Morning Joe - Morning Joe 5/23/24

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Nikki Haley says she'll be 'voting for Trump'

If he decides that he's going to run, would that preclude any sort of run that you would possibly make yourself? I would not run if President Trump ran. I don't put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you're wearing heels. I'm Nikki Haley, and I'm running for president. Times change, and so has Trump. He's gotten more unstable and unhinged. Biden has been a catastrophe.

So I will be voting for Trump. So first she would not run against him. Then she did three months ago. Hold on. Hold on. I'm so shocked. I'm so shocked. We want to hear your list. Yeah, it's a list saying I'm checking it off. So she wouldn. We want to hear your list. Yeah, it's a list. I'm checking it off. So she wouldn't run against him. Then she did. Three months ago, he was too unhinged to get a driver's license. And now Nikki.

Yeah. Now Nikki Haley will vote for Donald Trump for president United States. I mean, Willie, this is what this is one of those. I'm shocked, shocked. She's done this over and over again. Right. Yeah. And I will say that. Let's just say right off the top, this happens in politics. I mean, you know, people say nasty things about other people when they're running against the president. And then and then they did they come together? I do think, though, everybody has to make a choice. And in twenty twenty four, you know, Nikki Haley could have

made the choice that a lot of conservative Republicans have made. I'm going to be talking to Charlie Sykes about that a little bit. And that is, you know what? Stay conservative and don't go along with the authoritarian. don't go along with the guy that wants to amass more power in the White House and more power in Washington, D.C. than any president in American history. So her choices is support an authoritarian and the guy who's promised he's going to be an authoritarian. And I could go down the list, but he's promising it every day. Vote for me, Donald Trump says, and I will be a menace to American democracy. And of course, Nikki Haley basically hinted at that and and also called him a bully, said he was unstable, said he was unhinged to unhinged to get a driver's license.

As Mika said, And now it's like, oh, Biden, he's a disaster. I love when they start talking about how Biden's a disaster and they really can't name anything. They go, oh, student loans. It's so horrible. And they compare student loans with people trying to overthrow American democracy, understanding how don't not understanding just how out of it and how stupid they feel. They don't call Joe Biden a socialist or a Marxist or a communist with a Dow over 40,000, with the economy stronger than it's ever been. And again, I'm not realizing just how stupid they sound. But, you know, everybody everybody's got to choose.

And she has chosen. And unlike a lot of good conservatives, she's chosen the authoritarian leader. So let her go with that. And and it's it's on her, not us. Yeah. And by the way, she could make the choice that so many of her own supporters have been making in these primaries by not voting for Donald Trump, not saying that I love Joe Biden, but saying I'm not willing to take the country down the road of Donald Trump again, which we're seeing in primary after primary. She's getting 15 percent, 20 percent on a campaign that she shut down a couple of months ago, a campaign that she ended by quoting Margaret Thatcher and saying, never just follow the crowd,

suggesting I'm not going to just fall in line with Donald Trump. I'm never going to fall in line with Donald Trump. And now here she is in a move that, as you say, Joe, seemed inevitable to most people. Remember, she called him unhinged several times. He used a birther attack on her. He went after her husband, who's deployed in the United States military overseas, asking where's the husband? Well, he was defending the country around the world. None of that seems to matter. You can go back to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. We've had this conversation a thousand times. It just doesn't matter. But even take out the personal stuff. And as you guys point out, we're not talking about is it Joe Biden or John

McCain? Is it Joe Biden or Mitt Romney? Is it Joe Biden or George Bush? We're talking about a guy who has promised to undermine the foundations of this country and has already attempted to do so in our last election. Yeah, I mean, she could have waited perhaps for a moment to come her way with all the different dynamics in this election. You never know. But she's chosen to go with Trump, along with Joe, Willie and me. We have the host of way too early White House spirit chief at Politico, Jonathan Lemire, the president of the National Action Network and host of MSNBC's Politics Nation, Reverend Al Sharpton, NBC News, national affairs analyst John Heilman. He's a partner and chief political columnist at Puck.

Former White House director of communications to President Obama, Jennifer Palmieri. She's co-host of the MSNBC podcast, How to Win 2024 with Claire McCaskill and MSNBC contributor and author of the book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, Charlie Sykes. So here we are. And here is more of what Nikki Haley said yesterday in her first public appearance since exiting the race back in March, followed by what she was saying about Trump during the primary. I put my priorities. On a president who's going to have the backs of our allies and hold our enemies to account. Who would secure the border, no more excuses. A president who would support capitalism and freedom. A president who understands we need less debt, not more debt.

