thank you as always. so good to see you. i'll be reading axios a.m. in just a little bit. you can read the newsletter, sign up at signup.axios.com. that does it for me, i'm yasmin vossoughian. "morning joe" starts now. >> he's having trouble reading. >> when they're gathering around -- >> how many gaffes can you make every day? >> this is the definition of -- >> he increasingly sounds like one of those bad lip reading videos you see on the internet. >> they delivered a swift and swip -- it was swift and sweeping. >> we find he has troubles getting through the words. >> france, germany, finny. >> plasma, plosma -- >> he can't read a prompter.

>> he doesn't know what year it is. >> the choice in 220. >> for all new homes, offices and buildings by 230. >> has difficulty keeping his train of thought. >> broadwalk. and if you think i am announcing my -- >> he's on an obstacle course that makes it look like he's not up for the job. >> why are the trump supporters attacking donald trump? it's updated. every time the attacks come you find more clips of donald trump just wandering around. i mean, you know, the jonathan swan interview -- by the way, i was off yesterday and missed the jonathan swan interview -- the part where he was -- >> with the charts and the graphs? >> -- putting the papers in his

face and the charts and the graphs. first of all, let's talk about jonathan swan for a second. you know when chris wallace comes at you, he has none chunks in one hand and clubs with spikes in another. and jonathan swan is more subtle, would you like a brownie, and you don't know what you've eat enuntil you wake up the next morning in the bottom of the elevator shaft. he's sweet and polite. you look at the president's face and he looked completely lost. he didn't know where he was. it was as disoriented as i've ever seen the man on the camera. >> it's amazing if he's presented with facts. when he handed him the graphs, you're look at this the wrong way, there's no second beat there, he doesn't know where to go when confronted with the facts. if i had a nickel for every

night i ended up at the bottom of the elevator shaft hanging out with jonathan swan i'd be a wealthy man, both of us. >> do you think that just came off the top of my head? it's happened to both of us before. i want to follow the comedy central mash. here's jonathan swan again with the president. >> the figure i look at is death. and death is going up now. >> okay. no. >> that's 1,000 a day. >> if you look at death. >> it's going up again. daily death. >> look at these charts. >> i'd love to. >> let's take a look. >> let's look. if you look at death per -- >> starting to go up again. >> right here the united states is lowest in numerous categories. we're lower than the world. >> lower than the world? >> lower than europe -- >> in what? >> take a look. right here.

here's case death. >> oh, you're doing death as a proportion of cases. i'm talking about it as a proportion of population. that's where the u.s. is really bad -- >> you can't do that. >> look at south korea, 51 million population, 300 deaths. it's crazy. >> you don't know that. >> i do. you think they're faking their statistics? south korea, an advanced country? >> i won't get into that. you don't know that. >> germany. >> here's one right here. united states you take the number of cases. look, we're last. meaning we're first. >> i don't know what we're first in. what? >> look again, it's cases. we have cases because of the testing. >> 1,000 americans are dying a day. i understand on cases it's different. >> you're not reporting it correctly, jonathan. >> i think i am. >> if you look at this other chart. look, this is our testing, i believe, this is the testing --

>> 60,000 americans are in hospital, 1,000 dying a day. >> they talk about new cases, new cases -- >> i'm talking about death. it's going up. >> it's way down from where it was. >> it was 1,000 a day. it went down to 500, now it's going up again. >> excuse me, where it was was higher than where it is. >> it's spiked again. >> it's going down in florida, arizona, texas -- >> it's going down in florida? >> and i'm really serious about this. if if he weren't president of the united states, we wouldn't play that clip on the air, because he looks so disoriented that people would say we were being cruel taking advantage of somebody on the air. but he clearly was disoriented, didn't know what he was talking about. scrambled facts. just -- it was -- i mean, we

have john meacham. let me bring you in here. he is president of the united states and i'd like to ask you what presidential precedence we have for a performance that disorienting and that bad? but i'm afraid maybe we need to go into the realm of like tv shows. did that remind you more of mr. hanny from "green acres" or fesstus from "gun smoke"? >> where's arnold the pig? >> the nick at night references. i think even willie is too young to understand what you said. >> i study the history of tv the way you study the history of presidencies, john. >> that explains so much, actually. >> i'm good. >> there's a clarity now about your career choices. i like it. no, and it's sort of, again, we

can be somewhat light hearted about it, but it's, at heart, at best discomforting and at worst terrifying. what i had -- and both of you know this. you know, when do you what we do for a living, you get a lot of mail. particularly the old days you'd get manila folders from people who found the key to everything. and it went from the book of genesis through the council on foreign relations and would end up with george herbert walker bush in dallas during the kennedy assassination. this odd conspiracy theories, but rendered as if it were factual, right. so that -- just watching it right now, i was thinking this is like getting, you know, a power point deck from area -- was it area 54?

>> 51. >> 51, i think, yeah. >> 51. see, there you go. car 52, sorry. but i think, to me, and i hope that the power of satire with what trevor noah is doing although as christopher buckley says it's hard to satirize somebody who satirizes themselves all the time. i hope that gets to the consciousness because the attack on vice president biden about his coherence and all that is going to get worse, a lot worse, because it's all they got. it's interesting to keep an eye on the social media stuff about what trump has to argue. and none of the arguments, this is fascinating for this point in a presidential campaign. none of the arguments on substance have any salience.

can you think of one? there's perspective. the perspective arguments like, he's going to, you know, drive us into a socialist future. nobody believes that. joe, you and i talked about, there's a much better chance that joe biden will end up somewhat centering the democratic party than anybody is going to come along and center the republican party. and so -- and i think that's an existential threat to a republican party that has sold its soul, the check bounced, and they've got to figure out what are they going to do to attempt to be something approaching majority party in this demographically changing country. and my bet -- just quickly. my bet is, sometime in the middle of november of this year

because it's going to take a while to count the ballots. let's not talk about election night. let's talk about election week. let's not set up the expectation that we're going to know everything and david brinkley is going to tell us everything at the right time because that plays into trump's hand, chaos helps him. i think if there's a blue wave-ish, there's going to be a point before the end of the year where a lot of republicans are going to say, donald who? no, i don't know what you're talking about. i don't know who that is. if they do, it's because of that kind of clip. >> that is exactly what's going to happen. i can tell you a lot of the same people blindly defending donald trump right now was viciously attacking me when i was criticizing george w. bush's

spending in the second time and and asking me why i was a socialist, when i became a left wing radical. when he abandoned all conservative concepts as far as i was concerned, which is why i was attacking him. and after he got out of office, they started saying the same thing. and now the attacks, oh my god, you would think george w. bush was a socialist. the same thing will happen with donald trump. it's the game they've been playing. i remember in 2012, me getting viciously attacked by people for criticizing mitt romney's campaign. mitt is a friend of mine, the family was a friend of mine, but he was running what i thought was an uninspired campaign, and the same people defending donald trump now were viciously attacking me and defending mitt romney, if you can believe it. it's bizarre behavior, it's happened in the past, it's going to happen this year, too. if donald trump loses, it'll be

donald who in december, and everyone will be writing their books how i won the war, saved the world from the chaos of this man. you look at the clips of jonathan swan and you see this is a campaign that is completely blocked in. i mean, they're talking about -- you don't want -- hey, you don't want four debates if you're running donald trump's campaign. he may say he wants four debates. you don't want four debates. look at the jonathan swan interview. he was completely lost. he had a blank, dead look in his eye. he was completely out of his element. he has been allowed to live like autocrats in his own world for the last four years where he makes up an alternate reality. sets out an alternative set of facts and he doesn't have anybody around him that's challenging him. that's not somebody that you want out on the stage one debate

night, let alone four debate nights. so this suggestion they do is foolish. every time he goes out there, he's going to look just as bad as he did with jonathan swan. joe biden wasn't great in some of the early debates. but he did a lot of debates. he's been out there more than donald trump has. and john, you bring up a great point about their arguments. what are they going to do? are they really going to argue that joe biden is out of it? every time they do, there's a clip where donald trump looks as bad or worse. are they going to talk about china because every time they do, there's a clip or tweet about donald trump cozying up to president xi, congratulating him for being a strong man, for being a great leader on the

china virus or the wuhan virus as the president called it after he forget he thanked president xi on behalf of americans for doing such an increedabdible jo the coronavirus. he has nowhere to go. let's bring in jonathan lemire here. white house aides have to be dazed by the president's horrid performance in front of jonathan swan. a confused, bumbling, rambling performance. where again his eyes, it's like he wasn't there. do they really want a fourth debate? >> so, joe, this is now the second high profile interview in recent weeks the president has really struggled with. one with chris wallace on fox a few weeks ago the other. the aides said this doesn't have the traction, it was on hbo, one aide dismissed it as liberal porn to me -- we can all watch

the clips. >> what was liberal porn? he got the facts wrong. i'm a conservative, a life-long conservative. i was a conservative before donald trump lied about being a conservative. i'm a conservative after he will leave being conservative. i'm more conservative than all of these people that have followed this autocrat in training. what are they saying is liberal porn? that he got all the facts wrong. have they really put themselves in a corner now where if you go along with facts, if you go along with statistics, that makes you a liberal? >> that's their argument. it has not proven to gain any traction in recent days. one thing that interview also did was dismiss a talking point about the coronavirus. the mortality rates, they were hanging their hats on that, it was lower. but that has changed. but you raise the question whether they're boxed into a corner, the answer is yes.

this is a campaign, under three months until election day and we're now under one month until early voting begins in a number of battleground states including north carolina to which the president doesn't have a path to win without capturing the tar heel state. they're running out of time to turn this campaign around. we know the convention has been upended. the president will give a speech but it's not the four day celebration he hoped. he's unable to hold any rallier. he's trying to use smaller events to take that space, i'm traveling with him to ohio. he has to go to ohio, a state a few months ago they thought they had in the bag. now they have to put resources there. the campaign yesterday called for a fourth debate, one that's earli earlier. right now the first debate is

scheduled for the end of september, they want one at the beginning of september, coinciding with the beginning of early voting. to this point the biden campaign said no to that we have agreed to the three we'll stick to that. but the white house and the president are running out of moves. they plan to highlight when joe biden stumbles or gets a fact wrong but it also opening you up the litany of clips that the president has done so and the risk on the debate stage that he, not joe biden, may be the one suffering the verbal implosi implosion. >> the united states averaged more than 1,000 daily deaths from coronavirus for a tenth consecutive day yesterday, in addition to more than 51,000 new cases. this comes as an analyst from the associated press finds testing in the united states declined by 3.6% in the last two weeks. officials attribute the drop to

americans becoming discouraged to having to way hours to get a test and weeks to get the results back, rendering it meaningless. and states where the, quote, percentage of positive tests is high and continuing to climb, an indicator the virus is still spreading uncontrolled. the testing is seen as the key to reopening schools and businesses. meanwhile, president trump continues to claim the virus will just disappear. >> the country's in very good shape and we're set to rock and roll. this thing is going away. it will go away like things go away. >> it'll go away like things go away, absolutely. no question in my mind it will go away. hopefully sooner wrathrather th later. >> let's bring in professor and msnbc political contributor,

jason johnson. and national political correspondent molly ball with us, she wrote the cover story, ways the covid-19 pandemic is changing the 2020 election. he's still now six months into this, the president is still wishing it away. saying it's going to go away the way things go away. we saw his ineptitude when confronted with the facts that voters and americans are seeing in their lives around them, that it is not really happening and, in fact, it's not going to just go away. >> first off, the only difference between the interview the president did with jonathan swan and the crazy press conference from kanye west a few weeks ago is he didn't burst into tears. he has no handle what he wants to talk about and what he wants to do. some states, there's a little bit less testing and some states a bit of a spike.

