Morning Joe - Morning Joe 6/30/23

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Supreme Court strikes down college affirmative action programs.

Take a look at overruling Roe v. Wade. Take a look at what the decision today. Take a look at how it's how it's ruled on a number of issues that are have been precedent for 50, 60 years. Sometimes across the board, the vast majority of the American people don't agree with a lot of the decisions this court is making. Hey, that's President Joe Biden yesterday on MSNBC reacting to the Supreme Court overturning the use of affirmative action in college admissions. And, you know, Willie, it was a fascinating interview. I'm going to say that I'm a little concerned. The New York Post, which, of course, as you know, is Morning Joe's newspaper of record. Also, when people always come up to me on the street, they go, Joe, why is the New York Post? Well, you know, it's very

simple. They've won more Pulitzer Prizes collectively than all other newspapers. You had to look it up if you don't believe me. You can look that up. And they want. So that's why. But anyway, they have on the don't look it up. They have on the cover of online like Joe Biden walking off set. Right. And it's like he kind of get lost and kind of like Barnacle when we'll ask him a question. He walks off in the middle of a question because he wants to get their report, get back to Boston. But they act like Biden was confused. No, he just he's president of the United States. He said, thank you. And I'm going to leave now. People do that to us all the time.

And they don't end up on the front page of The New York Post. I mean, I get it. He says God saved the queen. I mean, I'm a big Sex Pistols fans, too. I'm probably not going to end the speech with that. He confuses Iraq and Ukraine. I get all of that stuff. But some of this stuff is just ridiculous. President Biden talked to Nicole Wallace right in our studio at 30 Rock, and they had a cordial goodbye. Nicole's reading the tease to get to the next segment. And he walks by and apparently that's front page news. But there is a theme if you read certain newspapers, including the newspaper of record for Morning Joe, where you watch certain TV programs about Joe Biden suggesting there's an age problem, suggesting that he sort of daughters and wanders and he

does misspeak. And we talk about that all the time. But it's probably not the most important thing that happened yesterday. And I think we'll get into some of that. So we'll turn the page, even though the paper of record is our favorite. Exactly. And I don't know if people know this, but Joe Biden was misspeaking in 1987. In fact, he had to leave the presidential campaign in 1987 because misspeaking. Well, that's just a thing he did and does. Anyway, let's bring in some other people who do not misspeak. They are professionals, unlike me, former White House director of communications to President Obama, Jim Palmieri, also the president of the National Action Network and a host of MSNBC's Politics Nation, Reverend Al Sharpton, NBC News National

Affairs analyst John Heilman, and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and associate editor for The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson. We're going to be talking about affirmative action, a landmark ruling yesterday, just a shocker for a lot of people. But first, I just John Heilman really quickly on politics while we're talking about Joe Biden and Biden getting knocked around. David Brooks has a piece in The New York Times this morning I thought was absolutely fascinating on why President Biden isn't getting the credit he deserves. And David writes this. The misery index is a crude but effective way to measure the health of the economy. You add up the inflation rate and the unemployment rate. And if you're present running for reelection, you want that number to be as low as possible.

When Reagan won reelection, 49 states, it was 11.4. When George W. Bush did so, it was nine. For Barack Obama, 9.5. For Joe Biden today, 7.7. Biden should be cruising to an easy re-election victory. Of course, you look at the numbers, he's just not. There is such a disconnect between the economy, his economic numbers, and just about every respect and those before him, especially Donald Trump. And yet the right track, wrong track is wildly askew, despite

all the legislative accomplishments, just as a matter of record that he's that he's put down there. It's really there is this huge divide between reality and well, perception. Yeah. And obviously, it's a huge challenge for the White House and for the committee to reelect the president to try to deal with how do you fight through that? There is, if only there were like some magic elixir that would help to align reality and history with President Biden's standing in his political standing and standing in the polls. I think there are two things that are going on there, at least two that come immediately to mind, Joe. One of them is, and my friend Jim Palmieri can speak to this maybe as dramatically as anyone, is just how different

