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tv   Morning Joe  MSNBC  August 4, 2020 3:00am-6:00am PDT

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great to see you this morning and great interview. that does it for me on this tuesday morning, i'm yasmin vossoughian. "morning joe" starts right now. president donald j. trump is a working class president. >> i'm rich. >> this campaign is going to match his work ethic. >> i'm an ivy league, i went to ivy league college, i went to wharton school, which is the best business school in the world. >> he's a working class president -- >> i just sold an apartment for $15 million. >> it's all too much. this is -- they shutdown the campaign -- it's like, meltdown, meltdown at the core and homer simpson turns it off. when we turn it on we'll say mr. burns is working class here. it's not going to work. the campaign is trying to
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rebrand donald trump as a blue collar working class every man. good morning. we have former aid to george w. bush and from the state department elise jordan. the host of "politics nation" and president of the national action network al sharpton. reporter for axios, jonathan swan. more from his remarkable interview with the president coming up. willie, it's a thing we're starting to see more and more from donald trump. him working against his own political self-interest we've been talking about this had for a while. yesterday was no exception. let's go through some of the highlights of the day. he spent the day undermining an economic relief bill for struggling americans. constantly attacking the idea of passing it, the people negotiating it. he then attacked deborah birx for telling the truth about the
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pandemic and called her pathetic. he, once again, believe it or not, he pushed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus a day after the trump administration's coronavirus testing czar became the latest official to say doesn't work. it doesn't work. quote, we need to move on from that drug. just like the fda said it. just like everybody in trump's own administration has said it. it's a scam, and doctors who push it are pushing a scam for whatever reason. the trump administration has said it doesn't work. but donald trump, he keeps pushing the scam. and he continued to work to undermine legal forms of voting. i have to say again, these are legal forms of voting that usually favor republicans. and it's making donald trump freak out, actually. and making republicans freak out
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that he keeps attacking a form of voting that republicans do quite well in. and, of course, with 156,000 americans now dead from the virus the president decided to take time yesterday morning, again, to attack our show. and this time to attack our show's ratings. he, of course, lied about our numbers, but i responded to him with this genuine plea. i ask again that you please stop obsessing over our show. 150,000 americans are dead. we need you to focus on that. by the way, congratulations to the "morning joe" team for putting together some of the highest numbers in "morning joe" history. willie, of course, you brought up our competition on another channel, f"fox & friends," i think friday had us getting
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1.3 million viewers an hour. so even his attacks continue to be lies. and you wonder why the poor man remains obsessed with us and with -- i mean, it's a cable news show and then going after deborah birx, the person who's been the most loyal to him over the past several months. so loyal that she's actually compromised her own credibility in the medical and science community, which, of course, again another lesson for people that have been loyal to donald trump, it never sticks. but just the absolute sheer chaos while his own team is trying to put together an economic relief bill that will help the country get through this terrible time and his doctors are trying to spare more americans from dying as the death count is over 150,000.
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this guy just can't help himself. >> yeah, there was so much yesterday. i had the same thought when i heard about his tweet when he was going after our ratings incorrectly. i thought look what's going on out in the world and you're worried about the ratings of cable news morning shows. used to be many years ago, the president of the united states has something to say about our show how should we deal with it? i didn't hear about it for a few hours. it gist makes me sad that he's not focussed on this crisis in our country right now. as for the legislation going on on capitol hill, the president if you talk to republicans, both -- and democrats, they say he's not a part of this. he has representatives helping, mark meadows and steve mnuchin trying to get a deal. but the president who campaigned entirely on being this great deal maker, the guy you know from the apprentice, the guy who's going to shake up washington and come in and throw out the old ways and get deals
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done is not even participating in a deal that would help, by the way, many of his own supporters but tens of millions of americans get money, some food on the table and weather this crisis. he's not participating in that exercise. that's who he was supposed to be when he ran for president and he's not delivering on that whatsoever. >> he said, i alone can fix it. and yet i talk to people in the government, talk to people that work in his administration and more and more they're working to actively exclude him. foreign policy people are moving about trying to handle very delicate situations as much as they can without talking to the president, as much as they can keep from the president they do because he's become even more erratic, even more irrational. and you hear it in the campaign that they just try to keep their
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heads down and stay away from donald trump whenever they can. and here you have, again, here you have the guy who said, i alone can fix it. i know how to make deals. he's sitting on the sidelines, nobody wants him to be involved because he's such a destructive force. so instead of being involved, he's just sending out tweets and saying nasty things from the white house to actually undermine the work that his people and that the republican senators are trying to get done because they know that they're in enough trouble as it is because they're attached to donald trump. >> yeah. and now would be a great time to be the master deal maker he claimed he was during the 2016 campaign. the country needs him to put this deal together. jonathan swan is with us this morning, we've been talking for days now about his interview for axios for hbo when he sat down
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with president trump. here's another clip where the president defends his administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. >> i've covered you for a long time, i've gone to your rallies, they love you, listen to you, hang on every word, they don't listen to me or fauci or the media, they say we're fake news. when you say don't worry about wearing masks, many of these are older people. it's giving them a false sense of security -- >> it's under control. >> how? 1,000 americans are dying every day? >> they are, but that doesn't mean we're doing everything we can. it's under control as much as we can control. it's a horrible plague. >> you really think this is as much as we can control? 1,000 deaths a day? >> first of all, we have done a great job. we've gotten the governors everything they needed. many of them didn't, some they did, we'll talk about the
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successful ones the good ones one day, we had good and bad and a lot in the middle. i could tell you right now who the great ones are and who the not so great ones are. but the governors do it. we gave them massive amounts of material. >> jonathan he says it is what it is, he says we've got it under control and resorts to the greatest hits, saying i gave the governors everything they wanted. that doesn't get to the core of where we are right now. >> no. >> and what the federal government could be doing about this. >> this is a very, very serious point. we 'in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. 150,000 americans are dead, 1,000 americans are dying every day. and when president trump is pressed on it, he returns to a few different lines. he says we've done more tests than anyone else in the world. yes, that's true, but it's also not a particularly relevant
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statistic. because many of the tests people have to wait more than a week to get their results which renders them useless because they're going around infecting other people. the reason we've done so many tests is because we didn't get to the testing early enough, the virus spread like wildfire throughout the country and we're now playing catch up. perhaps the most important thing is the president's own communication. when you talk to public health experts they'll tell you communication from a leader is the most important thing to do in a public health crisis. you need credible, fact based, consistent communication. this is what i was trying to get at in the interview. he always wants to tell and present the most positive spin on things, even if if it bears no resemblance to reality. whereas that might be appropriate for selling a commercial real estate property, or hyping a reality tv show, when you're talking about a bunch of people, millions of americans who hang on his every word, many of whom are elderly
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and in the high risk category, when you're telling them the virus is under control, that's not a harmless statement. it has real world consequences. it's deadly serious. >> and elise jordan, we've gotten to a point where donald trump has gone from saying this is one person coming in from china and soon it's going to be over with. in january. in february saying, it's 15 people coming in and soon they'll be taken care of. in march he says it's going to go away in april when the weather gets warmer. he promises americans it will go away magically. then he keeps saying it's about to leave, believe me, trust me, it's goingaw away. in the spring he undercut dr.
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anthony fauci and said this won't come back in the fall. it's going away and it's gone for good. and now he is still talking about how it's going away. he's had to move from saying that it's one person coming in from china going away to here in august saying, 1,000 people died? it is what it is. 150,000 people dead? it's a terrible pandemic, but it's going away. and yesterday deborah birx warned how bad this was. you look at the numbers and you look at the fact that july was just a horrific month. and deborah birx tries to tell americans the truth, donald trump calls her pathetic. and keeps lying to the american people, keeps saying, it's going away. and just tosses aside the fact that 1,000 people died in a single day from this pandemic.
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>> joe, i just can't move beyond that jaw dropping moment in jonathan's interview where donald trump just essentially puts up his hands and says, it is what it is. seriously, the american president, we have 150,000 americans who have died, that's countless families who are suffering loved ones who died this year that didn't have to die because of his administration's negligence. and donald trump is just dismissing all of that death, all of that loss as it is what it is. can you imagine if a wartime commander in chief said, oh, sorry about those men and women i sent to battle that died, it is what it is. would the american public accept that? i don't understand why we're
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going to accept that now and i don't see how this isn't anything but the perfect attack ad. donald trump in his own words dismissing the pain and suffering of countless americans. >> and, you know, willie -- >> jonathan -- >> -- i remember hillary clinton in a ben gbhengazi hearing abou four people who died, a thousand people died in a single day in the united states from a pandemic that he's been saying was going to go away since january and he dismisses it with it is what it is. we've had two and a half vietnams in effect. more people dying of this pandemic which he said was one person coming in from china which would soon go away than
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died in world war i. my god, how many 9/11s? forty 9/11s? and now donald trump wanting us, his supporters to go, things happen. no. things happen for a reason. things happen because donald trump's leadership has been off since the beginning. you compare the number of deaths in other countries across the globe right now with the number of deaths in america, you compare the cases, there's just not a close comparison. we are by and far the worst countries in this pandemic.
