we have a best new thing in the world today. her name is flynn mary donovan. she has just arrived in the lives of our dear colleague, jen marini donovan and her big wonderful family. look at her. you are perfect, not just because your mom says so. you are plain perfection in your little hospital hat. flynn mary donovan, welcome to the world. best new thing in the world today, god bless you. it evening. tonight on a minute, trump's team sign in transition agreements with the biden administration. that intrude from fashion,

there's a twist. plus, donald trump may be the president-elect, but right now it is elon musk who is acting like he is in charge. and we will unpack trump's newly proposed tariffs. what they could mean for our allies and for you. i'm sam stein in for ayman mohyeldin . let's do it. all right, good evening. the trump transition team has finally agreed to work with the biden administration on the official handoff from one administration to the next. but there's a catch. well, there are three catches. the trump team is still refusing to sign an ethics pledge that was swear off conflict of interest. there refusing fbi security checks for their staff and continuing to fund the transition with secret, unlimited donations. so basically, the trump transition appears to be as indifferent to charges of corruption and preventable

security lapses as they were before this announcement. now, the standard practice during presidential transitions is to sign an agreement that puts strict limits on private funding, discloses the names of private donors, and caps donations at about $5000 in exchange the transition team gets $7 million in federal matching funds. instead, team trump is continuing to rake in untold sums of money from secret donors, both domestic and foreign, in exchange for who knows what. as a reminder, trump's first administration was found by an ethics watchdog group to have more than 3400 conflict of interest. but corruption and quid pro quos are not the only concern. the guardian reported this week that trump's team is planning on conducting background checks on staff only after, after trump has taken office and taken over control of the fbi with his personnel. it seems that trump does not trust current bureau personnel

with these background checks and only wants them conducted when they are hand selected people in place. this comes as the new york times released a stunning, and i mean truly stunning new report on trump's pick to lead the department of defense. fox news host pete hegseth . the times has obtained an email that hegseth's mother sent him in 2018 while he was in the midst of a divorce. she wrote to her son the following. quote, you are an abuser of women. that is the ugly truth, and i have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. you are that man and have been for years. as your mother, it pains me. it embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. she added this. we still love you, but we are broken by your behavior and lack of character.

on behalf of all the women, and i know it's many, you have abused in some way, i say get some help and take an honest look at yourself. now, ms. hegseth is now disavowing what she wrote in that 2018 email. nbc news has not obtained this email or an alleged apology email she says she sent afterwards. but this is an administration that clearly does not put a premium on background checks and character references. hegseth's lawyer recently confirmed to nbc news that his client paid a woman undisclosed amount after she accused him of sexual assault. kicking us off tonight, tom nichols, staff writer at the atlantic. barbara walter, professor of international affairs at uc san diego. and the author of quote how civil wars start and how to stop them. and my friend, tim miller, msnbc political analyst and writer at large at one of the great sites online, the board.

he is also the author of why we did it, a travelogue from the republican road. all three of you, thank you so much. i know there is no where else would rather be on a saturday on thanksgiving weekend, so i appreciate it. tom, let's start with you. first of all, i hope your mom is never written you an email like that. secondly, what you make of the latest hegseth revelation? >> well, yeah, i mean, when your mom send you something like that that is time to re- examine some life choices. normally, and i think this is important to say. normally discussion between pete hegseth and his mom is nobody's business. if you want to run a 3 million person apartment, the biggest in the government, have clearance that includes the nuclear chain of command, and be in the presidential line of succession, yeah, your personal behavior does matter. and it does become an issue of national interest and national security. this is the kind of thing that if you were applying for a

really senior security clearance and you had engaged in this kind of behavior, it would come up. people would ask you about it. you might not get that clearance. so on the one hand, it is just painful. i mean, it is such a painful thing to read from a mother to a son. but it suggests that this guy has had issues with women for a long time, and especially for a department that has had its share of issues with sexual harassment problems, this really is a problem. i mean, you know, i think hegseth is disqualify a ball for so many things, including that he is not in any way qualified for the job. now it is just one more straw on an already woken camels back. >> yet, it is a deeply common deeply personal, painful, but ultimately relevant bit of information tomorrow. those are not bad this week,

written by former republican and necrotic senate counsel. who used to deal with his fbi back ground checks. they write this. the need for rigorous senate consideration could run roughshod over the government with no in challenging them. the senate, across party lines, must make clear that as has been the case for years it will not consider nominations without an fbi background check. listen, with these latest hegseth revelations, after the matt gaetz situation where he bowed out due to his indiscretions, will the senate, you think, feel that they need to have that fbi background check? are they going to say we trust be trump administration to do their own homework? >> the big picture right here is that the main check on presidential power here in the united states is congress.

