Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: This is Talk Easy. I'm studing for Goso. Welcome to
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 3: Today. I'm joined by reporter evan Osnos. Ostnos has been
Speaker 3: a staff writer for The New Yorkers since two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight, covering politics and foreign affairs. You may have
Speaker 3: also seen him on CNN, where he's a regular contributor
Speaker 3: throughout election season. That's why I wanted to sit with Evan,
Speaker 3: especially on the heels of Joe Biden and Donald Trump
Speaker 3: securing the required delegates to become their party's nominees. I know,
Speaker 3: for many people listening to this right now, the fact
Speaker 3: that that sentence is true, that is true again in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four as it was in twenty twenty is
Speaker 3: deeply upsetting. It's the sequel nobody asked for a rematch.
Speaker 3: That makes just about everyone I know in my life
Speaker 3: want to get into a cryo chamber and set the
Speaker 3: timer to twenty twenty eight, or at the very least
Speaker 3: January twentieth, twenty twenty five, which is when in all
Speaker 3: likelihood Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be sworn in
Speaker 3: for a second term. So with all of that, what
Speaker 3: do we do with these choices? That's the question that
Speaker 3: guides this conversation. It's the question that made me want
Speaker 3: to sit with Evan because when it comes to Biden,
Speaker 3: there are few reporters that have had as much access
Speaker 3: to him as Evan Aus knows. In fact, as President
Speaker 3: Biden has been historic press a verse. He's done less
Speaker 3: interviews than Obama, Trump, Bush, all of them by a
Speaker 3: significant margin. It's not even close. He does not talk
Speaker 3: to the press, and there are a few reasons for that.
Speaker 3: But in the last month, Ostno sat with him for
Speaker 3: a profile in The New Yorker titled The Last Campaign,
Speaker 3: which is a double entendre of sorts as we consider
Speaker 3: the fate and future of American democracy. Ostno's has also
Speaker 3: written a pretty uncompromising, incisive book on the forty six
Speaker 3: president titled Joe Biden, The Life, the Run, and What
Speaker 3: Matters Now. So in Act one of this episode, we
Speaker 3: talk about Biden's complicated bid for reelection, where he's succeeded
Speaker 3: in the last four years, and where he's fallen painfully short,
Speaker 3: especially in Gaza. In Act two, we discussed the alternative
Speaker 3: in Donald Trump and how he is very much not
Speaker 3: the Donald Trump of twenty twenty or twenty sixteen, what
Speaker 3: he plans to do, what Trump and his team plan
Speaker 3: to do if granted a second term, is deeply horrifying
Speaker 3: and is something that Evan outlines pretty thoroughly in this episode. Then, finally,
Speaker 3: for Act three, the big messy existential questions that I
Speaker 3: think a lot of us are having about Biden, democracy,
Speaker 3: the values of this country, and the disillusionment that so
Speaker 3: many feel in this moment. I talked about this at
Speaker 3: the top with Evan, but Time Magazine recently ran a
Speaker 3: piece titled The Dread Election, which is definitely appropriate and
Speaker 3: funny and depressing, but it's also kind of useless because
Speaker 3: what do we do with dread? Dread flattens us, it
Speaker 3: paralyzes us, It makes us think we have no options.
Speaker 3: And I think the way Evan lays it all out,
Speaker 3: the way he relays his reporting, his knowledge of his
Speaker 3: it actually gave me a little bit of hope. Not
Speaker 3: a lot of hope, not a surplus of hope, but
Speaker 3: just a little bit. And in twenty twenty four, I
Speaker 3: don't know about you, but that's about as much as
Speaker 3: I can ask for. And so with that, here is
Speaker 3: evan Osnos. Evan Osnos, thank you for being.
Speaker 4: Here my pleasure, Sam, thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: You have been the boy covering the selection and the
Speaker 3: political landscape for a while now, but especially the last
Speaker 3: four years, and so I figured I need to start
Speaker 3: by asking you are you all right?
Speaker 4: That is a decent and generous question, and I think
Speaker 4: a logical one for anybody covering politics.
Speaker 3: That will be my last decent and generous question.
Speaker 4: As the Brits would say, I'm bearing up.
Speaker 3: What does that mean? Again?
Speaker 4: It means you're kind of stiff up or lipping it.
Speaker 4: And I do find that I can't do politics too long,
Speaker 4: too much. I have to break it up by doing
Speaker 4: other things.
Speaker 3: Like coming on talk easy and talking about politics.
Speaker 4: Easy is the relevant word, I got it, Yes, exactly. Well,
Speaker 4: this is talking about it is slightly different than staring
Speaker 4: at the surface of the sun of it. So this
Speaker 4: is a much better version.