Trump has not been perfect on these policies. I've made that clear many, many times. But Biden has been a catastrophe. So I will be voting for Trump. Having said that, I stand by what I said in my suspension speech. Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they're just going to be with him. And I genuinely hope he does that. You know, that is one of the most remarkably unmoored from facts description

on why you're voting for Donald Trump I've ever heard. I mean, it is mind boggling that somebody who actually claims to know anything about policy would say what she just said. Like I said, I'm not shocked that she's cynical. She's been cynical her entire political career. It doesn't shock me she went back to Trump.

But you're going to have to do a lot better than that, Nikki. I mean, hold our enemies to account? Hold our enemies to account, hold our enemies to account. You know, John Heilman, let us. Where do we begin when when we talk about how he lavishes praise on Vladimir Putin? Trump lavishes praise on President Xi, sends, quote, love letters to Kim Jong-un. He loves our enemies. He loves the tyrants that hate the United States of America to their very core. What is she talking about? She's so Joe Biden has hemmed in China, in the Pacific. We've seen it.

We've talked about it. It's a part of the historical record. He's leading the effort to push back Vladimir Putin, where Donald Trump says, basically, turn it over. I'm going to end this war in day one and call Putin brilliant for what he did. And yes, he said he has a love affair with Kim Jong-un, the most ruthless tyrant who wants to nuke the West Coast of the United States of America.

So hold our enemies to account. That is completely fact free garbage. And then you go to supporting capitalism. Let me say again, the Dow is over 40,000 points. If Rishi Sunak had the economy in Britain that we have here, he would be in much better shape on July the 4th when the next election is called. We have, and conservative economists will say this and columnists will say, we have the strongest economy in the world. There's not a close second. We are the envy of the world. And so somehow Donald Trump is gonna do better than that,

throwing up tariffs and protective borders that even the Wall Street Journal calls, you know, a nightmare. And then finally, the one that again, because I got the Congress because I was worried about the national debt. She says Joe Biden's been a disaster on the national debt. So she's going to support Donald Trump. Joe Biden's been a disaster on the national debt. So she's going to support Donald Trump. Donald Trump, in four years, raised America's national debt. More, just him, 45, than presidents 1 through 44 did over 240 years. I mean, think about this.

Think about just how wrong. We were supposed to play back to back clips. We were supposed to play those clips. And then what you said in the campaign, I said, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is how people spread disinformation and lies and get away with it, where you just let shit keep going. Sometimes you need to stop things and just explain how big her lies were there. She lied about the economy. She lied about debt. Just look, just look at the number. She lied about the economy. She lied about debt. Just look. Just look at the numbers.

She lied through her teeth about debt. And she lied about Donald Trump holding our enemies accountable when he actually praises our enemies and sends love letters to them and talks about how brilliant they are because they can hold down millions and millions of their countrymen and women. I'll let you go from there. I'm just seriously, I'm not shocked at the endorsement. I am shocked that she would sink so low so fast and just lie about the facts as badly as she did. Morning, Joe. How are you? It seems like I'm doing well. How are you doing? The Rudy coffee is flowing.

No, no. If you're not shocked by that, John, I know it's very funny. Ha ha ha. But if you're not shocked by her lying through her teeth that way, like she could have picked three or four other issues. She could have talked about Afghanistan. She could have talked about inflation. She could have talked about two or three, the cost of gasoline. But she picks these three things where she actually picks Donald Trump on policy, his weakest points, and then lied to the American people about it. So, yeah, yeah, I'm not laughing about that.

I'm not laughing either. I was just saying you were fired up. That was my only comment about the rooty coffee. I'm very happy and calm. Good. I just, look, I mean, to just say a couple of quick things. One, of course, there's a history in presidential primaries of tough primaries, opponents saying tough things about each other on both sides of the aisle. There's also also a little bit further over, there's garden variety, political cynicism, where people engage in politics. And we say to me, actually say some things that maybe would be hard to walk back if we lived, if we really held people

to their words. To Joe's point, this is a different category of thing here because it's, I mean, I, I was, as you guys know, I was out there, you know, and I listened to her as she got tougher and tougher on Trump in, from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina. I went to a bunch of those events and listened to her get closer and closer to the edge. And she wasn't making, uh, critiques of Trump on policy primarily. She was saying things like, I've been in the room with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, you know, and coming very close to saying, you know, that he's not fit,

kind of competent to serve. You made the point earlier, Mika, about the driver's license. He shouldn't get a driver's license. You know, he should be right up to the edge of making the kind of critiques that never Trump, that progressive Democrats and never Trump Republicans have made for.