it is the senate and it is the house of representatives. if they don't check attempts by the presidents to try to grab as much power as they can, and appointing incompetent loyalists into big positions of power and purging of the judicial branch and appointing loyalists there, that is a presidential grab for power. and if the senate does not check this grab, then basically , one, they are not doing their job. and they are allowing the president to essentially do what our founding fathers never wanted to happen, and that was to make themselves king. >> tim, look, we are in a situation where if you get angry or mad or you bring up these revelations, what happens is that people in trump's orbit sickly rally around the person who is being targeted, showing disdain for a system the people dislike and distrust is kind of a big reason why trump got

elected. so this is almost energizer for them. do you think that they will actually be emboldened around pete hegseth because of this, that they will just go to the mat for him all the more? >> well, certainly in the maga media sphere, that is true. us sitting around msnbc complaining about this is just fodder for megyn kelly's youtube show on monday or something, but that isn't really the people that matter anymore. those are the people that were key during the election. right now the question is are there four republican senators that might look askance at this. and you can think of four republican senators that are not the types to just rally around somebody who is decently, excuse me, completely unqualified to own the libs . we have already seen it, there

is another category, particularly in national security issues, of people who have not been courageous over the past eight years. who might look at pete hegseth and say this is too preposterous of a choice to lead the defense department. and it is also worth remembering, we are so early in the process. trump made these nominations, historically these don't usually come until closer to the inauguration. it feels like we are in the trump presidency already, the way he has been acting. so we are at november 30th. january 20th is a long time. i mean, if your mother write you that email, you've done some bad stuff. and let me tell you, there are other stories that are coming out about pete hegseth between now and january 20th, and i think while the far right or the maga media folks might rally to his defense, it might be enough to disqualify him for a few key senators. >> now, look, because this is the trump years, and information comes like a gusher, when we were sitting here, news has broken that donald trump is going to be

naming kash patel to lead the fbi, to be his new fbi director. a couple things to consider here, one is that kash patel is a long-standing critic of the fbi. believes that it was used to unfairly target trump and his supporters. also, the current fbi director, christopher wray, does serve a 10 year term. it is not up, i believe, and until 2027, which means that donald trump would have to fire christopher wray, in order to nominate kash patel who would be confirmed by the senate. i had to put you on the spot, tom, but what is your reaction to this one , among all the choices for confirmable positions, there is obviously a few that i've had severe pushback. this one seems like one that could engender a lot of pushback, precisely because kash patel has been such a vociferous critic of the fbi, and trump himself has said he wants to weapon eyes the fbi

for political purposes. >> yeah, tim just use the word preposterous. this is the world we are living in now. of these preposterous, and yet extraordinarily dangerous picks. what you see trump doing, and it is kind of strange, to use this word about donald trump, but he is methodically appointing people who will completely destroy any limits on his power, and this is just putting foxes in charge of the henhouse at every possible turn. he would have kash patel at the fbi, pam bondi at the justice department. that means that his opponents get investigated and his friends, he and his friends do whatever they want. there is a saying attributed long ago to a latin american dictator, for my enemies, for my friends, everything. for my enemies, the law. and that is what you're seeing here. and on top of everything else,

as if we have to actually say this, kash patel has absolutely no qualification whatsoever to be the nation's top law- enforcement official at the pi. none. but his main qualification is absolute servitude to donald trump. and, you know, this is just incredibly dangerous. you are starting to put together, we don't know what will happen with the hegseth nomination, but you put together tulsa gabbard as dni, john ratcliff, another loyalist at cia. kash patel at the fbi. pam bondi at justice. you have the makings of a not so slow-motion authoritarian takeover of the united states government. and people ought to be really concerned about this. >> tim, we talked a bit about this, you and i, about the overloading of the system, basically. in which case senate republicans are just sort of overwhelmed by it, maybe want

