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Transcript: All In with Chris Hayes, October 14, 2020

Guests: Brian Fallon, Dahlia Lithwick, Lina Hidalgo, Peter Hotez, Sarah Longwell, Jane Coaston

Summary

President Trump is pushing for a friendly Supreme Court Nominee to decide the presidential election. Amy Coney Barrett would be the third Supreme Court Justice who worked on Bush v. Gore along with Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts. Harris County shatters a single-day early voting record with more than 129,000 ballots cast. Two coronavirus vaccine trials in the U.S. are on hold.

Transcript

JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Yes, it's a lot. Omarosa Manigault Newman, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, thank you both very much. I really appreciate you being here. That is tonight's REIDOUT. By the way, tune in tomorrow night. We're going to have an exclusive first look at a brand new ad from the Lincoln Project. That should be very interesting. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN. Getting the gang back together for Bush v. Gore, the 20th anniversary edition.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN): If you are confirmed, the Supreme Court will have not one, not two, but three justices, you, Justice Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice Roberts, who worked on behalf of the Republican Party in matters related to the Bush v. Gore case. Do you think that that's a coincidence?

HAYES: 20 days out from November 3rd, why Amy Coney Barrett may be Donald Trump's best hope. Then, the historic explosion of early voting in Texas with the Harris County Judge leading the way.

Plus, the president's son contracted Coronavirus and new reporting the Trump ministration is messing with the vaccine process again.

And as Biden expands his lead with older voters, can the President's strategy of openly mocking senior citizens win the back? When ALL IN starts right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Good evening from New York, I'm Chris Hayes. We are less than three weeks from Election Day, and already more than 14 million people have voted. That is over 10 percent of the total vote count for 2016 three weeks out. Unsurprisingly, the President is desperate.

And for all the worries about him pulling some authoritarian move and refusing to step down, the much more likely risk is a perfect storm not dissimilar from what we saw in 2016, where polls are systematically off in a certain direction.

And then that, combined with the Electoral College system that already favors Trump and his coalition by a few points, together that puts Trump close enough in battleground states where he can challenge the result in the courts and rerun the Bush v. Gore playbook on its 20th anniversary.

And this is not some cable news anchor, you know, wild fanfic hypothesis. Donald Trump has been explicit about that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think it's very important. I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it's very important that we have nine justices. I think it's better if you go before the election because I think this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it's a scam. The scam will be before the United States Supreme Court. And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: I think it will go before the Supreme Court. That's what he says about the election. That's the plan. Like Trump said, it is part of the reason they are trying to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and confirm her so quickly. He knows Bush v. Gore laid the groundwork for how to steal a presidential election.

Whether you remember not, in the 2000 presidential election, it was unequivocal, there's no question that Al Gore had won more votes nationally. But the outcome in Florida was razor, razor thin and highly disputed based on ballot malfunctions and the notorious hanging chads and some absentee ballots, and there was a brutal court battle about whether or not to complete a recount that when completed might have shown Gore pulling ahead.

But before that could happen, the conservative majority the Supreme Court stepped in to actively stop a recount in Florida before it might have shown a Gore lead. And they did it based on a constitutional theory that was completely at odds with their own stated principles. They use the broadest possible reading of the equal protection clause in the United States Constitution. A reading so broad that in the ruling itself, the conservative justices had to go out of their way to say, now we're using this here, but you can't ever use it for precedent. It's good for one ride only because they realized how ridiculous their own reasoning was by their own lights. That's how corrupt that decision was.

And that is also how George W. Bush became President 20 years ago. And it is notable that those people who participated in the Bush v. Gore fiasco, those people who were the loyal foot soldiers of the conservative movement, working at the ground level to bring it about to put a president in office who lost the popular vote for the first time in over 100 years, the guy who probably lost the Electoral College too. Those people are still around. They didn't go anywhere. In fact, a few of them are on the Supreme Court.

One of those lawyers with John Roberts who before Bush made him Chief Justice, edited legal briefs produced each day but the Bush team of 400 lawyers, as the case was moving through the lower courts. And he played a crucial role in editing the final 50-page Supreme Court argument preparing just 24 hours. Good work Roberts.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, he was also part of Bush's legal team. Bush made him a judge the U.S. Court of Appeals. And one of them was a young lawyer who was working for the Martin County Republicans and they had a crazy situation. They were in a desperate attempt to make sure that hundreds of absentee ballot request forms went out to Republican households even though local Republicans had actually removed the forms from the Office of the Supervisor the Elections and added the required voter I.D. numbers and sent them out.

So, they took them away from the election supervisor, and guess what, those lawyers did their job. They got those ballots to count. 673 of those ballots would have otherwise been uncounted in the state that Bush ended up winning by 537 votes. If you're not good at math, that's the margin of victory.

