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Nick Cordero dies TRANSCRIPT: 7/6/20, All In w/ Chris Hayes

Guests: Lina Hidalgo, Michelle Goldberg, Amesh Adalja, Cory Booker, Yamiche Alcindor

JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: I`ll be back tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. Thanks so much for being with us. Don`t go anywhere. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes is up next.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN. As Coronavirus cases spike across the country, state and local officials go into crisis mode. The White House just hopes we get used to it. What the failed federal response means for the next COVID hotspots.

Plus, a new campaign slogan for the President`s platform on defending the symbols of treason and slavery. And the shocking Coronavirus data on racial disparities that had been fried out of the Trump administration`s hands when ALL IN starts right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. The President and his allies are reportedly settling on a re-election message amid the death and misery brought on by the present pandemic. The messages, get used to it. The Washington Post reporting that White House officials hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day according to three people familiar with the White House`s thinking.

They want you to grow numb, not just the death toll but also to their failure to what you see on this chart, this national shame. The chart illustrates the fact the European Union, Canada, Mexico, China, Japan, they all brought their cases down, but not us. Our daily cases just keep rising. We are now around 50,000 new ones a day.

This is the American exceptionalism that Donald Trump has achieved. And there`s no plan to turn it around. No, there`s just a plan to try to convince Americans this is normal. This is fine. That`s what we get from a guy who inherited a bunch of money from his daddy and then spent decades of public life BS-ing and bullying, and wearing people down, and drawing things out, and tying people up in litigation and acting so shamelessly and sociopathically he was eventually able to get over on people, run them over, wear them out.

Now, it`s not been a huge success. His companies have gone bankrupt. He`s managed to fail in all sorts of ways. But it has been enough to con his way through. And now he`s up against the virus. And all these tools he`s used in the business world that are totally sociopathic, he`s tried to apply them to the virus, and it doesn`t work because the virus doesn`t care. You can`t cow it, you can`t shame it, you can`t wait it out. You can`t spin it or draw it out from litigation or file for bankruptcy or distract people away from it. That doesn`t make it go away. None of his tricks work. You can`t B.S. a virus.

And so he`s left to try to tell us all to just get used to it. Don`t worry, just accept the death and the misery and the illness and the failure. But guess what? People aren`t going to get used to it because it`s not get used to-able. And I don`t know about you, but there`s something broke in me over the last two weeks as we`ve watched these spikes across the country.

I mean, intellectually, reporting on this now for months and talking to public health experts here on this show every night and when I`m not on the show, I knew that things were bad. And we were likely never to get back to normal in the near term. But I feel it intensely now, as I watched these numbers, and I think the country does too.

And here`s the thing. For all the talk, and there`s a lot of it about how divided we are. The fact that matter is that Donald Trump is wildly unpopular with the American people right now for a reason. And his numbers just keep getting worse. People are not used to the pandemic and there is a rough social consensus. It`s not complete, but a rough social consensus that the virus is bad and scary, and people don`t want to catch it, and they don`t want their loved ones to catch it. And we should do what we can to get it under control, and it`s a failure of leadership if we can`t get it under control.

I mean, look at the state of Texas. Governor Greg Abbott rushed to reopen his state before the virus was contained. He even overrode local efforts to mandate masks before eventually reversing courses think went from bad to worse. In Texas, I`ve seen this question spiking cases and it is getting worse with a state repeatedly setting new daily records for newly reported cases.

It`s also setting records crucially for hospitalizations, more than 8,000 as of yesterday, raising the ominously familiar specter of the sort of overcrowded hospitals we have already seen too many times before in Lombardi, in New York, and in Detroit. Indeed, officials in several Texas cities are worried that hospitals may run out of beds in two weeks, if not sooner.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PETER HOTEZ, DEAN NATIONAL SCHOOL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE AT BAYLOR: The numbers are increasing dramatically. The predictions are as terrible as these numbers are. This is the beginning. They will double in the next two weeks, and then double again the week after that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: But one silver lining right now is that we are not yet seeing huge spikes in fatalities yet. Hopefully, that`s going to continue. Maybe we think because it appears to be at least for now that younger people are getting the virus and also we have improved treatments over three months. That`s the hope. We don`t know.

But even if it`s not having the devastating fatality rate it`s had in other places yet, guess what, Texans are changing their behavior to stay safe. Look at this. Data from open table shows that restaurant reservations in Texas are down dramatically compared to last year, a drop of 62 percent yesterday versus a year ago a drop of 75 percent the day before that.

New polling lays out how scared people are of the virus. 65 percent of Texans, two out of three think it is unsafe to send their children to school in the fall. 53 percent say is more important to try to control the spread of the virus even if it hurts the economy. They understand the virus has to be stopped even if their leaders can`t quite seem to get it through their thick skulls.