to defeat one or two of them, but they are not going to defeat all of them. how do you see this playing out on the ? are they just going to say okay, we will give you rfk junior, we will give you tulsa gabbard, but please know kash patel. or is there enough backbone there, you think, to defeat multiple nominees? >> i don't know, i think it's possible. we saw with matt gaetz already, and i was surprised how quickly that happened. to me, kash patel, and i don't say this lightly, is the most dangerous using yet to our democracy. you may think having pete hegseth running the military is a literal danger because of his lack of experience or tulsa gabbard at intelligence, but as far as the threats to democracy we are warning about before the election, kash patel was a key player inside the trump white house , pushing for and orchestrating the coup attempt in 2020. he was trying to completely take control of the justice department at the time.

he was trump's top lieutenant, who is willing to do anything and advance any lie and service of his attempts to overturn that last election. to such a degree that there were many people that were trump appointees in 2020, who were staying around and saying no, standing in the breach and saying no, not kash patel. you cannot put kash patel as a temporary leader of the justice department, et cetera. these are trump appointees. so we will see what happens in the senate, but if trump had people around him that work was i loyalists that were like that guy is too far, who knows what that will mean for the senate? >> all right, well, listen, this is a lot. definitely a lot. unexpected. but i guess that is the trump years. barbara walter, thank you so much, i appreciate it. sorry we could not get you in more. tom and tim, you guys are sticking around, appreciate that, as well. more on the breaking news after this quick break. quick break.

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to keep you cool and comfortable throughout the night. our smart sleepers get 28 minutes more restful sleep per night. and now, save 50% on the sleep number limited edition smart bed. plus, free home delivery beds when you add a base. shop a sleep number store near you. president donald trump announced via true social moments ago that he is nominating former chief of staff to the secretary of defense under the first trump administration, kash patel, to be the next director of the federal bureau of investigation. patel had several other notable roles during the first trump term. what's notable here is that christopher wray, who donald trump chose as fbi head in 2017 after firing james comey, chris wray has not yet finished his 10 year term . so trump would have to fire him in order to get

kash patel into that post. tom and tim are back with me to unpack all of this. look, tom, we were talking in the last block about this, among his other faults, kash patel is a conspiracy theorist and he would be another one in a line of them who will be going to the trump administration, should he be confirmed. he also was an organizer or a key component of the january 6th insurrection. what is it say about having that type of personality in your next term? it just completely obliterates any recognition or culpability for anyone who is involved in that riot, as far as i'm concerned. >> yeah, i mean, donald trump has been trying to erase history and read con that whole business into just another day in washington, and unfortunately, he has been somewhat successful. at least some of it. but patel is, and i think tim

is absolutely right, when it comes to the danger to our democracy patel is about as dangerous as it gets. he believes in nothing except serving donald trump, his own interests. they really don't care about the interest of the united states, they are there to build an authoritarian cadre and to put themselves beyond the reach of the rule of law. and if you want to be beyond the reach of the rule of law, one of the first things you want to capture is the fbi. the other thing this says, putting patel there, it says the fbi is no longer in the law enforcement business and is certainly no longer in the counterintelligence business, which our enemies will be very happy to hear. it's in the business of protecting donald trump,

furthering donald trump's interests, and making sure that donald trump's enemies are investigated and that donald trump's friends are given a free pass. this is really, you know, i suppose if we still had the ability to be shocked, it is shocking. but i think this is something probably many of us are coming and it should not be that surprising. but it is incredibly dangerous as a development. >> tom, i am impressed that you retain the ability to be shocked. tim, i want to read this part of the washington post write up of the kash patel nomination. it reads as this. patel has publicly mused about targeting journalists and government officials, and he published a list of quote deep state names in a book last year, titled, quote, government gangsters. promotional materials for the book included a quote from trump, who called it a road map highlighting every corrupt actor, and a blueprint to help us take back the white house and remove these gangsters from all of government. so, i don't want to bend your mind in uncomfortable ways,

