STEVE KORNACKI, MSNBC HOST: That is it for tonight. Thank you for being with us. Don`t go anywhere. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes is up next.
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN.
LARRY KUDLOW, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: I will still argue to you that this is contained.
HAYES: The White House keeps trying to spin science.
KELLYANNE CONWAY, COUNSELOR TO THE PRESIDENT: It is being contained. And do you not think it`s not being contained?
HAYES: As the president mislead the nation.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: In terms of deaths, I don`t know what the count is today, is it 11?
HAYES: Tonight, Donald Trump`s grand deception in the face of a pandemic.
TRUMP: I don`t need to have the numbers doubled because of one ship.
HAYES: Plus, how markets understand coronavirus better than the president.
TRUMP: Unforeseen problem. What a problem.
HAYES: And how the Democratic race was turned on its head in seven short days.
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Were very much alive.
HAYES: And how African American voters are driving that change.
REP. JIM CLYBURN (D-SC): We know Joe, but most importantly, Joe knows us. Live from Studio 6A and Rockefeller Plaza. ALL IN starts right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Thank you. Thank you. Hello, New York. Hello, 30 Rock. Great to have you here. Welcome. It has been a huge week in the Democratic presidential primary. The field is completely changed down to two people. We`re going to talk about that. But I want to start with a story that has basically been dominating the headlines and rightfully so, which is, of course, the coronavirus.
A lot of anxiety out there. And I`m not here, I just want to be clear, to freak people out, OK. But here`s the thing. Consider this. How does anyone, you, me, Vice President Pence know how to handle a situation if we don`t know the full scope of the problem we face. In fact, when it comes to any difficult problem that any policymaker faces, you cannot solve the problem if you do not properly know the scope.
And we have had three months, three months to prepare for the coronavirus to come to the U.S. since the outbreak started in Wuhan, China. And we have completely failed so far. The federal government and the Trump administration have completely failed up until now. And we are now weeks and weeks behind where we should be.
And the biggest problem right now, way above anything else is that the government is not testing at capacity, right? To measure the spread of the disease, you need to test for it. And the testing for this is similar to all sorts of tests for common illnesses, other countries are doing it at tremendous scales. You swab some saliva, you run it through a machine, it tells you if the patient has coronavirus.
The problem is we do not have anywhere near the capacity we need. And that is because the first step, the first test developed by the Centers for Disease Control was deficient. It was so bad they had to recall it. It was giving false positives. And then the CDC also had kind of kept a monopoly to itself on testing and other people couldn`t develop their own tests. So when that test didn`t work, we were kind of out of luck.
So now they`re letting other places develop their own test. But it hasn`t been deployed quickly enough. They`re shipping out thousands of tests, and that`s fine. The CDC is finally starting to send them out across the country, but there`s a huge bottleneck still. So the key thing is that as of today, if you are a random doctor somewhere who has a patient presenting symptoms, and you think this person might have coronavirus, it`s very hard as of today to get them tested for it.
The CDC has also not told us how much they are testing, which I think is weird, particularly because of the beginning of the crisis, the CDC was telling us how many tests they`re running a day, and then they just took that number off their Web site. And so it was left up to news organizations to try to track down the numbers of how many tests have been run. And get this, it`s less than 2,000 tests in the entire country, OK.
So today, these two great reporters at the Atlantic did a lot of like shoe- leather reporting where they reported the following. We can only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, less than 2,000 people. For context, in South Korea, more than 66,000 people were tested within the first week of the first case of community transmission. South Korea is now testing 10,000 people a day.
The worst of the outbreak in the U.S., of course, been centered around Seattle, Washington. We have 14 people have died in that state so far. And a spokesperson for the Seattle told Yahoo News that only 100 people have been tested in an area that`s inhabited by 3.4 million people. And somehow now, even now, even two weeks after a senior city official warned that we need to prepare for disruption, we still have reports as of today, there is limited testing capacity in the places on the front line of this app epidemic from Washington to California.
Here`s a headline of the La Times today. Look at this. Chaos at hospitals due to shortage of Coronavirus tests. And the article quotes one California doctor explaining how people working the E.R. exposed to the virus cannot get tested. Quoting him here. "The doctor said another suspected coronavirus patient was a transplant nurse whose job is to work with immune deficient patients. I said, come on, please, we need to test her."
And if you want to get a sense of why this is so dangerous, it`s worth taking a moment to take another -- a look at another famous disaster. And I want to be clear here before this section of monologue that the stakes of that disaster much, much higher, a much bigger disaster, much greater scale of devastation and misery.
But the thing is, there`s a lot to learn from sudden disasters, whether that`s the challenger launch decision, or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or the financial crisis, or in this case, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. And one of the most disastrous things that happened in Chernobyl is when the accident first happened, people all through the chain of command, good people, smart, skilled people, they didn`t want to believe it was as big a deal as it was.
