Morning Joe 5/10/26 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 Breaking News Today May 10, 2026

Añadido: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Republican members of Congress and what they said about gas prices under Joe Biden. Remember the whole thanks Biden.

[00:00:05]People go around put their little stickers uh on gas pumps. Thanks Biden.

[00:00:11]Uh so yeah, comparing what they said then when Joe Biden was president to what those lawmakers are now saying about high prices at the pump under Donald Trump. Take a look.

[00:00:24]>> What should Congress do about gas prices at 411 national average? Well, there's nothing we can do.

[00:00:31]>> I mean, I don't like to brag about all the expensive uh uh expensive places I've been, but earlier today I went to the gas station.

[00:00:38]>> Gasoline and diesel fuel and oil is a product of the conflict in Iran.

[00:00:43]>> How do you square that patience with impatience with gas prices under Biden when it at times was 330 340?

[00:00:50]>> I don't have to square anything with you.

[00:00:52]>> Okay. Politicians should not get a free pass on the ridiculously high energy prices under the Biden administration.

[00:00:59]>> Do you think that the war should stop because of this? How patient can you be >> energy prices?

[00:01:05]>> Just because gas prices have come down a little bit, they're still really high.

[00:01:08]>> 430 gas prices. Do you think the war in Iran has gone on long enough?

[00:01:12]>> Americans are not joyful when they go to the gas station and fill up their car.

[00:01:17]>> Gas prices at 430 national average. Do you think the Iran war has gone on long enough? Oh, it's not about uh how long it goes on.

[00:01:27]>> It's about how it ends.

[00:01:28]>> Americans are so displeased with gas prices, they're slapping these Biden I did that stickers on the pumps. We ought to drag those oil companies in and um and chew them out. I I think they they're gouging.

[00:01:41]>> In my state, average price of a gallon of gas has gone from just over $2 to now uh well over $3. And it is the policies of this administration that's causing it.

[00:01:52]>> How do you explain the patience for prices around $4 a gallon now? Because the difference is solving the problem, not creating a higher price environment like the Biden administration was doing with the Green New Deal.

[00:02:06]>> We're pumping more um oil and gas than we ever have before. Well, then why aren't prices coming down at the pump?

[00:02:14]Gasoline is a commodity that has uh a worldwide price structure. So I have patience for now.

[00:02:21]>> GDA is just talking about, you know, Teslas and battery powered cars while the American people can't afford gas.

[00:02:26]We'll get gas prices down. It's just we're going through the the the important uh resetting the stage on on Iran.

[00:02:31]>> If you've got a job, you have to travel to your job. That means that it's going to cost you more to travel.

[00:02:36]>> It's a small price to pay whenever you consider that he's saving millions of lives in the future. Record gas prices.

[00:02:41]I know they're down a little bit, but nationally 60% higher than they were when Biden took office.

[00:02:46]>> What do you hear from your constituents about gas prices? Do they also see this as just a short-term thing?

[00:02:51]>> I hope so. I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm communicating this. It it we have to do this.

[00:02:58]>> It's just really remarkable. You have It's Biden's fault, too. Well, you you understand that gas prices are a global commodity and the prices fluctuate B and and you've got other people that are saying I don't have to explain anything to you to a reporter and condescendingly patting him on the arm as he walks away.

[00:03:18]You've got others running away from the that's fine. They can do that. But Republicans aren't going to be able to do that this fall. They they wanted this war. They got this war and and they can see it through to the end if they want to see it through to the end. I nobody wants a president look as weak as he's looking right now, desperately trying to run away. But really, the hypocrisy like putting stickers on gas pumps when it was $3 a gallon, uh blaming Biden, and now it's over well over $4 a gallon.

[00:03:51]Yeah, good luck with that in the fall.

[00:03:54]You You may think voters are stupid.

[00:03:57]voters actually think you're stupid.

[00:03:59]Voters think you're the ones who are idiots that have taken America down a disastrous path over the past 18 months.

[00:04:06]And you know, domestically, you've got the gas price problem, but you look internationally and John Hileman, you have Donald Trump's friend Vladimir Putin. Now, we find out from the economist openly planning trying to kill Americans. Let me say that again. Vladimir Putin, who Donald Trump continues to side with, is scheming with Iranians to kill Americans. So, he's got that problem.

[00:04:35]Also, Iranians keep attacking US ships, with American soldiers, with American sailors, with American Marines on them, and Donald Trump saying, "Oh, it's nothing. Don't worry about it." Yeah, the Iranian I mean, can you imagine if Jimmy Carter, what if Joe Biden said that? They freaked out over a balloon.

