ARI MELBER, MSNBC HOST: -- a bit of a response from some of this. But that`s a product of the work done, not a reason to stop working. I want to thank both of our doctors and Mr. Raines. I appreciate it. That does it for me. I will be back here along with Brian Williams in the 7:00 p.m. Eastern hour tomorrow. But don`t go anywhere, Chris Hayes starts now.
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes as we enter yet another week of staying at home, the Coronavirus pandemic has now taken the lives of nearly 42,000 Americans. It`s been over a month of social distancing, six weeks in some places, and so it is extremely understandable. And I say this as a personal expression of how I feel that people are eager to get back to some kind of normal.
And while there really is some encouraging news out in New York, where the one-day death toll fell below 500 for the first time since April 2nd, there is still a long, long way to go. And yet the President has embarked on this, I think, quite cynical and calculate a strategy to talk about the future of the country totally reopen. There`s going to be restaurants that are crowded and college football stadiums Alabama are going to be full. And the messages were passed the worst of it already. We`re over the hump. We`re going to get back to it.
But if you`re thinking in the long term, and it brings me zero joy to say this, the reality is we are early in the parts of battling pandemic. Today alone, today, we lost more than 1,300 Americans, the ones we counted. This remains a four-alarm fire, not time to discuss what kind of redecorating we`re going to do in the house when it`s all burned through.
And according to the head of the World Health Organization, unless the world can work together, things are going to get worse before they get better.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS, DIRECTOR-GENERAL, UNITED STATES: Without national unity and global solidarity, trust us, the worst is yet ahead of us.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: The worst is ahead of us. Even if we`re able to open up in small ways in the next few weeks, we will have to go back to staying at home if cases spike. And this desire to look past the present ignores the fact that there`s a crisis every hour every minute in American life right now.
And look at these headlines. This is just in the last 24 hours. There`s a state prison in Ohio where 73 percent, 73 percent of inmates have tested positive. 1,828 confirmed cases among inmates at that one prison alone. We think it`s the largest cluster in America. Prison advocates have been talking about this for weeks that this is going to happen.
In New Jersey, there are 425 outbreaks just at nursing homes. In Michigan, the devastating news of a five-year-old girl succumbing to the virus. There are just so many stories of the horror and the anguish this virus continues to inflict on us every single day.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ASHLEY WAY, REGISTERED NURSE, MOUNT SINAI: We ended up getting a patient in a room that -- I mean, she was basically dying. She was very unstable. We were too worried to move her upstairs because -- sorry. We were afraid that she would die in the hallway.
So they set up -- Mount Sinai has Zoom set up to where they can bring in iPads in the room. And they get the family on the phones to make a phone call to say their goodbyes over Zoom because we`re not allowed to have any visitors right now.
So I would say that was probably my (INAUDIBLE) because I`ve never had seen anything like that ever.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: That`s the reality of right now. Not a few weeks from now, right now. And every day we are seeing the federal government`s failures in addressing massive shortfalls when it comes to testing and personal protective equipment. We are also hearing more and more stories of how the federal government and Trump ministration, it`s not just not helping, actively harming state and local efforts to procure those goods.
On Friday, the New England Journal of Medicine published this remarkable letter. It`s from a Massachusetts health care executive, a guy by the name of Dr. Andrew Artenstein, who has been desperate to get personal protective equipment for his healthcare system. And after seeing a number of deals fall through, he arranged for a shipment of masks at five times a normal cost.
He said two semi-trailer trucks cleverly marked as food service vehicles to an industrial warehouse near a small airport to pick them up because he was worried the feds might try to seize them out from under him. And the plan was have the trucks take distinct routes away from the warehouse to minimize the chances that the entire shipment would be commandeered by the feds.
And yet when they got to the warehouse, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, show their badges and started questioning me. No, the shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents check my credentials. I tried to convince them the shipment of personal protective equipment was bound for hospitals.
The FBI eventually allowed the trucks to be loaded up but the doctor later discovered the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting the shipment. "Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure."
This is the reality of now. This is what the people on the frontlines are dealing with. It`s why Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker arranged secret flights from China to bring millions of masks and gloves to his state. Why Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland and his wife embarked on what he called the confident project to get coronavirus tests from South Korea. Governors, as well as hospitals and healthcare systems, are actually having to keep the feds from finding out what they`re getting for fear will get hijacked.