Nobody wanted to suggest things might be even worse than everyone thought. And they brought out their tools to measure the levels of radiation. And the radiation detector said it was 3.6 Roentgen per hour, OK. Now, Roentgen per hour is how you measure radiation levels and they thought, ah, not great, but not terrible, at the high end but not terrible.
Here`s the problem. The tool that we`re using to test radiation only went up to 3.6. It`s a true story. They were maxing out. The tool they were using to measure the scope of the problem is insufficient. And later on, when they brought out military-grade equipment, the real measurement was 15,000 Roentgen per hour. They were off by a factor of somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,500 to 5,000. That`s why measurement matters.
And here`s the thing. We have already seen a version of this in the U.S. with Trump`s leadership in a time of crisis. Do you remember back in September 2017, of course, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. And in the aftermath of that storm, there was a kind of complete disconnect between what was being presented as the scope of the problem and the actual scope of the problem.
And day by day became clearer and clearer the Trump administration`s response and the Puerto Rican government`s response, were both totally inadequate, right? People did not have drinking water, they didn`t have a place to sleep, there was no electricity. There were many, many elderly people who were not getting needed medical care like dialysis.
And then President Trump flew down to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria to assess the damage. And he sat there and he took a victory lap over the death toll in Puerto Rico, and how low it was compared to Hurricane Katrina.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Every death is a horror but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with really a storm that was just totally overpowering. Nobody`s ever seen anything like this. What is your -- what is your death count as of this moment, 17?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 16 certified.
TRUMP: 16 people certified 16 people versus in the thousands.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Right, what`s your death count, 16, 16 certified. Except that number was wrong, of course. The number was the equivalent to 3.6 Roentgen. It was only what they had measured. Almost a year later, once researchers went into the island and they look at the death toll, we learned it was 3,000 people not 16. But Trump got away with it politically.
That`s the lesson that he learned from Puerto Rico because we did not find out the 3,000 excess deaths number until it was off the front page and after the cameras were gone, and he never paid a political price for it. There was never any commission or Goldstar inquiry. There was never any systematic investigation to what went wrong. It`s just Donald Trump saying Puerto Rico is a great success story and he`s applauded by Republican members of Congress at the State of the Union.
So the President faked his way through it by mismeasuring the crisis on the front side, and got on the backside with pure BS. And that is very much what it looks like he`s doing right now. So here he is today. He`s signing $8.3 billion spending bill to fight coronavirus and he`s wearing the same costume he wore when he went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria weirdly why, he`s in the White House.
He`s bragging that he got $8 billion when he only asked for two and that the coronavirus came out of nowhere. And in the middle all this, he`s joking with reporters and tossing is pen to them. Just like you toss those paper towels to the people of Puerto Rico And if you`re concerned at all about what his priorities are, then listen to him at the CDC today. He is talking about what to do with a cruise ship off the coast of California right now that is filled with Americans, thousands of them, who have been exposed to the coronavirus.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: They would like to have the people come off. I`d rather that the people stay but I go with them. I know them to make the final decision. I would rather because I liked the numbers being where they are. I don`t need to have the numbers doubled because of one ship. That was our fault. I liked the numbers -- I would rather have the numbers stay where they are.
But if they want to take them off, they`ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 will be a higher number.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Yes, that -- you heard what you just heard. He`s saying that his preference in defiance of the experts is that the sick Americans stay marooned on the boat because he doesn`t want the numbers going up for him, which is the perfect example of him do it again. All he cares about are the numbers, not the actual problem.
He went into Puerto Rico and he said 16 people died. And now here he is saying keep them on the boat. So my coronavirus numbers don`t go up. I want to keep them where they are. Shortly after we learned two things. One, Vice President Mike Pence announced he plans on taking those Americans off the ship and two, there are 21 people infected with the coronavirus on that cruise ship. And in this way, in this one way, viruses like radiation, you can`t see it, it`s going to go where it`s going to go.
But we can properly deal with this. We can reduce transmission, we can take the proper steps. This is not going to be World War Z. There is nothing to panic over or lose sleep over personally. It is actually the truth. You`ve heard this administration is true that more people will die this year of the common flu than this virus almost certainly.
But, but, but, OK, in order to keep the outbreak manageable, we have to measure it properly because you cannot spin a virus. Other countries like China learn that early on. But spinning is all our President knows. And this is what happens when you elect a B.S. artist in the most important job in the country. He has BS-ed his way through his entire career. He has BS- ed his way through the crisis, and he is trying to B.S. his way through this one. And so here we are.
I want to bring in Dr. James Hamblin, a staff writer at the Atlantic and Dr. Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. Give them a hand.
Doctor Hamblin, I`ll start with you. Your colleagues at the Atlantic, you write the Atlantic, you wrote a great piece saying you will probably get the coronavirus. Your colleagues had an incredible bit of reporting about the total testing capacity. How big a problem is it? How far behind are?
JAMES HAMBLIN, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: We`re extremely far behind. The basics of containing any disease but this one is you have to be able to identify it. If you`re going to separate people and prevent spread, you have to first people to know what a case looks like, predict its progression, see where it`s going, trace contacts, and isolate people for a small amount of time, and then get them back out into society working and being productive.