Joining us now is Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the most senior elected official in the county that is home to Houston. And Judge Hidalgo, let me - - let me ask you first to just tell us how things look to you in Harris County and in the Houston area given what we`re seeing in terms of case growth and fears about hospital capacity.

LINA HIDALGO, EXECUTIVE, HARRIS COUNTY, TEXAS: We`re very concerned about the hospitals ever since May 29th. We`ve had an increasing trend, we haven`t had a decrease a single day. And so that tells you before Memorial Day, before protests already, once the reopening got underway, these cases were starting out. The first time we had this issue back in March, I was able to issue a stay at home order. People were part of it, we work together, and we stemmed that curve.

Now, this time, I don`t have the authority to do that. I`m watching this go by. I read the news today that the Miami Dade County Executive was able to order restaurants closed. I can`t do that anymore here. Restaurants are open, indoor events can take place of any size as long as they`re indoors, and yet we`re seeing these numbers.

We`ve had a couple of days where the hospitalizations are still increasing but a little bit slower. We don`t know if that`s a trend. Certainly, the seven-day curve is faster than the 14 day curve. So, I imagine is going to speed back up. But we`re watching with a lot of concern. And I`m advocating for a stay at home order here in Harris County for the authority to be able to issue that again, because we can`t just be asking folks to do it as a suggestion. This is an urgent situation.

HAYES: I should note, you`re referring the governor, Greg Abbott, has essentially preempted local ordinances on a variety of things. In fact, he blocked mask ordinances at the local level for a while. He just released this sort of seven-minute video where he -- using statistic made the cases where lo and behold, you should wear a mask. There`s now a mandatory I think, state order in counties that have more than 20 cases.

The share of Texans who say the effort to deal with a pandemic in your state are going badly increased between April and June from 29 percent to 51 percent. What is going to turn this around, I guess, is the question.

HIDALGO: You talked a little bit ago about philosophically where we should be in. Philosophically, it doesn`t make sense for the plan to be that we fill up all our beds before we take meaningful action. That`s just not right from a human standpoint, especially when you see this as the community. It is the community that dealt with Hurricane Harvey that`s come together so many times, that places a high value on human life.

But even if we`re thinking purely intellectually, from a number standpoint, if we want to be intellectually honest, we have to recognize that flattening the curve so to speak at this very high level will never allow us to sustainably reopen. If you reopen bars, and even more than starting up here, you`re going to run out of space, and so we got to get ahead of this.

If there`s one thing I`ve learned in my time in office, and I`ve dealt with massive chemical fires with floods, now this, is you have to control the disaster. You can`t let the disaster control you. And unless we implement a state home order at least in this county, the disaster is going to keep controlling us.

We have to be smarter, we have to reopen in a safe way, and we can`t reopen until that curve comes down because everybody had Memorial Day, everybody had protests, but the communities that were careful, that stayed close longer, that open fewer things that each phase, those are the ones that are doing better. And now we have the opportunity of that hindsight that we can see what worked and what didn`t.

So we`ve got the cards that we can use. The problem is we need to step up and do it and that`s why I`m advocating for that stay home order here and continuing to ask my community to stay home.

HAYES: When I saw this story that I`m about to mention, I thought it was like a joke or like a dumb parody from some Web site, but I might correct the state GOP is going to have an in-person convention. They explicitly overrode a virtual convention to have an in-person convention in Houston this summer.

HIDALGO: That`s right. In about a week or two, they`ll be gathering here, one of the city`s convention centers.

HAYES: What do you think about that?

HIDALGO: You know, same concern. Right now, we know what works. What works is a stay at home order. What doesn`t work is what we`ve been doing, even what we`re doing now. I don`t believe that we should be allowing any kind of gathering of that size. I don`t believe restaurants should be open. I think we need a stay at home order right now to get the economy back on track to get our health projections back on track.

And so that or any other gathering, I don`t agree with but then again, you know, they`re allowed right now. It doesn`t matter the size. If they`re indoors, they`re allowed. If they`re outdoors, there`s a limit, but many things are still open and that`s a big issue for us. We`ve got to step up and get in front of this thing.

HAYES: Final question for you. So what I`m hearing from you is that -- I mean, Greg Abbott clearly thinks that like masks usage might be the thing that knocks the trajectory away from what it is. Now, what I`m hearing from you is, you are convinced the trajectory cannot be really bent in -- without a stay at home.

