Pod Save the World - Our new coronavirus reality

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

Tommy and Ben talk about the new normal as the world combats the coronavirus. They cover how South Korea has successfully reduced cases, how the Trump administration was warned about this threat, how a functioning White House should respond, Trump’s war of words with China and much more. In non-coronavirus news, they discuss the possibility of a new Prime Minister in Israel. Then Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy joins to discuss the latest on the COVID-19 relief package in Congress.

Welcome back to POTS Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben. It's good to be 10 feet away from you. This is far as we've been. This is weird. So I think we should start by noting that this is scary and unprecedented times. And while I am no health expert, I feel like it's pretty clear that life is about to be radically different for several months. And it probably won't be fully back to normal for like a year, 18 months. We don't really know. And maybe the reason for that is that long term, there's only a couple ways to do. deal with the virus. The first is a path we don't want to go down as a country, which is for everybody to get it, basically. The British path. Yeah, the British path, where 60 or 70% of the population gets the virus and thus we become immune. But that would mean that a million more people are killed probably. The second way out of this thing we're dealing with is develop a vaccine that makes us immune or really good antiviral treatments that decrease the lethality. But experts say a vaccine is a year to 18 months away from being ready. So what we have to do in the interim is practice social

distancing to break down the chain of transmission and limit the spread as much as humanly possible. And that means working from home and sitting as far away from you as I possibly can in this room and just trying to keep the number of cases down so that the system isn't overwhelmed. But it feels like this is our weird new normal for a while and it's scary and it sucks. And it's going to change everything, including this show. So we're going to try to keep you guys up to date on all the most important things happening in the world. And a lot of those will be from a coronavirus angle because this virus is likely to not just be a health care scare. It's likely to lead to political changes and test democracies and impact people in ways we haven't thought

about yet. And so, you know, this is pretty dark moment in our history, but I promise we won't be all the time. We're going to be our usual profane and avuncular cells. And we'll try to figure out things we can do to make our lives better individually. And we're going to get through this, but it's going to be a frightening period in our lives that we'll probably remember forever. So how's that for an intro? Yeah, I don't really know. Let me just say that I want to thank the Worldo, who Tommy and I went out to dinner recently. And this bartender sent over shot, you know, said he was a Worldo. And let me just say that that shot didn't sit that well with me. But I still appreciate it because that's the last time I went to a restaurant. And that may be

the last time I go to a restaurant for a really long time, which is a massive change in my life, but then makes you think of, well, how much did that bartender count on that salary, right? And I have to say, you know, people always ask me, you know, do you miss your job? Do you miss the White House? And I think they're surprised when I usually say, I actually don't because my life is much better. But I've actually really found myself missing being there now because not that I'm a genius and I would solve the coronavirus. But just the capacity to feel like you're doing something

and that you have some agency in a crisis is very acute in the White House. And frankly, I do think that if we were there, this would just be so different. And we can talk more about that. It's not because Obama was great. It's because Obama was normal. Like, I'm not measuring this against great.

And so I have this mixture of the fear and anxiety that everybody has, the stir craziness that's going to come with having a three-year-old, five-year-old girl on top of me constantly in the house. But also just the, you know, absolute frustration that I just don't think this has to be going like it is. Yeah. And that, that says something very sad about where we are as a society in 2020, that something that didn't need to, and we'll get into why, but did not need to be at the point that it's at.

Because make no mistake, where it's at is that because governments around the world failed to deal with this, we have to. You know, I mean, that's what social distancing is. It's like there could not be responses by governments to contain an outbreak where it was. And so therefore, it's sufficiently spread that all the responsibility shifts over to citizens. And we should welcome that responsibility. But again, you do not need to be a public health expert to understand that a virus spreads if you can contain that spread in a certain geographic locality or even several certain geographic localities that you wouldn't get to a place where the outbreak was sufficient that every single American is going to probably have to end up sheltering in place. Yeah, yeah. But here we are.

I know exactly what you're saying because when I left the White House, I was so ready to be gone. I missed the people. I missed the issues. I missed the information. But the first time I missed the job was during the Boston bombing. Yeah. Which is a weird thing to say, but it felt like a terrorist attack on my hometown and I was just like a spectator for the first time in a long time and I felt completely impotent to deal with it. And I think that's how we all feel right now. One note, you know, if you want like coronavirus news from a doctor and a public health expert, subscribe to Abdul Sayed's show America dissected coronavirus. He is smart, calming. He'll keep you well informed. He won't freak you out. So I think there'll be a really great resource for people.

It's going to be twice a week. So subscribe there. So why don't we just start by giving you guys a statistical snapshot of where things stand? So, uh, We're talking at 1.30 p.m. on Tuesday. The rate of spread in China and South Korea has slowed, but it is spiking in Italy. Italy has 31,000 infections. Iran has 16,000, Spain, 10,000, Germany, 8,000. The U.S. has over 4,000, but I would basically just ignore that number because we are seemingly the only place incapable of testing for the coronavirus. The CDC is now saying, don't gather in groups of more than 10. San Francisco is telling residents to shelter in place for a couple weeks, three weeks, I believe. You're seeing school cancellations all over the country.

cities and states are locking down. They're closing bars, they're closing restaurants. Too late, in my opinion, but they're doing it. So we're starting to see a very significant response. The challenge is we don't have a centralized enforcement or response from the White House. So it's happening in this patchwork fashion. So, you know, if that sounds a little bit bleak, it's because it is. Yeah.

And usually you would have the White House establishing the baseline that all 50 states are following and then various municipalities are following. And it's remarkable to kind of watch this play out, you know, like you all are probably on Twitter and cable news. And it's like every now and then some new mayor sets a new baseline. And so it's like, you know, suddenly Garcetti says he's shutting down the gyms. And so now other mayors are being asked, are you going to shut down the gyms? Or the governor. Or Diplazio goes to the gym. Yeah. Or DeBlazio goes to the gym. Or the governor of Illinois, you know, I think was the first one I saw at a statewide. level shut down bars and restaurants. And it's very odd. It's not that all of those cities and

states are doing that because they're like on the front line. It's not all Seattle and Washington State. So this is not a situation where you have a patchwork of responses based on and driven by an understanding of the spread of the virus, because frankly we don't have an understanding the spread of the virus because of the lack of testing. What you're having instead is, is a Patrick response because there's just no baseline from Washington. I mean, I could ask you, Tommy, like, what is the White House's guidelines on what should be open and closed? They don't know. You know, you finally saw Trump say no gatherings of more than 10 people after basically that had been mandated at the local level or by commissioners of sports leagues here, you know?

And think of it this way, Tommy, too. every mayor who's had to make that decision, how many hours of meetings have they been in to make that decision that should have been made for them by the White House? Right. And that's time they could have been spending doing other things to prepare. A mayor shouldn't be like dialing through the phone book for the 45th best disease expert they can get on the line. It should be the White House with the people in the CDC. It's ridiculous. Yeah.

Well, we'll get into the U.S. response more later. But so let's start with what passes for good news in terms of the coronavirus response, which is South Korea. So as of Monday, infections in South Korea have leveled off at around 8,000. And that is because the Koreans have managed to test more than 250,000 citizens. And that's the number as of Tuesday afternoon. The tests are administered for free. The government also has broad health emergency powers that arose after the SARS epidemic that allow them to force testing or keep infected people hospitalized or quarantined or even force people to get vaccinated in some instances. So South Korea can test 20,000 people per day at over six.