the world is today, the political world is today, than it was even when Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2012. The degree of polarization is so much further off the charts. It was bad in 2012. It's been getting worse over the course of our lifetimes in the last 30 years, the dominant factor in our politics, really. But it is the case now that because the polarization is what it is, because the media landscape is dominated by extreme voices on both sides, and particularly the megaphone on the right is so loud, there's a distorting effect that Bill Clinton, that Ronald Reagan, that George W. Bush, that George Herbert Walker Bush,

and even Barack Obama didn't have to deal with to the extent that Joe Biden did. And then the second factor, which is, again, a central challenge for this reelect, which is, fairly or not, is the case that there are a lot of Americans who look at all the good that's going on, who look at the state of their 401ks that have just been going up for the last three or four months, and look at all of the things that have happened, all the accomplishments and so on, and still continue to tell pollsters that the fact of Joe Biden's age, any president who is in his 80s, gives them pause. And I think that's a challenge.

Hopefully, from the Biden perspective, hopefully it will be a soluble challenge. But it does point to how stubborn that view is among a lot of people, including some people on the Democratic side. All right. Let's start this hour with the landmark decisions, two of them from the Supreme Court yesterday, ending race based affirmative action in college admissions. The court ruled programs at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. The schools were accused of giving substantial preference to black and Hispanic applicants while discriminating against Asian-American students. The vote was six to three in the North Carolina case, with all three of the liberal judges dissenting and six to two in the

Harvard ruling because Justice Katonji Brown Jackson had to recuse herself. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, stating both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping and lack meaningful endpoints. However, he also did give admission to offices an opening on the issue of race, writing nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise. Justice Katonji Brown Jackson in the rebuttal wrote with let them eat

cake obliviousness today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces colorblindness for all by legal fiat. Justice Jackson goes on to write, quote, but deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. The court noted the decision will not take effect immediately. In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the ruling would first apply to students starting college in 2028. So, Reverend Sharpton, yesterday morning, you and I discussed this. You had anticipated this ruling. Most people expected it to go this way. You had begun to walk us through some of the follow on effects from this decision.

So how are you looking at it this morning? Well, I think that it was as bad or worse than I had thought. Clearly, the court, in my judgment, stuck a dagger in the back of many of us that feel that we need to continue to legally protect people that have had to deal with historic inequities. You must understand affirmative action started under the Nixon administration written by Arthur Fletcher. This was a conservative remedy to try and equalize the facts that blacks by law couldn't go to certain schools, by law were enslaved. I mean, we are not talking about a custom here. We're talking about the law said that we couldn't do certain things. I just spoke in Jackson, Mississippi, two weeks ago,

where James Meredith was in the audience. He's a much older man now. He was the first black to go to the University of Mississippi. He had to be escorted in by the military. And that's just a generation before me. So I think that we are trying to act as though all of a sudden by some magic wand, everything is equal. When you look at the fact that affirmative action was voted out in the state of California and look at the numbers of blacks and Hispanics now in those top schools, as Governor Gavin Newsom brought up. It has gone down in high percentage points. So this is bad. It can also be used in the private sector, is my fear, because to say it is unconstitutional

to have race as a factor, they can now affect the minority contractors programs and programs to deal with diversity and employment and on boards. This could have devastating impact if we don't resist. And let me say this, Joe, when you refer to New York Post, when the president left the studio from the cold, he came and met with me for about 10 or 15 minutes. He probably was looking for where his meetings were going to be when he was leaving. He was not stumbling around. The Secret Service was directing him. I think Alex has a picture of him and I meeting here. So he wasn't lost. I think the post was lost. Yeah, no, he wasn't lost at all. I mean, you could see you could see again him him in a hurry to get out of the chair and get out and meet somebody really important. And we all know that person,

Rev, was you. I got the picture from Alex to prove it. As the Rev was saying, even liberal states have voted out affirmative action. California, Washington state, the results, despite their best efforts in California, you look at UC Berkeley, the numbers are down and they're doing everything they can to try to have, again, the numbers of their student body just match up with the percentages of people in their state based on demographics. So they have actually a student body that represents the diversity of their state. California, they're still struggling to do it because affirmative action was banned statewide by a vote. But this is, Gene, obviously, affirmative action is people have very complicated feelings, mixed emotions about it. It's unpopular with the majority of Americans, even with Asian-Americans, Hispanics, black Americans. But I noticed Tyler Austin Hooper, a Bates College professor, he wrote this in the New York Times today about racial gaming. He's a he helps kids get into college. He's a tutor, also helps kids get into college. So the Chinese and Korean kids always wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean.

