Is there any chance he would flip again if it would help him politically . Good morning, its tuesday, may 11th. White house correspondent for politico and coauthor of the playbook Eugene Daniels. Hes an msnbc contributor. Thats quite a mashup. He flips like a pancake. Willie, again, he got on the senate floor rate after the January The 6th, and im done with this, im off he was done until he wasnt. And then two people and a chicken are chasing him down Washington National airport, and he just he changes overnight and asks if he can start golfing with donald again. I dont get it. Its crazy. That must be a nice golf course down there if hes willing to put himself through all of this to play 18 holes with donald trump. The quote from january 6th. Trump and i had a hell of a journey, but enough is enough. Lindsey graham declaring himself finished, done with donald trump because of what happened that day at the capitol. And just as you say, he was heckled at an airport, felt some heat from his home state, immediately flipped and we see where he is today. This would be like gone with the wind, rhett butler says, frankly, my dear, i dont give a damn, turns around, walks down then turns around and says, oh, never mind. Can you make up some fried greens and sweet tea . Im hungry, dear. I dont know. Ive done this before. I dont understand, willie youve done that . No, ive been in congress before. Ive had people yelling at me. Ive done hundreds of town hall meetings. I dont you know, its not i love serving my district. It was the greatest professional honor of my life. Not a close second, but nothings worth that. Nothings worth degrading yourself so much. So you get elected. Like, the next time. Its just not worth it. And hes certainly not alone. Weve seen just about every republican since january 6th, even if they said something as Kevin Mccarthy did. Also on january 6th, he said donald trump is responsible for what happened here. Weve seen all of them take it so far now that tomorrow they will run Liz Cheney Out of leadership because she will not hug donald trump as closely as theyre willing to. Yeah. And mika, its not even hugging. Its like acknowledging the truth. Sometimes, weve been so surrounded by this, it reminds me of this short little story that is interesting about people not recognizing whats around them. A story about the old fish, hes swimming past two younger fish, and as hes passing by, he goes, nice water. And one of the young fish say to the other fish, whats water . Well, i think sometimes were all like the younger fish. We dont understand whats surrounding us every day or we do understand it, but it happens so much. And after five years, were numb to the fact, even though we say it time and again. And tom friedman touched on this, it is just as serious as it was the day before the election. You have 75 Million People who voted for a guy who called for the arrest of his political opponent two weeks before the election and was pressuring his Attorney General to arrest his political opponent, as if we lived in belarus. As if we lived in russia. As if we lived in china. And 75 Million People went out and voted for this guy, regardless of all of the facts. You can stack them all up. And now theyre believing the lie, theyre repeating the lie, theyre living by the lie that this election was stolen by donald trump. And you look at what youre doing in arizona and look at the fact that liz cheney is simply saying what Rudy Giuliani said in federal court, that there was no widespread cheating. That the election wasnt stolen. What all of the lawyers have said. And whos the woman who said all the crazy, crazy stuff. What was her name . Sidney powell. Sidney powell. Sidney powells argument, when she like got in trouble was, oh, they knew i was lying. Judge, they knew i was lying. Nobody what i was saying was so ridiculous about those Voting Machines that no person with any common sense, with any horse sense, would believe what i said. Your honor, they knew that i was lying. Thats what she said. And theres one example after another example. Theres one trump judge after another trump judge. Theres one trump lawyer after another trump lawyer. They all basically said inside federal court, that this election wasnt stolen. That there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have changed any of the state election results. This is a fact that could be given judicial notice in any federal court in america. Your honor, i want to take judicial note that donald trump did not win the election, joe biden did, and there was no widespread voter fraud. Every judge in america would go, all right, yeah, whatever, sure, Everybody Knows that. Ill take judicial notice of that. Lets start the trial. And yet, mika, liz cheney is about to be kicked out of the Republican Party because shes just telling the truth about this. And by the way, this is like, i heard somebody say yesterday, this is so true. The republican i mean, if youre a democrat and dont like republicans, you should probably be cheering for this. Because this is not going to pick up one vote for the Republican Party. Its going to lose them some more votes in the suburbs. Its going to lose them some more votes among independent voters. Its going to lose them some more votes about people who arent in this base that donald trump has boiled down. Well, its going to change what it means to be a republican In Washington, and you didnt think it could go lower with the party of no options. They are against everything with no ideas. Its the party of big spending, until they dont feel like it. And now its going to be the party of liars. Corrupt liars. I mean, its a choice that each leader In Washington will make and it will go down in history and i think its a dangerous moment for this country. We are looking, though, right now with this Current Administration at very, very good news. The fda yesterday approved pfizers covid19 vaccine for children as young as 12 years old. A study of more than 2,000 u. S. Volunteers at just 12 to 15 found no cases of covid19 among the fully vaccinated, compared with 18 cases among the age group that received the placebo. The children in the study also developed higher levels of virusfighting antibodies that in earlier studies. Younger teens will receive the same twodose regimen as two adults and can expect similar side effects such as sore arm, flulike fever, chills, and aches. Shots can begin as soon as a federal Vaccine Advisory Committee issues a recommendation for using the twodose vaccine on the expanded 12 to 15 age group. And that announcement is expected tomorrow. Willie, thats great news. Its certainly great news for our family. As you know, jack, as you remember very well, was a premie. And hes going to end up being like 65 or so, but because he was a premie, he still sometimes has upper respiratory problems. This is great news for him, great news for us. But for the country, its such great news for parents, for their children. And for people that want their kids to go back into school, which is like the overwhelming majority of parents. This just assures that Middle School and High Schoolers can go back to school and everything can be open next fall. They should already be open now. Im just saying, this takes one more excuse away from those people who want to close Schoolhouse Doors on our children. Even after dr. Fauci has been saying for months, you should open the door and let them in. It takes off the table the last excuse to keep schools closed. Its huge news. And as we talk about swimming through and taking things for granted, swimming through that water like those fish, its worth stopping and thinking about, looking at what science has done it for us, not just a vaccine, but to get it into kids arms well before most people thought this would happen. To get them into camp maybe before school comes. The summer looks more normal for most people. And hopefully all the doors of all the schools are open as kids get this. And it comes against a backdrop of another drop in average new daily covid cases. Down 30 from two weeks ago. Thats the lowest level since last september. So far, just over 32 of the countrys population is fully vaccinated. The u. S. Is averaging 2 million vaccinations per day over the past week, down from the peak level of 3. 4 million daily shots nearly a month ago. Globally, new cases are leveling off, but the virus Still Ravaging India and Southeast Asian countries that lack the vaccines they need. Experts warn if the virus is allowed to spread unchecked in parts of the world, dangerous variants will continue to emerge that will threaten all countries. And this, mika, perhaps the competence were seeing and the growth were seeing in the vaccines and everything thats happening in our country is why President Bidens Approval Numbers are where they are. Yeah. Look at this. The latest ap norc poll shows President Biden with the highest Approval Rating in its polling so far. 63 of americans surveyed approve of the president s Job Performance so far, up two points from last month. 36 disapprove. His highest ratings continue to come from his handling of the nations most pressing issues. 71 approve of how hes dealing with the pandemic, including 47 of republicans. 57 give him high marks on the economy, though the survey was conducted before fridays dismal jobs report. The president s weak spot is still on the issue of immigration, 54 disapprove. And the poll shows an uptick in american optimism. 54 say that the country is on the right track, the highest since 2017. So, joe, these numbers are Pretty Amazing. And i guess some would say, okay, what are they based on . Are they based on his handling of the coronavirus, is it the checks that some people have received that could be causing some challenges for the economy to get back on track . A lot of people see it as soaring, but there are large sectors of this country where people are still suffering mightily. And he was trying to address that, but will it ultimately bring us there . You look at polls and there always is in my mind an asterisk. I remember the polls showing him up 20 points in wisconsin the weeks before the election. These numbers, though, are very dramatic. I must say, measured against what i have seen and heard anecdotally over the past several months, from dozens of people that ive known. Friends and Family Members and others that voted for donald trump, i have yet to meet or talk to one person that voted for donald trump that said, yeah, that was a mistake. I dont think im going to vote for him. And i really still believe, if the election were held tomorrow, instead of 75 million votes, donald trump might get 74 74,997,000 votes, because we are so entrenched. And were seeing a president with Approval Ratings that we havent seen in a very long time. And the number that really is fascinating is the right track wrong track number. 54 to 44. Its just not something, in all of our years doing this on morning joe, we dont usually we havent, i dont think, in our 12, 13, 14 years very often shown a right track wrong track as positive as that one. Well, its tracking from where it was just a year ago with donald trump. And it happened so quickly. But obviously, its because the pandemic is easing across the United States. A third of the country is vaccinated. Theres the economy is picking up, despite the jobs numbers last week. So its not surprising that many americans, 54 have a sense of optimism. Its going to be very hard to get those Trump Supporters to have a sense of optimism. But its what ive said for a long time. Come 2022 in the fall, if the pandemic is under control, if the economy is doing well, as we expect it to be doing, im a little befuddled about what republicans are going to say. I guess theyll go after biden on immigration, but its a hard one. Its kind of why theyre using these culture war arguments. And again with immigration. But i do think its going to be hard for republicans in the fall of 22, despite whats probably going to happen in the house. But i just see that its, you know, theres a sense i feel a sense of optimism about the country after a very long, hard 2020 and a very long, hard winter. Eugene daniels, if you look at bidens approval on handling of the pandemic, its 71 . So theres your answer to the question of where the 63 Approval Number is coming. That 63 is very high, compared to other numbers weve seen mostly down into the 50s, but hes doing well on the pandemic. Hes doing well on the economy and health care. Upside down on immigration the the only place and gun policy in terms of approval. As elizabeth said, its a contrast frankly when you look at the right track wrong track to the previous administration. Things were going to poorly, the country was in such chaos on january 6th and january 20th that perhaps a sense of calm has washed over some voters. Absolutely. Thats what the right track can be. How do you feel about the country . You feel a little bit calmer. People are and at the same time, government seems to be working for people. Thats what theyre telling us and pollsters. They started out this year, everyone was really scared, still. We had this vaccine. We didnt know how we were going to get it . Fast forward 100 days later. The Vaccine Rollout in terms of Health Experts, they tell us its gone really well. You add the fact that 12 to 15yearolds can now get the vaccine, its widely available and all of those things. And the idea that the economy, though we know the jobs or the on friday wasnt exactly what the administration wanted to see or what anyone wanted to see, you feel like things are moving in the right direction. And the thing is, that doesnt happen in a vacuum. You talk about the fact that republicans seem like their house is not really in order right now. And i think that also leads people to think that, well, okay, its really drama free over here. That makes me feel really good about joe biden and the Democratic Party. And joe biden promised to bring that calm back to the white house, back to washington, d. C. And thats what weve been seeing for the last three months. And i think that his issue is going to be, can he bring can he get this Information Bill done . Whats it look like . All of those things are what were watching to see how those numbers change, because theres only so much time that you can kind of ride high on how well hes been doing with the pandemic. Because at some point, the pandemic will be over. And we will move into infrastructure and he will have to be more proactive in the way that he operates as president. And i think thats where republicans are hoping therell be more slipups, but this is a person who wants to find bipartisan deal, at least one on infrastructure, whether thats the just focus on the rolls and the glitches, but thats something that they want to do. So it doesnt seem like this is a white house that will take their foot off the gas at any point at all, because they see these numbers, as well. Lets talk about that jobs report that gene mentioned. Yesterday, President Biden looked to stem the criticism that his policies have led people to choose Unemployment Checks over paychecks. Our economic plan is working. I never said and no serious analyst ever suggested that climbing out of the deep, deep hole our economy was in would be simple, easy, immediate, or perfectly steady. Its easy to say the line has been because of the generous employment benefits, that its a major factor in labor shortages. Were going to make it clear that anyone who is Collecting Unemployment who is offered a suitable job must take the job or lose their Unemployment Benefits. But were not going to turn our backs on our fellow americans. You know, so thats joe biden trying to balance against, willie, a lot of the critiques that youve heard from Restaurant Owners, that ive heard from very democratic Restaurant Owners. Im sure you have, too, from Small Business owners, from employers especially in the Hospitality Business, that there are a lot of restaurants that arent able to open up in the New York Times. That arent able to open up parts of the restaurants. I know other people in the Hospitality Business that are basically shut down again for this summer, because they cant find employees. And you ask why, and they really do, so many of them say the same exact thing. And mika and i have been hearing it now for some time. And that is, people just dont return their calls. They have 1,400, they have enhanced checks for Unemployment Benefits. And right now, them going back to business in the middle of covid, when theyve got kids just doesnt seem to make a lot of sense. Thats just a fact. Its not the entire reason that jobs number was so terrible on friday, but it is a fact that theres a shortage in labor supply. Elizabeth, if you look around, ask around, talk to people. If you read about it, Restaurant Owners say a job that would usually bring in a hundred applications, usually trickle in. Some people have moved on or changed their lives in the pandemic, but many people are not accepting a job in this moment that will pay them less than what theyre currently getting from the federal government. Right. And biden made the point that this is not just about those that get enhanced Unemployment Checks. Its also fear about going back into the economy, going back into crowded restaurants. The jobs numbers are very interesting. There was an uptick in the number of restaurant jobs. There was a loss of jobs in Grocery Stores. So the question is, are people not shopping at Grocery Stores anymore . The white house was blindsided by those numbers. They were throwing out their Talking Points and rewriting them very quickly last friday. It is not at all what they expected. And there is a sense that the numbers were a real fluke. They could be adjusted next month and it could be a very different story. But for now, of course, the republicans had a field day and said, this is because those Unemployment Benefits are much too generous and people just dont want to return to work. I think its more complicated than that. Its far more complicated than that, mika. Thats what we hear anecdotally. Its far more complicated. But that is, of course, it is one of the problems and its also emblematic of what weve heard economists, democraticleaning economists, democratic businesspeople talking generally about this covid relief plan, this 1. 