Phil Murphy

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Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This pandemic is a disaster.

And normally in disasters, the federal government takes the lead.

But not this White House.

It's been largely up to the governors.

And many of them have become nationally known for their very public responses, which have included shooting down ideas out of Washington.

It's been governors like Cuomo, DeWine, Newsom, Whitmer, whom we had on the podcast a few weeks ago.

But the state with the second highest number of infections and deaths is New Jersey, and the governor there, Phil Murphy, has taken a different approach.

He's been less combative in public, and he's had a much smoother relationship throughout with President Trump.

Besides having to manage this crisis, Murphy just emerged from his own health scare.

He found out about the first COVID case in his state while in the recovery room after getting a tumor removed from his kidney.

As he faces the decisions around when to relax stay-at-home orders, Murphy comes at it as a former Wall Street banker who knows the economic cost as well as the obvious human toll.

And about that relationship with Trump.

You'll hear that in the middle of our interview, we had to stop for a bit because the president was calling him on his cell phone right then.

You might hear the cell phone ringing in the background a little toward the beginning.

Take a listen.

Governor Phil Murphy, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Isaac, thanks for having me on the ticket.

Good to be with you.

Yeah, so right before this hit, like right before,

you were in the hospital for surgery to remove a tumor on your kidney.

It went well, and that's good news.

But I'm wondering what that perspective of having just come out of a hospital dealing with healthcare right before

that became a part of everybody's lives and in some way, what that does to your perspective on everything?

Yeah, I first of all

thank you for

the good words and so far so good.

Although I came back a lot faster and a lot harder than I should have, but so far so good at least.

In fact,

ironically, our first case in New Jersey was on the day of my surgery.

We had been wargaming and preparing since January, but it actually hit on that day, March 4th.

You know, I don't think it ever would have been abstract.

There's just no way it could be.

And you look each day, we read out a few of the obituaries and

memorialize some of the lives lost in an effort that it never becomes just a question of numbers, that it's always about

specific human beings and lives lived.

So I don't think it ever would have been abstract.

But boy, I'll tell you, having lived through a challenging health crisis myself

and now going through this, it certainly made it even more real and

more tangible than it otherwise would have been.

In fact, one of the underlying comorbidities of folks who are more likely to get this virus and suffer hospitalizations, if not fatalities, is kidney disease.

So in that respect, it was explicitly a lot more real.

But as I said, so far, so good.

And I'm keeping away from other people and wearing masks, and I've got to keep it that way.

Is it hard?

Everybody's trying to figure out how to do their jobs in the middle of this.

You've got to be

your job is running the state.

You, as you said, are in a high-risk category now.

You'd be careful anyway, I assume, but it must make it extra tricky.

Yeah, it does.

It does.

I mean, the whole question of social distancing, as I'm sitting here with you, I've got a colleague about 10 or 12 feet away from me, and that's as close as we'll become.

I've only taken my mask off because of

the fact we're talking, and you probably couldn't understand me terribly well.

But yeah, I mean,

it's in the back of your mind.

I mean, I don't dwell on it.

It's just a reality that I accept.

And I'm behaving as we've suggested to so many publicly and privately, behave as though you've got it in the sense of

staying away from people, masking aggressive hygiene, the things that we're preaching to others, we're practicing ourselves.

One of the masks that you have is an exit 109 mask.

That's

like a good jersey guy.

You've got your exit on the turnpike identified right on your face now.

100%.

How did that mask make its way to you?

So it was a t-shirt.

that my wife, as kind of a surprise, carved up for me.

And it was a t-shirt clearly that I wasn't wearing a whole lot because I didn't realize that it was being carved up.

But it indeed says Exit 109 on it.

My wife quietly carved it up and I've worn that a handful of times.

It's a little bit of a handful to tie up and untie.

But the point is this, when we walk into the press conference, we're masked.

When we leave, we're masked.

And we're doing that not just because that's what we're doing privately, but we also want to make that statement to everybody that that's what we're doing.

What would you say to the people who aren't wearing masks?

They're making a mistake.

They're making a mistake.

There's just no two ways about it.

You need to be doing the basic stuff.

And I understand folks may think it's a nuisance and it's a burden and all of that.

And I can completely appreciate that.

But it is...

the basic stuff that's going to get us out of this.

It is wearing a mask.

It's aggressive hygiene, washing with soap and water, cleaning surfaces aggressively.

And by the way, as my health commissioner reminds me,

nothing trumps social distancing.

That's sort of job number one for us.

And again, it's not fun.

I get that.

And it's probably, particularly as the weather gets better, folks are going to get more and more impatient.

And all I could say is stay the course.

Folks in New Jersey have done an extraordinary job staying the course.

And please, God, we need to keep it that way because we're not out of this yet.

I wonder what you'd say to the protesters who have been showing up in some of the state capitals saying that this needs to be changed back, all the social distancing rules, all the business closures, the lockdown needs to end, the liberate.

What do you make of that?

Listen, we've had some of them here as well, not to the scale that you've seen in places like Michigan.

