I apologize, this is just horrific. The terrible and entirely predictable hurricane milton. This is a very dangerous storm in terms of its strength and size as it approaches landfall. Tonight as another monster storm heads to florida powered by extreme temperatures in the gulf and as millions across the south dig out from last week's devastating hurricane, a reminder of what trump thinks about climate change. We will add a little bit more beachfront property. That's not the worst thing in the world. And the life or death stakes in this election. Then day donald trump prefers to run on problems instead of fixing problems. A kamala harris media blitz with 28 days left to go. And senator sherrod brown on his must win race in ohio when all in starts now. Good evening from new york, i am chris hayes. Hurricane milton is expected to make landfall in florida early thursday morning. At this hour the storm is back to category 5 strength. The national hurricane center advises, quote, florida residents should get their families and homes ready and evacuated told to do so. Milton is currently reaching maximum sustained wind of 165 miles per hour. It is expected to pick up forward speed tonight. The storm will continue to move across the gulf of mexico until it makes landfall. Now the latest data predicts a storm surge of 10 to 15 feet south of sarasota. Localized areas in central and north florida could see up to 18 inches of rain, threatening catastrophic flooding. Hurricane specialist john morales, the longest tenured tv meteorologist in south orta. He got choked up as he delivered the devastating report last night. It is just an incredible hurricane. It has dropped it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologize. This is just horrific. Maximum sustained wind is 160 miles per hour and it is just gaining strength in the gulf of mexico, where you can imagine the wind. Just so incredibly hot. Record hot, as you might imagine. You know what is driving that. I need to tell you. Global warming, climate change leading to this and becoming an increasing threat. That is john morales. We do know why this is happening. Climate change is making our earth and especially our oceans otter. The gulf of mexico has seen record warm water this year. We covered it in the summer, warning this was going to happen. Those temperatures fuel stronger storms with higher wind, more rain and worse flooding. I mean, all of this stuff is complex, but this part is simple. The storm essentially sucks up the heat and uses it as energy. It is like packing more dynamite into a bomb. The warmer the water, the more energy there is. Now hurricane helene you showed us how this phenomenon is wreaking havoc even in areas previously thought to be safe from the storms. Reporter: tucked away in the blue ridge mountains, asheville, north carolina was considered a little slice of paradise. Some called it a climate haven, suggesting it was immune to extreme weather. But last week that paradise turned out to be an illusion. Helene battering the area for days, ripping apart homes, washing out roads, toppling trees and cutting off entire towns. New research this week says there is strong evidence human driven climate change strengthened helene's destructive power. One study saying it made the storms rainfall 20% heavier and the wind 7% stronger. We are seeing these events that are boosted by climate change. Stronger, wetter, lasting longer. Reporter: another report found a warmer climate lead to 50% more rain for parts of the carolinas and georgia then would have been expected. Storms like helene and what we expect from milton are exactly, precisely what experts have been screaming about for decades. As john morales told nicolle wallace, it is why he got so emotional over last night's forecast. When i saw 50 millibars in 10 hours, i just broke down. Checked the injection of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and here we are. It is not going to get any better. So we are now preparing for the second major climate change fueled hurricane in two weeks which could put a dangerous strain on federal resources. The new york times reports the federal emergency management agency is running out of staff to deal with the potential devastation. As of monday morning just 9% of fema personnel were available to respond to the hurricane or other disasters. While fema says it is well equipped to handle the strains, it is a reminder of more frequent national disasters. Fema is also responding to flooding in vermont, tornadoes in kansas, the aftermath of tropical storm debby, and the watch fire in arizona and those are just disasters declared in the past two weeks. What i'm telling you right now, what we are looking at and preparing for with milton, this is what we now face with global average temperatures a little over 1 degrees celsius higher than the preindustrial average. 1. Imagine what it will look like when we reach 2 degrees, twice as bad, or 3 or 4. That is the world donald trump would push us towards faster if he returns to the white house. Not that he cares. He thinks it would be good for real estate values. When i hear these people talking about global warming, that is the global warming you have to worry about. Not that the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch and you will have more seafront property if that happens. I said is that good or bad? i said isn't that a good thing? if i have a little property at the ocean i have a little more property, i have a little bit more ocean. Every time i play this clip we stop and think about that and give it 10 seconds of your brainpower. If the oceans rise do you have more beachfront property? does that make sense? to have more or do you have less? we have known for decades our planet is warming and we would start seeing the brutal effects, but conservatives are so deep in their denial they are flailing around for anyone to blame. Republics and republican congressman marjorie taylor greene is promoting a bizarre conspiracy theory