And as senator Amy Klobuchar pointed out today, that your lawyer who helped make sure those ballots got counted was Amy Coney Barrett.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KLOBUCHAR: Many argue that Bush v. Gore, and back to your earlier work, hurt the courts legitimacy. If you are confirmed, the Supreme Court will have not one, not two, but three justices, you justice Kavanaugh and Chief Justice Roberts who worked on behalf of the Republican Party in matters related to the Bush v. Gore case. Do you think that that's a coincidence?

AMY CONEY BARRETT, U.S. SUPREME COURT NOMINEE: Senator Klobuchar, if you're asking me whether I was nominated for this seat because I worked on Bush versus Gore for a very brief period of time as a young associate, that doesn't make sense to me.

KLOBUCHAR: I know, you said you wouldn't recuse. That's why I thought it was so --

BARRETT: That isn't what I said. I said --

(CROSSTALK)

KLOBUCHAR: You're right. You said you would make -- announced your decision on recusal and you wouldn't commit to recusing. But again, I think the public has a right to know that now, three of these justices have worked on the Republican side on a major, major issue related to presidential election.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Is it a coincidence? I don't think it's a coincidence. I mean, participating Bush v. Gore, working to get the candidate who did not win the popular vote installed in the White House by the courts was the crowning achievement for an entire generation of young conservative movement lawyers, who then grew up to have plum assignments like judges and Supreme Court justices.

This is a long-standing tradition that's only intensified. I mean, this current generation of movement, conservative activists are working hard to suppress the vote to undermine the legitimacy of elections and follow the President's marching orders to intimidate people at the polls and make it harder to vote.

The Washington Post reports in a conservative training seminar, J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official, and the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation urged the activists not to worry about the criticism that might come their way. Be not afraid of the accusations that you're a voter suppressor, you're a racist, and so forth. Adam says. He's quoting John Pope -- John Paul there. Here's another tape The Post obtained from one of their training sessions.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLIE KIRK, FOUNDER, TURNING POINT USA: I'm fighting every single day from now to the election. I am more and more optimistic about the President's chances. I think we're going to do really well with younger voters. The Democrats have done a really foolish thing by shutting down all these campuses, foolish for them. There -- it's going to remove ballot harvesting opportunities and all their voter fraud that they usually do on college campuses. So, they're actually removing like half a million votes off the table. So, please keep the campuses closed. Like, it's a great thing. So, whatever.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Keep the campuses closed. We don't want those half-million people voting. That fine, young man is Charlie Kirk. He's a member of the movement. He's a made man so to speak. He was the first speaker at the Republican National Convention in August. If I ask one thing here, it is please 20 years from now, please, I beg you, spare me the long out beds about how we can trust Charlie Kirk to be a fair-minded member of the Supreme Court.

To talk about the President's plan to push the election to a friendly Supreme Court, I'm joined now by Brian Fallon, co-founder and executive director of Demand Justice. In 2016, he served as the national press secretary for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. And Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and legal correspondent for Slate. She wrote today about the heartlessness of Amy Coney Barrett's originalism.

Brian, let me first start with you, because you've been in the trenches of these judicial fights for a while, and I've watched you. I've known you for a while and I've read what you had to say for a while. And I've watched it kind of radicalize you over time partly I think is you have appreciated the full scope of what the conservative legal movement has built. Is that -- is that fair? And what do you -- what do you say when you watch a possible third Bush v. Gore lawyer about to ascend to the court?

BRIAN FALLON, CO-FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DEMAND JUSTICE: Yes, Chris, absolutely. So, this is the culmination of a 40-year project as Dahlia well knows and can attest to, that began with the founding of the Federalist Society. And what are sort of the animating impulses that have driven this movement over time to take over the courts?

Well, sure, it is all about overturning Roe, and it is all about expanding the view of the Second Amendment. And that's what sort of helps build the foot soldier army at a grassroots level for this project on taking over the courts. But one of the other big things that it's about is about entrenching Republican political power.

And so, I thought it was interesting last term that even though John Roberts sort of chose his spots carefully, departed from the conservatives on a certain number of cases, one of the places he's been remarkably, almost 100 percent consistent in voting with the conservative block is when it comes to voting related cases, election law matters. He's a consistent, reliable vote for the Republicans.

And just this week as the hearings are going on, while we're all sort of participating in this charade and asking questions of Amy Coney Barrett that she has no intent to answer, what does the Roberts Court do it announces? It announces that it's siding with the Trump administration on this request to prematurely suspend the census so that we can have a massive undercount of people of color which would contribute to the rigging of the drawing of congressional districts for another 10 years.

So, my point to Democrats is we have to realize what we're up against here. This is -- Donald Trump is saying it out loud that he the reason he wants to shove this nominee through before the election is because he's intending to contest the election results. And he needs the fifth vote from Amy Coney Barrett because he doesn't even trust John Roberts.