The rich white kids wanted ways to seem less rich and less white. The black kids tended to want to make sure they came across as black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids. Affirmative action is necessary to redress the historical evils of chattel slavery and its myriad afterlives, and above all, that it is crucial counterbalance against a prevailing system of de facto white affirmative action that rewards many academically mediocre and wealthier students by having legacy parents are being good at rowing a boat. Yet I also believe that affirmative action, though necessary, has inadvertently helped create a warped and race obsessed American university culture. This is one of these these issues, Gene, that as we talk about, it requires us to use dialectical

thinking there. There are it's an imperfect system, but at the same time, it redresses, again, a lot of imperfections in America's past and present. Right. Affirmative action is or was the system that we were allowed to use to try to redress some of the inequities of the past, because a sort of frank and honest attempt at remediation was never allowed. You had 350 years of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, redlining, wage theft, you name it. And then you had the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s. And you had, beginning in the Nixon administration, a very limited sort of affirmative action light program or philosophy to begin to redress some of those wrongs. And then, really, quite suddenly, with the Bakke decision and then moving forward, any Any sort of ability to honestly and frankly and openly try to remediate some of the wrongs that were committed over centuries was taken away. justification that's been allowed for affirmative action in college admissions, at least, is

diversity, not remediation for the many past wrongs that compounded themselves over the centuries. And so, yes, people have sort of tied themselves in knots to try to justify something that should have been very frankly justified. And and then you could have talked about time limiting if you if you actually made a an honest attempt to remediate some of what was done to African-Americans right over now, 400 years. Let's bring to the conversation Supreme Court correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, Jess Braven. Jess, thanks for being here today. Help us, if you can, parse through a little bit of this long opinion and what Chief Justice Roberts

said, which is effectively that race based admissions policies violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. But, he said, in an essay, a student of color can write about how his or her race has impacted his or her life, telling a story about their own individual experience rather than a broad experience about their race. What does that mean exactly? How does a college admissions board take this ruling, which, by the way, most of them have been expecting to go this way for some time now? Well, it means that you can't make any assumptions about someone because of their race. That's what the chief justice was really stressing.

He said you can't say, well, because this applicant is black or Hispanic, you can't assume they carry with them certain experiences or or obstacles or what have you. He called that stereotypes. He did not rule out, as you say, that if someone has been affected in their own experience by their race, and he described whether it is obstacles over a cane or a particular pride that they take in it, if it is relevant to their own personal experience, they're certainly able to describe that, and schools can consider that in admissions. They just can't, and this was a term that came up all the time during the oral arguments

last year, they can't just check the box. They can't just look at it as automatically meaning something because an applicant is black or Hispanic. And so, Jen Palmieri, as I said, most colleges had been expecting it to go this way based on the arguments that were made actually last fall. They heard the justices' questions. They thought the conservatives, and it didn't go that way, and the 6-3 in one case, 6-2 the other, would side the way they did and write this opinion. So colleges are ready for it. But the problem is, as Gene has been saying, as Rev has been saying, we have experience with this in other states where racial preferences and affirmative action have been eliminated, that it does just objectively reduce the number of students of color that go into these schools.

Right. And I mean, by really the and the margins are stark, too. Right. It was I think I think that the California rates for black students now is a third of what it used to be. And so just, you know, both Sotomayor and Kentonji Brown Jackson accused the chief justice of being disingenuous and saying that, well, that the schools could still consider race in terms of it being something that may have either inspired them or set them back, that that kind of adversity could be taken into account. And the court specifically—his opinion, controlling the pen, the chief justice, said it was not setting new precedent, not overturning precedent. How do you parse that argument from the minority side, that this is the chief justice being disingenuous about,

you know, trying to make it appear as if race can still be a factor in admissions? Well, you know, it comes down to really the difference between the chief and the majority and the dissenters about what, excuse me, what equal protection means under the Constitution, right? So from the chief's point of view, it has to be colorblind. You can't make any assumptions, but people can talk about it in their essays. And already they do. I think you had that commentary before that some applicants emphasize their race or downplay it because they think it will have an impact.