HIDALGO: That`s right. And that`s because there`s no evidence to the contrary. We scoured the country, the globe for example. There are other countries that have been able to flatten that curve to bring it down with masks, but also they had significant contact tracing efforts, they had much more sophisticated testing. And frankly, they had some measures that would not pass muster here for civil liberties reasons that we treasure.

We don`t have an example, in this country of a place that has brought that curve down with just masks. And we are not in a position to experiment right now. So we`ve got to buckle down and get smart and get real and honest, be intellectually honest and be really human about what we`re seeing in this community and in other communities as well.

HAYES: Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, thank you so much for taking time from a very busy schedule, I know, to talk to us tonight. I really appreciate it.

HIDALGO: Thank you.

HAYES: I want to now bring in Michelle Goldberg, who`s a columnist for The New York Times, who`s been writing a lot about the pandemic. You know, Michelle, I said this in the opening, and you and I had an exchange earlier today about this, about just this sense that I think some people, a lot of people sort of convinced themselves, tried to talk themselves into some optimistic case where we would -- or at least sort of bear down for the shutdown.

And then maybe after the shutdown, there could be something that kind of looked like normal, even though intellectually, a lot of us who were covering this knew that we weren`t putting the things in place to make that possible. But it is really clear right now, it seems to me like there`s something breaking in the American psyche, about this, as you look at that curve, as you think about how other countries are getting back to normal and we are not.

MICHELLE GOLDBERG, COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: That`s what`s so devastating, right? I mean, I think especially if you had kids in school, and you were experiencing the nightmare of remote schooling, a lot of us just thought, OK, just get to the end of the year, just get to the end of the year.

And now we`re certainly facing not just a summer of, you know, kind of a summer of all activities canceled and trying to endure a summer without any sort of help as parents, but facing the extreme unlikelihood that we`re going to have anything like normal school in September. And then meanwhile, looking around the world and seeing that everyone else with a couple exceptions is getting back to normal.

I think they had fewer than 300 new cases in all of Canada yesterday, right, fewer than 200 new cases in Italy. People are having normal lives. People are you know, they kind of went through the same very intense process that we went through in New York, but then they came out the other side of it. And for us, it just looks at this point, never ending.

And when you think about what it means to kind of just -- as Trump or as Trump ally said get used to it, that`s Texas, that`s Florida, right, basically saying, OK, we can`t beat this thing so we`re just going to learn to live with it. You see very, very quickly where that goes and where that ends up. And so, you know, we`ve all -- you know, I have a lot more privileged probably than a lot of our viewers and a lot of people in this country but we`ve all seen the things that make life worth living taken from us and there is no schedule for getting any of it back for resuming anything like a livable life.

HAYES: You know, the one thing -- the weird part of the -- it`s not a silver lining, but the weird thing that keeps grounding me back to some sense that gravity still exists is just that it doesn`t -- this sort of bizarre, brazen Jedi mind trick of like, this is fine. People are dying people are getting sick, it`s fine. Don`t worry about it. Like, it isn`t working.

I mean, I thought this polling on net -- this net approval of governors handling, this is from an NBC poll on governor ratings. And it`s like Whitmer, Michigan who is really attacked for the virus vigorously is plus- 18, average is plus-10. DeSantis is minus six, and Ducey who`s watching his state, you know, burn under the virus is negative 26. Like there is at least hope basic relationship between the competence in managing this and public opinion at a time when so much is so polarized.

GOLDBERG: Well, look, you know, if people you know were in the hospital. You know if people you know have died. You know if people you know are sick. You know if you are enduring the incredible burden of having your kids at home and trying to hold down two jobs at the same time. There`s no spinning some of this stuff.

I mean, I still think it`s unbelievable in a sign of our extreme polarization and kind of, you know, epistemological derangement that Trump is at 40 percent and not five percent.

HAYES: Yes, I totally agree, yes. I mean, that is right. If you focus on that part too, it does -- that part of it does seem insane because in any objective sense --

GOLDBERG: I mean, all lives are ruined.

HAYES: -- it just is the case. Yes. Yes, it`s really that. And it`s --

GOLDBERG: Right. I mean, I think a lot of us have watched the institutions of this country burn. We watched the things that maybe we thought made America what -- you know, the kind of liberal democracy that those of us -- you know, that our patriotism attached to. We`ve watched all of that eroded.

But now we`re seeing our day to day lives become untenable because Donald Trump has done to this country what Donald Trump did to Trump stakes and to his casinos and to everything else that he has ever touched.

HAYES: Yep. And he did it and the two canaries in the coal mine that I always come back to is what he did to hurt Puerto Rico on hurricane Maria, which was absolutely omnidirectionally incompetent and cruel as what we`ve seen here. And to people seeking asylum in our -- you know, in our country with family separation, where they couldn`t bother to put the families together in some database. I mean that -- but those are the canaries in the coal mine and now it`s all the whole time.