Speaker 3: You recently published this excellent profile of Joe Biden, and
Speaker 3: it was striking for a number of reasons that we'll
Speaker 3: get into today. But since that interview, ran Biden delivered
Speaker 3: a pretty i'll say animated performance at the State of
Speaker 3: the Union. He also, along with former President Trump, recently
Speaker 3: secured the requisite delegates the clinch nomination from the Democratic Party,
Speaker 3: setting up a rematch that Time magazine called the Dread Election.
Speaker 3: And I want to start here as a way to
Speaker 3: frame this conversation in terms other than dread and despair,
Speaker 3: which I don't think actually get us anywhere. How would
Speaker 3: you frame the state and the stakes of this election?
Speaker 4: I think that if we start with the stakes, which
Speaker 4: ultimately is what this should be about. It's a strange
Speaker 4: moment to be writing about things that are beyond the
Speaker 4: range of hyperbole, Meaning you really can't talk about what
Speaker 4: this election is about without acknowledging that it is genuinely
Speaker 4: an election that is about the very future of democracy,
Speaker 4: which has become the most kind of familiar in banal cliche,
Speaker 4: except it happens to be true.
Speaker 3: Are you saying, once again, as pundits have said for
Speaker 3: the last twenty thirty years, this is the most important
Speaker 3: election you'll ever vote in.
Speaker 4: I would have, but I you know, I practically have
Speaker 4: a post it note that says, don't ever say this
Speaker 4: is the most important election of your life. If this
Speaker 4: this thing goes frankly into the hands of Donald Trump,
Speaker 4: it's not entirely clear what happens to our system of elections,
Speaker 4: and that would sound like a bizarre thing to say
Speaker 4: in any other race, except that in this particular case,
Speaker 4: that's just what the facts deliver.
Speaker 3: And framing it in that kind of binary, I do
Speaker 3: think people feel that talking about it is a bit challenging,
Speaker 3: because no one really knows where to go when you say,
Speaker 3: if Trump wins, we may not have a democracy. And
Speaker 3: so I want to start with President Biden. You know,
Speaker 3: you last interviewed him in twenty twenty. I think it's
Speaker 3: safe to say that the last four years have aged
Speaker 3: all of us quite a bit. But in poll after poll,
Speaker 3: seventy to eighty percent of voters are worried about his age.
Speaker 3: It's been a point of emphasis in the press. Who
Speaker 3: is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Hurr's report
Speaker 3: on Biden's handling of classifying materials, in which he rendered
Speaker 3: the President a sympathetic, well meaning elderly man with the
Speaker 3: poor memory. Having sat down with him in twenty twenty
Speaker 3: and then again recently, is that description of Biden in
Speaker 3: line with your experiences with him?
Speaker 4: I'd be lying to Sam if I didn't say that.
Speaker 4: The very first thing on my mind when I walked
Speaker 4: in to interview him in January of this year was
Speaker 4: precisely that, because in some ways, depending on what the
Speaker 4: answer to that question is, everything else changes. And what
Speaker 4: I saw when I went into the room this time
Speaker 4: was a man who is thinner physically, and that includes
Speaker 4: the sense that he just looks a little more frail.
Speaker 4: His voice his thinned kind of dramatically, and he clears
Speaker 4: his throat all the time. But I will tell you
Speaker 4: that it was pretty clear within a couple of minutes
Speaker 4: of talking to him that the gears, the cogs in
Speaker 4: the machine are exactly the same. What I mean is
Speaker 4: he was doing the same sorts of things that his
Speaker 4: is always done. You know, James Comey, who worked with
Speaker 4: him in the government before becoming kind of the famous
Speaker 4: former FBI director, used to say that a conversation with
Speaker 4: Joe Biden started at point A and ended at point Z,
Speaker 4: and it went everywhere in between. And it has ever been.
Speaker 3: Thus and that's a good thing.
Speaker 4: I don't know if it's a good thing or not.
Speaker 4: It's him, it's been him, and it's partly a reflection
Speaker 4: of his own ideological and intellectual restlessness and intellectual insecurity.
Speaker 4: Let's call it what it is you know, this is
Speaker 4: really you can't understand this man without knowing where he
Speaker 4: has always felt a little bit vulnerable, and for that
Speaker 4: reason he often filibustered. You know, he would fill the
Speaker 4: space because if he didn't fill it, then you might.
Speaker 4: So I think the thing that's noticeable is he doesn't
Speaker 4: say as much as he used to. He doesn't fill
Speaker 4: every silence. But I think the key point is that
Speaker 4: this guy is there. This guy is still there, and
Speaker 4: he's not different in any of the core competencies that matter,
Speaker 4: like his decision making or his his judgment on issues,
Speaker 4: And that I think is a hard thing for people
Speaker 4: to accept because he looks and sounds so much older
Speaker 4: than he was before, and you have to be able
Speaker 4: to have these two ideas in your head at the
Speaker 4: same time.
