The General Election has begun. The race is set now. It will be a rematch and we like that rematch. Donald trump Running Unopposed against President Biden. Tonight, a Special Edition of all in. Rachel maddow and alex wagner join me on bidens chances against Candidate Trump as republicans try to erase the memory of his disastrous presidency. Are you better off today than you were four years ago . Then Steve Kornacki on who will decide this election. Jen psaki and Claire Mccaskill on what is at stake. Plus, a big announcement in arizona. I will leave the senate at the end of this year. Ruben gallego joined me for his First National tv interview since senator Kysten Sinema dropped out when the Special Edition of all in starts right now. Good evening from new york, and chris hayes. Thank you for tuning in for the Special Edition of all in on march 6, 2024. It looks to be the unofficial official first day of the president ial General Election. Rachel maddow and alex wagner will join me in a moment. First, lets start with a Brief Trip Down Memory Lane to four years ago exactly today, march 6, 2020. Do you remember where you were on that day . We remember because we do a television show. It was the last time we did and all in Live Audience show before the world shut down and truthfully, just between you and me, maybe shouldnt have gone that long. Slightly questionable call but we didnt really know. It was also the day went donald trump, do you remember this, when the president of the United States in the maga had took a tour of the centers for Disease Control headquarters to a sensibly comfort americans about the new Novel Coronavirus that was already spreading like wildfire and had come into the shores of the u. S. And did not go well. I dont know if you remember this. At the time, there was that cruise ship, the grand princess. It was stuck off the coast of california after an outbreak of the virus was discovered on board and it was an open question as to what should be done with the boat and its thousands of passengers and crew . Franklin, if it were up to me, it would be inclined to say leave everybody on the ship for a period of time and use the ship as your base. A lot of people would rather do it a different way. Now, when they do that, our numbers are going to go up. Remember that . The question was americans on a boat floating in the harbor should just stay there in order to keep our numbers like the Trump Campaign numbers, basically, low. That was the way this all worked from then on. There was no pretense of compassion for those affected. There were families on the boat sick, or concern for public health, broadly. It was about the numbers, the metric. He was concerned about how the rising case it would look for him politically, plain as day, if the passengers would be counted toward the tally of active covid19 cases. It is worth Remembering Trump already knew, this is key because we didnt know it at the time, now we do, he already knew him when he was saying that exactly how deadly and disruptive the virus would prove to be. He privately admitted as much to analyst bob woodward a four month earlier. It goes through error, bob. That is always tougher than the touch. The touch, you dont have to touch things. The air, you breathe the air, that is how it is passed. That is a very tricky one. That is a very delicate one. It is also more deadly than your, even your strenuous bloom. More deadly than your strenuous flu. That was a month before it came on our shores and what you want to say dozens of times that it was just like the flu. That deadly negligence, that callousness and deceitfulness displayed by trump was emblematic. He mishandled the entire pandemic, which was eight catastrophe. 1 Million People died. So, i thought of all that today when i heard the House Republican conference chair and trump toady Elise Stefanik ask this question. As Ronald Reagan famously asked us are you better off today than you were four years ago . The answer for Hard Working Americans across the country is a resounding no. Know it is a resounding yes and it will be more of a resounding yes each day we go forward in this year. It is a resounding yes because we are not currently entering the pandemic phase of covid19 with a negligent president was more interested in saving his poll numbers than saving lives. Of course, as of today, donald trump is effectively the republican nominee for president. For all intents and purposes, the General Election begins right now and toms entire Election Strategy depends on completely utterly retconning what happened four years ago, violating 2020 from public memory and he is helped in that strategy by the fact we all want to forget what a disaster 2020 was. It was a disaster. It was a disaster worse than the, wasnt in many ways by donald trump. That moment four years ago today would only be the beginning of the most bumbling, incompetent, chaotic mismanagement of a crisis since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression nearly a century ago. A year that was nothing but chaos and turmoil, illness and death, abject economic destruction, donald trump settled or treated as the country burned. That is why, again, we all lived through this. Lets go back to for a second. That is why joe biden won the 2020 election. The problem with the Biden Campaign is a democrat and biden harris would restore to leadership someone who thinks about what is the best of the country, someone who would restore legislative a compliment, who would restore the economy by investing in Working Americans and rebuilding things from the middle out. And, President Biden successfully managed the Vaccine Rollout and a return to public life. Our economy is stronger now than just about any expert protected it would be before covid19. That is thanks in large part to the massive Stimulus Spending on things like public and structure the white house ushered through congress, sometimes on a bipartisan basis, as biden promised during that campaign, sometimes on a partyline vote. Republicans cannot run against any of that. Instead, they are trying, a Campaign Slogan of Make America 2019 again. Just listen to tim scott Celebrating Trumps Win last night. President trumps spoke to the voters today across the country more republicans, democrats, and independents about to the future. We have to go back to that future, 2017 to 2020. It is not a three year term. Its not a three year term. Trump was president from 2017 to 2021. Not 2020. I promise you, i was there. This is the whole game appeared donald trump and republicans want you to chop an entire year off trumps term as if he just gets this political mulligan for the catastrophe that was the end of his presidency. They want you to ignore the mass unemployment, the disruptions to every aspect of your life, the Freezer Trucks packed full of bodies. He wanted to know the final month of 2020 when trump attempted the first coup in our countrys history, culminating in the deadly january 6th insurrection when he sixth a violent mob on the capitol. Trump is now running to finish the job he started on january 6th. If he is elected, he will pick right back up where he left off. Hes not going to govern like its 2019. He