And here`s the thing, these tests and this protective equipment that hospital execs and governors are trying to acquire, it`s not just stuff we need for a short period of time during a surge of use like ventilators, right, which are needed when a city or localities overwhelmed by a health care system. No. These things, tests, personal protective equipment, they have to be a huge part of our lives the foreseeable future if we want to get this nation back to something that looks approximately like normal.
Here with me now, one of the governors who`s been fighting to get protective equipment for her state, Democratic Governor Kate Brown of Oregon. Governor, can you talk -- I mean, you in Oregon and Washington, I think there`s been a lot of press about the job that you`ve done there. A place That looked like it could have had a really, really severe early outbreak. Because of the strong steps, I think, taken by yourself and Governor Inslee and others local leaders, it has not been what we see in New York.
And yet now as you sort of envision the future, talk about what you need, what your state needs, if you`re going to start thinking about some sort of reopening.
GOV. KATE BROWN (D-OR): Thank you, Chris. I really appreciate the question. In Oregon, we took early and aggressive measures to protect our people, measures to socially distance and close down parts of the economy. And as a result, we`re starting to bend the curve, but we are not getting the supplies and testing equipment that we need.
States that did not take aggressive action are getting more help from the federal government. So for those states that did the right thing and made really, really difficult choices, it feels very punitive.
HAYES: The President has said and insisted multiple times and insisted again today that there`s adequate testing, that governors like yourself literally just don`t understand what`s going on, that you haven`t read the proper documentation, that you don`t know where the labs are, and that essentially you`re just complaining without understanding that actually there are plenty of tests for you. Is that true?
BROWN: Dr. Birx, Deborah Birx told us today that Oregon is one of a handful of states that has the lowing -- lowest testing capacity in the entire country. So even by their own information, they know we don`t have the test that we need.
And we are very interested in reopening. We have rural communities that have shuttered their businesses to protect their people. And we want to get these small businesses up and running. But we need both additional personal protective equipment and we need additional testing capacity. That`s what the very -- that`s what the federal government told us this morning.
HAYES: Have you found yourself in competition or in these kinds of crazy situations in trying to acquire PPE, particularly, as people talk about, you know, some kind of reopening, there`s going to be a lot of that needed, right? I mean, places that didn`t used to have personal protective equipment, obviously, if they`re, you know, running a grocery store, all kinds of venues are going to have to need it now to protect their workers. And that`s going to have to be secured somehow. Like, how are you finding that process?
BROWN: Absolutely. We`re all in this together. And I`ve been really clear. We`ve been working hard to collect PPE from around the state. Generous dentist`s office, medical clinics have donated their personal protective equipment, masks, gloves and gowns so that we could use them where it`s most needed on the front lines in Oregon.
We have been working to conserve our PPE. But we`re also working to both produce it and to procure it. We have a team that`s very aggressive both working with national and international companies to get us the supplies that we need.
And what I love most is the creativity and ingenuity of Oregon companies, big companies like Nike and Intel working to produce personal protective equipment. And then little companies like the Renewal Workshop Project in Cascade Locks, working to create PPE. We even have our adults in custody in the Department of Corrections making masks.
All of this is a collective effort. We`re going to need it obviously in the ground -- on the ground here in Oregon. But if we have enough here, then we`ll be able to send it to other states and then maybe to other countries. This is truly a global challenge. And we all have to work together to solve these problems.
HAYES: Final question to you. You have entered into this kind of pact with California and Washington to coordinate kind of phased reopening or ending the strictest part of lockdowns. And it strikes me, there`s news out of Georgia today, Brian Kemp is lifting restrictions on places like nail salons and bowling alleys and gyms.
As a governor, you know, if you`re -- if you have a neighboring state that were to do that, what would that mean for you given the fact that the virus has no idea which state line it is in at a given time?
BROWN: That`s absolutely right. This virus knows no state boundaries, and it knows no international boundaries. And that`s why I texted my colleague Governor Newsome and Governor Inslee early on to say, can we coordinate and align our work around opening up our states? We have a shared framework. It`s going to be individual steps for our states.
But I am working hard to coordinate with our business community, for example, our restaurants, and our personal services, our hair salons, to get their advice about how we do this, and protect their clients and their customers from the virus.
And it`s great to be doing this from a regional perspective. And we`re all in this together. We need to be making shared sacrifices, and we need to be sharing best practices.