Is he being disingenuous? Well, look, this is a very important issue to Chief Justice John Roberts. This is as important to him as, say, the abortion cases were to Justice Samuel Alito last year. Eliminating racial preferences, as he sees it, has been a driving part of his jurisprudence for decades. So it's, you know, it's no surprise to them. It's not some new attitude that the chief justice has. In 2007 or 8, he wrote an opinion uh... getting rid of voluntary integration programs in k twelve schools and this is really the second shoe to drop in his effort to uh... implement what he sees as a colorblind constitution

so is he being disingenuous or is it just simply he wants to take race out of the picture uh... in american society he believes that's what the constitution requires not everywhere there are some exceptions in other areas of law and we saw him American society, he believes that's what the Constitution requires. Not everywhere. There are some exceptions in other areas of law. And we saw him uphold part of the Voting Rights Act earlier this month, which may have come as a surprise to some people. So I can't get it inside his head. Is he being disingenuous? I think this is what John Roberts sincerely believes. Yeah. Just let's talk about what got us here. The Harvard case, particularly if I were an Asian American listening to this conversation, I'd be saying, hey, wait a second.

You want to talk about what's been happening to us and at Harvard and and in other schools, you had Asian Americans openly being discriminated against because they were overrepresented in some schools because they had higher grades and, you know, there would be personality scores. And I think it was the Harvard case personality numbers where they were, you know, so many were just zeroed out to try to discriminate against Asian-Americans and try to keep their numbers down on class. So you could have been an extraordinary student. You could have had extraordinary extracurricular activities. You could have been the extraordinary student you could have had extraordinary extracurricular activities you could have been the model applicant for the process but you were discriminated against discriminated against by harvard isn't that what got us here in the first place well harvard said no we're not discriminating against anybody and these personality scores or what have you uh don't reflect discrimination. They reflect the views of the interviewers or whoever.

So Harvard certainly says we're not discriminating against anybody. We're only giving kind of a plus to certain applicants, particularly black and Hispanic applicants. Now, obviously, the allegation was they were discriminating and because, you know, it's a zero sum game in college admissions. If somebody gets a plus, then somebody else gets a minus. So, yes, some Asian-Americans felt they were being discriminated against. And the chief justice looked at the fact that Harvard had sort of maintained almost identical racial breakdowns of its entering class for years and years and years as evidence that

they were juicing the numbers to make sure they stayed at certain proportions year after year. Supreme Court correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, Jess Brave. And Jess, thanks so much for walking us through all this. We appreciate it. Let's bring in now former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance. She also, of course, is an MSNBC legal analyst. Joyce, good morning. So as we said, not a big surprise here. Most people expected this decision to come down this way, both of these decisions to come down this way. What's your reaction to the legal argument made by Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion? Right. So the legal argument, there's a constitutional basis engaged here for saying that these programs that give a bump up to minority applicants have to come to an end and

they have to come to an end now. Unfortunately, that opinion ignores some of the basic realities of the world that we live in. And Justice Jackson's dissent does an impeccable job of pointing that out. She says, in essence, the chief justice tries to decide by fiat that discrimination, that racial discrimination has come to an end in America. So there's no longer any need for these affirmative action programs. You know, we hear an echo here of Justice Roberts decision in Shelby County versus Holder, the voting rights case, where 10 years ago he said there's no longer any reason to have concern about racial discrimination in voting. These old statistics

about low registration and low turnout among black voters, they no longer tell the story. And of course, history has proven that that opinion was dramatically short-sighted, that in fact, we do have problems that continue to pervade the ability of black people to vote in America and that that decision made it worse, not better. I fear that thatade the ability of black people to vote in America and that that decision made it worse, not better. I fear that that's the outcome of the short sighted analysis in these cases where the chief justice says, in essence, this opinion puts a burden on black applicants and other minority applicants to write an essay that says, hey, take a look at me.