And without that, if you can`t do that, the only option is to shut things down. And that`s the direction that we`re moving.
HAYES: Well, it seems to me that there was -- I saw a computational paper today that was published that looked at Italy, OK. And it looked at Italy - - people who traveled from Italy out to other countries and had the disease there, and it use that math to basically estimate that when Italy was saying it had 1,000 cases, it probably had 4,000.
So there`s a huge risk of us also spreading the virus, right, exporting it if we don`t have our hands on the number.
STEPHEN MORSE, PROFESSOR, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: I think that`s especially true that most of the people who are infected are not showing very severe disease. So we`re picking up those who are really at the tip of that pyramid, who are sick enough to get medical attention. And that, of course, is a small number compared to the much larger numbers when we test the population. They found that in Korea, and in other places.
And I`m an epidemiologist, so we rely on numbers. The only way we can understand what`s happening is by looking at those numbers. And we expect that for every severe case we see, that probably 14 or 15 percent, according to the China CDC of the total infected numbers that they were able to find -- excuse me -- to find in Chinese.
HAYES: So people with symptoms of in China, people with symptoms severe enough, they`re going to a doctor for medical care are one-fifth, one-sixth of the total case number according the Chinese?
MORSE: Maybe even -- maybe even less than that. Some modeling efforts have suggested that maybe they represent only about 10 percent in total.
HAYES: So the issue here too -- I mean, we saw -- we`re starting to see sort of big what`s called social distancing and mitigation policies. The University of Washington today which is 50,000 people across our campuses I think, they said, we`re canceling classes last two weeks, we`re going to have people remotely do classes. South by Southwest canceled for the first time in 34 years.
How does anyone -- I mean, how do you make that decision? What -- like, how do you make the cost-benefit analysis if you`re running the University of Wisconsin, or the University of Washington, or South by Southwest in this condition?
HAMBLIN: We are going into this pretty much -- pretty much blind. We don`t have enough data to make smart decisions. So when you don`t know how many cases are out there, how many -- how many cases are in the area, what exactly are the risks to everyone? You`re going to have to shut down the festival, you have to cancel these big events, you have to close your businesses because you can`t make the evidence-based call that you might be able to make if we had a handle on the data.
And we can be really strategic about our shutdowns and our travel restrictions. We can say exactly what the risks are of any given event, but we just don`t know right now.
HAYES: For people that are looking at this and saying, look, you know, there`s what, there`s 5,000 cases in Italy. It`s a country of 60 million people. You know, so maybe we get, I don`t know, maybe we get 5,000 cases here. 30,000 people die a year from the flu. There`s all kinds of risks we run in for time to get in the car. Like, what why is everyone -- why is the world so sort of obsessed with that? Explain that?
MORSE: Well, I think there`s several reasons. First of all, our history with these kinds of coronaviruses that originally come from bats actually has been pretty bad. We had SARS in 2003, and before that, you could hardly find anyone working on coronaviruses outside of the veterinary profession because they were animal, livestock disease, they weren`t really thought of as being serious human diseases.
SARS changed that whole equation, and that originated in a small bat that is sold in a lot of live animal markets in China, and probably elsewhere. At that time other people looked at the same species, tested the same species of bat, and found a number of related SARS-like coronaviruses. So we knew there were others out there. But until then nobody took it seriously. And we didn`t take it seriously then.
What wasn`t really factored into the equation, but nobody was really thinking about was the possibility that there could be a SARS-like coronavirus that actually spread from person to person, about like the flu, maybe a little more efficiently.
HAYES: Right, because such harsh transmission was much lower -- it was very deadly, it was really dangerous, but as much lower than the flu.
MORSE: It was almost entirely in healthcare settings. So it was the result of breaches and infection control procedure.
HAYES: And this gets us back to why governments are trying to take these extraordinary measures because when you look at someone posted today at the chart and they said it`s literally a textbook case of exponential growth, if you look at new cases outside China.
HAMBLIN: Right. And there`s this fatality rate which is right in an especially dangerous area too. And different experts put it at different levels between even just under one percent and is up to 3.4 percent according to the World Health Organization. But no matter which of those you take, if you extrapolate that to basic projections of spread that people have between 20, and 60, or 77 percent, depending on the containment strategies we use, you`re talking about many, many millions of people worse than a bad flu season.
HAYES: Do you think that`s going to happen?
HAMBLIN: I think that we need to know that this is a pathogen that has the capacity to do that if we don`t take it seriously. And we in this country, at least have not treated it that way thus far. Dr. James Hamlin and Dr. Stephen Morse, that was sobering but thank you for sharing your expertise. I really appreciate it.
MORSE: Thank you.
