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JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Thanks for watching. I`ll be back here at midnight for MSNBC`s continuing coverage of the nationwide protests. And please be sure to tune in tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. Eastern for "AM JOY." Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison will be my guest. Don`t go anywhere, "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes is up next.
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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight, on ALL IN. The policing crisis in America, new outrage over more violent clashes with peaceful protesters. Tonight, one active-duty police officer who says the era of the warrior cop needs to end. And the mayor of Newark, New Jersey and how he achieved peaceful policing of his cities protests.
Then, as D.C. takes back the streets from the military, new evidence of Donald Trump`s performance of strength is costing him bigly. Plus, the growing danger of acting like the COVID pandemic is over when it very much is not.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman on what`s actually happening in the economy after today`s surprising jobs numbers. When ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES: Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. Americans are on the streets in protest again tonight, 11 days since the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. So far, the police have been peaceful. We`re going to keep an eye on the situation throughout the evening.
Because with these massive protests, we are seeing tons of police activity and tons of people with smartphones out in the streets recording the police doing their jobs. It`s given us more of a picture of what policing in America looks like than we almost ever get even if in fairness it is not perfectly representative.
And as I start tonight, I want to be clear upfront that policing in America can be very dangerous and is very dangerous and very dangerous in this moment. There have been several officers around the country who`ve been shot, who`ve been injured. Retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn was killed responding to an alarm at a pawn shop just earlier this week. In Buffalo, New York, which we will discuss shortly, three officers were seriously injured when an SUV just plowed into a group of law enforcement that were out on the street.
Being a police officer is not an easy job by any means. It is certainly not an easy job under conditions of maximum stress. But it is very hard to look at the videos that we have been seeing from all across the country. And particularly this one video we`re going to show you what you may have seen and not conclude that there is something deeply broken in the culture of policing in America. Something that is at the core of the crisis this nation is now experiencing.
Now, this is a really upsetting and graphic video so be warned. In downtown Buffalo last night, 75-year-old Martin Gugino who`s a longtime peace activist there approached a group of officers at a protest, just walking up to them. Here`s what happened next.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Move.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He is bleeding.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He`s bleeding out of his ear.
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HAYES: That`s just 15 seconds of that video that you saw. And then just those 15 seconds, that scene is an entire syllabus on how the culture of policing is broken. What has happened to it, how it operates, and how it is essentially created a hole that is worse than the sum of its parts.
First to begin with, you have an officer shoving an elderly protester entirely unprovoked for no earthly justifiable reason, just pure escalatory violence, which results in a 75-year-old man hitting the ground with blood pooling from his head onto the concrete as you see there.
And then there is a moment where one of the police officers goes to help him which of course is the natural human reaction. You can see one of the officers bends down to help. It`s almost primal, the reaction, before another officer stops him. He puts his hand on his back and pushes him forward.
And I would bet to you, that is the human reaction to stop and help that almost all of these officers would have if they were not in uniform in that circumstance. I have to believe, if those officers you see they`re walking down the sidewalk, just as normal civilians, and they saw someone push an old man, and that old man fell, and his head was bleeding on the concrete, they would probably stop to help and attend to the old man bleeding on the side of the street.
But not in this context. In this context, that impulse that human impulse is literally yanked back. Physically, another officer pulls him back from helping the bleeding, elderly man. And everyone there, all those officers, they are so focused on closing ranks in a literal and metaphorical sense that they either cannot recognize or will not recognize what their brethren just did, and what humanity and compassion and serving and protecting is required of them in that moment.
No, instead they`re on war footing. And other then calling for a medic, which they do. They keep marching forward. And you may expect afterwards to see them walk into some huge sea of unruly protesters they are all geared up to face, but they just go after this one guy. There`s barely anyone else even there. It`s just a handful of people walking down the street.
All that is right there, the gear, the militarization, the warrior mindset, the inability to police each other, all the worst impulses succeeding over the best impulses. And then the top it all up, immediately after it happened, the buffalo Police Department has the gall to initially claimed that the 75-year-old man was injured when he tripped and fell as though on his own.
Even After two officers were suspended amidst the massive outcry, the police union president had the gall to say the man just slipped. Thankfully, Martin Gugino`s attorney says he is now in serious but stable condition. But anyone who`s been paying attention to news knows this is far from isolated incident. And this kind of violence that we`re seeing there, it has been visited on African American, Latino, brown and black folks for years, for decades, even longer.