I've overcome diversity. And the court says this sort of limited individualized factor can be considered. That imposes an awfully strong burden on your average 17 or 18 year old writing their college application. And instead of permitting colleges and universities when they make admissions decisions to look at factors that contribute to stronger communities in these academic institutions, it places all of that burden back on individuals who, frankly, may or may not be able to carry that forward. So, Joyce, I agree. I certainly agree with you and share your concerns. I do wonder what's your response, not just to the majority's facts that they put forward about Asian Americans being discriminated against, but Asian Americans that talk about their children being discriminated against,

Asian American students saying we are being discriminated against because this is a zero sum game. If you plus up one demographic group, you're going to subtract from another. And and time and time again, that's been Asian-Americans over and certainly over the last decade. And of course, you look at Asian-Americans who have not who faced a different kind of discrimination, but from internment camps to just absolutely horrific treatment throughout throughout the years. This isn't exactly a demographic group who has been who's been embraced throughout American history.

So what do you say to Asian-American students and Asian-American parents this morning to say, OK, finally, my kids are going to get an equal chance and stop being minused, stop being zeroed out on the personality scores because of affirmative action. So, Joe, I think your comments are smart comments and they point to how difficult and nuanced of a problem this is, because when you talk about college admissions, it's inherently a zero sum game. Some students are admitted. Other students are not admitted. And the central question here is whether there's a legitimate interest that survives strict scrutiny in ensuring that black students are admitted, that the historic impacts of slavery and of discrimination don't continue

into the modern era. And although that's tough in some ways when you look across the groups, what we have to do is have legal rules that permit universities to make decisions that benefit the future. I don't mean to pretend that these decisions are any more easy or simple than they are. But the fact of the matter is that when you look at the law in this area, not just cases about affirmative action like Bakke, but when you go back to Brown versus Board of Education and when you think about whether there's a legitimate interest in ensuring that black students can go to college, that disadvantages can be taken account of by universities, which when you think about it, what they're doing, right?

They're on some occasions giving some applicants a bump up because of their background. Other students get those bump ups too. For instance, legacies. If your dad went to Harvard, you get a bump up. If you're an athlete, you get a bump up. So these are nuanced decisions that consider a lot of different

factors. All that affirmative action did was level the playing field by permitting race to be considered as one of many factors used in a holistic decision making process. That's what the Supreme Court has said can no longer be done. And by the way, speaking of legacies, John Heilman, the majority also pointed out that this all could have been avoided if the universities had stopped giving preferential treatment to legacies and athletes. Right, right.

And I mean, we're all familiar with this problem and it's really one of the more grotesque elements to the whole system of university, private university, the process of how they evaluate students. And the legacy problem has been a problem that's bedeviled people for a long time. And Joe, I guess my question for, as I listen to you and Joyce talk about this, the question that's been on everybody's mind politically over the course of the last 24 hours is whether this will have the kind of impact, this decision, that the abortion decision did last year. There's been a lot of speculation from both directions. Obviously, it's all just as before we saw the fallout from the abortion decision. We all were speculating about what impact it would have. Obviously, it was an extreme in one direction, which is to say the degree of outrage over it and the way in which it animated Democratic voters.

We saw the impact of that. I guess I'm curious what you think about whether there's a similar pattern that could play out here. As I listen to you and Joyce talk about it, it highlights to me, at least on the politics, why I'm at least a little bit skeptical about whether they can have that kind of impact or not. Affirmative action is such a complicated, nuanced question. Groups are affected in such different ways. The abortion decision was very clear-cut in some sense. A fundamental right that more than half of the population had for 50 years was taken away. And the notion that people would rally in the population had for 50 years was taken away.

And everybody, the notion that people would rally in the way they did around women's rights in that case, you could see the straight line. Affirmative action has always been more complicated because it's, as I said, affected different groups differently. And the application of it is much more subtle, much more nuanced. There are lots of groups who you would think might be allies that aren't going to be on the politics of this. I'm curious what your thought is about whether this is another giant explosion in our politics and will affect 2024 or whether, as I think this is, there's so much complexity around this issue that it's not likely to cut in quite as deeply or as clearly as the abortion decision did. I think that the politics of this is it will cut deeply into black and brown voters. When you look at the decision saying that we, in effect, are ending affirmative action, but not in military schools. So, in other words, you can go to the bunker. I was reading someone wrote, but you can't go to the boardroom through being educated properly. A lot of people in the immediate reaction was saying to me, this is racially targeted towards stopping our progress, stopping to, in many ways, fix a lot of the historic discrimination.

