TOM HANKS, ACTOR: But your after is not going to look the same as your during, or as your before. You will have made it through the time to great sacrifice and great need. And no one will be more fresh to the task of restarting our measure of normalcy than you, you chosen ones.
STEVE KORNACKI, MSNBC HOST: "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes is up next.
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. The Trump administration is about to hang the mission accomplished banner in the fight against the coronavirus. Today, the president confirmed the White House is winding down the task force charged with combating the virus with Vice President Mike Pence citing the "tremendous progress we`ve made as a country so far."
Meanwhile, the President is encouraging states to end their lockdowns and shelter in place rules even though, and this is a key point, they do not meet his own administration`s guidelines to safely reopen. the ones that his administration put out from his CDC. And he`s telling Americans who might be nervous about contracting the virus and dying if they go back to work or they go out in public or we go back to normal, that they need to think of themselves as warriors on the battlefield.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I`m viewing our great citizens of this country, to a certain extent and to a large extent, is warriors. They`re warriors. We can`t keep our country close. We have to open our country. I`m not saying anything is perfect. And yes, will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: When he says, we have to get our country opened, he means come what may. I personally don`t think of the folks in say nursing homes as warriors that need to be sacrificed. But what the President seems to be saying is you`re on your own, thoughts and prayers. Sorry, if you were one of those people who`s badly affected. Think of yourself as a soldier dying for the cause.
There`s just this incredible disconnect here between the rhetoric from the president, even the sort of public discourse that he has helped kind of anchor with all these vanguard protests you`ve seen and the actual reality of the trajectory of the virus.
Look at this graph from the New York Times. It`s showing newly reported cases, OK. On the left is the New York metro area, right. That`s the epicenter of our outbreak here in the U.S. You can see the new cases and what has been the epicenter have been trending downward, which is great news. There is real progress, that shape of that curve is encouraging.
But look at the char on the right. That`s the rest of the U.S. outside the metro New York epicenter. And you can say new cases are still growing. Now, to be clear, partly that is probably due to some increased testing in a lot of places. But the thing is, the curve is not even flat really. I mean, new reported cases are going up. We don`t really know for sure, but things may be even getting worse. At the best, they seem to be plateauing.
And we`ve already lost more than 70,000 of our fellow Americans. We were almost certainly going to lose tens of thousands more. And the virus is manifestly not suppressed. The mission is obviously not accomplished, and it`s becoming clearer and clearer that Donald Trump never even really tried to accomplish it. He just wants to open up the country so the economy can come back and help him reelected.
Today, the man who was removed from his position leading government`s effort to find a vaccine, a guy named Dr. Rick Bright, filed a whistleblower complaint. We`re going to get into the details of that complaint later in the show. But one of the big revelations is the administration refused to listen to early warnings about the virus. They just kind of ignored it, blew it off.
That`s a pattern of course. From the very beginning, this administration has been contemptuous and distrustful of the actual experts in the government. They have opted instead to listen to cronies and relatives and donors and legacy cases and the buddies of the president. That`s who they turned to make policy, not the full institutional knowledge or one of the most powerful governments in the history of humankind.
We saw it on full display during the president`s impeachment. Remember, when we found out that Trump huddled with Lev Parnas and Igor Furman, to hash out the American government`s Ukraine policy. Remember those guys? Only now, the exact same method has been applied to the biggest public health challenge in 100 years.
And there are so many examples of the damage this is done. Like how the administration relied on a model from White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett, a man with no epidemiological experience to plot out the course the virus.
And I should note here that Hassett`s most famous moment in public life infamous, in fact, is writing and publishing a book called Dow 36,000 back in 1999. It is literally one of the most infamously bad economic forecasts of public life of the last 30 years. That guy Kevin Hassett, that was the guy they had to model predict the virus. And you will be shocked to learn that that guy, Dow 36,000 guy, was even more wrong about the virus.
The Washington Post reported his model showed deaths dropping precipitously in May and essentially hitting zero by May 15th, by May 15th, 10 days from now. You think that`s going to happen? That`s what happens when you bring in Dow 36,000 guy. That`s who the President was listening to.
Just today, we learned about a complaint filed the House Oversight Committee involving the coronavirus response effort coordinated by the president`s son in law, who for some reason, has a job doing this kind of thing because he`s married to the guy who runs the country.