I mean, think about what`s happening now while the cameras are out. What do you think happens when they`re not there? We`ve seen so many disturbing videos in the past 11 days. It`s hard to keep track images of violence perpetrated by the police. And I know police, the police is a massive oversimplification of a term to describe hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans.
I talk to police officers in a fair amount. I`ve reported on police and policing for years. And I know there are so many good people out there wearing the badge. Decent and compassionate people, people who want to serve and protect, people who are embedded in the communities they police.
As individuals as human beings, these stories like all stories, they are complicated stories. But what we are seeing with our police reminds me so much of what happened with another institution, an institution I feel personally close to the Catholic Church. And I come at this from a personal place. My father was a Jesuit seminarian for years before he met my mom. I was raised in the church. My great uncle was a famous priest in Chicago area.
And when the crisis of child sexual abuse happened, the priests, the perpetrators, they were a small, sliver of the priests overall. But what became clear is that so many of the other priests had simply refuse to step in. They refuse to police their brothers. They refuse to grapple with the reality of what was happening in front of their eyes, the evil being committed in front of them. They look the other way. They lied to themselves. They forgave too easily. And it came very damn well near destroying the church in this country and other countries. It still hasn`t recovered.
You know, there`s a reason people use the cliche of the bad apple. You hear it all the time, though people always get it wrong. People say well, yes, there are some bad apples when talking about police officers. The whole point of the cliche is that a few bad apples spoil a bunch. And there is something rotting with policing in America. In that video of Buffalo, you can see the bunch being spoiled.
Now, there`s a police officer in Savannah, Georgia, a guy by the name of Patrick Skinner. He`s got an incredible story. He joined the CIA after 9/11 as an operations officer where he worked in places like Afghanistan, Iraq. After leaving CIA, he returned to his hometown to become police officer, making the subject of this amazing 2018 New Yorker profile called The Spy Who Came Home that examines his experiences in the CIA and his philosophy on policing.
This is a guy who gave his adult life, his career to his country, and then decided that being a good police officer was what he had to contribute next. He`s someone I followed and corresponded with for years. He`s one of the most fastening perspectives on policing with anyone I know. And amid the protests all around the country, he wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled, "I`m a cop. I won`t fight a war on crime the way I fought the war on terror." And Patrick Skinner joins me now.
Patrick, it`s great to have you on the program. I guess I want to start with the bad apples metaphor, which I saw you tweeting about earlier in saying, you don`t like the bad apples metaphor, and we have these discussions. Why not?
PATRICK SKINNER, POLICE OFFICER, SAVANNAH, GEORGIA: Because it makes it seem a little bit more innocent than it really is. I understand the metaphor, the analogy, but apples don`t kill people. Apples don`t kill my neighbors. Apples don`t violate constitutional rights. Language is important. And if we keep making it cute, I understand it, but you should just say bad cops ruin policing. It`s -- I mean, it`s -- I get the apple metaphor, but we`re kind of past metaphors now.
HAYES: As someone who works to be a cop day after day, when you look at that video in Buffalo, when you look at the group, the sort of individual police officer who shoves the man and then everyone else`s reaction, what do you see?
SKINNER: I see fear on the police. They`re terrified of their neighbors. Well, they don`t see them as neighbors. Hopefully, we can talk about that quickly. But I see fear. The old man, the 75-year-old man is not afraid. He comes up and the cops -- I understand their order is to clear the square, but there are several ways to do that.
And it`s just, you know, the guy touched a police officer, oh my goodness. And then they push him or they -- he enabled him to fall. Whatever metaphor, they push him, and it`s an assault, and it`s wrong. And it just shows that how afraid we are people. And we`re afraid because we`re constantly told we`re at war -- we`re on a war on crime, we`re warriors. And I reject that with every single part of it.
HAYES: Yes. You wrote this. I`m a cop. I won`t fight a war on crime the way I fought the war on terror. We need to change our mindset about what it means to police in America. And my limited experience as police officer in a high crime, high tempo city, I and my colleagues who train me have tried a different mindset, a neighbor mindset. What`s the difference as someone who was active in what`s called the war on terror in intelligence services in your previous career, the policing you`re doing now, between the warrior mindset and the neighbor mindset?