Those are existential arguments. Those are about not about any policy. They're about this man is not fit to serve. This man is a threat to democracy. All of that. She's right in that zone. And so then to retreat to policy is so craven and cynical. And to Joe's point, I think what we have learned about her, the most cynical, the most negative, critical people about Nikki Haley have always said

she is ambition incarnate. She cannot believe a word out of her mouth. She will say whatever and she will change her mind from Monday to Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. There were people who would say, you know, you're being misogynist about that. You don't hold men to those standards. People said those that, you know, you wanted to do. I think some of us bend over backwards in this in this winter period to say maybe she has finally come to Jesus here and she's not going to go back. She's going to try this. She's going to stake her claim and say when Trump, the theory that Trump loses this fall, that she can say, I was right all along. I want to say here that, A, we should

never believe a word she says about anything ever again. And B, she must not be allowed by Republican voters who continue to go to the polls. She still is getting 20 percent of the vote. Right. But this month now, there's still 20 percent of Republicans in these primaries are still voting for. They must not let her in November. Those are people choosing against Trump. Yes. Interesting. But just let me just say with that, what they can't let her do. Yeah. Is if Trump loses in November, stand up and say, oh, I told you so. She forfeits the right to say, I told you so. Donald Trump was the I was always against Donald Trump because she's now back on the Trump train. And there's got to be some accountability for that for her politically going forward. Really? Yeah. I mean, as John says, that's exactly the case she was making at the end

of the primary season in places like New Hampshire. We all saw it with our own eyes where she said, don't come crying to me when Donald Trump loses in November. I'm telling you right now, I beat Joe Biden. He doesn't. That was the core of her argument at the end of the primary. And Jen Palmieri, the Biden campaign weighed in yesterday after Nikki Haley said she'd be voting for Donald Trump, writing, quote, Nothing has changed for the millions of Republican voters who continue to cast their ballots against Trump in the primaries and care deeply about the future of our democracy. The Biden team also shared a video montage on social media of Haley primary voters who say they would choose Biden over Trump in November. This is a section of voters, Jen, that the Biden campaign has been courting, continues to court those 20 percent that John was talking about in the primaries in places like Pennsylvania and Indiana and Nebraska.

And for his part, Donald Trump said during the campaign that he didn't want Nikki Haley voters to vote for him, that they'd be banished from the MAGA camp for the sin of supporting Nikki Haley in the primaries. Yeah, that there's there's there's forever banned T-shirts that Nikki Haley gave to her, gave gave to her donors. And this is going to be a big priority for the Biden campaign. You know, there's the group Republicans against Trump, the Sarah Longwell group. And that universe of voters is bigger than it's ever been. You know, there was there was a universe of voters, Republicans against Trump and 16 and 20. And it's bigger in 24 in terms of who Biden has open to him that he can reach out to to try to win over their support. You know, you're not going to get all 20 percent of them. But even if you get a few percent of that 20 percent, that is good.

You know, we're talking a tight election. That can be the margin of victory. And the thing that, you know, just watching when I when I heard her when I heard the Haley video, I thought it was from the campaign. You know, I thought it was from the primary because she was talking about someone who would stand with our allies. And as Joe said, talking about debt, she can't even be intellectually consistent in the moment that she's saying she's going to vote for Trump. And it just, you know, it contributes so much to cynicism. And it lifts up Trump's message that, like, see, none of this matters. It's all just a game.

And, you know, like my new friend, Sarah Matthews, former Trump staffer, Alyssa Farrah Griffin, both women who oppose Trump now. And it's a sad, you know, you see them on Twitter and they're saying, like, see, this is what politicians do. It's not what all politicians do. Right. It's what it's what Nikki Haley is doing. It's what Republicans who prop up Trump do. And in the end, it does kind of help him just say, like, see, none of these people are on the level. None of these people are serious. Yeah. We're going to take a look, Jonathan Lemire, at her during the 2016 campaign, just how she framed. This is 2020, actually, how she.

