morning joe. it is wednesday, march 29th. we have a lot to get to this hour, including a major development in the investigation into former president donald trump s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. a federal judge has ordered mike pence to give testimony. meanwhile former trump ally chris christie appears to be willing to play the anti-trump role if he gets into the 2024 race. we ll have more on that new reporting. and we re still on so called indictment watch since the president announced, the former president, that he was going to be arrested. we ll have the latest on the manhattan grand jury s investigation into the hush money payments to a porn star. plus, an update on the continuing protests in israel, and what president biden is saying about meeting with the country s leader, along with joe, willie and me, we have the host of way too early, white house bureau chief at politico, jonathan lemire, just ran over. how does he do that? and member of
purpose is to kill as many people as quickly as possible. the nra has stirred up fear, they re going to seize your guns, take it back. that s why we see gun sales go up after every shooting. the nra, they have their annual convention coming up in a couple of weeks in indianapolis, guess who s going to be there. the leading republican presidential candidates, including mike pence, including donald trump. they will be there. there s no effort to separate themselves with what the nra is doing. you re not allowed to have a machine gun. not allowed to have a rocket launcher, not allowed to have a lot of things. what s a weapon of war. this is one of the discussions we don t get to have. why is it that a machine gun, a fully automatic weapon is not protected constitutionally, and semiautomatic weapon, ar-15, doesn t allow you to do the kind of damage, why is that look, i m not an expert on guns, and certainly not those weapons. never touched one, don t want to. what is the distinction?
like conservative politics where the free market should decide and it is not what farmers want, they don t want to get government checks instead of doing business and selling products into the biggest growing market in the world which is china. everybody agrees that the president is broadly right, the chinese cheated for years. and he has labeled them a currency manipulator. odd thing to do when the chinese currency fell because china stopped manipulating it, what china was doing is artificially enhancing. they stopped doing that, it fell. odd to say they re a manipulator when they re doing the opposite. china cheats on trade. there s no key heercoherent str change that. had we had a coalition of countries to fight against china, we might have had head way. this is no coherence, no strategy, markets go crazy over that. thank you for that.
there s some bipartisan support for that. the most you can say about the president s policy changes, he hasn t foreclosed the possibility of working with democrats or republicans in congress on background checks. he s a long ways away from endorsing either banning assault weapons or background checks. i was with the president when he went to the nra and gave a full-throated endorsement of what the nra is doing. so we ll see if the president changes and shifts in attacks against the nra but they re saying all doors open. not a whole lot new on specifics. meantime, the vice president announced president trump will go to both ohio and texas. i want to play reaction a short time ago from the mayor of dayton. he s made this bed and he s got to lie in it. he hasn t, you know, his rhetoric has been painful for many in our community, and i think the people should stand up and say they re not happy if they re not happy that he s coming. everyone has it in their power
from actually getting something done. unfortunately as we noted in playbook this morning, this is a long time between now and when congress comes back and oftentimes the news cycle, the media, everybody else, as time goes on, there s the less and less kind of push for something to actually happen here. it seems very unlikely to me that the senate is going to take up some real meaningful legislation. maybe they ll take up red flag laws, other things on the margin but as far as a big package on gun reform, that s not what mcconnell is saying he s looking at doing. one republican has said he s ready to cancel the recess. take a listen. something that i would be happy to do. i d happily come back to washington to have a conversation about gun violence. right now? i hope we do it in a thorough way. i do. i d leave tonight. i ll go tomorrow. it doesn t matter to me. this is such an important issue. kasie is there any realist chance mcconnell does an