SKINNER: So overseas, I worked in intelligence, but it was part of a counterinsurgency effort and then counterterrorism where we did collective punishment. We did -- targeted a whole population based on 10, 20, 30 people. And so -- and we -- but we kid ourselves. We said, oh, we`re getting them on our side. We`re getting the Sunni leader or the Shia or the community leader, and we fooled ourselves. And they hated us, and they should have hated us. We were an occupying army, and so there was no way to make it work with that mindset, but also the reality of being an occupy army.
And so, I come back here and I live here. I live in a -- so it`s not a metaphor for me, it`s a reality. These are my neighbors. And I realize this is -- we`re fighting this as a war on crime. And yet here we have home field advantage. We live here. And they`re our neighbors. This is not enemies. And I`m just tired of being afraid of my neighbors so I stopped.
HAYES: You use that term neighbor a lot when you talk about policing. And it`s not something I`ve ever -- often don`t encounter it among police because the warrior mindset is so intense and partly because being a police officer can be scary. And you do see people in tremendous distress. You do see people on their worst days. You do see people threatening you and hurling insults at you. What does it mean to police as a neighbor?
SKINNER: I think it`s a -- it`s a mindset that -- I mean, what you say is what you believe, and what you believe is what you do. And so I am very intentional about it. I only used it because I reject the term civilian, because I`m not in the military. We`re -- you know, we`re cops, we`re not warriors.
And so, I just say that these are actual neighbors. And it means -- it means everything. You`re not going to put your neck on -- or your knee on the neck of your neighbor. You`re not going to be afraid of them at all times. And this fear, it`s just -- it`s devastating. I can`t explain it. We want to -- we want to make it an issue of training. I`ve already seen it. We`re like, oh, we`ll just have to change the training and a couple de- escalation. That`s not it.
If you have a warrior mindset, you can`t de-escalate. And so, I always tell -- I`m a training officer now. My department is very supportive of me. And I always say, you know, if you didn`t have a badge and a gun, how would you handle this 9/11 call. And whatever you come up with that is thoughtful, legal, and kind, try that first.
HAYES: There is news today on this and you said your department has been supportive of you and you`re on television right now, which I really appreciate. There was news out of Buffalo today that really kind of broke my heart, I have to say, after seeing that video. The buffalo police officers in mass resigned from that unit. That was your Emergency Response Unit in -- not out of shame for what happened, in protest to the suspended colleagues who shoved the man, 75, to the ground. What -- I just -- this sort of closing ranks, I get it. I understand the psychology of it, but it just seems like such an obstacle to progress here.
SKINNER: It`s one of the obstacles. I mean, we have -- our nature needs to change the mindset of what it means to be a police. But I am a huge supporter of unions. I think they built the middle class. I love unions. But I`m in the south, I`m not in a union. There isn`t a police union and I can be fired tomorrow.
And so police unions they protect the police. And they forget that protect and serve part, they`re protecting the police. That is not the police`s job. And you know, it would be great to have better benefits and more pay but the accountability to my neighbors is far more important.
And so, I don`t support the police unions doing this. The statements they put out attacking politicians who, you know, are their leaders or you know, their supervisors, that`s insane and it`s counterproductive. And that is a warrior mindset that we have got to change.
HAYES: Officer Patrick Skinner who is a police and he lives in the city of Savannah, Georgia where he is a police member among his neighbors. Officer Skinner, thank you so much for making time for us tonight. I really, really appreciate your perspective.
SKINNER: Thanks for having me, Chris.
HAYES: Over the past week, many cities across the country have seen police violence amid the protests, from New York to Minneapolis and beyond. One city held the march attended by thousands with not one protest related arrests. That`s a choice. That`s a policy choice.
Newark, New Jersey has a long history of strife between its black residents and the police going back decades. But many credit common Newark and part to its Mayor Ras Baraka. He`s the son of poet and activist Amiri Baraka who suffered a beating at the hands of city police in the 1967 protests.
Ras Baraka is almost -- also a former high school principal who helped create Newark`s first civilian complaint review board that oversees police complaints before becoming mayor. And Newark Mayor Ras Baraka joins me now.
Mayor, it`s great to have you. I want -- I wanted to get your sense of how in the wake of George Floyd`s death, as you saw this outrage and anger, how you talk with police, talk to people that -- in your city about protest and policing and the intersection of the two and how the police would protest - - police a protest.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA (D-NJ), NEWARK: Well, we have many protests in the city of Newark, so this wasn`t -- this wasn`t our first one. And the person that organized this protest, the organization, People`s Organization for Progress have many protests and our policy even in those protests are not to engage.