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1,244 americans dead in a single day in the united states. zero in spain. zero in germany. 11 in france. seven in australia. and one in japan. again, the united states of america, with the best hospitals in the world, best research, universities in the world, 1,244, willie. and it's all because of leadership from the top. >> president trump talked about those countries, that group right there, which is why we put them on the graphic for a comparison. but there's an embarrassing moment in the interview with jonathan where jonathan talks about the death rate and the president pulls out charts as a percentage of cases. he's trying to twist and spin his way out of the facts you just stated and the facts you put on the screen. i should point out yesterday the
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trump campaign put on an email where for the first time in writing, august 3rd, i guess we should probably wear masks. so president trump endorsing that through his campaign finally. there's another moment where president trump was talking to jonathan about the legacy of the late congressman john lewis, remember the president finally put out a tweet and that was about it as the country mourned the death of the civil rights icon. here's that exchange. >> john lewis is lying in state in the u.s. capitol, how do you think history will remember john lewis? >> i don't know. i don't know. i really don't know. i don't know john lewis. he chose not to come to my inauguration. he chose -- i don't -- i never met john lewis actually, i don't believe. >> do you find him impressive? >> i can't say one way or the other. i find a lot of people impressive. i find many people not
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impressive. but no -- >> do you find his story impressive? >> he didn't come to my inauguration, my state of the union speeches. and that's his right. and again, nobody has done more for black americans that i have. >> i understand. >> i think he should have come, he made a mistake. >> taking your relationship with him out of it, do you find his story impressive, what he's done for this country? >> he was a person that devoted a lot of energy and a lot of heart to civil rights, but there were many others also. >> there's a petition to rename the edmund pettis bridge in selma, alabama as the john lewis bridge, would you support that idea? >> i would have no objection to it if they'd like to do it. >> it's a good idea? >> would have no objection to it whatsoever. >> donald trump can't even say john lewis was an impressive man and he brought up repeatedly this poor, tortured, twisted
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soul brought up repeatedly that john lewis did not attend his inauguration four years ago. so as this american icon, this american angel, or saint as john meacham calls him, is lying in state, donald trump can't even say anything nice about him. is that because he's extraordinarily small or he's still sending signals out to white nationalists like david duke who say his election was great for america? >> probably a combination of both. i mean, for one to sit there as the president of the united states where the three preceding presidents went to not only john lewis laying in state and gave
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statements, they went to his funeral in atlanta, georgia, none of whom lived in atlanta, made a journey to honor him. and you the president, so small, when someone asked you about him laying in p state, you saying he didn't come to my inauguration. that's like you asking me about a great figure and me saying but they didn't come hear me preach last sunday. how small for you not to be able to give the kind of due credit to a man who was beaten and shed blood to give all americans the right to vote, those of the black community like me who were barred from the right to vote or at least using it in a way that people could not put impediments in the way. for him not to recognize that but say there were many people,
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to minimize that is to send signals to the most racist and the most backward and bigoted parts of the electorate which he wants to appeal to. and i think it's sad that we have this person who has such a low and small self-concept that everything is about his insecurity rather than being able to see the bigger picture. for that type of person to sit in the white house is dangerous. it's the same type of person that would say with the coronavirus pandemic that we're facing, we're doing better than others rather than trying to strengthen america to say we're going through something that is serious. we must be strong and get through this together, inspire us to do it and say to people, we need to get an answer to this. we need to get the vaccine. we need to get away to keep people eating rather than to try to play the baby thing, i'm doing better than john next
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door. we are dying, mr. president, we don't need a comparison. we need a solution. i think it runs as a thread through his whole character he can't raise up to it. because you criticized him, you got bad ratings. that's not what's important here. if you're not with me, if you're john lewis and don't come to my inauguration you're not great. that's who we have in the white house. >> well, you know, it's interesting that you have republican senators, we talk about a good bit, who actually are lined up and continue to support this president who not only refuses to go visit john lewis as he lies in state at the united states capitol but won't even say a positive word about
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him. this is something that hasn't happened in decades. that you have a president that's just this small. and willie, the choices are not good for supporters of donald trump. they are either behind a man who is so small that he's refusing to pay any tribute to one of the giants in civil rights history, because he didn't attend his inauguration. or he's trying to send a message to white supremacists and others that he's not going to say anything nice about a black man. and, of course, you have to put that as a possibility after months of donald trump picking away, day by day, on the scab of racism in america. >> yeah. i like to point out, also, i
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think a lot of people forget, john lewis also boycotted george w. bush's inauguration because of the outcome of the election that he thought wasn't legitimate at that time. you know who spoke at his funeral? george w. bush, travelled from texas to georgia and spoke at john lewis' funeral. everything goes through the prism of donald trump's personality, we know that. so the first thing jonathan asked, he said he didn't go to my funeral. and also said, i didn't know him personally. you don't have to know him to know his story. we know donald trump watches tv, there was plenty to say about john lewis if you didn't know anything about john lewis going in. it's all about him, a personal grievance he felt because john lewis wasn't nice to him once.
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jonathan swan you gave him every opportunity, take your relationship out it, his personality out of it, what do you think of his story? and he still couldn't say a nice word. >> there was a striking part of the exchange after saying john lewis didn't attend his inaugurati inauguration, president trump said nobody has done more for black people than i have. the implication is donald trump is saying he has done more for african-american than one of the civil rights icons in the last half century. there was another part of the interview where he said no president has done more for black people apart from maybe abraham lincoln. i said are you saying you've done more than lyndon johnson who passed the civil rights act? he said, how did that work out? i was sort of confused --
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>> black people were able to vote. >> yeah, it was a very -- a very strange part of the -- he talked about opportunity zones and criminal justice reform, et cetera. but i did return to it because it was a striking comment saying you did more than lyndon johnson who passed the civil rights act, and he insisted he had. >> yeah. it's -- it is breathtaking. but this is what would be autocrats do. it's what they do across the world. they create their own reality. an alternate reality. and they invite their followers to come along and, like cult members, a lot of them do. a lot of them believe the alternate reality. and that's why donald trump still has the 40% or so hard core support that he does have because he has gotten people to
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buy into alternative facts. we were talking, as i've been saying since march, we were talking about robert mueller, this was just lying about robert mueller or if this were those sad pathetic souls that follow donald trump's propaganda about the, quote, russian hoax, ignoring all of donald trump's cabinet members and team members that got thrown in jail for lying about their contacts with russia, that would be one thing, but now, following the lies of donald trump, the alternative realities of donald trump when he thanked president xi in china for their transparency and great work on behalf of the united states people, the coronavirus on january 24th or when he said two days before that to cnbc in late january that it's one person coming in from china and it's going to go away.
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when he told a michigan crowd a month later at the end of february, it's 15 people coming in from this country but it's soon going to be down to zero. we have nothing to worry about. when he told republican senators in early march, don't worry about it, it's going to be fine. it's going to go away. when he told black leaders in the white house that it was going to disappear magically. that they needed to just relax. it was going to disappear magically. when he started to say it was going to go away in april because the weather was going to get warmer. when he mocked people for wearing masks when somebody asked him a question in a mask and he told them to take a mask off and when the person refused to for the safety of themselves and their family, donald trump said you're being politically correct. when he continued to mock masks as somehow being unmanly or for
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whatever reason, when he said that the virus is going to magically go away and it wasn't going to be with us in in the fall and we should open schools in the spring, last spring, i mean, it just -- again, it continues. this alternate reality has now killed 150,000 americans. who knows how many lives could have been saved if donald trump had taken this seriously as joe biden, at the end of january in a "usa today" op-ed -- when joe biden said we're not ready for the pandemic. let your scientists and let your doctors lead this, mr. president. let them speak to us. tell us how we can save ourselves. how we can protect our families, how we can protect our senior citizens. how we can protect people with
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underlying conditions. let your scientists and doctors talk. but the president wouldn't do that. instead he went out, day in and day out -- by the way, you keep thinking he's going to learn, as he gets the death count wrong and 1,000 die and then 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 150,000. you would think he would have learned by now but he's telling you now, cult followers, it is what tit is. it is what it is. are you going to continue following him, over 200,000 deaths, 250? how long do you go republican senators until you speak up and start being more worried about the lives of the senior citizens in your district than the loyalty you show to a man who has shown no loyalty to you or your people?
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that's a question, because he's not getting better, republican senators. he's still talking about hydroxychloroquine when everybody in his administration has said it doesn't work. let's move on. it's not doing the job. and doctors out there, who are still pushing it for whatever reasons, they're scam artists. because the fda has said, don't use it. it's dangerous. for the coronavirus. and you have his -- but he's still talking about it. and he's still saying this is going to go away. he attacked deborah birx yesterday for telling the truth about the coronavirus. and yet, people are still buying in to this alternative reality, despite the fact it's killing their friends, it's killing
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their loved ones, it's killing family members. let's bring in the author of "the washington post's" early morning news letter power up, jackie. of course, there have been other devastating impacts from the pandemic, so many people losing their jobs, at risk of losing their apartments, losing their town homes, their family homes. what's happening on the hill, even though donald trump is trying to undermine negotiations? do we have republicans and democrats on the hill moving closer to some sort of deal that will provide economic relief to americans who are hurting so much right now? >> no, joe. we don't have any signs of that, 152,000 americans dead and over 30 million americans who have lost out on enhanced unemployment benefits across the country along with the moratorium on housing evictions having expired.
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chief of staff mark meadows told reporters yesterday, the two sides, democrats and republicans, are still far apart. but the president seems to be far apart from both of those sides as well. he announced yesterday through our washington post reporting that he was considering taking unilateral steps on lowering payroll taxes which has been unpopular amongst his republican allies. along with moving to stop tenant evictions. the president wants a short-term deal cut on unemployment insurance in order to get people through the summer until a more comprehensive package can be figured out, but democrats are still latched onto a $3 trillion package if if they want to figure out how to help stop the economic wreckage we're seeing across the country and terrible stories of people losing their jobs, being evicted from their homes and not being able to put food on the table right now,
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contrary to what republicans are pushing, which is that these benefits are incentivizing people not to go out and get a job. >> what's the sense of urgency right now, because a lot of us watch these negotiations last week and then we watched congress leave for the weekend on thursday without a deal in hand, without the president putting his elbow into it and trying to get them to reach a deal, do they understand, because democrats say we passed a bill two months ago, we did our job. do republicans understand the urgency of a family losing $600 a week, if so, what are they doing about it? how close are they to getting a deal here? >> congress is usually able to come together at the last minute and stay away from missing an expiring deadline but that didn't happen. that deadline expired last friday and republicans and democrats don't seem any closer than they did when we spoke last
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week. i feel a bit like a broken record at this point. that's why you see the president moving closer to uni lateral action. this president has enjoyed the expansive powers of the presidency and acted unilater unilaterally before. it hasn't been popular amongst his republican peers but there doesn't seem to be the sense of urgency you think there would be with so many americans losing jobs permanently, going hungry, being evicted during a global pandemic. that being said, lindsey graham is going to announce an amendment today that would make the enhanced benefits go higher than the white house of 70% but lower than the democrats of $600. democrats are worried it would be difficult to pull off and again, there is not much republican support for that high of a benefit to be given to people. so we'll see if that goes anywhere today. >> meanwhile, a huge chunk of
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the country is worried about how it's going to pay its bills this month. jackie, thank you good to see you. still ahead, much more from jonathan swan's interview with president trump, including his continued attack on mail-in voting. a few filing suggests the manhattan district attorney's office is looking into possible bank and insurance fraud. i did more for the black community than anybody with the possible exception of abraham lincoln. whether you like it or not -- >> you believe you did more than lyndon johnson who passed the civil rights act. >> i believe so. >> how? >> i did prison reform. >> lyndon johnson, he passed the civil rights act. >> how has it worked out? >> you think the civil rights act was a mistake? >> it took a long time.
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but for african-american -- >> you think that was a mistake? >> -- under my administration -- jonathan, under my administration, african-americans were doing better than they have ever done in the history of this country. they had money, they were getting -- their percentage was up, their housing ownership was up. they did better than they've ever done. up they did better than they've ever done. ♪ ♪ ♪ the open road is open again. and wherever you're headed, choice hotels is there. book direct at choicehotels.com. ♪ >> techand your car., we're committed to taking care of you >> tech: we'll fix it right with no-contact service you can trust. >> tech: so if you have auto glass damage, stay safe with safelite. >> singers: ♪ safelite repair, safelite replace. ♪
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joe biden by the people he's surrounding himself with. at every step of the campaign, every mile marker of the campaign he has kowtowed to the radical left of the party. we'll see it when he chooses his vice president nominee. he's a vessel of the left, that's how he won the nomination in the first place. >> you just don't want to go there. that was president trump's newly promoted campaign manager making his first tv appearance yesterday, and he was talking
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about the people that joe biden surround himself with. look at the people that donald trump surrounded himself with. i mean, remember that donald trump's foreign policy adviser was busted and convicted for lying about russia. his national security advisor busted and convicted about lying about his contacts with russia. donald trump's campaign chairman, busted and convicted for lying. deputy campaign chairman busted and convicted for lying about russia. his personal lawyer, busted and convicted for lying about russia. political consultant, busted and convicted for lying about russia. and his attorney general and his son-in-law misspoke, didn't tell the truth about their contacts
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with russia as well. willie, i mean, you look at the number of people that have gone to jail lying for donald trump, you look at the fact that if donald trump weren't president of the united states he would likely have been on his way to jail because of obstruction of justice. it's really -- it's just staggering that the trump people have so little to go after joe biden on. >> well, it's also they have a strange habit of attacking joe biden on something that easily could bounce back to president trump. as you laid out there, when they talk about joe biden's mental acuity, we've played the clips you watched donald trump for four years you can draw your conclusions there. i think the larger point is the attack line is joe biden is a vessel of the radical left, a tool of aoc and whatever other boogey men and women this the to
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put out. but the public doesn't seem to be buying that. they don't buy the fact that the man they've watched for 50 years is a radical leftist. in fact, he's been attacked in his own party for not being enough. meanwhile manhattan's district attorney suggested his office may be investigating bank and insurance fraud by the trump administration. in a federal court filing vance's office argued the president's latest suit to stop his accountant's compliance for eight years of documents is a delay tactic that should be dismissed while the president's attorneys say the subpoena is not valid because it's too broad. prosecutor carey dunn told the court the trump argument fails because it rests on the premises that the grand jury is limited to so-called hush payments made in 2016.