Speaker 3: Biden surrogates often tell the press behind closed doors, you
Speaker 3: wouldn't believe this man. They all become like Jewish mothers
Speaker 3: Suddenly they he's a different man. He's alert, he's engaged,
Speaker 3: he's the best boy. Colleagues praises energy, his commitment to
Speaker 3: the job. This has happened so much that SNL did
Speaker 3: a sketch about Biden's prowess behind closed doors.
Speaker 4: Okay, so you feel he's up to the job, Dana.
Speaker 5: I was just with him and behind closed doors he's
Speaker 5: a dynamo. This weekend, we both went down to the
Speaker 5: border town of Brownsville, Texas, and Joe went into beast mode.
Speaker 5: He said, we're going to tighten border. Look how easy
Speaker 5: I can cross it. Then he parkourd up to the
Speaker 5: top of the border wall. He front flipped into the
Speaker 5: real grand and came back up with a fish in
Speaker 5: his mouth. But you didn't report that because it doesn't
Speaker 5: fit your little narrative.
Speaker 3: I need to ask you, why is there such a
Speaker 3: startling disconnect between Biden behind closed doors and Biden doors slightly?
Speaker 4: Ajar, I think that what's happening is that some of
Speaker 4: that gap is closing. If you take as an example
Speaker 4: the State of the Union, the person that you saw
Speaker 4: at the State of the Union, and I would even
Speaker 4: say put aside the speech for a second to the
Speaker 4: degree that people subjected themselves to watching the State of
Speaker 4: the Union, and a lot of Americans don't really want to.
Speaker 4: But if you watched him beforehand, when he walks in
Speaker 4: the room and he's working himself down the aisle and
Speaker 4: he's shaking every hand and he's you know, even the
Speaker 4: people who hate him, he's chatting with them, and you
Speaker 4: saw a kind of energy there that I think was
Speaker 4: probably a little surprising to people. And you know, we
Speaker 4: can talk about whether he had a red Bull or
Speaker 4: six or whatever it was on the way in, But like.
Speaker 3: I have questions about the regimen that I'm gonna ask
Speaker 3: you about later.
Speaker 4: But in a direct answer to your question, Sam, if
Speaker 4: you want to really know what he's like behind closed doors,
Speaker 4: read this transcript that just came out recently from the
Speaker 4: Robert Hurr Special Counsel's interview, because that transcript is actually
Speaker 4: really one of the clearest descriptions and it really captures
Speaker 4: what this man is like, which is to say, he
Speaker 4: tells a million stories, some of them are completely unrelated
Speaker 4: to why he's in this interview with the Special Council.
Speaker 4: He ties them back in in some way. But that's
Speaker 4: exactly what it's like talking to him. It's not as
Speaker 4: if this guy is somehow, you know, doing bench presses
Speaker 4: behind the scenes, and then when he gets out in
Speaker 4: front of the crowd, he looks like an eighty one
Speaker 4: year old man. Part of the reason why you see
Speaker 4: a difference now is that this guy is a lot
Speaker 4: better when he has the time, the space, the preparation.
Speaker 4: Like the State of the Union speech did not happen casually.
Speaker 4: They went up to Camp David. They rehearsed the hell
Speaker 4: out of it. They practiced. He puts like little breath
Speaker 4: marks on his script into every word about where he's
Speaker 4: going to take a breath. Part of that's it's related
Speaker 4: to being you know, the fact that he's a stutterer.
Speaker 4: But and if he doesn't do that kind of stuff, Sam,
Speaker 4: he sounds a lot less good, particularly now at this age.
Speaker 4: And so one of the lessons, and this is a
Speaker 4: big blaring thing, is over the next eight months they
Speaker 4: have to figure out a way to give him as
Speaker 4: much time and space to prepare for big public occasions,
Speaker 4: because if he doesn't, then he looks much less good.
Speaker 4: And that is the biggest difference.
Speaker 3: I understand that. So I think moving beyond the superficial
Speaker 3: aspects here, I wanted to talk about the substance of
Speaker 3: his reelection campaign. He said to you that he's running
Speaker 3: again because he's quote proud of his record. That's a
Speaker 3: record that includes the Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act, the
Speaker 3: Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act that will
Speaker 3: make this coming decade one of infrastructure and invention, as
Speaker 3: as Reclin wrote, a decade of building, of decarbonizing, of researching.
Speaker 3: They expanded the Affordable Care Act, in which twenty one
Speaker 3: million people signed up last year. They took the first
Speaker 3: steps towards letting Medicare negotiate drug prices. They took steps
Speaker 3: towards student loan forgiveness. They've taken step to decriminalized non
Speaker 3: violent offenses, and when it comes to the violent crime,
Speaker 3: it has dropped nearly a fifty year low. Unemployment is
Speaker 3: below four percent, the SMP of the Dow hit record highs.