tim, but paint what an fbi under kash patel might look like, knowing what he has written and what trump has endorsed. >> yeah, actually, it is probably more direct and worse than how the washington post put it there. he has not mused, really, about targeting journalists and political foes. he said it absolutely explicitly and with relish, often, on steve bannon's podcast and other maga media sources. so, in addition to the book that you mentioned. this is somebody that is planning to target donald trump's political foes. prosecute the prosecutors. this is also something that pam bondi said that she planned to do. so i think of the people that were investigating donald trump , using completely open reasons, going to grand juries, playing this by the book. nonetheless i think they can

expect to be targeted by this incoming administration. the other thing, in addition to targeting people they think are not loyal within the government, career officials, i think that this is also, they want people to quit. right? there is a notion of if you are a senior fbi official, the idea that you are going to have to report to somebody like kash patel who has absolutely no business being the director of the fbi, who does not have the career record , does not have the experience, has not gained the trust of the people that work there, i think that there will be an exodus, or at least there will be a thought. and i think the trump administration is hoping that people leave. and i think, unfortunately, we are going to have to hope that some of these people stay and what is going to be a pretty uncomfortable bureau. >> tom, let's talk a little bit about going back to the james comey firing. because when that happened, it was an uproar. it was deeply, and deeply problematic for a lot of people

in d.c. and trump responded by ultimately selecting chris wray, a guy who had the backing of chris christie , and institutionalist, someone who is totally fine for all of the republican party. this go-round he is not going on that road map. he is obviously going with the most loyal person he could possibly have. what do you think that says about the trump presidency 2.0? >> one thing that i think is really clear, first of all, he believes he has a mandate. he won by a small margin, but for him, he thinks this is, you know, an absolute license to rule at will. the other thing i think is that he feels very strongly that he can just push this republican senate around. that there is nobody left in the republican. and he may be right, but he feels that there

is nobody left among senior elected republican officials who is going to dare to stop him. i hope he is wrong about that. and i am hoping that he is finally, i think with matt gaetz he went too far, and it was clear it was not going to happen. and i hope now, again, people in the republican party and in the senate, especially, are going to remember that they are the article one branch of government that tells the president he can't do stuff like this. but he feels strongly that he has got a mandate and that the republican party and its elected officials are his to push around at will. and again, that is really dangerous. you can see that he has been kind of numbing us towards this. he has been paralyzing the system. he starts off with marco rubio, and a few other credible nominations, and it gets worse and worse and worse. and he has been, i think patel, this nomination has been out

there for a long time. but he wanted, in true trump fashion, wanted to exhaust everybody, wear them out, and i think your question, sam, about whether the senate has the spine to take down multiple nominees is a really good question, because he is trying to flood them with completely unqualified and dangerous nominees, to see how many of them managed to get through. >> yeah, that's about right. tom, stick around. you've been a great guest. tim, i wish i could say the same. but we got to let you go. thank you very much. hours ago, donald trump launched a new threat to raise tariffs on outside nations, saying he is going to -- i'm going to go to break. sorry, we are going to break, we will come back with more on kash patel . trouble breathing. don't stop your asthma treatments without talking with your doctor. tell your doctor if your asthma worsens or you have a parasitic infection.

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india, and china among others. he will do that if they move away from the u.s. dollar. this comes after trump proposed a 25% tariff on products imported from allies of mexico and canada, while threatening china with an additional 10% tax. all this is part of an apparent effort to curb migration and drugs, mainly fentanyl, into the united states. after trump posted, canadian prime minister justin trudeau for a dinner at mar-a-lago on friday, he posted on true social, quote, trudeau has made a commitment to work with us to end this terrible devastation of u.s. families. this comes after a phone call between mexican president claudia schein mom and trump, where the two leaders had, shall we say, vastly different takeaways from the conversation. the president-elect claimed that she promised to close the border with mexico. posted on x that mexico's position is not to close borders, but instead bridges

between government and people. joining us is msnbc contributor maria kumar. she is also the president and ceo of the voter latino. tom, various campaign, trump claimed various times that a tariff is not a cost on the american consumer, that is going to go and be borne by the other country upon which it is placed. of course, economists have debunked it. people in his orbit still argue it. how badly could these new tariffs actually impact the american people, and how would this damage are diplomatic relationships, if, and this is the most important part, if he actually follows through on them. >> yeah, i mean, the tariffs will fall most heavily, ironically enough, on many of the people who voted for him, just as they did the last time. people, we were talking earlier about january 6th falling into the memory hole. here we go again.