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quote, undisputed assertions in earlier court filings that prosecutors say document criminal conduct at the trump organization. joining us now, u.s. attorney for the northern district of alabama and msnbc legal analyst joyce vance. we knew the manhattan da was looking into the hush payments to two women over affairs during the 2016 campaign. what we learned yesterday it seems they're also looking into bank and insurance fraud by the trump organization. >> that's right. cy vance who i'm not related to confirmed that yesterday in this pleading. it's important to know the pos cure of the case. this is vance going to the court saying there's no argument that has any merit. you need to dismiss this. and vance says go ahead and dismiss this complaint it's time
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for us to enforce our subpoena and get the document. and the bombshell, and it's one that the president's lawyer stepped straight into is the argument there's really no need to do this. this is an overbroad subpoena all the da is investigating is hush payments to stormy daniels and karen mcdougal. and suddenly the manhattan day care -- da says that's not the case. and the judge has seen early on in camera, which means the judge reviewed this document alone without trump's lawyers entitled to see it an affidavit that set out the full scope of our investigation. and while we don't have to tell you at this time, vance says the full scope of our investigation, what's in the public record are allegations of bank fraud, insurance fraud and the clear implication is there might be more, willie.
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>> joyce, a political question here. it's hard not to wonder will any of this come to light, see the light of day before the november election? what do you think are the odds? does this seem like because of the political nature of this case that it will be expedited or not because it is so inherently political? >> i think that's an important question elise. and the best answer that i can give you that the political nature of this case shouldn't influence the proceedings at all. i know a lot of folks have a hard time accepting that people in the judicial system set aside politics. but it's important to do that. i think the reality here is that this case will move pretty quickly because of the weakness of the president's arguments. as vance says in his pleadings these are meritless variety claims that the president is making on his third attempt to
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get the complaint in court. so there's little left for the judge to do. the judge has ruled the president's claims are meritless, the president doesn't raise any new claims. the second circuit court of appeals put it's premature on the argument that vance has made. i hesitate to have a crystal ball when it comes to courts but i think we can see this move quickly, certainly it should. >> we had a white water flashback, said susan mcdougal, you meant karen mcdoug. >> i did. >> the president threatened legal action against nevada after allowing mail-in voting. joyce, what does that even mean? is that something the president could do? what would an executive order look like? would it be legal? >> this is just bluster by the president. states set the way that they
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vote. there's a wide variety across the country in how states vote, whether it's strictly in person, whether absentee voting is permitted and whether you have to have an excuse to get an absentee ballot or do it for whatever you choose. and now there are states that have chosen to move to mail-in voting where you may get an application in the mail and the ballot is sent to you and you have to just send it back in. that wide variety is part of federalism in this country where states get to decide how they'll vote with some limitations set by congress. the short answer is, the president can't successfully challenge what's going on in nevada or any place else with an executive order. if he does, he'll be in court quickly and he will not win he doesn't have the right to tell people in nevada how they'll vote. >> as you say, states run their own elections. on this question of mail-in
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voting, jonathan swan you asked the president about the allegations of fraud in mail-in voting and not accepting the results if he loses. >> you told fox news you couldn't say if you would accept the results of the 2020 election. what does that look like as the sitting president? >> hillary clinton never accepted them. >> she conceded -- >> she still doesn't accepted them. >> she conceded on election night. she grumbled about it -- >> grumbled? she wrote books about it. don't use the word grumble. >> i get it. >> 306-223. >> i'm not disputing you beat hillary clinton. listen. >> we have a new phenomenon. it's called mail-in voting -- >> new? it's been here since the civil war. >> the kind of millions and millions of ball lots.
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>> it'll be bigger this year because of the pandemic. >> not bigger. massively bigger. >> because of the pandemic. >> they'll send tens of millions of ballots to california, all over the place. >> they send applications. >> i have a friend whose son passed away seven years ago, he told me, he said i just got a ballot -- >> probably an application. >> -- for my son robert who died seven years ago. somebody got a ballot for a dog. for something else. you have millions of ballots going. look at the corruption with universal mail-in voting. absentee voting is okay. >> you have to apply for mail-in voting it's the same thing. >> they're sending out applications -- >> no, they're not. it's applications. >> there is no way you can go through a mail-in vote without
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massive cheating. you know, you could have a case where this election won't be decided on the evening of november 3rd. >> absolutely. what's wrong with that? >> it could be decided two months later. >> what's wrong with the proper count? >> lots of things will happen during that period of time, especially when you have tight margins, lots of things can happen. >> jonathan, we could see the outward visible frustration of the president when you presented him with facts of absentee voting. >> hep tried to make a distinction between absentee voting which he has done and mail-in voting. did you walk out of the room with the feeling if he loses the vote on election night or a couple days after that he would accept the result? >> i think you probably see a repetition of what e with saw in 2018 when, in florida, that's a race i think people should go
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back and revisit for how if you're wanting to see what you think the president might do after the election. so there's a very plausible scenario in which the president is looking strong on election night because he has convinced his supporters that voting by mail is unsafe. he may get a larger inperson vote during a pandemic. and some of these states, some of these key battleground states, it takes a while to count them. pennsylvania is a good example. you see a scenario in the days after the election, the mail-in vote comes in and trends more and more towards joe biden, my suspicion, based on previous behavior is that president trump would call for a halt to voting and would try to litigate in various states. so that's where i think this is heading. >> jonathan swan, thank you so much for your important work. we really appreciate it. appreciate you coming on and
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sharing it with us and with our viewers. so reverend al, one lie after another, let's just start with the biggiest lie which was that hillary clinton never conceded. she conceded the day after the election. she conceded the day after the election. he said mail-in voting was a new phenomenon. that's an easily disprovable lie, but all his lives are easily disprovable. he kept talking about ballots being mailed out. jonathan swan corrected him four or five times, they're applications. they're applications. donald trump repeatedly spreading the lie. and, of course, it's only bad when republican -- when democratic governors do it. not when republican governors are doing it.
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he talked about massive cheating. no evidence whatsoever and there has never been evidence in in the decades and decades there have been absentee ballots and mail-in ballots there's been massive cheating. but this is what ann applebalm in her book "twilight of democracy," a must read. she says autocrats in poland, in turkey, autocrats around the globe, autocrats in training like donald trump, they don't participate in the big lie, often it's the medium size lie. it's an alternative reality like donald trump is trying to spread right now, republicans are trying to get him to stop it and he just won't because the autocratic impulse in him tells him if he's behind in the polls he's got to rig the election or at least claim the election is rigged. >> that's exactly what we're
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dealing with. his autocratic impulses and desire to be the autocrat, makes him really want to get away from voting, period. we must remember he's been president three and a half years. he talk about how people were cheating at the polls when he was running. he's had the justice department doing everything they could to support him. there's been no investigation of that to prove that. now he is saying that mail-in voting is fraudulent. what he really thinks is any voting ought to not be legitimate. he is against voting because he wants to be an autocrat. so whether it's in 2016 where he has this imagery voter fraud scheme going on that was never established, the voting fraud was not there or now where he makes voting by mail some kind of fraud, the problem is that
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you cannot deal with democracy, mr. president, and you cannot deal with voting. that's why you can't even give the praise to a voting rights advocate like john lewis. and i think that it's a sad day in american history when we have an elected president by the electoral college that cannot support the very basis of what this country was founded on we're against monarchies and autocratri autocratries. and we have a president, mail in or in person voting, he's going to find a way to be opposed to it and take away the legitimacy of the results. >> joyce vance, thank you very much as always. still ahead on "morning joe," our next guest says surviving a covid-19 icu stay is just the start. dr. vin gupta joins us next to
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explain that. "morning joe" is coming right back. n that "morning joe" is coming right back ♪ ♪ the open road is open again. and wherever you're headed, choice hotels is there. book direct at choicehotels.com. ♪
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what we're seeing today is different from march and april. it is extraordinarily widespread. it's into the rural as well as equal urban areas. and to everybody who lives in a rural area you are not immune or protected from this virus. that's why we say no matter where you live in america, you need to wear a mask and socially distance. >> we're beginning to see evidence of significant
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progress. i have to add that the virus is receding in hot spots across the south and west we've seen slow improvements from their recent weekly peaks. we must focus on new flare-ups in states where the case numbers are risen, including georgia, mississippi, tennessee, oklahoma, missouri i think you'll find they'll soon be under control. >> as the must remember of coronavirus cases in the u.s. climbs and the death toll grows, president trump painting a rosie picture. right now cases are surging in the midwest states. missouri, montana and oklahoma have seen some of the largest percentage increases in cases. and new signs in new jersey a state that appeared to flatten its curve. the number of new cases there have spiked by 175% in the last
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two weeks, joe. >> yeah. you see those quotes side by side. again talking about donald trump lying to his people, lying to americans, creating this alternative reality that again republican senators should speak out on to save the lives in their states. deborah birx says that the pandemic is, quote, extraordinarily widespread. donald trump once again says, the virus is receding. time and time again he is given the opportunity to follow the advice of doctors, of epidemiologists of scientists of the smartest people in the world and time and time again he lies to the american people and talks about how the virus is receding, is going to go away. even told chris wallace, i'll be
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right, one day the virus will go away and says, soon very much under control. that's not the case. to talk about about it, let's bring in medical contributor dr. vin gupta. dr. gupta, deborah birx was called, quote, pathetic by the president of the united states for simply saying what dr. fauci, what every reputable epidemiologist, reputable doctor would be saying while people in his circle are attacking doctors, epidemiologists who have been right every step of the way on the danger this pandemic caused to americans. >> good morning, joe. you couldn't be more right. what i'm hearing from parents, from school districts, from teachers is how do we safely
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reopen schools? and to dr. birx's point, part of that is masking regardless of your zip code. but we need a national -- we've been talk about this for five months, but what does it mean when we talk about testing to keep schools opening up already, how do we keep them open? there's a great study that came out in the journal of the american medical association we might need every point of care testing that is lacking. the president talks about this type of test as though it's making up half the tests in in the united states, that's not true. we don't have enough of the type of tests we need to keep school districts and universities open. that's what we need to talk about here, point of care testing to keep these places open. >> and dr. gupta, turning around those tests has been a challenge as well with the labs having backlogs. as you listen to the president
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contradict the doctors and scientists, saying it's reced g receding. you treat covid patients where are the concerns right now? as you look at a map right now of the united states, where should the president be focused? >> i still remain concerned about florida, california and texas. those are the three hot spots here. arizona has seen some progress. if your viewers go to covid act now, that is one source of truth i recommend anybody look at. you'll see 100% of icu beds per the data they have are filled. it's not just beds, willy. if i'm the president i'm thinking what happens when somebody discharges from the icu. if they're lucky enough to have access to the icu bed now we're able to get 66% of individuals out of the icu. we're better at getting individuals out of the icu, off
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the ventilator but what happens afterwards? nursing facilities are overwhelmed. we don't have nearly enough ppe for home health aids, family members care iing for their loved ones who spent 45 days in some cases in in the icu. we do no have the infrastructure to deal with individuals coming out of icus. we don't have that in place. to places where we have older individuals, where we know we have outbreaks, let's focus on longer term care needs. that's what the heroes act does it makes sure to focus on home healthcare givers and nursing facilities getting the ppe and hazard pay, making sure they get what they need to stay safe. >> this started in your backyard in the state of washington way back when. you treated a lot of covid
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parents. people say they're out of the icu, out of the emergency, they're okay. what happens to your patients once they leave the icu? what are the lingering effects of coronavirus? >> i'm glad you ask that, because there's never a great outcome the second you leave the icu from covid. if you're lucky enough to leave it's after 30 to 40 days on a ventilator, your muscles are at trophied, you've been on die al cy -- die dialysis. you can barely move. basically means you need to go to a long-term nursing facility or vent weaning facility where you start a long process of recovery, of rehab. that can take months. and then you go home and that can take months in terms of getting back to a normal quality
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of life but you need home healthcare, physical therapy, occupational therapy. it's easy for me to say this, to get the services in place requires infrastructure and funding we don't have right now. >> dr. gupta we appreciate the work you're doing and coming out of the icus to tell us about it every morning. thanks so much. let's bring back in to our conversation, associated editor of "the washington post," ju gene robinson. stuart stevens is with us, author of the new book "entitled, it was all a lie". and elise jordan is still with us as well. >> let's go through new poll numbers. in morning consults general election matchup, joe biden is up nine points 51 to 42%. that seems to be pretty consistent with most of the national polls we're seeing right now.
