Appreciative. If they dont treat me right, i dont call. The governor of washington and the governor of nebraska join me, next. Plus Congress Passes an historic bill to help workers. Every dollar we spend is an investment in the lives and livelihood of the American People. Will it be enough . Ill speak exclusively to House Speaker nancy pelosi, next. Hello, im jake tapper in washington where the state of our union is staying at home. Today marks exactly one month since the first coronavirus death in the United States. Thereof n there have now been more than 2,000 deaths in america, a Staggering Number that has doubled in the last two days. More than six times as many deaths now as last week. President trump has backed off a plan to quarantine the new york region. Instead the cdc is issuing a travel advisory recommending that people in new york, new jersey, and connecticut refrain from travel for 14 days starting immediately. Health experts have submitted recommendations to the White House Task force on coronavirus that seek to reopen some schools and businesses in cities where infection rates are low, according to a Senior Health official. It would be an effort to strike a balance as americans across the country are losing their livelihoods, an economic catastrophe in its own right that congress is attempting to address by passing the biggest stimulus plan ever. Well talk to a lead member of the president s Coronavirus Task force in a moment. First, House Speaker nancy pelosi, thank you so much for joining us, i hope youre well and safe. I know your home district of San Francisco has been particularly hard hit. President trump is considering relaxing federal guidelines for coronavirus for some of the less affected parts of the country. Do you think he should . First let me say how sad it is that even since the president s signing of the bill, the number of deaths reported has doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 in our country. This is such a very, very sad time for us. So we should be taking every e precaution. The president , his denial at the beginning, was deadly. His delaying of getting equipment to where it his continued delay in getting equipment to where its needed is deadly. Now the best thing to do would be to prevent more loss of life rather than open things up, because we just dont know. We have to have testing, testing, testing. Thats what we said from the start, before we can evaluate what the nature of it is in some of these other regions as well. I dont know what the purpose of that is. I dont know what the scientists are saying to him. I dont know what the scientists said to him, when did this president know about this, and what did he know . What did he know and when did he know it . Thats for an afteraction review. But as the president fiddles, people are dying. We just have to take every precaution. Speaker pelosi, when you say the president s denial was deadly, he obviously downplayed the risks of coronavirus for several weeks and it wasnt until i think about two weeks ago that he started acknowledging the gravity of the crisis. Are you saying his downplaying ultimately cost american lives . Yes, i am. Im saying that. Because when he made the other day, when he was signing the bill, he said, just think, 20 days ago everything was great. No, everything wasnt great. We had nearly 500 cases and 17 deaths already. And in that 20 days, because we werent prepared, we now have 2,000 deaths and 100,000 cases. So again, we really want to work in a unifying way to get the job done here. But we cannot continue to allow him to continue to make these y underestimates of what is actually happening here. This is such a tragedy, and we dont even know the magnitude of it because we do not have the adequate testing. Our first bill was about testing, testing, testing. The second bill was about masks, masks, masks. Of course both of them were about addressing the emergency. We still dont have adequate testing. And we still dont have the personal protective equipment. And i thank you all for calling attention to the needs of our Health Care Workers and other First Responders who are risking their own lives to save lives. So again, lets review later what we should have done when. Now lets stop doing the same thing, which is to deny and to delay, and instead to get what we need for the states so they can meet the needs of the hospitals, to our Health Care Workers, who are our heroes, our First Responders and the rest so that they have what they need, so, again, they dont risk their lives while trying to save other lives. Speaker pelosi, obviously Congress Just passed and the president just signed a 2 trillion relief plan. Take a listen to what Governor Cuomo of new york had to say about that stimulus bill. I was shocked that they were so irresponsible in addressing the state and the city need. I mean, i never believed that they would just pass a piece of legislation that didnt address it. They just did not address the revenue shortfall. Whats your response to Governor Cuomo . We have to do more. I think this bill was just a down payment. We had in the house bill 200 billion. The final bill was 150. Neither amount was enough, because again, every single day the need grows. Ive talked to the chairman of the fed, the Federal Reserve bank, mr. Powell, chairman powell, and asked him to do much more because they have the authority to do so, even more authority, since we passed this bill. But we have to pass another bill that goes to meeting the need more substantially than we have. We have other issues that we have to deal with in the bill in terms of personal protective equipment and osha rules that protect workers. We have to do more on family and medical leave. We have to get peoples