HAYES: All right, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon, thank you for taking a bit of time with us tonight. I really appreciate it.
BROWN: Thank you. Take good care. Be safe.
HAYES: I`m trying. I want to turn now to one of the best science journals in the country, Laurie Garrett Pulitzer Prize Winner, columnist for Foreign Policy, who has been tracking and covering this virus at the beginning. She joins me now by phone. Laurie, I want to start with this idea of like where we are in this trajectory. And I genuinely hate coming on the show, to say to people like we`re a long way away, there`s a long way to go. But I do worry that a gap has opened up between the expectations being set by the White House and by some political leadership and what public health experts and epidemiologists are saying about where we are in this.
LAURIE GARRETT, COLUMNIST, FOREIGN POLICY: Well, Chris, first of all, apologies for not being on camera, and happy to be back with you. Yes, we have a very long way to go. And you know, everybody`s event horizon that they`re looking at right now is just, when can I get out of my apartment? When can I go to a football game? But the event horizon that`s real in terms of this virus is two years, three years, way down the road.
And look at what`s happening now in China. A whole second giant epidemic is emerging in the far north near the Russian border. We see a resurgence of virus, after everything proper was done in Singapore, in Japan. We have to be very, very careful how we approach all this and understand that we can`t simply test our way out of this pandemic.
We`ll never have enough test kits. Nobody is using them properly. Many are inadequate in terms of their design and function. And honestly, we need smart testing and nobody`s really talking about that.
HAYES: Well, I want to follow up on that I -- if there`s any basket that I think we are all tempted to put our eggs in, it is the testing basket, the tests are way out of the crisis. So it`s somewhat deflating to hear you say the sentence, we can`t test our way out of this. So please explain.
GARRETT: Well, first of all, a lot of employers who contacted me and they think that literally they Going to be able to test all of their employees say, you know, a million workers spread out over 12 countries and know who`s infected and let the ones that aren`t infected come back to work.
But they have to understand you test them Monday, but they`ll be infected on Thursday. So are you going to test every single employee every single day? Similarly, kids going back to school? Are you going to test every single school child every single day? Where are those tests kits going to come from? Who`s going to manufacture them? And who`s going to do quality control and regulate to make sure they really are what they claim to be as test chips.
What we need to be doing is a smart testing, really guided by scientific principles where we target -- we ask the right policy question and come up with a way to answer the question with appropriate targeting.
So for example, let`s say you run a big automobile plant in Detroit, and you want to know, can I -- is it safe for me to let my workers back. We`re not going to be able to test every single worker today, but you might be able to set up a cohort of a representative sampling of your workforce and test them on a regular basis. And similarly, school trips. You might be able to say, what`s the rate in 12-year-olds in New Orleans today?
HAYES: That`s a great -- a great point. And it sort of contrasts a little bit with this, the news out of Georgia today, right? So the idea of like, this has to be very thought through, there has to be the sort of procedures. You know, Brian Kemp, Georgia governor today lifting some restrictions, including things like nail salons, massage therapists, bowling alleys, which seems to me like I don`t know, that seems like going to be tough to do that in a safe way.
And then on top of that, which I find so bizarre and strange is then issuing these guidelines about how you have to reopen. But it`s unclear that the two mesh together like, can you safely social distance as a massage therapist? I don`t -- it doesn`t appear so. It just feels like people are going to be left in the lurch with no actual clear indication of what`s safe and what`s not if governments go about it this way.
GARRETT: One of the things I`m worried about, Chris, is that we`re headed towards the sort of marketplace approach to risk assessment. So that, oh, you open up -- you say, OK, we can open up massage parlors, and leave it to the customer. Customers would be aware. You walk up to the door, you know, tap gently on the door and ask, have you guys been tested? And they say, oh, yes, sure, sure we`ve been tested. We`re all clear of virus. Come on in and let me give you a massage.
And you can -- you could almost see that everybody`s supposed to just vote with their feet, and their checkbooks deciding is this safe or not safe. And that`s just not the way to go about this business. We have to be thinking also about, you know, you just had the governor talking about the competition between states and between large cities over who can buy what test kits and driving the prices up.
Well, guess what, who`s really losing in that. Who`s really losing is poor countries all over the world. All over the world, they`re being outbid by Americans. And India has already protested that they had placed an order with a Chinese testing company, and some Americans swooped in and bought the whole order up.