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get this, south carolina much tighter than anybody would expect. donald trump leading joe biden only by 5 points, 49% to 44%. here's another one of those texas polls. and another texas poll has joe biden up by one point. 47 to 46%. and a poll out of ohio that was just posted by real clear politics this morning has joe biden up four points in the buckeye state. 46% to 42%. so stuart, we've been putting these polls in different silos. let's start with the traditional swing state polls that donald trump thought he was going to be fighting re-election and focussing his money on. joe biden is ahead in wisconsin, ahead in michigan, ahead in pennsylvania, ahead in florida. then you have the states in if the center that six months ago
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trump was sure he was going to win. sure was going to be a walk. arizona, texas, georgia, ohio, those are all tight. now we've got this third group we're probably going to start, and they're the ones that are a lot closer than they should be, and let's put south carolina on that list because you only have a five point difference in a state that donald trump should be ahead by 10, 12, 15 points. but let's focus on the center column. texas, ohio, georgia, arizona, these states were supposed to be trump in a walk so they could expand and focus on new mexico and minnesota and states like that. what's happening in texas? let's talk about that specifically. we've had, over the last three or four weeks, we've had poll after poll showing it's a dead heat and dallas morning poll showing joe biden up by 5
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percentage points. do you think that's a race we could be staying up late leak night or later in the week with the possibility of joe biden winning? >> i think we're into one of a few scenarios. there is a scenario for donald trump to win narrowly still. i think there's a scenario for joe biden to lose narrowly and i think there's a scenario for joe biden to blow this sucker out. there's not a scenario for donald trump to win in a landslide. what we tend to forget for the industry of how trump won, trump voters and all of that, trump won for one simple reason on a basic level. he won because he won in a year where a republican could win with 47%. romney lost with 46%. nonwhite turnout, particularly african-american turnout, declined for the first time in
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20 years. so if you overlay the turn out over '16, trump loses. so trump never came into this from a very strong position. and had you gone to work, god forbid as the political director of the white house, the first day would have been about expanding your base. ultimately, politics is about addition more than subtraction. and trump has done the opposite. he thinks the more angry voter gets to count more. that's not how it works. and i think that they're just in complete denial about this. and, you know, i found that clients who have never lost, can't imagine losing and i think one of the disadvantages that the trump university facing now is that everybody said they were going to lose in '16. lord knows i said it. it's hard to find anybody more wrong than me. so when anybody says they're
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losing now, go back to '16, they told us this before. it was like the doctor told me i was going to die and then i lived so i'm not going to listen to the doctor. problem is, doctors are usually right. and, you know, you run that race in '16, 100 times and clinton wins 90. trump has not put together any kind of logical campaign. what is the trump campaign about? there's no policy there, which is extraordinary. in '16 you can say he has policy, it's crazy, mexico is going to pay for the wall. we'll solve the health care problem right away. we're going to win with the trade war with china. none of that stuff has happened but he doesn't even have those out there now as proposals. and they're just lost. they thought they were going to run on the economy.
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now the economy is the worst it's been in the history of the country and they thought they were going to run against a socialist in bernie sanders and now they're running against joe biden. even the nickname, sleepy joe biden not a nickname to scare women and children. >> it's not. and he's not running on policy because he can't run on policy. he's running on his personality, he's running on creating this alternate reality. he's running on resentment. he's running on outrage. but it is so unfocused. you wrote a column basically saying, pretty much he's not the commander in chief, he's just a fw guy running around shouting insults and perhaps we should be relie relieved. >> yeah, he's the troll in chief right now. and it's ridiculous, embarrassing, shameful.
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but that's what the president of the united states basically is, what he spends his time doing. he gets up in the morning, fires up the twitter machine and trolls the whole world until he gets tired and then goes downstairs and yells at some people i guess for a while and then goes and plays golf. that's what he does. and that's -- that's better, actually, than him spending his time trying to run the country because he -- you know, we have these three huge overlapping crises going on right now. we have a pandemic, we have the economic crisis, as stuart said, the worse it's ever been. and we have this nationwide reckoning with systemic racism and the protests that followed the killing of george floyd.
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he makes all of these things worse. he materially makes them worse than they had to be. so when he's not actually trying to president, to be president, we're probably better off. but you know, to stu's point, if there's strategy, it's just voter suppression, just trying to lower the turn out. that's the only strategy i see with what trump is doing with the noise about mail in voting and fraud and all this ridiculous stuff. there are obvious problems with that. number one, it's not likely going to work because people are quite motivated i think to vote against donald trump. but number two, he may well be depressing the wrong vote. he may well be convincing his base that there's something wrong with mail-in and absentee
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voting and they shouldn't participate in and he may be hurting himself there. but nobody -- there's this myth of donald trump as a three dimensional political chess genius is ridiculous. he's never been that. you run the election 10 times and hillary clinton probably wins nine of those. he pulled to the inside straight flush once. that doesn't often happen twice. >> stu in the book you try to explain how the republican party ended up as the party of donald trump and how the country got donald trump as president. you came up as president watching people like ronald reagan, working for people like john mccain, mitt romney and bob dole. obviously a different time for the republican party. so how did republicans wind up
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with donald trump? >> i asked myself that and that's why i wrote the book. you have to go back to the history of the post world war ii republican party, there have been two competing camps and it played itself out. and there were those of us particularly saying governor bush campaigned and president bush campaigned that we looked at this and we believed our vision, call it compassion or conservatism was the dominant gene and the dark side was the rece recessive gene, you have to admit that was wrong. really it goes back to raise. in 56 eisenhower gets almost 40% of the african-american vote. it falls off to 7% in 1964, goldwater is against the civil rights act. you can make a case
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african-americans would come back to the policy drawn by conservative culture, faith in the square, entrepreneurship, but that's doesn't happen. so the republican party has been predominantly the white party since 1974. we used to admit it was a failure, used to talk about it being a big tent. in mississippi, it was moving to a lot of us when the state flag came down, which is basically the confederate battle flag and then the president is out there defending monuments. it's the wrong political move i know he's ended up on the wrong side of the culture war with walmart and nascar, not a great place for a republican to be. it's just sort of an admission that the party is now the grievance party.
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it it's terribly -- >> let me ask you, stuart, how much responsibility do people like you and me share in this where we always believed that the -- the best in the party. we believed there was a part of the party that was, you know, again -- an unfortunate part of the party that we believed was sort of the recessive gene, at the same time george h.w. bush, a man we loved and respected, using lee atwater. resentment was always a part of this. resentment was always a part of our campaigns. resentment against the elites. resentment against the media. resentment against academia. of course, yes, yes, academia has always been way too liberal. the media has always been way too liberal. but at the same time it was a
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constant bounding of resentment, resentment, resentment. and i'll ask elise the same thing. we have the mississippi caucus here with you and elise and me. but how much of a responsibility do those of us who spent our adult lifetime in the republican party bear? >> if you're asking me, i can only speak for myself and i wrote this book, and the first sentence of the book is, blame me. if we believed in a party that valued personal responsibility, joe, i don't know where else to begin except with personal responsibility. look, politics has always had a dark side, right. you can go back to the '88 campaign and look at that, but then when it really came to a test in governing, how did
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president bush, 41, handle it when david duke ran in louisiana. when david duke was a republican nominee, he opposed david duke, he put together an organization of republicans to ensure that david duke as a republican lost. and a democrat won. contrast that to how we responded to donald trump when roy moore was the nominee in alabama. we endorsed him. it is a true statement that the republican party is the party that endorses roy moore and attacks john bolton. so i think leaders matter here. and it -- it's -- it goes back to why in the 1930s did america not become fascist? there was a huge fascist element there. probably in part because roosevelt was president. i think our bluff has kind of been called. we're the guys that say character counts, it was the soul of the nation.
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we said that when clinton was president and it was true. and it's true now when donald trump is president. but it's like we've forgotten that because it's expedient and there's a relationship we have with donald trump that we feel i can get this, get that. it never works that way. >> yeah and at least -- i'm sorry we have a delay. i thought you had stopped. elise, you look at, again, whether it's republican party leaders, whether it's the rank and file of the republican party. whether you look at evangelical leaders, a baptist, grew up in the south, grew up a conservative, grew up a republican, and i look back and everything i told people about my party, that it wasn't a racist party that we were moving beyond that the leaders, you know -- for instance my family moved away from the democratic
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party because of the chaos in the streets after chicago 1968. that was a case with my family but i think i extended that a little bit too far. there are 90% of republicans, 85% of republicans who continue to remain loyal to a man who continues to race bait. who continues to pick away at the ugly scab of american racism every day. wouldn't even say anything positive about john lewis or visit him while he was lying in state in the capitol. so what is it about our party that we've been members of for the past 30 years? >> joe, i don't know about you. but i read stuart's book and i just devoured it. read it in one sitting pretty much. and had such ptsd reading it entitled, "it was all a lie," because i did believe in
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compassionate conservativism. i believed in george w. bush's kinder big tent philosophy. that was the era when president bush pushed out senator trent lot as the majority leader even though he was a strong leader but because of his comments about tom thurman and i didn't think i was part of a racist party and then cut together and donald trump and it would be embarrassing. i would be embarrassed to say that i was a republican anymore, which i have left the party like you and stuart. but i guess where i would go now, to ask both of you, joe and stuart, where do we go from here if personal responsibility doesn't matter as has been completely abandoned under this president's tenure. and you look at the question of, say, the deficit.
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deficit spending doesn't matter under donald trump republicans supposedly cared about it, these long-held principles. so if these tenants that were so central to the party are no longer in existence. what is the wreckage of the party? what comes out of that? >> it's a great question, elise. you look again -- we'll keep going back to ann applebalm's book that i'm reading right now. because the battle that's happening among people on the right in america is happening in britain, is happening in poland, hungary, spain, italy, and in so many of those countries, you have nationalists, kpee know phobic forces that have taken over those parties. but i think in the united states especially the result is going to be extraordinarily negative for the republican party.