I think that you will see that. I'm going to New Orleans this weekend. The vice president is already there. Largest gathering of blacks. Essence magazine, Rich Lou Dennis and I talked yesterday. The owner people want to mobilize now because the other thing that is resonating with a lot of people is that this Supreme Court, a third of it, three out of the nine were appointed by Donald Trump and voting matters. And that had there been more black turnout in certain places, we may not have had those justices. So I think that you're going to see over the weekend on into the August 26th, March, a lot of people saying, wait a minute, we are not going to have a country where you can get affirmative action to serve in the military

or go to military schools, but you can't continue the documented evidence that it made a difference in our lives to have our children have a bump up to be able to go into schools that their parents and grandparents couldn't go to and therefore couldn't help nurture their education. My mother, my mother had to go drop out of school in Alabama. I was born in New York. She raised in Alabama. She could help me with my homework because she didn't have certain educational skills. We're not talking about something just in 1800. It was a continuation into these times. So you need to remedy what was done by law. And I think that's going to energize a lot of black voters that might have sat on the fence in terms of voting. Gene, Gene Robinson, in your piece in The Washington Post this morning, you say that

this decision yesterday, both decisions is ignorant of the past, but you also express concern for the future. So as you think, even beyond college admissions, even beyond campus, the follow on effects of this, what this means at the corporate level, perhaps if we see new lawsuits brought against corporations with DEI programs and things like that. What are your concerns as you now look over the horizon based on this ruling? Well, my concerns are this majority on the Supreme Court and where they're going with this. And I wonder, I mean, Justice Roberts did exempt the military academies. He said that that issue wasn't presented to them in this case.

And so they're not messing with that. But when we get lawsuits coming up, percolating up, perhaps, that deal with perceived affirmative action, whether it's real or not, in employment, in hiring, in promotions, wherever, what is this court going to do? And I have great concerns about that, but we'll have to see. Just two quick observations about this ruling. Number one, when we talk about Harvard and UNC and these very selective schools, we're talking about choosing a freshman class from a huge pool of qualified applicants. Harvard could assemble a perfectly fine all-white freshman class or an all-Asian freshman class or an all-black freshman class from the pool of qualified applicants. We're not talking about giving a place at Harvard to somebody who's not qualified to be there. That's one point. The second point is about Justice Roberts sort of leaving the door open a crack and saying, well, nothing prohibits discussion of race, you know, in an essay. It's what he was essentially saying.

In the very next sentence, he kind of takes it back and he says, but we but colleges are not allowed to do through essays what we forbid them to do through other means. So it's very unclear how the court's going to react if colleges go that route. Colleges now left to grapple with all of this. We'll come back to this, of course, much more this morning. MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance. Joyce, thanks so much as always. Jonathan, got some news here. Want to get on the record for you. The conservative political network led by billionaire Charles Koch has raised more than 70 million dollars ahead of the 2024 election in a push to sink Donald Trump. According to The New York Times, the network plans to throw its weight into the Republican presidential nominating contest for the first time in its nearly 20 year history.

The Times notes the Koch network's goal described only indirectly in written internal communications is to stop Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination. Back in February, a top political official in the network wrote a memo to donors and activists saying it is time to, quote, have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter. So obviously, the Koch network has been incredibly influential, John, over the years in Republican politics, pushing a bunch of money into elections they say they think can help to sink Donald Trump. Unclear what that means, which presidential candidate it's focused on or backing, or if this is just throwing money away because Donald Trump is running away with this thing.

