MSNBC's Morning Joe and Mika bash Trump for 'whistling past the graveyard' as coronavirus claims hundreds of lives per day

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski ripped into President Donald Trump's continued bungling of the coronavirus crisis, and begged him to use his executive powers to help contain the pandemic.

The "Morning Joe" co-hosts called for him to order more ventilators, personal protective equipment and other necessary items as hundreds die every day from COVID-19 -- and medical experts warn the worst is yet to come.

"This is science," Scarborough said. "I don't know, maybe you didn't take science at whatever school your daddy got you into, I don't know, but this is just science. This is just data. Donald, you can't fudge this, you can't negotiate with a pandemic. You can't have a patchwork approach to going to war. Americans are dying. They're going to keep dying, and you're wrecking the economy."

Scarborough seemed to speak directly to the president, a former friend who regularly watches the program.

"You are wrecking the economy unless you start nationalizing the effort to get testing out to every American so we can see who's healthy enough to go back to work," he said. "We can see who has the disease and who needs to be quarantined, and we can tell the difference between the two. We are flying blind because of you, Mr. President, and it comes down to testing, testing, testing. We've been telling you this for a month. We're telling you this again. You've got to focus, you've got to save lives, and you've got to save the economy, and right now you're failing on all three points. Do a better job."

Brzezinski tried to explain that the virus would not just go away, as Trump hoped in the early stages of the outbreak, and seems to explain his inaction.

"The president tried to say that this was going to go away," she said. "It didn't go away, and to your point, Joe, about testing to back up a little bit on two fronts. No. 1, if we had followed the warnings of the World Health Organization, if we had not fired everybody in the pandemic office, we would have had testing early on and perhaps some of his economic goals would be possible if we could do rapid tests across the country, if we could figure out if there are any asymptomatic carriers out there, we would have a road map."

"We would not be flying blind, and for some parts of the country it might be possible to reopen a lot quicker, but we don't have that because the president botched that, so then it gets to a question for the Republicans," Brzezinski added.

She laid blame for the president's behavior on Republicans, saying they had never challenged his abuses and would be responsible for the deaths of Americans from the COVID-10 outbreak.

"Are we going to find out the hard way that it is not okay to let a president run roughshod over our democracy and go completely unchecked?" Brzezinski said. "Are we going to find out the hard way, are Republicans and Democrats and American citizens going to find out by watching their families get ill from a virus that the president tried to play down? By getting ill from a virus that the president reopens the economy before it's possible scientifically scientifically? How far are we going to let him go?"

Scarborough said the GOP had already let Trump get away with abandoning his duties to protect Americans.

"We have nurses who are dying, by the way, nurses that the New York Post reports are forced to wear garbage bags because they don't have protective gear," he said. "They are literally draping garbage bags over them in this fight against a pandemic that the White House has been warned could kill over 2 million Americans, more Americans than died at every war since 1776, and yet this president is still whistling past the graveyard, and it's nurses and doctors and our senior citizens who are effectively being told to go to hell."