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we are a country that is growing. you look at the demographic shifts that george w. bush told us republican members of congress about in 1999. 1999 he said, this is coming. you got to get right with hispanic voters. you got to stop look at your party as a white party. jeb was saying the same thing. jeb understood it. nobody wants to talk about jeb bush now. very few want to talk about george w. bush now. but they delivered that warning. guess what, here we are two decades later. and i'd be shocked -- if republicans don't win texas this year too bad they're never going to win it again because starting in 2024 i think that's going to shift to the democratic column. you have shifts that are going to blow the ultra nationalist party to pieces.
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and a lot of formerly respected journalists who have been playing the antiantitrump card are exposed and are going to be more exposed in the future. you look at the editorial pages of some of these papers that used to be respected, and it is. they try to find the latest outrage on table news tv. they try to find the latest outrage, the latest stupid thing that a left wing academic said, the latest stupid thing that a late night economic said. the latest thing that an anarchist in the streets of portland have said and it's all anti-anti-trumpism. they're not focussing on their political world that is burning down in front of them right now. there is no future for a republican party that continues to follow in the steps of donald
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trump. this is how the party of abraham lincoln dies. i wrote that in february of 2016. i still believe it today. i don't know how they move beyond that. by the way, stuart stevens thanks for being with us. "it was all a lie," what an incredible book. i don't know what comes next, willie. i think there's a great right wing for the republican party, an expansion of the democratic party and a lot of debate about the direction that party should go because there are going to be a lot of independents and republicans coming to the democratic party as political refugees. >> what's interesting, if you read those columns or watch the cable news shows, they're generally not defending president trump they're owning the libs. they resent that group of
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people, many of them are smart, in the past have been good at political analysis. they 'not defending donald trump liter literally, in some cases they do. but for the most part they want to own the liberals. but it'll be interesting what lessons republicans take out of the trump years and stuart wrote a book out of it, is the message we should be more like president trump, we should fight every issue we should be on twitter and engaging in these slum attacks? is that effective? on the one hand he won the white house but look now where we are as a country. let's -- >> yeah but -- >> go ahead. >> they're writing about the latest outrage that a left wing professor said at an ivy league school, right? >> yeah. >> instead of focussing on the fact that vladimir putin has put
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bounties on the heads of american troops in afghanistan and donald trump refuses to say anything about it. or they'll find a video in portland that's especially outrageous of what an anarchist is doing or a left wing person is doing, again they'll talk about that. you look "the washington journal" editorial page today, nothing about donald trump calling deborah birx pathetic. nothing about donald trump lying again saying, oh, things are goati goati getting better with the pandemic. instead they're attacking teachers unions. i understand they've been attacking teachers unions for year but that's their take on covid-19. it's not a look at what parents need to do with their children.
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there's never any of that guidance, it's always again the latest outrage. more op-eds on that page attacking elites. can you not be any more predictab predictable? i get it, you don't like urban mayors. you don't like academia. you don't like the media. this is all the media's fault. remember marco rubio saying, gee, he wishes the media wasn't cheering for people dying. when all we were doing is telling the president of the united states and the republican senators to start taking the pandemic seriously. i guess they think that anti-anti-trumpism will save them from the harshest review in history. it will not. >> and none of the arguments n confronts what's in front of us,
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150,000 dead and some states still on fire. let's turn to the state of michigan it may give us a look of what the election season may look like. it's primary day there and it could illustrate what's at stake in november as president trump goes on offense against mail-in voting. heidi, good morning. what are you looking at in today's vote? >> there was a record 90,000 requests for mail-in absentee ballots in the city of detroit, according to the clerk who told me this was a record for any general election. and she believes this indicates a hardy turn out as well for november. why does this matter? trump won the presidency in the midwest, in the state of michigan and it was by such a hair. a lot had to do with the low turnout by the african-american voters in the city of detroit. in the state of michigan, black participation was down by about
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12 points from the previous election cycle. so he can't eke out another win in michigan and some of these other midwestern states with participation levels like this. here's the catch, a lot of these african-american voters are living in communities that have been most devastated by covid. and many of the communities a lot of them at least know someone that have lost a friend or family member to covid. this is why a lot of the minorities in these communities are telling me they take the president's attacks on mail-in voting personally as an affront to their right to vote. and if there are any delays or attempts to suppress mail in voting they equate that with an attempt to suppress the minority vote. i spoke with a lot of african-americans there to really gauge the level of enthusiasm because i was
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skeptical that african-american voters could be as motivated by fear which is what they tell me they feel about the trump presidency as they were about the enthusiasm of the obama presidency. but i found plans to participate here, even by former bernie voters. the group they're most concerned about are the younger voters but so much work has been done in the state of michigan since 2016 they told me they woke up the day after just blind-sided by what happened there. now they have their first african-american state democratic party chair. >> a lot of eyes on michigan this time given the slim margin in 2016. thanks, heidi. joining us democratic senator gary peters of michigan. one of two seats republicans are targeting to flip in a state p president won in 2016.
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i want to ask you first about mail-in voting specifically in the state of michigan. you sent a letter to the postmaster general expressing your concerns about delays in delivery that could create a problem around election day. what, specifically, are you worried about? >> we're very concerned about a slow down of the mail. what we're seeing from the postmaster general is that there are a number of procedures being put in place, presumably to save money, but the impact has been to slow down mail delivery. we're hearing from folks in the postal service there isn't overtime processing centers are shutdown early, mail has just left off to the side and that's certainly not part of the postal service which is a work hard every day to make sure the mail gets out every day. we're seeing, as a result of some of the changes and the
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changes are broad across the state of michigan, in the process mail is slowing down. i think there's two reasons for it, one the trump administration does not like the postal service. they would like to privatize the postal service. they believe if they slow down delivery that will get people upset about the postal service but also know that slowing down the mail has significant impact on a state that just moved to no-reason absentee voting. which means they can vote by mail by calling their clerk. all over the state of michigan we've already had more requests for ballots than the entire vote total in 2016. and slowing down the mail and losing confidence in the mail could be a part of what the trump administration is doing right now. >> senator you pointed out that the postmaster general, mr. dejoy, is a supporter of
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president trump, was in 2016 the rnc finance chair. are you suggesting he's directing the postal service to slow down the mail because that may help president trump in the election? >> i don't know that. i can't say that, but it's certainly raising a lot of issues. i've asked my colleagues in the senate to give me information as to what they're seeing in their state. i'm the ranking member on the senate of homeland security and government affairs, responsible for overseeing the postal service. the stories i'm hearing are concerning. we have to get to the facts. but it's broader than just vote by mail. there's an effort to make it the business model of the postal service more difficult and hope they can eventually privatize. that's the goal of the trump administration. president trump clearly does not like the postal service. attempts we have made through covid packages to make sure the
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postal services can provide ontime delivery not just ballots but medicines and other mail that needs to be delivered to folks, especially in rural areas, this administration has not been helpful. you're actually seeing pro procedures put in place that could slow down delivery further. so we have to do what we can to have a robust vibrant service, something the country has relied on for over 240 years. it's really being challenged. we have a trump administration that's creating greater challenges and that could very well manifest itself during a vote by mail process. >> senator, gene robinson here. a lot of people will, indeed, vote by mail. and we hope that goes smoothly. but many people will also vote on election day. what is being done to make
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certain that people can do that and do that safely? >> we're seeing that today. today is primary day. the secretary of state has put in a number of procedures to keep people separated, make sure there are masks, there's sanitizer available. folks are encouraged to vote by mail, request that absentee ballot and we're seeing huge numbers do that. but we're -- the secretary of state and clerks across the state are committed to have a safe place to vote in person. but today will be the test. we're going to have to take a look at what happened today, how votes were processed. there's also concerns because legislation that the state has doesn't allow the counting of those -- even preparing of those prior to election day which we believe will slow down the tabulation considerably. >> senator we'll have you back
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to talk about soon. coming up, house speaker nancy pelosi says she does not see a deal on the next coronavirus relief bill happening until next week. we'll speak to a member of house leadership about the standoff on capitol hill when congressman hakeem jeffries joins our conversation. "morning joe" is back in a moment. conversation "morning joe" is back in a moment to severe psoriasis, little things can become your big moment. that's why there's otezla. otezla is not a cream.
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congressional democrats announced a number of oversight measures and this is what a few of them are going to be. in september the oversight committee is going to be holding a hearing featuring the postmaster general. obviously an issue at the top of many people's lists. there are concerns about the 2020 election. also, the house foreign affairs and house oversight committee is launching a joint investigation into the state department's ig firing. and house intel committee chairman adam schiff announced
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an investigation into dhs regarding their activities in portland. let's bring in former senior adviser for the house oversight government reform committee curt bardella, a columnist and senior adviser to the lincoln project. thank you for being with us. another former republicans. we've had a lot of republicans or former republicans on the show today. you worked as a republican on the house oversight committee, a committee i was a member of in my time in congress. you complained that unlike republicans democrats have failed to be as aggressive as they should be using that committee to figure out what's going on. sounds like they're stepping it up now and i think most importantly getting the post office -- the people running the post office in to see whether we're going to have a postal service that's going to be
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working to ensure american democracy operates smoothly or going to be working against that. >> yeah, i think what we're seeing finally, joe, this is something we talked about a lot on this show, democrats finally exerting their oversight prerogatives. two things are happening right now. we're seeing investigations that i think are going to be important into next year, when hopefully democrats in congress have a president in the white house and an attorney general at the justice department who will help them in their efforts to find out what's going on with some of these trump administration shady deals. the state department investigation going on at the heart of it, the firing of an ig who's looking at an $8 billion arms package to saudi arabia that no one can make sense of. and when you fire an inspector general investigating something people say why did y-- people
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might look at that. and when you look at the postmaster general going into 2020, up until may he was a primary fund-raiser for the republican committee. and now he's running the institution that's more responsible for our election than anything else. the executive actions he has taken so far, which have only slowed down postal delivery in this country, what that means for the election is of significant consequence. >> curt, going back to the state department a bit. it really is incredible that an $8 million arms deal is not getting much skroocrutiny. how do you see the house oversight committee proceeding, looking into what's happening at the state department?