HAYES: Well, so while that`s happening, there`s also an election going on. And one week ago, this was the Democratic field, seven candidates. Now it`s down to two. Who knows what will be next week. We`ll talk about that next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: This has undoubtedly been the most consequential week for the Democratic presidential campaign so far without question. Just one week ago, Bernie Sanders was the front runner expected to emerge from Super Tuesday with the most delegates. Last week before the South Carolina primary, it was only a week ago, just a Saturday, the stats guru at FiveThirtyEight showed Sanders has the most likely candidate to win the nomination outright. Joe Biden had just a 16 percent chance of doing that. In fact, no one winning the majority was the prohibitive favorite before the convention.
And then Biden won that landslide election in South Carolina and as Super Tuesday approached, the odds that Biden would win the nomination shot up to 65 percent. And then came Biden`s big delegate hall on Tuesday. And look at this. FiveThirtyEight now has Biden with an 88 percent chance to win the nomination. That is up from just 16 percent a week ago.
So Biden is now the front runner, but I will say this, the other conclusion you can draw from all this is that things can change very quickly. Joining me now for an update on where things stand with each campaign. NBC News Political Reporter Shaquille Brewster who`s embedded with the Sanders campaign, and NBC News Senior Digital Reporter Alex Seitz-Wald who`s been on the trail with the Biden campaign. Good to have you both, gentlemen.
ALEX SEITZ-WALD, NBC NEWS SENIOR DIGITAL REPORTER: Thanks.
SHAQUILLE BREWSTER, NBC NEWS POLITICAL REPORTER: Good to be with you.
HAYES: Shaquille, you`ve been doing great reporting on the Sanders campaign throughout this whole campaign. There was a really upsetting moment in the campaign last night I just wanted to ask you about, in which an individual, apparently a fairly well-known neo-Nazi, unveil the swastika flag in the arena in which Bernie Sanders speaking. Of course, his father`s family was murdered by the Nazis.
He unveiled that flag, he might have said something, the crowd booed him. What was that like? What`s the reaction been like inside the campaign?
BREWSTER: I`ll tell you is a very weird moment. It was in Phoenix at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona last night. And you saw that video where the flag was unfurled there. And what really -- Senator Sanders first I`ll say, he did not see the flag. He was speaking, he was giving his speech, and the crowd started to see it, and they pointed up and they started booing. And once he turned around, the flag was already gone, and the man was being escorted out.
What you`re hearing from the Sanders campaign is one they`re emphasizing, he didn`t see it. He didn`t really know about it until he left the stage. When he was asked about it at a press conference today as he was leaving Phoenix, he called it a horrific event. He`s explained the idea that someone felt comfortable enough to go to a political rally of someone who would be the first Jewish President if elected and cause that kind of intimidation. So he wasn`t happy about that.
He gets protesters every once in a while. These are people who come with their Trump hats on or might have a Trump flag on. But this is definitely something a little bit different. And you can tell -- it`s something that the campaign really took seriously, as it is a serious incident.
HAYES: Alex, the Biden campaign is suddenly in a much better position than they were a week ago. Obviously, they know that. The money has been pouring in, in terms of fundraising, the endorsements have been pouring in. What do you think it means for their campaign strategy?
Because I think that it has been generally the perception among political professionals. They haven`t run a particularly aggressive campaign in terms of him doing events. It hasn`t been a main feature in terms of having field offices. He won five states he never campaigned in on Super Tuesday. Are they taking the lesson basically that, you know, we could -- we could just keep doing that?
SEITZ-WALD: Well, I think they have a lot more tools in their toolbox now than they did just a week ago. The money you mentioned, all these new endorsements, which they`re going to start deploying. One Biden ally told me it`s an -- it will be an overwhelming show of force.
They already have Amy Klobuchar going out to Michigan, you`ll see Beto O`Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Deval Patrick, other people now going out. All of whom are still, you know, pretty popular in the field. So they can now go back in and do the kind of, you know, one on one stuff of building field offices and running more ads.
But what they`re really feeling good about is that having the party kind of coalesce behind them. And the big piece of news that made them feel good was Bernie Sanders canceling an event in Mississippi to focus on Michigan. They view that as him kind of seething the South, seething African Americans in the south. And you know, that`s a big advantage for Joe Biden, obviously.
But the reason that it really matters is that the way the delegates system works in the Democratic Party. It`s awarded proportionally so margins matter. In 2016, there was a similar setup. Hillary Clinton won Mississippi overwhelmingly and she netted so that`s, you know, you take her delegates minus by Bernie`s, she netted 26 delegates.
In Michigan, Bernie Sanders won there, but he only netted four delegates. So they feel really good about this if Bernie Sanders essentially seething Michigan and other states with large African American populations to them.
HAYES: Shaquille, Bernie Sanders is doing an event I think right now in Detroit, if I`m not mistaken, or right around now.
BREWSTER: That`s right.
HAYES: How do you interpret the move to not go to Jackson, Mississippi where the mayor Chokwe Lumumba had actually endorsed Bernie Sanders, instead, go to Michigan, do multiple events in Michigan. How do you see it from the campaign`s perspective?