630 sites. They get the results within the day. South Korea also provides us with a powerful example of the need for social distancing because South Korean authorities believe that one woman who has been called patient 31 infected at least 37 people at her church, 37. And that is why everyone else is not allowed to go to bars or restaurants or sports games because you could be a so-called super spreader and just explode this epidemic. So Ben, I think this example is, it's helpful because it gives us some hope. It shows us a path forward. And it shows us what not to do.

And it knocks down this idea that you're also hearing out there that only an authoritarian government like China can combat the coronavirus because what it takes is like brutal, blunt force. In fact, Chinese government policies, which we can get it to more detail later, but they made this outbreak way worse before they were able to contain it. Yeah. And I think we should be mindful that you're going to start to see a bunch of hot takes probably turbocharged by the Chinese, that once again this proves that their authoritarian system

is able to respond better than democracies. That's not the case for two reasons. One, as you said, they're part of the reason we're in this problem because their failure to contain this quickly is what allowed essentially the horse to get out of the barn to begin with. But secondly, it's not just South Korea, too. If you look at Germany, Germany moved very rapidly to deploy testing. Angla Merkel was very transparent from the get to. go. And the result was that out of the first 1,000 cases that were confirmed in Germany, there were only two fatalities, which is a dramatically lower fatality rate. What that shows you is that they're testing so widely that they're catching, you know, everybody who's caught the disease,

or maybe not everybody, but certainly a much higher share, such that you get this lower reported rate of fatality and they're able to contain the spread of it. And so this is not about whether democracies can handle it. It's about whether democracies are going to be smart in handling it. And thus far, I think Germany and South Korea give you hope that you can pretty dramatically bend this curve. The problem is that was very testing related. And we may have missed the window when that form of testing was most essential. It's still useful. And if you see in Italy, by contrast, I think they're just beginning, based on reports, to slow the growth in cases. That curve is beginning to bend, not nearly as dramatically

to South Korea. And that's because of the social distancing measures that they've done, which is what we're doing, right? Yeah, exactly. And so testing is the difference between being Italy and South Korea and Germany. Yeah. So let's talk about the U.S. response for a minute. So Trump keeps saying that no one saw this kind of pandemic coming,

no one could have predicted it, blah, blah, blah. That is obviously a lie. Um, Ebola was in 2014. The movie Contagion came out in 2011. Like, just in case anyone thinks that this message wasn't sufficiently conveyed? Like, here's a story for you. On January 13th, 2017, the outgoing Obama administration team hosted a briefing for Trump's transition team. This was like a very senior level meeting. It was Obama's chief of staff, national security advisor, CIA director, secretary defense, Dr. Fauci was there, like 30 top Obama administration people. On the Trump side, you had Secretary Mnuchin, you had Mike Pompeo,

and then like Reince Priebis, Rex Tillerson, General Mattis, like senior people. and then some clowns like what's his name, the press secretary? Oh, Spicer. John Spicer. Danzing with the Stars, Spicer. So, you know, it's not great that all the senior sort of people you would thought that were well thought of are gone now, but whatever. But this was an exercise to go through a hypothetical scenario where a new strain of flu

emerges in Asia. It overwhelms health systems and it quickly moves around the world and what could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918. So this exercise in 2017 is, literally what's happening right now. And I'm not raising this to suggest that one planning meeting somehow makes it easy to respond in a situation like this, far from it. But my point is, this was not only predictable, but predicted. And Ben, you know, I know you didn't attend this meeting, but you helped prepare it. You were still in government. Can you explain, like,

what a tabletop exercise is, how it works, and why these briefings or exercises are mandated by law? Yeah. So the, I mean, the first thing I'd say, I was reminded of this recently, by a friend of mine, you know, when Obama would meet with foreign leaders or, you know, frankly, other people ask this question, they'd say, you know, what's the one thing that keeps you up at night? And he would always respond, particularly in the last couple years after Ebola, a pandemic, you know, which I think surprised people. They expected to hear like a nuclear war or a financial crisis or a terrorist attack. But I think what he understood and certainly had learned from Ebola when we averted worst case scenarios is that a pandemic is something that

can catch you off guard and wipe out far more people than anything other than, say, a nuclear war. And a pandemic is a much greater likelihood. In fact, you know they're going to come. Like, you know there are going to be outbreaks of novel diseases. This is not only predicted, it just happens every few years, you know. You don't go a decade without some new novel disease emerging somewhere. And so at the end of the administration, you know, there was a desire to say, okay, what is the most important? We have limited time once they get the team picked out, what is the most important thing that we can do with them? What are the most important threats we can prepare them for? And for the same reason that we set up this global

health security directorate at the NSC that's gotten some attention, we had this tabletop exercise. And what a tabletop exercise is is you get people around, you know, a table. Tell me more. Not unlike, you know, all the situation room meetings you're in, right? And you basically put them through scenarios of, okay, here's what's happening. there's, let's say, an outbreak of a new novel virus in China. And you're the Commerce Secretary and you're the Secretary of State and you're the Secretary of DHS. What is your respective role?

And you put the incoming administration into the position of managing a crisis and make them make decisions. Sounds a lot like Pentagon Wargaming. It's like, it's exactly same thing as a war game. Like you put people in the position where they have to anticipate, okay, what decisions will I have to make? And you at least get them thinking, okay, oh, this is what this would feel like. And this is the problem set.

Right. And then importantly, here are the resources I have to potentially draw on, because that's all part of the materials, right? And I think, you know, number one, that president of the United States wasn't taking this seriously because Trump shut down, obviously, that global health security directorate and slashed funding for CDC and every budget he proposed. Number two, the chaos in the administration matters. So, you know, there are all these graphs of how rapid the turnover is under Trump and how many

secretaries of defense he's gone through and national security advisors. and that's easy to laugh at when it's like, you know, Sean Spicer quitting to go for dance at the stars. But like at the same time, that means that the people in these jobs, they weren't prepared. They haven't been there. They don't know what they have at their own capacity. Right. Like the National Security Advisor, who was previously the hostage advisor trying to free ASEP Rocky, has been in there for a few months.

He's probably not at all familiar with. Right. The guy who went to this exercise was, Mike General Flynn, who that day, I believe, learned. that his fucking Russian phone calls had been disclosed, and he was fired like less than a month later. Yeah, and this gets to one of the basic themes of this whole episode in our history, which is that when you devalue, in fact, disdain expertise and run the White House in a fundamentally unstable way, when a crisis hits, all of that is exposed right away. And so the exercise we did was meaningless for them because, number one, almost none of those people are sitting in the same chairs,

and number two, they didn't work for a guy who cared about it. And frankly, they worked for a political party that has disdained government for most of my lifetime. Yeah, unless it's killing terrorists. So clearly, like, the response has been disastrously slow. Trump won't take responsibility. He said today that his only failure is getting good press, which is just amazing. You know, watching those press readings is like, it's so enraging. He's actually getting better press than you just sort of.

I know, I know. It's one of his successes. So, like, setting aside for a minute, like what they're doing, let's talk about. about what a good president would be doing, like a normal president would be doing because, you know, we saw it up close. We saw competent technocratic leadership up close. I keep reading that Trump rarely stops by the Corona Task Force meetings, which seems wild to me because there is nothing that forces government action like the President of the United States literally sitting at the table demanding something happening. It tends to happen. So that's weird. I'm also surprised when we talked

with Senator Murphy about this a little bit at the lack of an effort to coordinate an international response. Like you're not seeing the G20 or anything spun up. And obviously we have an acute need to manage what's happening here in the U.S., but, you know, we could learn from other countries. One and two, until we have a vaccine to suppress this virus, if it's raging through Africa or Southeast Asia, it's going to find his way back to the U.S. And it could destabilize other countries in the process.