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i hear all the time from diplomats who are concerned about the climate in the state department and how it's not the traditional channels of speaking out within and decent has been stifled by the pompeo administration. how do you see with the state department that oversight proceeding? >> one of the things i found during my time at oversight, the most effective investigations starred with having someone who was on the inside come and talk to us behind closed doors, doing on a transcribed interview, a deposition. that's what's happened part of the lynch pin for the subpoenas issued yesterday for pompeo lieutenants was because a former state department official came and talked to the committee and gave a transcribed interview on the record. so having that road mapp, that testimony allows them to ask for very specific people and i
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guarantee you that if they show up and adhere to the subpoena, they're going to have a lot of targeted questions, targeted line of inquiry about what's going on there. it's not just the saudi arms deal it's how mike pompeo and his wife have been using taxpayer resources at the state department to advance their own personal interests. those are the two investigations that lenox was doing when he was removed. that's the road map we'll see, a lot of people concerned internally going to congress, giving them the road map and congress pursuing those lines of inquiry. >> thank you very much curt. joining us now member of the house judiciary committee and member of the house democratic caucus, congressman hakeem jeffries. good morning. >> good morning. >> nancy pelosi says it may be next week until there's a deal. i haven't talked to anyone on
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the hill who believes there's anything imminent. how can you update us? where are you in your negotiations and discussions and what's the senate doing about the bill that you all passed in the house? >> negotiations are have lost employment we passed that bill
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2 1/2 months ago. it's unfortunate we're at this point, but it is because the senate republicans have effectively decided to do nothing up until this very point. >> so, congressman, what are you hearing from republicans? i know you work across the aisle quite a bit. what is their underlying criticism of this? i know they wanted to make that weekly check $200 instead of the $600 currently existing and that you had in your bill. where is that middle ground? where do you feel like you can meet them? >> well, senate republicans have put forth a bill that even the senate republican conference doesn't support in its entirety. so, that is part of the challenge. mitch mcconnell indicated he saw no need to assist state and local governments, even though we know budgets across the country have collapsed. unless we step in as a federal government, we're going to see
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dramatic cuts to public health, public safety, public education, public transportation, public sanitation and the public good. so, that is a line in the sand for us. we also believe that the $600 unemployment insurance emergency benefit is essential because there are no jobs to go back to. so, we've got to help out everyday americans. that's the line in the sand. and also we include in the act $175 billion in assistance for renters and homeowners who are struggling to pay their rent and their mortgages. the senate bill is silent on the question of providing assistance to tenants and homeowners. and we think that that is ridiculous. >> congressman, this is gene robinson. is it basically the democratic view that eventually republicans will fold on this, that the pressure from -- from republican
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senators, whose seats may be in danger this year, will eventually mount and leader mcconnell will have to essentially go along with you on the emergency benefit, on the assistance for rent and mortgages the other things that are your lines in the sand? >> well, we have passed four bipartisan bills this year, and we expect we will get to a fifth because of the urgency of the situation requires it. but to your point, gene, every time that we have arrived at an agreement in washington, d.c., it is because the house and the presidency have gotten together to get something done. that was the case with criminal justice reform in 2018, that was also the case with the revised u.s./mexico/canada trade agreement last year. it's my expectation while mitch
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mcconnell continues to be an obstacle to progress, because the white house has shown an interest in getting something done, speaker pelosi recently indicated that the meetings have been increasingly productive, we will eventually get to a point where the senate's hand will be forced on behalf of the american people. >> congressman, let me ask you this, four years ago, as you know, we have abundant evidence regardless of what trump hacks say in their alternative reality. we have abundant evidence that vladimir putin and russia interfered in american democracy. they did it aggressively. four years later we have the president of the united states who is talking about moving the election date, president of the united states who is lying about mail-in ballots, the president of the united states who has already said this election is going to be rigged, the president of the united states who is put in place of the united states post office, a
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political hack whose really only qualification or biggest qualification seems to be that he was a big contributor to donald trump. and he has already put policies in place that are going to slow down the delivery of mail and can get in the way of a fair election where every american's vote can be counted. what can you do? what can the democratic house do? what should congress do to ensure every american, republican, democratic, independent, every american that wants their vote counted in a timely way can get their vote counted in a timely way? >> thank you for that question, joe. in the midst of a deputi deadly pandemic, we have to ensure that the health and well-being of the american public on the one hand is not sacrificed for the exchange of constitutional right
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on the other. we have to protect votes. in the c.a.r.e.s. act we include cld $400 million in election security grants to be provided to the states so they could stand up vote-in by mail options and ensure there are adequate election sites. in the heroes act we included an additional $3.6 billion, which we think would be necessary to comprehensively implement those changes across the country. we're fighting for that amount right now. as you point out, joe, the president and the administration has been resistant, even though attorney general barr has voted by mail, vice president pence this year voted by mail and donald trump voted by mail. they want to deny that opportunity to the american people. the last thing we have to do, i believe, is continue to elevate the principle of the peaceful transition of power. that is essential to the character of our democracy.
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and the more the american people are socialized to the possibility that the trump administration may do something inconsistent with their principle, the more i think the public will demand we put the infrastructure in place to ensure everybody votes and whatever the outcome, the peaceful transition takes place on january 20th of next year. >> congressman hakeem jeffries, thank you so much. it's always great having with you with us. good luck and be safe. >> thank you. >> just following up, again, on the lies, all of the lies that donald trump is sending out there, the alternative realities, the sort of alternative realities that you see autocrats across the world doing, as they're moving towards elections that they want to lay or have an impact on. he talks about hillary clinton still contesting the election.
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hillary clinton conceded the next day. let me say that again. okay. because you may go on facebook today, you may get confused, a few, buy into donald trump's alternative reality. hillary clinton conceded the next day. did she complain later? sure. donald trump wants to complain after his loss. he can. but she conceded the next day. this president is doing everything he can to undermine your confidence in american democracy. he's lying, he's talking about how mail-in ballots is something new, that it's something radical. acting like there's a difference between absentee voting by mail and voting by mail. there's not. it's the same thing. there's nothing new about this. it's been going on for years. and more and more stories are
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showing up, if you think that this is some left-wing plot, more and more stories are now showing up have republicans worried that this stupid plan to undermine democracy will not hurt democrats. it will actually drive down the vote of republicans. because if you don't watch this show regularly, you haven't heard me say regularly, that when it comes to mail-in voting, when it comes to absentee ballots, republicans are the ones who have historically benefitted the most. donald trump's desperate right now. donald trump understands that he's losing in michigan. he's losing in pennsylvania. he's losing in florida. he's losing in wisconsin. he's losing in arizona.
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hell, he's even losing in texas, according to some recent polls. texas is, in effect, tied. instead of blaming himself, he's trying to undermine american democracy. i understand, you have been upset at elites for years. my family was upset at elites for years. i was upset at elites for years. i still think what goes on on college campuses too often is ridiculous. i think what goes on on the far left wing of the democratic party is ridiculous. but come. don't go along with a guy who wants to undermine american democracy. you believe in exceptionalism your entire life. now is no time to turn away from that because of a failed reality tv host is about to become a failed politician. the next hour of "morning joe"
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starts right now. president donald j. trump is a working class president. >> i'm really rich. >> this campaign's going to try to match his work ethic. we're going to have a blue collar chip on our shoulder. >> i went to an ivy league college. i went to wharton. >> president trump is a working class president. >> i just sold an apartment for $15 million. >> it's all too much. this is -- this is -- they shut down the campaign. homer simpson like turns it off and he said, hey, i have a good idea. let's turn it back on. we'll say mr. burns is a working class -- it's not going to work. willie, the campaign's trying to rebrand donald trump as a blue-collar working class every man. good morning. welcome to "morning joe."
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we have former aide to george w. bush and also from the state department, elise jordan, reverend al sharpton, jonathan swan, we'll have more from his remarkable interview with the president coming up, and much more. willie, it's a thing we're starting to see more and more from donald trump. him working against his own political self-interest. we've been talking about this for a while. yesterday was no exception. i mean, let's just quickly go through some of the highlights of the day. he spent the day actively undermining an economic relief bill for struggling americans, constantly attacking the idea of passing it, attacking the people who were negotiating it. he then attacked deborah birx for telling the truth about the pandemic and called her pathetic. he once again, believe it or
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not, he pushed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus a day after the trump administration's coronavirus testing czar became the latest official to say, doesn't work. it doesn't work. quote, we need to move on from that drug. just like the fda said it, just like everybody in trump's own administration has said it. it's a scam. and doctors who push it are pushing a scam for whatever reason. even the trump administration has said it doesn't work, but donald trump, he keeps pushing the scam. and he continued to work to undermine legal forms of voting. by the way, i have to say again, these are legal forms of voting that usually favor republicans. and it's making donald trump freak out, actually, and making republicans freak out that he keeps tabattacking a form of vog
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that republicans do quite well in. with 160,000 americans now dead from the virus, the president decided to take time yesterday morning, again, to attack our show. this time to attack our show's ratings. he, of course, lied about our numbers, but i responded to him with this genuine plea. i ask again that you please stop obsessing over our show. 150,000 americans are dead. we need you to focus on that. by the way, congratulations to the "morning joe" team for putting together some of the highest numbers in "morning joe" history. willie, of course, you brought up our competition on another channel, "fox & friends." our prelims had us getting 1.6 million viewers. even his attacks continue to be
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lies. and you wonder why the poor man remains obsessed with us and with -- it's a cable news show. going after deborah birx, the person that's been the most loyal to him over the past several months. so loyal that she's actually compromised her own credibility in the medical and science community. that was, of course, another lesson for people who have been loyal to donald trump. it never sticks. just the absolute sheer chaos while his own team's trying to put together an economic relief bill that will help the country get through this terrible time, and his doctors are trying to spare more americans from dying as the death count's over 150,000. this guy just can't help himself. >> yeah, there was so much yesterday. i had the same thought when i
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finally heard about his tweet when he was going after our ratings incorrectly. i thought, my god, look what's going on out in the world and you're worried about the ratings of cable news morning shows. it used to be many years ago you employ, oh, the president of the united states has something to say about our show. how should we deal with this? i didn't hear about it for a few hours. it just makes me sad he's not focused on this crisis in our country right now. as for that legislation that's going on on capitol hill, the president, if you talk to republicans and democrats, they say he's not even a part of this. he has representatives, of course, helping. mark meadows and steve mnuchin trying to get a deal. but the president who campaigned entirely on being this great deal-maker, the guy you know from "the apprentice," the guy who's going to shake up washington, throw out the old ways and get deals done, is not even participating in a deal that would help -- by the way, many of his own supporters, but
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tens of millions of americans get some money, get some food on the table, and weather this crisis. he's not participating in that exercise. and that's who he was supposed to be when he ran for president, joe. he's not delivering on that whatsoever. >> you know, willie, he said, i alone can fix it. and yet i talk to people in the government, i talk to people that work in his administration, and more and more they're working actively to exclude him. foreign policy people are just moving about, trying to handle very delicate situations as much as they can without talking to the president as much as they can keep from the president, they do because he's become even more erratic, even more irrational. and you hear it in the campaign that they just try to keep their heads down and stay away from donald trump whenever they can. and here you have, again, here
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you have the guy that said, i alone can fix it. boy, i know how to make deals. he's sitting on the sidelines. nobody wants him to be involved because he is such a destructive force. so, instead of being involved, he's just sending out tweets and saying nasty things from the white house to actually undermine the work that his people and that the republican senators are trying to get done because they know that they're in enough trouble as it is because they're attached to donald trump. >> yeah. and now would be a great time to be the master dealmaker he campaigned on in 2016. the country needs him to put this deal together. jonathan swan is with us. we've been talking for days about his interview with axios on hbo. here's another clip where the president defends his administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. let's watch.
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>> i've covered you for a long time. i've gone to your rallies. they love you. they hang on every word you say. they don't listen to me or the media or fauci. they think it's fake news. they want to hear from you. when you say, it's under control, you shouldn't wear masks. many people are older people. >> yeah, but -- i think it's under control. i'll tell you what -- >> how? 1,000 americans are dying a day. >> they are dying, that's true. and it is what it is. but that doesn't mean we aren't doing everything we can. it's under control as much as you can control it. this is a horrible plague that they sent us. >> you think is this is as much as we can control? 1,000 deaths a day? >> i would like to know -- first of all, we have done a great job. we've gotten the governors everything they needed. they didn't do their job. many didn't. we'll talk about the successful ones, the good ones. the good ones and the bad. we had good and bad. we had a lot in the middle.