9 trillion covid relief plan. We have Steve Rattner on an awful lot to talk about it. Larry summers, also concerned about the amount of money, the fact that we are putting more money into the economy actually than was taken out from covid, if you had this covid relief bill, with all the Covid Relief Bills in the past. And larry summers, who unlike me, doesnt warn about inflation every like three or four days, which ive been doing for a quarter century now, worrying about debt and deficits and inflation and debttogdp ratios. Larry summers has not been warning about inflationary pressures over the past 20 years or so, but he is now. So i think this is emblematic of a much bigger concern, even among democratic economists, that when you put more money into an economy than was taken out by covid. When you spend the trillions that were spending, whats the impact with the Market Forces . Is that impacting Market Forces . Im sure the Biden Administration is going to be holding their breath and hoping that the next jobs report is a more positive jobs report, because it should be and theyre planning on the economy soaring through the summer. Well, what you see is this administration trying to be more about just handing out money. I think its also about creating jobs, and thats why you see the very diverse definition of infrastructure in the Infrastructure Bill and it will be interesting to look whats in it and all the different sectors that it covers, because there are a diverse many different skills to bring into the future. People who have been knocked out of the economy, due to the pandemic or even prepandemic, due to changing times. So well have to see if the act meets the moment. Still ahead on morning joe, the age of misinformation. Were going to take a closer look at the forces that are combining to make the sharing and believing of misinformation a major problem with no easy solution. Plus, israel and gaza militants have been exchanging fire throughout the night after clashes in jerusalem left hundreds injured. Well have the latest on those escalating tensions. And new developments with the major u. S. Fuel pipeline hack. 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This is what david says. It just came across my internet machine. And he talks about when the cdc released new guidelines for mask wearing, they said that the reason for doing it is because the statistics show that less than 10 of people get covid outside. David goes on to write that the benchmark seems to be a huge exaggeration. In truth, transmission that occurs outdoors seems to be below 1 and may be below 0. 1 . David writes, multiple epidemiologists told me. And then he said, saying less than 10 of Covid Transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers per year. The actual worldwide number is 150. Its both true and deceiving. But the takeaway here is, a couple of takeaways, i keep wanting people to be guided by science, we want people to be guided by science as we were saying during the trump era, and it is so important we dont overreact in the other direction now that we seem to be moving through covid. Its what Scott Gottlieb said to shep smith, its what we keep hearing from people, is that sometimes being overly conservative actually if youre not following science, like not sending our kids back to school in a timely manner, youre actually undermining your credibility and in this case, the cdc undermines its credibility when it oversells a statistic. And i think thats part of the confusion for people who heard, even dr. Fauci and others say, yes, im vaccinated, but im still going to wear a mask in certain places. And they said, wait a minute, i thought the race to the vaccine was the holy grail and once we got that, we can move on with our lives. Theres this muddle of information weve received over last year and a half or so. Youre right about the masking. I think its changing. I just monitor it by being outside in new york every day, you see fewer and fewer masks now. I think people who have been vaccinated are coming to terms with the fact that they at least dont have to wear it outside. Certainly probably in many settings inside, as well. But its going to take a while. This has been a long haul for a lot of people who are trying to do the right thing by wearing a mask. They thought they had to wear it inside, maybe outside to be safe, too. But as you say, the science tells us that getting this outside, especially when youre moving around at some distance from people is not impossible, but pretty close when you look at the statistics of it and that we can, in fact, sort of peel those masks back. And i think its happening even in places like new york city, where weve been incredibly conscientious really for ourselves, but also for our neighbors about wearing these masks. And if im outside and i always carry a mask with me. If im outside and there are a group of people around and somebody has a mask on, even though ive had the vaccine, both shots, i put the mask on, to be respectful of that other person. But we need people to get on cdc officials, we need Biden White House officials to get on and say what the epidemiologists said to david linehart, which is come on, its next to impossible to catch this out. And now that you have over 100,000 people with at least one of the shots, what we found is that theres like a 0. 1 chance that you may get this outside. And if youve had the vaccine, its even less than that. Its like, you know, were going to get to a point where youve got more of a chance of getting struck by a car in new york city. We may already be there, than being vaccinated and getting covid outside. Yeah. And i think that the bottom line is people arent going to listen at some point. When you say, yes, youve been vaccinated, but you still have to wear the mask, people are going to say, ive been doing this long enough. Im getting on with my life. As donald trump and his republican backers are proving so clearly, misconception about pretentious issues in politics are very persistent and difficult to correct. Thats the focus of a new paper by our next guest, political scientist, brendan niam. And the Dartmouth Professor joins us now. The New York Times, max fisher wrote a piece last week that quoted a lot from your recent paper and proceedings of the National Academy of sciences, in which you asked, why are misperceptions about contentious issues in politics and science seemingly so persistent and difficult to correct. Its not for want of good information, which is ubiquitous. Exposure to good information does not reliably instill accurate beliefs anyway. Rather, a growing body of evidence suggests that the ultimate culprits are cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some Group Identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and political elites. So brendan, while i was reading this story, and its something that i grapple with all the time, because so many of my friends who, again have advanced disagrees will still say, oh, covid, its just like the flu. 500,000 people havent died from covid. You know, doctors get paid more if they put covid on it. All of these things. And im sitting there reading, you know, i read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the wall street journal, financial times. And looking at this information, and i just i almost sometimes fall into despair for my friend and loved ones. And i say, how can they be doing this . Its right here. And i always stop and say the same thing. Oh, my god, theyre not reading the wall street journal. Theyre not reading the financial times. Theyre on facebook and theyre sending posts, lies, Scam Documentaies like plandemic to each other and thats their world. They dont get the facts. Some people dont follow the news as closely as you do. Most people dont follow politics closely or science news closely. And in that context, its easy to be misled. Theres good news here. More and more Research Shows when we people accurate, factual information, it does help them come to form more factual beliefs. Efforts to fact check can work. The problem is they often struggle to overcome elite messages, whether its on issues like climate or the legitimacy of our elections, right . That all the other information that people are getting, whether its through social media, whether its through politicians, whether its through people they know, that seems to often overwhelm the issue we might like them to know. And that puts us in a really dangerous position when it comes to, for instance, a Global Pandemic or a president who refuses to accept the legitimacy of an election, right . In both of those cases, the kinds of vulnerabilities that we all have as human beings with misinformation can be, you know, dangerous. Theyre dangerous vulnerabilities of our system and its up to us to see how we can at least limit the potential downsides, the dangers. Well always be human beings, but there are ways that we can do better and we can try to at least make that happen. Elizabeth has a question for you, brendan. I was curious, what was so, i dont want to say interesting, but one of the aspects of the January 6th Riot was how many there were a number of veterans, military veterans in that group. And i know youve written about this, but they i think many of them were looking for a cause larger than themselves. They had been in the military and thats one of the things that you get out of being in the military, especially if youre in a war zone, a sense of belonging, a sense of tense group dynamics. And do you think that was a factor in what was going on in the riot, among many other things . I do. I think Group Identity is a really powerful force when it comes to what people believe. One of the concerns that social scientists have is that partisan identity has become such a powerful motivating force for people. You know, when it comes to how we think about politics. And in that context, people may be more vulnerable to misinformation that appeals to those identities. And in the extreme cases, it may actually may have the people to take action in the world. And this is one of the most challenging aspects of misinformation. Even if most people dont take it as literally as we might fear, some do. And even if its a Small National emergency, that can be dangerous. As we saw on january 6th, people can be inspired to act on those claims. And the worry is that Going Forward, more people will do that. We still have ongoing efforts, for instance, to challenge legitimacy of the election in arizona. So, you know, i think the struggle here is going to be how we limit these downsides while respecting the very important traditions of Freedom Of Speech in this country. Not demanding that facebook becomes a global truth police, but at the same time taking seriously the Ways Misinformation can do real damage in our politics and to Public Health. You know, willie, following up on what elizabeth said, yes, it was very concerning that there were a lot of veterans in the January The 6th riots and insurrection. Also concerning is, if you look at vax hesitancy, there are a large number of active duty military men and women who are vaccine hesitant and not taking the vaccination, which is a disturbing trend inside our armed forces. And police departments, too, if you look at who will and wont get vaccinated. Brendan, im curious, as joe mentioned, facebook, what to do there . None of this happens in a vaccine and 20 years, these kind of conspiracy theories, we would get emails from people or they would talk to people in their neighborhood. But now theyve Found Community and found so Much Community on january 6th, they gathered at a date certain on the capitol and attacked the capitol of the United States and tried to overturn a president ial election. Theres been a lot of talk in congress about how to handle facebook. What is a reasonable expectation of how facebook might police itself and what Congress Might do to do something about facebook and all that it wreaks the havoc it wreaks on people gathering for nefarious reasons . Thats the milliondollar question. And people say, if we revealed 230, these would go away. I dont think thats the case. But we do need to take seriously the ways that people can coordinate online. The way they can use the tools of Social Media Platforms like facebook to mobilize people, not just to spread disinformation, but to take action based on that misinformation. So there was a leak you may have seen of an internal facebook report on what happened prior to january 6th to talk about how these stop the steal groups overwhelmed facebooks internal protections against efforts to engage in harmful actions in the outside world. That they were follow the rule book that couldnt keep up with how fast things were moving. And in that context, we do need to think we need to at least be ready to take action quickly. The people at these platforms have to be ready for think about taking different measures when circumstances become dire. Theres no easy Public Policy solution to that problem. But ultimately, some of these questions are political ones. The stop the steal group was organized on facebook and thats how that process gained Critical Mass in part. But ultimately, it was rallying to the cry of a political leader. And a political leader was inspiring people to take that kind of action. The point that i tried to make in my piece was that misinformation so often is inspired by political elites, who call on their followers to ignore other information they might see and repeat this information they put forth. And thats a situation we find ou ourselves in even after january 6th. The misinformation that hes promoted shows us just how difficult