So, Democrats, I thought, approached the hearings this week as they would any other set of confirmation hearings. And I think they're missing the ball in terms of exactly what's at stake here. I think its Democratic rule overall that is in jeopardy if Amy Coney Barrett gets onto the court.

HAYES: You know, Dahlia, one of the -- one of the sort of frustrating to me fictions here, right, is that like there is a conservative legal movement. It's not a conspiracy. It's like an actual out in the open project. And there's people that publish articles about returning, you know, the conception of the Constitution to the Lochner era right back and pretty new deal about what you can and can't regulate and what laws passed constitutional muster. And they're very open about it, right? There's a project to do that.

And then there's participants in that, and they're, you know, very, very accomplished, very smart, very, you know, a good writers who come up through the, you know, through the, the sort of pyramid of this project. And then when they get to the top as a judge, the pretense is that like, they get this like men and black thing where they lose all prejudices and all beliefs and everything, they put on the robe, and they become blind justice, it's just very hard for me to swallow. But am I too cynical?

DAHLIA LITHWICK, SENIOR EDITOR AND LEGAL CORRESPONDENT: No, I don't think so. And I just want to flag because you said you've watched Brian get radicalized, I think I've gotten radicalized since the last time I saw Brian, when he couldn't quite get me to pledge that I believed in structural court reform.

And I have been just gobsmacked, Chris, by what I've seen in the last couple of weeks. And I'm just going to add two data points to your, I think, immaculately argued introduction of what you just said now. One is that we've heard Leonard Leo, Leonard Leo all week, right? Sheldon Whitehouse has been very clear about the machinery that you described and how the Federalist Society is sort of written off as a debate society, you know, a benign place for likeminded conservatives to float ideas.

In May, OpenSecrets and the Guardian revealed that Leonard Leo, Carrie Severino, actually were funneling money to this incredibly Orwellian, creepy new honest elections project. So, this was actually sending money to an effort to suppress the vote in states. And they were spending huge, huge money moving from this judicial project to overt vote suppression.

And I think it goes right to your introduction, Chris, that they've given up even on selling conservative ideas, even on grooming young conservative judges. Now, there's all out going to Colorado, and Florida, and Michigan, and spending money, writing letters, threatening elections officials, floating ads saying vote fraud, people are cheating, suppressing the vote.

And I think it's anathema to the idea of what federal society was, and what conservative legal movement was to say, now, we're just going to give up and pour dark money at suppressing the vote. It suggests, as Brian says, they've given up on the project of persuasion. They're just going for all-out minority rule.

HAYES: Yes. And there's -- you know, again, there's something sort of fascinating about how all this work, right, because at some level, it's like, I don't want to -- I don't want to overstate the case in so far as -- like, I don't know how Amy Coney Barrett is going to rule on the ACA case, or this individual case. And, you know, these are people that have a certain amount of intellectual vanity, they might have a certain amount of integrity. Like, there's lots of cases that don't have a clear ideological valence that they're asked to rule on. So, it's not like this like easily, perfectly, predictable thing.

But one of the things that you see happen, Brian, is that, you know, everyone's like associated with this like moral cretin, Donald Trump. And he comes out and says the quiet part loud. Like, I am putting you want the court to overturn Roe, take away the ACA, and give me the election. And if you point that out, everyone goes to the fainting couch. Like, how dare you impugn the integrity of this wonderful judge? But it's the words of the man who nominator her. But like, maybe he's got a better sense of what's up than everyone else does.

FALLON: And there's an utter contradiction to how Republicans play this game. You know, if you're coming up through the ranks of the Federalist Society, you're encouraged sort of tacitly to audition for these judicial vacancies by giving prominent speeches at these Federalist Society functions, where you speak out on all the touchstone issues that the Federalist Society likes to keep tabs on.

And so, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, it's no coincidence that they found platforms for themselves in the last several years to come out and criticize John Roberts over his ACA ruling. They had to get on to Donald Trump shortlist, they had to get the eye of Leonard Leo, but then they become the dog that catches the bus because then they go through these kind of confirmation hearings and they have to disown all their past statements.

And the Republicans themselves, they campaigned on the idea that they're going to insist on holding these judicial nominees to overt explicit commitments to overturn Roe v. Wade. Josh Hawley has been going around preening, you know, presumably getting ready for 2024 presidential run. He said he would only support somebody that explicitly said that they thought that Roe was wrongly decided. And now he's in a position of having to square that with Amy Coney Barrett pretending that she doesn't know how she'd rule on Roe.

Mitch McConnell the other night, in a Senate debate, has to downplay the ACA lawsuit that's going to be argued the week after November. He literally said, no one expects the ACA to be overturned. Well, that's what all these Republican state attorney generals and the Trump administration are in court arguing for. So, it's a total contradiction.

And for -- nobody should pretend that this is on the level. You know, believe what they said the first time.