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but we had some incredible governors. i can tell you right now who the great ones are and who the not so great ones are. but the governors do it. we gave them massive amounts of material. >> jonathan, he said it is what it is. he said, we've got it under control. he resorts to the greatest hits when you push him on it. he said, i gave the governors everything they wanted. that doesn't get to the core of where we are right now and what the federal government could be doing about this. >> this is a very, very serious point. we're in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century, 150,000 americans are dead, 1,000 americans are dying every day. and when president trump is pressed on it, he returns to a few different lines. he says, we've done more tests than anyone else in the world. well, yes, that's true. but it's not particularly a relevant statistic because many of those tests people have to wait more than a week to get results which renders them
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effectively useless because they're going around and infecting a lot of other people. the reason we've done so many tests is because we didn't get to the tests early enough, the virus spread like wildfire throughout the country so we're playing catch-up. perhaps the most important thing is the president's own communication. when you talk to public health experts, they will tell you that communication from a leader is the most important thing they can do in a public health crisis. you need credible, fact-based, consistent communication. this is what i was trying to get at with him in the interview. he always wants to sell and present the most positive spin on things even if it bears no resemblance to reality. whereas that might be appropriate for selling a commercial real estate property or hyping a reality tv show, when you're talking about a whole bunch of people, millions of americans who hang on his every word, many of whom who are elderly and in the high-risk category, when you're telling them this virus is under
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control, that's not a harmless statement. that has real world consequences. it is deadly serious. still ahead, another staggering moment from jonathan swan's interview. we'll show you what president trump had to say about the late civil rights leader, john lewis. you're watching "morning joe." we'll be right back. jooishgsz no matter where you live,
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. there was another moment where president trump was talking to -- he finally put out a tweet and that was about it as the country mourns the death of the civil rights icon. here's that exchange. >> john lewis is lying in state in the u.s. capitol. how do you think history will remember john lewis? >> i don't know. i really don't know. i don't know. i don't know john lewis. he chose not to come to my inauguration. he chose -- never met john lewis, actually, i don't believe. >> do you find him impressive? >> i can't say one way or
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another. i find a lot of people impressive. i find a lot of people not impressive. >> do you find his story -- >> he didn't come to my inauguration. he didn't come to my state of the union speeches. that's okay. that's his right. and, again, nobody has done more for black americans than i have. >> i understand. >> he should have come. i think he made a big mistake. >> but taking your relationship with him out of it, do you find his story impressive, what he's done for this country? >> he was a person that devoted a lot of energy and a lot of heart to civil rights, but there were many others also. >> there's a petition to rename the edmund pettus bridge in selma, alabama, as the john lewis bridge. would you support that idea? >> i would have no objection to it if they would like to do it. i would have no objection to it whatsoever. >> rev, donald trump cannot even
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say john lewis was an impressive man. and he brought up repeatedly this pore, poor, tortured, twisted soul brought up repeatedly that john lewis did not attend his inauguration four years ago. so, as this american icon, this american angel or saint, as jon meacham calls him, is lying in state, donald trump can't even say anything nice about him. is that because he's extraordinarily small or he's still sending signals out to white nationalists like david duke saying his election was great for america? >> probably a combination of both. for one to sit there as the president of the united states
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where the three preceding presidents not only went to john lewis laying in state, they went to his funeral in atlanta, georgia. none of whom lived in atlanta. made a journey there. you, the sitting president are so small, that when someone asks you about an historic figure, laying in state, you say, but he didn't come to my inauguration. he didn't come to my speech. that's like you asking me about a great american speech and i say, they didn't come to hear me preach last sunday. how small can you be? on top of that, so not be able in any way give the kind of due credit to a man who was beaten and shed blood to gain all americans the right to vote, those that are the black community, like me, who were barred from the right to vote or at least using it in a way that people could not put impediments in the way, for him not to
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recognize that but say, oh, there were many people there, to minimize that is to send signals to the most racist, and back quardz and bigoted parts of the electorate that he wants to appeal to. i think it's -- we have this person with such a low and small self-concept that everything is about his insecurity rather than being able to see the bigger picture, for that type of person to sit in the white house is dangerous. it's the same type of person that would say with the coronavirus pandemic that we're facing, oh, we're doing better than others rather than trying to strengthen americans to say, we're going through something that is serious. we must be strong and get through this together and inspire us to do it and say to people, we need to get an answer to this. we need to get the backseat, we need to give way to keep people
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eating rather than do the baby thing. i'm doing better than john next door. we're dying, mr. president. we don't need a comparison. we need a solution. and i think that it just runs the threat -- he can't raise up to it. because you criticized him, you got bad ratings. the ratings are off the wall. that's not even what's important here. what's important is that if you're not with me, if you're john lewis and don't come to my inauguration, you're not great. if you're joe scarborough and criticize me, you have bad ratings. that's who we have in the white house. california now has the most coronavirus cases of any state. we will talk to los angeles mayor eric garcetti about his city's fight against this pandemic. "morning joe" is back in a moment. "morning joe" is back in a moment and can't wait until you are too. universal orlando resort. buy now and get two days free at the parks. restrictions apply. among my patisensitivity as well tas gum issues.
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willie, the choices are not good for supporters of donald trump. they are either behind a man who is so small that he's refusing to pay any tribute to one of the giants in civil rights history because he didn't attend his inauguration, or he's trying to send a message to white
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supremacists and others that he's not going to say anything nice about a black man. and, of course, you have to put that as a possibility after months of donald trump picking away, day by day, on the scab of racism in america. >> yeah, i like to point out also, john lewis also boycotted george w bush's inauguration because of the outcome of the 2000 election that he thought wasn't legitimate at the time. you know who spoke at his funeral the other day? george w. bush flew from crawford, texas, to atlanta, georgia, and spoke at john lewis's funeral. everything goes through the prism of donald trump's personality, we know that. the first thing he said when jonathan swan asked him about john lewis was, he didn't go to my funeral. he also said, i don't know john
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lewis. well, you don't have to know john lewis personally, as jonathan pointed out, to know his story. we know donald trump watches tv all day. obviously, people were talking about john lewis. his funeral was on tv. there was plenty to say about john lewis. if you actually didn't know anything about john lewis going in. it's all about him. it's all about a personal grievance he felt because john lewis wasn't nice to him once. jonathan swan, you gave him every opportunity. you said, take his personality out of it, take your personal relationship out of it, what do you think of his story? even then he couldn't conjure a nice word to say. >> there was a striking part of that exchange where he said -- after saying john lewis didn't attend his inauguration, president trump said, and nobody's done more for black people than i have. well, the obvious implication is that donald trump is saying that he has done more for african-americans than one of
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the civil rights icons of the last half century. there was another part in the interview where he said, no one's done more -- no president's done more for black people apart from me, maybe abraham lincoln. i said, are you honestly saying you've done more for african-americans than lyndon johnson who passed the civil rights act? he said, how did that work out? i was sort of confused. >> black people were able to vote? >> yeah. it was a very -- a very strange part of the -- you know, he talks about opportunity zones and criminal justice reform, et cetera. i didn't return to it because it was such a striking comment. i said, you're really saying you did more than lyndon johnson, who passed the civil rights act? he insisted that he had. coming up, true crimes and misdemeanors. legal analyst jeffy toobin joins us on his new book, the
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investigation of donald trump. first, here's bill karins with a check of the tropical storm heading up the east coast. how is it looking? >> isaias is being a prolific tornado producer. we've had ten tornadoes reported so far. we've had one that's injured two people in lancaster county, virginia. that was about one mile outside of whitestone. we currently have four active tornado warnings in delaware, maryland, and a little one here just outside of -- north of ocean city, maryland. as these storms continue to pivot and rotate through, we could get small, weak tornadoes even in through long island, the jersey shore, new york city area over the next couple of hours. that's one thing we'll be watching. here's the current wind gusts. we have winds on the coastal areas up to about 50 miles an hour. the winds are not as bad in washington, d.c., all northern maryland. i think if we're getting power outages, it's mostly going to be from i-95 towards the coast. right now we have 650,000 people without power. that's mostly in areas of eastern north carolina, eastern virginia. the power outage numbers will
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start going up shortly in areas like new jersey as those storms move northward and high wind gusts move in. here's the wind forecast. look at atlantic city. our computers are pinpointing around 11:00 a.m. we could see wind gusts as high as 80 miles an hour. that will do significant damage, also to the trees, power outages. new york city peak winds 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. 65-mile-per-hour gusts and isolated tornadoes will be in this area. through this evening, the winds die off a little bit. we'll still get downed trees from hartford to providence and boston. it shouldn't be as widespread. here's power outage forecast, the most widespread will be the jersey shore and spreading throughout new york city and long island in the evening. the other issue is a lot of heavy rain. we're under a high risk of flash flooding from washington, d.c., to just outside philadelphia. you can see that bright red and orange area, that's the area of greatest concern. 50 million people still under
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flash flood watches. numerous issues with this storm as it moves throughout the northeast throughout the afternoon. all eyes will be on seaside heights and jersey shore as high winds, torrential rains and tornadoes move in throughout the day. you're watching "morning joe." o"
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as congress moves towards a potential compromise for a second stimulus package, u.s. mayors are taking up the fight as well. joining us now, the mayor of los angeles, democrat eric garcetti, who is part of a new coalition pushing for direct, recurring cash payments as part of the next stimulus package. elise jordan and gene robinson are back with us as well. mr. mayor, we've got a lot to talk about. first of all, what's happened not only in los angeles but across california with the
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pandemic, early on cities like san francisco and los angeles seemed to be doing everything right, but the pandemic has come back and in a very big way. what happened and what's your plan moving forward. >> good morning. good to be with you. we're in a decent place right now. los angeles very proudly, first city to offer testing with or without symptoms. first city in the country to put on face masks, first city to shut down our major gathering areas and first city to lead with science. we're down about 20% in infections just over the last two weeks. i think the message is received loud and clear. remember, this is a virus that's just as days yongerous today as one. when it comes to the national leadership, i want to thank the money we got in the first
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c.a.r.e.s. act, but meanwhile, we're looking at fiscal cliffs where we'll be laying off public workers who will be responding to this crisis. we're putting $2 million a day into testing without any direct testing assistance from the federal government. so, we've got a long way to go. and cities are kind of having to do it for themselves. but we know that america needs that national leadership to make sure that we take individual responsibility and have standards and that we have the collective help from washington we all deserve. >> let's talk about also what we've seen out of los angeles and the rest of the country the last couple of months. an awful lot of civil unrest following the death of george floyd. of course, we saw that in very stark terms in los angeles for quite some time. let's talk about the aftermath of that. what has los angeles done to bring the community and police officers together?
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what are you doing to make sure you keeple los angeles residents safe? >> absolutely. los angeles i always say we're a little further advanced not because we're any better. we just went through that kind can of unrest in the early '60s and '90s and we have incredible models leading the country. we just announced two weeks ago the expansion of a program called community safety partnership that had folks around the country are looking at. where you place officers who often grow up in a neighborhood, in a neighborhood for five years instead of two. >> oh, great. >> they form relationships. they don't respond everything on their own. they get to know the names of young people who they serve and vice versa. instead of somebody cycling through and just being assigned to a neighborhood, they become part of a neighborhood. on top of that, we've cut our police deaths -- or deaths at the hands of police officers in half in just four years by doing very straightforward things from body cameras, de-escalation and we passed the package two weeks
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ago of nation-leading reforms on force and accountability without opposition from our police union. so, i do believe we can come together. the last thing is it's a moment to reimagine policing, to take things off the shoulders. this fall we'll be launching to ways to do that, to responding to mental health calls, without police officers, bringing clinicians to the streets rather than a gun and badge to respond to things. that's how you keep morale high in a police department, you keep accountability there and you make sure people are being served much more effectively. >> mayor garcetti, it's willie geist. i want to ask you about schools because a lot of places across the country are looking at big cities and how you're going to handle this. first day of school two weeks from now in los angeles. there had been some dispute between the teachers union and unified school district about safety measures taken inside those schools. how confident are you that kids can go to school safely? and what will school look like to you this fall?