BREWSTER: It was definitely a shift in priority. I mean, it`s very clear this campaign is putting a lot of stock into what happens here in Michigan. And you see that with the surrogates that they`re sending in with the events that Senator Sanders added to his schedule. He`s going to be in Michigan through -- by the end of this weekend, he`s going to have five different events, rallies and town halls in Michigan. Those are events that are being lately added to his schedule.
So he is definitely escalating the stock and the value of what happens here in Michigan and he`s hoping for a performance that mirrors what happened in 2016. Alex was mentioning the delegate battle and how he won by about one point and he didn`t really net as many delegates. But the thing about Michigan in 2016 is also that it was a surprise win for Senator Sanders. Polling didn`t have him ahead in the days and weeks up to the primary.
So it was a surprise win for him. And he wants to have another win here. And that`s why you`re starting to hear these attacks come in, these attacks against Vice President Biden, specifically on the issue of trade. I just left Senator Sanders where he had this roundtable discussion talking with union leaders, talking with workers about the impact of trade deals like NAFTA. And he talked about Vice President Biden and his support of these trade agreements.
He`s leaning into that trade attack because he thinks that can be an opening and that can help him win here in Michigan just come on Tuesday.
HAYES: Alex, the latest national polling -- the first real big national polling after all of the folks in the race have dropped out it has Biden at 54 percent, Sanders at 38 percent, so sitting on a comfortable lead. I will note also today, we got the debate qualifications and officially will be the first one on one debate of this cycle. It`s on March 15th. It will be between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
And I wonder how the Biden people are thinking of that, because that has not been a super -- it has not been his campaign strength debating thus far.
SEITZ-WALD: No, certainly not. I mean, he`s gotten better, I think recently. But he`s even acknowledged that these are not his favorite events at all. And Bernie Sanders is a pretty good debater in general. But, you know, I think what they`re going to try to do is turn this as much as they`re having this incoming on trade and other issues with Bernie Sanders, they`re going to try to turn this to the one issue that has been more important than all others for Democrats, and that`s Donald Trump, and how you can beat him.
And they kind of view, I think, the Super Tuesday results as Democratic voters being, you know, tired by these years of chaos in Washington by this long primary system. Once they were told, this is the guy who were going to put up to beat Donald Trump, vote for him. If they can make it as much about that as possible and continue to ride that advantage that they have in the polls on electability, that`s what they would like to have it.
I will say, though, this is the same Joe Biden that the party did not consolidate around for more than a year. They knew him. He still has all the liabilities, all of the weaknesses. He happened to have a really good 72 hours right when he needed it, but we`ll have to see if that will continue on the debate stage going forward.
HAYES: All right, Alex Seitz-Wald, Quille Brewster (ph), both doing fantastic reporting. Thank you gentlemen both.
Up next, we have breaking news just a few minutes ago. Mick Mulvaney is out as acting chief of staff -- yes, yes, surprising. Republican congressman -- well, I would hold off on the applause until you hear the replacement. Republican Congressman Mark Meadows is in. And we`ll talk about that next. Don`t go anywhere.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Breaking news here on the live show just in the last few minutes we got some breaking news that thanks to a series of tweets from the president, his acting chief of staff, always acting, but acting for a long time, Mick Mulvaney, who only held the position for just over a year, is out. He is being replaced by Republican Congressman Mark Meadows.
Here to talk more about this NBC News senior business correspondent, anchor of MSNBC Live at 9:00 a.m. weekdays, Stephanie Ruhle.
(APPLAUSE)
HAYES: Well, this was sudden, but this says to me they`re worried.
STEPHANIE RUHLE, NBC NEWS SENIOR BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Without a doubt.
Remember, Mick Mulvaney, this has been chattered about for months. This has been in the works, Mick Mulvaney sort of was eying -- he hoped to get a cabinet position.
But think what the president has done in the last two weeks around Corona, the communication, from it`s a hoax, it`s air tight, but today specifically at the CDC, for many people have said this is the tipping point, this is the most awful. And Mick Mulvaney, as the acting chief of staff, has been the one saying Mr. President you cannot say this. Mr. President, this is what needs to happen. And over time you know from people who have already left the White House -- I just spoke to a former senior administration official that said when you are the guy telling the president the truth he gets angrier and angrier and angrier and then he shows you the door.
HAYES: Today felt by the way, Mick Mulvaney is being sent to Northern Ireland where he`ll be special envoy. So, good luck, Northern Ireland.
Today felt -- we`ve had two weeks of this, right? So, we`ve had unbelievable turmoil in the markets, huge volatility, huge sell-offs. Today felt different to me. Equities markets and credit markets and oil markets all taking a bath.
RUHLE: After a great jobs number and record low unemployment.
HAYES: Right, after a great jobs number. And it seems to me that increasingly global financial markets are just pricing in that there is going to be an enormous impact on this and the White House is focused solely on the numbers and not the problem.
RUHLE: Which is what`s making the numbers go down even more.
HAYES: Exactly.
RUHLE: At any other time in history when faced with a world crisis, whether you`re talking the financial crisis, SARS, Ebola, say what you will about the elected officials, everybody gets in a room -- business leaders and government leaders -- and says, how do we solve this? Safety first.