Sorry, Alex, what are we showing? Oh, OK. Here's Nikki Haley in 2023. Times change, and so has Trump. He's gotten more unstable and unhinged. If you mock the service of a combat veteran, you don't deserve a driver's license, let alone being president of the United States. We've seen him get confused. He was confused about me having something to do with keeping security away from the Capitol. He was confused when he said that Biden was going to run us into World War II. He's not qualified to be the president of the United States. It's not normal to insult our

military heroes and veterans. He was thin skinned and easily distracted. It's not normal to spend $50 million in campaign contributions on personal court cases. There is no way that the American people are going to vote for a convicted criminal. It's not normal to threaten people who back your opponent. He went and was trying to buddy up with Putin. Every time he was in the same room with him, he got weak in the knees. And it's not normal to call on Russia to invade NATO countries. Donald Trump has done all of that and more in just the past month.

Made so much sense. Jonathan LeMire, what do you think is behind this decision? Is she running to be VP? Could that be already being cooked up? And what's the opportunity for the Biden campaign? Well, just about everything she said there, we don't need to fact check. I mean, she was she was right. And the timing of this is puzzling. No one made her endorse Donald Trump yesterday. No one made her say she would vote for him. There has been a little bit of speculation in some media reports that she could be a VP pick or back to the Trump cabinet, although Trump himself publicly said last week that she was not

in the running to be his vice president. But we can't believe anything he says. But we can't believe anything he says either. So that was hard to say. But I should note, in that same speech yesterday, she delivered a full-throated defense of Ukraine, saying the United States needs to give Ukraine whatever it takes, give them every weapon they need in order to defeat Vladimir Putin in Russia. And then in her very next breath, said, I'm going to vote for Donald Trump, who, of course, we know will not do that. He's rooting for Russia. Siding up with Putin time and time again. So Charlie Sykes, just rank hypocrisy at the highest level yesterday and deeply disappointing to many Republicans who thought Haley would

hold strong. But my question to you is how much you think this matters? Yes, there are people who are coming out there in every primary still voting for her. Are they going to take cues from her and say, OK, now I'm going to vote for Trump? Or are they simply like, well, you know what? I really wasn't for Nikki Haley. I was simply against Donald Trump. And I'm going to stay that way. Yeah, I don't think it's going to have that much of an effect. I mean, you know, she's saying that she hopes that Donald Trump reaches out to her voters, but Donald Trump did nothing for her. So Nikki Haley, in many ways, this is peak Nikki Haley. She turns out to be a very, very cheap date for Donald Trump. But this is a choice that she made. It's a very different choice than Liz Cheney made, Adam Kinzinger made, Chris Christie made. It's a different choice than Mike Pence made. And I don't know that it actually makes that much of a

difference. But but it's so revealing about, first of all, you know, front and center about her character. I wrote a piece called The Unbearable Lightness of Nikki. So there's nothing surprising about her getting back on the Trump train. She's gone on and off. She's gone on and off. But, you know, to Joe's point, how do you make a full-throated defense of Ukraine and then turn around and endorse someone who has made it clear that he will pull out of NATO, that he will abandon Ukraine, who actually invited Vladimir Putin to invade Europe. It makes no sense except in the context of Nikki Haley's unbridled ambition. And I just, just one footnote here, that if you look at the screen of her endorsement, she's now affiliated with the Hudson Institute, which is one of the, you know,

conservative think tanks out there. The moment she signed up for that, I think it was inevitable she was going to endorse Donald Trump because this is what the Republican donor class demands. There is no way that the Hudson Institute would embrace her unless she is going to basically bow the knee. But I don't know that this changes the dynamics of the race at all. And frankly, I don't know that it positions her particularly well. She's not going to be the vice president. I think that's absurd. And I don't know that the MAGA world will ever welcome her back in because she is, in their mind, she was disloyal and she is a neocon.

So, you know, her cynicism has led her to a position where I think she's going to find herself very lonely very soon. Well, she's put herself in no man's land where she is politically, because she's not those people that are voting for her are voting against Donald Trump, not for her. They're not going to. Oh, Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. Sure. I mean, when you're voting against Donald Trump, like months after he has no body running against him, I'm going to vote for him in the general election. I just, Rev, I just want to go back and look at these words. She said, let's see, I'm comparing this. We need to vote for somebody who will hold our enemies to account, she says, of Donald Trump. In the campaign, she said Donald Trump buddied up to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump calls on Vladimir Putin to invade NATO countries. Her words, just like she called him on to one inch to have a driver's license, said no one should ever be president who mocked the service of combat veterans, which Donald Trump has done and did during this campaign.