Yeah, there's a lot we don't know yet here, Willie. You're right. The Koch network, extraordinarily influential in conservative politics, though influence diminished a bit of late in recent years. They've been opposed to Trump for some time, and he's given it right back. And he also is less reliant on some of the big donors because he has proven so successful

at those small donations of raising money from his loyal followers, including getting them to pay for his legal defense fee more than one occasion. So we'll see here, though, that's still a big number, and it does symbolize that somehow some, I stress some, Republican-leaning institutions are really trying to move the party away from Trump because they've just simply, largely because of electability reasons. They don't think he can win again in 2024. But right now, the anti-Trump movement

hasn't really taken off. And it's not clear if they coalesce around one of his rivals and who that might be. Ron DeSantis was certainly the great hope among many Republicans who wanted to find a different path away from Trump. And at least so far, his campaign has not achieved liftoff. He's 30-odd points behind Trump in the polls. And, yes, it's early, but there's already a sense, Willie, I'll certainly say this, Republicans I speak to here in D.C. and across the country, a sense of real panic among the never-Trump Republicans that they feel like the party is already hurtling toward nominating him yet again. In large part because the Ron D. Santus train has taken a detour away from winning.

It's just had a horrible, horrible few months. So let's look at this, John Heilman, when you have the Koch Network talking about pushing 70 million dollars in the stop Trump effort, reporters talking about how Leonard Leo, who, you know, just inherited over a billion dollars for his political activities, is starting to spread money out behind Ron DeSantis. It seems people with the most money in the Republican Party are uniting against Trump in a way they didn't do in 16. You know, they didn't and they didn't.

They didn't, Joe. So you remember back in 2016, at least a lot of the people with the most money were united behind Jeb Bush. Not maybe not. We'll see how it all plays out in this in this race. I mean, it's it's been this growing trend, as we've observed over the course last few months. The Republican donor class from the from the circles of all listen to people like Karl Rove, the people who are in the club for grope, the people now out front. We've known the Kochs have been kind of moving this direction for some number of months. They've all now kind of decided that they are definitely, definitely, definitely going to try to challenge Trump. I think the problem is twofold. One is that,

you know, with whom? You know? You talked about Ron DeSantis having his detour. You know, you can't beat Donald Trump with money. You got to beat Donald Trump with a candidate. And a candidate, a well-financed candidate, money's part of the solution here. But you can't beat Donald Trump without a candidate. And the problem right now, at least, is everybody and their mothers running in the Republican nomination contest. A split field helps Donald Trump. And the argument, the second point I want to make, the second point is that the argument that the establishment forces on both in the deep state on the left and now increasingly in what Donald Trump will surely attack as the establishment right are a raid against Donald Trump. It actually helps his argument to his core followers,

which is still the largest chunk, the plurality chunk of the Republican base. It helps them with the argument that he's a persecuted figure, that he's a martyr, and that he's fighting for the little guy like them who are all under siege from all these various powerful forces. So it's not that if Donald Trump's going to get beaten. He's going to get beaten by someone with a bunch of money. But this is not in any way a thing that guarantees that Donald Trump is going to go down just because now suddenly the Kochs and others have decided that it's in their best interest and that a more electable candidate could win. In certain respects,

it could actually end up helping Trump and hurting the Republican Party. As you say, you've got to have a candidate to beat Donald Trump. Money's nice, but there's no candidate who's confronted him in any meaningful way yet. We'll see if that changes now. The smoke is back, not only in Chicago, but also New York and across the East Coast. And scorching temperatures and bad air quality are really impacting millions of Americans outside of Chicago and the East Coast all across the country. Texas, my Lord, Texas has been baking under a severe early season heat wave.

It's reaching triple digits this week. Temperatures there rivaling the hottest locations on the planet, including the Sahara Desert and parts of the Persian Gulf. The heat is now spreading to the lower Mississippi Valley and parts of the southwest. Meanwhile, much of the Midwest and Northeast are facing unhealthy air alerts this morning as wildfire smoke from Canada blankets the region there. Let's bring in NBC News medical contributor Dr. Vin Gupta to talk about what all of this means. He's a Harvard-trained lung specialist and health policy expert. Hey, doctor, we'll get to the heat in a minute. Just horrible, horrible temperatures, especially in Texas. But first, let's talk about the smoke coming down from Canada. How dangerous is it?