So, you know, Ben, if you were Trump's national security advisor, what do you think you would be doing? How would you structure a response? Like, would you say, set up a parallel health care infrastructure with the military, like some of suggested? Like, what are some of the ideas out there you think we'd pursue? Well, you know, I think I'd tick through the very stage of this. And, you know, unfortunately, I'll start with a step that has already been missed. But, you know, the initial effort to contain the outbreak. The example I give is Obama, you know, we were briefed

on an Ebola curve. We were shown by the head of the CDC, left unchecked. Here's what the spread of Ebola would do. And it looked, this is podcasting so I can't draw it, but it looked exactly. like the curves that we're seeing, you know, just rocket up. The hockey stick, exponential. Yeah, millions of people at risk of being infected. With the disease, it was much more lethal. And Obama asked about the capacity to surge materials, healthcare workers, healthcare equipment infrastructure to West Africa,

so we could contain it there, so it wouldn't spread anymore. And that didn't exist within the normal pools of resources available. And he basically said to Susan Rice, National Security Advisor, like, well, then we need to go find a different option, right? And she came back with this novel idea of deploying thousands of U.S. troops, so reaching for the U.S. military to provide a function it doesn't usually do. Essentially, the U.S. military went to war against Ebola and built that health infrastructure. So number one, we could have contained it, and that's also an example of how a president can force his team

through the right questions to try to go find alternatives. And that leads me to the second thing, which is the testing. I mean, I just can't imagine if President Obama was in this situation, he would be asking for updates, like, every four hours about how we're doing on testing. Yeah. I mean, he did this all the time. I'm not, you know, this is not something I'm inventing for coronavirus. This is the reality of how he responded to everything from, like, the failure of the Obamacare website when it launched to the campaigning incisis, like hourly-type reports.

And if things weren't getting better fast enough, he would say, well, that's unacceptable and find a different way to do it. And so instead of just, like, continuing to work at the wrong model, say, like, we've made the wrong choice in rejecting WHO testing and trying to develop our own, he'd make sure that there were multiple streams going to develop these tests and deploy them. Like, he would be so mad every time he got that feedback loop that the government would have to go find a different way to do it. And I think that's what that presidential engagement gets you is essentially kind of direct accountability if it's focused on the right issues on the most urgent matter, which in this

case is testing. I think the military is a key piece of this because I've been wondering when they're going to get more involved because they're sitting over there with massive capabilities. I mean, you're talking about a nearly trillion dollar budget that, by the way, includes a lot of health care because they have the cutting edge, really, and they have things like respirators and hospital beds. And so if you're the president, don't just ask, you know, the people at CDC and NIH about what are the hospital bed availability and what are the availability of some of the supplies that could get stressed, even, say, surgical masks. Go find where that is in the government. And one place is definitely the Pentagon.

And so I think you'd have a president who was willing to look at and understand the resources available to them in a normal circumstance, breaking some of these loggens where stuff isn't getting done. And then importantly, as I alluded earlier, setting the national baseline, Obama would have a group of experts in, and he'd be saying, okay, what's the worst case scenario that we're going to get to here? And I saw him do this in other circumstances, say, like, tell me where this is actually going to end up so we can start talking about that now.

Yep. And so a week ago, it became apparent that social distancing was going to be important. If social distancing is important to containing the spread of this virus, you know you're going to end up with basically de facto shelter in place. So I think a normal president would have asked those questions one week ago and come out of the box with the robust guidelines that could then inform what state and local governments do. And instead, Trump is kind of staying half a step behind where everybody else is head it. And so that's, it's that consistency of communication of resourcing and also of coordination

with foreign governments because there seems to be none of that happening so that not only you have a baseline at home, but you're trying as best you can to have a baseline for things like travel and social isolation and development of potential treatments with other countries. Yeah. So good news, bad news, right? There has been a stark shift in tone that happened on Monday when it comes to the seriousness of the steps they want to take. So, on Sunday, the CDC recommended limiting gatherings to under 50 people. On Monday, the White House said, oops, just kidding, avoid gatherings in groups of over 10 people, avoid travel, close schools, work from home if you can, don't go to bars and restaurants. None of that is mandated,

but they certainly change their tone from the sort of like laissez-faire. Oh, it's going to go away in April when the fucking weather gets warmer. This change was reportedly because of a British scientific report from a university in the UK that did a model that said without drastic action to suppress the coronavirus spread, 2.2 million Americans could die. And that includes an 8 or 9% mortality rate for people over 80 years old. Now, that's a statistical model. It assumes the government does nothing. Models are not perfect predictors of the future. But holy shit. And to your point earlier, like, imagine how the country would have reacted if knowing that possibility, we had been told the stakes of taking social distancing seriously.

If kids had known that going to the bar on St. Patrick's Day could mean this catastrophic death toll or the beach. You know what I mean? It's like he has lied and spun the American people to try to get through the day's political news in a way that will likely exacerbate the problem. Yeah. And I think one of the things I became really acutely conscious of

when I was working in the White House, is just how big a megaphone the presidency is, you know, that the president of the United States says and does things, and that's consumed by a scale of the American people that no other politician even comes within a fraction of reaching, you know? And so we'd be getting bombarded by Republican critics, and I'd be getting really mad in the White House, and Obama would go out and give a speech, and I realize, wait a second, like, I'm, you know, consuming all this criticism of us, but Obama is able to communicate over everybody's heads directly the American people in a way that nobody else is.

And this has been so important in the last few weeks because if you're a world, though, you've probably been aware of these worst-case scenarios for weeks because you closely follow the news and you're on Twitter or you're reading stuff or you're listening to podcasts. But let's keep in mind that, like, most people aren't doing that. And if you're kind of vaguely aware of the news,

it's something that's kind of on in the background somewhere, all you're really likely to see is like the President of the United States pops up and there's a clip or something. And so when Trump was popping up and saying, oh, it's 15 cases going down to zero or, oh, we've got it under control essentially, you know, that's hurt by people. Of course. And then... And that's what they want to

hear. Yeah, and the easiest thing to point out is that the right-wing media is like, oh, yeah, see, you know, it's a hoax. But even kind of, you know, I looked at those young people, even people are not like living in Fox News, they're not just watching news at all. If they think, oh, there's something out there that sounds dangerous, but literally the President of the United States,

even if he is kind of full of shit is like, oh, you know, it's going to zero. You're going to be more likely to go to the bar. You assume he's well informed? Yeah, you assume he's well informed and he seems totally relaxed about this. And so I think we can't overstate how much

he modeled the wrong behavior when the presidency is supposed to model the right behavior. Now I think something finally got to him. Yeah, it sounds like it was a statistical model. I think, yeah, like this statistical model, frankly, the market's just in spiral. He looked like a different guy.

But let's be very clear here. Because, like, you know, I go on TV and cable TV is now, like, the new tone. He does have a new tone. He seems shocked into some sobriety by this. And then he goes on Twitter and, like, attacks the governor of Michigan. Without any context, yeah. What are you talking about? It's still, like, let's not, like, you know, give him the benefit of grading him on such a curve that, like, you know, jumping an inch clears the bar.