Speaker 3: They averted a recession that basically every respected economist predicted
Speaker 3: would happen, and we are still seeing strong wage gains
Speaker 3: for the poorest Americans. Inequality is down. Growth it's quick,
Speaker 3: and the country is producing more energy than at any
Speaker 3: previous moment in its history. I could go on and on,
Speaker 3: but it really does doesn't matter because every accomplishment I've
Speaker 3: just outlined has had to this point no meaningful impact
Speaker 3: on any major pull. It does not change how people
Speaker 3: feel about Biden, and it has not inspired enthusiasm in
Speaker 3: a second term. So my two questions to you are
Speaker 3: why do you think that is? And secondly, how does
Speaker 3: the Biden administration plan to combat this tendency for good
Speaker 3: news to fall on deaf ears.
Speaker 4: So if you take what is this extraordinary record that
Speaker 4: you just described, and you put it into the context
Speaker 4: of this moment, you have to first begin with the
Speaker 4: fact that people, more broadly, whether it's Joe Biden or
Speaker 4: other politicians, the public is completely sick of politics. At
Speaker 4: the end of the Trump era, people had been forced
Speaker 4: in a sense to deal with politics in their brains
Speaker 4: every day, day in and day out. That there was
Speaker 4: a just a measurable drop off the amount that people
Speaker 4: wanted to care about politics. They didn't want have to
Speaker 4: talk about it with their friends. They'd lost friends over
Speaker 4: the course of the last few years. So that's one
Speaker 4: thing that's happening, is that that list of things, which
Speaker 4: by any measurement would have usually registered in people's approvals,
Speaker 4: a lot of people frankly, just didn't pay all that
Speaker 4: much attention.
Speaker 3: So basically, once Trump lost, their interest was in a
Speaker 3: kind of like remission.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, And I think honestly, I mean, you could
Speaker 4: have had Taylor Swift in the presidency, and probably she
Speaker 4: would have been a little bit unpopular after a while
Speaker 4: because people were just sick of politics.
Speaker 3: She would have had better pulling numbers than mine.
Speaker 4: But yes, and she would have had a better way
Speaker 4: of getting out of it, that's for sure. I think
Speaker 4: there's two other things that are going on. We are
Speaker 4: as a country right now in a midst of not
Speaker 4: just a psychic funk, I mean a kind of a
Speaker 4: degree of whether it's like informal mental health terms, but
Speaker 4: just as a country, our level of dissatisfaction with the
Speaker 4: direction of the place is profound. And then on top
Speaker 4: of that, half of the country is not talking to
Speaker 4: the other half. It's almost exactly half. And so as
Speaker 4: a result, the people who might be inclined to if
Speaker 4: you're a Republican, and you might be inclined to say,
Speaker 4: I'm pretty happy that my stock portfolio has never been
Speaker 4: better because the S and P just broke records, or
Speaker 4: you might be happy that, if you're on the left,
Speaker 4: you might be happy to find that, in fact, more
Speaker 4: people have healthcare than ever in American history, or that
Speaker 4: you know, they just passed this big climate build, the
Speaker 4: largest climate build in American history. The fact is that
Speaker 4: in each half there is a group of people who
Speaker 4: will simply never want to say that Joe Biden, the
Speaker 4: centrist of centrists, is my guy. Means that he has
Speaker 4: a kind of ceiling on his natural support. I think
Speaker 4: the other huge factor here that until very recently, I
Speaker 4: mean Joe Biden just clinched the nomination, just very recently.
Speaker 4: Until that point, a lot of Americans, honestly, and the
Speaker 4: data supports this, didn't really accept the fact that it
Speaker 4: was going to be a choice between Biden and Trump.
Speaker 4: The campaign internally estimates it's about twenty five percent of
Speaker 4: Americans in swing states who fully engaged that fact.
Speaker 3: They couldn't believe that we would have to run it back.
Speaker 4: That's right. It just felt unbearable. And and for that reason,
Speaker 4: when you ask people about how you feel about Joe Biden,
Speaker 4: a lot of times the answer was terrible. And you know,
Speaker 4: it was one commentator who called it referred pain, meaning
Speaker 4: everything of the last few years, the pandemic, inflation, just
Speaker 4: the sort of dyspepsia with the state of the country.
Speaker 4: You put all that together and it attaches to the incumbent. Now,
Speaker 4: none of that is an exoneration. None of that is
Speaker 4: I don't say any of that as it intended to
Speaker 4: sort of, you know, say that it's not his fault
Speaker 4: or his problem. All I'm saying is that when you're
Speaker 4: trying to understand these numbers right now, and perhaps more importantly,
Speaker 4: when Joe Biden is looking at these numbers and trying
Speaker 4: to figure out am I going to lose this race?