And the complaint alleges, according to the Post, that that man Jared Kushner, that his effort "Relied in part on volunteers from consulting and private equity firm`s little expertise in the task to which they were assigned, exacerbating chronic problems in obtaining supplies for hospitals and other needs."
Part of the reason the volunteers had trouble establishing relationships with suppliers and because they were just using personal e-mail accounts, like just some random over G-mail being like, hey, can you hook me up with some PPE, I`m working with the president`s son in law. It`s almost too ridiculous to believe, but this is what we got. This is what we`ve been getting for three years this administration.
And now, at this extremely perilous moment, amidst this natural calamity, this global catastrophe, the so-called plan is to just let a lot of Americans die like warriors on the battlefield, and then try to paper over that. Rather, as NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen put it, the plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and 3,000 become a normal thing and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible. That`s where we`re headed. Because after President botches this horribly and then reopens country, he wants to basically wash his hands of the whole thing.
Joining me now to discuss the lack of a plan going forward, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. Is that your read of what the White House is gearing up for?
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): Yes, you have this new estimate suggesting that because of these early reopenings without enough testing capacity, we`re going to get to a point in the early summer where 3,000 people will be dying every single day. That is essentially a 9/11 happening every single day over the course of the summer, a near doubling of the death rate today.
The President has lost patience, as he frankly has lost patience with every endeavor he`s ever been involved in his life when it doesn`t go well right from the get-go. And he is about to lead this country down a potential path of slaughter. In the northeast, as you mentioned, we have done some of the right things, and so, we`ve been able to turn the trend line in a positive direction. But we`ve done that without any help from the federal government.
When I get on the phone with a hospital in Connecticut, they don`t tell me that any of the PPE or the testing machines have come to them through the federal government, they`ve had do it all on their own. Today in Connecticut, we`re doing thousands of less tests than we should be doing. Why? Because we don`t have swabs, swabs. If we`d started building swabs on a federal basis two months ago, we wouldn`t be in that position today.
So we`ve made progress in Connecticut, but much of that is going to potentially be reversed because of this administration`s insistence on opening up too early, violating their own guidelines, because even if we beat it in Connecticut, if you have a surge in some other part of the country, it`s eventually going to find its way again to our state.
HAYES: What do you think about this idea that the American citizens are warriors, that the men and women who are in long term care facilities that have been ravaged by the virus, that the men and women that work in meatpacking facilities around the country, the bus drivers, and the Amazon warehouse workers, that they`re warriors, that basically they should -- they should accept that they may just be giving up their life for this?
MURPHY: I mean, we all, you know, scoffed when I think it was the governor -- Lieutenant Governor of Texas suggested that, you know, grandparents should be willing to die for their grandchildren. And of course, no grandchildren wants to sacrifice their grandparents. And that`s essentially what the President is saying is that we just have to accept that as a price of being able to go to the movie theater again, there are going to be 3,000 people every single day who will die needlessly.
And he is, as you mentioned, going to try to obfuscate and confuse people and say that it was China`s fault, the WHO`s fault. And while there`s lots of blame to be spread around here, the simple fact of the matter is that the President put out a plan to reopen the country. And because that plan wasn`t realistic, or because he didn`t have the patience to stick to it, within weeks of, of putting it out into the public, he`s going to violate it knowing that ultimately that`s going to lead to the death of thousands of Americans.
HAYES: I think -- I mean, I should -- two things. One, I think it`s so important to stress that what they`re doing is violating the Trump administration`s own guidelines. It`s an 18-page report. It`s been set out, it`s been talked about, you can read it online. It`s their own guidelines for the -- what a state has to do to "reopen." It has three phases. It`s a fairly sensible document. Everyone`s just blowing through it at the urging of the President.
It`s his it`s the Trump administration guidelines they`re blowing through. But he decided after two weeks, he got impatient and you know, it was fun to go to the Taj Mahal the night it opened Michael Jackson and not so fun when it goes bankrupt. And basically, he`s doing that with the CDC guidelines.
MURPHY: And Chris, he frankly didn`t do anything to implement the plan. Let`s just take one element of the plan. What the plan says is that once you reopen, you`ve got to adopt a system of testing, tracing, and quarantine. Meaning you test, you find out who that person talks to and had contact with, and then you quarantine those individuals. Well, that doesn`t happen without an infrastructure, without staff, without funding.