people talking about this as if trump did not try this and then have to bail out farmers and small businesses because he either doesn't understand tariffs or thinks that tariffs are a magic word, because he keeps bringing them up and people who also don't understand what tariffs are respond because they think it is somehow a tax on foreigners. so, if he does it, what would it do? well, canada, for example, the people in the midwest and the plains would start paying a lot more for a lot of things, because they're kind of on the front line of where a lot of stuff comes in from canada. people that did not vote for donald trump in coastal areas and some of the upper income blue cities, not really going to hurt that much. i have always been amazed that trump kind of gets away with this threat to hurt his own voters. but he did it before, i have no reason to think he won't try to do it again.

but the kind of tariffs here talking about, you are not talking about an inconvenience. you are talking about a trade war that will then remind people of things like the pandemic, or you have supply- chain bottlenecks and shortages and other things. i guess people just keep wanting to touch the hot stove of a trade war over and over again. i am just surprised that the people that would be most hurt by this don't realize it, again. >> and maria, the other part of this is that the problem that these tariffs would supposedly be used to solve, maybe, in fact, is overstated. if you look at the numbers, migration and apprehensions at the southern border are down significantly in the past half year, year. in a statement firing back at trump, mexican president claudia sheinbaum made it clear that mexican officials have actually been working to curb migration . tell us what's going on here. how big a role as mexico playing and curbing migration? and exactly how far down are we

from the highs of the biden years? >> sam, let's be very, very clear to everybody tuning in. a tariff is a tax. a tariff is a tax on the american people. right now what trump is trying to do is create a whole bunch of bluster, like i am going to go ahead and create a trade war with mexico and canada because i want to prevent and curb migration. i want to curb fentanyl. but he is actually not laying it straight. the fact of the president of mexico came back and said not only are we right now working to build ridges between people and government, but we have been working behind the scenes, very effectively, with president biden. in fact, migration is down 75% at our southern order because of the policies that have worked in coalition with the u.s. government and mexico to curb migration at the moment people into mexico. there actually immigrated back into their country. so it has been one of the most successful programs that, frankly, has not been covered.

but if we take a step back, it does not matter in trump's world if migration is down. the moment he steps in the office he's going to say you know what? my threat actually work. this is the rub. the fact that he threatens trade wars, whether it is mexico, china, whether it is canada, he is putting it very clearly to the rest of the world, to our allies and our trade partners, that perhaps america cannot be trusted. that we are going to use words without action, and that actually is going to erode our ability to do real trade agreements in an increasingly inter-global world. i would encourage folks to recognize that a tariff is a tax not on the country, but on the american people. every single person that right now says inflation is a big deal, you have seen nothing yet. if anything actually happens. but secondly, let's remember those trump years where he did a lot of bluster, he did a lot of his policies via x. all in bluster. but none of it came through.

but it did destabilize our ability to have relationships, because it eroded trust. >> tom, i want to talk about the kind of divergent reactions we've seen from world leaders who have been on the receiving end of these tariff threats. you have mexican president sheinbaum, who basically posted, in fact, the stats say this, you're wrong, and then you have justin trudeau, who literally flew to mar-a-lago to sit with trump and talk over and put out a statement saying we are on the same page, working to this similar end. how do you feel like world leaders how to navigate this? what is the right approach? is there a singular approach that is right? and as maria said, a lot of this is just bluster, but do you have to play along? >> yeah, i just want to emphasize something maria just said, which is he claims victory when he gets people to, you know, he thinks he's gotten people to do stuff they were already doing.