Speaker 4: Part of his answer is I don't think the race
Speaker 4: has really begun yet, and we're just in the moment
Speaker 4: now of people tuning in.
Speaker 3: I'd say on the left, it has certainly begun, and
Speaker 3: it has especially begun since October seventh of last year.
Speaker 3: Since then, I've heard from many people on the left
Speaker 3: that as this crisis in Gaza goes on, that they
Speaker 3: don't feel comfortable re electing an administration that continues to
Speaker 3: offer military aid to Israel, that is presiding over thirty
Speaker 3: thousand plus Palestinians dead, seventy percent of whom are women
Speaker 3: and children. When you spoke to Biden recently, did he
Speaker 3: view this issue as the existential crisis It very much
Speaker 3: appears to be in this moment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have to tell you, this was the one
Speaker 4: point in my interview with him where this kind of
Speaker 4: somewhat blustery, very confident, I've got no problems attitude collapsed. Honestly,
Speaker 4: I mean, this was the moment when I could see
Speaker 4: he knows how politics works. He knows when something is
Speaker 4: a profound issue and when something is a short term
Speaker 4: issue that he can manage physically. I saw him kind
Speaker 4: of sink when I raised this question of what are
Speaker 4: you saying? What can you say particularly to young democrats,
Speaker 4: to people of color, to Arab Americans, Muslim Americans who
Speaker 4: say that they have lost faith in you? And the
Speaker 4: reason why I think he almost shrank in that moment
Speaker 4: was that he does not have an easy answer for
Speaker 4: that question. First thing he said was, of course, we
Speaker 4: do not want to see Palestinians dying by the thousands.
Speaker 4: This is not he said. The way he put it
Speaker 4: was it's un American to imagine that. Then, of course,
Speaker 4: he said, but I also ask them for patience. As
Speaker 4: I heard that, I thought to myself, there are very
Speaker 4: few people who are going to hear that his critics
Speaker 4: who are going to say, well, that's a solution, Because
Speaker 4: this is an urgent, ongoing emergency. How is patients, a
Speaker 4: solution to the problem.
Speaker 3: By the way, a patience and a time not afforded
Speaker 3: the people who are in Gaza right now.
Speaker 4: But you have to consider also the position he's in.
Speaker 4: You know, the United States for as long as Joe
Speaker 4: Biden has been alive, has supported the State of Israel
Speaker 4: from its origins. You know, Joe Biden has been alive
Speaker 4: longer than the State of Israel has existed.
Speaker 3: A man born in nineteen forty two.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. And I think for him he is tugged
Speaker 4: between these two impulses. One to say, I can never
Speaker 4: relinquish my support for the State of Israel as an idea,
Speaker 4: as a refuge for Jews in the world, without which
Speaker 4: he deeply believes they would not be safe. And at
Speaker 4: the same time he's had this fifty year very tense
Speaker 4: and often angry relationship with bb net and Yahoo. And
Speaker 4: I think if there was a an obvious mistake that
Speaker 4: he made in this process, it was going to Israel
Speaker 4: and putting his arms around bib Netneu. I mean, he
Speaker 4: did it at a moment when it felt like at
Speaker 4: the time he was doing it as a gesture of solace,
Speaker 4: and in the end it attached himself. He attached himself
Speaker 4: to a man who who, for one thing, doesn't see
Speaker 4: the world the way that Biden does, and two doesn't
Speaker 4: really want him to win again. I mean, bib Neetnah
Speaker 4: who wants Donald Trump to win again? And that's because
Speaker 4: Donald Trump, let's remember, does not exactly have the Palestinian's
Speaker 4: best interest at heart.
Speaker 3: I want to hold that moment that you were describing, though,
Speaker 3: as both the reporter but also as a person in
Speaker 3: the room sitting right across from him. You said it
Speaker 3: was the only time in your interview where he seemed
Speaker 3: to break character, where the bluster subsided, he slunk down
Speaker 3: in a seat. I wonder do you think he felt
Speaker 3: deflated about the actions or the inaction that he's taken,
Speaker 3: or was he more horrified by the prospect that this
Speaker 3: may cost him an election?
Speaker 4: Now I got the sense that it is about the dilemma,
Speaker 4: the predicament, the fact that he is in a moment
Speaker 4: of anguish, and look, you have to think about how
Speaker 4: he perceives himself, you know, I know this is hard
Speaker 4: to imagine for people who now see him as somebody
Speaker 4: who is in effect helping bib Net and Yaho do
Speaker 4: what he is doing. But that's not Joe Biden's self image.
Speaker 4: You know, he's a person who's been calling for a
Speaker 4: two state solution for years, long after it was out
Speaker 4: of fashion in politics in this country and in Israel.