And when I've been asked about it, I say, listen, I appreciate folks' right to protest i appreciate the fact that they um

they may be you know fed up cabin fever all all of that who doesn't want to get the economy back on its feet we've been crushed with unemployment small businesses getting crushed completely get it but and here's the big but

we have to continue to make decisions based on the data based on the science, based on the facts.

And the facts and the data and the science overwhelmingly tell us, at least in in New Jersey, it may be different somewhere else in our country or in the world.

I know Germany, where I've lived a couple of times, is, as we speak, starting to quietly and responsibly open up.

And I hope that someday sooner than later, we'll be doing that.

But at the moment, we're not there yet.

And we have to make sure we don't jump the gun and that we don't transpose the steps.

It's a healthcare recovery first, then it's the economic recovery.

Your colleague Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington,

he said,

because President Trump has been encouraging these, he said, the president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies, even while its own administration says the virus is real and it's deadly.

You agree with that?

Listen,

I don't know that I've he hasn't done it to New Jersey.

So, and I and I think one thing is I've spent an inordinate amount of time, as you can imagine, with the White House and a fair amount of time with the President himself.

He, I'm going to say say that New Jersey is with New York and California, New York and Florida rather as the three states he knows the best.

All I could say is, right, so he's got family, he's got investments, he's got a place where he spends a lot of his warm weather weekends in spring and summer.

And I've made it, you know, I've gone through painstakingly with the president, with the vice president, with their teams exactly how the the toll, what the toll has been in our state, state, how it has unfolded.

And it is,

you know, at least here, I believe he understands that we're not remotely near the end zone.

I can't speak for the rest of the country.

I do think it's got to be that the order I mentioned a minute ago has got to be health care recovery only first, and then

economic recovery after that.

So

let's continue to look at it that way isaac can i ask you a question sure

um i actually have the president who needs to speak to me is it possible we can break this and i can we can come back to you yes would you mind that no not at all

bear with me we'll get you back thanks okay

well I've never had an interview interrupted by a president before, but these are strange times.

So we'll take a break here and be back with more with Governor Phil Murphy in a moment.

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Isaac, sorry about that.

It's no problem.

When the president calls, you should hang up on me.

I want you to note that he called actually twice while you were speaking to me, and I let the call go twice.

But then the third time,

they called my family at home, and they called my other line here, so I couldn't.

Wait, so I couldn't hear your cell phone ring in the background.

That was the president calling on your cell phone I didn't realize it at the time but it was well my next question that I was about to ask you is to try to so much of this what's going on seems to be bound up in the way people have been having these conversations with the president you and other governors and other officials can you walk us through a little bit of what a conversation with the president is like when you're talking about the needs that your state has and what he's trying to do yeah i mean i won't betray private conversations but you can imagine they're fact-based, they're explicit.

The vice president is also very much involved.

And again,

I would remind folks to distinguish between fact-based getting installments of what we need versus having everything we need.

So those are two different realities.

But the fact of the matter is, there's no call with place that has gone unanswered.

And even if we don't like the answer, we get an answer.

It just sounds so different from the way that we've seen him at these briefings every day.

Yeah, I don't, and I'm not saying this for any reason.

It's going to come out the wrong way, and I don't mean it the wrong way.

I don't watch the briefings only because people have said to me, hey, have you thought of, you know, do you do X because Governor Cuomo does Y?

And I say, listen, Governor Cuomo has been an extraordinary partner, but I don't watch his briefings because

I'm up to my eyeballs and stuff in New Jersey and similarly with the president.

But you know enough to know that the president.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, absolutely.

I watch news shows at night and I watch highlights from, absolutely.

And so, no, no, I'm not denying that

I know they exist.

And that I don't have those sorts of conversations privately.

Yeah.

They just don't, they have not, listen, they may, maybe they will happen, but they have not happened.

And including that's, that's where we're, again, I want to be explicit.

We don't always agree we we don't always get what we need or ask for so that I want to be clear about that as well but they are very you know straight-ahead fact-based conversations

you spent the last couple of years ripping into them every which way yeah there's a lot of stuff we don't agree on but but a lot of that uh and some of it relates to what we're going through you know we weren't prepared as a country as a testing matter and and and we're going to need to do a 9-11 commission like post-mortem on the you know where we were and where we are and where we need to be.

But a lot of the stuff that we're not going to be agreeing on is outside of the purview of the fact that the house is on fire right now, and I need help with the fire brigade.

The White House has suggested that some of the state and local aid that would be coming, they would make potentially contingent on reopening the state.

Yeah,

I haven't heard that from them privately or publicly, frankly, but

I don't think that's a prudent move because one state's reality may be very different from another one.

I'll be the happiest guy in America, never mind New Jersey, when we open.

But here's the problem with the state aid.

We've got expenses which are through the roof, revenues that have fallen off a cliff.

And we're helping everybody from you lost your job to you're in the hospital to you're a small business and you're going up on the rocks.

And here's the reality that I don't know that that folks really think this through right now, but in particular for folks who are on the fiscal year that we're on, so we're a mid-calendar year, fiscal year, and a lot of states are, if we don't get state aid in big numbers, we'll have an Armageddon in terms of services that we can't provide, layoffs that will be widespread.