we know one thing, as kids go back to school, as college students go back to campus, we are seeing spikes. we're seeing spikes in elementary schools in indiana, spikes in high schools in georgia. if anyone was able to fool themselves in summer and believe the president's fake statistics, maybe it's going down, i don't know anyone. that's not the case as we have dozens of children sent home from schools in the next couple weeks with the coronavirus. the president has no plan for how to handle this. as people head to the polls in the next few months they'll be voting with that anger and fear. >> the man in the interview with jonathan swan, the reason it's so serious is he's the guy with the keys to the car, he's the guy to have the national testing theory. molly, let's talk about your cover story for time magazine.

ways this pandemic is going to impact the 2020 election and already is impacting the 2020 election. how did you come come at this? there were different ways to look at it, including the way we vote with mail-in voting which the president said was fraudulent and will lead to a rigged election. >> there are so many ways that this election has been transformed by the pandemic. so we wanted to zoom out the lens and look at all of that, look at the ways it has completely changed the context of this election. there's the logistics piece of it, you were talking earlier about the conventions, that's one part of this election, that will be unlike any other in our memories because of the coronavirus and campaigns have had to get creative and figure out how to adapt to a world where it is difficult and potentially risky to campaign in person. so we're seeing them take different approaches and do that in different ways. the voting, as you mentioned, we have not seen the scale of change in the way americans vote

in any recent election and it is a massive transformation. of course, things were moving in this direction anyway with mail in voting and early voting becoming prevalent in a lot of states. but this is an overnight change for a lot of people that poses a lot of stress to an election system that was already fragile, subject to things like foreign interference and other risks. now this additional strain is being put on it and it's changing so quickly that a lot of states still can't say for sure exactly what the procedures will be for people to safely submit their ballots. and then the big picture is the way it has changed the way people feel about this election. the way the context for voters has changed. in terms of how they look at the candidates, evaluate the state of the country. you just played that clip of trump saying that the country is in a great place. americans don't believe that these days. the shear of people who think we're on the right track has

plummeted in a short period of time. the things that people value, they're looking for from their leaders, that has changed as we grapple with the pandemic and people look around and says i want a leader that listens to experts, who's compassionate. so all of the attempts that trump and his campaign has made to change the topic, refocus on the issues he wants to talk about, has failed because the pandemic is the center of our national conversation. so one day when we look back on this coronavirus pandemic, you know, the election is going to be an inextricable part of that. the way we are dealing with the pandemic as a nation is coming together and using our democracy to figure out how we get out of it. >> john meacham it's fascinating. you started to talk about this earlier. donald trump's really -- he's

running for re-election but he's running for re-election without a theme. you look through the years, like 1960, john kennedy talked about getting america moving and talked about a missile grasp to draw contrast with ike's vice president richard nixon. 20 years later ronald reagan was running against jimmy carter's four years, talking about making america great again. 20 years after that, george w. bush, in reaction to newt gingrich and some of us that came along in the '90s, talked about passionate conservativism. and here we are 20 years later and donald trump is themeless.

he's asked, what do you want to do over the next four years if you get reelected? he can't answer that question. he's been given an opportunity to answer that question repeatedly. he has no answers and we heard yesterday in the press conference, his coronavirus strategy. think about this, over 155,000 people dead, and it's not getting better. it's getting worse in many parts of america. over 155,000 people dead. and his response, his reaction, his game plan? well, it'll go away like things go away. this is beyond. it is -- this is unprecedentunp. this is like no presidential re-election campaign we've ever seen because it is utterly themeless, utterly devoid of

plans, and is as directionless as it could be. >> vice president biden has a great example in ronald reagan. as you say, 40 years ago now, a biblical 40 years ago, ronald reagan broke away from jimmy carter in the last week of the campaign, the debate in cleveland was on october 28th, on tuesday, the election was on november 4th. and reagan, you know, because he didn't show up and drool at the ancient age of 69. remember, that was way too old. you would be a junior pledge in the white house in the current demography of the presidential election today. and the question, are you better off than you were four years ago. is it easier for you to go to

the stores and buy things four years ago. biden can say, can you go to the stores in the same way you did four years ago. and reagan ran through a series of things, more respected, secure, and he said if your answer is yes, he nodded that head at jimmy carter, then your vote is very clear. if your answer is no, you weren't better off than you were four years ago, i can suggest a different course and the numbers began to move in the last week. and there are two kinds of elections really in presidential politics. this is just my opinion and division of them. there are nuanced elections, where kennedy/nixon in 1960 would be one where in real time, you know, arthur had to write a book in september of 1960, kennedy's adviser, kennedy's speech writer, saying kennedy

versus nixon, does it make any difference? the fact that the kennedy campaign had to frame that question in the fall of 1960 tells you that in that era, they weren't seen as distinct as, of course, history has made them. does trump versus biden, does it make any difference? hell yeah. and it's a pretty straightforward argument, it seems to me. the other thing quickly, this goes to molly's point, i look forward to her piece, is i really do think, and ben smith wrote a column about this in the times this week, we have to find a way to adjust our internal ambient clocks to see that the election may not be fully decided by 11:00 in the east on election night because of the nature of the ballots. because of the volume, one

imagines, that's going to come out. and i just worry that, again, the king of trump-a-stan is going to try to suggest because he thinks in tv blocks, right, "the apprentice" you get an answer at a certain point. he likes having an answer at a certain point. if it's not there, he believes that knocks ordinary folks off their axis a little bit and they begin to think things are astray and, therefore, he is going to step in and put things back into order. we need to figure out a way to have a conversation to make people ready for this immense task counting these millions, tens and tens and tens of millions of ballots, it may take a couple of days and i think we have to prepare for that. >> that's important and federal election officials have come on the show to make that point, those hours, days that may go on after election night when you don't know who won are not

filled with chaos, they're filled with people certifying votes to make sure we get the vote right. we're just getting started here, still ahead on "morning joe," health experts not only pushing for more testing but the need for rapid testing. we'll talk to a top infectious disease doctor how we go about doing that. and pushback against the president's plan to hold his convention speech on the south lawn of the white house. he floated that idea yesterday. you're watching "morning joe" we'll be right back. ng joe" we'll be right back.

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if you look at children, children are almost -- and i would almost say, definitely, but almost immune from this disease. so few, they've got stronger -- hard to believe, i don't know how you feel about it -- but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this. and they do it, they don't have a problem. they just don't have a problem.

>> you said children are virtually immune from covid-19, but children have contracted this virus and some have died from it. >> i'm talking about getting very sick. if you look at children they're able to throw it off. it's amazing because some flus they don't, they get very sick, have problem with flus or whatever. but for some reason, china virus children handle it well. they may get it and it doesn't have much of an impact on it. if you look at the numbers, in terms of natality, the numbers for children under a certain age, young, their immune systems are strong, very powerful and they seem to be able to handle it very well. >> note what dr. anthony fauci and others have said, that children are not immune to coronavirus and can spread the virus to others. last week a study found infected children have at least as much

of the coronavirus in their noses and throats as adults. and children under 5 may host up to 100 times of the virus as adults, the authors found. facebook took note of the president's claim, yesterday removing a video from trump's personal page that featured those comments. the video quote includes claims that a group of people are immune to covid-19, which is a violation of our policies. and twitter removed it from their platform also. this is the first time facebook has taken such action against president trump for posting false claims about covid-19. in an email statement the trump campaign accused facebook of, quote, flagrant bias writing, social media companies are not

arby tars of truth. now it's bias to point out children are not immune. what a reckless thing to say. >> it's what autocrats do in turkey, russia, hungary, poland. and before you roll your eyes, it is what they do. they create alternative facts -- again, ann applebalm's book talks about this. and there is a very clear pattern that they do. they attack the press, they attack courts, they attack science, they attack -- they attack facts. and by continually attacking those facts, they can create their own realities and in donald trump's case, this has had devastating results. where scientists, epidemiolog t epidemiologists are warning him about this, even joe biden warning him about this in january.

joe biden writing an op-ed for "usa today" in january saying talking to your doctors and scientists, let them lead we're not prepared for the pandemic. donald trump at the same time saying it's one person coming in from china, it's going to go away. a month later it's 15 people and it's going to go away. talking about injecting disinfectants, putting uv lights into americans. talking about hydroxychloroquine whenever study is showing it doesn't work and only quack doctors would suggest that it was. that his own administration saying -- and saying it's going to magically go away in april. here he is, still lying, still creating alternative facts and claiming that you're biassed -- we heard this about jonathan

swan's interview. jonathan lemire said that they said it's just liberal porn. no, it's facts. even in donald trump's america, there is a reality that he may not like, but it is a reality that we all live in. and the fact that he's now making up things about children, it's -- again, it's extraordinarily dangerous, willie, and there's nothing biassed about people telling the truth about medicine. about science. about reality. >> it's a really important question about kids. let's bring in an expert on this. dr. paul sax. good to see you again, dr. sax. let me put the question straight to you. are children immune from covid-19? >> they're really not immune to covid-19. they can get this virus. fortunately they don't usually get as sick as adults,

especially older adults but one thing we learned, especially from the recent camp outbreak is children can acquire the virus and also can transmit it to others. >> that are the implications for a return to school then? i think when this started, we were told and a lot of people believe this is something most dangerous to hold people. if you're 65 and older, had a preexisting condition that's who we needed to be worried about. but as you look at schools reopening and children's ability to contract coronavirus, what place does that put us in? how do you think of it as an infectious disease expert? >> opening schools is important but it should be done safely and best done in regions with low incidents right now and most of the united states we can't say that with any confidence. the other thing is that the schools have to be prepared with a variety of safety measures, distancing, masks, and testing. and i think this is the case at

the university and college level where people who are young adults can get the infection and spread it readily. >> in addition to the students potentially spreading it, talk about the impact it may have on teachers who are a more vulnerable population, who might be older, who might have underlying health conditions, and also potentially them bringing it home to their families. >> that's an enormous concern about the teachers, they're frightened about the implications of opening schools prematurely because of their health and the health on their families. these are all the justifiable worries and m some worries that have been handled well in other countries where they have national policies about school safety and testing and one only needs to look about the countries that have done this successfully, i'm talking in particular in asia where they've done a nice job reopening

schools even after covid-19 has hit those countries. >> molly ball, this has been an ongoing problem. in your cover story you're talking about how this pandemic has impacted the election. you've had donald trump since last spring, pushing to have schools reopened. not for this year, but for the end of last year, in april and may, and now, of course, that battle continues just like he used a battle against wearing masks, used to mock people that wore masks. his instinct is open up the schools regardless. i know a lot of parents like us want our kids to be able to go to school. there's growing concern, especially in states like florida, texas, arizona, that that might not be safe. >> i'm a parent, too. i have three little kids a at home, i would love to get them