And just since the plan was released, the administration has had two weeks to work with Congress to appropriate money to the states, to local public health departments, to hire up all the people who would do this. Instead, they have resisted efforts to try to fund those activities. They`ve said that states should go bankrupt.
And so even since they released the plan, they have resisted any efforts to implement it. So it shouldn`t be a surprise to anybody that it didn`t work and that now they are left with only one option, which is to just sort of go along with the increasing tide being driven by Trump`s base and open up the country too soon.
HAYES: Final thought. Charlie Warzel who writes in the New York Times with this tweet that has been stuck in my head, he said, "The U.S. virus response feels so much like our response to gun violence. Seems easy to prevent, others have, but it`s not who we are. Certain idea of freedom makes it impossible, so we move on and just learn to accept a level of human loss that other countries won`t tolerate." What do you think of that?
MURPHY: So I think it`s similar in some ways, but different than others. On gun violence, there`s a really powerful political constituency on the other side that we have to be. We know what to do, but we`re not willing to do it because of a political force that exists on the other side.
What makes the Trump administration`s lack of response so unconscionable is that there isn`t a political force on the other side similar to the gun violence epidemic. We know what to do. We could follow what countries like South Korea did, and we could get our hands wrapped around this epidemic.
But what makes it so unconscionable is that there`s nobody stopping the Trump administration from following South Korea`s lead. There`s nobody stopping them from deciding to fund a testing, tracing, and quarantine system. There isn`t an NRA when it comes to the politics surrounding this issue. If Trump would lead and do the things that we know, would get this epidemic under control, we could save thousands of lives. And that I think, is the critical difference.
HAYES: Yes. The vast silent majority of this country across all sorts of different lines wants to keep each other safe, to get this virus under control, to look out for each other, and doesn`t want to get sick, and don`t want loved ones to die. That`s the vast majority of this country and a small group sliver is calling the shots right now in the President`s ear.
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, it`s always great to have you, sir. Thank you very much.
MURPHY: Thanks.
HAYES: I want to now bring in Kathleen Sebelius. She`s the former Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama Administration. Prior to that, she served as the governor of Kansas. A sort of remarkable resume to evaluate what`s going on right here.
I thought I`d start with the sort of question about expertise and who you listen to. I mean, this has been a theme of the Trump ministration from day one. You know, there`s a Mar-a-Lago club member who knows a guy, and he gets in the ear of the President on some policy. There`s a donor who`s got someone. There`s someone knows someone, as opposed to a sort of rigorous system for policy formation, for funneling information to the President. And we`ve seen this in the pandemic.
And to someone who`s had to sit there through H1N1 and another. What are the costs of that? Why does it matter if the president ignores the vast institutional knowledge of the U.S. government, and instead has his son in law, have someone post something on Facebook?
KATHLEEN SEBELIUS, FORMER SECRETARY, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: Well, Chris, I think it`s very dangerous for any leader to be in a situation where no one around him is able to tell him the truth. And that seems to be where Trump likes his information. And no one disagrees with him. No one can get him to read anything, listen to anybody.
We were blessed in the Obama administration by having literally thousands of people who wanted to leave their well-paid jobs, their long and distinguished careers to just come serve. They were -- they had their hands up and they said, Mr. President, I want to be part of your administration. I will do anything that you`ve say.
So, we had a plethora of talent, expertise, but also I worked for a president who said, we are listening to the science. In matters of healthcare, we are listening to the scientists. In scary times when you don`t have an answer, when you don`t have a vaccine, we will listen to the scientists. He never deviated from that. The advice was sometimes uncomfortable, but was really important.
And he wanted the scientists to talk to the American public directly. I think you`ve seen the public`s reaction to Tony Fauci who is a world- renowned scientist at the head of the vaccine development process in this country. Tony Fauci is being gagged by our president of the United States right now, not allowed testified in Congress.
I`ve been told that he can`t talk to anybody unless Mark Meadows says it`s OK. That is exactly what should not be happening. The American public will not have any faith in going forward in the back into normal society unless the scientists say it`s really OK. And if Tony Fauci is gagged, they`ll listen to their state and local health leaders, health scientists to give direction because if the United States backs out of that, somebody else is going to pick it up.