will govern like it is january 7th, 2021. With me tonight, my good friends, Rachel Maddow and alex wagner. It is great to have you here. I truly lost it when Elise Stefanik said that. I just thought are they really going to do this and are they confident enough that they can pull off the are you better . It seems like even if you dont blame trump, even if you are just going to do are you better, we are all better off. Even if donald trump had never been president , under joe biden right now, you got the best job market since the 1960s, unemployment below 4 , youve got the best economic recovery in the world. Youve got more people with Health Insurance than ever before in american history. Youve got Violent Crime at a 50 year low. If donald trump was still running as the former host of The Apprentice right now telling people that the biden years have been awful, havent they, is a weird sell to a country that is experiencing life under joe biden that has all been right economic metrics. I do think covid19 walloped everyone. But, i looked back and my coverage four years ago, when i saw that you flagged this. What i was talking about four years ago was Mick Mulvaney telling everybody that the liberal media has made up covid 19 to make trump look bad. We could do that again, sure. Put him back in there. I feel like you the hit on something that is not talked about enough, which is the way that we as a country have not dealt with the trauma of covid 19. It is a seismic event in american life. Who would want to go back to the fear and the death and disinfecting groceries. Classic trauma response. I made a photo album of that year because i was like im going to want to forget this and i need to remember that we were Wearing Masks outdoors. In that same time the Joe Biden Ran for president. We cant forget that. The lessons from that campaign are totally different lessons than the one seems to apply in this situation. I was on the Campaign Trail with joe biden. There were a lot of mediocre events and then there were none. Thats a good point. He is not a great campaigner. He has been a really effective resident. The dissonance between those two things has been compiled in your where he has to be a better campaigner and hes got to be something that is incredibly complicated, which is to get america to remember what life is like in the rearview. We are not good at that in this country. We are good at moving forward, not asking questions about the past, not reconciling the transgressions and faults and just go west young man. Mick mulvaneys campaign for all its faults, nikki haley cut montages of trump time in trumps presidency to remind people what it was like. I did see nikki haley do that. She is out as of today but that is something they can absolutely steal from her. She has tried to remind people about what the casket it was like, about what the chaos presidency was like. You could have reels of trump telling people to drink bleach and the cdc shaking their heads. It is staggering the mismanagement of one of the most seismically dramatic events in modern america. The other thing, so, im torn on this because im thinking about sort of i think we have extinguished 2020 from our memories and many ways because it was traumatic. The other thing i think is really important for the Biden Campaign is a vision of the future. To think like to go back to what you are saying about following him on the trail, i could tell you the 2020 platform. It was to get covid19 under control, it was to then begin bringing the economy out of the depths through investment in the middle class and through infrastructure and to rejoin paris and invest in clean energy and to restore our relationships. That is what they did. They said they were going to do it and they did it. I cant really tell you right now what the second term biden vision looks like it. I do think that is, when you talk about elections are about the future, americans are future oriented people, that strikes me, particularly going into the state of the union tomorrow, which is unveiling, i would be thinking about how that is. Makes the state of the union important. I do think that it is always in an Election Year the kickoff of the incumbent president s reelection campaign. Hearing the positive vision rather than the here was all the reasons you dont want the republicans back in the white house. Again, i think that is what we are going to get. So, we will see. It has to be said that it has been a remarkable few years of republican policy, particularly with the Supreme Court. Reproductive rights, what is the democratic agenda on Reproductive Rights, to stop the republicans from doing more of what theyve been doing. Can you articulate that in a positive way . Maybe. Change your verb tenses. Really, it is about trying to stop what the republicans have done and what they are continuing to do, what the republicans have done and what they are continuing to do on democracy and the rule of law. There is a lot of stuff in terms of this very unusual Republican Party led by donald trump that the Democratic Party now exists to stop. That is a bulwark. It is a bulwark to say we dont want to radically cashier who we are out as a country to become a strong man dictatorship. I was going to say i tend to agree, the republican mismanagement and leaning toward tyranny is so frequent, if you like the Biden Campaign distance to waft the fumes to the americans. I dont know why i am using a perfume metaphor. It is thinks. It is, and these are, we talk about bread and butter issues. Bodily autonomy is a Kitchen Table issue. One of the things in 2022 was there was this debate about the messaging and a bunch of people said you need to focus on inflation. It is all people care about and you are talking about democracy and dobbs. Joe biden did the expansion that was like his big capper. You could just, reams of commentators being like you are so out to lunch. Thats a little bit of a weird condescending thing that real people dont care about democracy. And, even one layer below that, workingclass people dont care about democracy. Like i dont think that is true. I think all kinds of people care about democracy, actually. That same debate is going to be service this year and im curious how you think about it. The inflation argument, the Economic Growth economic, the jobs argument, the wages argument, purchasing power, having Health Insurance, not being one Health Crisis away from bankruptcy, Student Loans, all that stuff, biden has a great story to tell on all of those things. A better story than he had in 2022. And it is a doublesided story because it is both what we are trying to do, what we have done, what we can brag about and look at what the republicans are doing. Why isnt there more Student Loan Forgiveness . Because the republicans have sued to stop it. All of those things have been against republican opposition. I do think we need to talk about what you are offering but you also need to talk about what is bad about the other guys. And, on every economic metric you can do that. I want, if you guys would stick around for one more block. Short. Rachel maddow, alex wagner, staying with me. 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