back in school if the it was safe. and what was striking to me writing about the election and the schools, was in both cases we spent time arguing about the problem that we squandered a lot of the time we could have taken to solve it. we talk so much about the messages that trump is sending and how people respond to them. my question for the doctor is, from a public health perspective, how important is it to have people who are credible, who can communicate with the public and have, particularly when you need a collective response to situations like this, to have a clear message coming from the top? >> i think it's absolutely critical. one of the things we've missed this year has been strong voice from the center for disease control, cdc, the cdc did issue school opening guidelines and then they were sort of softened. i think the message of just open the schools without a plan to do it safely is potentially very

dangerous. i say this as a person who is married to a pediatrician. so she gets this question all the time. we really do want to open the schools. we infectious disease doctors, pediatricians, but we only want to do it if it can be done safely. >> i know you said your current obsession is testing. testing has been an obsession for a lot of people for the last six months, unfortunately not the federal government's priority. you can test everybody in the country but if they take a week or ten days to come back, those test results don't mean anything. how do we do it better, how do we do it quicker? >> the key thing for testing is for us to use the expensive and difficult and bottlenecked pcr test for people with symptoms and sick, and then to use the cheaper and faster tests for people who are asymptomatic and

potentially even roll out home testing so people can test themselves relatively quickly, accurately, and that would be a test not just for covid-19 disease, but covid-19 contagiousness and if we shift the bar we can have a huge impact on this virus. that's going to take a national effort. fortunately several academics and companies are working on the problem. it is my obsession. i think it has a huge impact on the ability to get back to some semblance of normal life. >> it's a frustrating conversation. we've been hearing people like you say this since february, march, we have to test. we have to test. why are we sitting here on august 6th asking why we don't have a testing program in this country? >> that's an important question. one of the problems is that we don't have a national policy. and this was left open to the states and the companies to battle it out among themselves

to make tests available. i know here in massachusetts we've partnered with some other states to purchase significant number of rapid tests. why is this being done on a state level? this should be a national priority and it should be something that is as important as the military budget or as anything else. this is a really -- a crisis. the fact that test numbers are going down in some states that are still having a lot of covid-19 is really a tragedy and shows people are discouraged about the difficulty of getting the test. it's difficult in many settings and that can't happen. >> the difficulty of getting the test and we're hearing more and more how long it's taking to get the results back. if it takes 10, 11, 12 day, that does nobody any good. clinical director of infectious diseases at brigham women's hospital thank you so much. molly ball thank you as well. we'll be reading your cover

story in the new issue of "time". john meacham, i just wanted to go to you about following up what willie said. how surreal this is. we have seen, since 2001, rightly -- let me say, rightly, when there is a terrorist attack, not only in the united states but across the world, we respond quickly. all you have to do is look at the shoe bomber and how that completely has changed the way we are screened when we go through tsa checkpoints at airports. you look at other terrorist attacks or attempted terrorist attacks. completely changes the way we as a country have lived. i say good. i know a lot of people think we shouldn't overreact. i'm glad we react to attempted terrorist attacks as aggressively as we do. so -- and yet here we are, and

we have 155,000 deaths in america, how many 9/11s is that? i'm not great with math. but that's what, 30, 40, probably 30, 9/11s. and in march people saying all the time, us saying all the time, doctors, epidemiologists, scientists saying all the time, we had to strengthen our testing regiment, the only way to get restaurants back open, small businesses back open and keep them open. we needed to test, trace, isolate, we needed to treat. we've said this over and over again. and yet, donald trump still has refused to move forward with testing. in fact, he brag at a rally about telling his people to slow

testing down. again, how surreal is it that when we are challenged in the field of terrorism, the entire government stops, focuses on that problem, and moves to protect americans. and here we are in august -- here we are in august, still concern about the fact that we don't have basic testing done right when it's something that americans have been worried about for the past six months. >> yeah. you and i don't -- are not great posters for the mathematical education in the american south but i think it's more than 50, 9/11s. my children find me charming. that's good it enables them to take more money. but i think it's 50, 9/11s.

imagine that. so there's a straightforward, if not simple answer to what you're asking, and it really is leadership. so -- and people on twitter just don't start, have another cup of coffee and relax on this. but two very different american presidents would have responded in the way that i -- you and i think is the right way to this. that would be george w. bush, who by his own admission tended to act on instinct. and that's the way he acted in the wake of the attacks 19 years ago. and barack obama, who was clearly more of a cerebral figure, driven by data and fact. we've talked about this before. i didn't think i'd live to see as different a shift, as strong a shift, significant a shift, between two american presidents as a country that would go from george w. bush one day to barack obama the next.

until it was barack obama to donald trump of course. and yet both bush and obama would have, out of different life experiences, out of different world views, would have responded fully and strongly and better, i believe, than the incumbent. and i think it really is about the capacity of the person at the top. people like me get dinged occasionally for focussing too much on the presidency. this is a moment. today is an incredibly important moment to remember why that office matters so much. this is the anniversary, isn't it, august 6th -- >> it is. >> this is the anniversary of the dropping of the first automatic bomb on japan. that was harry truman that allowed it to go forward. that's a presidential decision.

arguably the most important presidential decision of the -- in history, because it ushered in the nuclear age, it made the presidency all the more vital. and we've entrusted that power, not just of military life and death but of ambient life and death to someone not capable of executing the job. and i don't see -- i know that seems partisan. but just because something is factual and may have partisan overtones doesn't mean it's not factual. that's the choice facing the country. who do you want to trust with the health of your nation and the health of your family? donald trump, who doesn't understand the difference in the proportion of deaths, or someone like biden who has spent his life in the public sector trying to manufacture consensus to address certain problems for a given period of time, which is what politics is.

>> john meacham may not know it but he led us to our next guest. we'll continue with the president of foreign relations, richa richard haass. richard, good morning we have a bunch to talk about, including what happened in beirut. but today is the 75th anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb by the united states in hiroshima. what are the consequences? we know what it meant in real time, what does it mean today? >> the immediate consequence, willie, was to avoid the cost to the united states and japan for that matter of an american invasion of japan to end the war in the asia pacific. i think some people will be uncomfortable with what i'm going to say. i think the long-term consequences were to keep war

unthinkab unthinkable. the nuclear war became cold. i think the nuclear age has increased the degree of stability but here we are 75 years later, cold war arms war arrangements between the united states and russia are unraveling. you have countries like north korea getting nuclear weapons and iran getting close. i think if there were a chance that a nuclear weapon would be use for the third time in history after hiroshima and nagasaki it could involve india and pakistan. so we're living with the problems of the nuclear age, as well as the benefits. >> harry truman, it's remarkable moment that harry truman, this untested, unelected president was thrust into to make that decision. but you look over truman's -- my

gosh, his first two years in office he had to make more decisions that still shape the world we live in today than some presidents who serve two terms. but you look at the people that donald trump has surrounded himself with, the yems men and women and people who completely lack skill and compare that to truman, who's harry truman and general george marshall, george kennon, it was a remarkable group of people that were around that created the post war world and the framework that actually allowed the american century to thrive. and also allowed us to ultimately win the cold war against the soviets. >> absolutely. i would say truman is the greatest in foreign policy of the post world war ii

presidents. y you're right. for 75 years we've been benefitting and living with the alliances that came to fruition under truman. it was the foreign policy dream team. his second secretary of state titled his memoir, "present at the creation". it was a truly creative period and we owe debt and gratitude to truman and those around him. >> is it not that framework that helped us win the cold war, thrive throughout the american century. it's truman's framework and marshalls and atchinson's is that not what donald trump has been tearing apart bit by bit over the past three, three and a half years. we can talk about nato, germany, who's our closest ally during the cold war.

do you fear that these structures that have been put in place, if donald trump loses, do you fear that some of this cannot be rebuilt, or do you think there's not been enough damage done that we still can rebuild some of the structures that have been torn apart over the past few years? >> some cannot be rebuilt. the power distribution in the world changed too much. some were old and needed rebuilding or refurbishing to begin with. donald trump has dismantled so many without putting anything in their place and that's what's disstdy stingtive about his three and a half years. so whether it's after trump now or in four and a half years the challenge will be to come up with arrangements in the world that provide a basis for

international relations for some kind of stability in the world in a modern era where we have to deal not just with traditional issues, say a rising china but we have to deal with things like pandemics and climate change and we simply don't have the international arrangements or consensus to do that. what we need, going back to truman, is a second creative presidency. there's been nothing comparable to truman in 75 years. we desperately need it now and we don't have it. >> as i mentioned a couple of days ago, president trump called the massive explosion in beirut an attack. president trump yesterday commenting about the blast that killed at least 135 people. here he is on the tuesday, followed by his comments yesterday. >> you called this an attack. are you confident that this was an attack and not an accident? >> it would seem like it based on the explosion. i met with some of our great generals and they just seem to

feel it was. this was not some kind of a manufacturing explosion type of event. this was a -- seems to be according to them, they would know better than i would. they seem to think it was an attack, a bomb of some kind. whatever happened it's terrible. they don't know what it is. they don't know yet. at this moment they're looking. how can you say accident? somebody was left -- some terrible explosive type devices and things around perhaps. perhaps it was that. perhaps it was an attack. i don't think anybody can say right now. we're looking into it very strongly. you have some people think it was an attack and some people that think it wasn't. >> still getting information on what happened. you know, most believe it was an accident reported and beyond that, i have nothing further to report on that. it's obviously a tragedy. >> richard from what you know, people you talk to, is there any

evidence this was an attack at this point? >> i see no evidence of it. can't rule it out. but again, i see no evidence. it doesn't seem like the sort of thing you would do for an attack because it's so indiscriminate. it's important to step back, this is lebanon, a weak state, an incompetent government, divided authority to the extent it exists at all. so this seems to me, in had keeping with it, we talk about strong countries, lebanon is a textbook weak country in the middle east you think of yemen, syria. the greatest threat to this part of the world is weak governments that can't do the basics of what we expect countries to do. it's an interesting moment in history where we have to worry about strong countries and weak countries simultaneously and

lebanon now is a classic picture of a failing state: let's talk about what the president did, though. he will float an idea out there, not have any evidence behind it, suggest that someone, some general mentioned it and it runs contrary to the facts, the preliminary conclusions of the intelligence may be. and we saw it again now, within hours of this explosion, the sentence from the ground that it was likely, not certainly, likely an accident and he went out and weighed in it was an attack. though he backed down a little bit yesterday not fully. talk about how dangerous this is. it is president of the united states, the commander in this chief, and he's trolling and rumoring gossip about anything, particularly something like this where hundreds of people are killed and if he's floating an attack, who knows what chain reaction that could create, what

violence it could create. >> it's so worrisome because the word of the president of the united states traditionally brought with it authority. there's literally billion of people around the world whose fate is in the hands of the united states. the president of the united states has more power than any person on the planet. what he says or doesn't say, does or doesn't do has tremendous consequences. you ought to be careful because what you say is a powerful tool. it's a powerful currency. the president is debating the currency because the day will come, almost like the boy who cried wolf, when the president will need to say things and the people will hold up the record of all the time he got it wrong, will what he says be in variance of the facts be it covid-19 or something like this and people will say why should we believe you now, take your word for it that something has emerged that's really a threat. so it's against his own interests as well as the

countries and what you're s saying, might it set up a chain of events, i don't know about that in lebanon. but the impact is the president's voice. >> it numbs his supporters, americans, people from across the globe to the fact that this president lies time and time again. he creates his own alternative reality. look at the news today, where he's talking about how this virus is going to go away, just go away like things go away. or saying that children are practically immune from this. or talking about his generals saying this was most likely a terrorist attack. all three of those things are blatantly false. yet the president has no problem putting that out there. any other administration, this would be a two, three, four week story. any one of these events. and yet with donald trump it happens repeatedly every day and

his supporters are numb to it and actually begin embracing this alternative reality. >> and the real danger here, the commander in chief role is arguably the most important role the president has to fulfill. there's other people to take care of other agencies but the commander in chief should not be speculating about foreign affairs, violence or terrorists. it's like going to a terrorist, you could need a new tire or a new transmission, i don't know. and for the president to sit there and speculate makes it difficult for our national security and allies to know what to do going forward. this is the problem. we have a president who's better at creating memes than he is at providing leadership. the fact that the interview with jonathan swan can be put to "curb your enthusiasm" means we don't respect this person.