HAYES: The argument that -- the thing they want to say is if you take seriously our arguments, the ones we're making in court, and you think that would fly, you're a monster. Obviously, that can't be the case. Brian Fallon and Dahlia Lithwick, thank you both for making some time with us tonight. I appreciate it.

Tonight, how did one Texas county pull off a record-shattering first day of early voting? One of the central figures in the Harris County success story tells us what went right next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: It is day two of early voting in the state of Texas and there are once again huge lines across the state as people line up to cast their ballots. The turnout is record-shattering. Here's the difference between the last -- this election last election in Texas. It's a graph comparing the first day of in-person early voting in six Texas counties in 2016, and then the first day of early voting in 2020.

Now, the numbers are pretty similar in Dallas County, in Tarrant County, and Bexar County, in Travis County, but turnout doubled on day one in Denton County on the far right of that graph, and it nearly doubled in Harris County on the far left. Those blue bars. You see those? Well, nearly five million people live in that county, in Harris County. It is the third-largest county in the entire country and includes the city of Houston, and it used to be solidly Republican.

I mean, George W. Bush won that county handily by -- in 2004 by 10 points. But in 2008 and 2012, the county went blue. Obama edging out a narrow, narrow, narrow victory both times. But then, in 2016, Hillary Clinton absolutely dominated in Harris County beating Donald Trump there by 12 points. And the last big election the 2018 midterms, you might remember Beto O'Rourke, well, he won that county by nearly 17 points.

Now, clearly something is going on in Harris County, Texas. They set a new record for early voting yesterday over 128,000 people casting ballots. By lunchtime today, another 50,000 people voted early, which get this, this means in the first one and a half days, voters passed 14 percent of the total number of ballots cast in Harris County in the entire 2016 election.

We've heard so many stories about voter suppression, about Republicans and the Trump campaign and local officials making it harder to vote, but Harris County is what it looks like when a local government is devoted to making it easier to vote. Someone who has been fighting in the state of Texas to make that possible is Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo who I'm so happy to have on with us right now.

Judge, it's great to have you back on the program. I've been watching both the images, and I've been following a bunch of lawsuits we'll get to. But looking at the numbers, what is going on in your county? What steps has your county government taken affirmatively to make it easier to vote in Harris County?

LINA HIDALGO, JUDGE, HARRIS COUNTRY: Well, thank you -- thank you, Chris, for having me. And I think what we're seeing is the best example of if you build it, they will come. We have been working -- I got into office about a year and a half ago. And we've been working since day one to make voting more accessible. This year, we've invested over $30 million in election safety and accessibility. Compared to 2016, back then, it was around $4 million. And so, that's what it is.

It is tripling the number of early vote locations, drive-through voting, mail ballot tracking. None of this sounds revolutionary. But we've been at war with the Texas GOP every step of the way. Ultimately, the community has come out and taken advantage of this. And I hope that will continue.

HAYES: Yes, you tripled -- I want to make this statement. You tripled the number of early voting locations, right? So, part of what we're seeing is, you guys just made it a lot easier to vote early. Like, in-person early voting was expanded by 300 percent under your administration. And then this drive-thru voting, which is sort of fascinating and obviously very useful in COVID times. Like, what is drive-thru voting? How does it work? And you just have a lawsuit over it. Tell us what happened.

HIDALGO: So, drive-through voting is done elsewhere. It's the first time it's been done in Texas, however. I mean, you'd show up in your car, and you show your I.D. things, signature, same verification information as if you walked and voted, you know, by walking there. And they then hand you a portable version of the voting machine where you cast your vote.

I was just at one of our drive-thru voting locations today talking to the election workers, and they were telling me down to a person pretty much everybody who's voting drive-thru, they say, wow, that really was easy, you know. And so, it is just as secure as voting any other way. But of course, we had a lawsuit from the Texas Republican Party just yesterday.

Now, the bigger point I want to make on this, Chris, is what they're trying to do is they're trying to have us focus on the ins and out of the litigation, because ultimately if they don't win by winning the litigation, they're trying to win by confusing voters. And so, what I'm trying to get across to folks is drive-through voting currently is ongoing in Harris County. People are taking advantage of it and loving it. And that is where we're at and we're going to continue fighting on that.

HAYES: Yes. So, there's been a bunch of suits. Texas GOP sued you overdrive through voting. They lost at least the first level of that. The governor issued an order saying, you had 11 different places around your county, if I'm recalling this correctly, that people can actually can deliver their mail absentee ballots, right. So, they don't have to put it in the mail. The governor said there can only be one, and that's being litigated.

And then, there's been a fight with the governor too where you wanted to -- is it right that you wanted to send every voter there an application for an absentee ballot, and they tried to shut that down as well?