No, it's ridiculous. So let's talk just about the UK for a second to give you an example of why models like this are difficult to base policy off of. So there's a ton of complicated assumptions and inputs to a model that creates an output like 2.2 million deaths, like the age range, lethality of the disease, like your medical capabilities as a country. So this thing was developed by the Imperial College in London and they had an error in some of their inputs initially. And that error led UK officials to at first adopt what's called a mitigation strategy. And that is designed to slow but not necessarily stop the spread of the disease.

And that's distinct from a suppression strategy where it is what we're doing right now, where you take drastic action, you drive down the number of cases as quickly as possible, and you try to keep them there and keep it from spreading. The mitigation strategy that the Brits tried when they fix their model, when they put in the correct death rate, initially they were using what they thought the impact would be, on comparison to viral pneumonia. When they got real numbers about the coronavirus and its lethality, they updated their

model and they figured out that the mitigation approach that had been adopted by Boris Johnson and his government would still lead to 250,000 deaths in the UK alone. So they were heading purposefully down a course of action that would have been just catastrophic. So like this is like one of the most consequential rounding errors in history, but it is just stunning to believe that something like that, an error and input error or a modeling error could lead to such a catastrophic outcome. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's a reminder that kind of governing is a human endeavor. Right. And there's human mistake and technological mistake that humans don't catch that can have grave consequences. I also do think, though,

that one of the things we're learning, and like, I'm not going to blame the rounding error directly on Boris Johnson, but the indirect point I would make, and I really mean this sincerely, is that we seem to have devalued kind of intelligence and expertise in leaders in general. And the reason you want presence in prime ministers who are very intelligent and very intellectually curious and very honest is because those are precisely the attributes you want in a crisis. In part because governments kind of reflect the personality of the person who's leading them. Personnel is policy. Yeah, and so there's kind of an ethos and an approach to the job that seeps down.

So this does show how much of human endeavor government is. I think all of this, all these episodes and all these countries should kind of restore a sense of like, you know what? Like, it's good to elect smart, honest people because if you're just voting on your kind of cultural projections and grievances, that may feel good for a while. But in a crisis, you're going to want to make sure that, despite. or possible as person is in there. Yeah, look, look, I know that you elect a president and you kind of, like, live with them for four years or maybe eight years, but somehow we got to a place where picking a president based on who you'd rather have a beer with became the thing that we, we fetishized and not like the smartest human being possible who would think to get a second opinion or

build the most effective team that's technocratic and bright, and it's toxic. And that's not a partisan comment because if there's a right-to-centered person who could do that, I mean, look, Anglomerical is a right of center politician. So this is not even a left-right point. It's just a basic value of competence and governance around the world. Let's talk a little bit about a kind of dark man-made piece of this problem, which is fake news and coronavirus-related scams. And so this is more just like a PSA for people to be aware of. So there's been a fake or factually inaccurate audio recording of a woman saying that ibuprofen

accelerates the spread of the coronavirus, and that has been racing through the phone. of German language speakers on WhatsApp. There's been similar messages that have been recorded in Slovak, so clear this is purposeful. WhatsApp users in Belgium are hearing that the country is about to be locked down. Poland has false rumors about lockdowns.

None of this is true, by the way. This is just like literally fake news spreading on WhatsApp. Here in the U.S., the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is selling products that he says will kill the coronavirus. Imagine that, like how fucked up that is.

Obviously, that's a lie. Maybe worse. Wired reported that hacker are using fear about the coronavirus to generate fishing scams, which are designed to get your personal information, your passwords, your bank info. There was, I guess, an attempt by Russian hackers to send fake messages about the coronavirus that were designed to look like they came from Ukrainian Ministry of Health, and that was used to target people in Ukraine with a disinformation campaign that resulted in riots. So hearing about this shit associated with this virus,

kind of saps your faith in humanity, but I just wanted to flag it, Because, you know, in the absence of a credible federal government, we're all looking for sources of information. And I am as guilty as anyone about, like, sharing, retweeting random Twitter threads and other shit. But I guess I would just say, be vigilant about what you click. Be vigilant about what you scare. You know, don't trust anything that is from your bank about the coronavirus, right? Like, practice a little social media distancing for a while because shitty people are out to get you right now. Well, you also get the good of humanity when you get, like, the neighbors, like, doing impromptu cello concerts for their elderly. Or, like, Jose Andres, like, whatever he's done over the last decade, just being a good guy.

But I think, you know, first of all, just to point the utility of the segment, I got the ibuprofen thing. Did you? And I thought I didn't know it wasn't right. Right. How would you? You just fact-checked this for me. But I think the only thing I'd add to this, number one, it's a fact of the current geopolitical environment. that you can be sure that some governments will try to take advantage this with disinformation campaigns.

You know, this is going to play out over many months. You know, Russia could wreak havoc here. Others could as well. We live in a world where whatever is going on, not just our elections, because it's always focused on our elections. We have to remember that, like, there are constant disinformation campaigns in this country emanating from Russia and probably other countries. Second thing is we have to remember that, particularly when people are nervous, what travels the fastest and the farthest is usually something sensational, right? So it's usually some conspiracy

theory or some worst case scenario. And so, yeah, look for where the information's from, as you said. I think the last point is that, you know, when you're in a crisis, it kind of exposes some of the underbelly of your own culture and society, you know. And so we've already talked about how it's kind of exposed, like, how do we elect somebody like this in the most place? It certainly exposes the entrenched nature of right-wing information in this country that so many fewer Republicans thought that this was a serious thing as Democrats, but also this too. It just shows the vulnerability of our communications to being manipulated to disinformation campaigns. And so one of the interesting things to do, as we're all social distancing and socially isolating, is thinking about, you know,

what have we learned about ourselves that we need to get better, you know? And this is one of those areas where we need to literally extend the metaphor, develop antibodies to these disinformation campaigns. Well, and frankly, I think I'd like to put a lot of the on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. I mean, they're all owned by the same parent company, Twitter, a lot of these companies where this shit is spreading because they need to help us. Like, they need to help people figure this out. They need to cure it. And they always say, we're not media companies, so we don't have an obligation. But now we see, you know what? Actually, you do have an obligation. You certainly don't want to spread potentially life-threatening disinformation. Yeah.

then speaking of fake news, Trump keeps deflecting blame for his coronavirus response by bringing up Obama's response to the H1N1 or swine flu outbreak in 2009. And I was in the White House at the time. Like, I barely remember this period, probably maybe because I didn't specifically work on it, mostly because we had a lot of shit going on with the financial crisis and everything else. But do you want to respond to his claim that there was somehow some catastrophic response in that instance and just give people the tools to fact check? their conservative Maga cousin who uses this as a rejoinder? Yeah, I mean, this has been really crazy in part because of what you just said, Tommy.

I lived through that, and I don't remember at all this being seen as a subject of a lot of controversy. So it's almost like he went back in time to just find some example to lie about in order to hang this on Obama. I mean, the reality was, I do remember in 2009 amidst the financial crisis. So I remember a lot of kind of gallows humor about, I can't believe we're going to have to deal with this at the same time as financial crisis. But, you know, you have the development of this virulent strain of flu, H1M, swine flu.

And I remember there being some concern. The testing was surged, contrary to what Trump said. We got a million tests out to understand how this was spreading. I think there was a sense initially that we were a little behind but caught up. There was a lot of communication around, you know, good practice. just like washing your hands. President Obama did a lot to try to model certain behavior. Remember the coughing into your elbow arose around this. Obama's later doing videos coughing to his elbow. He's doing elbow bumps before they were cool,

eventually getting a flu shot. And then a vaccine was developed. And so Trump has lied in a number of ways. He's totally lied about the lack of testing. The test came online much faster than Trump has said. He said it took months. It didn't. Secondly, he's inflated the number of because there ended up being on order of 20,000 deaths because of H1N1, but that number is actually lower than many seasonal flus. This was a flu, unlike the coronavirus, this was. And so he's sought to, I think, in a really, if you think about a crass way, use the number of deaths from this flu as a political weapon.