when there's no leadership at the top it's impossible for well meaning officials to conduct their work, whether it's foreign or domestic. >> jason johnson, thank you so much. we appreciate it. we do joke about it but unfortunately there's nothing funny about the fact that this president, again, is not bound to reality. we showed pictures of him with the governor of arizona talking about what an incredible job he did. the governor of arizona failed his state. same thing with ron desantis. both ron desantis and the governor of arizona have dragged their feet time and time again, they've ignored their scientists. i'm not attacking them. i'm using it as another example of the president again continuing his steady stream of lies. john meacham while we have richard haass here. i want to talk about something else that happened this week 30

years ago. 30 years ago this week, of course, we launched the first iraq war, george h.w. bush launched the first iraq war and he said he did so to liberate kuwait. and a remarkable thing happened after george h.w. bush rliberatd kuwait. he kept his word. he brought his troops home. and now there are people squawking saying he should have stayed there and gone into baghdad. we found out a decade later what a mistake that would have been. >> jyeah. that's one of baker's better lines, nobody says that anymore, circa 2004, 2005. to me the hinge point of the bush presidency was on sunday,

august 5th, 1990, when he's coming back from camp david, talking into this tape recorder diary and worrying about whether the arab world will actually stand up to saddam. and he decides they won't. and is worried about the saddam going into saudi arabia and blowing up the world order. so i would like to ask our friend, dr. haass to pick up the story that never you're in the white house and know the helicopter is coming. can you tell us what happened? >> sure. i got a call from the national security adviser saying he couldn't meet the president would i meet him on the south lawn, brief him, there was going to be press there. so i collected the intel and it

was clear the arab world was saying give saddam time we can work it out, you americans shouldn't overreact. this was over the backdrop of a somewhat divided administration. so when i briefed the president, and to say he was less than happy, content with the statement was an understatement. and that's when he went to the cameras and said this aggression against kuwait will not stand. i thought it was extraordinarily courageous and clear. he thought it was a hinge point not just for his presidency but for history. he thought the character of the post cold war world was in the balance. and if we allowed aggression to stand in the middle east it would spread around tb world and if we stopped it, it wouldn't usher in an era of peace but at least you have things going in

the right direction. the president was ahead of his congress, the administration, the world, and he did the right thing. he pushed back against saddam there but he had the discipline not to go on to baghdad. he knew -- he was disciplined enough to keep the war limited and in the back of his mind and we talked about it, again with truman coming back to our earlier conversation. he wasn't going to make the mistake of truman who after liberating south korea he wasn't going to march up to the border and try to unify the country at force. that's what truman did, and another 20,000 americans died. so it seems bush go it right on both ends. resisting aggression and then keeping the war limited. >> richard we're taurning this into the richard haass variety

hour. we wanted to talk about the good friday agreements and a man who helped bring peace to a land that many people thought was incapable of peace and that peace still holds in ireland. i have friends from northern ireland who saw him as a figure like we saw john lewis, a man who was willing to take chances and those two actually spent some time together. talk about john hume. >> it's interesting you mention john lewis. john hume and others like him were fundamentally influenced by the american civil rights movement. because the initial movement in northern ireland was to provide equal opportunity for the significant catholic minority. and the idea, john health careume's contribution was to keep it nonviolent.

unlike the ira that was using violence. he thought the only way to win the battle was with non-violence. he was the person that persuaded people to put aside the violence and he was the one who played an essential part with george mitchell and others in negotiating what became the so-called good friday agreement, which was the basis for desew hughes of authority in northern ireland and arrangements on how to management. and john hume, john lewis, nelson mandela. talking about somebody of that impact on his history. >> all right. richard haass thank you for being with us. john meacham thank you as well. let's bring in chief white house correspondent for the "new york

times," peter baker, and correspondent yamiche alcindor. we've been talking about the president's blizzard of misstatements. a couple that were so upsetting and so concerning that even some top senate republicans yesterday felt the need to at least put their voices out there and be on the record against the president. >> yeah. at least one top senate republican yesterday pushed back against president trump's ongoing, unsubstantiated claims that mail-in voting leads to mass fraud, he said it would lead to a rigged election. john thune told cnn the republican party should be encouraging voters to vote by mail. saying mail-in voting has been used in a lot of places for a long time. i don't want to discourage. you want to assure people it's going to work, it's security and

if they vote that way it's going to count. he also questioned president trump's floating of a plan to deliver his speech from the white house for his acceptance. saying i'm not sure that's something you can do, adding i think anything to do with federal property would be problematic. president trump raised the possibility during an interview on fox news yesterday morning and then defended the idea at a news conference later in the day. >> there are reports that you're considering possibly giving your convention acceptance speech from the white house lawn. what's the latest? >> we're thinking about it. it would be the easiest from the standpoint of security. you know, they move with a lot of people, it's an expensive operation militarily and law enforcement wise, the secret service is fantastic. we're thinking of doing it from

the white house because there's no movement, it's easy, a beautiful setting, great, great people making speeches and i'll probably do mine live from the white house. >> senator john thune questioned whether that's legal given the hatch act. is this something you would get clearance for. >> john thune did? the republican john thune? okay. well, it is legal. there is no hatch act because it doesn't pertain to the president. but if i use the white house, we save tremendous amounts of money for the government in terms of security, traveling. >> white house chief of staff mark meadows told cnn he does not expect an address from the oval office but said it, quote, would be appropriate for president trump to give his acceptance speech from the east wing because it is the private baker. we won't play the game what if obama proposed this because we know how they would react to this. is this something real or

something president trump spouted off on the phone yesterday? >> this is a real idea. look at the history the last few weeks. wanted to do it in charlotte, things didn't work out because of the coronavirus. decided to move it to jacksonville, had to cancel it because it wasn't safe there. he's been left with fewer and fewer options at this point. he's retreated back to the one place he knows he can do things from physically, which is the white house. is it illegal? i'm not a lawyer. there have been instances in the past where presidents used the white house for political purposes. president clinton had coffee with fund-raisers, got in trouble for it. president obama filmed a couple of campaign ads from the west wing. these were not, you know, seen as illegal but they were seen as inappropriate. that there is something different about the white house

as a political venue. the white house is not supposed to be used as a partisan venue for a president when we talk about a rose garden strategy historically what we mean are presidents who spend their time in the white house being presidential, not being partisan from the white house. this is the era of the coronavirus, options are limited. the president is now just weeks away from a convention that doesn't have a home. you can't suddenly snap your fingers and produce a convention around the country at this point. so he's been left with fewer and fewer options. the rose garden one has problems in terms of proprietary and appearance. but there are not a lot of obvious placines for him. >> maybe this is the progression to a step we've watched where the alleged briefing of coronavirus or announcement of a new policy towards china turn

into campaign events that's been happening all summer where he comes out, pulls out of his pocket a list of attacks on joe biden at an event that's supposed to be an update on something else. what are you hearing in your report about how serious they are? >> they're looking at the option. it's not clear how serious they are. but as peter said there are few options for the president. i should add, of course, what we've seen over and over again is that the president has not had any problems using the white house as a campaign backdrop. we've seen press con frferences where the president has given remarks and attack joe biden. we've seen the president play things that look like campaign ads from the briefing room inside the white house. today going to ohio, signing reportedly an executive order directing u.s. manufacturers to buy medications from u.s. companies but what he's also

doing is visiting another battleground state. he's been to north carolina, florida. so what he's doing, while he's saying he's official white house business he's campaigning and going to the states critical in his re-election in some ways. so i don't have to remind everyone o that the president changed his stance on mail-in voting. with florida, with a lot of seniors saying it's okay to mail in vote but pennsylvania and michigan, he doesn't condone mail in voting. but local officials determine who can vote and how they can vote. >> and donald trump saying john thune, a republican said that? yes, john thune a republican said that. john thune also talked about mail-in voting why? because as we said time and again you don't want to discourage republicans from using mail-in voting because that's what republicans do well.

that's what they organize. so this president again once again politically shooting himself in the foot. and john thune bringing up what a lot of republicans are saying behind closed doors, that he's got to stop discouraging republicans from using mail-in voting because that's what republicans have organized best in the past. peter baker we're talking about the election. we've been talking about the coronavirus and the spread of the coronavirus. earlier this week you talked about something that could be a real problem for americans right now. we're all looking forward to that vaccine, we want a vaccine, the president keeps pushing a vaccine. almost hoping it seems that it would be his october surprise. but there's a real concern, a growing concern from doctors and from the medical community and scientists that if it's pushed too hard and too fast, and enough regulatory hurdles are

pushed through, that there's a possibility if it's rushed to market that that vaccine may not be safe. tell us the concerns that you raised in your story. >> right, exactly. this would be a fraught debate under normal circumstances. at what point do you say we need to go through the full trial, process for a new drug, something six months versus let's short circuit because people are dying right now. if you go all the way through a phrase three trial that would take you into the beginning of next year with thousands of people dying every day, there's a natural desire by a lot of people to say if we seem to have one that we think is working given the partial results of the trials let's start using it, at least for maybe say front line workers, medical personnel that kind of thing, that would be a normal debate and a tough one, a difficult one, because you don't want to get it wrong.

overlay a political calendar on top of that and it becomes incredibly difficult. the president saying there will be a vaccine not just by the end of the year but before the end of the year. that means cutting short the trials they're currently going through right now and taking a chance with a vaccine that hasn't gone through that process. the scientists we've spoken to are very worried about that. they're worried that a political motivation will drive this decision. the administration says no we rely on the data, the facts. but there's such a level of distrust right now in the country you have a president who has floated all sorts of unsubstantiated facts if you want to call them facts, assertions about the disease but if they had a vaccine by the end of the year, would anybody trust that? this is moving faster than any vaccine in history. the typical vaccine takes ten years to develop, this has been a matter of months, the question

is are you cutting it so short you're taking a risk with something you put into 300 million americans. >> and the misstatements over the last few months are going to cause distrust not only with those that distrust donald trump but those that support him and are critical of the government anyway. you look at what he's saying about hydroxychloroquine and what his government has said about it, him pressuring the cdc to backoff regulations for reopening for schools. injecting bleach, uv lights, some of these ideas, obviously, have made americans less trustful of what the president says. and you lay on top of that the ant anti-vaxing movement and a lot of those people supporters of donald trump and it looks like a complete mess.

peter baker thank you for your reporting. as we wait for joe biden to announce his running mate. steve kornacki is going to break down the former vice president choices and he can draw lessons both good and bad from other candidates in recent history. we'll go through that list. you're watching "morning joe," we'll be right back. berty mutuas your car insurance, so you only pay for what you need. i wish i could shake your hand. granted. only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ no uh uh, no way come on, no no n-n-n-no-no only discover has no annual fee on any card.