GOLDBERG: Yeah, exactly. I mean, and I think that you know, that -- I think it`s such -- the fact that people sort of thought that, you know, it was just them, that Puerto Ricans, you know, he can -- the fact that they didn`t apply that lesson to their own safety that they didn`t see in that a source of, you know, sort of an ominous warning of what would befall them if they ever faced a crisis under this presidency, is a sign of just how much his legitimacy has relied on dehumanizing large parts of the population, because otherwise people would have realized that something like this was going to happen.

HAYES: Michelle Goldberg, I`m going to use that "he`s throwing paper towels at all of us" line. Columnist in New York Times, it`s great to talk to you as always. Thank you.

GOLDBERG: Thank you. See you.

HAYES: Coming up, the President`s latest bogus claim about the Coronavirus and the real toll that COVID-19 takes on the bodies of many of those who survive it.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: The President celebrated July 4th this year with a speech in the White House south lawn in which he made the manifestly preposterous claim that 99 percent of Coronavirus cases in this country are, and I quote him here, "totally harmless." That provably false assertion led to immediate pushback from scientific bodies and doctors and fact-checkers alike. It also listed in some memorable squirming from Trump`s FDA Commissioner who repeatedly refused to weigh in on the accuracy of the President`s bogus statistic.

Talk to any E.R. doctor who has dealt with this disease and they will tell you that in reality, as many say 15 to 20 percent of Coronavirus confirmed patients can require hospitalization. Among these are the so-called long haulers, those who exhibit symptoms for over 100 days.

Many of these people can experience chest pain, shortness of breath, nausea and heart palpitations for months. This weekend, we got the news of the tragic passing of a Broadway actor named Nick Cordero. Now, the actor who had zero preexisting conditions spent three excruciating months in the hospital. And during everything from a brief stoppage to minor heart attacks and sepsis as well as a leg amputation before finally succumbing to the virus on Sunday. He`s 41 years old.

This virus is still so new and there remains so much we don`t know about it even as day by day we tried to learn more. And joining us now to talk about some of the latest science is Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Doctor, I thought maybe we would start on this topic of these sort of long haulers chronic kind of cases, because it`s a really disturbing aspect of this. Obviously, you know, we know about the fatality rates, particularly among people 70 or older. But this category, what do we know about the category of people that seem to just have this and get very sick for a very long time?

AMESH ADALJA, INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST, JOHNS HOPKINS CENTER FOR HEALTH SECURITY: What we know is that some people with any type of virus they get, can have what`s called a post viral syndrome where after they`ve cleared the virus, the symptoms may decrease. They`re not having the acute fevers and chills that you get with the acute infection, but they may have lingering symptoms like headaches, trouble concentrating, fatigue.

And we really don`t know exactly why people get this but there clearly are a subset of individuals who get coronavirus seemingly recover but then are plagued with these symptoms that which can be debilitating, it can really interfere with your quality of life. And this is an important research question to understand why certain people get that (AUDIO GAP).

HAYES: I wonder -- we`ve seen -- have we seen things like this with sort of similar viruses in this family like SARS and MERS, which never quite, you know, blew up here into -- in the U.S. But is there sort of precedent for that?

ADALJA: There is precedent with other viruses. But when it comes to SARS, and MERS, those have very different coronaviruses because they cost so much severe disease. We didn`t really see very many mild cases of those.

HAYES: Right.

ADALJA: And we know that people who have critical illness. So those who get into the ICU who have pneumonia, those people are always going to have a post ICU syndrome. So it`s a little bit harder to compare this Coronavirus which in many ways behave somewhat like our common cold coronaviruses, but worse than the SARS and MERS, so it`s a little bit hard. But we definitely have seen it with any kind -- any number of infection. There is this group of people that have post viral syndromes that we really find a mystery to deal with.

HAYES: You know, one of the things that struck me when we were -- when the sort of first wave was hitting places like New York and I was talking to a lot of E.R. doctors was this real manifest frustration with a lack of clear treatment protocols. They would do things they thought, you know, that the symptoms were presenting this way, they thought this was the right thing to do, and it would backfire or wouldn`t work. It was a very confounding disease.

I thought this piece from Bloomberg was interesting that, you know, there has been a lot of collective effort by doctors and clinicians to talk about treatment protocols. Months into the most destructive pandemic in a century, doctors` collective experience is starting to build a framework of how best to cope with Coronavirus patients, as many thousand COVID related research papers are being released daily ahead of peer reviewed and publication. Do you think we`ve made real progress on that on the clinical front in the last three months?

