Rachel Maddow: 'The federal government is just abandoning ship' on stopping the coronavirus

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow described the "dystopian" world that the United States has been thrust into as the federal government has decided they're done dealing with the problem.

The United States just had the worst day on record for coronavirus cases, but President Donald Trump hasn't met with the coronavirus task force in weeks. Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence told elected officials on Capitol Hill today that there were only a few counties in the country having spikes, which is false.

"If the federal government isn't going work on this thing that killed 121,000 Americans in 16 weeks with no signs of stopping and we are breaking records all around the country -- if the federal government is not going to work on it we will form new smaller subgroups of United States to try to work on it together since the federal government is just abandoning ship," said Maddow, suggesting states are going to have to fend for themselves.

"So you have got the tri-state area that went through hell and high water and is coming out of it and has bent their curve all the way down," she continued. "You see those states now banding together and say well we are going to try to protect ourselves from the states where this thing is out of control. Today in Virginia, for example, it looks like that's going to be the first state in the country to issue their own statewide binding workplace safety rules for what companies have to do to keep workers safe from coronavirus in the workplace."

She noted that it's "weird" to see states trying to solve the crisis by themselves without the help of the U.S. government, which usually swoops in during national problems.

"This is the sort of thing that the federal government does, the Occupational Safety and Health Association -- safety and health administration in the federal government is in charge of doing this," said Maddow. "But in the Trump administration, they are just not. They are just not working on it at all. Since the federal government isn't doing anything at all on that score while lots and lots of people are going back to work in the face of the threat of getting infected at work, well, yeah, states are going to have to start making up these rules themselves, for themselves. because the president has just decided that the federal government won't do it."

The failure of the federal government to address the coronavirus crisis will likely "start to pull the states apart from one another and to pit the states against each other in some ways," Maddow predicted. "And if we have good leadership in the states, we can all hope and pray that the states will try to work together cooperatively and collectively to advance their mutual interests."

"It's at least all on a theme. You know? It is all dystopia," Maddow lamented. "It's all on a theme of how disastrously bad American governance, perhaps the worst American governance in the history of this country, how that manifests in terms of rule of law, in terms of health and safety of the people, in terms of the la-la land nonsense from the people who are supposed to be leading this country during this dark time."

See her opener below: