U.S. Death Toll From Coronavirus Approaches 90,000; Trump Expected To Travel To Michigan This Week; Officials: 180 People Exposed To Coronavirus At Church Service On Mother's Day; Texas Reports Its Highest One-Day Spike In Coronavirus Cases This Weekend
DON LEMON, CNN HOST: This is CNN TONIGHT. I'm Don Lemon. Here's our breaking news. The coronavirus death toll in this country getting closer and closer to 90,000, but the fact is, by midnight tonight, at least 48 states will have started reopening to some degree. Pretty much everywhere you look this country is opening up, beginning to lift stay-at-home orders and sending businesses back to work: the president telling NBC Sports tonight he really wants to see tens of thousands of fans crowded together not wearing masks.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We really want to see it get back to normal, so when you have all of those thousands, tens of thousands of people, going to your majors, and going to golf tournaments, we want them to have that same experience. So we don't want them to be -- having to wear masks and, you know, be doing what we have been doing for the last number of months, because that's not -- that's not getting back to normal.</s>LEMON: We all want to get back to normal, no doubt about that, or some version of normal. But is now really the time to be talking about tens of thousands of people, tens of thousands of fans crowded together, not wearing masks? And then there's the Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar, putting part of the blame for coronavirus deaths on the state of Americans' health.</s>ALEX AZAR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: Unfortunately, the American population is a very diverse, and it is a population with significant unhealthy comorbidities that do make many individuals in our communities, in particular African-American, minority communities, particularly at risk here because of significant underlying disease, health disparities, and disease comorbidities, and that is an unfortunate legacy in our health care system that we certainly do need to address.</s>LEMON: There's no question that communities of color have been hard hit by coronavirus. We pointed out that disparity over and over. Remember, a recent study found African-Americans make up 27 percent of fatalities in communities where we are only 13 percent of the population. But it is pretty rich for Azar to point to underlying health conditions in minority communities while ignoring the fact that the president downplayed the virus for weeks: weeks when we could have been taking steps to protect all Americans, including in communities of color. We are also learning tonight that social distancing may have prevented tens of millions of infections that, as far as more people are looking for any excuse to abandon social distancing and masks. A recent study finds without any social distancing at all the number of coronavirus cases in this country could have been 35 times higher. But with the weather getting warmer in a lot of -- in a big part of this country, the country quarantine fatigue is really setting in. I'm sure you've seen it where you live. I want you to take a look at these crowds. This is in New York City, this is on Friday night, okay? Which is why talk like this from the president's son, Eric Trump, is not just idiotic: it's dangerous.</s>ERIC TRUMP, SON OF PRESIDENT TRUMP: They think they're taking away Donald Trump's greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time, right? So they -- they will, and you watch. They'll milk it every single day between now and November 3rd, and guess what, after November 3rd, coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear, and everybody will be able to reopen.</s>LEMON: How low can you go? Seriously. That is stunningly callous, accusing Democrats of using social distancing to keep the president from holding campaign rallies, when nearly 90,000 Americans have died; and then echoing his father's absurd claim that the coronavirus will magically go away. But that's the story that this president needs to sell. He needs you to believe that we're on the other side of this thing, meaning the country -- the world, really. Even though we are not. He needs you to believe that the economy is going to come back roaring, come roaring back, just in time for election day. That's why he's saying things like this.</s>TRUMP: I just want to make something clear. It's very important. Vaccine or no vaccine, we're back, and we are starting the process. And in many cases, they don't have vaccines, and a virus, or a flu comes, and you fight through it. We haven't seen anything like this in a hundred and some-odd years. 1917.</s>LEMON: Well, the president flat out saying that we are opening the economy, even though we don't have a vaccine. His advice for Americans who get sick, just fight through it. Just fight through the virus that your own CDC director says could kill 100,000 Americans by June 1st, only two weeks away. I guess it should be no surprise that this president, and this is according to sources, has privately questioned whether the death toll is inflated. But here's the fact -- the fact is, people are dying, nearly 90,000 of them, yet the president wants you to think that this is all about politics.</s>TRUMP: People want to come back. You see what's going on at state houses all over the country. They want to come back. I think some people don't want it really to come back, for political reasons, which is sick. But the people, the real people, the people that want this country to be great and great again, we can say they want to get back. You look at some cases, some people think they're doing it for politics. Here we go again. But they think they're doing it because it will hurt me. The longer it takes to hurt me in the election, the longer it takes to open up.</s>LEMON: Me, me, me, me, me. It will hurt me in the election. Listen, I've said this before. Everyone wants to reopen the economy. That is a fight that he needs you to believe in order to win the election. There is not one person out there who doesn't want the economy to reopen. People need to feed their families. They need to pay their bills. We need the economy to open up yesterday, weeks ago. Everyone needs and wants that, but we have to be smart about it. That is a trick. Don't fall into it. It's not, we have to open the economy, and some people don't want the economy. Don't fall into that. What we have to do is be smart about it. We need the tools -- the right tools in order to do it, testing kits, contact tracing, all of that. He wants to get your mind off of that, but we have to be safe about it. Millions of Americans are hurting, so don't fall into the trick, everyone. This is not a political thing. This is about your health, your life, your safety, and also about your livelihood and taking care of your family. It's not about politics, OK? But millions of Americans have made a lot of sacrifices, staying at home, staying away from their jobs, their families, their schools. And in the face of all of that, I want you to listen to -- this is the former president, Barack Obama, who, in a virtual commencement address to high school seniors also seemed to have a poignant message for President Trump.