and we are going to be living in this alternate reality for a long time now, where trump says i talk to somebody and they agreed to do what i want. and the other person says that is not even remotely what just happened. and i think world leaders who have met him, they know this guy. they've dealt with them before. and you saw it in his first term. they are going to manage him. they understand that he does not understand anything or care very much about international relations, about trade, any of this stuff. they understand that flattery, i suspect trudeau came down because having dinner with donald trump, if it makes him feel better, if it makes trump feel better, then that is probably time well spent, and then everybody gets back to work. but they are going to have to manage them. they are going to have to manage around him, just like they did before. and, you know, it is going to slow down a lot of things in the world that americans care about.

things like trade and immigration and other things, where having a good relationship with foreign leaders really matters. and trump is already starting america off behind the eight ball, because the leaders he seems to have a positive relationship with our authoritative leaders and dictators. and even some of those seem kind of chapped and ticked off with him lately. so i don't think, i think every leader is going to have a different approach to managing donald trump. but make no mistake, they are going to manage him and they are going to work around him. >> tom nichols, maria teresa kumar, thank you both so much. appreciate it. nice, trump taps a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates to lead the world's top health agency. next up, my panel wray asked to trump's latest threats against the press and what it could mean for accountability.

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the national health institute is america's top biomedical research agency, with an annual budget of around $40 billion and dozens of centers and institutes under its jurisdiction. so you would think that the person at the helm of it would be a proponent of evidence- based science. but earlier this week, donald trump chose dr. bhattacharya to lead the nih. bhattacharya is a physician who gained prominence over his critiques of the federal government's coronavirus response. back in august of 2020, he was one of several doctors who met with donald trump in the oval office and told him that the covid pandemic was not as severe as public health officials had warned. a couple months later, bhattacharya, a trained economist , physician, and professor at stanford university co-authored the open letter called the great barrington declaration. the declaration advocated for ending coronavirus shutdowns

and returning to life as normal , while maintaining so-called focused protections for vulnerable people. in other words, he was a big backer of herd immunity, with some protections. the open letter was widely criticized by public health experts, including the then director of the nih, dr. francis collins. collins wrote an email to nih colleagues that was later made public. in it he said, quote, there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. this was not the only time that dr. bhattacharya courted controversy. he also repeatedly underestimated the death toll from the covid pandemic, and he cowrote an early study that overestimated how many people had already been affected and recovered from covid-19. bhattacharya has also called for rolling back the power of the institutes and centers that make up the nih and he has

singled out career civil servants like anthony fauci who he says wrongly shapes national policies at the height of the pandemic. this, this is the person donald trump leaves should be heading the nih. after the break we will talk more about dr. bhattacharya and rfk junior, who could work closely with him as trump's pick for hhs secretary. we will be right back. ♪ ♪ (vo) with verizon, trade in any phone, any condition, this black friday get iphone 16 pro with apple intelligence. get four on us. only on verizon.

dr. bhattacharya, donald trump's pick to lead the national institute of health, is known for his controversial views on the coronavirus pandemic . i have confirmed he will be leading the nih under the watchful eye of robert f kennedy junior, trump's choice for hhs secretary. as it turns out, bhattacharya is already a big fan. he cowrote for a british opinion site earlier this

month, arguing that kennedy will disrupt the u.s. medical establishment, writing, quote, the rot having accumulated for decades was plain for all to see. if the officials continued to deny their own culpability, avoiding a long look in the mirror. kennedy can be that mirror. joining me now to discuss this is dr. fidelio, infectious disease physician, founding director of boston university's center on emerging infectious diseases, and former senior adviser on the biden white house covered response team. dr., thank you so much. appreciate it. where to begin? it is clear that rfk junior and dr. bhattacharya are on the same page about what they would say is shaking up the help agencies that oversee healthcare and medical research. bhattacharya even echoed rfk's goal of making america healthy again, days ago on x. what strikes you about the combination of these two men, and is disrupting the health agency what we are really

talking about, or is it gutting them and replacing them with different people? >> yeah, sam, thanks for having me. to me, the simple part of this equation that bothers me a lot is that if you have all these aspirations, and by the way, making america healthy is an incredibly useful goal to have. it is a powerful way to unite the country. because we are unhealthy. 70% of us are overweight or obese. there are issues we need to face with our health system. but the recommendation the both of these men have about gutting our health system, our public health government employees, is taking away decades of knowledge, of expertise that has led many residential administrations, through the pandemic, through threats to the nation's health, that does not bode well for what threats might be on the horizon for us. that bothers me a little bit. but of those two men, i think rfk junior, to me, is a bit more troublesome, partly because of his long history of being anti-vax.

