it is reported that his sullen demeanor could backfire. coming up next. anor could backf. coming up next you'll get there. and now that you can lease or buy a new lincoln remotely or in person...

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♪ it's amazing to see them in the wild like th-- shhh. for those who were born to ride, there's progressive. welcome back. a new report that behind closed doors the president is lamenting his current standing. people are describing him as shell-shocked and sullen. he has cast himself in the role as the victim of a pandemic that happened to him rather than the country. the polling for the president is dire right now with the topic on their minds, the coronavirus. there is time for the president to turn things around, but is there a way.

according to the report, he thinks there is and is certain the virus will go away by october. then, he adds, the economy will rebound overnight and he will win a second term. i am joined by a co-author of that report, and co-chair of color of change and msnbc contributor and rich lowry. phil, we are quoting from your story, so let's start with you. two different moods being conveyed there about the president. one concerned about his political standing, but, two, confident he will yet turn this around. in 2016 during that campaign, trump's political obituary was written multiple times and he wound up winning the presidency. is his confidence now similar to then or is he in a different or more concerned place?

>> he's confident in that he thinks the virus will go away and he thinks there will be a solution, a cure, as he puts it, by the fall. that is inconsistent with the reality presented by a lot of the scientists working in the administration, but his advisers are trying to re-create the around him of 2016, trying to get him into more of a disciplined state of mind, but that has been challenging because this is a president not known for his discipline. they feel like they have enough time to try to reverse the trajectory of this race, but they do acknowledge privately that there are troubles right now. >> heather, the president sees a path that involves the change of coronavirus. we spent the first part of the show looking at the current situation. can you see a scenario where a

few months from now the country feels differently about the president's leadership on coronavirus, the trajectory of the virus, that changes the politics of this race in a way that would give him a shot at re-election? >> i think anything is possible in politics, but the underlying assessment that the american people have made in this test of leadership has broken faith with many crucial blocks of the american electorate. i think that the economy is not going to snap back into place. we saw that once we had any kind of interruption, it was clear that it was built on a house of cards. there was a ton of corporate debt, a ton of household debt. a third of americans missed their housing payments on july 1. it was really supported with extraordina extraordinary measures, trillions of support from the

federal government and still one out of every four americans filed for unemployment insurance and that's not to mention the millions who are left out of that system and were forced to go to work and get sick. we don't mitch mcconnell has continued to block any progress on a second recovery bill that has languished for six weeks after coming out of the house means there is no -- for me as an economic policy person, i don't see a way forward that has americans feeling more economically confident, no matter what phase we might be in the actual pandemic. >> we hear the president talking very optimistically talking about the coronavirus, talking about the need to reopen, the need to get back to life. we mentioned there is this canceled rally in new hampshire this weekend. he blamed it on the weather. do you think the president politically needs to change his

message on the coronavirus, needs to change the way he talks about it? >> yeah. i think it was a mistake right at the beginning for him to minimize it and it is a mistake to minimize it now. they were counting on us being over the worst and actually it seemed as if we were over the worst. experts said we could get a break with seasonality in the warmer weather. that's turned out to be the opposite of the truth and we have had more cases than ever. i would expect this race tightened in the fall and for the president to have a puncher's chance, but he now needs breaks. he needs things to go the right way. he needs this current outbreak to recede or certainly not to be -- to drive the kind of fatalities we saw in the northeast earlier this spring. and he needs the economy not to be all the way back, but the clear trajectory to be towards a rebound. i think that puts him in contenti contention, but he will still need joe biden to stumble.

>> that's the other question there, phil. if there is an almost miraculous turn-around in the coronavirus, that it goes away in the fall, is there any talk of how else to approach this campaign, how to approach this campaign if the reality from here to election day is going to be more cases potential an uptick in the fall, you know, thousands, maybe tens of thousands more deaths, as horrible as that sounds, is there conversation around the president about how to run a political campaign in an atmosphere like that? >> well, you know, certainly they're going to have to grapple with whatever's happening with the virus out in the country. you know, talking to trump's advisers the last few days, they're hopeful that they can have some sustained efforts to define joe biden in a more negative light. however, they have been trying to do that for many, many months now and it has not worked according to virtually all of the public polls we see with joe

biden leading trump. there are the august conventions about a month from now that both parties are going to have. that's obviously an opportunity for both candidates to frame a message heading into the general election in the fall. but donald trump is the president, and he's going to have to grapple with the crises that come at him, and that's not something he and his political team will be able to kor you graph. it may not always work in his favor. >> i am getting some breaking news right here, and i will share it with everybody. nbc news now confirmed that president trump has called roger stone and told him that he will commute his sentence. now, roger stone had been scheduled to begin serving a prison term next week. he had been seeking to have that delayed until september, but it had been scheduled to begin next week. stone had been convicted almost a year and a half ago on seven counts of obstruction, witness