it is to counter these forces, because you would think that would be enough. You would think that wife driven the nails into the coffin of these kind of political lies, but instead, were seeing the Republican Party organize around the idea that the 2020 election was wrongly decided. And thats incredibly discouraging and its not going to be the last time that this happens. We have to figure out better ways to do this and better ways to create political consequences and encourage people to Cross Party Lines the way brave republicans like mitt romney and liz cheney have. So professor, you talked about the disinformation coming from a political leader, but what about those beyond facebook, who give that political leader, you know, infinite platform, im pointing to a Washington Post report about fox news. And its an attorney for a Capitol Rioter who is claiming that his client suffered from foxitis. And in the hearing, the attorney argued that fox newss decision to regularly air then president Donald Trumps false claims of mass Election Fraud contributed to his defendants decision to participate in the insurrection. Are you looking, when you are talking about facebook and other areas that disseminate false information, are you looking at tv news as a part of this as well . Very much so. Cable news is powerful. You all have a lot of power. Fox news has a lot of power. And in particular, you know, fox news reaches a Republican Base thats if at a given moment onl million or 2 Million People are watching fox news, that matters for a certain set of people in a quite powerful way. Im not a lawyer. I cant tell you if thats valid legal defense, but i think we need to worry and similarly, we need to worry when fox news is giving airtime to uninformed attacks on the safety and efficacy of the covid19 vaccine. Thats terribly dangerous. We need every republican vaccinated. We need, you know, fox news anchors with shots in arms, showing us theyre getting vaccinated, theyre protected. That republicans need to get protected, just like democrats do, just like independents do. In some ways, the challenge ultimately is to say theres some factual claims that are kind of central to the stability and thriving of our country. Like legitimacy of our elections. And the safety and efficacy of our medical system. And if we can prevent those from being politicized, it can be a really important bulwark against the kind of information that we worry so much about. Dartmouth professor brendan nyhan, thank you very much for being on this morning. More now on facebook. Last week we discussed the decision by a semiindependent Oversight Board to uphold for now the sites Ban On Former President Trump. But donald trump is just one of billions of facebook users. Keir simmons joins us now with a closer look at whether facebook, which is worth almost 1 trillion and employs nearly 50,000 people is meeting its global responsibilities. And keir, what did you find out . Reporter its fascinating the conversation you were just having, because the conversation about facebook cant just be about domestic politics. It cant just be about facebook and President Trump. Think about the fact that facebook has billions of users around the world. Pull back the curtain. I spoke to a senior facebook Security Executive, a former facebook moderator, and a former facebook Data Scientist. The executive told me that he believes that facebook has made real strides since the Russian Influence Campaign in 2016, but the former employees say that what they saw was facebook struggling to police its platforms around the world. One even telling me she felt like she had blood on her hand. They are on facebooks front line, policing platforms designed to give everyone a voice. Now they are speaking out. We are paid to look at the worst of humanity every day, this instagram content moderator said in an internal post before resigning last month. Now nbc news can reveal he is josh sklar. Youre reviewing maybe hundreds of pieces of content a day. Were talking everything from hate speech to Animal Mutilation to videos of people committing suicide. One time, you saw three Child Exploitation videos in the space of an hour . Yeah. And that wasnt even on the Child Exploitation cube so that just suddenly pops up on your screen . I mean, that was a really good day. Reporter for two years, josh worked for accenture in austin, texas, a contractor for facebook. In 2019, staff reportedly complained of inhumane conditions there. He says, without moderators like him facebook would become a total like cesspool. Reporter josh says they had to be actively filtering for six hours a day. One time, a glitch allowed Animal Mutilation videos to go online. And it continued for months. And you try to speak out and that theres nothing . Yeah,directly from malice, i think it comes from an inefficient management structure. A recent memo says, i monitor my own Mental Health. We were basically told, the company is not going to be held liable for these things. Reporter accenture told us, our people have 24 7 wellbeing support, including proactive and ondemand counseling. We ensure they have a clear unction of the work they do. Sophie zhang was a Data Scientist who worked for facebook for more than two years. She felt she had the world on her shoulders. I was literally a new hire straight out of college. Reporter when she was fired in 2020 for poor performance for not focusing enough on her primary job, she like josh found a scathing post. I found multiple blatant attempts by foreign governments to abuse our platform. Facebooks job was to make money, not to protect democracy ultimately. If i was doing something that drastically affected facebooks ad revenue, im sure people would have noticed and cared. Reporter during more than two years at facebook, sophie said she discovered armies of trolls working for authoritarian governments. What was your case example . Azerbaijan was the worst example, just because of the sheer size and audacity of the behavior. And all supporting azerbaijans leader. In honduras, she found fake pages backing the president. Facebook, she says, took a year to take the posts down, while she was overwhelmed, forced to choose where to defend democracy and where to let it go. I was just one person. I cant single handedly fix the world, though i certainly tried. Reporter now she believes interviews like this are what will make facebook listen. At the end of the day, facebook is focused on publicity. A press fire is what we called it at facebook. Reporter facebook told us, we fundamentally disagree with miss zhangs characterization of our priorities. Adding that they have already taken down more than 150 networks of coordinated, inauthentic behavior. Facebook says a more than 200person expert team works with hundreds of sources like the fbi. Cory prider runs a not for profit called foxglove to demand changes. She says facebook is failing its workers and its users. If were going to have a Global Public square, its facebooks direct responsibility to moderate that platform properly. Reporter and you may be thinking that facebook can replace people with algorithms, but that senior facebook Security Executive told me, willie, that youre never going to have ai to be able to do it on its own. It needs to be a combination of tech and people, if you like. Willie . Keir, what did josh and sophie, as people who have been on the inside of it, seen how it works, now expressing their frustration to you, what do they suggest or recommend . Because as you say, its such a vast platform that you couldnt possibly plug all the holes in the dam as they come with people or even with an algorithm . Reporter joshs recommendations is that facebook moderators are employed directly by facebook. Whether that would make changes or not, people can decide for themselves or figure out for themselves. I think the big thing here, willie, is that facebook has expanded so much, The Big Question is whether it is able to deal with these public squares around the world. Billions of people. Does it take more resources . You have to train people and get people with the right qualifications. Is it simply too big to handle . Those are questions that facebook vehemently pushes against and says that it is leaning in and solving thesis problems, particularly working with government authorities. Heres the issue, though, of course. Its fine perhaps when youre working in democracies with governments, but in places where there arent democracies, autocracies, where the government is using facebook to influence, thats where facebook executive admitted to me, while he thinks they are doing things, it is the hardest challenge, willie . Thank you so much. Nbcs keir simmons. Greatly appreciate it. What an important report. And eugene, weve heard, obviously, for some time that congress is going to be moving at some point on facebook. Donald trump obviously wanted to eliminate section 230. Joe biden during the Campaign Said he also supported the elimination of section 230. But also, you have Amy Klobuchar thats moving on antitrust concerns regarding the company. Whats the latest status of congress attempt to reign in the worst aspects of facebook . I think theyve stalled, is the best way to put it. You dont hear this conversation happening, although things are happening behind the scenes. This is one of the places interestingly that democrats and republicans agree that something has to be done for very Different Reasons for the most part, but they agree that something has to be done to reign in the power of facebook and twitter and all of these other Social Media Platforms. Theres often a lack of understanding of how social media works on capitol hill. When you see zuckerberg or the guys from twitter come up and talk to people, likely because of age and how it actually works on the ground. But unless Congress Jumps in, its hard to see how this gets cleaned up. And i think facebook has gotten much bigger than anticipated and like they were saying in that piece, this idea of it becoming the public square, that wasnt how facebook started out. But now it is, you know, i spend a lot more time on twitter, because its part of my job. But my Family Members, a lot of your Family Members, im sure, and people everyday people, they are spending more of their time on facebook. How much power and influence has over actual voters and people who are making the everyday decisions in this country really party. So you have to you have to wait and see kind of, facebook has not selfgoverned in the way that a lot of these experts want them to do, and even when they do speak to congress, they dont seem fully onboard with congress doing something, whereas twitter seems a little bit more interested in government doing something. I will say, i have been talking to some experts on this and they tell me the American Congress is not what you want to look for as to whether or not something will be done with congress. But overseas, the uk, and things happening over there and how facebook will be regulated. Then it might be easier if other countries, you know, take some kind of action for congress here to step forward and do something. And elizabeth, weve seen over the past year stories of facebook not just allowing people to come on their platform and promote antidemocratic movements here or promote antidemocratic rallies here, but weve seen tyrants in other countries spreading misinformation through facebook and running people off who actually were trying to speak out against tyrannical governments. This is a challenge to Democratic Institutions and democratic movements globally. Facebook is not a publisher, not bound by the same rules of the New York Times, although recently it is a publisher. I have been at number of events where facebook has made their case, we are really policing ourselves now. It is not manageable given the number of users worldwide. Its an unreasonable expectation that they would be able to police themselves, or that they would want to, frankly. And i do agree that congress has been nowhere on this. Facebook has a very powerful lobby In Washington, understandably, and the pressure is on it right now. I dont see this changing anytime soon. All right. Coming up, the crime of the century. A new Documentary Employers one of the most devastating Public Health tragedies of our time. The creation of americas Opioid Epidemic. Plus, the weekend cyber attack on a major u. S. Pipeline has exposed vulnerabilities when it comes to americas aging energy infrastructure. Chris krebs, the former director of Homeland Security Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency joins the conversation next on morning joe. Joins Thcoe Nversation next on morning joe. R rumbles] [sfx rainstorm] comfort in the extreme. The lincoln family of luxury suvs. When a truck hit my car, the Insurance Company wasnt fair. I didnt know what my case was worth. So i called the barnes firm. I was hit by a car and needed help. I called the barnes firm, that was the best call i couldve made. Im rich barnes. Its hard for people to know how much their Accident Case is worth. Let our Injury Attorneys help you get the best result possible. The Barnes Firm Injury Attorneys call one eight hundred, Eight Million the most popular republican in america is not Lindsey Graham, its not liz cheney, its donald trump. People on our side of the aisles believe that trump policies work, theyre disappointed that he lost. And trying to erase donald trump from the Republican Party is insame. Its impossible for this party to move forward without President Trump being its leader, because the people who are conservative have chosen him as their leader. And you know why they chose him . Because he delivered. Ronald reagan made it clear that calling our party a big tent was more likely to bring people in. And thats what you need to do during elections. If you narrow the tent to a pup tent, you make it less likely that we win elections. And i cant imagine that rejecting liz cheney from leadership is going to draw in more voters. It may lose a number of voters who were still sticking with us. Welcome back to morning joe. It is tuesday, may 11th. Along with joe, willie, and me, we have pulitzer prizewinning columnist and Associate Editor of the Washington Post, eugene robinson. Nbc news capitol hill Correspondent Host of way too early, kasie hunt. And chief White House Correspondent for the New York Times, peter baker. Good to have you all onboard this hour. Great to have everybody here. Kasie hunt, first, congratulations last night. Your orioles took one from the red sox, 41. Thank you. I want to ask you about tomorrow, though. Its so fascinating to me. Weve been talking about it this morning. You talk about Organizing Principles, the partys organizer, in 1980, Ronald Reagan came, the Organizing Principle was, less spending, less taxes, more freedom. In 94, when we came in, our Organizing Principle was to balance the budget. We were small government conservatives. We wanted to balance the budget. We did it four years in a row. Right now the Republican Partys Organizing Principle, at least on the house side, is a lie. And that is well, not just on the house side, but also the governors and State Legislatures. Theyre all acting as if the election were stolen. Theyre all passing legislation, even in the state of florida, where trump won easily, just its virtue signaling towards this one great Organizing Principle they consider to be a great Organizing Principle for the Republican Party that the election was stolen. And tomorrow, it looks like Kevin Mccarthy is going to seal the Republican Partys fate, at least in the house and on the state levels, around this lie. So give us the lead up to pretty remarkable events that will occurring today and tomorrow on capitol hill . It will be a pretty astonishing moment that liz cheney is marching straight into with eyes wide open and is going to force them all. She could in theory step aside. Shes not going to do that. Shes going to make them say exactly what you just outlined. That