</s>BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Doing what feels good, what's convenient, what's easy, that's how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grownups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way, which is why things are so screwed up.</s>LEMON: And if you thought President Trump would take the high road in response, well, you didn't think that, did you?</s>TRUMP: He was an incompetent president. That's all I can say. Grossly incompetent. Thank you.</s>LEMON: Incompetent? Remember, that was the president that saved you and this country's economy, your country from the brink. The one who really grew the economy and just handed it to this president. So let's not forget that former president Barack Obama warned of a pandemic like this. It was way back in 2014, and he was right.</s>OBAMA: There may, and likely will come a time in which we have both an airborne disease that is deadly, and in order for us to deal with that effectively, we have to put in place an infrastructure, not just here at home, but globally, that allows us to see it quickly, isolate it quickly, respond to it quickly, so that if and when a new strain of flu like the Spanish Flu crops up, five years from now or a decade from now, we have made the investment. and we're further along to be able to catch it.</s>LEMON: So incompetent that he was able to see into the future. Wasn't heeded. That warning was not heeded by this President and this administration. And here we are tonight - more than 1.4 million cases of coronavirus, as the death toll gets closer and closer to 90,000. We've also got new developments on the case that we have been following - we have been covering for you for more than two weeks. The shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery. Ahmaud Arbery was chased. He was gunned down and killed when he was jogging in a Georgia neighborhood - this was back in February. Former President Barack Obama talking about the case in a - in that virtual commencement address - in another virtual commencement address, this one to graduating seniors at historically black colleges and universities. Pointing out the inequities and extra burden dealt with by communities of color.</s>OBAMA: Just as we see it, when a black man goes for a jog, and some folks feel like they can stop and question and shoot him if he doesn't submit to their questioning. Injustice like this isn't new. What is new is that so much of your generation has woken up to the fact that the status quo needs fixing. That the old ways of doing things don't work.</s>LEMON: We've got the very latest on Ahmaud Arbery's case for you tonight, including surveillance video showing that he wasn't the only person to enter that under construction house in Georgia in that neighborhood. But he's the only one we know of that was chased down. Definitely the only one we know of who was killed. But right now, I want to turn now to the coronavirus debacle in this country. CNN's White House Correspondent, Jeremy Diamond is here with more. Jeremy, good evening to you on this Sunday. You have new reporting tonight on the President, him traveling to the battle ground state of Michigan later this week. What are you learning?</s>JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Don. A little moment ago, we reported that President Trump is expected to travel to Michigan on Thursday to visit a Ford manufacturing facility. This will be the President's third visit in three weeks. Not only going outside of Washington, but specifically going to battleground states. These are official White House visits that the President is making. This time it will be to a plant that has been producing ventilators. But, of course, the political ramifications cannot be understated. Michigan is one of those states where the President is currently trailing the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and a state that was crucial to President trump's election in 2016. He won it by less than 11,000 votes. And now, Don, I do have a White House official officially confirming this visit. And it will be to Ford Motor Company's Rawsonville manufacturing plants in Ypsilanti, Michigan on Thursday. So that is the visit that we're expecting to see from the President. Of course, Don, this comes - as we know, as you were just talking about - as President Trump is talking about a return to normal. And he is talking about it not just in terms of him going out in the country traveling off and visiting these places without wearing a mask but, but also as he's talking about a return back to how things used to be. We heard the President on NBC Sports earlier today, during this golf tournament, talking about wanting to see stadiums filled to the brim once again. People not wearing masks. What the President, of course, isn't talking about there is what the time line is for that to happen, and specifically how that can happen. The President, it is said, recently has been focusing more on this - on painting a picture of what a return to normal looks like, but not how exactly we're going to get there, and what kind of testing capabilities - vaccines, all of these things - are needed to actually get to that place.</s>LEMON: Yes. Listen, I would like to be in a stadium filled with people. I think a lot of people are ready to get out of their homes. You know, a lot of us are going to home and going to work. But I think we need to do it very smartly. You know, it's time to - for many people, it's time to open up. They've got to - they've got to pay their bills. They've got to earn a living. But, I mean, I think getting in the stadiums, crowding people in, especially without social distancing, and masks - I don't know if we're ready for that part right now. Jeremy Diamond at the White House for us. Jeremy, thank you very much. Are we ready for this new normal in America's restaurants, in our churches, in our salons and our beaches? And as Jeremy was just saying, in our sports arenas - sporting arenas as well? Well, time is closing in. And are we closing our eyes to the dangers? I'm going to ask a global health expert next.