about a mysterious day, you can imagine who it is, controlling the weather, suggesting that they are sending hurricanes to republican areas to impact the election. Like someone is sitting at a computer somewhere, pressing hurricane. It's not just her. She is now being amplified by rightwing media and the republican nominee himself. As the government figured out how to build a superstorm that will destroy everything in its path and then right where they want to end it and it happens to ms. South florida world the democrats miss. Something strange is going on. These are trump counties and don't tell me for a second that we are not seeing a massive government pushed voter suppression operation. You know it is largely a republican area, so some people say they did it for that reason. I don't even think they are that bad, but they probably, maybe they are. They, they are sending the storms. Donald trump's running mate j. D. Vance found a way to get in on it, too, blaming it on immigrants. You have fema which is therefore disaster relief for american citizens after a terrible storm, being deployed repeatedly to deal with kamala harris is wide open border and the migrant invasion it has caused. That distraction of focusing instead on illegal immigrants, i guarantee that it has made the disaster response worse. That is false. Both fema and the white house dispute the claims, saying the disaster relief fund as separate from other programs, but it is not surprising this is the way that republicans are reacting. The guy at the top of the ticket. It was never going to be the case that they would see the real impacts of climate change. The heat that ends up fueling our storms. To see all that, which again is not hard to understand. After decades of denial i would be like my dad, that is on us, we were wrong, but their behavior in the face of this impending punch in the southeast should serve as a wakeup call to everyone stuck in reality about the very real stakes of this election. Adam smith is an applied climatologist at the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration. Hurricane helene was the first time he experienced one first handed his family home outside of asheville, north carolina. It is a great pleasure and honor to have you and i want to first ask how you guys are doing. Chris, thank you for having me. We are doing okay, but certainly the last week and a half has been very challenging for the entire community in western north carolina. Cities, really torn apart, flooded, turned upside down by this disaster, which we never really expected it to peek and be as bad as it has been. Let me ask about that. Everyone i've talked to from there or has friends and family from there and i have talked to a bunch of people, they describe the sort of biblical terms, the unthinkable, like a movie. You are somebody who studies this. How would you describe it? i mean, cataclysm is a rare word, but it is that bad. It will take years for us to rebuild. So many communities, so much infrastructure. Perhaps there is an irony. We hope to learn from these extreme events they had all parts of the country. Over the past five years there have been more than 100 separate climate disasters in all parts of the country. Hurricanes, droughts, wild flyers days wildfires and flooding. Hurricane frances came through, the last big flood. They put the water pipes 25 feet underground. The backup water pipes. Those backup plans were also washed away. It shows us the 20th century, even 21st century infrastructure sometimes is challenged by what we are facing today. I want to show this chart. This is what you study for our government, the cost of disasters. This is showing the rise in billiondollar weather disasters and you see the top line going up. Some of that is where we are building, density. It is not all climate. But thinking about the costs. Obviously the human poll. You know, the psychological toll and it boggles the mind. With helene and milton back toback, the once in a century event first for north carolina and florida again will be above $1 billion again this year. These disasters use to happen once every three months in the 1980s. In the past decade they have happened closer to every three weeks. It is increasingly difficult and the trends are going in the wrong direction for all of these hazards and climate change is supercharging many of these trends. Some of the numbers i saw were incomprehensible. The sheer amount of water. Feet of water in a short amount of time. Again, whether as a complex system and climate is a complex system. Generally though it does seem like the more energy you pump in the atmosphere, the more you are essentially rolling loaded dice when it comes to these sorts of things. That is exactly right. We have more energy in the ocean, more energy in the atmosphere. We are getting droughts and wildfires in the west. More water vapor and more rainfall in the east. Six out of the last eight years we have been hit by category four or five hurricanes. That is the highest frequency on record, dating back to 1851 for the top and storms. Exposure and vulnerability are also composing days compounding the challenges we face on our way to a more resilient future. Whether it is wildfire, droughts, hurricanes, a lot of these are being supercharged and our future is dictated by the decisions we make in the present. Just on a personal human to human level, now you are not in your home. You live outside asheville if i am not mistaken. You have family members and community members i would imagine. What do you say to our fellow americans about what this could look like if it comes to them or the folks preparing in florida on the gulf coast. Even studying these events and you feel like you know them well. Certainly they can shock you and surprise you and that is what we are experiencing in western north carolina. In a few days many people on the coast of florida will experience the same sense of shock and loss in terms of what their lives and livelihoods used to