We just have police officers who guide the crowd, make sure everyone is safe out there, that usually police officers are on motorcycle. And that`s what we did this time. And we had a few extra officers because I was present at the protest, so they obviously showed up and came. But we operate it the same way we would normally operate, which is to make sure, you know, the crowd was safe, that they were able to express or redress their grievances in a safe environment.
And we did that. We didn`t come out there with riot gear. We didn`t come out there with the intention of beating or stopping people from doing what they wanted to do, and what we just wanted to make sure that it was safe and that was in fact orderly. And that`s what we did and the residents did the rest. They made sure that things turned out the way it did, by the grace of God.
HAYES: You know, you`re saying about, you know, where you stand depends on where you set. And we`ve seen lots of people who are critics of the police become mayors, and then they are -- their perspective changes, whether that`s a perspective born of a good faith perspective shift or it`s a perspective shift born of being intimidated by the political capital and force of the police.
I mean, your father is a legendary activist. You come from a tradition that that is about, you know, standing up for the dignity of black lives, particularly in the face of police violence. Like, how do you think about your role as the supervisor of a police department?
BARAKA: I`m responsible, ultimately. And when I did a press conference, I said that we were atoning for our sins and I use the word we because I`m in charge of the police department now and I wasn`t in charge in 1967. But all of the incidents, everything that moves forward, I take credit and blame for everything that happens with this police department who showed incredible restraint that day.
I take it very personally. And I think that the work that we`re doing, we embrace the consent decree right away and we are working hard. We still have a huge number of issues, but we`re working hard to repair our police department or reformed our police department. And so, the other thing is the police are designed to do what they`re doing.
And I wouldn`t say that the police don`t see the folks -- they don`t see the folks as their neighbors because they`re not their neighbors, for the most part. They don`t live there. They`re not from these communities. And it`s more than just fear that these people don`t like the residents. It`s like white supremacy and hatred and racism that you have to reform and root out. And we`ve been doing that for the last couple years now, and I think has had an incredible effect and impact on our community.
HAYES: You -- the Newark Police Department, which has been quite troubled has been under a federal consent decree with the Department of Justice since 2016. There have been various reforms that have been implemented in previous administrations and carried through in your own.
When you see people say -- increasingly, I`m seeing people say the police can`t be reformed. It`s not a question of training. It`s not a question of making them live in the community. There`s something fundamentally just irreconcilable with civic peace and the police as we define them, and we need to slash police budgets. We need to defund the police. I`m curious what your response is.
BARAKA: Well, I think that a quantitative change causes qualitative change. I believe that reforms are necessary, that you have to root out some of the problems in the police department. And if you do that enough, that you begin to make real qualitative change to the department.
I do think you need to use some resources police budget have to do alternative policing, to do a strategy, to divert that money to social services and different things that are necessary. I think that needs to happen. But in the meantime, you still have to get rid of the culture of racism, you have to get rid of this warrior mentality that I was talking about, you have to get rid of police covering down and not informing when their colleagues does something that violates people`s civil rights.
We have to reform that because in the meantime, people are getting killed and hurt. So the reforms act as a wrap. These are wraps to keep people afloat long enough until there`s fundamental change that takes place systemically. And I think it`s -- I think it`s probably impossible, and we are doing that in the city of Newark.
We have more touches with the community and less arrest. Police complaints are down by 80 percent in the city. It doesn`t mean we don`t have any complaints and we don`t have issues. We have issues in front of us now. But what it does mean is that we handle them swiftly, we were being transparent, and we`re struggling with ourselves to get it right.
HAYES: Final question for you is about the pandemic which obviously hasn`t gone anywhere. You`re going unveiled the phase of Newark reopening. How do you feel your city is? I know that your city is a majority of African American, you represent people that are in populations that have been disproportionately hit by the virus. How confident do you feel about where your city is at with respect to COVID?
BARAKA: Well, our infection rate now is a little over eight percent. We were at 68 percent when we first started testing, so we`ve come a huge distance. The residents are following the stay at home orders. For the most part, many of them. Some people aren`t, but for the most part they are. That`s how we have an infection rate that`s so low.
We want to continue to move in that direction. We`re slowly opening up. But we`ve been hit the hardest. Cities like Newark in New Jersey have been hit. We have over 600 deaths, over 7,000 positive cases. So, we are bearing the brunt of it.
HAYES: Mayor Ras Baraka of the city of Newark in New Jersey, Mayor, it`s really great to hear from you tonight and I really appreciate you taking the time for us.