Nothing

will bring us no joy to do any of that, but we'll have no choice.

We can't print money.

I've got a constitutional requirement to balance the budget.

Right.

And so the state aid aid is desperately needed.

So if he calls you up and he says, hey, Phil, I need you to reopen the state.

I need the economy to get going.

And you're not at the place where you're comfortable, what do you do?

So far, that conversation has been respectful of the realities in New Jersey.

It has not been associated with any financial aid coming at us out of Congress or elsewhere.

If we're putting lives explicitly at risk, I can't hit the go button.

If you were still in your old life

in the finance world, what do you think you would be,

your sense of what to do now would be?

I mean, I think people look at things like the Dow Jones going all over the place and are confused by what that means.

They don't know whether they're 401ks or toasts.

They don't, you know, and so you're not a medical doctor, but you did have some expertise in

a holiday in Express last night.

Listen, I'm not going to give folks investment.

I'd say this.

Let me strike a positive note.

And I'm not just saying this to be positive.

Anybody looks at equities over multi-decade periods.

In other words, you're not trying to buy or sell to make money, quote unquote, this week or today,

but you're looking at what life looks like over a long stretch, long period of time.

And you make that graph as long, fused, time

table as possible,

you're going to find that you were smart to hold equities.

That's just always the case.

And I know that's a long-term reality.

I'm not suggesting I've got a good answer for you, what you do from this week to the next, but we are going to get through this.

Just don't know when.

And so you've got to hope for the best.

I know this is trite, but prepare for the worst.

You know, when a hurricane, as bad as it is, and God knows we've paid a big price in New Jersey for things like Superstorm Sandy and other natural disasters, but they come, they go, you go through a rebuilding process, you try to get folks back on their feet.

This is more complicated.

This is a profound moment in our history as a nation.

I mean, we just were not ready.

You were, among other things, in your life, the finance chair of the DNC at one point.

There's this question about the convention and whether it can happen.

It's already been pushed back from July to August.

I mean, are we just living in a fantasy to think that there's going to be a political convention, that people are going to go together and do that?

Yeah, I don't.

It's a good question.

It was postponed.

Maybe that was a good interim step.

I do look at the adjacencies, though.

There aren't a lot of things with mass gatherings associated with them.

in the summer that have not been postponed.

Yeah.

I mean, baseball may be played, and I hope it is played, but they've talked about even baseball being played with no fans.

Yeah, like

I don't know.

Exactly.

But things like the Olympics are an obvious one, golf tournaments, tennis tournaments.

So, yeah, it does stand out a little bit in the sense that it's still ⁇ I don't believe either party has

the Republicans were already in late August, as I recall.

Right.

Yeah.

And they say that they're going ahead as planned.

And the DNC says

that they're going to go with this August plan.

And I wonder, though.

Listen, by the way, I hope the world suggests,

I hope we're in a place where based on the facts, the science, the data,

that they can go ahead, right?

So

you're in a regional contact now with

the governors in the Northeast

up through

into Rhode Island, but New York, New Jersey.

Massachusetts, Connecticut.

Right.

Massachusetts.

Yep.

Connecticut.

New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware.

Right.

There's a Midwest one.

There's now a Pacific Northwest one with California, Oregon, and Washington State.

These are Republicans and Democrats that are part of

the Midwest and the Northeast one.

They're not Democratic governors

on the West Coast there.

Isn't it weird that it's 2020 and we've divided up into regions like this, where you guys are deciding by region what to do with reopening the economy?

It may look that way.

It's less weird up close than

it may appear.

And let me just say in why, in just two very quick respects.

Number one, unless in our case, admittedly, less Rhode Island and Massachusetts, although I compared notes regularly with Governor Ramundo and Governor Baker, but mostly with New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

We actually coordinated not with a formal association as we've established for opening up, as it were, but we coordinated quite closely as we closed down.

Not only is New Jersey the densest state in the country, we're the densest region in the country.

So it felt natural, and therefore it feels natural as well as we think about what we need to do to reopen.

And we just basically added a formality around that.

Like, are you scared about where things are headed?

That this is the new reality for who knows how long?

Yeah, I

scared is not, no, I would not use that word, but,

and by the way, let's not forget that this is the United States of America.

We are

in so many respects, the indispensable.

We truly are an exceptional nation.

And when we seem to be up against it, forget how we got up against it.

We have time and time and time again

beaten back and found our way through to victory, whatever that may mean.

And I'm an optimist at the end of the day.

Notwithstanding the toll, which is enormous, takes your breath away.

Multiple wars added together, multiple 9-11s added together.

So it is daunting.

But I believe with all my heart,

we get through this.

What I can't tell you is when.

I know we'll have casualties.

We've already had thousands, and we'll have more, sadly.

I can't tell you when

we,

at the end of the day, quote-unquote, win.

And it could be a lot longer than any of us want, but we will get through this.

We have no choice but to fight, and we will fight on, period.

And we'll fight until we win it.

Well, I think everybody's trying to sort through the confusion and the sadness and the reasons for optimism.

You bet.

So, Governor, thanks for taking the time to do this.

Keep the fake, man.

It's always good talking to you, Isaac.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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