Speaker 4: And now he finds himself in the position where he's
Speaker 4: the guy in the seat at the very moment when
Speaker 4: that is both necessary and politically impossible. So I think
Speaker 4: that's what it was about. Look, if he was so
Speaker 4: concerned that losing the election was an immediate risk, he
Speaker 4: wouldn't be running. The numbers are pretty clear. He thinks
Speaker 4: that he can probably turn this around. I think he's
Speaker 4: kind of and we can have a whole debate about
Speaker 4: whether that's delusional or rational.
Speaker 3: I think it's clear that his capacity to be delusional,
Speaker 3: to believe in himself has got him here. But if
Speaker 3: he does somehow manage to address and connect to those
Speaker 3: voters I'm thinking about the Arab American and Muslim voters
Speaker 3: in Michigan that put in protest votes in the primary,
Speaker 3: if he does manage to connect to those younger voters
Speaker 3: and people that are not just younger but feel strongly
Speaker 3: about this issue, I want to get to this one
Speaker 3: last bit here, which is that in twenty twenty, he
Speaker 3: positioned himself as the transition candidate, the bridge to the
Speaker 3: next generation. I just want to take a look at
Speaker 3: what that sounded like in twenty twenty for a second.
Speaker 6: Well, folks, there's time for America to get back up.
Speaker 6: I want again fight for the proposition that we hold
Speaker 6: is true self evidence that fight for the notion that
Speaker 6: America has to lead the world and lead Americans to
Speaker 6: this new place, this new generation. Look. I view myself
Speaker 6: as a bridge, not as anything else. There's an entire
Speaker 6: generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are
Speaker 6: the future of this country.
Speaker 3: So here we are four years later. Does he still
Speaker 3: see himself in those transitional terms?
Speaker 4: I think that to state the obvious, everybody assumed when
Speaker 4: he said that he was going to be a transition
Speaker 4: or a bridge, people thought that meant that he was
Speaker 4: only going to serve one term. Right, That's what the
Speaker 4: general perception was at the time. There was a little
Speaker 4: bit of what's known in foreign policy as strategic ambiguity,
Speaker 4: meaning he never said he was only going to do
Speaker 4: one term.
Speaker 3: When you interviewed him four years ago, did you believe that?
Speaker 4: No, honestly, and that might sound convenient after the fact,
Speaker 4: but the reality is it'd be nuts to say before
Speaker 4: the fact that you're only going to serve one term,
Speaker 4: because if you do that, then every reporter in the
Speaker 4: world is just going to spend your entire first term
Speaker 4: talking about who's going to be your successor, Is Kamala
Speaker 4: going to outplay so and so? And it would probably
Speaker 4: undermine your ability to do anything in Congress because they
Speaker 4: wouldn't work with you at all. So there's a way
Speaker 4: in which he was trying to have his cake and
Speaker 4: eat it too. He wanted to indicate, Okay, I'm not
Speaker 4: going to be around forever, but at the same time
Speaker 4: not hobble himself by committing himself to a four year term.
Speaker 4: And so that's what they came up with, was this
Speaker 4: kind of transition language. When he talks about being a
Speaker 4: bridge or a transition. That's true after eight years as
Speaker 4: it is after four. But I'm also, let's be blunt
Speaker 4: about something. I think there was something that changed in
Speaker 4: his mind. This is me speculating. I didn't ask this precisely,
Speaker 4: but I think at the point at which Donald Trump
Speaker 4: tried to steal the election from Joe Biden.
Speaker 3: A man who said that he wanted to be president
Speaker 3: since the age of twenty one twenty two.
Speaker 4: I think that when happened, there was a degree to
Speaker 4: which it kind of set off a piece of Biden
Speaker 4: that is competitive and proud and demands in a sense
Speaker 4: that he respond to the insult that Donald Trump represents
Speaker 4: not just to him personally, but to everything the guy
Speaker 4: stands for. And on some level, you know, because I
Speaker 4: asked him this question in the interview, I said, was
Speaker 4: there ever a moment in the course of this first
Speaker 4: term when you thought that you might not run again?
Speaker 4: And he immediately said no. What that clearly indicates is
Speaker 4: by the time he arrived in this job, he was
Speaker 4: pretty sure that he was going to run for a
Speaker 4: second term. And you can regard that as hypocrisy or
Speaker 4: renouncing an earlier pledge. You know, he would say, well,
Speaker 4: listen closely to what I said. I never said I
Speaker 4: was going to only do four years. I think it's
Speaker 4: a combination of all of those factors.