And Nikki Haley said that means he's unqualified, talked about how confused he was all the time, how thin skinned he was when and confused when he was talking to other world leaders not qualified to have a driver's license, so on and so on. It's just like she she is so Trumpy and she thinks she can lie to the American people about Donald Trump's record on the debt. She thinks she can lie to the American people about Donald Trump and how he treats our allies when she ran against how he treats our allies.

But just at the end of the day, I agree. I don't think it has any effect. What do you think? I definitely think it has no effect. In fact, it has negative effect on Nikki Haley's whatever she intends to do in the future. The people in double digits, some over 20 percent that voted for Nikki Haley even after she withdrew from the race showed there are a body of Republicans that want to get out of this Donald Trump cult. And she could have been a leader, if not the major leader in that, because sooner or later,

people are going to leave this cult in the Republican Party and redeem what conservative America is about. She just took herself out of the running, put herself in the list of long, cynical political operatives that will do whatever it takes and goes with whatever way the wind blows. She's only cheapened herself. She won't be embraced by Trump or the or the MAGA crowd. And she has now eliminated herself from any serious minded conservative Republicans that wants to redeem the party sooner or later and get past this Trump era. So I think that she only announced that she was not someone that could rise to the occasion of standing up for something. Well, you know, what's so interesting is she had set herself up perfectly politically for running four years from now and could have very easily said, I warned you. I told you.

And you voted for him anyway, and he lost again for the eighth year in a row. He lost in 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. Let's try something else different in 28. I told you he would do this. I won't lose. She could have done all of that. But she just had that going, couldn't be politically disciplined enough to not immediately see just a short term gain. And Charlie Sykes, instead of doing what Ronald Reagan did in 1976, and that is run against Gerald Ford and set himself up as the

alternative four years later after Ford lost. Now, again, she's in in this sort of no man's land, no woman's land, no politician's land where, you know, the MAGA people are never going to support her. And the people that were voting for her at the end will say, well, there goes Nikki again. Yep. Nikki Haley is no Ronald Reagan, is she? She was never going to do that. But also, I think this is her calculation that there is no future in the Republican Party for someone that does not kiss the ring with Donald Trump.

I think that she's making the calculation that Trump is in many ways forever, that even after 2024, if she doesn't get on board, that she will be considered disloyal. But then again, this is all about her personal ambition. It's not about the country. And I think this is why it's important to highlight this this contrast between what she says and knows about Donald Trump and the and the threat that he poses to our allies, to the country, to the constitutional order. And yet her willingness to say, yes, but my personal ambition trumps all of that. That's more important to me.

I am going to put my ambition ahead of country. I'm going to put party ahead of country. And it's just the it. But again, it feels so peak Nikki Haley, because this is what she has done over and over and over again. Chris, remember when Chris Christie dropped out and he was caught on that open mic saying she's not up for it, she's going to get crushed. Well, he was certainly right that she wasn't up for that, that Nikki Haley was never the one that we were waiting for, who was going to take the principled stand against Donald Trump, which makes yesterday's announcement absolutely not surprising at all. And we're probably done talking about Nikki Haley for a very, very long time, aren't we?

Because in what way is she going to be relevant ever again? And yet she did this because she wants to be relevant, right? She wants to be at the table. Maybe she wants to be VP. There's no chance that Donald Trump will ever name her VP. Zero chance. Just look at the reaction of MAGA world to her. She is still excommunicated from that. So to Joe's point, she's very much in a no man's land for a while. Charlie Sykes, thank you so much for being on this morning. We've got a lot more to cover this morning. Still ahead on Morning Joe, Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally today in one of the bluest counties in America. We'll talk to the congressman who represents that area. But first, new polling shows a majority of Americans have a false perception

of the U.S. economy. Steve Ratner standing by with more of that reality check. You're watching Morning Joe. We're back in 90 seconds. Guys, get this. Biden canceled another $7.7 billion in student loans. Biden's getting on the good side of young voters. He's canceling student debt. he's loosening marijuana laws, and then he's going to ruin it all by banning TikTok.

I'm just saying. Some more news from Washington today. The RNC headquarters was placed on lockdown after two vials of blood were delivered to the building. When he heard Rudy Giuliani, he was like, oh, good, my lunch is here. Jimmy Fallon last night. So despite some strong economic numbers, new polling finds most Americans believe the country is in a recession.