I mean, you know, so let's not give them too much credit for changing the tone here because I can't imagine anyone else, you know, who would. do this. And he's also kind of created the impression that Joe Biden was in charge of this whole response, which he wasn't. So everything about what he's saying is a lie or it's a huge exaggeration or it's an effort to take a number out of context and scare people with it. I mean, you can go to fact check.org, did a good fact check on this. So did CNN. But to me, it just shows you that his thought process runs to his own internal political interest. Yeah, it's all fucking spin. All right, let's do one non-corona thing before we talk China.

So we have talked a bunch of times on the show about the multiple three-in-a-year Israeli elections, but there might finally be some light at the end of the tunnel. So Benny Gantz, former general, head of the blue and white party, B.B. Netanyahu's opponent. He has been given the first opportunity to form a government. As you remember, you have these elections, but you're just voting for Knesset seats, tons of parties run. And then you need to build a coalition that includes 61 of the 11th, 20 Israeli parliament seats to become prime minister. So it appears that Gantz might be able to do it.

The president of Israel has tasked him with the government formation process. The coalition that he would build would include his blue and white party, the joint list, which is a coalition of Arab majority parties in Israel, and then a right wing, very right wing, secular party. And that would get him to 61. So then I have no idea how that group would actually function together. But I guess their dislike of Prime Minister Netanyahu is so strong that they're willing to give it a shot? Yeah, I mean, you know, the swing vote in this whole thing has been Avidore Lieberman, who, you know, is a bright-wing politician in Israel, but really broke hard from Netanyahu and kind of loathed Netanyahu. And Gans essentially had to agree to a whole range of conditions from

Lieberman in order to get his support. And most of these actually dealt with domestic issues, so this is less foreign policy-based. And then now what Gans has is the opportunity to form a government. So he gets first crack at a coalition. So if he can hold this kind of rag-tag group together, that is largely motivated by their opposite to Netanyahu. So this is the challenge. These are not people who agree about a lot of stuff.

But if they can find enough common ground for a mandate to initiate and form a coalition, then you'll get Nanjau out. I think the one thing to watch here that's been interesting is that Netanyahu, for really the last 20 years in Israeli politics, his nickname has been kind of Mr. Mr. Security, you know, or I'd call him Mr. Fear. Like, you know, only he can protect you from the Palestinians or the Iranians. He plays the fear card in ways, you know, that would make George W. Bush blush, you know. And since this coronavirus happened, outbreak, he's been all over the place and he's been getting ahead of this and shutting down travel. And this is very much in line with his sale,

salesmanship that he's somehow the indispensable man in his politics. So I would watch for him to be making some play to, you know, try to appeal people back to him or even suggest that he has to stay to deal with coronavirus. Imagine the most cynical thing. Yeah, and this might not be the last time that a leader's like, no, no, coronavirus, only I can fix this. Yeah. I haven't before. I mean, the one thing that, look, I hope that Gans keeps this thing together and they get rid of Bibi Netanyahu because he's a terrible human being. But it has been gross. I mean, even the New York Times had a piece that the headline was, Israel faces a defining question, how much democracy should Arabs get? And it is so fucked up with how casually it is like the de-legitimization of

Arabs is discussed in Israeli politics. Yeah, they're Israeli citizens. They're treated as subhuman, not citizens, not deserving of rights. You know, they're questioning whether to treat them as partners or the enemy. It is, I mean, swap in any other group. any other ethnicity, any other religion in that headline, and people are screaming bloody murder, and rightly so. Yeah, and people have to recognize it. When they say Israeli Arabs, they're not talking about, you know, quote unquote, Palestinians who are living in the West Bank.

These are Israeli citizens. It's also the case that the reason Gans is even in this position is if you look at the joint list, if you look at these Arab parties. You know, they mobilize and they campaigned and they turned out they won seats and they're willing to play ball with Gans, right? So they have a big part of reaching this point. I will say to skeptics on the left who say, oh, you know, Lieberman, Gantz is really just a right-winger, it's all the same.

Israeli politics has been so paralyzed by Netanyahu, and he's been so successful at dividing and demoralizing the left. It's a prerequisite of making progress on anything that you have to get past the BVNNahua error. Right. You know, I'd like to see him held accountable. I'd like to see his corruption trial go forward and all the rest of it. But the most important point is that even if you think that a Benny Gantz government of this coalition is not, your ideal Israeli government, you have to recognize that unless Netanyahu is removed from this political equation, you're going to be stuck in place because that's where you've been for the last

decade. Totally. Let's talk China. So China was hit first and hard by the coronavirus. The government greatly compounded the problem by suppressing news about the risk. They eventually got a handle on it. They locked down cities. They locked down provinces like truly draconian measures.

Two months later, things are starting to get back to normal. Al Jazeera reported that 13 out of the 34 provinces in China have cleared their remaining cases, and 69,000 of 81,000 confirmed cases have been discharged. There's still 10,000 cases at the epicenter, but that number is finally manageable, and they've been able to send home some of the emergency health care workers that surged capacity to deal with the acute crisis. So Ben's obviously good news. But when I see reports that factories are starting to resume operations and public

transportation is going to come back online and inter-provence travel will resume. It makes me nervous because I just don't, I don't see any plan for how to keep this virus from flaring right back up. In fact, it seems impossible. Yeah, no, and I think, first of all, we pointed this out, but the original sin of not getting on top of this thing may have cost us all this opportunity. So before we give the Chinese a medal here, let's remember that they're the ones who initially failed to get on top of this. I think that the thing that is most unsettling to me about this whole virus, because this gets to your point, Tommy, is at home, for instance. Okay, let's say we avoid the worst-case scenario for the next couple months, and then the summer, everybody's back traveling and doing everything they're doing, and this thing comes roaring back in the fall.

Because Trump is saying, oh, go shopping again, travel, yeah, resume economic activity. And if you look at China, a country that is so vast where people live in such close proximity to each other, work incredibly close proximity to each other in those factories. And where there's a lot of connectivity of the global economy, so there's a lot of travel coming in and out of China, the ability of this virus to kind of regenerate and come back is pretty acute here. And so I think we have to be cautious as we look at countries as having bent the curve because it can come back at them. I think the Chinese are also probably, you know, looking at their own economic data and thinking, how do we balance the need to have the best response here against, you know, how much can we suffer a huge economic hit that could bring some instability? So that could lead them to make some poor choices if they start prioritizing.

We got to like start cranking up the machine in the Chinese economy again. Because if they do that too fast, you know, they could find themselves right back where they work. Yeah, that's exactly right. So now, meanwhile, Trump keeps calling the coronavirus the Chinese virus. A White House aide referred to it as the Kung flu virus to an Asian reporter's face. Great. So a couple of problems here.

First, uh, don't do that. I guess I, yeah, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that these guys found a way to be racist towards viruses, but wow. And clearly like, it's not just racist. It's going to exacerbate the stigma currently felt by Asian Americans who are obviously not at fault for what's happening. If you look around, uh, it's the Asian countries that are containing this virus. Uh, but it is now raging through Europe.