BARAKA: Thanks for having me on.
HAYES: Up next, the rambling performance by the president today and how his attempt at domination keeps backfiring on him. That`s coming up.
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HAYES: The President has basically one rhetorical mode which can best be described as addled discursive, narcissistic demagoguery. Somehow, it`s getting even more discursive and even more addled and more demagogic as time goes on.
There`s currently some sensitivity to this in the White House. They`re clearly reading the same polls we all are. Like this Marist poll out today, 92 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of Independents say Trump is increasing tension. Only 41 percent of Republicans say he`s making things better.
I mean, the polls overwhelmingly, at this moment, snapshot in time, show America does not like his reaction to the protest. And that`s on top of his catastrophic handling of the coronavirus which has killed 110,000 of her fellow Americans and basically everything else.
And even the Trump people who have one mode recognize what Trump has been doing is not working, which is why today Trump came out for a kind of victory lap for an unemployment rate that`s 13 percent and had to read prepare remarks about equal justice under the law.
He didn`t take any questions. He shushed Yamiche Alcindor, a black woman who`s the PBS NewsHour White House Correspondent. And then this is how he responded when she persisted.
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YAMICHE ALCINDOR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, PBC NEWSHOUR: Black unemployment went up by one -- by 0.1 percent, Asian American unemployment went up 0.5 percent. How is that a victory?
TRUMP: You are something.
ALCINDOR: How is that a victory?
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HAYES: It pales in comparison to this bizarre riff where the President appears to be saying that George Floyd would be happy with what`s happening today.
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TRUMP: We all saw what happened last week. We can`t let that happen. Hopefully, George is looking down right now and say there`s a great thing that`s happening for our country. It`s a great day for him, it`s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality. It`s really what our Constitution requires and it`s what our country is all about.
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HAYES: It`s a great, great day for him? Did he say that out loud? Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that`s happening for our country. One thing we`ve learned is that you can never actually get the full flavor of how disjointed, incoherent, and incapable of the most basic response of the president is to the most pressing social questions until you actually just read the transcript.
On Wednesday morning, the President spent the better half of half an hour doing what he does best calling into talk radio. And on that radio show, President Trump was asked a simple direct question from Brian Kilmeade, of all people, about African American police treatment. And Kilmeade tried to coach him through the question.
This is the transcript and I`m going to read it. Ready? Kilmeade: "This is the one stat I want to bring you to and I want you to attack this. According to Axios-Ipsos poll, 70 percent of white Americans say they trust the local police, only 36 percent of African Americans do. How do you attack that problem? How do you change things?"
This is the President`s response. "Well, I think it`s a very sad problem. As you know, as a Republican, I`m doing very well with African Americans and with the vote, with the -- in polls and everything. Especially, I mean, I haven`t seen one very recently because you had the plague come in from China. So that changed things up, but we had the best economy ever. We have the best numbers for African American unemployment and unemployment in history, best homeownership, best everything. We had the best numbers and everything, not only African American, but the African American numbers were great."
Kilmeade realizing the President has lost the plot entirely and tries to retrieve him from his tangent. Here`s Kilmeade. "How do you handle the law enforcement part? He says, "Well, I think you have to get better." Kilmeade: "How do you handle the law enforcement part of this?" Trump: "They have to get better than what they`ve been doing. I mean, obviously, that was a terrible thing.
And I`ve spoken about it numerous times in various speeches. And what`s interesting is I spoke about it when we launched a very successful rocket, a tremendous program that culminated on that day and obviously it goes on from there. But then I made a speech and it was a speech about the rocket, and I devoted 25 percent of the speech probably to what happened -- or more -- to what happened with respect to George -- George Floyd, and it was -- and then you listen to this, he doesn`t talk about George Floyd. The rocket went off, I then I made a speech, and I talked about George Floyd, but they said he didn`t talk about George Floyd. Half -- maybe even almost half of the speech, but a large portion of the speech was devoted exactly to that. And so, you know, with -- with the media you basically -- and basically no matter what you do, it`s never going to be good enough. But the people understand it.
Kilmeade, Right.
HAYES: Trump, And that`s one of the beauties of social media. I mean, I would love not to even bother with social media, but I`m able to get my word out beautifully by social media fortunately. You use social media too.
Kilmeade, right.
That person, the American president, is failing the most important test he`s had so far, and Americans know it. The president is doing the only thing he knows how to do and that is try to look tough and pretend all is well. More on that right after this.