We could end up looking like the big bad bullies on the international stage, you know, stealing test supplies and reagents and so on that are needed all over the world in order to satisfy some kind of his false sense of security at this end. We need smart testing. And there`s been a lot of good proposals. One in Massachusetts, there`s a new plan from David Bloom out of Harvard. There`s several different groups that have come up with strategic plans, strategic Plans, that means less actual tests that get you better policy guidance answers.
HAYES: That is a -- it seems like a very smart way to go. Laurie Garrett, always so illuminating to talk to you. Thank you for all your great reporting and taking time tonight.
GARRETT: Thank you, Chris.
HAYES: Next scenes from the very small but very vocal groups that have gathered over the weekend protesting those stay at home orders. A dangerous move spurred on to the propaganda network for the White House.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Before we show you pictures of the small but loud, deeply unnerving, and dangerous chorus of people calling for Americans to throw themselves on the sacrificial altar of the virus in the name of a good Donald Trump economy and liberty, it`s worth noting this polling out of Michigan, which has been the site of some of these protests particularly targeted the governor.
After weeks of attacks, getting called everything from a tyrant to a Nazi, governor Gretchen Whitmer`s approval rating in Michigan of her handling of the coronavirus is considerably higher than the President`s.
And yet a familiar marriage between Trump T.V. propaganda, wealthy right- wing interests, and a base that runs on resentment have created this phenomenon we`ve all seen, which again is small and absolute numbers, but really one of the most disturbing I have seen in my time covering public life, I got to say.
People huddled together in cities throughout the country today on the steps of the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I suppose, I guess, putting their bodies where their mouths are, so to speak. Yesterday in Denver, Colorado, this is what happened when a nurse stood at an intersection to block protesters to remind people of the human toll of all this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is a free country. Land of the free. Go to China if you want communism. Go to China.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Go to China. The entire phenomenon seems reverse-engineered to solve a very obvious political problem, which is this. The country right now is going through literally unprecedented economic devastation and misery and mass death at a scale that`s impossible to contemplate. While the conservative basis beloved leader is at the helm of all of it. So there`s got to be someone else to blame.
For more on this phenomenon and the President`s propaganda arm that encourages, I`m joined by Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters of America. You know, Angelo, this seems to be three ingredients here, which is that there are actual people who were actually upset and I saw a guy interviewed in Michigan about not being able to buy fertilizer.
And I have to say, like, I am sympathetic to people being frustrated and upset about where everyone is at right now. Like it is genuinely frustrating and upsetting that you know, people can`t do the normal things. So there`s that. There`s a sort of normal kind of right-wing interest. And then there`s to me -- it just seems to me that the Trump T.V. aspect of this is a largest. Like, how much did they gone all-in on these protests?
ANGELO CARUSONE, PRESIDENT MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA: Oh, they`ve gone all in. I mean, in the last week they`ve given it -- there`s been 87 individual segments discussing, promoting, advocating for this protest. None of them are they criticizing them? Just a little bit of comparison. If you look at the coverage that Fox News gave the Michigan event. That was more than a coverage way more than the coverage that they gave to the Women`s March in 2017. Just that one small event, right, got more coverage from Fox News than the entire Women`s March.
HAYES: It`s striking to me also -- it is the case that the folks at Fox News itself, like they aren`t coming to the building, they`re socially distancing. They all have remote cameras. Like they`re -- the people that run the network from the business and H.R. side, don`t seem to think like it`s fine for everyone just to get together and let`s go at it.
CARUSONE: That`s right. And I actually think that`s a good point. Because it`s true from corporate policy in terms of their practices, they`re not violating the social distancing. But what`s really interesting because I think that this is a good illustration of the feedback loop between Fox and the larger right-wing ecosystem and these individuals. Because, you know, most of these Facebook events, we tracked, you know, more than 75 of them across the country. It started popping up on April 10th.
So the question is what was happening in right-wing media before April 10th. And some of the most highly trafficked videos on the ninth and in the few days before, but on the ninth in particular, was Tucker Carlson, and other Fox News segments calling for an end to the national lockdown, making an impassioned plea about liberty.
And it`s an important point because one of the things that took place in those few days before you started to see these events beginning to pop up was that Fox News stopped making the argument that they were still saying it, but originally they were saying some, we have to be willing to sacrifice grandma and grandpa for the sake of the economy.