Right now, you tell me, who`s the grownup in the room in the White House who can pick up a phone and say, here`s what things really look like, here`s what we`re going to do? Is it going to be Steve Mnuchin who has said in the past that President Trump has perfect genes? Is it going to be Larry Kudlow, who has said over and over buy the dip. This thing is air tight. We have got it covered.
HAYES: Today he had said we have it pretty well -- he went on business television today and said we have it pretty well contained.
RUHLE: The president said we`re going to do well financially because people are canceling vacations overseas and going on vacation here.
Or is your choice Jared and Ivanka? If you have to make decisions for thousands of employees, who are you going to trust? You`re going to err on the side of super caution because lives matter.
HAYES: There`s also a kind of interesting sociology of Wall Street to me. And there are people that are in finance that are sources of mine that I have, you know, report on the financial crisis...
RUHLE: Hold on, Chris Hayes is friends with people who work on Wall Street. What? What? You just lost half your viewership.
HAYES: That`s not true. I am a journalist. I have sources and friends there, one of whom is watching this and laughing right now.
But...
RUHLE: Does that person admit to being friends with you when they`re at work?
HAYES: Yes.
RUHLE: Really?
HAYES: I think he gets a hard time for it.
But the sociology of Wall Street is interesting, because I think there was a lot of like Trump, this guy is a clown. And then it was like, oh, we like the estate tax and we like the tax cuts, and we like the Dow going over 30,000. And, hey, make it rain.
And now you`re seeing those same people be like, oh, wait maybe he isn`t up to this. Is that fair?
RUHLE: More than fair. And guess what, it`s infuriating the president, because they`ll take his tax cut because it works for them. But right now when he`s saying you`re my boys, let`s tighten this up they`re selling no way.
HAYES: No, we`re selling.
RUHLE: They have a completely different time horizon than the president does. They can see very well he`s focused on the economy and how does he pump markets up to get himself through November? They have got a way different time horizon.
And think about it this way, if you`re the CEO of a company, you`re not getting fired over Corona. It`s into the your fault. So, you want to be extra safe.
And what`s more important and more disturbing, this is a perfect time to remember that the markets are not the economy. And poor and working class people are going to be disproportionately hurt by the impact of all that`s going on and the president hasn`t even acknowledged that.
HAYES: It`s a great point. I mean, there are lots of people that don`t have paid sick leave. There are lots of places that maybe facing school closures and don`t have child care. And when you cancel an event like -- you know, when you cancel big events, right, there are people at the top who are in trouble, but there are tons of people down at the bottom that are going to get screwed.
RUHLE: The people on top aren`t really in trouble. They have got insurance. Think about...
HAYES: Good point.
RUHLE: ...all the people below -- even when you talk about school closures, there are millions of kids in this country dependent on free school lunch, free school breakfast. You think school is 9 to 3, it`s 7 to 5 for working families and there`s no plan for that.
HAYES: What -- I mean, this next question is crazy so maybe it`s dumb to ask, but like what could they do? Like, the problem to me is that the existential core of who the president is makes him incapable of dealing with the crisis, and the markets recognize that. So, when he goes out to CDC today and he says Jay Inslee is a snake, and -- he said that, literally...
RUHLE: Keep him on the boat, I`m...
HAYES: Keep him on the boat because the last thing I need is my numbers doubling. Like if you`re watching that, if you -- you`ve got to be thinking like this is going to get much worse.
RUHLE: Without a doubt. And what`s so scary is what if you were seeing the precautionary measures being more than we need, right? What if the measures they`re taking are so extreme, and those extreme measures end up tipping us into a recession when we don`t need to be, but you have to, because you have to err on the side of caution.
HAYES: This point is so important, you know, there`s been -- there`s all sorts of theories of business recycles and recessions through the years, and exogenous supply shocks, the sort of psychology of manias, panics, and crashes and canes (ph). One of the things we know is that like psychology can affect the real economy, right, that essentially when you have panics, when people are selling, you can actually find yourself in a sort of self- fulfilling prophecy.
RUHLE: OK, but you`ve hit the best thing, because our economy has been very fragile for the last few years, but the president is an amazing salesman.
HAYES: Right.
RUHLE: And it wasn`t that corporate profitability was way up. Consumer confidence has been up. The president has sold this economy and people are out there spending. People are not going to spend. What did we see this week? Not just a rate cut, an emergency rate cut.
Given what`s going on, you may have expected when the fed meets in two weeks, we`re going to get a rate cut. An emergency rate cut? That happens when the financial crisis happens, after 9/11.
And what does a rate cut do? Does that get you to want to go out and buy a house or start a business? The recommendations around Corona are stay home. Hunker down. No one`s out there spending.
I mean Jason Furman, who was a former economic advisor to Obama, put out a piece in the Wall Street Journal today suggesting, Andrew Yang style, cut a check for $1,000 to every American.
HAYES: Yeah, fiscal stimulus.
And I think they`ll be on the Hill within a few weeks asking for that.