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HAYES: The more the president tries to project strength, the worse he looks, the more people are able to see through it. Trump specifically encouraged the National Guard to be armed against American citizens.
Today, The Washington Post reported the Pentagon told the D.C. National Guard and guardsmen from other states not to use firearms or ammunition -- probably a good idea.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper apparently made the decision without consulting the White House. Esper also ordered hundreds of active duty soldiers on high alert in the D.C. region to go back home.
And then there was a letter published today by Just Security signed by nearly 300 former senior U.S. diplomats and military leaders warning the president the misuse of the military for political purposes would weaken the fabric of our democracy.
And there`s the public response. New Marist poll out today has Trump down seven points to Joe Biden.
And while he`s stuck in the spiral of attempting to assert dominance having backfired, the president finds himself bunkered behind a wall that grows both literally and metaphorically every day.
I`m joined now by Ashley Parker, who covers the White House for The Washington Post and whose most recent piece is titled "With White House effectively a fortress, some see Trump`s strength, but others see weakness."
How -- it struck me, Ashley, when the president stopped what he was doing to sort of read that equal justice under law segment today, and a few other things they`ve done that they are reading the same polling we are and are aware in the White House that the response thus far has not been well received by the public. Is that a fair assessment of what`s going on in there?
ASHLEY PARKER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Yes and no. In the White House and in the campaign, everyone is deeply aware of the polling, because that is the key thing that Trump cares about. But just take the incident Monday night where the president wanted to stage the photo op at Saint John`s Church and the police and authorities used force to clear peaceful protesters. You might be surprised to learn this, but opinion inside of the White House in Trump`s orbit is actually divided on that. Some people thought it was a good idea, and that at the end of the day if this unrest does come down, that the president will get credit for protecting the safety and security of the nation and that people will blame -- the president is hoping they`re local officials, their Democratic governors.
That said, there is another section subset who believes who that was -- as one person put it to me, an unmitigated disaster and he totally botched the response.
So there are polls, but there is some divide on -- you know, if the bunker boy, as his critics call him in the fortress White House, if that looks strong and powerful or weak.
HAYES: There has been reporting throughout that it was fairly apparent for me, at least publicly, that once the president stopped doing his daily Coronavirus -- ostensibly a Coronavirus briefing that would sort of be his own kind of TV show essentially, Allo Presidente (ph), that he got bored of the Coronavirus, and they kind of dropped it. It wasn`t something he really wanted to talk about or think about.
Are -- is there -- are people in the White House still aware the Coronavirus is out there still? Like, is it a thing they think about and are worried about?
PARKER: It is striking how much the Coronavirus has receded from public view. The president mentioned it today. But the task force has largely wound down. There are still some meetings, but the president is not meeting with the public health officials as much as he was previously and I think the key thing is this is a White House, more than others -- all White Houses are directed and led by the person at the top, but this president in particular his attention span and interest really the tone.
And the president is very much he`s no longer focused on the Coronavirus. And I do think there is a bit of a trickle down approach inside the administration, although there are some people who you could too who say, look, this has just gone back to the agencies, the agencies are proceeding at pace their doing their job and in fact in some ways they claim that is perhaps more effective having it out of the West Wing where the president in many cases was a distraction.
HAYES: Yeah, there is probably a case to be made that the president being removed from being active on it is fundamentally helpful in a substantive sense. In terms of the campaign, in terms of the polling, I mean, what is so clear to me is that the core argument, they`re very clear the core argument for reelection was the economy is humming along and I`m responsible and you should vote for me. That has dissipated. There is a pretty good jobs report today, which we`re going to talk about.
What is their theory of the case now? What is their understanding of what the case you make to the American people about why you should re-elect Donald Trump amidst all of this?
PARKER: It`s two-fold. There is a degree of optimism, and it may be foolish optimism, that things will recover a bit by the fall and the president could kind of go back to that economic message. There was that good jobs report today, but I think a lot of people think that is a foolhardy thing to rely on.
Which brings me to -- they are very much struggling and grappling to find a message. I was talking to someone who said, look, the president -- say what you will about him, but one thing he is, is he is an expert brander, an expert marketer, and even if he didn`t pay for a lot of focus groups, his gut was almost always right.