tampering and making false statements to congress. again, nbc news now reporting that the president has called roger stone and has told him that he will commute that sentence. i believe we have betsy swan with us right now who has been following and covering this extensively. betsy, thank you for joining us. again, the news here, i want to be clear, commutation as opposed to pardon. there has been a lot of talk this might be a presidential pardon. this will be a commutation apparently. what is the difference between those two? >> that's right. a pardon totally wipes the slate clean, and it removes a guilty verdict. it would basically make it so that roger stone had never been convicted in the first place. a commutation, meanwhile, either removes or less sons someone wod face for being convicted, but it leaves that guilty conviction still on the person's record. in this case, trump is going to be commuting roger stone's

sentence. now, it's possible in the future that he could also pardon him, removing that guilty conviction from his record as well. trump has pardoned multiple people who have already served either time in prison or have paid fines because of crimes they have committed. the pardon is still something that's on the table. what trump is doing now is basically making it so that roger stone will not be spending time in prison. this is something the president had eluded to before he tweeted suggesting that roger would not end up spending any time incarcerated. and it's something that many of roger's close allies have been lobbying the white house about furiously ever since -- ever since roger stone, of course, first found himself in the cross hairs of the justice department because he was convicted of lying to congressional investigators who were scrutinizing his connection to russia's interference with the 2016 election.

stone was not convicted for anything that happened during the 2016 campaign cycle, and there haven't been any a allegations that he participated with coordination with the russians. what he was convicted of was lying to the investigators, as well as tampering with someone who those investigators wanted to use as a witness for their own congressional russia probe. >> betsy, just to understand the process behind this, the thinking that's going into this from the white house's perspective, to go with the commutation rather than a pardon is your sense that that is because they believe they would like to see roger stone having a chance to actually win an appeal and get these charges taken down altogether, or is this more on the political end where there is a sense that in an election year going with a commutation as opposed to a full pardon that there might be a political difference there. >> my understanding is the legal process is finished for stone.

i don't believe there is a whole lot more he would be able to do. what i can tell you is that there was internal debate among senior white house staff regarding whether or not to encourage the president either to give stone a full pardon or simply to give him a commutation. and the people arguing in favor of giving him a commutation argued, well, perhaps this will have a little bit less of the political sting than pardoning him would have. however, the probe pardon camp said it's not going to matter. any sort of leniency that we grant to roger stone is going to be something of a big political mess, so we might as well go all the way. those were sort of the two schools of thought that existed in the white house. clearly at this point the argument for commutation has won out. it's possible that there may be legal remedies still available to roger that i just don't have at the tip of my tongue. but basically what this means is that the president is granting stone this leniency. he's granting him this clemency

and he's not going to have to worry about going to prison. >> we have one of our legal contributors with us as well. if this is what's going to happen here, if roger stone is going to have his sentence commuted by the president, does he have any potential legal recourse remaining to get the actual conviction removed from his record, or is it going to eventually be he would require a presidential pardon for that to happen? >> well, the question is does he really care? i mean, roger stone takes such great pride in being a dirty trickster. i'm not sure he cares about his conviction. the truth of the matter is as long as he doesn't have to go to jail. he can continue to appeal and make those attempts, but this isn't a get out of jail free card. lots of people are arguing, well, maybe we need to use this as part of an obstruction of

prosecution against the president and this is exhibit a, especially given his statements today, that the reason why he thinks the president is going to do it is because, basically, he had goods on the president and he kept silent. so perhaps down the road there is a prosecution, an obstruction prosecution by a different white house and justice department, but it seems unlikely to me, but that's obviously possible. >> and, betsy, very quickly here. we have under a minute. but just the relationship between the president and roger stone? obviously this is somebody who has been very close to him for years. can you just talk a little bit about that? >> stone and president trump have gone back for decades, knowing each other when they were in new york city's small and close knit republican circles. my understanding, i'm aware of any active connection or communication between the two then since stone found himself in doj's cross hairs, but he's clearly someone who the president is deeply aware of, who the president knows quite

well and who the president saw as a valuable adviser. >> okay. just to get this across to folks, too, we have now received word from the white house. the white house put out a statement confirming the sentence has been commuted. the president has personally informed roger stone of that and the white house has put out a statement it has been done. i want to thank you all. appreciate you all being with us. that is going to do it for us. but don't go anywhere. "all in" with chris hayes is up next. good evening from new york. i'm chris hayes. some breaking news just now. just a few moments ago in a very anticipated news dump. the president just called roger stone to tell him his sentence will be commuted, sparing him jail time. later today a federal appeals court denied stone'