Although, Meadows -- I wonder what role Meadows plays in that, because the smart thing to do would be go to Democrats and say let`s do a fiscal stimulus bill now, but at least theoretically that would be ideologically antithetical to him.
RUHLE: Mark Meadows is an original Freedom Caucus homeboy. I mean, he is true fiscal conservative. There`s no spending in his dojo. And look at the position he`s in.
HAYES: We will see. That will be tested. I`m curious to see if that ideological commitment lasts through the month.
Stephenie Ruhle, thank you so much. That was fantastic.
RUHLE: Thank you.
HAYES: Still ahead, there`s only one way to win the Democratic nomination and that is with the support of black Democrats, but that`s not a sure thing for either candidate. We`ll tell you why coming up.
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HAYES: It is so good to be back home here in Rockefeller Center tonight. We started this week 3,000 miles away in California on the eve of Super Tuesday. That was super fun. We had plans to be on the road again next week, those plans have changed. And so on Monday we`re going to be right back here in studio 6A for another live show.
This Monday, March 9, tickets are available right now. Head to MSNBC.com/allinlive to grab yours, like these people did and come join us. Hope to see you here on Monday. We will be back with much more right after this.
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HAYES: Without the overwhelming support of black voters across Super Tuesday states and South Carolina there is no way that Joe Biden would be the Democratic front-runner today. According to NBC News exit polls for 12 Super Tuesday states, 55 percent of black voters backed Joe Biden compared to 18 percent who opted for Senator Bernie Sanders.
And all of those results and the turn around in Joe Biden`s fortunes have occasion to sort of fascinating conversation about the complexities and diversity of what is so often referred to as the, quote, black vote.
To talk about the role that black voters play in the Democratic coalition, please welcome Eddie Glaude, professor at Princeton University; Tara Dowdell, Democratic consultant and strategist; and Dorian Warren, president of Community Change, a national organization that empowers low income people of color.
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HAYES: I mean, the one thing that seems indubitably true about the trajectory of the last week is that black South Carolina voters saved Joe Biden`s nomination and candidacy and turned it around and then catapulted him to front-runner status. What is your understanding of what we see...
DORIAN WARREN, PRESIDENT, COMMUNITY CHANGE: So, I think multiple things can be true at the same time. So, one is I think black voters are strategic voters and always have been, and vote out of lived experience and , by the way, high information, lots of information.
And so actually if you dig a little deeper into the numbers I think those black voters voted for Biden in the south because they actually have the lived experience of living under authoritarianism called Jim Crow. There`s historical memory of that. And they want to defeat Trump.
Now, if you dig into the numbers, who is the number two choice? Bernie Sanders. So, it`s not like there`s a disagreement around the vision, or the critique of oligarchy or the rigged rules of our democracy and society that black voters have around Bernie, but I think in those cases black voters made a strategic decision.
HAYES: One of the things I`ve seen a lot of people writing about is Sanders I think got caught napping in diversifying his coalition back in 2016, so he got hammered among black voters. He was a guy from the state of Vermont, which is overwhelmingly white state, but made real efforts in the last four years. It wasn`t like they didn`t recognize what was up, like they were -- they knew that they had to do better among black voters. They put money and effort into organizing into that.
The numbers are essentially the same that they were in 2016. And one of the things I saw a few people write about is that a tax on the establishment from Bernie Sanders ring differently, particularly among black southern voters who see the local Democratic Party in far more positive terms than some of the people with Sanders. I wonder what you think of that.
TARA DOWDELL, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Well, I think first of all it`s complicated, right, and I think Dorian raised some really excellent points about this. But I do think when people make these attacks on the establishment the core voting base of the Democratic Party is black voters. So people are in fact I think hearing something different.
But I think it`s more than that, though, with respect to Joe Biden, I think the Obama factor has been talked about, but not in the right way. It wasn`t just that Joe Biden was Obama`s vice president, but if you`re an older black voter and you have the lived experience that Dorian referenced, Joe Biden not only served as the vice president, but he was loyal but more than just loyal, he had Obama`s back. And I think a lot of black voters -- and I think a lot of black voters -- remember her came -- Joe Biden came to the table with more experience in terms of politics than Obama had, right?
HAYES: Of course, yeah.
DOWDELL: And so if you`re a black voter you`ve had this experience where you`ve trained a white person that worked under you and seen that person go above you, right? These are the lived experiences. And so I think when it comes to Joe Biden I think he`s given a lot of credit -- and people can argue whether he should be -- because he had his back, he stood by him, he did not try to undermine him.
And as black Americans in this country, I run a small business. I have the experience of working even in politics where people have tried to undermine me within my own party on campaigns.
HAYES: Eddie, I think your politics, your sort of vision of the world, are in the sort of left part of the -- would you say -- of the Democratic Party coalition.
EDDIE GLAUDE, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Very much so.
HAYES: And I think you`re, you know, probably consider yourself a social democrat or, you know -- how do you see this? How do you see this as someone who -- if you had to choose your policy vision it would probably be closer to Bernie Sanders.