Well, Joe, good morning. Thank you for highlighting this. This is something that we haven't had to talk about outside the West Coast of the United States in the months of July and August. The fact that the Midwest, New York, just a few weeks ago, is experiencing this is bringing to light something critical here. Air pollution, Joe, in and of itself is now the sixth leading cause of death worldwide. And we don't talk about this a lot, but the impact it can have on maternal health. We know that if pregnant women just breathe in air from wildfire smoke for just a few days, it can result in preterm birth. We know children exposed to wildfire smoke, again, for just a few

days might have lower lung volumes for the next 10 years of their life, reduced immune system. So this is serious. And there are clear things that we can do to keep ourselves safe. But we are living in this era of wildfire smoke. We have to be prepared. Become a far more common occurrence, not just in the weeks ahead this summer, but it's summers going forward because of the effects of climate change, the more the greater frequency of these wildfires and so on. So how can we as a country prepare to adjust to do this? What can we do in the short term to take better care of ourselves, to protect our lungs?

But what are some things we need to do longer range to people, particularly people with vulnerabilities, that this is the new reality? Jonathan, I'm so glad you asked that. And I think we have a graphic here just for the viewers that I'd love to take them through. There are certainly things that you can do to keep yourself safe. First of all, go to airnow.gov, airnow.gov to check your local air quality report. Yes, it might seem hazy outside, but Jonathan, the fact is you spend most of your time, most of your life indoors. If it's hazy outside, you want to make sure that your indoor air quality is as clean as possible. So stay informed. If it's bad outside, it's likely risky to be bad inside.

Avoid physical exertion. I can't tell you how many people still go out and runs when it's hazy outside. That's a bad thing to do. Even if you are otherwise healthy, clean your indoor air. You want to make sure that if you have an AC, as an example, look and see what type of filter you have in that. Make sure when it's clean, you're cleaning it regularly. If you can, order a MERV 10 or MERV 13 filter. It's actually going to catch the particles from the wildfire smoke much more effectively than the filters that are usually in place. That's vital. That's one of the most important things you can do. MERV 13 filters.

Run your AC as an additional point. If you have AC, I know a lot of people don't have AC, but if you have AC, make sure the inset people don't have AC, but if you have AC, make sure the inset to the fresh air intake is shut off. You're setting it to recirculate. Again, that MERV 13 filter, keep your windows closed. If you have asthma, COPD, one of these underlying health conditions, make sure you're optimized for their medical regimen, that you're feeling well, you have refills in your inhalers to as optimize as possible. And then lastly, those masks we talked so much about the last three and a half years, use them. N95s will protect you fully, but they're better than nothing. Dr. Gupta, good morning. It's good to see you. I want to turn you to that heat in Texas. The

people in Texas are used to the summertime being hot, but this is something else. Heat over 110 degrees rivaling the temperatures in the Sahara Desert and the Persian Gulf right now, making Texas among the hottest places on earth right now. The risks are obvious, but this has been going on. This is sustained now for a long time. What do the people down there do about it? How do they cope? This is difficult. Again, a lot of these places have grid problems. If you have AC, you have to utilize it. If you don't, there are shelters that are being put into place across these places in the Southwest that are experiencing high heat. Just real quick,

I know we don't have a ton of time. A lot of heat. It's not just heat stroke. There's cardiovascular compromise. We've seen now heat actually impact, again, maternal health, result in preterm birth. And there's now clear evidence here that excess of heat leads to premature aging. There's a lot of ways in which heat is causing ill human health, Lily, in ways that we don't often talk about. So critical to protect yourself and get shelter publicly or if you have it at home. We want our friends down there to be safe and certainly check on your neighbors as well. NBC News medical contributor, Dr. Vin Gupta.

Dr. Gupta, always great to have you on. Thanks so much. Some other stories making headlines this morning. The former sheriff's deputy who failed to confront the gunman in the Parkland school shooting has been acquitted. Yesterday, a jury found Scott Peterson not guilty of seven counts of child neglect, three counts of culpable negligence,

and one count of perjury. Investigators accused Peterson of retreating as the shooting unfolded inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018. 17 people were killed in that attack.