Speaker 3: He contends that he's still best positioned to beat Trump
Speaker 3: because he beat them before.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that there are a few things
Speaker 4: that matter. One is that it's not just a Biden
Speaker 4: talking point to say that there are not other people
Speaker 4: out there who have beaten Trump. It's a really specific
Speaker 4: bit of political chemistry to beat this guy who has
Speaker 4: very high name recognition, who has this concatenation of all
Speaker 4: of these different constituencies, most importantly after all, the white
Speaker 4: working class who has this record in the upper Middlewest,
Speaker 4: like all of that matters. And Gavin Newsom, just to
Speaker 4: give you one example, polls about ten points behind Joe
Speaker 4: Biden compared to Donald Trump. So if you are imagined,
Speaker 4: and that applies really to most of the big names,
Speaker 4: I can't say that everybody fits into that particular arrangement,
Speaker 4: but that's pretty much what happens when you start looking
Speaker 4: at people who are often talked about. So you're in
Speaker 4: this odd position where Biden is both polling behind and
Speaker 4: is also one of the only people who has the
Speaker 4: raw political elements at this point to be able to
Speaker 4: say I really have shown a path to beating this guy.
Speaker 3: So he really wants the sequel. That's basically what you're.
Speaker 4: Talking Yeah, which I find somewhat mystifying sometimes honestly, Sam,
Speaker 4: I mean I sort of look at it. I think
Speaker 4: you could retire at this point and you would go
Speaker 4: down in history as having taken America out of the
Speaker 4: pandemic and vanquished Trump, driven him from the White House.
Speaker 4: And the fact that he doesn't do that is where
Speaker 4: it becomes as much of a kind of I think,
Speaker 4: a story about his own personal psychology and his notion
Speaker 4: of his read of the politics. I've been doing this
Speaker 4: for a while now, and if there's one thing I've
Speaker 4: learned about covering politics is that it is a whole
Speaker 4: lot harder to win elections than you might think it
Speaker 4: is from the outside. And God knows, I've been wrong
Speaker 4: over and over again about trying to estimate who's going
Speaker 4: to win and who's going to lose.
Speaker 3: Well, I certainly don't underestimate how hard it is. And
Speaker 3: I think he is hoping that his sequel is more
Speaker 3: like Godfather too than speed to and I wish him
Speaker 3: at all of us the best. In terms of the
Speaker 3: psychology of Biden, I want to get to that a
Speaker 3: little bit at the end, because you know, growing up,
Speaker 3: Biden's father would often say to him, Joey, don't compare
Speaker 3: me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative, which
Speaker 3: is the line Biden has used in talking to voters
Speaker 3: about Trump. And you know, for the last four years,
Speaker 3: I think many people have been able to at least
Speaker 3: to some degree to not of Trump TV, which I
Speaker 3: think was healthy for a time but is perhaps not
Speaker 3: prudent in twenty twenty four, so with that, Trump held
Speaker 3: his first big rally of the campaign in Waco, Texas.
Speaker 3: What was the historical signs up agains of kicking off
Speaker 3: his campaign there?
Speaker 4: Heah, it's kind of an amazing symbol in Waco, Texas
Speaker 4: is this iconic place in the history of the far
Speaker 4: right movement in America Because in nineteen ninety three, thirty
Speaker 4: years ago, so this was in effect the thirtieth anniversary,
Speaker 4: there was a cult called the Branch Davidians that was
Speaker 4: stockpiling weapons and they came under siege from federal agents.
Speaker 4: There were children inside this compound. The federal government was
Speaker 4: basically saying we're going to try to shut this cult down,
Speaker 4: and the building went up in flames and dozens of
Speaker 4: people died, and it became this moment that became a
Speaker 4: real touchstone for militia movements and people who ended up
Speaker 4: becoming the forerunners of the Alex Jones and other far
Speaker 4: right figures of today. To have a Republican Canada president
Speaker 4: start his first public rally in Waco, Texas is the
Speaker 4: kind of things and that if you had told me
Speaker 4: that ten years ago, I would have said that's completely nuts,
Speaker 4: never gonna happen. And it is a real measure of
Speaker 4: where Donald Trump is and who he is seeking to
Speaker 4: connect with.
Speaker 3: That he did that, that he chose that place as
Speaker 3: the bedrock. What do you think that portends?
Speaker 4: What it pretends is that he is running in effect
Speaker 4: as an anti government figure. I mean, it's a crazy thing. Here.
Speaker 4: We have the Republican nominee for president who is draping
Speaker 4: himself in all of the aesthetics of the far right
Speaker 4: anti government movements. The people who stormed the Capitol on
Speaker 4: January sixth, at that rally, they played the national anthem
Speaker 4: as sung by There was members of the January sixth
Speaker 4: insurrection who recorded it in prison, and they played it
Speaker 4: at this rally. And Donald Trump is standing there with
Speaker 4: his hand over his heart.
Speaker 3: How did that work? Exactly?