they believe whats the former president has been pushing, this big lie that they are willing to look the other way at the very least. Although perhaps not willing to go out there and defend former President Trump, they want her to not say anything about it. They want her to pretend theres nothing going on. At the bottom line, thats whats going on here. And whats remarkable to me is, we said it before on the show, former President Donald Trump lost the election. He lost during his term control of the house. He ultimately lost control of the senate. Mitch mcconnells favorite saying is winners make policy and losers go home. And right now donald trump has caused the Republican Party has been basically sent into exile. And republicans have no idea how to solve this problem. They spent four years ago looking the other way, pretending not to have seen the tweets or wanting to answer the questions. Basically just crossing their fingers and hoping it was all going to go away, while they got some judges on the bench and a couple of conservative fiscal policies into law. They still seem to be doing that even though donald trump is no longer president of the United States. It failed to work then and i fail to see how its going to work then. Liz cheney may be making a bet, longterm, i know where the country stands and i want to be on that side of it. Thats assuming the republicans want to solve this problem or at least wanted to in the beginning. And there is no evidence of that. Especially now. Theres no reason to follow him now. This would be the time to break away. But gene robinson, you write about the republicans break with reality, literally, being one of the biggest threats to our democracy. Yeah, i really do think it is. I mean if you think about, one of our two big parties, they go back and forth for many generations. And one of them now has completely lost its mind and stands for nothing except the big lie and the fact that Kevin Mccarthy wants to be speaker and thinks that he can eke out enough seats in the Midterm Election to become speaker of the house. Thats it. Theres no set of governing inciples that they follow. Theres no ideology, really, except the big lie ideology. And i think that is a real threat to this country at a time when theres so much that needs to be done internally, externally, facing the world. And the Democratic Party right now is forced to be essentially the entire functional political spectrum. Youve got aoc and the squad on the left, joe manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the right. And the democrats have to work out that whole negotiation by themselves, because the republicans have decided to follow the lie and nothing else. It is just, its just extraordinary. Its astounding peter baker that its a policyfree zone theyre operating in. This is not like some Crazy Washington Bubble thats just happening in the house. Its also happening in the State Of Georgia with republicans, in the state of florida be arizona, you go around the country, and this is the big lie if you believe that donald trump actually lost the election, but youre saying he won the election, that big lie is the Organizing Principle. Im just curious, though about maybe its a tiny bit of friction, but i mentioned the difference between Kevin Mccarthys house and Mitch Mcconnells senate. Because mitch on January The 6th came out and spoke very directly about the most important vote he cast in his entire career was for those electors. Was to give people back the day of the insurrection, to cast that vote. And republicans in the senate, for the most part, other than ron johnson, have been shying away from this. Talk about the tale of two parties in basically one building in congress. I think thats right, joe. I think obviously the Senate Republicans doesnt want to be part of this fight that Kevin Mccarthy is having. At the same time, they dont want to be on either side. Its not that theyre standing up to trump, either. They just assume try to keep out of it. We said after january 6th that the Republican Party was in for a civil war among itself. And that civil war now looks to be over and donald trump won. Donald trump seems to have cemented his hold over the party, despite what happened on january 6th, despite what happened in the months leading up to january 6th. And why is that . Its not because hes popular, right . As kasie has said, he lost the popular vote two elections in a row. He never had the support of the majority of the American Public for a single day in office in the major poles. We havent seen a twotime popular vote loser in america since Adlai Stevenson, although Adlai Stevenson didnt have a hold over the party after that. Jimmy carter didnt have a hold after his party after losing after one term. Donald trump has a hold over this party. And why is that . Its because his poll numbers arent strong among the overall public, but theyre strong among republicans. Hes polling at 84 among republicans. It matches the high that george w. Bush had at the best point of his presidency. So who are the people in the Republican Party responding to . Theyre responding to their own supporters, to their own constituents. And donald trump has a hold over them. That he is still popular among them. That he is still their champion. Theres no Policy Platform here. This party had no platform in last years election. No platform it was all about the success of donald trump. They see him as a champion, as their fighter, as their balter against people In Washington who are the establishment, including their own party. And thats enough for them. Thats what they want. Willie, yesterday, we talked about parallels between american politics, whats happening in great britain, as well, with some local elections that were held in great britain. But Anne Applebaum has been talking about how there are similar problems among centerright governments, rightwing kbofts across the globe. Governments that called themselves conservative. Whether youre talking about donald trump and the United Stateses or the law and Justice Program in poland. The queen is delivering her speech today. I believe i just saw a feed of her delivering it. And one of the headlines out of that speech, the queen promises and this is, of course, reading what Boris Johnsons responsibilities, what Boris Johnsons goals are for the new session. The queen said that legislation that would come out that would guarantee the integrity of elections, from georgia to great britain, this is now, i dont know if you call ate dog whistle or a clowns whistle for people on the far right who believe that elections are being stolen when, in fact, just the opposite is true. The past year was one of the most successful elections in american history. Thats precisely what were looking at right now this week in the United States congress. Liz cheney said it was a fair, safe, secure election. Elise stefanick continues to say even this week there wereirregu got to focus on Election Security. Theres that word again. Kasie hunt, my sense over talking to republicans in congress over the last six months or so is that the majority of them, not all of them, there are some who actually do believe that the election was stolen, but most of them are just afraid of donald trump. And if you injected them with truth serum, they might say, there might be a few votes here or there in georgia or arizona, but not enough to make donald trump president , but i cant say that out loud. If i cross donald trump, i lose my job, we lose our power . Is that your sense still today talking to republicans on the hill . It is, willie. And i think that youve nailed the fundamental difference between liz cheney and mitt romney and the vast majority republican members of congress. And thats that liz cheney is not afraid of donald trump. Most of them are. Certainly Kevin Mccarthy is. He is concerned that donald trump will get involved in these primaries, hurt incumbent members. Hes also got reason to be concerned that perhaps donald trump would urge his own supporters in the house to pick someone else to be speaker, even if mccarthy and his Leadership Team do succeed in winning back the house. And donald trump has shown, demonstrated repeatedly that it doesnt matter how many times you demonstrate your loyalty to him, you cross him one time, youre done. Look at mike pence, the former Vice President who was nothing if not loyal to donald trump for four years made this decision at the very end to say, you know what, no, im putting my country, our country ahead of this man. And now he is persona Nongreat Nongreatta and his supporters were inside the Capitol Chanting hang mike pence. The same thing could happen with Kevin Mccarthy, where he said he called t presi and said call them off and that the president bore some responsibility with that. And now theyre all still so afraid over the power that he holds over this group of Republican Voters that they wont do anything about it. And winning elections is a game of addition, not subtraction. They cant necessarily if those republicans turn on them because of donald trump, but they also dont have a path back to power if they continue to do it this way. Lets bring into this conversation the former director of cybersecurity and infrastructure, Security Agency, chris krebs. Its good to see you this morning. Well talk to you in a minute about the cyber attack on the palestine. But we want to get you in on this conversation, as well. I just pulled up your Agency Statement on november the 12th. Quote, the November 3rd Election was the most secure in american history. Youve obviously studied this and looked at it closer than anybody in the country. What do you think when you hear not just republicans in the United States congress, but governments around the world talking about the need to shore up our elections . First, willie, i want to clarify, that statement was not me or my agency, that was a coalition of folks that were involved in administering the election. That included state and local election officials. That included other federal partners and private sector partners. That was really a sense of the community at the time that the 2020 election was, in fact secure. And it was. And its been recounted in multiple staples multiple times and every single time the outcome has been consistent. Election security here or abroad can be a term that can be used as a sword or a shield. I think what were seeing right now is the Republican Party, throughout the country, not just at the federal congressional level, but at State Legislatures, theyre using Election Security as a sword to get their objectives. To defend why they failed to retake the dosh, you know, retain the presidency in the 2020 election. Never mind the fact that there were historical gains in statehouses and in the house of representatives. So somethings not adding up there. I think you can talk about Election Security in a positive way, as a shield, and thats to continue to invest in our systems across the country, to retire some of the aging infrastructure. Elections arent perfect and there are things we need to do to continue to protect them Going Forward. But not like this. This is undermining confidence across the country. So, chris, i know most of us have friends who supported donald trump, i know i have, friends and Family Members, and im just curious, if youre going to talk to them and try to convince them that theyre being lied to, what would you lead with . What would be of course, said in love, what would you say to a friend or loved one to say, listen, i know what youre seeing on facebook, i know what youre hearing from donald trump, but this is the fact . What would you lead with . So this is really the hard part, right . You want to kind of understand what theyre coming from, what theyre sourcing their data from. So i would ask for help me understand why you think this is the case. What are you seeing out there . Try to get to the root of their concerns skpr the root of whats driving them to these outcomes. But i spend a lot of time in rural virginia and i see the and i talk to folks, and it has sunk in. It is really part of the zeitgeist in the Republican Party these days. And until you see the leadership at all levels can, including up to the former guy, admit that the election was legitimate, i think were in for a rough run here. And you and i both know, he aint doing it. Yeah, hes not going to do it. And it has weirdly enough, when i talk about it becoming the Organizing Principle, i know like the Reagan Lincoln dinners or the reagan dinners, whatever they call it in these specific counties. Its what everybody is talking about. The election was rigged, the election was stolen. You see it from the governors, you see it from the State Legislatures. It is so hard to have a strait conversation with somebody, because youre right, its become part of the zeitgeist and the little fabric. Peter baker of the New York Times is with us, chris, and has a question. Peter . Chris, how are you . Listen, as you watch these legislative efforts around the country, florida, georgia and texas, obviously, theyre so polarized, theyre so controversial, a lot of the assumption on the left is that theyre aimed at suppressing the vote, are there ideas that are aimed at Election Security that are worth thinking about that are, in fact things that could be bipartisan if they were taken out of this sort of Hothouse Atmosphere that were in . Or is it entirely from your View Politics and partinship and trying to gain the system to maximize your own vote and minimize the other partys . Look, i think there are serious politicians and legislators out there. Look at whats happening in kentucky. The State Legislature there driven by Secretary Of State Michael Adams has put forward a number of recommendations that would codify some of the improvements they made over the course of last year, including in 2020. That includes online registration for Absentee Ballots and things of that nature. There are glimmers of hope out there, but theyre getting overshadowed by some of the early efforts in georgia, not necessarily the bill that was passed and signed into law, but the early georgia efforts. Michigan continues to drive some voter not as much access, voter suppressiontype legislation. And of course, just the travesty of whats happening out in oorz, that is whats carrying the news cycle. But even that is starting to the shine is coming off of the arizona efforts a little bit and youre starting to see the Senate Leader walk away a little bit from both the team they brought in as well as the outcome theyre seeking. It might have been when they started to look for bamboo in the ballots, because they originally were isnt from china. That might have taken some of the shine off. Lets talk about this cyber attack on the pipeline. The company that owns the Fuel Pipeline Hit by a Ransomware Attacks says it hopes to be back up and running by the end of this week. The Colonial Pipeline was paralyzed by a cyber attack over weekend. The fbi and white house have confirmed the russian criminal Hacking Group dark side were behind the attack, working with the company to restore security. The most important thing is that systems are patched and cybersecurity is maintained at the level needed in a given network. We want to see ransomware not be successful, and that begins with greater resilience, particularly in greater infrastructure networks. The fbi has recently worked with International Departments to take down and disrupt ransomware infrastructure. We expect that will be a continued focused area to make it far more difficult for these actors to prey on their victims. The Criminal Group wrote a statement on its dark web page saying, our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society. President biden said, although the group is separate from the russian government, he will discuss it with russian president Vladimir Putin at an upcoming meeting. Im going to be meeting with president putin, and so far there is no evidence based on