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>> i'm glad to see the agreement yesterday, as you'll recall, last year i helped resolve our strike when we had a massive strike of our teachers here really bringing both sides together about 18 months ago. and building on that, i think there's an agreement to make sure we have the right number of hours of instruction for our children. i'm incredibly worried, willie, especially for our black and brown kids, to not have the advances we have in other communities, access to internet for equipment out there. and i do believe children can safely go back to school as well as teachers. but i think it's going to rely on a different testing paradigm. not using these expensive $1 to $200 tests around the country are seven to nine days. in l.a. we're country, we get those turned around in about one to two days. paper strip testing which can be done for $1 to $5 is another example of national leadership. i'm bringing a consortium of cities together. governor hogan is doing the same thing with the rockefeller
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foundation. we should have the national government leading on this, but instead it's falling on states and cities. if we can fund the startup, it could change schools or institutional facilities like jails and nursing facilities to get people to be safe and get our kids back in school where they need to learn and not fall further behind. >> i know you've also gotten together with other mayors across the country talking about guaranteed income, which is a monthly ka, direct payment to people to get them through this time. what does that look like to you and what are your hopes it can actually be implemented? >> we've seen this work. this has been -- i joke this pandemic has turned some republicans into democrats and some democrats into republicans. what do i mean by that? democrats are getting out of the way of the regulations and red tape that sometimes we create to get things done quickly, whether it's housing more homeless people here in l.a. than we ever have or moving things through congress. republicans are spending like democrats where they always cash makes a difference, especially
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in a society where too many people, especially communities of color, start without resources in their hands when they're born. giving people that payment helps them meet the rent, be able to pay for food. we raised $37 million privately that we handed out with mastercard and cash cards and, lo and behold, what did people spend it on? not on toys or frivolous things, they spent it on the basics. the food they needed, the debt they had to pay off, the rent to keep them from being homeless. i joined together with 13 other mayors, led by michael tubbs, my brother in stockton, california, where they've already had an experiment of this for over a year and a half. we see this is a smarter way than trying to pick up the pieces of poverty after we fail like most industrialized countries, put a basic floor down that allows people to do this. and lastly, i think this fits into the discussion of reparations where we look at what the impact would be for black americans, specifically, of making up for centuries of the race gap and discrimination.
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it has two-fold, it can save people from poverty and also address the inequities of this moment. >> gene robinson is with us from "the washington post." he has a question for you, mr. mayor. gene? >> hey, gene. >> hi, mayor garcetti. you're on the vice presidential selection committee for presumptive nominee biden. so, who's it going to be and where is the process right now? >> so, of course, that's one of the four co-chairs with the honor of doing that, i will leave the process to mr. biden, who has been extraordinary. he's an extraordinary guide. he's ready to restore the soul of this country and to build back better in america. we have amazing women that have been a part of this process. we're keeping them all -- we vetted them heavily. all of them have passed the vet. now in this next week, week and a half, mr. biden can spend some time with them. i know he's going to pick a vice president that reflects the kind of relationship he had with
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barack obama. he told us at the beginning of this, i'm not looking for a geographic, demographic or political choice. i'm looking for somebody who can serve the american people and be the closest counselor to me in the white house. it's a wonderful model. i think together with that vice president, we could set up a relationship that would be one of the most important relationships in american history. i do feel president biden will be in many ways like president johnson that you said, very different personalities, obviously, but the poetry we saw and the promise of both the obama and kennedy administrations set up the success for president johnson in tougher times to put through civil rights legislation, a war on poverty. this is time for president biden to do the same thing. i know he's going to have a great wing woman on his side. >> all right. mayor eric garcetti, we appreciately appreciate you being with us. thank you. coming up next, fearing president trump would try to shut down the russia
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investigation, fbi agents hid key documents related to the probe. that's one of the new revelations out in jeffrey toobin's book. he joins us straight ahead. we'll talk about that and so much more when "morning joe" returns. en "morning joe" returns. ♪ ♪ the open road is open again. and wherever you're headed, choice hotels is there. book direct at choicehotels.com. ♪ liberty mutual customizes your car insurance, so you only pay for at what you need.om. i wish i could shake your hand. granted. only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ the coronavirus is wrecking stif the senate doesn't act, it will mean painful cuts
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>> i hope this is not the new normal, but i fear it is. >> this just came out. wikileaks. i love wikileaks. >> how do you react? >> it's problematic, is an understatement. >> this is a whole, big, fat hoax. it's a hoax. >> it's not a hoax. >> it is a witch hunt -- >> it's not a witch hunt. >> there was no obstruction. if you read that, you'll see that. >> the report did not conclude that he did not commit obstruction of justice. is that correct? >> that is correct. >> it was a complete and total exoneration. >> did you actually totally exonerate the president? >> no. >> all right. it was not an exoneration. and, again, i want to just read this again because the president lied, like he always lies, about this russian investigation, and said it was a hoax. and yesterday his campaign manager was talking about the people joe biden had around him.
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trump's foreign policy adviser lied about russia to investigators in congress. his national security adviser lied. campaign chairman lied. deputy campaign chairman lied. personal lawyer lied. political consultant lied. they were all convicted. invest russia or other russian activities. and, of course, the attorney general and jared kushner also either lied or misstated their contacts with russians before they got into the white house. with us now, let's bring in the staff writer at "the new yorker" and cnn's long time legal analyst jeffrey toobin. he's out with a new book entitled "true crimes and misdemeanors: the investigation of donald trump." the timing is fascinating because i had been wanting to write for months a column in my "washington post" column about this topic because i have become
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so enraged about how op-ed writers at "the washington post" and at other pro-trump sites -- not "washington post," "wall street journal," and other pro-trump sites continue to talk about a, quote, russian hoax, all because the steele dossier turned out to be uncrew. by the way, we attacked the steele dossier here on morning joe from the day it came out, but they're hoping everybody will look at the steele dossier and ignore the mountains of evidence that show how huge, how systematic this was. this connection between the russians and donald trump's campaign. >> the scale of it is really extraordinary. and, you know, i have a lot to criticize about the mueller investigation, but one thing they succeeded in enormously was identifying the specific acts, whether it was the internet research agency in st.
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petersburg run by putin's close friend or, more importantly, the hacking done by the russian military intelligence operatives that had an enormous impact on the election. and, you know, one of the stories i tell in the book is how on a single day, a young prosecutor in mueller's office named rush atkinson, he was looking at the hacking, the day by day hacking in russia and he sees one day when it spikes. like why do they do more hacking this day, and he starts googling what happened that day? and it was the day that donald trump said, russia, if you're listening, go get hillary clinton's emails. so the interaction, the call and response between russia and donald trump was really extraordinary. and it had an impact on the 2016
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election. no doubt. >> again, within hours of donald trump holding that press conference saying, go after hillary clinton's 30,000 missing emails, within hours, the mueller report said it was the first time the russians tried to start hacking clinton-related accounts. we also can look at the fact and this isn't an original thought by me but the huffington post continues to ask, when someone on the trump campaign team, someone in the trump white house, someone who blindly supports donald trump and his connections with russia will just admit and explain why donald trump and his team used information stolen from the russians every single day the last month of the 2016 campaign. >> and, you know, they did it openly and, as you just saw in that montage, i love wikileaks.
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the candidate trump said that over and over again. and one of the things about the mueller investigation that was -- perhaps a missed opportunity was that they never went back and looked at the historical relationship between russia and trump. other than the 2015 letter of intent to build a trump tower in moscow, what is it about vladimir putin that donald trump, to this day, refuses to criticize? mueller didn't do that. he didn't subpoena donald trump. he didn't spell out his crimes in the final report. the irony here is that for all that the president and his allies criticized mueller in excess of zeal, the real story of the mueller investigation is the absence of a complete
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investigation, especially one that included real questioning of donald trump. >> and again, he pulled back at several key moments, again, on the questioning of donald trump, on several conclusions that he just refuse -- the door was wide open, and he refused to step through it on several occasions. elise jordan, i remember when jeffrey talks about donald trump for some reason will not cross vladimir putin, i remember reading the news about the bounties that vladimir putin was putting on the heads of u.s. troops and turning to mika as i was reading the breaking news saying, oh, my god, what a terrible position this is going to put donald trump in because he will not criticize vladimir putin for this. i wonder how he's going to avoid it. and here we are over a month later, the president of the united states, the commander in chief, has still refused to criticize a former kgb agent who has put bounties on the heads of young troops in afghanistan. >> joe, it really is incredible.
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just as this whole morass is so incredible that we're actually in this situation where we're talking about this investigation into donald trump and collusion with russia. jeffrey, just to press you a little bit further, i have wondered so often, why did mueller choose not to subpoena donald trump and to force him to sit through an interview. did you gain any additional insight into that from your reporting just because it still seems so inexplicable. >> that is a story that plays out over many months. it's at the core of my book. and the -- it was a combination of the -- mueller's worry about being allowed to do it by rod rosenstein who was his supervisor in the justice department. robert mueller is a rule follower. robert mueller is someone who believes in the chain of command, and he was always
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concerned that he was pushing rosenstein too far. rosenstein never told him no, but he was always worried about it. the other point, and this is somewhat surprising, was the very effective lawyering by rudy giuliani. rudy giuliani did a good job, believe it or not, for donald trump, by stretching out the process of the negotiations. making the -- never saying no about the interview, but also never saying yes, and by the time he agreed to produce a written series of question and answers, mueller felt it was too late in his investigation to begin a long legal fight. the paradox of rudy giuliani in this case is that, though he was effective with regard to russia, he was a disastrous failure with regard to ukraine, and really is the person most responsible for donald trump's impeachment. >> hey, jeff.
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it's willie. congratulations on the book. another question a lot of people had about mueller's report was in volume 2 which addressed obstruction of justice where he laid out 10 to 12 cases that could be interpreted as obstruction of justice but he said we could not determine whether or not the president committed a crime. why didn't he go farther there? why didn't he come out and say, here are all these cases. these are obstruction of justice? >> you know, willie, this is -- the two great flaws of the mueller investigation were the failure to subpoena and the failure to state in a straightforward way that the president committed obstruction of justice. if you look at the facts of the mueller investigation, look at what he found, whether it was telling jim comey to lay off michael flynn, whether it was telling his white house counsel don mcgahn to fire mueller and then telling mcgahn to lie about that, all of that was obstruction of justice, far
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worse than anything richard nixon or bill clinton did who were charged by congress with obstruction of justice. the reason was, again, i think mueller tying himself in knots trying to follow the rules. as you know, the office of legal counsel said that you can't indict a sitting president. but mueller said, well, if i say that the president can obstruct justice, he won't have his day in court to sforespond to it. so i'm not going to be explicit. i thought that was an overprotective attitude toward trump but that was the conclusion he reached and it led to a real attitude from the president this to day on the issue of obstruction of justice when he was clearly guilty of it. >> all right.
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the new book is "true crimes and misdemeanors -- the investigation of donald trump." jeffrey toobin, thank you so much. we really appreciate it. that does it for us this morning. stephanie ruhle picks up the coverage right now. hi there. i'm stephanie ruhle. it's tuesday, august 4th. here's what's happening now. top health officials are warning that we've entered a dangerous new phase of the coronavirus and that we need to get a handle on it before the fall. this as we approach 4.8 million confirmed cases and nearly 157,000 deaths. the president, he is saying the opposite. telling reporters yesterday that the virus is receding. but that is not the reality. certainly not in a number of southern and midwestern states that are seeing cases surge for the first time. missouri, montana, oklahoma and nebraska all seeing infections and deaths rise at an