It is not. In the latest Harris poll conducted for The Guardian, 56 percent of adults expressed the belief that we are in a recession. That includes 67 percent of Republicans, 49 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of independents. And although inflation has fallen sharply over the past year, 72 percent of adults still think that is increasing. Joining us now, former Treasury official, Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Ratner to help us separate perception from the facts of this economy. Steve, good morning. So we can start with that idea of the United States being in a recession right now, which it plainly is not. We can talk about why so many Americans believe that. But

let's talk first in your chart about where we really are. Yeah, well, it's really quite an excuse me, an extraordinary poll. We've seen polls before that show Americans having a more negative view on the economy. I've never seen one quite like this. These are the numbers you mentioned in your lead-in that roughly more than half of Americans think we're in a recession. It is divided somewhat by party. More Republicans, 67 percent, feel it than Democrats. But even Democrats, 49 percent, feel it. We've seen this kind of divergence before.

And interestingly enough, it flips around with every election, not surprisingly. But here's the reality. The reality is the economy has basically been growing since covid, except for a very small downturn here. Under Joe Biden, it's grown by two point eight percent a year, which is actually slightly faster than it was growing under Trump even before COVID hit. And so you can see every quarter we've had reasonably strong economic growth. So why people feel this is really quite a mystery. So, Steve, what about, I mean, this other sort of low unemployment, a surging stock market, and yet dot, dot, dot. How do you explain what's going on with the economy? Yeah, you get the same kind of results when you look at those those kinds of things. 50 percent of Americans think unemployment is at a 50 year high. 50 percent think it's at a 50 year high.

Unemployment is actually at a 50 year low. It's really amazing. Unemployment is below 4 percent. It's been below 4 percent for months and months now. And it's just extraordinary that people think we're at a 50-year high. You can see some of the highs over here. Another issue is stocks. Half of Americans think stocks are down this year. Stocks are actually up 11% this year. They're up 45% since Joe Biden took office. Complete disconnect in people's minds between perception and reality of the stock market. Well, it's how I mean, there are some people who are legitimately feeling the pinch still. And yet, though, overall, Americans have a very negative perception of Biden's economy. And is that fair? What do you what do you see?

What's interesting, and we've looked at some of these numbers before, is that if you ask people how their own finances are, about 75 percent think they're OK. And that really goes all the way back to 2018, pretty consistently. What's happened in the last number of years and not just under Biden, but it really started back in about 2019 or thereabouts. The perception of how local economies are doing has deteriorated and the perception of how people's the national economy is doing has deteriorated. So people have created this dichotomy in their minds between the national economy, their local economy and themselves. What's also interesting, most recently, and these are from some other polls that have come out lately, what's also interesting is the way divergence between sentiment and approval has occurred. People's sentiment about the economy has actually been trending up. We had

one bad number the other day, but we'll have to see if it's an aberration, if it jumps around a little bit. But the general trend has been improving sentiment. On the other hand, Biden's approval ratings have been trending down. Now, there are obviously a lot of other things going on, particularly the war in Gaza and so on and so forth. But but there seems to be now a spread between how people feel about the economy to some degree and how they feel about Biden. So let me bring Jen Palmieri into this, because what what does the Biden campaign do with this? There is not just what Steve has laid out, but you have politicians, Nikki Haley, the Trump campaign screaming from the rooftops pretty much anything about the Biden economy

being, you know, a complete failure and not a lot of truth to what they're saying. And then also some right leaning networks echoing what you could argue is disinformation or at least loose facts. How does the Biden campaign pierce through this? I mean, the first thing I would want to try to understand is how is this is to look at the data to understand why this is happening. I mean, it's interesting. Steve says sort of where things diverged from what reality what what reality is and how people feel about it was around 1920. I mean, I think that people are still in just such trauma from covid, from what happened to jobs, what happened to prices, supply chain during that time. They're still just feeling very uncertain. And so, you know, and prices are still high.

Inflation is not growing, but we don't have deflation. So I think what you want to do, I think you really want to let people know there is a strong foundation under us. So it's not so much Biden taking credit. I did this. I did that. I made everything better. But believe in the strong foundation of the economy so that you know that this know that this is real and it's something we're going to build on. And then let people know what you're doing to make things more affordable to them. That's like the cost of insulin going down.

Note when prices are decreasing. We're seeing that some with some major chains have decided to do that to show people both the big picture. It's better. But then also the small differences in their own life of ways they're trying to make things more and more affordable, whether that's through student loans, health care or even just noting when prices are dropping. And I feel like then maybe it can kind of take hold for people to be a little more real. All right. Steve Ratner is going to stick around for our next discussion at the table here. The UK will hold a new election in July. We'll have a live report from London on the British prime minister's surprising announcement, the fight to keep his party in power and the impact this will have on U.S. relations. Morning Joe will be right back.