But they made a switch. And you know, starting on April 7th, April 8th, April 9th, they started saying that it`s not about the economy, it`s about liberty and freedom. And that`s why we need to end these national lockdowns. And immediately after is when you started to see these things popping up.
And look, some people get the message, right. It`s not just these astroturfing kind of groups or these national level groups are putting in, some of these events are being run by elected officials. In Maine, the leading organizer up there is a sitting congressman. In Michigan, it`s a state -- it was a state representative and an advisory member to Women for Trump that were really the leaders in the vanguards of these events.
So they sort of saw that opportunity right where Fox sort of creates a demand, then you go out there and satisfy it, and Fox in turn rewards you by bringing you on, just like they did with the sheriffs. You know, if you were a sheriff and you announced that you were not going to have to find people or punish people for violating these, you know, the orders of the state, Fox would invite you want to celebrate you, right. So that`s what they did. They create a demand, and then they`re able to satisfy it and reward it, promote it, and amplify it.
HAYES: There this -- Judge Pirro on Fox the other night had this -- she had a long monologue ranting about this. But there`s one part that stuck out to me that I want to play for you. Take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEANINE PIRRO, HOST, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: We want to go back to work, feed our families. And as a governor sit there and pontificate, we are the ones experiencing the reality that forever percentage drop in employment, there are five to 10,000 deaths occurring.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: First of all, you`re at work. You don`t have to go back to work. You`re -- literally, your show is -- that`s your work and you`re at a remote camera. But also, I just thought this was interesting. As the governor sit there and pontificate, they had found -- I mean, the problem here, right is like, how do you do a tea party, but it`s Donald Trump in the White House, right?
How do you capture this kind of sense that people have that things are amiss and awry and bad, but you`ve got down from the White House? And here is the answer. The governors. The governors, the category of the governors, they`re the ones to blame. And we`ve seen the president essentially work hand in hand -- hand in glove with that as a kind of national strategy for actually battling the virus.
CARUSONE: That`s right. And I think you bring up a very good point there because that`s exactly a big piece of this, is that you know, originally it was he was going to be the decision-maker with respect to ending these lockdowns right, but immediately retreated from that position.
And it was a very important thing when he started to shift because he said, I`m authorizing the governors to make the decision. And that`s when Fox News started to really aggressively begin to push for this idea that it was time to end national lockdowns. And in particular, and this is where it`s important, where the misinformation becomes fuel for these calls in these demands.
So one of the things you heard on fox news that was not true, right, you start to outsource it is that in Michigan, they banned the sale of the American flag. They said that a bunch of times on Fox. That was repeated over and over again.
And it sounds like, wow, maybe Michigan has gone too far? You know, you`re not even able to buy a good old fashioned American flag there. And that`s the point is that you create this demand. You fuel it with misinformation which allows for you to then attack the governors for over stepping, right? And these individuals are getting back out there to sort of correct things and balance things out, right.
They`re only responding to the most unreasonable restrictions that don`t seem to make any sense, but they actually under score another issue which is that these governors, who all disproportionately happen to be Democrats, right, or opposed to Trump, are bad.
HAYES: Yeah. Angelo Carusone thank down so much for running through that. I really appreciate it.
CARUSONE: Thank you.
HAYES: Next, a shocking development today as oil prices plunge below zero dollars going into negative -- negative -- hitting the lowest price in history. Expert oil trader Dan Dicker is here to explain what this all means after this.
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HAYES: It was just a week ago that President Donald Trump was bragging about his efforts to increase oil prices by working on a deal between his good buddies, the strong man who is the head of Russia and the strong man who is the head of Saudi Arabia.
Well, Wall Street Journal editorial praised the president for his bold leadership saving U.S. shale producers. That was a week ago. Today, one week later, U.S. oil prices plunged into negative territory. The price settled at, get this, negative 37 dollars per barrel, which is down 305 percent, meaning people would pay you today to take their oil off their hands.
It is actually the first time in the history of oil markets this happened. What exactly does it mean? Why did it happen? What happens next? For all that, we go to one of our favorite independent oil traders, energy market experts, Dan Dicker, who is the founder and host of the interactive webinar The Energy Word, among other things.
And Dan, I had one of my lifelong buddies say, literally text me, I got to hear from Dan Dicker today about the negative oil prices. So, here you are. Why did oil go negative today? What happened?
DAN DICKER, INDEPENDENT OIL TRADER: Well, basically what you have is you had the Coronavirus, which had killed demand. So, a third of demand has come out of the global market, but of course, a third of supply hasn`t come out of the global market despite the great deal that President Trump had managed to put together for 10 million barrels. So, 30 million barrels of oil is the surplus that we have right now, but 10 million barrels is what is cut. So there is 20 extra million barrels just sloshing around with no place to go. All the storage is filled up, and when all the storage is filled up, there is nobody who wants the oil. In fact, you have got to pay people to take it away, and that`s what you saw today in the spot markets in crude.
HAYES: Right. So I read that like these are futures contracts that close on May and when the contract closes, like you got to deliver the oil and actually a specific place, this is West Texas crude. So it`s got to go to Oklahoma. So there is actually like a bottleneck. Like you just don`t -- there is not the space to like off load all this oil.
DICKER: Right. The futures market, as you know, is a financial system, so, you know, money changes hands, but when we get to this end of time when the contract is actually due, we have got to turn this into real physical oil and that changes the game entirely and you need to have people who actually take it or going to deliver it. And right now, nobody will take it.
HAYES: So what does this mean? I mean, what are the sort of reverberations? I`ve heard, well OK, this is just the end of May contracts are looking so dicey, but then there will be future contracts after that, and it is going to -- it will come back up, but oil is just going to be crushed for the foreseeable future, right? What does that mean more generally?
DICKER: Yeah, you know, I kind of look at oil as a canary in the coal mine here, Chris, and thinking about it as if -- you know, people are being entirely too optimistic what COVID-19 is going to do to the global economy in the long term, not in the short term.
I mean, you can protest all you want and you can, you know, say to liberate Minnesota, but the truth is no matter what you try to do in restarting the economy, nobody is going to a restaurant as much as going to see a baseball game or a concert or a hundred other things that would indicate a normal global economy going forward.
So oil may be the canary in a coal mine. There may be repercussions through places we haven`t even seen yet that are going to keep the economies cratered, not just oil, you know, for a long, long time until we have, you know, a vaccine. And that could be a year, a year, a year-and-a-half away.
I think that what this is telling me, at least, is that, you know, we`ve been far too optimistic about how this is going to play out in the long- term economically. And I think oil is telling you a story how bad things are still going to get going forward.
HAYES: So you think this is -- you think the oil market might be correctly pricing in the level of future economic activity right now? Like, the signal -- if there is a signal here that`s other than sort of market panic, which again, sometimes markets panic and they don`t necessarily send you some intelligence signal about the future, but you`re saying to the extent there is an intelligence signal about the future, a sort of forward predictive price that`s happening here, it`s this market saying this is going to be awhile, demand is going to be down for awhile.
DICKER: It did it in 2007. Oil started crashing well before the financial crisis hit in 2008. I mean, it has been known to be an indicator.
Think about automobiles for example, Chris. I mean, if you have 20 percent unemployment and, you know, automobiles, you know, millions, 15, 20 million of them are leases, how many of those leases will get thrown back at the banks? And what will the banks going to do with all these cars? And cars prices are going to crater. And nobody is going to be able to sell a car. Nobody in this country wants to buy a car. There is going to be tremendous pressure on banks that have all of these loans basically that they are getting back with cars that have very little value. They are going to see cars go down the way crude did closer to zero.
And this, you know, reverberates in a thousand different ways where we could call any commodity, not just oil, as being a victim of this virus and the cratering going on in the global economy.
So I just don`t believe that we`ve seen anywhere near the worst of all of this. And I think oil is telling that story right now.
HAYES: All right. Dan Dicker, always great to have you on explaining these things, thanks a lot.
Coming up, the danger of broadcasting President Trump`s daily briefings uninterrupted and the searing attack ad released by the Biden campaign. That is just ahead.
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HAYES: I have said on this program, many people have said, in fact, the airing of the presidents` daily propaganda sessions can often be dangerous to public health. That`s really my main concern with them separate from any political benefits or political costs they might happen to have.
Though, it is notable several days ago some people close to the president were telling The New York Times that they find the unhinged ranting and bullying and performance of narcissism not great politically, quote, "the White House was handing Mr. Biden ammunition each night by sending the president out to the cameras."