from our intelligence people that russia is involved. Although theres evidence that the actors, ransomware, is in russia. They have some responsibility to deal with this. Chris, President Biden saying, its not the russian government, as far as they know. But theres a reason, is there not that so many of these Ransomware Companies set up shop inside russia. Yeah, absolutely. The russian government has turned a blind eye to these sorts of activities for a number of years. And this is just the latest crew to take advantage of that. And look, this goes down even to the programming in the malware that they used, the actual malicious software. It runs a check as soon as it gets on network, it looks for russian language packages installed on the computers. And if it finds the language package from a number of countries, it will exit. They know where their bread is buttered and do not take advantage of those. What i think Going Forward is going to happen, there are two different crews set up in this dark side. Theres a team of Software Developers that design the package and they effectively rent that infrastructure out or lease it out to affiliates. And those affiliates go out and do the lockups and the ransoming. I suspect what might happen is one of those affiliates that was responsible for this attack either finds himselves at the gate of the u. S. Embassy in moscow or goes for a long walk in a forest and we dont hear from him again. Chris, this is a little bit different than the massive solar winds attack, which was the russian government, the americans pointed directly at the russian government on this. How do these attacks work, exactly . Lets take the pipeline. How do they get in without being deequity the and what do we need to do to do to change that . Its unclear just yet on what happened with colonial. But particularly with ransomware, there are a couple of Different Things that happened, typically. First is, they can come in through an email, an attachment, a link. Somebody in the Company Might click on that link. And then they turn over their password. And the best way to defend against that is either to have some good antiphishing techniques or you implement whats known as multifactor authentication. Thats where youre basically in a Password List Environment and you have to use a phone or some sort of hard token to log in. There are other ways through unpatched appliances or vpns that they can get in, but any way you cut it, there are Security Techniques that can be used to defend against the vast majority of these attacks. Every single ceo yesterday needs to be convening his senior Leadership Team, his security team, and running through the various Security Drills and making sure theyve got not just instant response plans, but Business Continuity plans, because everybody will have a bad day and you need you can get through it and support your customers. All right. Chris krebs, thank you so much for coming on the show this morning. And just a side note, joe, i was struck by that sound bite we ran of the president. And when you look at joe bidens Approval Rating wins among republicans and look at his language on russia and Vladimir Putin, calling him a killer, saying to his face, you dont have a soul. And what we just saw now, that kind of consistency zprent would be welcome on the right. Well, i dont know that i dont know about the diplomatic nicety of calling any leader a killer. Well, unless its true. Well, im just not going to name the other countries we deal with you could say the same thing about. But i will say this about joe bidens approach. And actually, let me bring in peter baker here. Peter, the russians had to deal with this schizophrenic American Foreign policy apparatus during the trump years. You would have donald trump kowtowing to Vladimir Putin in helsinki, Lavishing Him with praise and you would have a republican and a Democratic Congress passing some of the toughest sanctions yet against russia and against oligarchs and against people close to Vladimir Putin. I actually would think despite the fact he doesnt get the praise that he got with donald trump that even russia would like a steadier hand, a more stable relationship where joe biden says, well, were not sure who is responsible for this hacking, but were going to talk to Vladimir Putin and it sounds like hes trying to move this relationship forward, if the russians want this relationship to move forward. We have a lot of issues on the table and we need some steadiness, not only in russia, but across the world. The question for President Biden at this point on russia is how you can be both tough on the issues like solar winds and areas where they have been inimical to american interests and still try to find ways to cooperate. As you say, there are a wide variety of areas of our relationship where we have cooperated, even among periods of great tension. The space program, nuclear arms control, things like that. We have interests at this point in the middle east where we obviously are at odds, but could find some common ground. Remember this Iran Nuclear Pac that President Biden wants to revive included russia as one of the parties to that agreement. Russia is important in Climate Change if you want to reinvigorate that paris Climate Change process. So youre right, its a very wide ranging multifacetted are relationship. President biden has signalled that he wants to both be tough and reach out to putin at the same time, by having this meeting. A lot of people are not certain whether thats a mixed message that he can carry off. Its a tricky balance to have. And whether or not putin sees that as constructive or steady, as you say, or as weakness that he can exploit. Its the open question. And theres a disagreement even within the Biden Administration about that. So its a very volatile moment. Remember that russia still has about 80,000 troops planted on the border of ukraine or nearby, even though they said that they were going to pull back, they havent. Not entirely. And those 80,000 troops stand there as kind of a sword hovering over not just ukraine, not just europe, but even the United States at this point. So its a very, very fraught moment in our redevelop. Peter baker, thank you very much for being on this morning. Still ahead on morning joe, putting the coronavirus pandemic into historical perspective. The New York Times bestselling author nat ferguson joins us with his new look at the politics of catastrophe, examining why the u. S. Seems to be getting worse at handling disasters. Youre watching morning joe. Well be right back. Watching well be right back. [sfx psst psst] allergies dont have to be scary. Spraying flonase daily stops your body from overreacting to allergens all season long. Psst psst all good hooh. That spin class was brutal. Well you can try using the buicks massaging seat. Oohh yeah, thats nice. Can i use apple carplay to put some music on . Sure, its wireless. Pick something we all like. Ok. Hold on. Whats your buicks wifi password . buickenvision2021. oh, you should pick something stronger. Thats really predictable. Thats a really tight spot. Dont worry. I used to hate parallel parking. [all together] me too. Hey. You really outdid yourself. Yes, we did. 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This is where i want to be. Talk to your doctor and ask if latuda could make the difference youve been looking for in your Bipolar Depression symptoms. Tech every customer has their own safelite story. Youve been looking for this couple was on a camping trip. When their windshield got a chip. They drove to safelite for a sameday repair. And with their insurance, it was no cost to them. Woman really . Tech thats service you can trust. Singers safelite repair, safelite replace. 34 past the hour. Why are disasters so hard to predict . Why are those who warn of disasters so often ignored . How do social Networks Contribute to the spread of disinformation . These are among the questions taken on by historian and Senior Fellow at the hoover institution, niall ferguson, in his new book, doomed the politics of catastrophe. Great to have you on. Just looking, starting with the coronavirus pandemic, which got a lot worse than it needed to. Dont you think at this point, it was disinformation even from the very top at the United States of america . Mika, that was certainly part of the problem. But i think if we tell ourselves that if only someone else would have been president , Someone Other than donald trump who would have been done much, much better, we might have been kidding ourselves. As i talk about in the book, President Trump made any number of mistakes. But thats not really why we ended up with half a million plus of excess mortality. Plus, we know how this was done well, because in taiwan and in south korea, they ramped up testing, they did integrated Contact Tracing and isolated the infected or the suspected infected. We did none of those things. In practice, its not really the president who organizes Pandemic Response. The president is not king emperor. Theres a Public Health organization whose job this is. And i think it must be admitted that those different part of the bureaucracy failed, despite being on paper prepared for a pandemic. I think thats one of the puzzles i address in the book, on paper, the United States and the uk were well prepared for a pandemic in 2019 and they had lots and lots of pandemic preparedness plans. Its just when a pandemic happened, none of those plans worked. And so i think we have to get away from the narrator that this was all trumps fault and remember something ron klain said recently, which was that if the 2009 wine flu would have been as bad as covid, its not clear the Obama Administration would have done a whole lot better. So niall, i want to talk about your book. I dont want to get way down in this, but i do have to say, Matthew Poddinger and so many others were warning the president were Warning Health officials starting on December 31st 2019 about this. And they did not respond adequately. You can respond to that if you want. Fired the Pandemic Response team. I would like to bradden the aperture of it here though and talk about the United States, whether its our response to 2001 and as some would say, our overreaction to that for two decade, our response to 2008 or our response to this pandemic, why is that we eventually get it right, and we do, if you look at bushs policies in 08, 09, we figured out how to get it right and then we left and all hell broke lose again. If you lock at what happened with subprime, that crisis, we eventually got that right. If you look at the pandemic, we eventually got that right if you look at how were doing on vaccinations compared to the rest of the world. But why does it take the United States in particular to long to turn this massive ship around, where south korea, like you said, moved quickly and efficiently and protected their people . Thats the right question, joe. Doom is a book about disasters. And the question is, are we getting worse at handling them even though our scientific knowledge is increasing. Its like each president gets a different disaster than the one he was prepared for. 9 11, i think youre right to say, we kid not handle well. Ultimately, i think historians will say going into iraq was not a logical response to that crisis and ended up creating huge unintended adverse consequences. And of course, theres the financial crisis. And thats quite similar in some ways to the covid story. On paper, there was lots of regulation of banks in 2007, 2008. So answer that i offer in the book is that over time, weve become more bureaucratic in our approach to risk management. In other words, the federal government likes to drop enormously complex Contingency Plans and regulations designed to avert crises. And this makes our system very unwieldy. Whereas in taiwan, when i look at their response, its nimbleness. They were extremely quick to ramp up texting in the beginning of this crisis. Whereas in the u. S. , the center for Disease Control exhale limited testing. And then cdc capped it all by producing a test that debate work. One has to look quite closely at this pattern of bureaucratic failure. Because we have the illusion of preparedness. Yet when they happen, they take us by surprise. I dont think you could say that if you look at back at earlier periods, lets say the 1950s where america had to deal with many disasters. And the generation that have come through world war ii understood better that you have to be very quick on your feet in a crisis. I think thats what we got bad at. And we need to look at, for example, the way taiwan used technology. One of the great mysteries of 2020 is why the United States, which has the Biggest Technology companies in the world, companies that have data and enormous amounts of data on all of us, why they werent able to produce a good Contact Tracing app. And its not like they couldnt have done it. But i think one has to conclude, they decided not to because there were downside risks, even though that would have put all of the data they have at their disposal to some good public use. You write in the book about a relatively new variable faced by governments in the face of catastrophes. And that is social media that when a government is trying to attack a problem, it is often met online, on facebook, and other places with dissenting information, saying, well, this isnt as bad as media is making it sound. Its not as bad as Public Health experts are making it sound. Now were in the face of, you shall get the vaccine, you shouldnt trust the vaccine. How do you factor that into this equation now, which is something you talk about in the 1950s and well before, something that no government had to contend with . Willie, thats a great question. In think last book, i tried to argue that we had a problem with the they the internet had evolved, because a relatively small number of platforms like facebook and google were capable of disseminating disinformation and misinformation on a scale weve never seen before. Of course, its as old as Human History that in the plague, you get crazy ideas. That was true in the black death of the 1340s. Its just that crazy ideas are much, much easier to transmit to billions of people today. And i think that second contagion of fake news about the virus, about possible remedies and vaccines has been a huge obstacle. Not just in the United States. So we still have to remember we havent fixed the problem that first really became apparent back in 2016 that our public sphere is now to a very large extent dominated by Companies Whose principle interests is getting eyeballs to stay on screens to look at ad, which is how the money gets made. If thats your incentive, youre essentially going to be a machine for disseminating click bait. And if you look at facebooks role in spreading antivax ideas, its really a bit of a shocker that there was no serious attempt last year as far as i can see to address the super spreader problem. Whats interesting is just like the virus is spread by super spreaders, about 20 of infected people do 80 of the infecting, the same is true on the internet. There are people who spread nonsense about vaccines and nonsense about the virus. And we know that facebook looked at this, was aware of this problem, didnt do terribly much to address it, because in the end, this is how the money gets made, throughsensational fake news that people cant take their eyeballs off. Gene robinson is with us and has question for you. Hi, niall. Getting back to the pandemic. Isnt sort of the strain of can tankerous individualism, didnt that have something to do with our initial failed response to the pandemic. I would argue, as joe does, that donald trump aggressively hurt our response. But he was giving people something they wanted. He was giving people reasons to say, just leave me alone, no central control, Contact Tracing app, nobody you know, people would claim that was a scheme by bill gates to drain their, you know, precious bodily juices or