[00:04:56]Republicans freaked out, melted down over a balloon. You would have thought it was Sputnik. And now you have Iranians continuing to attack America and America's allies. And the president's calling it a love tap. How would that have worked for Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter? We know how that would have worked because it looks so weak and factless. And finally, what I heard from the beginning, John, and this is I think for Donald Trump, probably what he considers the biggest problem. So much of what he thinks his legacy is going to be depends on negotiations with the Chinese when he meets with Shei later. And I heard from the very beginning of this war from sources really close to the president that the invasion in Venezuela, the the war in Iran, that was all to position ourselves and put ourselves in a position of strength when the president met with Shei.

[00:05:51]And now with this stalemate continuing, with Donald Trump stuck in Iran, with him trying to declare victory while the Iranians, while the Revolutionary Guard continues to mock him on social media, and they continue to attack US vessels, US ships.

[00:06:10]Now, how's that summit going to go? It's actually we're looking we would have looked a lot stronger in front of Xi if we had never gone into Iran in the first place. So talk about that part of the story and why that's driving so much of what Donald Trump is doing right now.

[00:06:29]>> Well, right, Joe. I mean, you know, it we forget because so much has happened in the course of the two months, two plus months that the war has been going on is that when we started what Donald Trump has called, you know, our little excursion or our engagement with the love taps or the skirmish, whatever this is supposed to be in his mind. There was a the summit with Shei was supposed to happen that that week when we started the war and so they the the White House asked for uh a delay of the Trump Xi summit and uh he got it. Uh it's now set for next week. This time next week we will be uh talking about the second day of the summit in uh in China. and and you know that you know given Trump's um frame of reference, the way he thinks about the world, this matters to him a huge amount. He understands how important China is and he loves the the pageantry of these summits. He wants to go to China and stand there opposite she uh and come back with a bunch of what he would call big deals, biggest deals ever, right? And instead, as we head towards this summit, you were talking about the the way the Russians are kind of uh openly uh challenging the United States, mocking us in some ways, the way that the the social media posts are coming from Iran. You now have these stories coming out uh this morning in the in the New York Times, something you don't see very often, and that is clearly orchestrated and designed to to taunt Trump. You have officials from uh the Chinese government and former Chinese military leaders making this point explicitly on the record saying, you know, Donald Trump thought he was going to get a quick victory in Iran and be able to come to China uh with that victory, brandishing it, and instead uh the America is tied down. There's deadlock. There's a stalemate. Their munition stockpiles are are are are falling. We see these reports that say how much the munition stockpiles have been depleted by this war, which raises a significant national security issue.

[00:08:33]The Chinese hawks are now sort of pointing to the notion that maybe the United States couldn't actually defend Taiwan. Um, so that's a substantive issue. But the image issue, which is I'm sure what matters more to Trump, is that the Chinese are openly belittling him and us in the days leading up to a summit that obviously matters a lot to him. And if you were, you started off the show talking about his desperation to end the war. I'm sure I think there are a lot of factors there and certainly domestic politics is one of them. But this is another one for sure. This is a big deal for Trump and I think he would desperately love in the next 6 days, 5 days to be able to to be able to really be able to say that he has a deal in Iran and be able to ride into Beijing uh saying, "Hey, okay, that's in the past now." And I'll tell you, I'm sure the Iranians know that and they're not going to give him that that victory or give him that opportunity if they are playing this game as strategically as as they played every other game so far in this war.

[00:09:29]>> Shashank Johi, what's the possibility of that happening? How do you see this playing out? Um, possibility of peace talks happening and actually bringing peace, especially now as the definition of ceasefire seems to be a bit confusing.

[00:09:44]>> Yes, of course. A ceasefire is what the president makes of it. I I think there's only two ways out of this conundrum to put it very simply. One of them is that the United States realizes the limits of its leverage over Iran and seeks a deal, particularly over Iran's nuclear program that is far short of what this administration originally sought. And the result will be something that resembles the joint comprehensive plan of action, the deal that was done by the Obama administration, abregated by President Trump in 2018, and led to this crisis. Still ahead, Florida Governor Ronda Santis signed into law this week a new congressional map that could give Republicans four more seats in Congress after the midterms. We'll be joined by Democratic primary candidate Leela Gray, who is running in the state's 13th district, a seat that has been impacted by this redistricting effort. Morning Joe is coming right back.

[00:10:45]not going to let the extremists successfully rig the midterm election.

[00:10:51]We will not allow them to artificially hold power as a result of a racial gerrymander, a partisan gerrymander, or dantis dummy mander. Doesn't matter what it is. We're not going to let them prevail.