And interestingly enough, that view was echoed by Joe Biden`s digital director yesterday on Twitter, quote, "don`t know when people on here are like don`t air these press conferences when they are doing more work for us than any ad buy could."
Of course, President Trump does not see it that way.
So, now the Biden campaign is trying to use everything he said to their advantage.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: The buck stops here. Harry Truman said it. It means no excuses. It means taking responsibility, the ultimate responsibility for the biggest decisions in the world. Every great president has lived up to it, but Donald Trump...
TRUMP: No, I don`t take responsibility at all.
First after all, governors a supposed to be doing a lot of this work.
We`re a back-up. We`re not an ordering clerk, we`re a back-up.
ANNOUNCER: Donald trump thought the job was about tweets and rallies and big parades. He never thought he`d have to protect nearly 330 million Americans, so he didn`t.
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HAYES: I mean, what we are seeing is just a real-time example of just an unbelievable failure to lead. And it`s not just about this crisis, it`s also about the biggest one we face when all of this is over. We`re going to talk about that next.
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HAYES: From the beginning of this Coronavirus crisis, the obvious parallels to the climate crisis have just been impossible to ignore. I keep thinking about them, particularly as the pandemic plays out like an intensely sped up acute version of the climate crisis, the same warnings, the same disinformation, and no nothingness, the same tragic consequences, the same failure to act.
Two aspects, in particular, have been haunting me. One is the invisibility of the problem in a very literal sense. And the president has even taken to calling the virus the invisible enemy, which is a happy bit propaganda, but based on a kernel of truth we can`t see the Coronavirus, like you can`t the carbon in the air. And it is hard to mobilize people around things you can`t see. In the case of both the Coronavirus and carbon pollution, the absence of spectacle is an obstacle to rallying people.
The second thing that is so maddening is that both the climate crisis and a global pandemic did not come out of nowhere. They are not unlikely things that might happen in the future we should plan for, no, according to experts, they are certainties. Here is Bill Gates back in 2015.
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BILL GATES, MICROSOFT FOUNDER: Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn`t look like this; instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it`s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war, but we`ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We`re not ready for the next epidemic.
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HAYES: Like Bill Gates, everyone who knows anything about global health and virology, and transmission, has been screaming for years about exactly this moment that we`re in, that it is not if, it`s when. And that is also exactly what climate experts have been saying. And they have been called into question, and they`ve been ignored, and they`ve been bullied, but they`re saying the exact same thing as health experts did about a pandemic. It`s coming. And yet here we are standing on the tracks watching the train barrel toward us and refusing to get out of the way.
So I want to talk to a writer who has written about both of these issues, David Wallace-Wells, deputy editor and climate columnist for New York Magazine, his latest book was about the climate crisis, now he is covering the Coronavirus pandemic, basically full-time, and he joins me now.
And David, I wonder how much you`ve been thinking about these parallels.
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS, DEPUTY EDITOR, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: They`re totally hard to avoid, as you point out. And there are a lot more than the ones you have just said, although those may be the most obvious ones. You know, the truth is the lessons of the Coronavirus and climate crisis are quite similar, too, in the sense that they remind us that we don`t live outside of nature no matter where we are, no matter who we are, no matter what country we live in or how rich we are, we still live subject to the laws of nature and occasionally subject to its brutality.
And they also teach us that all of these crises, crises of this scale, are much better when we get a handle on them really early. Studies out of China show that if they acted three weeks earlier they could have avoided 95 percent of all of the spread of the Coronavirus through the country, possibly preventing its spread throughout the world. And a new bit of research this week shows that in New York, if we had taken action two weeks earlier we could have prevented 90 percent of all deaths.
They also open up a whole new -- the Coronavirus opens up a whole new spectrum of political possibility that a lot of climate activists are becoming quite excited about for some good reasons and for some complicated reasons. But the truth is when you look out at the climate right now, it is hard not to be moved by the expression of global solidarity and fellow feeling that is demonstrated by a literally hemisphere-wide, quarantine that is being engaged in willingly by billions of people, I mean part out of concern for their own health but out of concern for the health of those around them.
And considering that is really the ultimate project and challenge facing us with climate change, how can we make everybody care more about our collective fate? You can look at thin credible tragedy and horror with some hope.
The question is whether we can sustain that kind of feeling through a year or more of quite exhausting struggle, expensive public spending, and all of the pain and suffering that we`re going to be witnessing, and come out on the other side still with some political capital and some literal capital to make the kind of investments in green infrastructure and power that we need to.