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welcome back to "morning joe." coming up on 7:30 here on the east coast. joining us national political correspondent for msnbc and nbc news, steve kornacki husband rece -- his recent piece entitled four ways joe biden's running mate could help the ticket. and ed luce is also writing about joe biden's vp pick. and curt bardella, a "usa today"

columnist and works for the lincoln project. we'll speculate in a minute about who the running mate might be, what should joe biden be looking at? >> his relationship, his partnership with barack obama as a model he's looking to emulate with his pick here. the obama/biden partnership was an unusual one, i put it in the category of mostly a governing pick when joe biden became president obama's running mate, he didn't close the possibility of running again but that was not his concern in the eight years as vice president. when it came to it and obama's second term was expiring, biden ended up not running for president, a strange set of circumstances that got him into

the race at age 77 right now. he's been looking at that as a model. think back to george w. bush and dig cheney in 2000. look at the folks biden is talking about, a name that comes to mind, susan rice, somebody he thinks he can have a lot of idealogical commonality with, work with, especially on foreign policy might see a governing relationship that might be formed there. that comes to mind just based on what biden is putting out there. the other pam pl, too, you have had candidates in in the past who for various reasons felt there's one pick that there's a lot of consensus in the party behind them taking it. ronald reagan took george h.w. bush. bush represented the moderate wing in 1980 that seemed to be successful but 2004, when john

kerry was getting a lot of pressure from folks around him to take john edwards who ran against him in the democratic primaries and edwards was seen as a great communicator. kerry had the instinct to take dick gephart. but he let himself be overruled by the folks around him, he took edwards he made clear in the years since he regrets that pick for all sorts of confederareaso. that's a cautionary tale. >> there's been articles saying the biden campaign is concerned that kamala harris is too ambitio ambitious, she's thinking about running for president the first chance she gets to. but don't worry about january the 20, 2021, worry about the election. don't get ahead of yourself.

but also i have to say, i've been interested by the talk of commentators saying that it is racist and misogynistic to talk about kamala harris' ambition when you brought up 1980 and i'm reminded of reagan thinking about picking ford and i can just say, for the record, as somebody that studied history for a long time, old, white men have forever been concerned about other old, white men's ambitions when they were thinking about picking an old, white man to be their vice president. this is nothing new with kamala harris, as far as concerns from the biden camp. this is a story as old as

american politics themselves. >> you can substitute loyalty. that's really the concern you're hearing when you talk about reagan and ford in 1980. there were folks around reagan worried about george h.w. bush, they had just run against each other in a primary. there was concern that bush may not be a team player. that was his main goal when he talked with ronald reagan, no, i can sign off on every element of the platform, i'll be a loyal number two, won't try to go off on my own. as vice president that is basically what he did, but that was a concern. i say, that was a concern with john kerry when he was looking at john edwards in 2004. this is somebody who had just run for president, who wanted to run for president again, who clearly would see in the vice presidency an opportunity there to enhance his reputation, his image, his positioning for a future presidential run in all of those cases, and many more,

we can go through the pick for the last generation in each party, you can see the concern on the part of the presidential nominee, is this person going to be loyal to me or is this person mainly interested in this role as a way of positioning themselves for future national office, aka the presidency, and would that interest collide in a negative way with amy governing goals. >> again, ed luce, again i just -- i hear people -- i hear people, the biden camp talking about this concern. and it just -- it makes me scratch my head wondering where they're looking ahead to january 20th, instead of looking only at november and who seems to be the safest pick. you think that pick would be kamala harris. i tend to agree with you because she's been through a tough presidential campaign. she's run statewide in california, she's been a united states senator.

but again, most importantly, she knows what those bright lights of presidential campaigns feel like. and there are a very few americans who know that feeling and have been under that sort of pressure. >> yeah, she's -- well, biden is going into what i think will be the mother of all dirty campaigns. i know that's an extravagant claim but it look like it's headed that way. he's going to need first and foremost in the coming 10, 12 weeks he's going to need somebody who knows how to land a punch and take a punch. if you've seen kamala harris' career, you've seen her cross-examining bill barr, kavanaugh, what a prosecutorial killer instinct she has. she checks that box. and at this point i think it's probably boiling down to kamala

harris versus susan rice. susan rice has never run for election before. this would be a risky bet to put her essentially in a shadow presidential audition. because of biden's age we're going to be looking at his pick much, much more closely than we might otherwise have done as somebody who could be president. and i think kamala harris versus susan rice -- susan rice would make a great first female secretary of defense, a secretary of state, but her specialism is foreign policy and that's biden's strength too. he has to balance his ticket with somebody who, a, knows how to run and fight an election and land punches, but, b, who has some domestic credentials. i think you look down the short list. it's obvious, like her or not,

and clearly the biden camp has some misgivings about kamala harris' chemistry with him for historic reasons but like her or not, she's by far the best qualified of those women on the short list. >> so yamiche, a trump campaign official is telling politico this morning that susan rice is, quote, our number one draft pick. they want her to be on the ticket. they'd like to revisit the b benghazi story. does that ring true to you, is it susan rice the white house would like to see as the number two on the ticket? >> i think base on my reporting, the president is ready to have a whole opposition row search dump on susan rice but they would be as likely to do the same thing to kamala harris, senator harris. the idea is whoever biden picks

is going to come under a tremendous amount of pressure and attacks from the trump campaign. i think your guest put it in some ways pretty articulate, we're going into the mother of dirty campaigns because you see the president has not shied away talking about women, they have horse face, talking about reproductive systems as to why they're in a bad mood during certain times of the months. i think the president is someone who has not at all shied away from getting really, really personal, really, really dirty, especially if he feels his back is against the wall. he's already somewhat struggling in swing states so he's chomping at the bit. whoever joe biden picks he's going to want to make that person look like a socialist, does not want law and order. you see in senator harris someone with a long history of prosecutor. she ran as president, it did not

go well for her, for all sorts of reasons, including the name recognition for her. i remember being in south carolina where people didn't know who she is. in washington she's well known, around the country not so much based on my reporting. there's a lot to juggle. the number one thing i'm hearing from my reporting is joe biden is looking for someone loyal to him, he has chemistry with. that could be susan rice or kamala harris. >> you're looking at the vice presidential picks, curt, but you're saying who joe biden picks as attorney general is going to be critical. explain. >>, you know, i actually think of all the choices that vice president biden will make perhaps most consequential is who the attorney general will be when you look at what they have to face, a justice department that's gone rogue and used as

donald trump's personal law firm under bill barr. you have to look forward and see how they're going fo deal with the crimes of the trump syndicate and what that's going to look like in a biden presidency. you look at the discussions in our country about social justice, police brutality, creating more equality in law enforcement, that's the attorney general spearheading that. you look at the firing of u.s. attorneys like we saw with geoffrey berman in sdny. if i were kamala harris i would rather be the attorney general than the vice president. you look at someone who can get things done, who doesn't have to deal with congress, doesn't have to wait. consensus building, they can take executive action to move the ball forward, have signature achievements and reforms. when you look at the things this attorney general is going to have to deal with and undoe it's going to be props the most consequential cabinet position

in the biden presidency. >> and attorney general barr who decided he was going to be president trump's roy kohn. my professor would say like a freight train coming out of the mist you can see him having durham drop this supposed bombshell report ten days before the election. it's -- they're not even trying to disguise it. it's -- again, you look and see how the office of the attorney general has been besmirched. i agree with you completely, curt, that's an important pick if joe biden is elected president. let me circle back to you, steve kornacki, before the killing of george floyd and the black lives matter protests, there was a question of whether joe biden was going to pick only a black woman for vice president or

whether he might pick a white woman or a latino woman for vice president. of course reverend al sharpton and others said his selection did not necessarily have to be a black woman, i don't know how much that has changed. again, following the killing of george floyd and the remarkable protests that followed that. i'm curious, are you hearing greaten whitmer's name, tammy baldwin's name still in the hunt for vice presidential selection? obviously those two would go a long way in helping the former vice president lockdown wisconsin and michigan. or has the vice president now decided that it would only be a black woman who is his vice presidential pick. >> i can't say i have inside information. i'm hearing the same chatter i think everybody else is, you've

been talking about it here, harris and rice getting more buzz than everybody else. karen bass a week ago you were hearing a lot about her, the congresswoman from california, but there's been a lot that's -- it's come out in a public vetting process here that i think has made it much less likely he'd go in that direction. the other name i heard was tammy duckworth, the senator from illinois. but the other names i haven't gotten buzz about them in a while now. >> all right. steve kornacki thank you so much. ed luce, what are you working on right now? >> i'm working on a long kind of bio graphic cal profile of biden that will be our cover story just before the virtual convention and looking at the life since he became a centsena in 1972. some sol measure of his

longevity in politics and wanting to be president. in rereleading the famous richard ben kramer book on the 1988 election, they were worried that mario cuomo was going to get into the race. now, of course, his son, andrew, is governor of new york and was briefly considering a presidential run last year. so this has been the american history, i think. if biden becomes president, having in 1974 in a famous interview said he wanted to be president. we're now in 2020 and the likelihood probably is he will become president. i cannot think of such a comparable marathon of any figure in american history. it's an extraordinary story. >> it really is. i mean, there's that moment in 1988 when joe biden is pushed from the race and richard ben

kramer talks about biden, of course, then suffering through his aneurysm. and it's just -- people should go back and read that. it's just a -- there's so many remarkable moments out of that, what a story that he's on the cusp of possibly winning the presidency all these years later. curt, tell us about the morning hangover this morning. what's your lead story on nashville and country music's most important news letter? >> today a lot of excitement about keith urban anuns onnnouns releasing a new album in september, 16 new songs including collaborations one with eric church for a song called "we were" that eric co-wrote with keith. i tell you, during these crazy times, country music is still

something i look to as a respite. it's not an accident that country music has been increasing amongst consumers during the pandemic. i think if our good friend, brad paisley just put out a music video that has cameos from an incredible cast of characters, payton manning, pete buttigieg, and michael steele. it's things like that where artists are trying to get creative looking at a way to bring people together, communicate with fans, put out positivity, connectivity. i it's something. and i think next week we'll get brad to come on the show and talk to us. >> that would be fantastic. if you like country music you need to sign up for the morning hangover. coming up talking to the authors of a new book on donald trump's mar-a-lago's property,