HAYES: Your Secretary of HHS which is an extraordinarily large agency with huge responsibility. The CDC is one of the agencies in that. And the CDC is really is world-renowned, I think it`s fair to say. I mean -- and one of the great mysteries of this pandemic is like, what happened? Where is the CDC?
I wanted to quote you this from Laurie Garrett who`s a great reporter on this. She said, I`ve heard from every CDC in the world, right, other country`s CDC, and they say normally, our first calls to Atlanta, meaning our CDC, but we aren`t hearing back. There`s nothing going on down there. They`ve gutted that place. What`s that mean?
SEBELIUS: Well, it`s absolutely terrifying. First of all, I think the United States helped build all the other CDCs in China, in parts of the world, because part of the notion is, you are only safe and secure as Americans if you have an ability to immediately identify dangerous elements that are breaking out any place in the world.
You look at the Ebola incidents, and the reason that was so successful is we immediately sent trained teams of folks to help Africa contain what was an outbreak of what could have been a lethal pandemic. It didn`t happen that way. So having Atlanta, having the CDC, the epidemiologists who are envied all over the world, who train the scientists all over the world, not do what they do so well, which is test like crazy, teach every state in the country how to do contract tracing, make sure that we staff up a well- trained army in every part of the country, teach students how to quarantine.
I mean, they have folks embedded in every state and local health department. Unfortunately, states have no money. States have no additional resources to hire folks. They`ve taken a huge hit. The federal government not only has no guidelines for what goes next and are violating their own CDC plans -- I have to tell you, Chris, you and Senator Murphy are overly generous. It didn`t take two weeks for the President to ignore the CDC guidelines. It took 24 hours.
The guidelines were put out, the following evening, he began texting liberate Michigan, liberate Maryland -- I mean, liberate Virginia. That was 24 hours after the CDC guidelines which do make sense were put forward. Where the CDC is? I don`t know, but we need them front and center.
We should be hearing from the CDC who will teach us how to track and trace and identify and shut down outbreaks of this disease, and from the NIH who will be at the front end of vaccine development. And right now, the CDC is missing in action.
HAYES: Former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the agency that the CDC is part of, thank you so much for your time tonight.
SEBELIUS: Great to see you.
HAYES: Coming up, the shocking new whistleblower complaint for an ousted HHS official that the Trump administration ignored dire warnings about COVID all the way back in January when he was ringing the alarms. What we learned when Dr. Rick Bright spoke out today, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Do you remember Dr. Rick Bright? He was the guy who would be in charge of the government`s efforts to find the coronavirus vaccine. And two weeks ago, he was removed from this extremely important job with zero explanation. And then Dr. Bright claimed he was fired for pushing back on President Trump`s push for an unproven malaria drug to be essentially distributed on demand.
Today, he filed a really revealing and shocking whistleblower complaint, charging among other things and abuse of authority or gross mismanagement, he elaborated on a conference call with reports this afternoon.
RICK BRIGHT, FORMER DIRECTOR, BIOMEDICAL ADVANCED RESEARCH AND DEVELOMPENT AUTHORITY: The past few years, however, has been beyond challenging. Time after time, I was pressured to ignore or dismiss expert and scientific recommendations, and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections.
In other words, I was pressured to let politics and cronyism drive decisions over the opinions of the best scientists we have in government.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Dr. Bright also described his concerns with a lack of government response to the growing outbreak as far back as January. After Bright relayed concerns from a domestic surgical mask producer that "the U.S. mask supplies at imminent risk, nothing happened for a week, leading the mask producer to e-mail Bright, "Rick, I think we`re in deep shit."
Joining me now is Sam Stein, politics editor for The Daily Beast. He reporter I`m Dr. Rick Bright`s complaint today. And Sam it`s a long and detailed document and it is quite revealing. What trumped out to you?
SAM STEIN, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Well, two things. One is the stuff that happened prior to the coronavirus outbreak which is he details the systematically corrupt HHS process in which huge contracts are being awarded to people who are very close to top officials at the agency.