GLAUDE: Right. So, you know, I want to just begin by insisting on what we`ve basically -- we`ve come t o -- we`ve agreed to, that black voters are complicated, that we range across the ideological spectrum, and oftentimes because of the way in which white supremacy functions in this country we`re kind of collapsed into this undifferentiated sameness, so just because you`re black, so just because you`re black you seem -- you all have to have the same interests.
We describe James Clyburn as if he just blew a whistle and all the black folk in South Carolina just got in line as opposed to thinking about James Clyburn as a very savvy political actor with a very elaborate political machine in South Carolina.
HAYES: Although, I will also say, I mean like Amy Klobuchar endorsed Joe Biden and the white Democratic voters in Minnesota went right to Joe Biden.
GLAUDE: But I want to say is what we do is we tend to read voters in the way in which they`re following people when in fact they might be making very, very interesting and very nuanced decisions, right.
It could very well be the case that since South Carolina, and even before South Carolina, the electorate has been kind of swamped with fear and panic, right? If we elect Bernie Sanders, if we nominate Bernie Sanders, we`re going to re-elect Donald Trump, the country is going to go to hell. We heard all of this from Mike Bloomberg`s campaign. If you nominate Bernie Sanders, down ballot we`re going to lose all these candidates. We`re going to lose the house. We`re going to lose -- Nancy Pelosi is going to lose her gavel.
So there was a kind of politics of fear and in some ways inducing a panic among the electorate that I think white voters, white working class voters, black voters, young voters, a lot of folk are making those decisions.
And so -- now let`s say this, again, before folks come at me on Twitter, it`s also the case that some folk just simply agree with Biden.
HAYES: That`s the -- OK, but this gets to my point that I think we don`t talk about enough. First of all, there`s generational division, so even in South Carolina, right, where Sanders got his butt kicked among black voters as a whole, he won black voters under 30, right. So, there`s something going on there generationally.
And the second thing is that, look, white people in America have two parties to choose from and between those two parties to choose from. And they -- between those two parties, they sort in all kinds of ways, so people that are college -- post-graduate atheists who live in metro areas, those are democrats. And people that are rural and go to church every week and are high school graduates most likely Republican.
For black voters in those two categories they`re both going to be in the Democratic Party, because there`s only one party they can be a part of because of the nature of structural white supremacy in America and the political coalition. So you`ve got a broader range of black lived experience among African-American voters in the party than you do in some ways the white voters.
WARREN: Well, Eddie and I were talking about this actually in the green room, this concept of captured voters from his colleague at Princeton, Paul Feimer (ph), that argues that black voters are captured in the Democratic Party because the Republican Party is not an option. It`s not a viable option.
HAYES: Right, exactly.
WARREN: And so then the primary -- the stakes become high in the primary season because that is the moment when there`s an option. I would argue that part of this discussion -- the frustrating part, I`m not blaming you, Chris, because it starts with electoral politics. And from where I sit in terms of movement politics that is the conversation we should be having is what -- because some of us are going to be here after election day organizing people and having conversations, getting them to hold the president accountable. We should have learned some lessons of the Obama administration of how you don`t go home after election day, right, you have to keep the pressure on the matter whoever the nominee is.
So, I would say people should their conscience, people should vote for whom they want. I believe black voters and brown voters are going to come together after the primary and support the nominee, but that`s not the end of the story. If you want actual radical transformative change you`ve got to show up after election day, too.
DOWDELL: And that`s what the Tea Party understood...
HAYES: It`s a great point.
DOWDELL: ...because they pushed the Republican Party in a way that changed the Republican Party. I mean, granted a lot of the issues that the Republican Party had were there before, but they pushed them in a way that allowed the creation of Trump.
But I want to make one point about it, I think voters do agree with Biden, because if you look at the polling, there are voters that do support him and agree with him just because they do. I think the mistake that I see the Bernie Sanders coalition making is the assumption that if you don`t agree with Bernie somehow it`s because you`re a corporate Democrat when you just might be a moderate. That exists in the party.
HAYES: Those people exist.
DOWDELL: They exist. And if you look at the polling The Hill did, Obama is actually considered the most representative of Democratic politicians.
Now, people may -- you may not like that if you support Bernie, but that`s the truth of the matter, and that was Obama`s vice president.
GLAUDE: Final thought really quickly, it`s ironic to me, and this is not about characterizing what every day ordinary black folk should be doing, this is just my political position, it`s ironic that black folk will provide cover for the moderate conservative wing of the Democratic Party, the very folk who used triangulation to pass welfare reform, to pass the crime bill. The very folk whenever the general election comes they bank right and they take black vote for granted.
I don`t give a damn if Joe Biden knows us, I want to know what the policies are. I don`t want empathy, I don`t want folk hugging me, I want policy, policy, policy.
HAYES: All right, Eddie Glaude, Tara Dowdell, Dorian Warren, thank you. That was a fantastic discussion.
That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now with Ali Velshi in for Rachel.
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