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three teenage boys were arrested over the weekend after jumping a wall president trump's mar-a-lago resort with a loaded ak-47 hidden in a backpack. the 15 year olds were charged with armed burglary and resisting arrest without violence. the teens are being held while prosecutors decide whether or not to charge them as adults. joining us from miami herald sarah blassky and nicholas hamas. authors of the book "the grifter's club." sarah, what is the setup around

mar-a-lago. security is run by mar-a-lago which is a secret service skeleton crew and the secret service doesn't get to vet who comes and goes. >> that's right, it may seem extreme what happened over the weekend, but with the understanding of the president's home there have been security breaches, accidental security breaches happen all the time. one thing to note, when the president isn't there, secret service isn't there. and the club security is minimal. sometimes, they don't even have enough guards to guard all of the different entrances. we understand that this property is very forest. there are almost unlimited ways to get into it. when the president is in town, secret service does set up a perimeter. but as you said, there's this tension between the security of the club and the interests of its members and secret service.

and what that means is that secret service often has to defer to security, the sort of hired people, who don't even carry weapons to protect the club, and that does cause problems for the security of the president. >> nicholas, there's so many colorful details in your book. we all know sort of the broad strokes of what happened in 2017 when president trump was having dinner with the prime minister of japan shinzo abe there. and surrounded by people taking photographs of him. and you add to that story, some details i'm not sure most of us knew, a woman who will i guess was a lounge singer who was there. walk us through that night, based on your new reporting. >> right, so what our book really does for the first time is illustrate this tension that you see at mar-a-lago between

president trump as the leader of the free world and, you know, the man in charge of keeping this country safe. and a very charming club host who is dedicated to making sure that everyone at mar-a-lago has a great time. so, as you said, president trump was hosting prime minister abe of japan for a summit, when at a dinner in front of many, many guests. when news came in that north korea had launched a missile in the direction of japan. he was so focused on showing off mar-a-lago's lounge singer and asking her to twirl for prime minister abe that he wasn't really paying attention to the missile launch. and someone overheard the singer say, mr. president, i really shouldn't hear this, as aides clustered at the table. and he responded, it's just nukes, sing us a song. and was quickly overruled.

it shows that he cares about having a good time. what was first on his mind is showing off his incredible lounge singer. later that night after that briefing with prime minister abe, he went and gave a toast at a wedding happening at the club. everyone applauded and loved it and then went back to mingling with his guests. that was the night of the north korean missile launch. >> congratulations on the book. i have a two-prong question. first, what's the biggest ethical challenges you saw uncovered reporting this book? and you can zoom out and talk about florida and discuss why the location of mar-a-lago might be important to the president as we see him changing his stance of mail-in, in florida? >> sure, we first think about how optics may play out on the ground at a club. as nick mentioned there is this

tension between what the members want which is unlimited access. they pay $200,000 to join this club and then $14,000 a year. and so what they want is this feeling of close proximity to the president. and it's in the president's interest to give it to them. so sometimes, you know, at the lowest level, this can look like people with strange and sort of bizarre interests all sitting together at a different table at mar-a-lago, getting what they want. in the worst cases, this kind of access that you can pay to sit at dinner next to the president can lead to real national security concerns and we did see that last year when she was arrested going into the property. we don't know what will her motives were but she carried a

purseful of electronics. and that certainly raised concerns that perhaps this is being targeted by foreign enemy government to try to collect information on the president of the united states. and that's a big concern for people in the national security realm. >> nicholas, let me ask you about jeffrey epstein. the president has said on a number of occasions that epstein was not a member at mar-a-lago. was he? >> yes, we viewed one of the major news breaks in this book, and there are several, is that we viewed a membership log that listed all of the members at a time and members who had resigned. or in epstein's case been kicked out. and what this log revealed was that epstein was a member until his account was closed in october 2007. and he was known as a regular at the club. but this ties him to mar-a-lago much more closely than the trump organization or the president has admitted to this point. >> why was he kicked out, nicholas? >> so, what we were today, and

this has been reported a little bit until cou bit in court documents was that epstein hit on or assaulted a teenage daughter of a member at mar-a-lago and that's not something that the president could tolerate. that is bad for his brand. that's bad for his business, so epstein got the boot. >> do you have any insight into the nature or depth of the relationship between jeffrey epstein and president trump? we know there's been video. we've all seen them yucking it up together at various events. how close were they, actually? >> well, they had -- >> go ahead, sarah. go ahead. >> yeah, i mean, we know that they hung out. and we know that they had this party with all of the cheer leaders. these things have been widely reported. but i think one of the things you need to understand is the nature of palm beach. this is a very small community. people here stick together. that is expected.

jeffrey epstein was a resident or a part-time resident of palm beach. donald trump was a part-time resident of palm beach. so there say lot of social mingling that happens in palm beach that we wouldn't necessarily be privy to as outsiders. again, a very close-knit society, very close-knit group of people. so, i think we don't have all of the answers but we can take a lot from that understanding. >> we've only scratched the surface. this book is amazing. it's called "the grifter's club: trump mar-a-lago." thank you. still ahead on coronavirus relief negotiations as president trump threatens to step in if lawmakers don't reach a deal soon. "morning joe" is back in just a moment.

he's having trouble reading, laura. >> when they gaze upon yosemites. >> towering sequoias. >> how many -- this is the very definition of total -- >> he increasingly sounds like

one of those bad videos -- >> they gathered swift and sweeping -- it was swift and sweeping. >> we find he has trouble getting through the words. >> mini -- >> mini -- >> plosma -- plosma. >> the poor man, he can't read a prompter. >> he doesn't even know what year it is. >> in 220. >> for homes and offices by 230. >> in april 2014. >> has difficulty keeping his train of thought. >> broadwalk -- >> and if you think i'm announcing my administration. >> he's on an obstacle course that makes it look like he's not up for the job. >> why are these trump supporters attacking -- well, it's updated, willie. i mean, every time the attacks come, you just find more clips

of donald trump just wandering around. i mean, you know, the jonathan swan interview -- with the papers in his face. >> and the charts and graphs. >> yes, let's talk about jonathan swan for a second. you know when chris wallace comes at you he's got nunchakus in one hand and a club with spikes in the other. jonathan swan is a little more suttle. he says, so, would you like a brownie. you don't realize what you've eaten until you wake up the next morning -- it's very subtle and polite. but you wake up the next morning. it was a bite of an elevator shaft. and you look at the president's face and he was completely lost.

he didn't know where he was. really as disoriented as i've seen the man on camera. >> it's amazing when presented with facts this is what jonathan swan did for him, when he handed him the graphs, oh, no, you're looking at this the wrong way but there's no second beat there. if i had a nickel for every time i hung out at the bottom of an elevator shaft with jonathan swan, i'd be a wealthy man. >> i just want to follow that clip of this, following that comedy central mash. >> what i look at is death, death is going up now. it's a thousand day -- if you look -- >> take a look -- take a look at some of these charts. >> i'd love to. let's look. >> if you look at death --

>> start to go up again. >> here's one. >> well, right here, united states is lowest in numerous categories. we're lower than the world -- lower than -- >> lower than europe. >> in what? >> take a look. right here. >> oh, you're doing death as proportion of cases. i'm talking death as a proportion of population. that's where the u.s. is really bad. much worse than south korea or germany. >> you can't do that. >> look at south korea, 51 population, 300 deaths. >> i do know that. do you think they're faking their statistics, south korea? >> well, i have a very good relationship with the country. but you don't know that. and they have spikes. >> germany -- >> here's one right here. united states. you take the number of cases, we're last. meaning we're first. >> i don't know what we're first

in. >> take a look, again at the cases. >> okay. >> and we have cases. >> 1000 americans have died a day. i understand the cases, it's different. but you're not reporting everything, jonathan. >> i think i am. >> you look at the testing. this is our testing. >> 60,000 americans are in hospitals dying. >> if you watch the newspapers they usually talk about new cases cases. >> i'm talking about death. >> death is way down. >> it's 1000 a day. now it's going to up again. >> where it was, is much higher than where it is right now. it's going down again. it's going down in arizona. it's going down in florida. it's going down in texas? >> it's going down in florida? >> i mean, i'm really serious about this, if he weren't president of the united states, we wouldn't play that clip on

the air because he looks so disoriented. that people would say that we were being cruel taking advantage of somebody on the air. but he clearly was disoriented. didn't know what will he was talking about. scrambled facts. just -- it was -- i mean, let me tell you, we have jon meacham. jon meachem, let me bring you in here. he's the president of the united states, i'd like to ask you what preferential preference we have for a performance that bad? but i'm afraid maybe we need to go into the realm of like tv shows. did that remind you more of whether haney from "green acres" or festis from "gunsmoke." you have to play the cards that are handed to you. >> i understand. i appreciate that, the nick at

night references. i think even willie is too young to understand what you just said. so that's pretty phenomenal. >> i study the history of tv the way you study the history of presidencies, jon. >> oh, that explains so much actually. there's a certain clarity now about your career choices. i like it. i like it. no, it's sort -- again, we can be somewhat lighthearted about it, but it's, at heart, at best, just comforting and at worst, terrifying. and what i had -- and both of you know this, you know, when we do what we do for a living, you get a lot of mail, particularly in the old days, you get manila folders from people who had found the key to everything. and it went from the book of genesis through the council on foreign relations. and would end up with george herbert walker bush in dallas during the kennedy

assassination. >> right. >> you know, just this sort of odd conspiracy theories. what rendered as if it were factual, right? so that -- just watching it right now, i was thinking this is like getting, you know, a power point deck from area -- was it area 54? >> 51. >> 51, i think, yeah. >> 51, sorry, see, there you go. car 52. sorry. but i think, to me, and i hope that the power of satire with what trevor noah is doing, it's hard to satirize what someone is doing who satirizes all the time in the case of president trump. i hope, with the attack on vice president biden about his coherence is going to get worse, a lot worse, because it's about all they've got.

it's been very interesting to sort of keep an eye on the social media stuff about what trump -- trumpastan has to argue. none of the arguments this is fascinating on the presidential campaign, none of the arguments on substance had any salientnes. you can think of one? the argument that he's going to drive us into that future, nobody believes that. joe, you and i have talked about that joe biden will end up centering the republican party than anybody is going to come along centering the republican party. i think that's an existential threat to a republican party who has sold its soul. the check bounced. and they've got to figure out, you know, what are they going to do to attempt to be something

approaching the majority party in this demographically changing country. and my bet -- >> well -- >> just quickly, my bet is, sometime in the middle of november of this year, because it's going to take a while to count the ballots. better not talk about election night, right? let's talk about election week, as people have been arguing. let's not set a false expectation that we're all going to know everything. you know, and david brinkley is going to tell us right at the right time. because that plays into trump's hands because chaos helps him. >> uh-huh. >> but i suspect that if there is -- even a blue -- a blue wavish, a wavelet, there's going to be a point at the end of the year, a lot of republicans are going to be saying donald who? no, no, i don't know who you're talking about. and if they do, it's going to be

because of that. up next, the president claims again that coronavirus will just go away. the data as you know by now says something very different. you're watching "morning joe." we'll be right back.