whatever. I mean, isnt that part of the reason why we dont respond or didnt respond in this case . This is one of the paradoxes of 2020, that freedomloving americans werent going to submit to a Contact Tracing app, whereas that was something you can do in asia, because theres much less individualism there. But if being locked up in your house for weeks, if not months on end, is a triumph of civil liberties, im mystified. In taiwan, they didnt need to do lockdowns. If you look at the measures of stringsy and government policy, they had the lightest touch response. So what we ended up doing was claiming to use technologies in ways that would have been smart and instead opting for house arrest. Opting for the extraordinary blunt instruments of lockdowns, which vader varied in their strictness across the country. But in california, we certainly didnt feel like we were having a very libertarian experience, when not only we were shut in our homes, we were also prevented from going to public parks and beaches, which was crazy, because it was already obvious in march of last year that there wasnt much spread of the virus outdoors. We tell ourselves this story that were freedomloving individualists as were stuck into these homes prevented from even going to a public park. I think weve got the wrong china in mind. A lot of people back in march thought that we should kpeep the peoples republic of china, which did this very, very drastic lockdown from late january onwards. But we should have been copying the republic of china, ie taiwan, which has been very smart in using technology not to empower government, but to empower individuals. The hero of doom is actually a transgender woman whos the digital minister in taiwan. We need to look much more closely at that. Because weve been ever tremendously behind in understanding that technology can, in fact, help individual liberty. And you know, it has i just i cant underline what you said there enough. I thought it crazy, first of all, mika and i agreed with you very early on in the pandemic, we were wondering why state parks and beaches were being shut down for people to go outside and walk when it was clear that this pandemic was spread inside where there wasnt a lot of ventilation. But also, as a small government conservative, a guy who believes in free enterprise, if you believe in small government, if you want businesses to open up, wear a mask nine months ago, get a vaccine now. We get to herd immunity and then there are no questions at all. And you are so right that the very people who are complaining about wanting to get in economy started back up are the very people who are pushing back on mild i mean, i talked about a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago about the need for people to get vaccinated. If they dont want to get vaccinated, at the end of the day, thats their business. Its just like, if you want to smoke six packs of cigarettes a day, up to you. Were america, right . Even though i have to pay for it at the end when you get sick frit. But niall, for me, thats the disconnect with so many of my former republican allies that they push back against the very things that would have opened Small Businesses, churches, et cetera, et cetera, much, much earlier. I think if you look back to the 1950s, the issue of vaccination was not a politicized issues. There have been controversies about vaccination in the very early days when the first inoculation against small pox was discovered. But by the 1950s, the United States took pride in the fact that it was the world leader in vaccine development. Another of the heroes of doom is a montana guy, morris hillman, whupz responsible for discovering a Staggering Number of vaccines in the course of his career, including the one for the socalled asian flu in 1957, which he did at extraordinary speed. And the eisenhowers policy was essentially, lets get this vaccine out as fast as we possibly can. And they managed to get from the discovery of the nature of the virus to vaccines into peoples arms in just a matter of months, even faster than in our time, though we sort of pat ourselves on the back and say weve done brilliantly. But nobody is saying its a kind of thought crime to get a vaccine. On the other hand, people regard it as a great patriotic victory that the u. S. Is first to get a vaccine that works. I think our problem partly is everything has become politicized. That went from masks to hydroxychloroquine to vaccines. H policy, but here is the worrying thing, the next disaster wont be a pandemic. It probably wont be something that we thought about terribly much and i suspect well react in the same way, whether it is a massive cyber attack or an attack in california. Well end up politicizing that too. I think the reaction will be a little different than a Pandemic Response team and respect for science from the top. Lettuce hope. The new book is doom, thank you so much for being with us. Now on to the other Public Health kries. The cdc said Overdose Deaths have surged during the pandemic. And well talk to an Award Winning filmmaker who is now taking on the Opioid Epidemic. N. Just take as much as you need. I said it sounds like a deal. Within the last 20 years, more than 500,000 americans have been killed by overdoses. Controlled release oxycontin will be the drug that triggered the Opioid Crisis. But what if we discovered that the crisis started with a crime. That was part of the trailer from the new hbo documentary, the crime of the century, a searing indictment of big pharma and the political operatives and government regulations that enable over production, reckless distribution, and abuse of synthetic opioids. The twopart documentary is directed by emmy and award award winner alex gibney who joins us now. So what are the takeaways well see in this. Weve covered the Opioid Epidemic at length and weve seen it firsthand in our lives. But what do we learn here maybe about the crime that started it all. Yeah, you know, i embarked on this project because it seemed to me that the Opioid Crisis wasnt being framed properly. It was being framed as a natural disaster, oh, this is terrible. It is happening and all of these people are dying of overdoses. What could we do. It is like a hurricane or a flood. What interested me about this is discovering how the crisis was purposefully manufactured by Companies Looking to make a profit. And yet when i looked at it even more deeply, it is easy to say Perdue Pharma which really lit the match that started the forest fire is hugely responsible and that is true. But it is a little bit like the Agatha Christy book a murder on the orient express, when youre looking for one culprit, you realize there were many and there were pharmacy, bad doctors, the department of justice, all conspired to permit the premise of profits over people. Alex, you cannot find, as you know, well researching this, a family in this country that hasnt somehow been touched by this epidemic and as you point out there is half a million deaths. It is a slow rolling tragedy and wiped out entire towns as you know. So my question to you is, we talk about big pharma and the role of the government, but what is the role of the middle men and women which is to say the doctors who were prescribing this stuff, did they have any sense of how dangerous it could be . Well, i think early on and im talking about the late 90s and early 2000s, the doctors were sold a bill of goods. There was a new fashion in the land, which is were undertreating pain, and particularly opioids and time release opioids cant be addictive. So doctors fell for that push which was very much a campaign by big pharma. But over time, lets be honest, the Business Model for selling massive amounts of opioids is to target bad doctors, people who are more interested in the money than they are in the care of their patients. And the way doctors will become corrupted would be by being paid a lot of money to be speakers on behalf of some of these companies. And in one case, i mean in part two of the documentary, we look at a Company Called instance where the company literally kept a flow chart on return on investment if they bribed a doctor say to the tune of 10,000 they would expect that doctor to write at least 20,000 worth of fentanyl prescriptions. So it was it was staggering and of course there were bad doctors involved. Though i think the important thing is to keep our eyes on the big picture here. Alex, as you studied this, did you find any sense of a conscience at any point during this on the part of the pharmaceutical companies, on part of purdue to say, my gosh, this is gotten away from us . No. That maybe was one of the most shocking things. Perdue and the Sackler Family has been unrepentant. And except for the fact that theyre being sued in multidistrict litigation all over the country, i havent found much sense of contrition on part of the other pharmaceutical companies. Because it wasnt just perdue. There are massive distribution companies, Johnson Johnson and mal an croft and others, and so it is the lack of attrition and lack of responsible. None of these people are taking responsibility even though we now know through the Washington Post that these companies knew exactly where every pill was going so that if you tracked to a town of say 3,000 people, and you learn that a million pills are going there, you think that is all going there for back pain. The companies knew and yet they show no sense of contrition. Part two of the documentary the crime of the century airs tonight on hbo and hbo max. Alex gibney, thank you very much for coming on this morning. Up next, Kevin Mccarthy sets the stage for liz cheneys removal from leadership. Scheduling a vote for tomorrow. Well discuss the future of a party that turns on its own to protect a lie. And before we go to break, were back with a new episode on our Digital Series leveling up at know your value. Com. We focus on the keys to building authentic diverse relationships at work. Catch that and much more at know your value. Com. Well be right back. Well be right back. 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Theyre disappointed that he lost. He gives a voice to their anger and their frustration. But hes not fit to be president of the United States. And to try to erase donald trump from the Republican Party is in sane and people who try to erase him are going to wind up getting erased. We think hes unfit for office and would be a terrible commander in chief. He doesnt have the temperament. He would get slaughtered as a party if donald trump is our nominee and quite frankly we would deserve it. So is there any doubt that hed flip again if it helped him politically . Good morning and welcome to morning joe, it is tuesday, may 11th, along with joe, willie and me we have New York Times Washington Bureau chief Elizabeth Bumiller and White House Correspondent for politico and coauthor of the playbook, Eugene Daniels. That is quite a mass. He flips like a pancake. Well, willie, again, he got on the senate floor right after january 6th and im done with this. Im off that he was done until he wasnt. And then two people in a chicken are chasing down Washington National airport, and he just he changes overnight. And asked if he could start golfing with donald again. I dont get it. It is crazy. There must be a nice golf course down there if hes willing to put them self through this. And enough is enough on the night of january 6 declaring himself finished and done with donald trump over what happened that day. He was heckled at an airport and felt some heat from his home state and flipped and now we see where he is today. Right at his side. This is like gone with the wind. You know. Brett butler said frankly my dear, i dont give a damn and he walks around and turns back and said never mind. You could make up some Fried Chicken an some greens, and some sweet tea, im hungry, dear. What is again, i dont know. Ive done this before. I dont understand, willie. Youve done that . No. Ive been in congress before. Ive had people yelling at me. Ive done hundreds of town hall meetings. You know, its not i love serving my district. It was the greatest professional honor of my life. Not a close secondary. But nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth the degrading yourself so much so you get elected. Its just not worth it. And hes certainly not alone. Weve seen just about every republican since january 6 even if they said something as Kevin Mccarthy said also on january 6 that donald trump was responsible for what happened here, weve seen all of them take it so far now that tomorrow theyre going to run Liz Cheney Out of leadership because she will not hug donald trump as closely as theyre willing to. Mika, it is not even a hug and it is just acknowledging the truth. I think sometimes were weve been so surrounded by this, it reminds me of you know a this short little story that is interesting about people not recognizing what is around them. The old fish is swimming past two younger fish and hes passing by and he goes, nice water. And one of the young fish say to the other fish, whats water . I think we dont understand what is surrounding us but we do understand it but it happens so much and after five years were numb to the fact, even though we say it time and again, and tom freedman touched on this in his oped piece last week. It is just as serious as it was the day before the election. You have 75 Million People who voted for a guy who calls for the arrest of his political opponent two weeks before the election and was pressuring his Attorney General to arrest his political opponent as if we lived in belarus. As if we lived in russia. As if we lived in china. And 75 Million People went out and voted for this guy regardless of all of the facts. You could stack them all up. And now theyre believing the lie. Theyre repeating the lie. Theyre living by the lie. That this election was stolen by donald trump and you look at what theyre doing in arizona and you look at the fact that liz cheney is simply saying what Rudy Giuliani said in federal court. That there was no widespread cheating, that the election wasnt stolen. Would all of the lawyers have said and who is the woman who said all of the crazy, crazy stuff, the attorney. Sidney powell. Sydney powell. Her argument when she got in trouble was, well they knew i was lying. The judge, they knew i was lying. Nobody what i was saying was to ridiculous that no person with any common sense, with any sense would believe what i said, your honor, they knew i was lying. That is what she said. And there is one example after another example, one trump judge after another trump judge and one trump lawyer and another trump lawyer and said inside of federal court that this election wasnt stolen. That there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have changed any of the state election results. This is a fact that could be given judicial notice in any federal court in america. Your honor, i just want to take judicial notice that donald trump did not win the election and joe biden did and there was no widespread voter fraud. Everybody judge in america would say i take judicial notice of that, lets start the trialm and yet liz cheney is about to be kicked out of the Republican Party because shes just telling the truth about this. And by the way, this is like i heard somebody say this yesterday, it is so true, if youre a democrat and you dont like republicans, should be cheering for this because it is not going to pick up one vote for the Republican Party. It is going to loosen some more votes in suburbs, among independent voters and lose more votes about people that arent in this base that donald trump has boiled down. Well, it is going to change what it means to be a republican In Washington and didnt think it would go lower was party of no options. They are against everything with no ideas. It is the party of big spending until they dont feel like it. And now it is the party of liar. Corrupt liars. I mean it is a choice that each leader In Washington will make. And it will go down in history and i think it is a dangerous moment for this country. And well have more on the fight against covid straight ahead, including case numbers around the world and how voters here at home size up President Bidens response to the pandemic. Youre watching morning joe. Well be right back. My plaque psoriasis. The itching. The burning. The stinging. My skin was no longer mine. My psoriatic arthritis, made my joints stiff, swollen. Painful. Emerge tremfyant™. With tremfya®, adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. Can uncover clearer skin and improve symptoms at 16 weeks. 