The more pressing thing, obviously, is that a detailed and administration that was basically had their heads in the sand with respect to the coronavirus outbreak in China for weeks, if not months. You touched on a bunch of the stuff early on, but just warning for seeing that a shortage of N-95 masks was going to be a huge problem, and being unable to convince anyone up the chain that this is something that had to deal with. Also, an urgency or lack thereof around getting a vaccine in the developmental process which we now see the administration and the President has but he was talking with officials late January, early February about the need to prioritize this stuff and of course got nowhere.
But I think the larger thing -- and I was -- it was interesting to hear Kathleen Sebelius talk about this, is that there`s sort of a bigger picture item here, which is that the careerists and the scientists in the administration were more or less ignored or pushed aside and have been since the onset of the administration. It`s not just the disbanding of the pandemic units, but it`s people like Dr. Bright, who are, you know, dismissed as alarmist, even though they`re the scientists in the administration.
And this is sort of a common pattern that you see with his presidency where he goes more with his political guts in how he`s thinking than actually doing any long term strategic planning.
HAYES: And it`s more than guts, right? I mean, there`s an allegation of essentially corruption here, right, that you have career scientists and civil servants who are making determinations based on the science and there`s pressure from above from the Trump ministration to steer things in the direction of people that have a monetary interest because they`re buddies or the president.
Like that -- and that`s one thing if you`re talking about, you know, a contract for buying pencils, you know, for a big federal agency. It`s another way of talking about vaccines and life-saving drugs.
STEIN: Right. And now there`s -- so there was this story, which detailed the President`s push for hydroxychloroquine as a therapy drug to be stockpiled against all sort of prevailing scientific evidence or lack thereof that it was effective. And Dr. Bright raised those concerns and admitted that he brought it to the attention or confirmed an inquiry from a journalist which ultimately led to his dismissal from his post. So this was a case of someone saying this is really crazy, what we`re doing is borderline if not completely unethical, and we need to stop, and he took provocative steps to stop it.
There was another story today involving a Jared Kushner`s coronavirus Task Force in which one of the complaints made against that was that Fox News personalities were able to jump to the front of the line in terms of getting PPE to the hospitals that they deemed helpful or, you know, emotionally close to. So you`re absolutely right. There`s a horrific way to do this. And the Trump administration is basically hitting every note which is cronyism, favoritism, and dismissal of the science.
HAYES: Yes. I want to -- I want to play what Bright had to say about his dismissal of the sort of hydroxychloroquine being the kind of breaking point in terms of the administration. Take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRIGHT: Americans need to have all the facts. They need to know the truth about this pandemic. They need to be able to trust that their government, and the information that they hear from politicians is based on scientific merit. The American people are strong and resilient. We can handle the truth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: He then said, I believe that his transfer -- this was from his earlier statement after he`s dismissed. It was in response to my insist that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions and not on drugs, vaccines, and other technologies that lack scientific merit.
And what`s also fascinating to me here, I mean, you`ve got -- you`ve got the ignoring the warnings, the cronyism. He says that Alex Azar basically thought that shutting down travel would be fine. There wouldn`t be any communities transmission even as he and other people knew there would be in raised alarms about it.
STEIN: Yes, and you know, this is -- from a political standpoint, this is rather devastating for the president as he tries to rewrite a narrative that he foresaw these problems on the horizon all the while that he took bold action to stop the spread of coronavirus and that he never downplayed it.
Internally, obviously, this was something that top officials were saying would never actually impact America. That the Azar segment of the complaint basically has him saying, Azar saying he didn`t think that it would spread within the United States domestically. Someone had to actually push back on that.
So yes, this is a devastating complaint. And I think the more interesting thing is as the administration is putting the clamps down on coronavirus Task Force members from testifying on Capitol Hill, Dr. Bright is now currently scheduled to go to the Hill next week to testify before the Democrats in the House. Although I was told by an aide to him or someone who`s working with him that he`s suffering from hypertension right now, he`s been out sick because of all the stress that this has caused.
HAYES: Yes. The fact that he has agreed to testify and what we`ve seen with the administration, as Kathleen Sebelius said, they`ve said Fauci can testify in front of the House, he can go to the Senate, basically --
STEIN: Right.
HAYES: -- post impeachment we seem to the White House is, no, nothing. You get nothing. We don`t have to listen to Congress at all. Maybe we`ll set up for Republicans and that`s -- that is -- that`s not going to just simmer in the back burner for very long. Sam Stein, always great to talk to you man. Thanks a lot.