HIDALGO: We did. Everything you mentioned is correct. We wanted to send mail ballot applications, and they wouldn't let us. State Republican campaigns will send their voters applications but they wouldn't let us do that. Last year, they tried to purge our voter rolls. And that's why we've been fighting.

The very first meeting of commissioners court, it was January 2019, we began the work to make it so people could vote anywhere on Election Day. It used to be in this county, that you had to somehow make it to your home precinct on Election Day, and cast your vote. And the polls closed at five many days, and so working parents working people, couldn't possibly make it before the polls close.

We've had groups that you know, credit where credit is due. They've been working hard in Texas, in Harris County, to come up with these policies. We had them, but we didn't have leadership at the county that was willing to invest in them. And so, for the past year and a half, we've said we got to do this.

It's not done, right. We still have days of early voting, but I'm so heartened to see that the community, that voters in Texas, voters in this county are standing up. They're not going to be intimidated. They're not going to be -- allow this confusion to prevail. Instead, they're participating.

HAYES: It's a -- I mean, we hear so many -- there's so many places in this country where local election officials are so devoted to the opposite. And we see what that produces. It's amazing to see that if you -- if you commit yourself affirmatively to expanding access -- and this is not necessarily a Democratic or Republican thing.

Like, the state of New York doesn't do a very good job on this in terms of making it as easy a possible vote. They're getting better. But this is a model, I think, for everyone. Whatever party you are, wherever you are in the country, as easy as possible vote. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo who's been at the forefront of this, thank you for making time tonight.

HIDALGO: Thank you for having me.

HAYES: Next, new reporting the Trump administration is interfering with the Coronavirus vaccine process yet again, as another vaccine trials put on hold. Dr. Peter Hotez will help us sort through what we know next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Once again tonight, the president out on the campaign trail around in Des Moines, Iowa without a mask for mostly masses crowd. He's been doing these rallies all week boasting to hundreds of people he's now immune to COVID just two weeks after he tested positive for the virus.

At least 28 other people connected to the White House also tested COVID positive after a super spreader event in the Rose Garden to celebrate Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett as you've been watching on T.V. And today, we found the President's teenage son is actually one of the folks that got COVID. Melania. Trump writing on the White House Web site that Barron Trump tested positive the same time as his parents. Fortunately, the First Lady says, he is doing well and has since tested negative.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is once again pressuring the Food and Drug Administration on a COVID vaccine. First, it was about vaccine guidelines and timeline, now it's about vaccine branding. Politico reporting that Trump wants to rebrand the emergency authorization of COVID-19 vaccine as a "pre-licensure." But the FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn is hell-bent against any modification of definitions because it would be viewed as a politicization of science, one senior administration official said.

There are currently 11 possible vaccines that are in phase three, the large-scale stage of testing. Two trials by Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca are now on hold after unexplained illnesses. But all that sad, there's still a lot of confidence and optimism that a working vaccine will make it through phase three by the end of this year and get approved. The question is, what then?

Approval is just step one, and there's a lot of steps after that. I want to bring in someone who knows all about what needs to be done right now, someone who has worked on vaccines for a range of diseases for years, is actually working on a Coronavirus vaccine right now, Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Doctor, it's great to have you back on the program. So, let's talk about sort of where things stand with the various phase three trials and the news that a lot of people are probably seeing that a number of them have been halted as they investigate possible illnesses. How sort of normal is that in this process?

PETER HOTEZ, CO-DIRECTOR, TEXAS CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL CENTER FOR VACCINE DEVELOPMENT: So Chris, we've got about seven or eight vaccines that will move through the pipeline of Operation Warp Speed in addition to several global health vaccines, including the one we've developed at Texas Children's and Baylor College of Medicine that's being scaled up now in India, where they're producing up to a billion doses. So, that's really exciting.

So, you know, I'm pretty confident we're going to have multiple vaccines by the middle of next year. So, the trick is going to be getting through these next few months, both in terms of fighting COVID and also going through all of the regulatory hurdles that we need to go to. Right now, in the U.S. through Operation Warp Speed, you've got about four vaccines in phase three -- various stages of phase -- what are called phase three clinical trials. These are the large 30 to 60,000-person pivotal trials that you need for licensure. Two of them have now been put on pause which is different for clinical hold.

Clinical hold is mandated by the FDA. These are voluntary pauses put up by the drug companies because of unexplained illness. And, and it's not that unusual. The way I like to phrase it is, imagine a city of 30 or 60,000 people let's say, outside of New York, New Rochelle, or White Plains, on any given day, you're going to have somebody with an unexplained illness or who gets sick or for unclear reasons.

So, that per se, is not so troubling. It's a matter of looking to see what the basis of it is. And, you know, the problem all along with Operation Warp Speed, I think the scientific rigor is good, I think the integrity of the clinical trials has been preserved by the FDA and everyone around it, the problem is the communication has been awful. There's been no communication strategy, deliberately.