ADALJA: I definitely think we`re in a much better place treating patients now in July than we were in March. I can say that we`ve got much better protocols, we have a much better understanding of the pathophysiology of the disease, how it causes symptoms, what complications might occur, how to prevent those complications. We have experimental drugs like Remdesivir. We also have the use of steroids and certain patients are much better at using mechanical ventilators understanding that there`s a little bit of a nuanced strategy you want to use and in COVID patients.

So I do think that that`s been good that we`ve been able to do this and disseminate this knowledge pretty widely around the world. And it may help when we get inevitably more severe cases as we move through this pandemic, to decrease that mortality rate of hospitalized patients.

HAYES: There was a news today that I thought was interesting, caught a lot of people`s attention about the evidence for a mutated strain that is spreading in Harris County and around Houston. A Baylor College of Medicine doctor says that he thinks there`s some evidence that there`s a mutated strain of Coronavirus that`s actually spreading faster.

So far, it seems like there`s been quite a bit of viral stability to the virus so far, that we haven`t seen major mutations. What`s your sense of what we know about this mutation and what more do we need to learn?

ADALJA: So, all viruses mutate. Coronaviruses tend to mutate much less than other viruses. But what`s happened is there`s this one dominant mutation that we`ve seen basically all over the world except for in a few geographic locations. And what it looks like in the lab is that it`s more efficient to transmitting, that it gets up to higher viral loads.

We haven`t been able to prove that this happens in people or actually out in the wild, but it`s something to look for. But it doesn`t change anything about the virus in terms of its severity. There is a hypothesis that it might be more contagious, and that`s what we`re seeing increased spreading for, but that`s not been fully proven. It`s something we`ve got to watch. But it really hasn`t changed how we treat this, what social distancing measures we recommend, and it`s something that we`re really going to evolve -- the virus is going to evolve, and we`re going to have to be prepared for mutations.

HAYES: All right, final question for you, briefly. The aerosol controversy. This has been a big point of contention from beginning. We know of course the droplet spreader, right, when you cough or you sneeze. The question of whether it can hang in the air essentially, and that can infect people has been a sort of controversial question unresolved.

Right now, we have 200 scientists from over 30 countries that are urging the World Health Organization to take this more seriously. Say it`s a grown - there`s growing evidence the virus can spread indoors through aerosols that do linger in the air, and can be infectious even in smaller quantities than previously thought. How definitive do you think this is right now because it really hasn`t been a contested question.

ADALJA: It`s still a contested question. It is not very definitive yet. We know that, like you said that droplet transmission for people in close contact with each other, less than six feet apart, that`s where we`re seeing most of the transmission. We`re not seeing the epidemiology consistent with for example, measles or tuberculosis or chickenpox, which are classic airborne diseases.

This doesn`t mean we can`t get some aerosol transmission. We probably are getting some. But is it a driving transmission outside of for example, hospitals where there`s aerosol generating procedures going on? I don`t think that`s the case. And I think this is going to be a debate that`s between the aerobiologists and the epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors. It`s going to continue for some time.

HAYES: That`s a really fascinating point, those other precedents where we know actually that it is aerosolized, and also we know what those sort of growth curves look like. It`s a really, really good point. Dr. Amesh Adalja, who`s an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, that was really, really enlightening. Thank you for your time.

ADALJA: Thank you.

HAYES: Still ahead, why Donald Trump wants to make the upcoming election all about big pieces of carve rock, and why that may backfire.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Donald Trump and a lot of people in the Republican Party, and conservatives on television, they want to turn the 2020 election into the statue election, so much so they put out this absolutely hilarious campaign ad on social media over the weekend, the campaign vowing to protect the statue of Christ the Redeemer, probably the most famous sight in entire country of Brazil, as if Antifa was going like airlift hundred of people down to Rio and then rent a crane and like take down the 12 story statue for a few days.

Clearly there is a line of thinking among some Republicans right now if they can just pivot the national conversation to defending the honor of George Washington`s face on Mount Rushmore, for example, they can get back on the right side of public opinion.

The problem is that the president, as he has been doing ever since the birther controversy, and in fact before that, just keeps saying the quiet part loud.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: There is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame out heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.

Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: That was just a little small portion of the president`s weekend of unending toxic racial grievance, culminating with a tweet storm today. The president accusing the only black full-time Nascar driver in the country, Bubba Wallace, of inventing a hoax, because this thing was tied in his garage stall. Despite the fact that Bubba Wallace says he did not report it or even see it himself.