And so it's insane to stigmatize Asian people. Second of all, it's pissing off the Chinese. I mean, Trump today said he's doing this racist name-calling because he wanted to push back on Chinese propaganda that claimed the U.S. military gave the coronavirus to its citizens. Now, I just say I learned about this Chinese propaganda from Trump, so he seems to have given them a megaphone. But like, racist name-calling is not exactly a time-tested diplomatic tool to solve problems. So I'm not sure what the outcome is.

So Ben, I guess I'm just wondering how big a deal you think it is to inflame tensions with the Chinese right now. Presumably a better flow of information would help everyone. And then on top of that, we learned today that China is going to strip press credentials from journalists at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time Magazine, and Voice of America, which effectively means they're kicked out of the country. This comes in response to the U.S. cutting the number of Chinese state-run media employees who are allowed to work in the United States. we've talked about this previously. So I would just love to hear your thoughts on like that press expulsion tit for tat specifically, but then generally like how you think they should be approaching relations with China right now. Well, it seems like, you know, China virus is like the new radical Islam,

like the term that shows that you get it or you're tough or something. And, you know, let's not forget there were conspiracy theories from right-wing figures in the U.S. that this was a plot developed in a Chinese laboratory. Tom Cotton. So conspiracy theories flew in both directions. Here's what worries me. You already had, you know, pretty tense relations with the trade war. We kicked out a bunch of Chinese state media.

You and I talked about that we thought there was good reason for that, but also we worried about these reprisal steps. We lose our eyes in China. And when I say eyes, I don't mean U.S. government, because that stays there. I mean, independent journalists who can report on things like the coronavirus, that's a huge lost to American citizens. But what I worry about in this context of where this is headed with the rhetoric around the China virus and tit for tat on journalists is that the Trump administration seems to have kind of a political strategy to cast this virus as foreign, you know, as they do

everything that's a threat. But like it's foreigners coming here. It's from China. Travel restrictions. other, this justifies travel restrictions, this justifies anti-China rhetoric. Now you increasingly see Trump talking about how we're war with an enemy. There is a world in which there's a kind of blending of this, make this virus the other, tie it to China, that gets pretty ugly. You know, where ugly, because if you're Asian American, obviously it's a stigma attached to that kind of rhetoric, but I think ugly in the geopolitical sense where if Trump is trying to make this about somehow combating enemies from abroad, keeping people out, standing up to the Chinese who were the source of this virus.

You know, we don't know where this is headed. Like, we don't know whether millions of people are going to die. We don't know whether there's going to be like civil unrest in countries. We don't know whether governments will fall. I'm not trying to scare people. What I am saying is if we are entering a period over the next six months or so of that form of instability in different parts of the globe, the two biggest powers in the world who need to usually work together to deal with things. Like in Ebola, China was a partner and obviously

things like climate change. If we're in this kind of increasingly intense showdown, rhetorically and politically, our capacity to manage fallout and instability is going to be badly compromised. And so, like, I just kind of shelve all this garbage for the time being. I mean, I shelve it permanently, if I could. And I say that as someone who's a huge strident critic of the Chinese government, but a virus is not about politics. It should be, and I don't say that in the sense of don't criticize Trump. I say that in the sense of, like, that's a time for governments to cooperate across borders. And I worry that there's a dynamic being created that could, you know, make that increasingly difficult. Me too. And I think my experience or my big lesson from the Arab Spring is that

crises tend to beget more crises. Yeah, yeah. And we need to get a handle on shit. We don't even know. We're going to be having a conversation in four months that you and I, you know, couldn't predict. Yep. Yep. That's right.

So last thing on Corona is like, I just, I'm obviously very nervous about the U.S. response and the risk to Americans and that's paramount. But in part because of this show, you know, I can't stop thinking about the places that coronavirus is hitting or going to hit that we're just not even talking about or that will fall off the list of priorities. So, for example, Venezuela, I mean, it's a failed state, basically. They have no medical supplies. They didn't have, like, gauze or band-aids.

Now they're starting to get hit. 26 of 54 countries in Africa have confirmed cases, which is a scary sign for a continent with an acute, acute health care worker shortage. I imagine this disease in Haiti or Mumbai or Pakistan, like incredibly dense places, or even worse, like refugee camps in Syria, Turkey, Burma, Bangladesh. And so, you know, the challenge is when something like this happens, it becomes all-consuming and the world can only focus on one thing and understandably so. But that doesn't mean that those other problems go away, right? We talked about the dire situation in Yemen or Idlib province and those people will likely get hit and then also get less aid that they need.

So, like, I'm not saying this because I have good solutions at a minimum. Well, like a couple things. Like the U.S. should and could relax sanctions on places like Iran. and Venezuela that are being hurt and help get them humanitarian relief because boy, if we want to build better relationships with the people of Iran, the people of Venezuela, the people of Cuba, how about we fucking help them out

in an extreme situation? But it's also just, you know, it's a reminder for me for everybody that as much as it sucks being stuck in your house and watching Netflix, like, my God, this could be worse. Yeah. Yeah. Well, now is the time where you would want to see, you know, countries that are national donors

to organizations that's sports. refugees or deal in public health to be stepping up. You'd want the U.S. to step up. People are looking at causes to support. You know, this is one that does fall through the cracks in a crisis. And we saw this, you know, in the financial crisis, like, you know, people get focused at home. How this hits people who are living under extreme poverty or in extreme circumstances is, you know, much more life and death in most cases. You know, the sanctions point is critical because, you know, with Iran, in particular, I talked about this before, but like there's long been a complaint of a lack of health supplies that are caught up in your sanctions,

and we've gotten to that territory with Venezuela. And you're right that this is a moment, sometimes in crises you can make big gestures that can have an impact on how a whole population views you. The U.S., you know, even in recent history, has helped nations respond to earthquakes and floods and ways that, you know, we're down to our benefit for many years in terms of how those public attitudes looked at Americans. So, you know, I think, obviously, with adversaries like Venezuela and Iran, it's a chance to reach the people if we're able to have the courage to take those steps. But even in other places, you know, this would be a chance for the United States to demonstrate that we're someone you can look to for hand when you're flat on your back.

Again, I worry that this administration won't do that. But frankly, this is going to be playing out such that the next administration, so perhaps a Democratic administration could do that. Yeah, agreed. All right, that is all the news we wanted to go through this week. But before we get to our interview with Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut about what Congress is doing, let's just talk about shit you're doing at home to take your mind off this nightmare. So usually Favre and I were talking about this. Like usually I'm a news junkie, Twitter obsessed person. I'm starting to hit a diminishing return on news.

You know, I don't need to know the exact. count in Italy, and it's kind of making me fucking lose my mind. So some books. So you put me on in the Garden of the Beast by Eric Larson. Fantastic book. It's about the family of the U.S. ambassador to Germany, you know, as Hitler is gaining power. A book about terrifying and looming and brutal authoritarianism is maybe not the best thing for me to be reading before I go to bed, but it's a great book. Yeah. Yeah. And it reads like, I mean, you can't put it down. It's incredible. I read Nixon Land recently by Rick Pearlstein. which is I never thought I'd give a shit about Richard Nixon or care about his career.

But it was one of the most interesting books I've ever read. It's 900 pages long, but I read it faster than almost anything I've read recently because it's written with an interesting voice, but it doesn't just tell you like, and then Nixon did this and that. It's like explains the entire context of the country after Kennedy was shot and huge civil rights legislation. And then the Watts riots and sort of a racial backlash among white voters and how Nixon just change the electorate, it's incredibly good.