look like. I study this quite deeply and the trends are becoming more exponential for the impacts in terms of not just dollars, but also the impacts on millions of people's lives and livelihoods and unfortunately climate change is a multiplying force that amplifies a lot of these extremes into billiondollar disasters. I really wish on a personal level, personally and professionally that we would not see these trends, but all signs point to more of this happening in the future. Yes we need to learn from them. Make better decisions on the policy front and technological front and, you know, for our children and grandchildren looking forward to the future, what we do today really does matter. The post hurricane and the backup water lines being buried 25 feet not being deep enough is a detail that will really stick with me as we think about what we are encountering and what we have to mobilize across every level of society and the government as we marched to this new era. Adam smith, i really hope that you and your family and the people in your life are good. Everyone in the country is sending you the best possible wishes. Thank you, chris. Coming up, new reporting on the people donald trump wanted to help most during covid. Here is a hint. It was not americans. That wild story, next. 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Mark farrell endorsing prop d, to bring the changes we need for the city we love. It is incredible to me that years later we continue to learn absolutely crazy details about donald trump's time as president of the united states. Things we did not know before. Today that comes in from an upcoming book by legendary journalist bob woodward. Early in the pandemic, remember that? covid was spreading in the u. S. And thousands of people were dying. Governors around the country were pleading with the trump administration for more covid tests. Remember that? you could not get tested and trump basically derided that is fake news. Trump was clear about this on the record. He said it all the time. He hated covid testing. The reason being that the more people that were tested for the virus, the higher number of recorded cases. We have the best testing in the world. It could be the testing is, frankly, overrated. Maybe it is overrated. That is probably the downside of having good testing. You find cases that other countries who don't even test don't have. If you don't test you don't have any cases. If we stopped testing we would have very few cases if any. Just a quick clarification on that. The biology of germ transmission does not care about the tests. If you don't test, the case is still there, the person is still sick, you just don't know about it. Donald trump ignored the pleas of his own people for tests, desperate pleas. When it came to vladimir putin, trump apparently jumped in to help according to woodward. In 2020 at the height of the pandemic, president trump secretly sent putin a bunch of rabbit covid test machines for his personal use as the virus spread rapidly through russia. Please don't tell anybody you sent these to me, putin said to trump according to woodward. I don't want you to tell anyone because people get mad at you, not me. Ben smith is cofounder and editorinchief of the news outlet, semafor and he joins me. It is not an election until we have a bob woodward book out. It is our october surprise. I remain dumbfounded that they run these pieces and it gave you a sense like we kind of know everything that happened and then we didn't, actually. The white house was an open book. Everybody leaked, but you look back and you see there were a lot of ideas about collusion. It turned out he could not even collude effectively with people he worked with. Meanwhile he was personally on the phone with people. He had a very personal, strange presidency where he is personally talking to vladimir putin about testing machines. There is not a government apparatus. It is really strange. I think that idea that when the apparatus got involved it would leak, but he knew enough to keep certain things on not the state apparatus level. There are still a lot of questions here. Yes and also in a way i think you could say, some geopolitical adversary want something fairly minor, maybe you give it in exchange for something. Like some diplomatic offer. Sure, but the strange thing is putin realizes he has leverage because it is embarrassing to trump and it becomes another gift to putin that he knows this embarrassing thing. And putin's flagging it in the conversation. Almost a sort of meta communication like i now have blackmail on you because this will look bad if it gets out. So strange. This revelation, i want to play kamala harris talking about it because it broke today and she was being interviewed by howard stern. Naturally. The classic howard stern interview. The sort of way in which a revelation like this gets processed by the news. I think it actually relates to this question about harris giving more or less interviews, which is that it is just the case if it turned out biden had done something like this, it would be a huge story. With trump this gets metabolized in 24 hours maybe, right? i think there has been an overall flattening of the news. Everything is a piece of content on your screen that moves past. I think he accelerated it. I think he's faster and accelerated it. Do you think he is the vector of that or he has been sort of the beneficiary of it? i think he is the beneficiary. You are either outraged or you are not and people, in some sense there is an assumption that people are bored and moving on. This is a great story. One of the other details about keeping the personal from the apparatus. Apparently he has talked to putin seven times. In early 2024 a trump aid loitered outside the former president's office in mara lago. Trumpet sent the eight out of the room so he could have what he said was a private phone call with vladimir putin. There have been multiple phone calls between trump and putin, maybe as many as seven in