[00:11:08]>> The Florida today is not the same Florida of 2020. We've netted two million people. We've had a massive change in demography. And so these lines are compact districts. If you look at the map, it's visually appealing. It's not like the Virginia one, but it does reflect the fact that we have had explosive growth in parts of our state.

[00:11:29]>> Two very different perspectives on Florida's new congressional map that was passed last week. Florida Governor Ronda Santis has defended the redistricting move, which is likely to give Republicans an edge in the midterms.

[00:11:44]Among the changes, the map splits the Tampa Bay area from two districts into three, shoring up Republican votes in the 13th district. But our next guest, retired Army Brigadier General Leela Gray, who's running as a Democrat for that seat, says she is not deterred. and retired General Leela Gray joins us now.

[00:12:07]Uh, thanks for for coming on the show this morning. You say you are undeterred. Um, how does this map change impact your race and what do you plan to do about it?

[00:12:19]>> Well, Ma, thank you so much for having me. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to talk about this issue and to talk to to voters and the American people. This issue in particular, the redistricting of Florida, was really done in the dark and not even the legislature had a chance to review these maps before the governor put them forward for a vote. Um, so not only was it done in the dark, but it was also done against the Florida Constitution.

[00:12:44]But the reality is, no matter where they draw the lines, the people are still feeling the same. They're feeling angst.

[00:12:50]They're frustrated. They're the cost of living is so high. Particularly in Florida, the cost of insuranceances are so high, homeowners insurance, flood insurance, car insurance. So when you couple all of those types of things with insuranceances, the cost of gas and groceries and housing, people are very, very frustrated. So no matter where they draw the line, I'm still hearing the same story. And people are going to turn out to vote because they don't want business as usual. People need to in Congress have to focus on the people's problems. And I'm here to do that because I've always ascribed to have service over self.

[00:13:30]>> General Gray, we've certainly, you know, in recent years, Florida, much has been written about how it's become sort of, you know, it's Trump HQ. He's a Florida resident. Mara Lago was there. He spends a lot of time there. It's become a far more Republican state than it used to be. It used to be the very definition of a swing state. But but and certainly this person, the Republican you're trying to oust, Congresswoman Luna certainly associates herself very tightly uh with the president. But are you sensing any sort of fatigue there?

[00:13:55]Any sense of disappointment in the state that the President Trump's priorities seem to be off? You mentioned rising costs, but it's not just that. We've spent every morning talking about the distractions that he seems to be focused on rather than his core campaign promise of two years ago that worked trying to improve people's lives. I think you you hit the nail on the head. Fatigue is exactly what I'm seeing and hearing from people. I'm talking to people that are Republicans, independents, and Democrats, and they're all telling me the same story. They don't want what's going on today with Washington politicians, with Congresswoman Luna.

[00:14:30]She's not focused on the problems.

[00:14:31]They're not focused on the problems. And what I'm hearing over and over again is they want people with experienced leadership that is willing to put themselves uh put the people first over themselves.

[00:14:43]And you're seeing time and again people like Luna are trying to grab headlines instead of actually being in the community. She refuses to hold a town hall. So I'm seeing that from across the spectrum. It's not just one party. And I would offer that people do think that Florida's very red, but that's not what hear what I'm hearing in the field.

[00:15:03]General Gray, you've had a distinguished military career. Uh, and I'm wondering, given the fact that you've worked with the most one of the most honorable professions in the world, the United States military, why would you want to ever join the most dysfunctional organization in the country, the United States Congress?

[00:15:22]>> Well, let me be clear. I've never backed down from a fight. And I've never backed down from doing what's right. Um, I mentioned before that I have always ascribed to serve. I've I'm not a politician. I never aspired to be a politician, but I've always aspired to serve others. And I think that in this time and age, I had to come off the sidelines. Yes, I've been retired. I retired in 2018. Um, and been doing many other things with my life, including having gone to law school in the last few years, but I felt that I had to come off the sidelines because people are hurting and our country is in trouble.

[00:15:57]And so if that this is the journey that I'm on, even though I never saw it for myself, but I'm ready and willing to stand up for people and help solve problems because that's what leaders do.

[00:16:07]They listen, they learn, and then they lead to solve the problems.

[00:16:11]>> Retired Army Brigadier General and Democratic candidate for US Congress in Florida's 13th district, Leela Gray, thank you so much for joining us this morning.

[00:16:19]>> Thank you.

[00:16:20]>> Steve Ratner is standing by with charts.

[00:16:23]He's taking a look at the rising health care costs that many Americans are facing.