STEIN: Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.
HAYES: Coming up, why did it take 39 days, 39 days for Native American tribes to see any money from the first coronavirus rescue bill inside that ongoing fight after this?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: More than five weeks ago, the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package was signed into law by the President. And in there, there was a set aside $8 billion appropriate in aid for Native American tribal communities to battle the virus. Some of those communities have been absolutely overwhelmed by the pandemic. As of Sunday, the Navajo Nation had a rate of 46 deaths per 100,000 people which is a higher coronavirus death rate than every state in the country except New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
Now up until yesterday, up until yesterday, zero dollars of the $8 billion had actually been released and dispersed to help those communities. Then today, a little more than half of the $8 billion was released, although they`re still waiting on the rest of that money with no explanation of when it will be given out in full.
Joining me now to talk about what exactly is going on, Congresswoman Deb Haaland, she`s a Democrat in New Mexico, one of the two first Native American women to serve in the House. Congresswoman, maybe first you can just start with the context of how this pandemic has hit Indian country, particularly the Navajo Nation.
REP. DEB HAALAND (D), NEW MEXICO: Thank you for having me, Chris. So happy to be here. Thank you for covering this important issue. So let me start here, Chris, Indian country is starts way behind every other community because the U.S. government has not lived up to this trust responsibility. This is underfunding and neglect for decades and decades and decades.
Some areas of the Navajo Nation you asked about don`t have running water, some tribes their waters polluted so they can`t use it. There`s no -- like some people don`t have electricity. And many, many tribes don`t have broadband internet service. So connecting with their hospital, with telehealth, with their kids` schools, that is absolutely something they`re unable to do because of all those disparities.
And so, that`s where we start behind the start line, you know, miles back. And then I want to also mention, Chris, today the President was on Facebook Live, talking about how the $8 billion is the largest amount of funding that Indian country has ever gotten. And look, this should be $20 billion. That`s what we asked for, that`s what we fought for. The White House came back with zero. They didn`t want to give tribes anything, not one dime. And so, so we ended up with $8 billion and that`s where we are.
HAYES: So I`m glad that you sort of interpose that because I was listening to an interview in which he was sort of bragging about it that my understanding of the legislative negotiation was the White House wanted zero. Democrats asked for $20 billion, there was a back and forth settled on $8 billion. And then explained to me, I don`t actually understand this.
Obviously, the government`s got a lot on its hand, just trying to move a lot of money out the door very quickly, but speed is of the essence. Forty days go by, 39 days and none of that money ends up with tribal communities? I don`t understand that.
HAALAND: So the Treasury needs to do a formula which it sounds like they came up with a formula today. It could have been done two weeks ago. They could have acted sooner than they did. But we were waiting on the Treasury to do a formula. In fact, last week, Representative or Chairman Gallego, Ruben Gallego from Arizona and I wrote a letter to the Treasury, say, you need to move on this, you need to make sure that you are putting this as a priority. Indian country has not gotten a thing and people are dying.
And so they finally come out with a formula today. But there`s no timeline yet. And quite frankly, it`s pretty easy for me to just get on my phone and called tribal leaders and ask them if they`ve gotten any funding at all. And my guess would be that they haven`t gotten it yet. So we`re fighting for this, we`re struggling for it.
As you mentioned, there are high rates of the virus infecting Indian country. And this is -- there`s a dire need for this funding, and that`s what we`re fighting for.
HAYES: I know that those, particularly Navajo Nation, but other parts of Indian country have had a very difficult time for some of the reasons you talked about both in terms of socioeconomic conditions prior to the virus and then the virus particularly in fighting it. What is the sort of status of that fight right now and the status of policy in Indian country for dealing with it?
HAALAND: So, well, look, there are 574 federally recognized tribes in our country and the disparities between those tribes, they`re different. Some tribes have tribal clinics --
HAYES: Right.
HAALAND: -- some don`t. Some are close to an Indian Health Service facility, some are not. Some live in very rural communities. And as I said, they don`t have -- they can`t even connect with anyone. I`ll tell you what`s happening right now as the tribal governments themselves are stepping up, many of them have appointed, you know, they`ve started emergency task forces. I know the Indian Affairs Department here in New Mexico, its State Department has stepped up to work with tribes.