The president also in that same tweet criticized Nascar for banning the flag of treason and slavery from their events. He then went on to defend the racist slur name of the Washington football team, while using his standard racist nickname for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Now, generations upon generations of white American politicians have learned how powerful it is to harness white racial grievance, but it tends to be most effectively harnessed with with a thin veneer of equanimity and charity, which this president is just incapable of mustering. He has one note he has been playing for years, and he`s going to keep playing it come hell or high water.

Right now, at least for right now, it is not working. And we`re going to talk about that when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: It was a brilliantly coined shorthand for the first term of Obama`s presidency, and something of an informal campaign slogan...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: That was the answer given by then Vice President Joe Biden, most memorably during the Democratic National Convention in 2012 after Republicans posed the question, are you better off now than you were four years ago?

And now here we are in 2020 and Trump`s version of that slogan seems to be your loved ones may be dead, but Confederate statues are still alive.

But as some anonymous Trump campaign adviser so eloquently put it to The Daily Beast, is the statue stuff going to work?

Joining us now is Yamiche Alcindor white house correspondent for PBS NewsHour who, on more than one occasion, has confronted President Trump over his ongoing use of racist and derogatory language and his embrace of the culture wars.

And Yamiche, it is great to have you. I think there is sometimes a sense of like, you know, the president has some strategy, distraction, et cetera, and I think he does think there is some upside in this. But it also strikes me that most of the people in the GOP, most people around him, don`t really want him tweeting about Bubba Wallace and the Washington football team, and this is actually just like what he thinks.

YAMICHE ALCINDOR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT PBS NEWSHOUR: I think you`re right. There is part strategy, part impulse here.

Now the president won in 2016 on just this strategy going after immigrants, talking about African-Americans saying, what the hell do you have to lose? So now we`re back in 2020 and the president thinking, well, this is the strategy that is going to work for me. He`s clearly settled on this strategy that objectively is about culture wars and is objectively about pushing at the things that he thinks divides Americans most.

The issue is that some of these issues don`t divide Americans. When you think about the issue of the Confederate flag, today it was pretty stunning to hear the White House press secretary say that the president hasn`t really settled on a stance when it comes to the Confederate flag, which as you noted is a symbol of people who supported slavery and treason.

You also think that the president is doing all this while we have a coronavirus outbreak that is just deepening all over the country, and one that The New York Times had to sue the Trump administration and the CDC to get information on that shows that it`s disproportionately affecting African-Americans and Latinos.

So, it is with that backdrop that the president continues to do these things.

HAYES: Yeah. And there is also the fact that, I mean, you know, there is a sort of infamous memo that Pat Buchanan writes to Nixon in advance of `72 I think where he basically talks about cleaving the country in half, but we get the bigger half, when he`s talking about certain culture war issues. And it does seem like, you know, cleaving the country in half and getting the smaller half is part of what`s happening here.

I thought this was interesting from the long-time GOP politico named Janet Mullins Grissom. She`s worked for McConnell and worked for Rand Paul, and she retweets the Bubba Wallace tweet and says seems POTUS is determined to give evidence to the I think he`s trying to lose the election theorists.

Like, I think that, you know, the professionals in the GOP do not see this as a particularly winning strategy.

ALCINDOR: That`s right. But the president also, I think, continues to go back to 2016 where people told him that he was doing the wrong thing. It worked in 2016. Of course it failed miserably in 2018 when of course House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gets to be the House speaker because President Trump decided to talk about American carnage and didn`t have an answer for health care. Now in 2020, that`s what he`s leaning on.

And when I talk to historians, they say that he`s essentially leaning in on this white resentment politics, and he`s talking about white America and the history of America as essentially white. This idea that our heritage is at stake when really he`s talking about white heritage and the myth that was America of this place that treated everyone equally.

So I think the president is particularly aggrieved, but I think he`s also thinking this is what my base wants, and these are the people that have stuck with me this amount of time and I can just kind of keep using those same people to win another election.

HAYES: There is also this sort of, you know, almost comical inconsistency to the president, right. He`s sort of pivoted back and forth like the virus is going away. Oh, it is actually the equivalent to World War II. He`s done this with Biden. And he got away with this with Hillary Clinton sort of attacking her in different ways, right from sort of both the left and the right at the same time.

But Dave Weigel pointed out that when it comes to Joe Biden, that these are two ads, these are screenshots of two ads currently running by the Trump campaign about Joe Biden. One of them is you won`t be safe in Joe Biden`s America, because like he`s, you know, an Antifa sympathizer who is going to get rid of the police, and the other is we do everything but hang people for jaywalking in this bill about how his crime bill was too tough on it.

Like there is some problem there in some kind of unified message if you are running both those ads at the same time.

ALCINDOR: That`s why the president is making the case he`s a law and order president while also saying that somehow he`s not going to usher in the next wave of mass incarceration through being a law and order president.