President new report. Trump's attorneys found classified documents in his bedroom four months after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago. The lawyers knew Trump was hiding something when they saw a box labeled books. Now, to be fair, Trump rarely goes into his bedroom. As we've recently learned, he does most of his sleeping in court. Now, the new... All right. Welcome back to Morning Joe.

It's 44 past the hour. The United Kingdom will hold its general election on July 4th. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made the surprise announcement yesterday outside 10 Downing Street. The July 4th date comes months before it was expected. Sunak had until December to call an election that could have happened as late as January 28th of next year. Sunak's Conservative Party, which has ruled for the past 14 years, has seen its support steadily dwindle. The center-left Labour Party is strongly favored in the upcoming election, with multiple polls showing it about 20 points ahead. Joining us now live from London is NBC News international correspondent Josh Letterman. He is just outside Parliament. Josh, what was behind this surprise news? Well, Mika, the smart money had been that Prime Minister Sunak was going to wait until later

in the fall to hold those elections, in part to give himself more time to try to turn around his party's political fortunes by then. But he appears to have made the calculation that now is as good a time event as any, that it wasn't really going to get much better. And in fact, that some recent positive economic news with inflation here plummeting down to 2 percent, 2.3 percent, down from a high of about 11 percent a couple of years ago, made this a good time to try to kickstart this campaign. And so as of this morning, this six-week campaign has now started with a bang. Both Sunak and Labor leader Keir Starmer are hitting the campaign trail today. Sunak is going to be in Scotland, while Keir Starmer is going to be campaigning in Kent. And a lot of the

themes of this campaign really do mirror some of the frustrations that we're hearing from voters in the United States as well. A lot of frustration with the economy, frustration with the failures of the government to stop immigration and to secure the borders, with Rishi Sunak campaigning on the beginning of his newly enacted plan to send migrants, asylum seekers who cross in small boats to the U.K. on flights to Rwanda, saying that those flights will start after the July 4th election. And of course, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, they have promised to scrap that plan entirely if they are elected. But, you know, interestingly, Mika, from Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, we're not hearing kind of big, bold campaign promises exactly what he is going to do. In fact, his message seems to be that he is going to be the

one that is going to bring stability to British politics. After a tumultuous period under 14 years of Conservative leadership, where we've period under 14 years of conservative leadership, where we've had a rotating cast of prime ministers, there has been the perception that this government has been unable to deliver on its promises to turn up the economy around, to deal with the crisis in the National Health Service, and of course, to deal with asylum seekers and irregular migration as well. And so Starmer campaigning is the person who's going to bring some order and stability to that. But of course, that is giving an opening to the conservatives to say, look, the Labour Party doesn't even really have a plan at this point

that they are unprepared to lead this government. Now, one person who will not be participating in this election, we learned this morning, is Nigel Farage, the far right leader and champion of Brexit, who was expected to potentially campaign as part of the Reform Party. But he announced just this morning that he is not going to do that. He says instead, he is going to focus on his bigger priority, which he says is to help Donald Trump get elected in the United States. Joe. All right. Thank you so much, Josh. Let him and greatly appreciate it. Let's bring in our Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, associate editor of The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson. Gene previously served as a bureau chief for the paper.

Steve Ratner with us as well. Steve, of course, also a reporter in Thatcher's Britain in the early 1980s. Gene, let's start with you. And let me just ask you your initial thoughts about this election being called early, why you think he went ahead and called it early when he and the Tories are deeply, deeply unpopular in Britain. Yeah, I have absolutely no idea. I think maybe Rishi Sunak decided he wanted July 4th to be his personal Independence Day. He wants to be free of the responsibilities of being prime minister. And I think he will be after that. And I took a look last night at the polling in Britain.

And it is, I mean, it is dismal for the Tories. It's something like 23 points is the poll average. Predictions are a huge labor majority when all is said and done. And Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, is following the rule. You know, if your opponent is making mistake after mistake, don't interrupt him. So I think that's why he's being so sort of namby-pamby in terms of coming out with proposals that are firm and a 10-point plan for this or that, because he figures he doesn't have to, that people are just tired of the Tories after all this time. And I think he's probably right.