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let's bring in jonathan let me merlemire. jonathan, republicans have been to be dazed amid the president's performance with jonathan swan. again, his face, his eyes, it's like he wasn't really there. do they really want to force debate? >> this is like the second high-profile interview that the president has struggled with, one with chris wallace on fox being the other. the agents think this doesn't

have the traction, one missed it as liberal porn thinking it was unfair. of course, we often watch the clips. >> i'm sorry, wait, wait, wait, what was liberal porn? i'm a life long conservative who was a conservative before donald trump lied about being a conservative. i'm conservative after he will leave. i'm more conservative than all of these people who have followed this autocrat in training. what are they saying is liberal porn? did he get all the facts wrong have they have really put themselves in a corner now that if you go along with facts if you go along with statistics that makes you a liberal? >> well, that's their argument. i mean it certainly has not proven to gain any traction in recent days, joe. one thing that interview also did is dismiss what would be a recent talking point. the mortality rate, they're hanging their hats on that

because it was lower. but that, of course, has changed in recent weeks. you answered the question about being boxed in the corner. the answer is yes. we're under three months to election day. we're now into one month before early voting begins in early battleground states including north carolina which the president doesn't have a path to win without capturing the tar heel state. yet, they're running out of time in setpieces to turn the narrative around. we know the convention has been upended. the president will give a speech at some point but it's not going to be the four-day celebration he had hoped. he's unable to hold any rallies. he's trying to substitute smaller events both official and political to take that space. i'm traveling with him today to ohio where he's doing a couple things even as a pause on that he's got to go to ohio, a state that a few months ago they thought they had in the bag. now, he's got to spend some time and resources there. they are putting a lot of eggs in the basket on the debate.

the campaign that you mentioned yesterday called for a fourth debate, one that's earlier. right now, the fourth debate is scheduled for end of the september. they want one at beginning of september. to this point, the biden campaign has said no, we've agreed to the three with the federal debate commission. we will stick with that. but it goes to show you the white house and the president, they're running out of moves. they feel like they can do well. but they do plan to sort of highlight when joe biden stumbles or gets a fact wrong or something like that. but it also just opens up the litany of clips that the president has done in the past. of course, the risk of a debate stage that he, not joe biden, may be the one suffering the verbal implosion. >> let's talk about some of those facts the president is bumping up against. the united states managed 1,000 daily deaths for a tenth consecutive day. this comes as analysis from the associated press finds testing

in the united states declined by 3.6% in the last two weeks. and largely the drop of americans becoming discouraged to wait hours to for a test and days and week to get a result back, rendering that result meaningless. 22 states saw declines the report says. places like alabama, mississippi, missouri and iowa where the percentage of positive tests is high and continues to climb an indicator that the virus is spreading out of control there. testing is largely seen as the key to reopening schools and businesses. meanwhile, president trump continues to claim the virus will just disappear. >> the country's in very good shape. and we're set to rock 'n' roll. this thing is going away. it will go away like things go away. >> it will go away like things go away. absolutely, no question in my mind, it will go away. go ahead.

hopefully sooner rather than later. >> let's bring in morgan state university politics editor. and political contributor jason jackson and contributor for "time," molly ball is with us. she wrote the cover story on ways the covid-19 pandemic is forming the 2020 election. good morning to you both. jason, he's still six months into this. the president is wishing this away saying it's just going to go away the way things go away. we saw his ineptitude in that interview when confronted with the facts of americans' lives about what's really going to happen is not just going to go away. >> willie, first off, the difference between the interview with the president and jonathan swan and that creepy one from kanye west is that he was sent to tears. he clearly doesn't have what he

wants to talk about and what he wants to do. regardless of what it is, some states there's a little more testing some states there's a little bit of a spike. we know one thing, as kids go back to school, as college kids go back to campus, we're seeing spikes. we're seeing spikes in elementary schools in indiana. we're seeing spikes in high schools in georgia. i don't see any reason if anyone is able to fool themselves this summer and believe the president's fake statistics, well, maybe it's going down. i don't know anyone, that's not going to be the case. as we have dozens and dozens of children who are going to be sent home from school with the coronavirus. the president has no plan rhetorically or strategically how to handle it. and the people at the polls they're going to voting with that frustration and that fear so far. >> coming up facebook and twitter remove a video of president trump falsely claiming children are, quote, almost immune to the coronavirus. how that lie could impact the lives of american children. "morning joe" is back in a moment. i wanted my hepatitis c gone.

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if you look at children, children are almost, and i would almost say definitely, but almost immune from this disease. so few, they've got stronger -- hard to believe, i don't know

how you feel about it, but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this. and they do it. they don't have a problem. they just don't have a problem. >> you said children are virtually immune from covid-19. but few have contracted this virus. >> i'm talking about getting very sick. if you look at children, they're able to throw it over easily. it's an amazing thing. some flus they don't. they get very sick and have problems with flus. for whatever reason, the china virus, children handle it very well. they may get it, but they get it and it doesn't have much of an impact on them. and if you look at the numbers, the numbers in terms of mortality, fatality, the number for children under a certain age, meaning young, their immune systems are very, very strong. they're very powerful. and they seem to be able to handle it very well. >> we'll note what dr. anthony

fauci and others have said that children are not immune to coronavirus and can spread to other. a study found that children have at least enough coronavirus in their noses and throats as adults. and children may hold as much as five times the amount of the virus in upper respiratory tracts. facebook took down the president's false claims about children and immunity to covid-19 yesterday. removing a video posted from trump's personal page that featured those comments. a facebook spokesperson said the video, quote, includes false claims that a group of people is immune from covid-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful covid misinformation. twitter also removed it from its platform for violating rules on misinformation about coronavirus. this is the first time that facebook has taken such action against president trump for posting false claims about covid-19. in an email statement, the trump

campaign accused facebook of, quote, frlagrant bias. now, it's bias, joe, that children are immune as parents decide whether or not they want their kids back in school. >> it's what autocrats do in russia, it's what they do in hungary, it's what they do in poland. before you roll your eyes, it is what they do. they create alternative facts. in ann applebaum's book, she talks about this. there's a clear pattern, they attack the press. they attack courts. they attack science. they attack facts. and by continually attacking those facts they can create their own realities. and in donald trump's case, this has had devastating results.

where scientists, epidemiologists, willie, are warning him about this, even joe biden warning him about this in january. joe biden even writing an op-ed for "usa today." in january, saying talk to your doctors and scientists. let let me lead. we're not prepared for the pandemic. donald trump at the same time saying it's one person coming in from china. it's going to go away. a month later saying it's 15 people. and soon it's going to go away. talking about injecting disinfectants, putting uv lights into americans. talking about hydroxychloroquine when every study has shown that it doesn't work. and only whack doctors would suggest that it was. that his own administration is saying it. and saying it's going to magically go away in april. and here he is, still lying, still creating alternative facts.

and claiming that you're biased. we heard this -- we heard this about jonathan swan's interview. jon lemire said it's facts. even in donald trump's world, it is a reality that he may not like, but it is a reality that we all live in. and the fact that he's now making up things about children. and it's, again, it's extraordinarily dangerous, willie. and there's nothing biased about people telling the truth about medicine. about science. about reality. up next, we'll talk to congressman eric swalwell about that. and the standoff in washington over economic relief for the millions of americans left jobless by the pandemic. a democrat joins us next on "morning joe."

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so, starting today, we're going to do something new in new york city. we will have checkpoints at key entry points to the city. travelers coming in from those states will be given information about the quarantine. they'll be reminded that it is required, not optional. they'll be reminded that failure to quarantine is a violation of state law. and it comes with serious penalties. in fact, under circumstancertai the fines can be has high as $10,000. so this is stuff stuff. it's time for everyone to realize if we're going to hold at this level of health and safety in the city and get better, we have to deal with the fact that the quarantine must be applied consistently to anyone who has traveled. >> that's new york city mayor bill de blasio announcing new quarantine checkpoints across

the city. elsewhere around the country, public school students in chicago now will begin the academic year remotely next month. mayor lori lightfoot made the announcement yesterday along with the chief executive of chicago public schools. the university of connecticut yesterday announced it is suspended its football season for the 2020 year because of coronavirus. uconn is the first football subdivision program, formally known as division 1a to suspend its program because of the pandemic. the director said the safety challenges created by covid-19 places our football student athletes at an unacceptable level of risk. and in california, los angeles mayor garcetti is authorizing the city to shut off water and power service to properties hosting large house parties. >> while we have already closed all nightclubs and bars these large house parties have essentially become nightclubs in the hills. many times the homes are vacant or used for short-term rentals.

and beyond the noise, the traffic and nuisance, these large parties are unsafe and can cost angelinos their lives. that is why tonight, i'm authorizing the city to shut off the los angeles department of water and power services in egregious cases in which houses, businesses and other venues are hosting large unpermitted gags. >> joining us democratic congressman eric swalwell. congressman, good to see you. how did california get to this point. in the early stages i'm thinking back to march and april it was one of the success stories because of the stages because of shutdown, the transmission was relatively low. and now you're to a point where you're thinking about shutting down again. mayor garcetti has floated that possibility. what happened in california? >> in many ways, we had success, we were one of the first to

shelter in place. especially in my congressional district you would see a daily case rate of 30 to 50 cases a day. rel thif relatively low. but as the rest of country started to reopen like texas and florida and georgia i think people starts to get antsy. and they wanted to come out and we let our guard down. the lowest common denominator pulled us now. and now we're all playing a price because we didn't have a national plan. >> eric, tell me what's happening right now in negotiations on the coronavirus relief bill. when you have, of course, democrats and republicans going back and forth talking about the possibility of moving closer to together. and now the president coming out and saying that he may move unilaterally because article two of the constitution gives him ultimate power. but the president says he may move unilaterally if congress doesn't get the job done. where is congress, and are they

going to get the job done? >> joe, you've been around long enough to know that plan beats no plan. 11 weeks ago we passed the heroes act which funds the testing and tracing that's needed. it extends the paycheck protection plan. and extends unemployment to the end of the year and provides hazard pay. and state republicans are all over the place. they don't have a plan. they have grievances. we're sticking to what is needed and that's ultimately going to prevail. i was at a food bank in my hayward district two days ago and the line went around the block of people who probably imagined themselves waiting in a line for hours to have a box of food in their trunk. the help and need is there. and we need to fulfill it. >> that's the frustration, congressman, a lost of americans who needed that help last week. not this week. a week ago. they're watching congress