In 2016, even though he was all over the place, the message kind of boiled down to drain the swamp and make America great again. But with the Coronavirus, with the racial unrest roiling the country, with the economy, you`re seeing some sort of -- for a lack of a better word branding misfires on the part of this president. He can`t seem to quite alight on a message. Is it China? Is it Joe Biden? Is it the economy? And he`s all over the place and that is a real problem for them.
HAYES: Yeah, personally I think transition to greatness is one of the most incredible slogans I`ve ever heard work-shopped.
Ashley Parker, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
PARKER: Thank you.
HAYES: Coming up, the latest on the spread of Coronavirus across the country. What today`s jobs numbers actually mean for the economy. Paul Krugman joins me ahead.
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HAYES: There has been a lot of concern in recent days, concern I share, about how the protests sweeping the nation may increase the spread of Coronavirus. But even before you get to that very, very valid concern, what if recognizing we`ve never actually suppressed this virus. I mean, nationally the trajectory of cases is trending down, thankfully, slowly, as are deaths. Both of the charts you see here showing the seven-day average, you can see it going down, which is good. We`re still averaging around a 1,000 deaths every day, have been for a while. New cases are increasing right now in 18 states and Puerto Rico.
Now, some of that is because of increasing testing capacity, but some states just look like they have outbreaks, frankly. Arizona is particularly worrisome. Today the state reported its highest single day rise in cases, over 1,500, and the highest single day increase in emergency room visits, which is important.
Cases and hospitalizations are surging in Texas, too, with more than 1,600 new cases yesterday. The actual number is believed to be much higher, in part because of testing shortages.
And we have, and perhaps somewhat understandably, acclimated to this strange new normal, this in-between space, where we still have a 1,000 deaths thereabouts a day.
That is a lot of people. I mean, it doesn`t have to be this way. Spain, which had a terrible outbreak, reported zero new deaths earlier this week. And New York City, which of course is the epicenter of the outbreak here, the worst outbreak in the world, also had zero confirmed Coronavirus deaths on Wednesday.
Suppression is possible. And we owe it to ourselves to continue to attack and suppress the virus as much as possible, and not just let ourselves get comfortable with a 1,000 of our fellow Americans dying every day, because even when news cycles move on and when political discussion moves on, the virus is still here.
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HAYES: A bit of breaking news, as we reported earlier in the show, over the past 11 days we`ve seen a lot of incidents of police violence towards peaceful protesters. Tonight, the NYPD has announced it has suspended two officers seen in two viral videos for the mistreatment of protesters. One officer is seen on video pushing a woman to the ground, suspended without pay, another officer was seen pulling an individual`s face mask down and spraying pepper spray at him also suspended without pay.
The two cases have been both have been referred to the department advocate for disciplinary action. In a statement, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said the seen in the video are, quote, "disturbing and run counter to the principles of NYPD training as well as our mission of public safety. The actions by these officers stand apart from the restrained work of thousands of other officers who work tirelessly to protect those who were peacefully protesting and keep all New Yorkers safe."
Meanwhile, the president who has been desperate for good news thinks he has found his golden ticket today. The unemployment rate surprisingly fell to 13.3 percent from 14.7 percent in April. The economy gained more than 2 million jobs.
But scratch the surface, there are a bunch of reasons to be very cautious, worried even, about what the real state of the economy is. For more on what these numbers do or do not mean, I`m joined by Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize- winning economist, New York Times columnist, the author of "Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight For a Better Future."
And professor, let me start with you on integrity of the numbers. We know that Donald Trump used to, and Jack Welch and others, invoked some conspiracy in the BLS about -- the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about jobs numbers. You expressed some caution today, given the sort of ways in which the Trump administration has subverted aspects of the government`s institutions. But my understanding is you think we should take these at face value.
PAUL KRUGMAN, ECONOMIST: Yeah. The thing about it is that you still have a very professional staff. I mean, the director of the BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a Heritage Foundation guy, but the staff is very professional, and these numbers would be extremely hard to cook. I think it would require a level of competence, understanding, to cook these numbers that we don`t see in this administration, so I think we can say -- and the are numbers, when you look in the details, they actually do make sense, they tell a coherent story. So don`t conspiracy theorize. I mean, you know, anything with this administration, always exercise caution, but this looks like a real number.
HAYES: And what is the coherent story? Because I had trouble making sense of the report today.
KRUGMAN: OK, what`s happened here is that the economy, after saying that we are in a medically induced coma, where lots of stuff has been shut down, necessarily, to contain the spread of COVID-19, and what has happened now is we`ve loosened and we`ve come slightly out of it.