Everyone`s doing what they can. They -- tonight, I had a Facebook Live with an organizer for a nonprofit organization that delivers food boxes to tribal families and the need is dire. So where the Trump administration should have gotten this funding to tribes weeks ago, nonprofit organizations have stepped up to make sure that people have water and food, and --
HAYES: Wow.
HAALAND: -- it`s shameful quite frankly.
HAYES: Congressman Deb Haaland in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I have to say Congresswoman, as we go through various people we talk to in quarantine these times, the beautiful Albuquerque light playing on the background of your house makes Albuquerque, New Mexico look like the best place in the world to be right now. So thank you for taking a little time to talk to us.
HAYES: Thank you.
HAYES: Coming up, the vulnerable President facing reelection in the blistering new attack ad from an anti-Trump conservative group, still ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: It`s become a tradition in cities across the country and around the world, people taking to their balconies or their stoops, streets to cheer for frontline workers. In that category, frontline workers is new in this COVID era. It`s like first responders, a term that emerged after 911. And frontline workers usually makes us think of course doctors and nurses and also grocery store workers or people who work in warehouses or drive trucks or work in nursing homes. But of course, there are many more people keeping our hospitals running throughout this crisis besides doctors and nurses. And those workers who are generally much more poorly compensated are just as exposed to risk and often invisible army of employees, as "New York Times" puts it, who have put their lives on the line.
Like Priscilla Carrow, who worked in the materials management department of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, handing out all the protective gear from the facility including masks, gloves, and keeping track of that inventory. She`d planned on retiring at the end of the year. Just by working the hospital sub-basement away from patients, Priscilla Carrow contracted the coronavirus and died on March 30th at the age of 65.
Adiel Montgomery was a security guard in the emergency department at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn. And back in March, he spoke out about the lack of protective gear that he and his colleagues received and was successful in convincing the hospital to provide them with more PPE. But by the end of the month, Adiel came down with coronavirus symptoms and he died in the hospital where he worked on April 5th. Adiel Montgomery was just 39 years old.
And 56-year old Gary Washington worked in housekeeping at the NewYork- Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Manhattan where he cleaned the rooms of coronavirus patients after they were discharged. His wife says he kept going to work after many others called out sick because he wanted to take care of his family. Gary Washington died on April 8th, the day before his wedding anniversary.
So, we are, I think rightly cheering for these people every night as we should. Brands are cutting ads about them and their service, but they deserve hazard pay. It`s outrageous they don`t have it. There are proposals for hazard pay for these kinds of workers exposed to risk. They`re in Congress right now and there is more that we can do for all frontline workers than just clap for them.
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HAYES: Breaking news tonight, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had nonsurgical treatment for a benign gallbladder condition. Ginsburg had an outpatient test in Washington, D.C. after oral arguments on Monday. It was during that visit that it was confirmed she was suffering from a gallstone that cause an infection. According to a court statement, Justice Ginsburg is resting comfortably, and plans to participate in the oral argument teleconference tomorrow morning remotely from the hospital. She expects to stay in the hospital for a day or two.
Meanwhile, for all of 2019 and for the first month and a half of 2020, the big questions surrounding the presidential election was an incumbent president who was disapproved by a majority of voters who won with fewer votes than his rival last time around but who is overseeing a macro economy that was doing pretty well. So what does all that mean for his reelection chances? The guy`s not personally popular but the economy`s doing pretty well. And that was what we all talked about.
Clearly Donald Trump was ready to run for reelection that way. And President Ronald Reagan did it in some ways in 1984 in the midst of an economic boom, and that strategy resulted in the famous morning in America ad. The message was, it was bad before, it`s good now. Vote for me. It`s a very simple message for an incumbent running for reelection.
Now that approach has been complicated now by the worst calamity the nation`s face since, I don`t know, World War II, maybe the Great Depression, unclear. And a new ad from an anti-Trump Republican group drives this home.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There`s mourning in America. Today, more than 60,000 Americans have died from a deadly virus Donald Trump ignored. With the economy in shambles more than 26 million Americans are out of work. The worst economy in decades. Trump bailed out Wall Street, but not Main Street.
