MSNBC's Morning Joe explains how Trump can fix COVID-19 and economy with one choice -- but he still might blow it

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough warned that President Donald Trump was taking exactly the wrong approach in handling the coronavirus crisis.

The president has started talking about ending social distancing next week to jump-start the stock market, but the "Morning Joe" host said this was actually a time when the best political decision was the same as the morally right thing to do.

"This is one of the rare times that everything that a politician wants, can be achieve achieved by one approach," Scarborough said. "You take care of the health care crisis, the underlying economic crisis will follow, and your political crisis will be alleviated. If you don't take care of the health care crisis, if you do half measures, instead of being like Wuhan -- it did begin there, you can be offended if you want to, but that's where it began -- this morning, Wuhan went back to work. Rush hour is starting back again. They took strict measures, severe measures, and they were able to kill the virus, or cut down on the virus enough, where they can go back to work."

The path Trump is considering will only make all of his problems worse in the long term, when he'll be facing election, and will likely results in millions of avoidable deaths.

"Let's just talk cynically," Scarborough said. "If you think the president does, he does for his own cynical purposes, if you believe that, then the best thing the president can do is to be as aggressive as possible and have what's happened in Wuhan and what's happened in South Korea, happen here. Bend the curve, bring the crisis to an end, get the economy started."

"Half measures and acting like a day trader where you think you can split the baby, that's going to drag this out, and it's going to drag it out into the summer," he continued. "It will drag it out into the fall. It will drag it out into election season, and, yes, it is, most importantly, most concerningly, it will kill a lot of people. If you just look at this cynically, actually doing the right thing medically makes the most sense economically and politically."

"If you don't, this drags on," Scarborough added. "More Americans die, more businesses fail, more markets crash, and this goes into the fall, during the president's re-election time. So if that's what he's thinking about, then actually we all can be grateful that what is in his best political interest, is also in America's health interest and economic interest, and he needs to start thinking that way, and stop listening to people, like Larry Kudlow, who told us this crisis, this pandemic, was contained weeks ago. It's not. We're about to go into the most difficult phase in America, and whether that lasts two weeks, three weeks, or three months, depends on what the president does over the next few days. The window for decisive action is quickly closing."