And if you now have a lot of free time, which we all do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nixon Land. Say nothing by Patrick Radden-Keefe is a good one. You got any? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, apart from, first of all, I have to say, like, making some half-ass attempts at homeschooling and think that teachers should be the highest paid people in the country.

But putting aside my deep relationships with the various kids' shows and different streaming services. I'm reading a great book called India by Patrick French. It's kind of like a survey of Indian history post-World War II. And it's, you know, pre this latest turn that we've been talking about inermode. But he writes very vividly, clearly with like a deep affinity and experience in the country. And part of what he does is show what a miracle India's progress was, you know, pulling together a secular, democratic, constitutional republic. It gives you a lot of context for understanding what's happening now, though, because, you know, you see the germ of Hindu nationalism, I mean, you see the tensions in the society. So if you're interested in India, that book, India,

by Patrick French is really good. A couple novels I've been reading, unfortunately tied to totalitarianism, but they have some hope in them. The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, who's just an amazing writer. It's a fictional account of the leading Soviet classical music composer during the Soviet Union. And he was occasionally harassed by the government. At times, he was a national hero. And it's all about being an artist, and he has to compromise some of his music in order to get it past the censors. Because even classical music, some of it was deemed as too bourgeois for the Soviets. So it's all about, like, how do you compromise?

Would it be more principled in not making music at all? Or is there a principle in doing what you love and making whatever compromise with the authorities you need to get through? It's just beautifully written, too. And also, I'm rereading the plot against America by Philip Roth. Oh, man, you're going dark. Yeah, it's pretty dark. This is the alternative version of U.S. history of Lindbergh had won the 1940 election against Roosevelt and basically become an American – well, he ran on platform of America first, right?

So you can guess what illusions are. But then I tend to go to comfort food, Tommy, so I'm, like, going all the way back, not just to Antiburban Parts Unknown, but to Antio Bordain, no reservations. So just binge watching Bordane. That's good. And so I turn off my Twitter feed, and I watch like three episodes of Anthony Burnay and like eating his way across Southeast Asia. And like I feel much better. That'll help.

Two other quick books. Hellhound on his trail by Hampton Sides, which is about like the last few months of Martin Luther King's life, the assassination by James Earl Ray and the Manhunt to find him, which spanned several continents. If you can actually believe it, it's one of the craziest narrative nonfiction stories ever. The spy and the traitor. So this book was on my Kindle. I didn't remember buying it. I started reading it. Halfway through there were all these real names and places.

So I googled it. So I was like, huh, they're using a lot of like real stuff. That's interesting. Turns out it's a true story. It's a craziest like Argo-like spy story ever. On TV, sex education on Netflix, mindless fun, shrill on Hulu. Fantastic. Jojo Rabbit is a great movie.

Great movie. I just watched that. A lot of Nazis in these wrecks. But, you know. I you know the other thing good world though content is the night manager you ever see that? Oh it's a great show. Yeah so it's like John LaCaree it's like armed dealers and

awesome. Eastern conflicts and you you will start and not be able to stop this if you're sitting on your catch all the time. I really like the spy did you watch that on Netflix? The spy too like all the LaCari stuff is worth going back and like this is the content you need and in the crisis is like spy stuff food stuff you know yeah and grossing take you out of your head I will also add a friend of the pod, Dave Lammy's new book just came out.

Oh, nice. Tribes, how our need to belong can make or break a society. There you go. All right. So pick up Lammy too. So that's the end of today's book and movie and TV wrecks, but I'm sure we'll have more next week because we ain't got shit to do. And if you've got kids, we're hanging on by thread to Dadora. It looks like we're going to make a big turn to Pinkalicious next.

Okay, okay. I'll keep an eye on that too. All right, when we come back, our interview with Senator Chris Murphy. I'm Akela Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. We're the hosts of What a Day at Crooked's Daily News Podcasts. Look, we understand keeping up with the news can be a challenge, especially when we're living in an actual pandemic and we haven't gone outside in a week. That's right. Life is like a movie. But you know what? That's why we're here. We'll be bringing you the news every weekday morning in about 15 minutes. So you're up to speed on the latest developments, both coronavirus related and not. And as always, our goal here is to keep you informed, but not feeling like you're overwhelmed. So you don't have to count on Twitter. which can be very exciting and dramatic, but also very scary and not always real. We're going to be level-headed right here all the time. Yeah, so go ahead and subscribe to What a Day. Now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

We are thrilled to be joined in our social isolation near-quarantined studio here by Senator Chris Murphy from Washington, D.C. Senator, thanks again for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. Thanks for what you guys are doing. Well, yeah, it's sitting alone in a room about 10 feet away from Ben is what I'm doing currently. So, Senator, the House has now passed two versions of a bipartisan coronavirus response bill that provides some expanded sick leave, food assistance, testing coverage, and unemployment insurance. But the Senate hasn't taken up the bill. Can you talk about why there's been a holdup and what the Senate's role has been in the negotiation of that package?

Well, it's really unconscionable that the Senate hasn't voted on it. We're talking right now on Monday afternoon, and we still don't have any scheduled vote. We may not vote until Tuesday. And, you know, why that's important is that there are moms and dads making decisions as we speak about whether they're going to go to work tomorrow. They may have a cough. They may have the beginning of a fever, but they also can't go a week without a paycheck. And so without knowledge that they're going to have some protection, they end up going to work. And, of course, that's dangerous for all of us.

And then you've got all these kids who are home and parents are leaving them alone or an unsafe situation, again, because they don't have this protection to stay home with their child knowing that they are still going to get paid. Now, the bill coming out of the house is a really partial fix. It's paid sickly, but only for a handful of the population. And so we have to do better than that. But as you also know, you know, this idea of helping workers stay home when they're thick as deeply. modern Republican orthodoxy. And so it's very hard for many of my Republican colleagues to get their head wrapped around the fact they're going to vote for a bill that's going to provide any kind of paid sick or family leave assistance to families. And so we're still sitting here

trying to get agreement on how we're going to do this vote. And meanwhile, families are really panicking at home, not knowing whether they can afford to not go to work tomorrow or whether they should just risk giving whatever early signs of the virus they have to their coworkers. Yeah. I mean, Senators, I know you are rushing to pass this bill as soon as you can, but what will Congress do if you guys go home and the entire country is then asked to shelter in place? I mean, what provisions are there for continuity of government for the Senate or for Congress generally? Well, I mean, that's a real-time debate that's happening, you know, both publicly, but, you know, more so privately amongst members of the Senate.

You know, what is our obligation right now? Should we be here in Washington? Should we be home setting an example, sheltering in our communities? I will say this. I worry about leaving Washington. I worry about not having any ability to monitor in real time and provide in-person pushback to what the administration is doing. If we had a normal administration that had this under some modicum of control, maybe we could all leave town. But I think we are going to need to be here, at least some of us, in order to keep the pressure on.

Social distancing is moving in the right direction. The CDC has started to take stronger measures and make stronger recommendations, but testing is still an abomination. And that is in large part because the administration still hasn't taken the necessary steps to increase capacity at public and private labs. So I understand the desire for a lot of my colleagues to get home, but I also think that we're likely going to need to be legislating on a weekly basis or at least staying on top of this administration from Washington. It's just a lot harder to do oversight from back into your states. And I just think we have a very unique obligation.

Okay. Well, look, Senator, you mentioned testing. And one of the things I think it's been so frustrating is to watch countries like Germany and South Korea that have had so much more success in containing this, in part because of their ability to deploy tests. But that also leads to this question that hasn't got a lot of attention, which is there's a lot of focus on the patchwork response at home between state and local governments because of the absence of a kind of national direction or baseline. I'm struck, having lived through Ebola, at the total absence of any international coordination here.