If you look at where the jobs have been gained, it`s restaurants, retail, you know, shops, and dentists. A tenth of the jobs we gained are in dentist offices. And that`s saying that, well, we`ve had a little bit of relaxation of social distancing and people are able to resume some, a small part, of the activities that have been put on ice for the past few months. And that fits together, that`s a story, kind of goes along with other data.
It was kind of odd, I didn`t understand why some of the economists were expecting a much worse number. I thought it would be more like zero or a little bit negative. But that`s the story. It`s not in any sense saying we`re out of the woods, that we solved the problem.
HAYES: Well, the big question here is this question about a v-shaped recovery, and I think Larry Summers who made the Martha`s Vineyard analogy, right, that every winter Martha`s Vineyard goes through a bad recession and then it comes roaring back seasonally, and that he -- I think he had analogized our economy to that, basically, it was sort of unnaturally frozen, and then when things come back, they come back.
The other side of it is, you have a bunch of cascading decisions that create kind of ripple effects such that you get people making contractionary decisions and you get a recession that lasts for a while, which side are you on? What does this data show us about which trajectory we`re on?
KRUGMAN: Well, I`m mostly on the side of fast recovery if the Coronavirus is under control. And the problem is, of course, we`re loosening without, as you were saying earlier, without really haven gotten this thing -- you know, we`re still in the middle of this, so all bets are off if we have a second wave.
But in terms of the economics, this is not like the last recession, which was brought on by over -- excessive debt and overextension, and this was kind of like an external force pushing the economy back, and as that force relaxes, it can spring back.
My big concern is that, you know, we have been in induced coma and we`ve been on life support, which was necessary and remains necessary, and that my big concern is that a couple of months of positive job numbers will lead us to withdraw the life support, that the, you know, the extraordinary business lending that has been supporting the small businesses is going to be vanishing over the next month, the extra unemployment benefits that are a key thing in supporting this economy will expire at the end of July.
So, everything could go wrong either with the resurgence of the virus or because we withdrawal the support that is actually holding us together right now.
HAYES: So, here`s the -- you put your finger on the profound paradox of today, which is it was a good jobs report, there is some reason to be optimistic. I think all of us are hoping for a fast recovery, because this has been so painful for so many people. The idea that that, we got reports from Capitol Hill, the Republicans said, look, see, good jobs report, we don`t need any further stimulus, we don`t need to do anything further legislatively, that you may end up getting a good jobs report, causing policy changes that make things more difficult in the long-term.
KRUGMAN: Oh, this has made me more pessimistic about where we will be by December, because it seems to me that this -- these good numbers make it less likely that unemployment benefits will be extended. They make it less likely that we will exercise caution in opening. And so the premature relaxation of social distancing, which was already taking place, will probably accelerate, so I actually think that once you take into account the likely political reaction, this was actually -- you know, we would have been better off if the numbers had come in worse.
HAYES: Because it would, it would have fortified political capital for further legislative sort of policy intervention, to make sure that we`re maintaining money flowing into the economy.
KRUGMAN: Yes. We did the right thing when the pandemic started, we did -- it was imperfect, but we did a lot of aid to people in distress, which was necessary. Better than I would have expected, better than we have in any previous downturn. But Republicans hate that, the administration hates it, Republicans in congress hate it. They can`t wait to stop helping people. And this gives them an excuse to do that, and that could be very disruptive if that`s the way we go.
HAYES: One of the items particularly that I think has been particularly helpful, we saw in this federal reserve data, this amazing thing that actually household personal income had increased in I think in the month of April, not in May, thanks largely to the fact that the $1,200 check and the $600 extra unemployment funding that had been given.
There`s real worries about the incentive structure there, that if you got the economy opening up, that you want to get people back to work, that they`re making more money out of work. Do you see that as an incentive problem?
KRUGMAN: You know, it could be eventually. But we`re not there yet.
And, look, we just saw 2 million jobs added. Obviously, firms did not have trouble getting workers to come back. It`s not -- you know, if we were going to do this for five years then even I, even the liberal economist would say, OK, this is a potential incentive problem, but not in the next few months. We`re still very much in this.
And there are ways to continue providing aid while diminishing the disincentives. You can offer a reemployment bonus. There are lots of things you can do without yanking the support, without ripping out the tubes.
HAYES: Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist for The New York Times. Thank you so much for making time tonight.
KRUGMAN: Thank you.
HAYES: That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
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