his organization has been touted as one of the biggest purveyors of disinformation around vaccinations, and has and responsible for many parents losing faith in vaccines that is led to the highest rates of parental exemption from vaccines, leading to some of the biggest outbreaks we've seen with preventable infectious diseases in children. >> i want to talk about that a little bit, because the two men both have very interesting views of the pandemic early in the pandemic. dr. bhattacharya, obviously, was advocating for a form of herd immunity. he also was speaking as if the likelihood of covid related deaths would potentially be as low as 40,000. it ended up being around 1.2 million in the united states. but on the flipside, to your point, rfk junior was also out there suggesting that he believed the covid pandemic might've been planned by the government. that is the order of magnitude to degrees that we are talking about here. as someone who is working on that covered response for the government, in the very early

months of the biden administration when it was incredibly bleak and vaccines were just coming online, i am just sort of curious what it's like. why do you think the country no longer understands or respects or even remembers how bleak it was and the steps that we did actually have to take in order to pull us out of those very, very troubling times? >> absolutely, so glad you framed it that way, because one , when the barrington declaration came out, i was the author of a rebuttal letter called the johnstone memorandum. and i feel like there was this revisionist history where somehow people think herd immunity was the way to go and we did not do it. taking everybody back to where we were. we did not know the long-term effects of this virus. we did not know its impact on children. and the fact that we have now found out that you can get re- infections and there is no such thing as a herd immunity against infections themselves, so separating the vulnerable from the rest of their caretakers, from their families, would never have been a sustainable long-term strategy

. it tells me that the whole take on herd immunity early on would've been a deadly route to take. but it is my hope. saying that dr. bhattacharya is a researcher, is a physician, at least it is my hope that he will listen to the evidence that comes out, from the government scientists that are in place to make those decisions based on the evidence in front of them, rather than looking at the political climate. it is my hope that he would be able to do that because he has been in academia, because he touts himself as an independent thinker. i'm hoping he's able to change his mind on some of these issues. >> that's a really important distinction. he is an academic thinker, he is a researcher. as far as we know he believes in the value of scientific research and biomedical research, and research into infectious diseases. whether or not he agrees with the final synopsis of the research is another question.

whereas rfk junior is on record saying he wants to put an eight year pause on research into infectious diseases and focus primarily on chronic diseases. as someone in the field, i'm sort of curious what kind of affect you think this is having or may have in terms of a brain drain? by that i mean people who are looking to further their studies and rely on government grants looking into infectious disease research. will they start looking to other pastors? canada, japan, korea, china lexi and say hey, this is a more open and hospitable environment for us, we are going to take a research there. >> yeah, that's a really critical point. but i will add, it's not a false dichotomy. we can chew gum and walk at the same time, we would invest in chronic diseases and infectious diseases. and it turns out that helps getting better results if you end up getting an infection. my worry is, and this is been something that has been bothering me since rfk junior said this about the eight-year block. look, epidemics don't care if

we invest in them or not. they are going to come anyway. so we need to be ready to do that. >> well, we are dealing with viruses right now, we hope nothing bad happens and we are crossing our fingers. thank you so much, really appreciate it. in the next hour of payment, more on the breaking news that donald trump has tapped loyalist kash patel as his new fbi director. get iphone 16 pro, on us. and ipad and apple watch series 10. all three on us. only on verizon. for more than a decade farxiga has been trusted again and again, and again. ♪ far-xi-ga ♪ ♪ far-xi-ga ♪ ♪ far-xi-ga ♪ ♪ far-xi-ga ♪ ask your doctor about farxiga.

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