And Steve Ratner, the Tories have been in power for so long there. You look at, and of course, their economy, you're not doing nearly as well as ours is. But you also look at the leaders that have been there recently. You have Sunak. Before that, you had a head of Cabbage and Liz Truss. Before that, you had Boris and Theresa May. Brexit mixed in there, which just ripped the party in half. I mean, this has been I mean, they've had one failed prime minister after another. This has been a just torrid, horrible run for the for the British conservatives. Do they have any shot of of keeping Keir Stormer out of Tim Downing? It seems very unlikely, Joe. The polls, as Gene just said,

are really quite extraordinary. More than a 20 point gap. Rishi Sunak has a 1616 percent approval rating. And as you say, it's been 14 years. We've not had a party in power for 14 years, really, since the days of FDR. And the only reason I think they even stayed in power for 14 years was because the Labor Party went through a period of kind of moving pretty far left, including some whiffs of anti-Semitism and some pretty other unattractive features and simply couldn't mount a credible opponent to the conservative candidate. But let's put this in perspective in a couple of respects. First of all, as I think has been mentioned, leaders are pretty unpopular around the world. I think we've talked on this show before about how Joe Biden at times, I think

maybe even at the moment, is in fact at 40 percent the most popular leader among the group of seven, the big seven countries in the world. There's a lot of voter discontent out there in the developed world because of the economy and inflation, immigration and so forth. And then Britain has a set of its own economic issues. It's been a low investment, low productivity economy for some while now. Average incomes today, after you adjust for inflation under the 14 years of the Tories are essentially unchanged. They're up a tiny, tiny little fraction. And so people have not improved their standard of living for more than 14 years. And then you have on top of

that some of the problems like the National Health Service, which used to be the pride of Britain, where you've got eight million people waiting to get elective surgeries. You have a four hour wait for half of people more than four hours to get an ambulance. And so there's just a huge amount of discontent among the British public. And I think it's almost certain that we're going to have a change in government here on July 4th. Interesting. As we close out the hour, Jen Palmieri, thanks for being on. I'd love to get your and John Heilman's final thoughts campaign-wise as we head into the Memorial Day weekend. What will you be watching for, Jen, over the next few days, especially as Trump's criminal

trial is on pause? Is the campaign thinking about how to handle the days leading up to a verdict and a verdict? And also, will Nikki Haley be a factor at all? I mean, I don't think that Nikki Haley be a factor at all? I mean, I don't think that Nikki Haley will be. I'll take the last one first. I don't think I don't think she will be a factor at all. I just think that her, you know, like I said before, her her anti vote, the vote for her is an anti Trump vote. And those voters are open to Biden. And I know that the campaign is going to make that a really big priority. And you'll see like you'll see more of that over the over the course of the summer. I think that with the with the trial, Trump's got his Bronx rally today, I believe.

Right. And the Biden campaign just put out a really tough ad aimed at black voters and some pretty racist things that Donald Trump has said about that. So I think that, you know, it is. Take a look at that, everyone. It is it's a sign of things to come in terms of the campaign, hard hitting stuff in the campaign. But when you look at I think what the campaign is also trying to do is understands that the June debate is their big moment. Right. That is the moment to really frame up the choice. And I think, you know, in terms of the Senate taking action on the border, at least or at least trying to take action on the border, some of the things the campaign is laying down now, you see that's all building to being on stage with Trump

and being able to hold him accountable on these issues and really frame that choice. Yeah, face to face. Jen, thank you. And Jen Hellman, the ad she was talking about, we're going to show at the top of the next hour. So you can take a look at that. Your thoughts. After Trump does this thing in the Bronx, goes down to Maryland this weekend to to headline the the Libertarian Party convention, where it's it's Donald Trump versus Robert F. Kennedy Jr. trying to claim that. Trump has suddenly realized that Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a problem for him, too. And this is about, I think, him trying to deny the Libertarian nomination. People,

you might say it's meaningless. It is a thing that would help Bobby Kennedy Jr. get on more ballots and both sides uniquely. Strange, you know, independent candidates usually help one side or the other. This is a case where both sides are worried about Bobby Kennedy Jr. I will also say, Rishi Sunak, man, he started out dry. Yeah. And he ended up sopping wet. And, you know, if you think about all the problems that this guy has with the low approval ratings and the strength of labor, you know, you'd think there was someone on the advance

team who could have noticed that the clouds were gathering before he went out on the street in front of Downing Street. Huge month of July for the special relationship. British election, followed by the NATO summit in Washington, D.C., followed by the Republican convention, where you could end up with a Labor prime minister and Donald Trump looking at each other about what that might hold for the next four years. So also you mentioned RFK, a big piece on his running mate on the front page of The New York Times. Morning Joe, economic analyst Steve Ratner.

Thank you for being on this morning.