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[sfx kids laughing] [sfx bikes passing] [sfx fire truck siren] onstar, we see them. Okay. Mother and child in vehicle. Mother is unable to exit the vehicle. Injuries are unknown. Thank you, onstar. My son, is he okay . Your sons fine. Thank you. There was something in the road. Its okay. Youre safe now. The fda yesterday approved pfizers covid19 vaccine for children as young as 12 years old. A study of more than 2,000 u. S. Volunteers at just 12 to 15 found no cases of covid19 among the fully vaccinated compared with 18 cases among the age group that received the placebo. The children in the study developed higher levels of virusfighting antibodies that in earlier studies. Younger teens will receive the same two dose regimen as two adults and and can expect similar side effects such as sore arm, flu like fever chills and aches. Shots could begin as soon as a federal Vaccine Advisory Committee issued a recommendation for using the two dose vaccine on the expanded 12 to 15 age group and that announcement is expected tomorrow. You know, willie, that is great news. It is certainly great news for our family. You know, jack, as you remember very well, was a preemie. And over six feet tall. Hes over six tall. Hes going to end up being 65 because he was a preemie he still has upper respiratory problems. This is great news for him. And great news for us. But of course for the country its such great news for parents, for their children and for people that want their kids to go back into school which is like the overwhelming majority of parents. This just assures that Middle School and High Schoolers could go back to school and everything could be open next fall. They should already be open now. Im just saying this takes one more excuse away from those people who want to close Schoolhouse Doors on our children after dr. Fauci has said for months you should open the door and let them in. It takes off the table the last excuse to keep schools closed. It is huge news. And again as we talk about swimming through and taking things for granted maybe, swimming through that water like the fish, it is worth stopping and thinking about look at what science has done for us. Not just to get a vaccine but to get it into kids arms to get them ready for camp frankly even before school comes. So maybe the summer looks more normal for a lot of families and looking to school in the fall, hopefully all of the doors of all of the schools are open as kids get this and it comes against the back drop in another drop of average covid cases. Down 30 from two weeks ago. Lowest level since last september. So far just over 32 of the population is fully vaccinated. The u. S. Is averaging 2 million vaccinations per day over the past week. Down from the peak level of 3. 4 million daily shots nearly a month ago. Globally new cases are leveling off but the virus Still Ravaging India and Southeast Asian countries that lack the vaccines they need. Experts warn that the virus is allowed to spread unchecked in parts of world, dangerous variants will continue to emerge that will threaten all countries and this, mika, perhaps the competent were seeing and the growth were seeing in the vaccines and everything that is happening in our country is why President Bidens Approval Numbers are where they are. Yeah, look at this. The latest a. P. And norc poll shows President Biden with the highest Approval Rating in its polling so far. 63 of americans surveyed approve of the president s Job Performance so far. Up two points from last month. 36 disapprove. His highest ratings continue could come from his handling of the nations most pressing issues. 71 of approve of how hes dealing with the pandemic including 47 of republicans. 57 give him high marks on the economy. Though the survey was conducted before fridays dismal jobs report. The president s weak spot is still on the issue of immigration, 54 disapprove. And the polls showed an uptick in american optimism. 54 say that the country is on the the right track. The highest since 2017. So joe, i mean, these numbers are Pretty Amazing and i guess some would say, okay, what are they based on, are they based on his handling of the coronavirus, is it the checks that people have received that could be causing some challenges for the economy to get back on track, a lot of people see it as soaring. But there are large sectors of this country where people are still suffering mightily. But will it bring us there. You look at polls and there is always in my mind an asterisk. I remember the polls showing him up 20 points in wisconsin the weeks before the election. These numbers, though, are very dramatic. I must say, measured against what ive seen and heard anecdotally over the past several months from dozens of people that ive known, friends and Family Members and others that voted for donald trump, ive yet to meet or talk to one person that voted for donald trump that said yeah, that was a mistake. I dont think im going to vote for him next. I believe if the election were held tomorrow instead of 75 million votes he might get 74,997,000 votes because were so entrenched and yet you look at numbers if theyre to be believed, were seeing a president with Approval Ratings that we havent seen in a very long time and the numbers that really is fascinating is the right track, wrong track number. 54 to 44. It is just not something in all of our years doing this on morning joe, we dont usually we have not i dont think in our 12, 13, 14 years very often shown a right track wrong track as positive as that one. Well, it is so striking from where it was just a year ago with donald trump. It happens so quickly. But obviously it is because the pandemic is easing across the United States. A third of the country is vaccinated. There is the economy that is picking up despite the jobs numbers last week. So it is not surprising that many americans, 54 have a sense of optimism. It is very hard to get the Trump Supporters to have a sense but ive said for a long time, come 2022, in the fall, if the pandemic is under control, if the economy is doing well, as we expect it to be doing, im a little befuddled about what republicans are going to say. I guess theyll go after biden on immigration. But it is a hard one, kind of why theyre using these culturebut i think it is hard for republicans in all of 2022 despite what is going to happen in the house. But i just see that its there is a sense of optimism after a very, long hard 2020 and a very hard, long winter. So Eugene Daniels if you look at bidens approval on handling fts pandemic it is 71 . That is the answer of where the 63 Approval Number is coming. That 63 is very high compared to other numbers weve seen. Mostly down in to the 50s. But hes doing well on the pandemic and the economy and health care. Upside down on immigration is the only place and gun policy. Hes pretty evenly split there in terms of approval. As elizabeth said, it is a contrast when you look at the right track, wrong track to the previous administration. The country was in such chaos on january 6 and january 20th that a sense of calm has washed over some voters . Absolutely. And that is kind of what the right track and how are you feeling about the country comes from. People feel a little bit calmer, right. Youre not seeing what we saw when President Trump was in office and people are at the same time, government seems to be working for people. That is what theyre telling us, that is what theyre telling pollster tz. They start the out this year, everyone was really scared still. We had this vaccine, we didnt know how we were going to get it, fast forward more than 100 days later, the vaccine roll out by measurements of Health Experts and people from con own straight on this all of the time, they sell it it is gone really well. You add this the fact that 12 to 15 years old could get the vaccine and it is widely available. And all of those things and the idea that the economy, though the jobs report on friday wasnt exactly what the administration wanted to see or anyone wanted to see, people feel like things are moving in the right direction. And the thing is, that is that doesnt happen in a vacuum. So talk about the fact that republicans seem like their house is not really in order right now and i think that also leads people to think that okay well it is really dramafree over here so that makes me feel good about joe biden and the Democratic Party and joe biden promised to bring that calm back to the white house, back to washington, d. C. And that is what weve seen for the last three months and i think his issue is going to be is can he get this infrastructure deal done, what does it look like and all of those things are what were watching to see how the numbers change. Because there is only so much time that you could kind of ride high on how well hes been doing with the pandemic because at some point the pandemic will be over. And we will move into infrastructure and hell have to be more proactive in the way that theyre that he operates as president. I think that is where republicans are hoping there will be more slipups. But this is a person that wants to find a bipartisan deal at least one on infrastructure, whether that is the just focus on the roads and the bridges, but that is something that they want to do. So it doesnt seem like this is a white house that will take their foot off the gas at any point because they see the numbers as well. Coming up, the fallout over last weeks jobs report. How both parties are framing this fact, the labor market has a long way to go. Well talk about that just ahead on morning joe. [sfx thunder rumbles] [sfx rainstorm] comfort in the extreme. The lincoln family of luxury suvs. My nunormal . Fewer asthma attacks with nucala. A oncemonthly addon injection for severe eosinophilic asthma. Nucala reduces eosinophils, a key cause of severe asthma. Nucala is not for sudden breathing problems. Allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue or trouble breathing. 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The lincoln family of luxury suvs. Yesterday President Biden looked to stem the criticism that his policies have led people to choose Unemployment Checks over pay checks. Our economic plan is working. I never said and no serious analyst ever suggested that climbing out of the deep, deep hole our economy was in would be simple, easy, immediate, or perfectly studied. It is easy to say the line has been because of the generous Unemployment Benefits that it is a major factor in labor shortages. Anyone Collecting Unemployment who is offered a suitable job, must take the job or lose their Unemployment Benefits. Were not going to turn our backs on our fellow americans. You know, so that is joe biden trying to balance against, willie, the critiques that youve heard from Restaurant Owners that ive heard from very democratic Restaurant Owners, im sure you have, too. From Small Business owners. From people and employers in the Hospitality Business that there are a lot of restaurants that arent able to open up, the New York Times was reporting arent arent able to open up part of the restaurants. I know other people in the Hospitality Business that are shut down again for the summer because they cant find employees and you ask why and they really do, so many of them say the exact thing. And mika and i have been hearing it now for sometime and that is that people dont return their calls. They have 1,400, they have enhanced checks for Unemployment Benefits and right now them going back to business in the middle of covid, when they have kids just doesnt seem to make a lot of sense. Yeah, i mean, that is a just a fact. It is not the entire reason that jobs number was so terrible on friday but it is a fact that there is a shortage in labor supply. Elizabeth bumiller, if you read about it, Restaurant Owners say that a job that would bring in a hundred applications, a couple trickle in. Some people have moved on to different careers or changed their lives during the pandemic but many people are not accepted a job in this moment that will pay them less than their currently getting from the federal government. Right. There is also just i think biden made the point this is not just about the enhanced Unemployment Checks that people are getting and the stimulus. It is also about fear of just going back to back into the economy, going back into crowded restaurants. And the jobs numbers have very interesting. There was an uptick in the number of restaurant jobs. There was a loss of jobs in Grocery Stores and so the questions are people not shopping for groceries as much any more, are they going to restaurants. The white house was very blindsided by those numbers. They were throwing out Talking Points and rewriting them very quickly last friday because it is not at all what they expected. And there is a sense that there was a lot the numbers were real fluke, they could be adjusted next month and it could be very different story. But for now, of course, the republicans have a field day and this is because of the Unemployment Checks are too generous and people dont want to return to work but i do think it is more complicated than that. Coming up, a story weve covered at length here on morning joe. The surge in abuse aimed at asianamericans since the start of the pandemic. The power of allyship next on morning joe. Ip next on morning joe. Some days, you just dont have it. Not my uncle, though. Hes taking trulicity for his type 2 diabetes and now, hes really on his game. Onceweekly trulicity lowers your a1c by helping your body release the insulin its already making. Most people reached an a1c under 7 . 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Well keep you ready for whats next. Get started with a powerful internet and voice solution for just 64. 