This afternoon, millions of Americans will apply for unemployment. With their savings run out, many are giving up hope. Millions worried that a loved one won`t survive COVID-19. There`s mourning in America. And under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country`s weaker and sicker and poor. And now, Americans are asking, if we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?
(END AUDIO CLIP)
HAYES: That ad definitely got under the President`s skin since he spent much last night rage tweeting about it.
Joining me now to talk about the political ad, Jennifer Horn, she`s one of the co-founders of The Lincoln Project, which the group that put out the ad, also former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party. Jennifer, tell me about how this ad came about. What was the idea?
JENNIFER HORN, CO-FOUNDER, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: Well, you really encapsulated it very well just in your introduction, Chris. Thank you very much, by the way, for having us. You know, this President is not facing the challenges that he is right now because he is leading a country that is confronting a global pandemic. He`s facing the challenges that he is because he has so horribly failed at leading the country through this global pandemic.
And I think that that`s why that ad not clearly got under the President`s skin, but why that ad has struck home I think for millions of Americans across the country. I think it really captures the heart of, you know, the heartache, really, of what our country is feeling right now.
HAYES: Yes. The idea of -- one thing that struck me here, obviously, it`s a play on mourning and morning, one without "u" and with "u". You know, it has been the case. This has been something that`s been covered and we have commented on. And, you know, the President`s inability, almost sort of in his very being to express empathy, grief, collective mourning, solidarity with those who have lost someone, it continues to be such a shocking aspect of what we`re living through. And I thought that the idea of acknowledging that was quite really profound.
HORN: There`s no question about it. I mean, yesterday when that ad was released, it talks about over 60,000 Americans lost and today we`re at over 70,000 American lives lost. And these lives are not -- no one is suggesting that Donald Trump created COVID-19. But his failures have absolutely directly contributed to an unnecessary level of death and loss in this country. And the fact that this President was on Twitter last night at 12:46 a.m. and he thought the most pressing thing that he needed to communicate was to attack those of us behind the ad is extraordinary.
You know, I got a lot of people reaching out to me today, texting me and calling me and saying, oh my gosh, the President, you know, tweeted you and attacked you in a tweet, isn`t that crazy? It`s not crazy. It`s dangerous. It`s tragic. It`s terrible. And it`s why when that ad was released, we had about 500 times the activity on our website, lincolnproject.us, than we`ve ever had before. I think that people are feeling a despair and a fear that is not about the disease, it is about the lack of leadership coming from the President.
HAYES: So there has been this very durable sort of set of conditions in the country. The President has not been popular. He sort of historically unpopular if you look at him compared to other incumbents. And their bands have moved around a lot more. But he`s, you know, hugging that kind of Carter Place, the kind of place where you would find yourself in danger reelection.
But we all know that his base is extremely loyal and I have heard it said, I may have said it myself that Republicans such as yourself never Trump -- Republicans, you know, there`s like, you know, there`s about two dozens of you and like God bless you, but like you`re not a huge constituency in the country. And I wonder if you see the calamity we`re experiencing changing that.
HORN: Yes. Well, I would say that the idea that there`s only a couple dozen of us is just not accurate. There might be a very small number of us who are willing to be public and loud and vocal about where we -- about how we feel or where we stand. But I think that we represent millions of American citizens, millions of American voters out there. And I think there`s no question and we see this in the polling, and you see it when you`re just talking amongst your friends and your family.
The American people any -- have completely lost faith in this President and his ability to lead, for those who hadn`t lost it already. And I would also suggest that there are -- even those who continue to say that they`re with the President because they`re with the party, behind the scenes what they`re saying to me, my friends at the RNC, my friends at the GOP in New Hampshire are saying, this guy, this is horrible. This is a tragedy. This is a failure of epic proportions and it falls on his shoulders.
HAYES: Yes, that question I think is the one that we face. I mean, the politics of this seem very distant for me at this moment partly because of what`s happening just day by day --
HORN: Of course.
HAYES: -- and how far the election is. But there`s question about whether the material conditions of the country are what matter in the end even in the crazy age we live in, and I think your ad, Jennifer, did a very good job of bringing that back home. It`s great to spend a little time with you, Jennifer Horn, thank you so much for making time tonight.
HORN: Thank you for having us, Chris. Thank you.
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