MSNBC "All in with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: "America's original terror resurgence."

Interview

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HAYES: In a week where President Trump canceled the state dinner called Jews disloyal, today the president called the Fed chair a man that he appointed an enemy. After that the President "hereby ordered -- those were his words -- hereby order that U.S. companies should come home from China sending the Dow to a spiral which he later made a inscrutable joke about. All that makes you wonder about the capacity and the fitness of the man in charge. But while all that is happening, the fact the matter is there`s business, the nation`s business to still do. Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut was tweeting yesterday, he`s actively working with the White House to try to get something done on background checks. And Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut is here right now.

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): I am -- I thought we -- I thought we`d agreed we`re not gonna wear ties.

HAYES: You look very sharp, senator. You had this tweet yesterday I thought was really interesting. You said, I spoke of the White House today, they`ve not walked away from improving background checks. That was a reporting earlier in the week they had. I am skeptical we can reach consensus but I`m willing to stay at the table over the next few weeks. Maybe I`m a fool for trying but stakes are too high.

MURPHY: Yes, I wear --I wear my fears on my sleeve in dealing with this White House.

HAYES: Yes, it`s a good hedge.

MURPHY: I`ve been through this before. I went over to the White House after the Parklands shooting on that meeting that was televised. The President said that day that he was going to work towards strong background checks. He nearly sends Dianne Feinstein into a heart attack by telling her that he might work with her on an assault weapons ban. And then a day later the NRA came into his office and everything changed. And so I understand the rug may be pulled out from under us again but two weeks later, despite some of this reporting, the White House is still telling me that they want to sit down and try to talk about whether there is some common ground to find on background checks. Maybe it`s not as far as I would like but you know, if we can at least get background checks extended to these gun shows in to some of these online sales, we will literally save lives. This is a life-or-death debate that we`re having here and so I just -- I get it -- I get it that the football may be pulled out again as I run up to kick it this time, but I feel like I`ve got to at least give a shot.

HAYES: Well, here`s what I find interesting watching this all to play out. You know, the president is a strange person but he has -- he has some political instincts that are quite good. And you can watch him almost in real-time be cross-pressured on this. You can see that he understands that background checks are popular. You could just see it in the way he talks about it and then Wayne LaPierre calls him up. And you can watch him kind of wriggle around trying to get out of this trap. Do you think you can extract him from it? Like the problem is you can never be the last person that talks to.

MURPHY: Right.

HAYES: Right? Like you could be very persuasive but then there`s someone else is -- Wayne LaPierre is going to come in the office after you.

MURPHY: Yes. I`m not going to talk to him as often as Wayne is going to talk to him. No, listen, the politics have changed and they have changed radically. Even from 2016 to 2018, all of a sudden this is an issue that swing voters vote on that turns out young people to the polls. And yes, it may be that Donald Trump gets it. It maybe that the reason that Mitch McConnell has interestingly opened the door to a possible debate in the United States Senate is that he`s not really interested in sending out all of these vulnerable 2020 Senate Republicans without taking a vote on background checks, and that is proof of what we have been attempting to do for the last seven years which is to build a political movement around anti-gun violence that is as strong, if not stronger than the gun lobby.

HAYES: So I saw this article in The Washington Post about the mental health proposal being floated. And I got to say the more I hear him talk about -- the President talking about mental health, the more freaked out I get honestly. It really seems like just to cite -- like sci-fi dystopia. They want to do something like DARPA which is the notorious Pentagon like research Association called HARPA, OK. It`s going to develop breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence. The document goes on to list a number of widely used technologies it suggests could be employed to help collect data. Apple watches, Fitbit, Amazon Echo, and Google Home. This -- whatever they`re doing on guns, the mental health stuff they`re talking about strikes me as genuinely scary stuff.

MURPHY: Yes, and listen. This is -- this is a very difficult issue to talk about because we absolutely do need more research into the intersectionality of the brand and instincts to violence. But Donald Trump is probably not the guy to thread that needle. I just think you know, every time we talk about this, we need to put the facts on the table. And the facts are that if you are living with mental illness today you watch more likely to be the victim of violence than you are to be the perpetrator of it. Of all the people in this country who have ever committed a homicide, less than five percent of them have a diagnosed mental illness. And in fact, less than half the people who have committed mass atrocities have been diagnosed with mental illness. You can still do really horrible things in this country it doesn`t mean that you are mentally ill and we`ll just shield people from ever receiving treatment if we try to equate the two.

HAYES: Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, thank you so much for time. I really appreciate it.

MURPHY: Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it.

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