So I think there is a messaging issue there.

I think also the big issue is that he`s trying to make this message that Joe Biden is somehow incompetent, that he`s somehow physically unable to do the job of the presidency while at the same time he`s getting crowds to clap for him because he can drink water with one hand.

So, what you see is a president who is just really contrasting his messaging all over the place. And I think part of the main issue and the main messaging problem is that you have in President Trump someone who does things from day-to-day that really are just not at all, I think, in one line of a direct message.

I mean, today you think of the Washington Redskins tweet. Did he really have to send that tweet? But the president obviously couldn`t help himself. He had to weigh in on this issue that really is not -- in some ways it`s a settled issue. The Washington Redskins likely should be changing their name, but the president can`t resist.

And as a result, you have the campaign and the White House having to circle the wagons, something that they didn`t want to have to focus on today.

HAYES: Yeah. And it`s also -- I mean, the ultimate thing that I keep coming back here is that he`s the incumbent and that`s the reality here. And in some ways, you know, whatever criticisms he levels at whoever about the statues, like, there is a once in a century pandemic raging.

And, you know, there is incredible reporting from some of your colleagues, you know, about this White House about, like, oh, should we get people to get used to it? Does he have to talk about the pandemic? The idea that there is some way around this just strikes me as nuts, but apparently some people inside that White House think there is some path around it.

ALCINDOR: Well, the president has settled on this idea that he needs to change the strategy of how he talks about the virus instead of the strategy on how he actually tackles the virus itself.

HAYES: Right.

ALCINDOR: So, what you see is a White House and a presidency that wants to talk about the virus as being in the rear-view mirror. Even at the White House, we`re not getting temperature checks anymore. He`s kind of in some ways try to move past the virus, when in fact the numbers issues and the actual Americans who are dying continue to be the issue that he can`t get passed, and as a result people are going to continue to be scared if their neighbors and their loved ones are dying, and that`s something that the president just can`t get around.

HAYES: Yamiche Alcindor who is the White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. Yamiche, always great talking. Thank you.

ALCINDOR: Thanks.

HAYES: Still ahead, Senator Cory Booker is one of the several lawmakers who has been pushing the CDC to release some key data on the coronavirus crisis. Those data have just been released. Senator Cory Booker joins me to discuss what`s in then next.

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HAYES: Throughout this pandemic, we`ve seen a number of reports from cities like New York and Chicago showing disparities in the way that people of different races have been affected by this virus. And as those reports are being cobbled together, city by city, the CDC was collecting and analyzes national data on the disparate impact the virus has had on black and brown communities nationwide.

But, the CDC steadfastly refused to actually release that data to the public, despite multiple requests from news outlets and members of congress.

Now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The New York Times, we finally get to see just what was in those data.

And the results are disturbing as they are all too familiar. According to CDC data, black and Latino people contract the virus at nearly three times the rate of their white neighbors. That disparity remains true across different states, across people who live in cities versus suburbs and rural communities, even across different age groups.

No matter what you try and control for, the people most affected by this novel coronavirus, the same people have borne the brunt of America`s much older plagues of housing and segregation, wealth inequality, police brutality, and mass incarceration.

And this revelation comes just as the nation is in the midst of a once in a generation civil rights demonstration from city to city against those same institutional prejudices.

Joining us now is one of the members of congress who pushed for the release of the data, Democrat of New Jersey, Senator Cory Booker.

Senator, I know that before this data even was released I know you and other members of congress were working on compiling it and getting it. Why was it -- why was it so important to you?

SEN. CORY BOOKER, (D) NEW JERSEY: Well, we know we have a country with a wild health care disparities already. And we knew that this was going to be, in particular, a help in dealing with what I saw firsthand as a guy who lives in a majority African-American city, that this virus was ravaging African-American communities, and even have strategies to deal with something, you need to have the data that can inform those strategies. And so it was very important to me and other members of congress to get that information.

HAYES: What is your reaction to seeing it laid out in the way that the CDC has? I mean, I think we all anticipated the general direction of this, but it is quite stark how consistent the pattern is across so many different areas.

BOOKER: You know, it reveals what is the truth in our country, is we have these profound racial disparities that penetrate so many areas of American life from employment to the criminal justice system -- you have written about that eloquently -- but also, to the areas of health care.

You know, I have been dealing with one of the founders, along with Tammy Duckworth of the environmental caucus, because we, she and I both know that the number one indicator of whether you are going to be drinking dirty water, whether you are going to be breathing toxic air, whether you are going to live around toxic super fund sites is the number one indicator is the color of your skin. We have African-Americans that have less access to health care and more.