[00:16:31]>> We will pass the great health care plan.

[00:16:33]We call it the great health care plan to stop all payments to big insurance companies and give the money. What we want to do is this. We want the insurance companies to be cut out. We want our government not to pay trillions of dollars to insurance companies to to pay that same amount of money directly to the people directly and you go out and buy your own healthcare and everybody likes it.

[00:17:01]>> President Trump last month talking about his administration's healthc care plan unveiled in January. But there remain no concrete bill containing President Trump's proposals for Congress to even attempt to pass. There's a plan, more like a concept of a plan to quote the president. Millions, meanwhile, reportedly have dropped their healthc care coverage after Congress failed to extend the COVID era subsidies of the Affordable Care Act. Former Treasury official Morning Joe. Economic analyst Steve Ratner joins us now with charts on how all of that is going. Steve, good morning. Always great to see you. Let's start with the premiums, what people are paying now as a result of the action of the administration.

[00:17:38]>> Yeah, Willie. So, as you said, just to recall, last fall, the Democrats had shut down the government for the longest period in history to try to preserve these tax credits. They ultimately failed and now we're going to see the consequences of all that. So, premium uh numbers have come in and the average premium for someone, these are for people who buy their insurance in the marketplaces that Obamacare set up 58% for the average premium. That's not even shared equally. Different age groups, different income levels, uh, will have different impacts. But let's just look at a typical family. $65,000 is the average income of an American worker today. If you're 60 years old, your premium is going to go on by go up by $920 a month. That's $11,040 a year. if you are making $65,000, paying $11,000 uh $40 a year for health insurance is simply not realistic. So, Steve, just to remind people, this is this was kind of the uh the basis of that government shutdown at the end of last year, a fight that Senate Democrats ultimately lost, but it was to expand these tax credits that would have covered a lot of this. So, as you move to your second chart, you've got information kind of about this middle class cliff that a lot of people predicted would come if those tax credits were not extended.

[00:18:58]>> Yeah, exactly. These were uh tax credits passed during the Biden administration uh in a co environment and they were set to expire. Uh but they were designed to solve a specific problem. When Obamacare was created, inadvertently or not, there was this cliff where you got you paid a reasonable percentage of your income uh in healthcare costs, but then suddenly it went away and you were paying as much as 20 25% of your income in costs. This was this uh Biden Europe provision was designed to eliminate that and essentially provide a smooth transition here from the subsidies so that nobody paid more than 8 12% of their income in health care premiums. So we went from this to up here. So what's the consequence? Well, obviously as I showed you with the numbers before, health care becomes unaffordable for a lot of people and they start dropping their coverage.

[00:19:51]And so the estimates at the moment that have recently come in is that this year somewhere between 17 and 26% of the people who bought their health care in the Obama exchanges will drop it. But the people who drop it are also the healthier people, right? I mean that's logical. And so what happens is that the remaining people in the insurance pools become sicker, have a higher morbidity rate. And that's what this number here is. And when you have a sicker pool of people, that drives the insurance premiums up even more because the insurers are trying to recover the costs of ensuring a smaller group of of Americans who are not quite as healthy.

[00:20:27]>> And those who drop the coverage still get sick, so they end up in emergency rooms, which are also paid for by the the taxpayers as well, which gets to your final chart. Number three, millions more people are now uninsured. What are the numbers here specifically around Medicaid?

[00:20:42]>> Right. So Medicaid uh is separate from what I was talking about, but back in the one big beautiful bill, the Republicans carved back all kinds of Medicaid eligibility uh uh definitions.

[00:20:55]And so the consequence when you put the two things together, this is the uh uh impact of these tax credits that I was just talking about. But when you add the one big beautiful bill impact on it, you can see that the number of people who are insured which peaked back up here at about uh almost 50 million people in the exchanges thanks to Obamacare went down down down down all the way down here because of those exchanges that Obamacare set up. Now it's going to jump back up here up to 37 million uninsured Americans. That means that we have essentially or we will essentially eliminate half of the people who uh got insurance through Obamacare will be giving it up. So half of Obamacare the Republicans have very quietly eviscerated without ever saying the words Obamacare because that didn't go so well for them in the past. Now we have some actual data. These are projections. But we have a test case.

[00:21:49]Georgia has actually already reported its numbers. And you can see here again the effect of those tax credits was to increase the number of people increase the number of people who got insurance through the marketplaces all the way up to a,500,000.

[00:22:04]Now it is down to 950,000.

[00:22:07]So you've you've something like 560,000 Georgian have dropped their insurance.