Normally, you would try to be harmonizing approaches across borders. Normally, you know, in the instance of a bowl, the U.S. organized UN meeting of over 40 countries took kind of control of the apparatus of the World Health Organization and other international resources. And I'm just wondering, given your purview from the Foreign Relations Committee and your interest in the foreign policy aspects of American leadership, what are you hearing from other governments or is there any international coordination taking? place out of the State Department, out of the White House. Why does this feel like there's nobody even paying attention to that part of this? Yeah, well, I mean, this is, you know, the chickens coming home to roost when, you know, you pursue in America first strategy when you see

good relations with the rest of the world as a sign of personal and national weakness. You are unfortunately incredibly vulnerable when a moment comes that requires international cooperation that requires the goodwill afforded to you by friends and allies. We have all been worried about the myopic nature of this administration's relationship with China. They appear to only be able to talk to China about one thing, and that is trade. And that conversation is a totally dysfunctional and helpful one. But it also has meant that we don't have room for other conversations.

And so it wasn't surprising that China shut down on us in those early days and weeks, robbing us of really important information about how the disease spread. You know, we have been at cross purposes with South Korea for much of the last several years, not on the same page when it comes to the approach towards North Korea. And that probably has something to do with the fact that we were not sharing technology early on as they were developing a test that we could have used. And then the disdain from this administration towards multinational institutions also was predictive of the fact that we decided.

not to use the WHO test, despite the fact that that test was easily repricable. It could be easily mass manufactured, but we chose not to use it and develop our own, I think in part because there was just perceived weakness in being part of any international organization or association. So it is not surprising that we are where we are today, but had we made different decisions to have a more functional relationship with China, to have a more cooperative relationship with the Koreans, and to be able to accept international technology. rather than reject it, we could have been in a fundamentally different place today. And if you're looking out at the fact that the world could be dealing with several months

of both a pandemic and the fallout from that, which will obviously hit differently in different places, and perhaps a global recession, perhaps on the order of the financial crisis, what do you think the kind of international coordination that is required if you're trying to deal with this effectively? You know, are you thinking about, you know, in the financial crisis, we obviously had to kind of coordinate stimulus to other countries. I mean, how should a normal response think about what we're heading into for the next six months to a year here? Well, at the very least, you want to be coordinating on a transatlantic basis. You want to be having a conversation with the EU and European nations about how to right-size stimulus policies. And, again, that is just not something that is going to happen under this administration.

It was just wild to watch the president announce an outright travel ban with Europe and have the Europeans learning about it as he was making the speech. You know, that's a sign of the dysfunctional relationship, but a warning sign about how difficult it is going to be to coordinate with them in the future. And then we also have to have a broader conversation about how we're going to stand up capacities in the short term that we don't have today. we're going to have some shortages of medical supplies. We already have them. And we really can't answer that on our own. We're going to have to work through that with the Europeans. For instance, the reagents that are used in the tests are mainly made in Europe. And so we can't, you know, produce enough domestically in order to fill our supply. We're going to need to have a joint conversation with them, one that, you know, would have easily happened under the Obama administration, really hard to figure out how it happens when, you know, our former ambassador to the EU who's no longer there, said that his job upon arriving in Brussels was to destroy the European Union. Yeah, that seems bad in hindsight. Senator, I mean, I'm struggling with the responsibility gene that exists inside every Democrat that believes, you know, government should function. It should provide services and solve problems for the American

people with feeling like Trump presents a grave health risk to the American people. I mean, he is still proposing a 2021 budget cut to health and human services by, I think, $9.5 billion. That includes a 15% cut to the CDC. And he's telling us to relax. He just, you know, he's been lying about the availability of testing. He's suggested sick people could go to work. He's modeling bad behavior. So I'm struggling with wanting this problem solved and wanting to do whatever I can as a Democrat to get there, but also wanting to make clear how much he has exacerbated the problem. and created a crisis in this country. And I'm wondering if you've figured out a way to do that. Well, just stop struggling. Like, don't struggle. It's not to me, I mean, I guess to me,

it's not a question of choosing one or the other. I frankly think it's my civic responsibility to point out what a miserable failure this administration's response has been. I think it's my duty as the United States senator to argue that the president of the United States shouldn't speak because he makes the problem worse when he does. And so I really worry about, about us being told that criticisms of the president, criticisms of the way in which he has botched this response from day one are political by nature. Well, maybe they are political, but they're political in the vein of trying to pressure him to do better. And if we all just pretend like the president has done a wonderful job and we censor ourselves because we're worried about looking

political or campaigning, then there's no pressure on the president and the people who work for him to do better, to be better, to get more tests out in the field, to start cooperating with all the people that we mentioned that need to be in the room with us. So I do both. I mean, I'm working on bipartisan legislation with a whole bunch of my friends in the Senate to try to make this situation better, but I'm also on a daily basis savaging the president's response because I think that's the only way to try to make sure that they change and do better for all of us. Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, one other question where you just, because people are, wondering, how are you dealing with this personally? How are your kids? How are your family? I mean,

you're someone in a position of authority who probably has better information than we do, who can actually feel like your day-to-day actions are actually making things better and not just screaming at cable news like I am or Twitter. But, you know, how are you managing through this thing? Yeah, and, you know, I've got young kids. There aren't many of us in the Senate who are in that category. I've got elementary school-age kids, so they are home. And In because we were talking on the phone, one of them peeked his head through the door. And so I'm managing, you know, a two-parent family. Both of us are trying to take care of our kids who are home from schools that are canceled while trying to manage this national conversation. And so,

yeah, I do feel empowered that, you know, I have a role to play in all of that. And I'm, you know, trying to find the avenues by which I can be helpful. I mean, one of the things I'm going to be thinking a lot about is right up both of your lanes. How do we learn? learn from the global failures. Is it time for us to sort of sit down and think, you know, wait a second, does it make sense to have a $2 billion global health budget and a $750 billion military budget? Does it really feel like that's the right ratio? No, of course not. We're going to have to have some real proposals to rebuild that, and I'll try to help lead. And then in the last 24 hours, I've been amongst those pushing my party to get serious about some pretty massive big cash assistance

payroll tax cuts are not the way to go. I'd like to see immediate money in the hands of workers. And so I've been working through some of those proposals and hope to, you know, be able to vote on them in the coming days and weeks. And then I'm just keeping in close touch with folks in Connecticut and trying to solve little problems, right? We had a hospital that didn't have enough swabs to do the tests. So I'm trying to solve that. We're having trouble getting volunteers to show up to food banks, which are shutting down, not because they don't have enough food, but because people just don't want to be in public serving the food. We're trying to solve that. You know, trying to manage the national and the local conversation well, also trying to make sure that my kids don't go absolutely stir crazy. Yeah, I feel that.

My two daughters, I think, are going to learn Spanish from the amount of door the explorer they're watching. We're busting through our screen time. I will say, it is amazing how I can. There's all sorts of things on YouTube, but as long as they have like a three or two-minute science content attached to them, I have deemed them educational. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Well, Senator, thank you so much for all the work you're doing and for joining the show. We really appreciate it. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. We promise to be more uplifting every day.

Yeah. That might be a lie. But thanks for sticking with us. We're going to get through this shit together. One podcast at a time. Yeah, wash your hands and don't stockball hands on. Talk to you later. Pod Save the World is a product of crooked media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to our digital team Elijah Cohn, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.