visits to the doctor covered. We have to do more in terms of the assault on pensions that was not addressed, but senator mcconnell said we would do it in the next bill. We have to address what happened to the district of columbia, which was really cruel, that they called it a territory and hence they got several hundred Million Dollars less in funding. The list goes on about what we have to do. Again, the states, the municipalities, hospitals, and other health serving institutions, need more resources. Its so selfevident. And i understand the governors anger, my own governor, we have big needs in the state of california. Why should the states and why should these hospitals be having questions about whether theyre going to meet the needs, life and death needs . On the subject of ventilators, for example, this is a life and death piece of equipment. This isnt about, lets breathe easier with a ventilator. This is about, lets breathe, period. Yet the president has been casual about the production act that would have called upon industries a while ago to be making this equipment. So again, its no use my granddaughter even said to me, why keep talking about it, if only he had done this, if only he had done that. Lets put that aside for now and say what we need to do now going forward. It really is a sign, here we are on a sunday morning, last sunday we were gathered in leader mcconnells office, Chuck Schumer and i, leaderer mccarth mnuchin. I said to them, i want to begin the meeting with a prayer. I quoted pope francis world prayer in the circumstance, he said, i pray we enlighten those who are responsible for the common good, that they will take responsibility for those in their care. And secretary mnuchin said, since you quoted pope francis, ill quote the markets. And so that has taken us to another area of values debate about this. I want to ask you, because when President Trump signed the bill, he brushed aside a key oversight provision with a signing statement. The provision would have an independent Inspector General reporting to congress about how the treasury loans out money to businesses. Congresswoman alexandria ocasiocortez responded by saying, quote, just like that, the congressional oversight provisions for the half trillion dollar wall street slush fund which were already too weak were tossed away the day the bill was signed, this is a frightening amount of public money to have given a corrupt administration with zero accountability. You and other democrats, especially Chuck Schumer, insisted on this Inspector General as a check on the administration and President Trump blithely said they werent going to abide by it. Whats your response . Its ridiculous. Two things, well, three. This is about americas families, how they deal with the Health Challenge that they have, their lives and livelihood. And parts of the bill was about making sure that we put workers first. The bill that the republicans putting forth was a gift to Corporate America that would trickle down to the workers. We did jujitsu on it, we turned it around into a bill that put workers and families first, and by doing that, to have, again, conditions placed on any money that would go to Corporate America. Recognizing that Certain Industries were under threat and that we needed, in order to protect the jobs, to put resources there conditioned on workers being paid, buybacks not being allowed, bonuses, ceo pay, the rest of that. The president wants to dismiss that, and in doing so, that is one of the things that the American People were so upset about, that money is going to these big firms and the rest without any conditions. He is really first of all, lets not even go into whether hes allowed to do it. But we dont accept that. We dont accept that. Well have our oversight in the congress. We have a panel that will establish and i see he said we shouldnt be able to appoint the staff to our own panel. I mean, really. But the fact is, its just the same business as usual for the president. Lets turn it back in favor of Corporate America at the expense of americas workers without any conditions that makes things better for americas working families. We will not let that happen. And as we go into another bill, for more money for state and local hospitals and other priorities that i mentioned earlier, we will continue to do so in a way that has conditions on any money that goes to if theres any other further money that would go to the business community. But lets not forget whats in there. Imagine, we had to fight republicans to save im sorry for interrupting, Speaker Pelosi, the president did not invite you or any of the democratic leadership or any democrats to the signing ceremony, and its been reported that you and he have not spoken in five months. Have you reached out to him to try to talk to him directly . Because obviously at a time like this, its important that all of our leaders are communicating as best as possible. Im the speaker of the house. Legislation is my responsibility. Responsibility in passing policy. It has not required any conversations with the nature of the policy and the passing of the legislation. Dont forget, i was there for the state of the Union Address and greeted the president at that time. Thats not whats important. Whats important is whats important to americas working families. Their health, their lives, their livelihood. And this is, again, to quote the pope, are or going to quote the markets in terms of where our vaults should be. It all should be balanced. And im hopeful, i believe the American People have hearts full of love. I believe that they are hopeful. And thats why theyre giving the president a chance. And again, i hope that those who advise him, the scientists who advise him, will get him on the right track so that he is making decisions that are in favor of ending this deadly pandemic rather than test whether he can quarantine a state or not as he had to reverse himself again yesterday. Dont fiddle while people die, mr. President. House speaker nancy pelosi, we wish you the best. Happy birthday, incidentally, we hope youre staying safe and healthy. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, jake. I want to go to dr. Anthony fauci, director of the National Institute of allergy and infectious diseases, a vital part of President Trumps Coronavirus Task force, of course. Dr. Fauci, its always good to see you. I want to ask you about the latest development, the cdc now urging, quote, residents of new york, new jersey, connecticut, to refrain from nonessential Domestic Travel for 14 days effective immediately. This came after President Trump considered an enforceable quarantine, as he put it, for those states. Why did the administration go with this travel advisory instead, and will this help stop the virus . I think it ultimately will help stop the virus, jake. We had very intensive discussions last night at the white house with the president. As you know, the original proposal was to consider seriously an enforceable quarantine. We believed, and he agreed, it would be better to do whats called a strong advisory. The reason for that is you dont want to get to the point that youre enforcing things that would create a bigger difficulty, morale and otherwise, when you could probably accomplish the same goal. One of the issues is that the infection rate in new york city and the new york city area is about 56 of all of the new infections in the country are coming from that area. Thats terrible suffering for the people of new york, which i feel myself personally as a new yorker. So what was trying to be done is to get people, unless theres necessary travel, so all nonessential travel, just hold off, because what you dont want is people traveling from that area to other areas of the country and inadvertently and innocently infecting other individuals. We felt the better way to do this would be an advisory as opposed to a very strict quarantine. And the president agreed, and thats why he made that determination last night, and i believe he tweeted it out last night. Dr. Fauci, the u. S. Now has the most officially reported coronavirus cases on the entire globe, of course that requires you to believe all the other countries reporting, including china. But lets for now assume that the u. S. Numbers are the largest. Do you believe that the u. S. At the epicenter of this outbreak . The semantics, jake, whatever you want to call it, its certainly the focus of whats going on right now. We have a very difficult problem here. We have areas of the country such as the new york area. Well be seeing places like detroit and other cities start to get into trouble, where the curve did what exactly i said on this show and other shows some time ago, it putters along a while and then it goes way up. When it does that, youre really in full mitigation, its very difficult to do containment. So we want to strongly do mitigation in those areas like new york city and the surrounding metropolitan area. At the same time that we dont neglect other areas of the country where it looks like there are just relatively few infections, because we have a window of opportunity there, as the Speaker Pelosi said, to get out there and test. If we do testing, identification, isolation, getting people out of circulation who are infected, and contact tracing, we might be able to prevent those areas from getting to that stage where we would have to do mitigation, which is much more difficult and much more frustrating than trying to contain. Dr. Birx said yesterday, as you know, that she doesnt think any city will be spared from this virus. How many cases do you think the u. S. Will reach . A million cases . 10 million cases . Or do we not even have any idea . You know, jake, to be honest with you, we dont have any firm idea. There are things called models. When someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. And the model is only as good or as accurate as your assumptions. Whenever the models come in, they give a worst Case Scenario and a best Case Scenario. Generally the reality is somewhere in the middle. Ive never seen a model of the decis diseases that ive dealt with where the worst case came out. They always overshoot. So when you use numbers like a million, million and a half, 2 million, that almost certainly is off the chart. Its not impossible, but very, very unlikely. I mean, looking at what were seeing now, you know, i would say between 100 and 200,000 cases. But i dont want to be held to that, because excuse me, deaths. Were going to have millions of cases. But i just dont think we really need to make a projection when its such a moving target that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people. What we do know, jake, is that weve got a serious problem in new york. We have a serious problem in new orleans. And were going to be developing Serious Problems in other areas. So people like to model it. Lets just look at the data of what we have and not worry about these worst case and best Case Scenarios. Let me ask you, so dr. Fauci, were about to hit the last day of the 15 days to flatten the curve. Everybody watching at home wants to know how long you think its going to last. What steps does the United States need to take right now in order to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and when might that be . Jake jake, what i want to see is a flattening down of the curve. People ask me, should we be pulling back on new york, obviously not. New york is doing this, new orlea