90 a month. And ask how to add comcast business securityedge. Call today. Overnight at least two dozen people are reported dead in gaza as deadly strikes and clashes spread across israel and the palestinian territories. More than 300 rockets were launched from gaza causing injuries in israeli neighborhoods, the rocket attacks were followed by retaliatory air strikes from israel. Morning air raid sirens sounded every few minutes in town wheres many had passed the nights in bomb shelters. Tensions have reached a boiling point during the muslim holy month of ramadan. The Palestinian Military Group hamas pledged to continue rocket launches in retaliation for recent Israeli Police incursions into jerusalems mosque, considering islams third holiest site and frequent flash point in the conflict. The fighting erupts after days of clashes in jerusalem where tensions have been rising over the possible evictions of several arab families. Daily protests have continued as Israels High Court prepares to rule on decades long property disputes, during a photo op yesterday, tony blinken called on both sides to deescalate the conflict. In the latest tense encounter between the u. S. And iran, a coast guard ship fired more than a dozen of warning shots as a group of fast boats armed with machine guns sped toward a u. S. Navy vessel yesterday in the strait of hormuz. The pentagon called them unsafe and unprofessional. This marks the third encounter twin u. S. And iran in the past five weeks. And comes amid talks if vienna over the u. S. Reentering the 2015 nuclear deal. Let me state for your longterm health, if youre iran, do not do that. Thats for your health. Back now to the pandemic. As more and more americans get vaccinated and cities and states continue to lift restrictions, medical professionals have their eyes on the next crisis. A Mental Health one. Joining us now we have child and as lessent psychiatrist dr. Blaise aguirre from Harvard Medical School and medical director at the three east unit at mcclain hospital. Along with dr. Gillian gallen, from know your value and a psychologist at mcclain hospital and an instructor in psychology at harvard. They both specialize in dialect behavior therapy, dbt. A focused therapy that teaches people the skills to manage strong emotions, volatile relationships and stressful situations and they are coauthors of the new book entitled dbt for dummies. And this is really breakthrough, this book. Because dbt, while it may have been focused for specific disorders, what medical professionals are discovered is that it applies to many people. In fact it could be mainstreamed in schools and really teach children and young adults and adults emotion regulation. Well, children as well as politicians In Washington, d. C. Any relationship that youre in, you read through this book and you see it really it is great for relationships. You talk about mindfulness, something, that mika, youve been talking about for sometime and this is a wonderful, wonderful and important introduction to a general audience that may not know about dbt. So blaise, start with you and tell our viewers what is exactly dbt and who would dbt help . Yeah, so dbt was originally a type of therapy that was used to treat highly suicidal people. So people who are really struggling with not wanting to live. And many people didnt want to deal many therapists didnt want to work with suicidal people. And so this approach, we found that many suicidal people had great difficulty in controlling their emotions. And you look at washington, to your point and many politicians seem to have difficulty controlling their emotions as well. So what happened was that dbt said that rather than people cant wont control their emotions, that they cant control their emotions. So rather than put them on a couch and simply talk to them, were going to teach them how to control their emotions and teach them how to tolerate difficult moments of distress and were going to improve their relationships so they could be more effective through the media of mindfulness and it was developed by dr. Marsha minahan, i think mika talked about her on friday on the university of washington and really helped people. And so dialectics, this is the d in dialectics, when there is a fight between two people most of us insist that im right and that you are wrong. But dialectic teaches that there is wisdom in each persons position and how to look for that wisdom. Well and weve talked about it on the show actually, gilleya, that In Washington there is an either or debate, in culture there is an either or debate and it is the easiest example for our viewers to grasp, the 1776 debate versus the 1619 debate. Dialectical thinking said you could hold both beliefs in your mind, both both could be true at the same time and one could actually complement the other if you use dbt. Dbt started as an approach to helping people who were suicidal because the one approach was counselors say oh, everything is going to be okay, youre going to be better. They knew that wasnt the truth. And then the other side was, okay, thicks going to be terrible and stuck with us for talk about the balancing of those two failed approaches and how dbt came out of it. Yeah, so it is really interesting, lynnahan was very passionate about treating women who were suicidal and not as blaise talked about not really treatable. And the idea with dialectics is we work on the dialectic in change, change how you think and change what you do and then you change hour yu feel and that just didnt work for a lot of people. That didnt work. That felt like you dont understand the pain that im experiencing, just saying that its a simple solution. So really what marsha came up with was well just balance accepting where people are and then moving them towards change by teaming them skills, right. So were accepting how difficult they are, whether again their struggling now with suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, just general difficults in regulating emotions that impact how they are in relationships and we say were going to teach you a set of skills. Well teach you mindfulness skills so you could be present, well teach you distressed tolerant skills so you could tolerate the moments of distress and move through them in a way that you could be effective, were going to teach you emotion regulation skills, what do you do to increase and decrease the intensity of your emotions and then teach interpersonal effective skills. If you struggle with regulated emotions and then that makes it difficult to hold perspectives and navigate disagreements and build the important relationships in your life. So some celebrities who have used dbt, selena gomez, lady gaga who we had a discussion with about her here on msnbc and brandon marshall. Blaise, i know the conditions it is used for, post traumatic stress, substance abuse, Binge Eating Disorder how dbt could treat certain disorders and really and what you teach in this book is that dbt could help anything who is struggling in their relationships. And it starts by understanding the way that the mind works and how the mind often doesnt work so well when its in a highly emotional state. And that applies to relationships that are causing you stress because your in emotion mind. Mostly in those difficult situations. You could explain how it works . Sure. I think it is a fundamental principle of the brain that it cannot think until it is regulated. So if your house is on fire, having a discourse on socrates isnt going to work because youre so disregulated. So you have to regulate before you reflect. And we see a kid that is upset and we tell them to calm down. And it is not like the kid said that is best idea ever, i should actually calm down. Because dbt presupposed that a person doesnt have the skillset to be able to calm down or if they are disregulated in that moment they dont know how to calm down or use their skills. But none of us could think when were upset. None of a single person. And so it is sort of a teaching of the ability to regulate so that then you could use a lot of other strategies. But if you havent learned that as a child, it is going to be much more difficult to learn as an adult. It is like a language. If you learn a language as a child, your much more likely to be able to use it later on. But we often wait too late and then we sort of blame people for not being able to regulate their emotions. You know, gillian, another skillset that could be used In Washington but one that is so important to dbt is radical acceptance. Talk about why letting go of judgments of other people in your family, with relationships, maybe it is at the workplace or maybe it is in congress for a lot of people watching right now but why is it so radical acceptance, why is that so important to your own Mental Health . Yeah, so it is a great question. I love talking about judgment. So ill sort of tackle the judgment one first. So this idea of judgments, we use judgments all of the time. Right. There is a shorthand. It is taking a larger concept and pairing it down into one word, right. Something is good. Something is bad. Spg is pretty. Something is ugly. Something should or shouldnt be how it is right now. So it is taking a large concept and pairing it down. Now generally positive judgments, they dont cause us too many problems. But nature they leave out information. If you ask how my weekend was and i say it was good you know the general gist of my weekend but you have no idea what i did. So what i did, which might be good to me, you might have no idea about. So positive judgments dont tend to cause us too many difficulties. Negative judgments are a different story. So when we judge ourselves, or our feelings negatively, like we might say i shouldnt be that upset, im being dramatic or you should get over this or your being dramatic, we tend to feel worse, right. So what it does is it tends to perpetuate that very feeling of upset or anger or sadness or whatever that feeling is within ourselves. And when they about what blase just talked about, when we enhance those problematic or really painful difficult feelings, we make it hard to think. So we tend to be then less effective in both thinking about what we can do to help ourselves, or maybe being able to step back and think about either what do i need or what should i do to solve problem that is in front of me that is causing me some level of distress. Now when we use negative judgments toward other people, right, we also tend to suffer, right. Because what we end up doing is fuelling the very challenge, so were really angry at somebody, we tend to judge that judge them, theyre so short sights, how could they do this and we go on and on and perpetuate our own anger and then it makes us more disregulated, make it harder to think and makes it nearly impossible to take the dialectical position and think how did this person get to the position that theyre at and how do we move forward. So we end up just stuck and miserable. The new book is dbt for dummies, dr. Blaise aguirre and gillian galen. This will help so many people and well continue this conversation this week as their book residency is only beginning. Exactly. Very exciting. Coming up, tom cruise has won three Golden Globe Awards in his career and just mailed them all back to the Hollywood Foreign press association. Just mailed them back to the hollywood press association. A lot of people shocked. This, i guess, happened overnight. They were giving gifts for decades. 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Now as youre thinking about all the vaccines your teen might need make sure you ask your doctor the light. It comes from within. It drives you. And it guides you. To shine your brightest. As you charge ahead. Illuminating the way forward. A light maker. Recognizing that the impact you make comes from the energy you create. Introducing the allelectric lyriq. Lighting the way. Amid criticism and controversy surrounding the Hollywood Association for lack of diversity, nbc decided not to air the golden globe in 2022. The Network State reads we continue to believe the fhpa is committed to meaningful reform, however, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the hfpa needs time to do it right. As such nbc will not air the 2022 golden globes. Assuming the organization executes on its plan, we are hopeful we will be in a position to air the show in january of 2023. This comes after the hfpa announced potential reforms last week, which were seen throughout hollywood as a start to meaningful change but not enough. It prompted netflix, amazon and warnermedia to distance themselves from the group until substantial reforms are made. Msnbc and the nbc broadcast Network Share Nbc Universal as a parent company. Actor tom cruise returned his three golden globe statutes to the hfpa yesterday, adding his name to the growing list of hollywood stars taking a stand against the group. Now to this, as we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage month here in may, it is critical to note the spike in hate crimes against the Aapi Community over the past year, the group stop aapi hate tracks those crimes and reports physical assaults have gone up, 64 in one year. While Online Harassment is up 82 . Our next guest tells her story in a powerful piece for know your value. Ceo of the Fashion Company gravitas, alisa sun joins us from nbc news and investigator correspondent vicky nguyen. Lisa,ly start with you, and vicky, you jumped into tz story helping out. Lisa, i will start with you. You jumped into the story with the know your value events and worked so hard in the fashion industry to develop your brand and name. And then this happened and nobody seemed more surprised by it than you. Tell us about it. Thank you, mika, and thank you for your messages of support throughout this process. So i have a factory in the Garment District in new york city, and a lot of our seamstresses, our head designer, had all experienced verbal abuse or have had things happen to them. And i dont know if you think about it happening to yourself. In march, i was going to the post office in the evening as i usually do. My bosses fell and then i felt a splash of beer on my back neck and another person bumped me and told me to go back to china. It happened so quickly, and i was shocked frankly, and i just kept going to the post office. I picked up my packages and kept walking. Later that evening i decided i needed to report it. I actually called one of my friends, jane park, who is also a know your value contributor and said im pulling up my laptop and working on this nonstop at aapi. Org right now. It will give you a sense of control. I sent a message to vicky and said what do i do . Youve been covering this issue. She sent me the phone number for stuart lu who created the task force. She sent me with a detective to the precinct who helped me so i could file the report. But i didnt really see what happened, i have seen bits and pieces of it. And the inspector and his team helped me find the video footage. It was actually two men who attacked me, not one. But it had tin me almost two months to process all of this. Vicky, jump in. You helped out. Tell us your part of this story but also what youre hoping everybody can learn from sharing this as well, because there were some roadblocks along the way and even being believed, it was frustrating but shocking, and also we are seeing this across the board arrive in usns departments just like these. Yeah, mika, what a fullcircle moment this is. Out of something horrible that happened to lisa, im glad were having this moment to talk about it on morning joe. What lisa wont tell you, she went to yale and shes a ceo of a company and been fearously fighting on behalf of her garment workers who are majority Asian Americans or asian who have been working throughout this pandemic. She has this armor on behalf of all of her staff, about the to be in a position where someone is yelling to her to go back to china when shes been in this country, she is american. Shes a Small Business owner, first to get over the initial shock of that happening to you, but then going through the process of reporting it, it is traumatic and it can be very, very difficult. She had jane, who encouraged her to report it to stop aapi hate. But going to police, new research out of this Organization Called launch. Org, its leading Asian Americans to unite for change, they said Asian Americans are the least likely Minority Group behind black americans, behind latino americans, to want to go to the police to involve them in any way, shape or form. I found that to be sort of surprising but also not surprising, because this culturally for us, you dont stick your head out, you dont want to call attention to yourself, even when you are the victim of a crime. For lisa to go to the police and thankfully the nypd to actually have a hate crimes task force, was a great first step. We want to encourage people to know they have to report, that there are Law Enforcement agencies and people who care. But Law Enforcement also needs to know, make it easier on victims. Offer multiple languages, offer diverse officers, make sure those officers are trained to properly respond to hate crimes. Thats the message of this story is to get that voice but hold on to it tightly. I want to hang on, vicky, very much for coming on and for helping lisa and lisas son, ceo of gravitas, amazing designs, by the way. Im so sorry about what happened. I appreciate your coming up to share it with us. That does it for us this morning. The Stephanie Ruhle picks up the coverage right