This is -- it's by intention, it's been left to the pharma companies. And the pharma CEOs are doing overall a pretty bad job of communicating problems or having a leak through investor phone calls, or you've heard about the stock dumping and the conflicts of interest. And that's really eroding public confidence.

And that worries me because a couple of the companies are not traditional vaccine companies. Moderna, AstraZeneca are not really vaccine companies, and they seem a bit tone deaf, to understanding how quickly a vaccine could be voted off the island because -- not because it's a bad vaccine, but because the public is concerned by all the crummy messaging or absent messaging.

HAYES: Well, one of the -- one of the issues -- so it seems like we're going to -- you know, there's a lot of confidence that we're going to have something that is pretty effective and safe, you know, and something emerging from these phase three trials by say, the end of this calendar year. You were talking about, you know, mass vaccination happening in the middle of next year.

If you've got a number of these different vaccines, right, and they've -- and they've been cleared, and he thought, you know, billions of people around the world that we should get this to, like just talking about the U.S. like, that's a big logistical issue. We haven't -- the Trump ministration hasn't been great on logistics as far as the virus is concerned. In fact, they've been terrible and tens of thousands people have died unnecessarily because of it. What is the plan? What do you need in the next administration, whether it's this one or the Biden administration to do logistically once you've got a few different vaccines to choose from?

HOTEZ: Yes, I think you've hit on it. This is going to be an extraordinarily complex undertaking, because remember, different vaccines will do different things. Some may protect better than others, some may actually block the infection, others won't actually prevent the actual infection but will reduce severity of illness or should still be used.

Some of the vaccines, if they're less protective than others, means there'll be companion technologies with existing public health control measures, not replacement technologies. That means we're still going to need masks and social distancing. And contact tracing or some of the durability of protection will not be very long, and they're going to have to get boosted. And do we get boosted with the same vaccine or a different vaccine.

HAYES: Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. Don't -- I want there to be a silver bullet, Doctor. Just telling me that there's some needle I could put my arm and then I can go to my brother's wedding in May. This entire segment is reverse engineered around the question of will I be able to go to my brother's wedding in May and I'm not hearing what I want to hear from you?

Because it sounds like what I'm hearing from you is, this is not a silver bullet. These vaccines have various levels of protection that they may give us, various durations, and will probably need to be paired with some of the basic public health measures mitigation strategies used, masks and social distancing. So, what does that mean?

HOTEZ: And none of that is being communicated to the American people which adds a lot to the complexity. And so, we've got to start that communication strategy now. I mean, to simplify this a little bit, all of the vaccines, including ours, including all the ones at Operation Warp Speed work by the same principle. The use different technologies, but they're all working by inducing high levels of virus-neutralizing antibody, and T cell responses.

So, for you to feel safe going to your brother's wedding, you're going to want to have virus-neutralizing antibodies in your system through a vaccine. The good news is all of the vaccines will do that to some extent. Some will be better than others. But the bottom line is don't wait for a better vaccine to come along.

So, I get -- the question I get asked a lot is, hey, Dr. Hotez, of all these seven or eight Operation Warp Speed vaccines, which one should I take? And I say that's the wrong question to ask, because we don't know which ones are going to be available. Do whatever you can to take an approved vaccine that will give you virus-neutralizing antibodies because that will protect you from going to the hospital, going into an ICU.

Later, you may have to get boosted with the same or a different vaccine. Worry about that at the time. The key is getting through this winter. It's going to be a horrible winter.

HAYES: Well, that's a great note to end on. Dr. Peter Hotez, that's my fear. I mean, the numbers show that. We've got 37,000 people hospitalized as of today. Thank you for sharing your expertise. I appreciate it.

HOTEZ: Thank you.

HAYES: Every time I try to do a positive COVID segment, it end up there. Coming up, with less than three weeks to catch up with Biden in the polls, Candidate Trump is focused and on message for tweeting conspiracy theories and mocking senior citizens. That's just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: People who spend too much time on the internet and Twitter and other social media have a term to use for people like themselves, which is extremely online, capital E, capital O, extremely online. I think it's fair to say we have an extremely online president.

Now, I recognize he's extremely online because I myself am extremely online and I'm not proud of it. I spend all day on the internet and it's probably doing to my brain what a pack of cigarettes a day would do to your lungs. But at least I'm partly aware of it.

One of the big problems or Donald Trump and his campaign is they seem to have somehow forgotten how to communicate with anyone who is not extremely online. I mean, just take the President's Twitter usage just yesterday, one day. He retweeted a QAnon account suggesting Joe Biden and Barack Obama had SEAL Team 6 killed, which is pretty clearly not true since SEAL Team 6 is alive. One of its members, a Trump supporter, spent all day angrily swatting away the conspiracy theories.