So, this is not surprising to me, but it does highlight the urgency of this moment.

HAYES: Yeah, you know, I -- you mention, you talk about these disparities and it`s remarkable when you walk through just the data, right, just this sort of objective conditions of people in this country, in different racial categories, and whether it`s household wealth and the ability to buy a home, whether it`s just life expectancy, right, like how many years are you going to live? Health disparities and health outcomes, poverty, environmental justice, all of these issues. They are enormous.

And I am curious what you think of the moment we are in, because it seems to me that these protests that are by some measures the largest we have seen in generations, if not decades, starts with the killing of George Floyd on camera, and addressing all these various racial disparities in how people are policed and household wealth. And there is, to me, a kind of desire to wrench them into the sort of cultural symbolic realm so that the answer is like they take some Golden Girls episodes off of streaming service, but the disparities you`re talking about are so profound and so extant, like what do you think about the national conversation we`re having right now more than a month after Mr. Floyd`s death?

BOOKER: Well, so, first of all, I`m encouraged to see the kind of dialog, conversations and movement that we have had, but we are just in the foothills of the mountain we have to climb in this country and have to come to grips with and speak truth about.

This is not going to be an easy quick fix. They are not some corporations who pull down their pancake mix or change the name of a product or put a little bit of, of sort of, more emphasis on diversity. These are structural problems in our country that actually hurt everyone, economic disparities, educational disparities, these have a financial impact on the flourishing of our nation as a whole, and there is an urgency that we actually go deeper than we are right now.

So, this is an encouraging beginning, but if America really stops and looks plain at the data -- and really the not deep historical roots. We don`t have to go back that many generations, as you wrote about again in your great book, this was by design, in my lifetime.

I mean, I told the story a lot about on my, on the campaign trail last year, about that it was, I was a baby when my parents had to get a white couple to pose as them to buy a house in a -- and to be the first black family to integrate a part of New Jersey, because housing segregation was so stark.

Well, following from housing that, the disparate educational opportunities people get, following from the disparate educational opportunities that people get follow a whole bunch of other aspect of life opportunity, these are all deeply entrenched problems that we created as a society by consciously doing it, and now it`s systemically apparent.

But to deal with this, we have to have the same conscious intention. And the first thing we have to do is be aware of the depth of the problem, and that`s where I`m hoping this conversation as a nation goes.

HAYES: You know, one of the other huge disparities in American life, of course, is the likelihood of particularly young black men being victims of violence, particularly violent homicide. We have seen in the -- in the last few weeks there have been really some really worrying data out of cities like Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, about year over year increases in shootings and homicides.

There`s a certain argument being made explicitly by NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea I think today, by others who tend to be conservative, saying, look, this is what happens, you protest the police and you say you don`t want the police and you say you want to defund the police and the police going into a defensive crouch, and then we get violent crime.

And someone that was the mayor of Newark, who lives in Newark still, I want to hear your response to people making that argument, because it goes all the way up to the president of the United States.

BOOKER: Well, it`s shamefully shallow and it hurts. Look, I don`t need to watch the TV, I have lived this experience. Right up the -- a block up the street from where I used to lived in these high rise projects, these beautiful, brilliant children, boys used to hang out in the lobby. The first one died was Hassan Washington (ph) back in 2006, the last one of that crew that died was Shahad Smith (ph), shot with an assault rifle at the top of the block that I lived on.

The numbers of kids that I know that are dead right now in a world that is constantly assaulting them, from poisoning them with the water that they drink, assaulting their lungs with the air they breathe, denying their equal educational rights. I could go so deeply into all the causes. And we know, I can show you the data, that extending Medicaid lowers violence. Nurse-family partnerships lowers violence, economic security programs, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, lowers violence in America.

Why are we thinking that public safety in America, true safety and security, means more police or less police? True safety and security in America is investing in the things of human flourishing.

My first meeting with the FBI when I was the mayor of the city of Newark, and I asked him about the gang problems, how we solve this, he looks at me honestly and says we don`t solve these problems. In other words, he knew that these problems stem from a poverty of empathy in our nation.

And god, if we want to talk about being the kind of beloved community that is necessary to prevent this level of violence and death and attacks and assaults on black bodies in our country, we have to have a deeper conversation that is far more focused on a more substantive type of love that`s evident in policies and investments and in true caring about children to prevent problems from happening before we read about them in our newspapers and in our statistics.

HAYES: Senator Cory Booker of the great city of Newark, New Jersey. Thank you so much for joining us tonight.

BOOKER: Thank you, my friend. I`m grateful for you, more than you know.

HAYES: Thanks.

That is ALL IN for this evening. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.

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