HAYES: Well, that point of international solidarity I think is a really important one, because it is something about the climate movement I always find very inspiring and moving, you know, on days of these sort of international global climate action, you will see like here are school children in Nigeria and here are activists in Pakistan, and here are folks in Seoul, South Korea, and here are people in Moscow, and here are people in New York City, and it`s like right, we all got the same climate. We all got the same thing we got to deal with. And you`re seeing that in this pandemic, the same sort of moving feeling when you see health care workers and you see nurses or you see people banging on pots and pans in all of these countries around the world, very distant places, very different people, and very different situations. And again, the thing we have to beat is the same thing, and we all have to work together to beat it.
And in that way, this period also feels a bit like a test, right, like the level of global coordination, in a short acute period, where there is some political capital, because it is so pressing, as a kind of dry run for what we need to do in a bigger scale afterwards.
WALLACE-WELLS: And we`ve accomplished honestly so much. I mean, in many countries of the world, I would say, most countries of the world, we failed to take seriously the Coronavirus crisis at the speed we needed to. And yet, just in the space of just a few months, we`ve engineered a, as you say, a kind of coordinated -- although, not literally coordinated -- global response in which all of the nations of the northern hemisphere and many in the global south, have basically up-ended all forms of life, all economic activity, all social activity in their countries for the sake of self protection.
It is amazing all of the things that we used to take for granted as permanent, unmovable features of modern life, the way the economy worked the unlimited ways our government could move quickly to protect us. All of these things that we took for granted as unchangeable have been proven to be quite changeable in just the timespan of just a few months when we recognized just how big the crisis that we are facing really is.
We haven`t yet got there with climate change in part because it is still, despite those inspiring marches, just, you know, just a small group of people who really believe that this crisis is as urgent as the scientists tell us it is, and we need many more people to feel that way.
With Corona -- with COVID, almost everyone is as scared as they possibly could be. And as a result we`re seeing top-down, but in other ways voluntary efforts to basically change how we live on the planet, you know, on a dime, and in quite dramatic ways, which you know honestly I find kind of breath-taking.
HAYES: That`s a great -- that`s a really great point, right? The suspension of normalcy and the speed with which it has happened and the sort of horizon of possibility, which is both sort of devastating and brutal, because people are losing their jobs and people are going to food banks and people are sick and all of that, but also the idea that you can coordinate a remarkable amount. I mean half of the world`s population, all almost on a dime, in a sense, right, in a few weeks, you have half the world`s population, suddenly abruptly ending every single daily ritual, and daily life as normalcy.
And also, the political possibilities, I mean we should note there is this sort of, you know, you have the way that CO2 goes up, the way that Coronavirus spreads through population, like those two graphs that we have like both look unnervingly similar, and both sort of create this kind of urgency to act quickly.
But there`s also the fact that like the political, the kind of political frontier, the possible, how are we going to pay for it is this question that haunted the questions of the Green New Deal. Now, it`s like $2.2 trillion, out the door, in a few weeks.
WALLACE-WELLS: Yes, a few months ago, if you were to ask the average American, would the country be willing to go into a total economic shutdown, reduce its economic output by as much as 30 percent, impose 30 percent unemployment on itself, in order to save 1 to 2 percent of the population, most Americans would have told you that was impossible. It would have been an indictment of the country that it wasn`t -- that they did think it was impossible, but they would have told you that it was really hard to imagine. And now here we are just in the space of a few months and we have done exactly that.
And not only that, we`ve seen Republican senators proposing something like UBI. We`ve seen talk about the government claiming some ownership stake in airlines in exchange for bailouts. These are things that used to be so far outside the Overton Window of political possibility that nobody ever talked about it as imaginable. And now they`re very much at the center of our political conversation.
We need to take that expanded horizon and apply it to climate change, because we need many more things to happen that are enclosed within our existing sense of what is possible. We need to expand that horizon on climate, as aggressively as we have with COVID-19.
HAYES: It`s a great point. And this segment, which I didn`t necessarily think would leave me feeling leavened and inspired has done that. We`re going to keep talking about these parallels throughout the week this week. David Wallace-Wells, thank you very much.
WALLACE-WELLS: Thanks for having me.
HAYES: That is ALL IN for this evening. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END