[00:22:13]Coming up next, staff writer for the Atlantic George Packer will be back with us for more on his piece about the rise of tech titan David Sachs.

[00:22:23]problem with racism. There is no problem with sexism. These or to the extent there is a problem, it is not very big.

[00:22:29]One of the reasons multiculturalism was able to get off the ground in the first place is that most college age students and especially those who are attending our top universities are not bigots.

[00:22:39]There are very few who are. And so I think one of the really big problems we have to come to grips with is this sense in which the reason we have racial tensions in our society, the reason we have other kinds of tensions is not because there is a problem with racism and other forms of oppression, but because people are looking for these things too much.

[00:23:00]>> That was then 28-year-old Peter Thiel promoting his book at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation in 1996.

[00:23:06]The book was titled The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. Tiel co-authored the book with David Saxs, who's a focus of an extensive piece out this week in the Atlantic titled The Venture Capitalist Populist: How David Saxs and the New Tech Wright went full MAGA and captured Washington. And we'll talk in a minute about how that actually may not be good for MAGA in the long run. with us now uh again the author of that piece staff writer at the Atlantic George Packer back by popular demand George the kids were crying out uh like voices in the wilderness more Packer more Packer so here you are um I wanted to uh talk about three people David Saxs who you've profiled Elon Musk uh and Peter Teal all of them either from South Africa or spent formative years in South Africa. I know you don't piece them together that way, but I just think it's fascinating that three people either from or people that live spent formative time in South Africa would have such a powerful impact and also all three and we can go through it specifically are harshly critical of Western democracy and and do not think uh that uh liberal democracy uh is the preferred form of government. uh talk about uh David Sachs and his views and the others as far as uh as far as you're comfortable talking about them.

[00:24:44]>> Well, I've spent quite a bit of time with Teal some years ago when I was writing about him and you're you're absolutely right that Teal has famously said freedom and democracy are incompatible. Meaning for him to be able to live his life as he wants and make money as he wants is impossible under a liberal democracy where people who have the vote who don't believe in his libertarian views. Saxs is not very interested in political philosophy in my uh research. He is a an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist and he is mostly interested in making money. So he and Teal go way back to Stanford. They were at the Stanford Review together, which was a conservative publication Teal founded. They then were at PayPal, which Teal co-founded with Musk and where Sachs played an important part. They have a long history. And now what's really interesting, Joe, is how having kept their distance on Washington because they really didn't believe in uh any role for government in uh their industry in technology. they now have kind of captured the Trump administration and Sax spent a year as Trump's AI and crypto adviser and in in that year he essentially aligned government policy with the wishes of those industries and not with what I would consider more the public interest and so in a way they've now come around having been hardcore libertarians all their lives to a view that government can actually be useful to their financial interests, their uh their business interests, um and their sense that really the world should be ruled by a a small number of um very smart, very wealthy men, uh which is I guess another word for oligarchy.

[00:26:40]Well, you know, they they they they believe in capitalism. When it comes to single mothers, uh who they think should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but when it comes to tech billionaires, they're all for socialism and all for the federal government giving them money and helping them out. Well, Sax uh didn't I mean, Saxs, hasn't he said, accused the United States of provoking Putin into uh war with Ukraine? and again uh in other ways again sort of aligned himself with Putin Orban and sort of that anti- liberal democracy uh right he has and for a long time I couldn't understand how someone who really does seem to care about facts and about logic and is a very good debater on his podcast could end up sympathetic to the Russian role in invading Ukraine and trying to destroy that country and absorb it into the Russian Empire. To be charitable, he's he's pretty ignorant about the history of that region and the politics of that region. But the way I came to see it was of a piece with his approach to to business, which is essentially there's no moral calculation here. It's not about whether Ukraine has the right to sovereignty, whether we should support a democratic country under siege from an authoritarian empire. None of that seems to come into play. And so once you take away the moral analysis of that war, you end up thinking, well, Ukraine's a risky bet. As Trump once said, they don't seem to have the cards, although actually right now they do have some cards. and you end up sympathizing with Putin and Russia because morality has been uh replaced by a cold calculation of where your interests lie.

[00:28:32]And maybe if you if if you're afraid of escalation toward World War II, well, that's that's going to be bad for your portfolio. Uh and and so let's tone this down and give Putin what he wants.

[00:28:44]That's my best analysis of how Sax got to the ridiculous position that he holds.

[00:28:49]Coming up, the polling giant Gallup announced earlier this year that it would no longer track presidential approval ratings. Well, now Forbes is looking to fill that void. We'll explain how when Morning Joe comes right