Trump also re-tweeted a conspiracy theory by another QAnon account claiming that Osama bin Laden had secretly been hiding in Iran and then was brought to Pakistan for "Obama's trophy kill." Also, totally insane, but the President is tweeting both those. And then, a president who is down by more than 20 points with seniors, according to some polls, at a time when people are dying by tens of thousands in nursing homes because of pandemic his administration just failed to stop, he tweeted this utterly offensive photoshopped image.

I mean, I guess the idea is that elderly people who live in nursing homes are worthless garbage with nothing to offer. Certainly, consistent with the way Trump allow the virus to ravage through our population this year. The only real audience for this kind of thing, the sorts of people who see that are like, oh, so funny, roasted, are like 14-year-old boys who never leave the internet. Human beings who have not yet developed their emotional maturity and are incapable of grappling with mortality and find any frailty in the human form, disgusting and contemptible.

But those are not the voters that Donald Trump needs 14-year-old boys who spend all day on the internet. His campaign seems to believe that because their troll campaign in 2016 was successful, they can troll their way back to re-election. But you actually have to talk to normal people to win the election, and it really looks like they have forgotten how.

Now, people who are extremely online call people who are not extremely online normies, normal people. And Joe Biden is running a hell of a normie campaign. Rather than posting weird and offensive images attacking seniors, this is how he talks to them.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: When he throws super spreader parties at the White House, Republicans hug each other without concern of the consequences, how many of you been unable to hug your grandkids in the last seven months? I got six of them my. Two of them, my deceased son's boys, they live not -- children, a boy in a girl, but not far from me. They can walk through the woods.

The only way I can see them, I stand on the back porch, and they stand down and we -- and I bribe them with Haagen-Dazs bars. But every single day, I contact them, but I can't hug them. I can't embrace them. And I'm luckier than most because they're nearby.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: There's a reason that Joe Biden right now is winning seniors by more than 20 points and his way up overall. You saw it when he spoke with seniors. And this isn't just conjecture on my part. There are a lot of people doing polling and focus groups with the kinds of normal non-Breitbart, non-4chan people that Trump needs to win a national election, and they are just completely done with him. One of the people who's doing those focus groups will join me next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Just 20 days until the election, Joe Biden still has a substantial lead over Donald Trump in the polls, over 10 points in the FiveThirtyEight National polling average. The President responded those numbers on the flurry of friendly rallies and right-wing interviews all of which could actually hurt his reelection hopes, because Trump is now so deeply embedded in right-wing subculture, he appears to have lost his ability to speak to people outside that bubble.

And so, he looks at polling numbers and he sees that he's like losing a certain voter group, say for instance, suburban women who we won in 2016 who are now breaking for Biden. Here's how Trump tries to get them back.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I asked you to do me a favor. Suburban women, would you please like me? Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Jane Coaston has some insight on this messaging. She's a senior politics reporter for Vox. She's done a ton of reporting on Trump's right-wing mindset, and Republican Strategist Sarah Longwell joins us as well. Sarah conducted a focus group last night and describes it this way. "I did a focus group with women who voted for Trump in 2016. Not a single one was planning to vote for him again."

Sarah, let me start with you on this. I mean, it really is striking to me, for all the insanity of 2016, that there was a kind of definable message. And the message had some appeal to a possible median voter who was not like a hardcore Fox News eight hour a day watcher. What are you hearing from people that that are in the kind of normie category who voted for Trump before and are kind of fed up with him now?

SARAH LONGWELL, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Yes, well, look, people are exhausted and they're hurting. There is a pandemic, there is an economic crisis. People have been furloughed. They're not going to their jobs. Their kids can't go to daycare. I mean, they're looking for solutions.

The personal consequences of the moment mean that people are genuinely looking for leadership. They're genuinely looking for a plan. And so when the President has a debate with Joe Biden and goes on and yells and interrupts when he contracts Coronavirus himself which he has been downplaying, what he's not doing is talking to these people about the things that matter to them, about the things that are important to their lives are going to improve them.

And so, what I've been seeing is Trump alienate these voters in real time. I've been doing the focus groups since 2018. I've probably done 50 of them. And since this summer, you've just seen him fall off a cliff with a lot of these women because, you know, before they said, well, the economy is good, you know, he's doing OK. They didn't like the divisiveness. But now, they've had it.

I had a group last night, non-college women, you know, suburban moms, and I couldn't get -- find a single one of them who's willing to say they were going to vote for him again in 2020, and they all voted for him in 2016.

HAYES: That that point, Sarah, about not talking about anything in their lives is what's so striking to me about the President's rhetoric, Jane, because he's so wrapped up in a series of like Byzantine right-wing conspiracy theories and about what the Justice Department did and this FBI agent text to this person. None of it has anything to do with what -- people's lives are.

And you're someone I think I got this thesis partly from which said, he's just -- he's trapped by his own immersion in picayune details of the right-wing, you know, extended universe.