slow-walk and it's affecting their lives. what have you heard about urgency in the senate. mark meadows is saying if we don't have something by the end of the week, the president may step in with executive action on unemployment insurance. on evictions. where is this going to end? tomorrow is friday. we've come up to a week anniversary of $600 payments running out for tens of millions of americans. is something about to get done here or not? >> it feels like it's moving that way, willie. again, we put out a plan, and we showed what our values were. if the president could have been acting uni ining unilaterally, have presented a plan in march. he doesn't have the ability of his own confidence or doesn't understand the gravity of the problem to act unilaterally. i think it's pretty clear what will we believe. and the security grievances from the senators well we don't want to add to the national debt,

that concern wasn't there three years ago, when their tax plan was passed for the wealthiest americans. it's never going to be cheaper right now to stimulate the economy and help people in need. >> i want to ask you about schools. the city reported los angeles -- excuse me, chicago is going to start the year online. what are you hearing about places like los angeles? san francisco? what does it look like to go back to school this year for all of the families in your district? >> mostly, it will be virtual. willie with a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, i would love for the kids to be in the pre-k programs. it's by the grace of god that they've not crashed this broadcast yet. >> there's still time. >> until they can have the same testing and sanitized environments that professional athletes have or the white house has, it's not going to be safe. and we have to put their safety above anything else. but i need them to see them get back to school. and it's also why in part, getting a deal with the senate

so we can fund the need that's there right now as states take shortfalls is oso important. i want to ask you about another story the manhattan district attorney battling the president in court over tax returns. and subpoenaing the lender now in what appears to be a wide investigation into trump business practices. cy vance subpoenaed deutsche bank. according to t"the new york time times", the german bank implied. the "times" reports the subpoena to deutsche bank sought documents to mr. trump and his companies including any materials that might point to possible fraud including two people briefed on the contents. the president and his company repeatedly denied wrongdoing. congressman, obviously, you were very much involved in the russia

investigation. and any links between trump businesses, president trump himself and the russian government and russian bit entities. what do you make of this story that shows perhaps the investigation in the manhattan's district attorney's office is more broad than we originally knew? >> it does feel like it's moving closer to an indictment, rather than farther away. it is filling in the gaps that we were not able to fill in when we were, you know, in the minority running the election investigation. and that the mueller investigation did not look at because it was stymied in congress and we did not you're our subpoena power to look at the president's finances. russia has invested in the president. the president has invested over in russia. he's disguised or been deceitful about those investments. so now, i think it's important for to us understand why does he continue to put the president of -- russia's interests above ours. and this may be one way for us to find out soon. >> congressman eric swalwell. you survived this interview in

its entirety because it's so early where you are without the 3-year-old or 1-year-old making an appearance. thanks, congressman. >> thanks. >> we will be back with much more "morning joe." to dream and thrive. when you're ready... look for the r. book two separate qualifying stays and earn a free night. the open road is open again. and wherever you're headed, choice hotels is there. book direct at choicehotels.com. and wherever you're headed, choice hotels is there. ♪ ♪ we've always put safety first. ♪ ♪ and we always will. ♪ ♪ for people. ♪ ♪ for the future. ♪ ♪ and there has never been a summer when it's mattered more. wherever you go, summer safely.

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the japanese city of hiroshima. it was carried out in a bid to win the war and voavoid the los of further american lives. it was a decision that harry truman said he never regretted. just ten weeks after the defeat of nazi germany, president truman toured the ruins of berlin. that very day, in the new mexico desert, the atomic age began. this successful test of the first atomic bomb gave the president a powerful new weapon in the war against japan. truman was in berlin for a summit with great britain and the soviet union. the potsdam conference. it was here that the president got the news of the successful test, and where he reviewed the final list of proposed targets before giving the go-ahead to drop the atomic bomb. truman saw the bomb as an alternative to a massive invasion of japan, which was planned for that fall.

the often suicidal determination of the japanese to keep fighting could have meant extremely heavy casualties on both sides. japan was given an ultimatum, surrender unconditionally or face destruction. japan refused. truman headed home crossing the atlanta on the "uss agugusaugus" it took off carrying a single bomb which it dropped on the city of hiroshima. on 8:15 in the morning august 6th, 1945. >> it is an atomic bomb has been let loose against those who brought war to the far east. >> more than 80,000 people were killed. tens of thousands were horribly burned and poisoned by radiation. the president again warned japan, surrender or face what he called a rain of ruin. there was no reply.

and so another atomic bomb was dropped on japan. this time on nagasaki. more than 40,000 people died there. many more were injured. finally, japan gave up. >> i deem this reply a full acceptance pottsdam declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of japan. >> the war was over and harry s. truman had not hesitated in using atomic bombs to end it. a decision he stood by for the rest of his life. >> i made that decision on the condition it would save hundreds of thousands of lives, japanese as well as american. the dropping of the atom bomb was the only sensible thing to do. it was the only thing to do. that bomb caused the japanese to surrender, and it stopped the war. i don't care what the crybabies say now because they didn't have to make the decision. >> with us now, journalist, author and biographer leslie

bloom. her new book "fallout" is about hiroshima, and it's hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world. leslie, thank you so much for being here. and i'm fascinated by your book about a book which, of course, all of us read growing up or a lot of us read growing up. john hirsch's extraordinary work in reporting on hiroshima. give us the backstory to that and to the new yorker's decision to send him over there to get the facts on the ground while there was still time. >> well, after the bombs were dropped, it appeared the government was being forthright about the might of its weapon. and the true fallout on the ground in hiroshima and nagasaki. but john hirsch and his editors looked at the reporting coming out of japan, and they realized

there was something missing, something really alarming, and that was true reporting on the human toll of the aftermath and any testimonies about what it had been like to be a human being on the receiving end of nuclear warfare. so the odd thing also about it was that many powerful media operations had bureaus on the ground in japan since day one of the occupation so why weren't they getting the story? so the new yorker decided if the big powerhouse media operations weren't -- either wouldn't or couldn't get the story they were going to try. so they dispatched john hirsch to get the story. he started his reporting trip in china and endeavored to get into occupied japan from there to get the real facts. >> it was an extraordinarily jarring report in the new yorker. and as i said, the book so many of us grew up reading it. and what struck me when i read

it, and you point this out, is how impassively hirsche told the story. he seemed to take extra care to not get in the way of the stories of those people he was interviewing. >> well, his idea was that, again, a lot of the reporting that had been done on the bomb was this very pseudobiblical language surrounding it. very eye of god. it was not really rendered in a way that readers and audiences around the world are reacting to. so he thought he would find a handful of blast survivors, just regular folks. a young widow with three school-aged children. a young female clerk. a young japanese medic and tell the story through their point of view because he thought, look, you know, not everybody can comprehend the physics of how the bomb works or, you know, visualize what it would be like to be part of an all-out global nuclear war.

but everyone can empathize with a handful of regular folks who meet with catastrophe one day. and yes, the impassiveness was key, and he said that he later said if he felt he had shouted his outrage from the rooftops that it wouldn't have been as effective, but it was presented in a hemingway-esque, nothing but the facts approach. this is what these six people, these six regular folks, experienced as -- experienced at 8:15 a.m. on august 6th, 1945. >> the united states government didn't want the public to see that human toll that john was pursuing. so what resistance did he meet from the government? obviously, it was easier back then to cover something up. as a practical question. didn't have people with iphones recording and posting to twitter right away what was actually happening on the ground. what was the push and pull between hirsche and the united states government? >> i don't think we could have the hiroshima government today in the world of video cell

phones. he had a couple of reporters that tried to get in before him. they were more combative. they had been budding headed with macarthur's wartime forces already for years and they sneaked their way into hiroshima and nagasaki. and one of them was -- two of them were able to get out reports in the very early days, but after that, the press was corralled into what one of them called a press ghetto. and they were closely monitored. dispatches were censored heavily. what made him an interesting candidate to get this story, he wasn't a combaste reporter. he was a wartime ally of sorts. a good team player with the military during the war. he had written glowing profiles of military figures, including douglas macarthur. he had written a biography that he later would feel was overly

laudatory and wished he could take out of print. a lot of that is necessary when trying to get into japan. they see that as being a more innocuous reporter and if they give him access, he's not going to do anything to embarrass the country and occupation officials would soon regret that decision. >> and you in writing this book, you actually retrace herse's steps and found a protagonist from his book. >> i did get to go to hiroshima to research and interview and one of the last sir viving central protagonists is a peace advocate. she was an infant, an 8-month-old baby on august 6th. and she had been in the arms of her mother when their house collapsed on top of them upon detonation. they managed to get out of the debris of the house just before fire storms swept through their area and eviscerated their entire neighborhood.

her name is coco tanamon tanamondo condo. she's been a peace advocate. i met with her and we retraced herse's steps and she told me where the hypercenter of the detonation had taken place. >> leslie blume, thank you for being with us. the book is "fallout." the hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world. greatly appreciate you being here. willie? >> can't wait to finish that book and sounds like a movie in the making to me, too. for the 20th straight week, joe, we're getting across the wires at least 1 million americans sought jobless aid amid the pandemic. nearly 1.2 million people filed for state unemployment benefits last week. tomorrow the government will report the unemployment numbers for the month of july. while it's expected to show gains from last month, even a solid report would mean barely 40% of the jobs lost to

coronavirus have been recovered. joe, i think it's a measure where we are that a jobless number of 1.18 million americans is seen somehow as an improvement because it is, as a raw number. but think of where we are where you are looking at more than a million unemployment claims as progress in this economy. >> and i know, again, we're not sure what's going to be happening over the next couple of months because, of course, you have states that are still grapple with the virus. we've had outbreaks. and we've had warnings. let's remember, we've had warnings from the start that the fall was going to be even more difficult because we would have a combination of the pandemic and flu season. that could really push hospitals to the brink. when that happens, obviously, you're going to have more americans sheltering in place and being concerned that if they get sick, they wouldn't have icu space. they wouldn't be able to take care of their loved ones. they wouldn't be able to take care of their parents. we still have a ways to go.

>> and that's the frustration as we watch clips again this morning of that jonathan swan interview. we don't watch those for entertainment. we watch those because they show the mind-set of the man who has the keys to the car. when you look at these jobs numbers, it's not just a health question. it's a life question. it's people losing their livelihoods and wondering where is that $600 check i get? what is congress doing to help me get out of this hole? it's touching almost every american's life in one way or another and when you watch the president talk about it, it's clear that he doesn't grasp that. as he said, it is what it is. it will go away, like things go away. that's where he is on the coronavirus right now. >> and for parents like us, you know, we want our kids to get back in school. we know that children learn better when they are in school. they need the socialization skills that they get from school. and the fact that this government still doesn't have a testing plan in august, the fact that people -- less people are

taking tests now because they're becoming discouraged, the fact that the president bragged a month or two ago about telling his staff to slow down the testing. you combine all of that, and it leads to a real frustration for parents, for children, for those small business owners we keep talking about, for restaurant owners. we have to get a government plan for the sake of every american. thank you so much for watching us this morning. that does it for us. stick around because stephanie ruhle has the news and will continue now. stephanie. >> thanks, joe. hi there. i'm stephanie ruhle. it is thursday, august 6th. here's what's happening now. we're getting a new picture of the depth of the unemployment crisis in this country. just moments ago, we learned 1.2 million americans filed for unemployment last week. that is lower than expected. but we are still seeing over 1 million people file