JANE COASTON, SENIOR POLITICS REPORTER, VOX: Right. It's interesting, because actually, just before we had this conversation, Trump was speaking and told the audience, did you hear the news, Bruce Ohr has left the Department of Justice? If you're in the Trump rally audience, what are you thinking? Who the hell is Bruce Ohr? Because you have things to do.

And I think it's such a fascinating departure because in 2016, part of the narrative that was constructed around 2016, as why this happened, is that elites weren't listening to what real Americans, normal Americans, middle America was really concerned about and talking about.

And I think in many respects, that was somewhat true. I think that the concerns of people in Rust Belt cities, the concerns of people in working-class neighborhoods, obviously a certain kind of working-class neighborhood, weren't getting hurt. But in 2020, it's like, forget all that. We care about the beautiful voters and the Russia gate hoax that you need in advanced degree to explain to anyone, and a conversation that is so focused on a very specific audience, which I think is me, you, and people who read townhall.com. And it just it's so internecine, it's so focused on this messaging that he is getting and then he shares on Twitter and then people reply to him on Twitter. And it's a back and forth, but at no point is there an interest from anyone else.

HAYES: You know, and part of what makes us to me sort of -- sort of fascinating to observe as someone who thinks a lot about politics and covers politics, Sarah, is there were so many ways in which, you know, Trump sort of defied political gravity in 2016. And when he said the thing he said about John McCain, everyone said, well, that's not going to work. When he bragged about the size of his genitalia, everyone was like, oh, that's going to be bad for him. And it never seemed to catch up with him, right? And then he won this improbable victory.

And, you know, one of the things I started learning as I started cutting politics at 22, 23 is like, you try to not be a jerk, you try to be kind of likable. You try to appeal to people that don't already agree with you. These are like basic tenants which he is completely overthrown. And it seems like it's like the revenge of those basic ideas now this time around.

LONGWELL: You know, I mean, the difference is, he's not running against Hillary Clinton. I mean, when I do these focus groups, here's what they say to me. I say, why did you vote for Trump in 2016? They say, oh, I didn't vote for Trump, I voted against Hillary Clinton. And he just doesn't have that foil now.

HAYES: Right.

LONGWELL: And so, you know, the thing is, Joe Biden is actually pretty popular. People like him. His favorables are pretty high. And so, look, these are Republican voters, and so they're not in love with Joe Biden, but he's acceptable enough.

HAYES: Right.

LONGWELL: He'll do, especially when he seems like a nice, normal person and Donald Trump really sounds like a raving lunatic to them. I mean, when they ask them how they think things are going in the country, they usually curse. They're very unhappy of how things are going.

HAYES: This is -- this is one of your voters saying after the debate saying, are we serious right now? You're on live T.V. You've got every single social injustice thing happen right now. Just come out and condemn it. This is about white supremacists. Is it for all the rednecks that you're not telling the KKK to knock it off? I had a WTF moment while that was happening. This is one of your -- one of the people responding.

And Jane, I thought this moment was amazing. Chuck Grassley saying to Donald Trump on Twitter, I suggest you use pocket card at podium with five short sentences on what you've accomplished, five things that differentiate you from Biden, five things you will accomplish the next four years. Focusing on these simple highlights will help your message and only take five minutes, then say whatever you want.

COASTON: Again, this is being said to the President of the United States. But I want to point out a very specific moment from the debate. There is a moment in which Trump appear to go after Biden for something having to do with his alma mater. That was a reference to a specific moment that in which Biden said he got his start at Delaware State University, which is a historically black college. And people were railing against him, like, he forgot where he went to school. That's not exactly what happened. It had to do with his first campaign. But also, who cares?

HAYES: Right.

COASTON: Like that was such one of those tiny little moments that if you cover or follow right-leaning conservative media you heard about because it was referenced briefly by someone, but it also was so disconnected from like, hello, there's a pandemic going on. We're in the midst of stimulus debates that you just pulled out of for no apparent reason because you've decided you're Paul Ryan now. Like what's happening? What's going on? I think that that's what a lot of people are starting to ask, even people who voted for him.

HAYES: Yes. And I mean, the other thing about this, and Sarah, you've talked about this is like the background context here is that the country is subjectively in terrible shape. And you know, there's 800 people who died today. So, there's 37,000 people in the hospital.

I talked to a guy the other day who's just -- you know, in a casual conversation, told me his father passed away on Saturday. And like, that happens a lot in America right now. If haven't -- don't have anything to say about that, you don't have something to say to the American votes. Jane Coaston and Sarah Longwell, thank you both for talking to me tonight.

LONGWELL: Thanks.

HAYES: That is ALL IN for this Wednesday. We do not have a show tomorrow night, so we'll see you back here on Friday at 8:00. Now, "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" begins. Good evening, Rachel.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END

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