Speaker 4: A number of the people who were locked up after
Speaker 4: January sixth for participate paiding and storming the Capitol, they
Speaker 4: ended up kind of singing a version of the National
Speaker 4: anthem into a phone in jail, and then Trump seized
Speaker 4: on this and decided it was going to be the
Speaker 4: anthem of his campaign in effect. And so here you
Speaker 4: have a guy running for president and the national anthem
Speaker 4: at his rally is being sung by people in jail
Speaker 4: for people who are under arrest for having stormed the
Speaker 4: Capitol on January sixth. We have never had a moment
Speaker 4: like this in modern American politics, just absolutely never. The
Speaker 4: reason why I highlighted that, why I think that's so
Speaker 4: important is I think a lot of people just kind
Speaker 4: of shrugged when that happened, to the degree that we
Speaker 4: were even paying attention to politics at people's you know,
Speaker 4: might have seen a newspaper story and been like, well,
Speaker 4: that's Trump being Trump, and no, I think you have
Speaker 4: to account for how truly aberrant that is and what
Speaker 4: it really portends for the country.
Speaker 3: I want to focus on the distinctions between Trump being
Speaker 3: Trump in twenty sixteen and Trump being Trump in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four and beyond, because I think you're right there's
Speaker 3: a conflation that's happened. In your book Wildland, you wrote
Speaker 3: extensively about how Trump cultivated what you called the combat mindset,
Speaker 3: which has a focus on self reliance. What exactly did
Speaker 3: that look like in the Trump presidency and how do
Speaker 3: you think it manifests in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in twenty sixteen, he tapped into this political vein
Speaker 4: of opportunity, which was essentially, it's the pro gun crowd.
Speaker 4: And as we all know, I mean that is beyond
Speaker 4: just people who are gun owners. It's people who sort
Speaker 4: of talk about the Second Amendment like it's their primary
Speaker 4: political identity. And what he realized was those people are
Speaker 4: in play, meaning I can activate them, I can get
Speaker 4: them to see me as their savior. And so it
Speaker 4: became this much larger idea than just gun rights. Yes,
Speaker 4: I mean I watched him go give this speech at
Speaker 4: the National Rifle Association convention, and I was realized that
Speaker 4: was where I realized, Oh, there was a fusion going
Speaker 4: on between his control of the Republican world and this
Speaker 4: what is in many cases a kind of latent anti
Speaker 4: government spirit. And he put these two things together and
Speaker 4: it was very powerful.
Speaker 3: He calls himself their retribution.
Speaker 4: He calls himself their retribution, and in a way, so
Speaker 4: much about our politics now is driven by a sense
Speaker 4: of who has power and who is depriving me of power,
Speaker 4: and that applies across the board, and I think you
Speaker 4: captured something really important. A moment ago, Sam we described
Speaker 4: how he has moved from the twenty sixteen Trump to
Speaker 4: the twenty twenty four Trump. In twenty sixteen, remember, it's
Speaker 4: almost easy to forget this now, he was a guy
Speaker 4: who had been on reality television. He had this weird
Speaker 4: kind of vestigial celebrity from being on the Apprentice. People
Speaker 4: didn't know what his policies were, people didn't take him seriously,
Speaker 4: and then when he started saying all of this really nasty,
Speaker 4: anti immigrant, white nationalist stuff. Frankly, a lot of people
Speaker 4: in the mainstream press I think made a terrible mine
Speaker 4: stake by treating him as a joke. And I think
Speaker 4: it was pretty clear from early on what was happening,
Speaker 4: but it took people way too long to realize the
Speaker 4: threat that he posed. But today he no longer is
Speaker 4: trying in a sense to sort of imitate a conventional politician.
Speaker 4: He's abandoned that. What he's doing now is actively running
Speaker 4: in effect as somebody who is seeking to undo politics
Speaker 4: as we know it and to undo actually government as
Speaker 4: we know it. That is not an exaggeration. And you
Speaker 4: have to reckon if you look at the things he's
Speaker 4: talking about doing, whether it's taking control of the Justice
Speaker 4: Department as a tool of political retribution, or laying off
Speaker 4: forty or fifty thousand civil servants and replacing them with
Speaker 4: people who would be loyal to him. You know, I've
Speaker 4: worked and lived in authoritarian countries in China, in Egypt.
Speaker 4: That's how it goes, That's what happens. That's how a
Speaker 4: system becomes actually an extension of a person of a man.
Speaker 4: And you really can't overstate how how grave that threat is.
Speaker 3: You've equated Trump's White House to quote, Emerald City, fortified
Speaker 3: against non believers and transpi its mythmaker and constantly vulnerable
Speaker 3: to the risks of reality. For those that are maybe
Speaker 3: unfamiliar with those plans that you just talked about, when
Speaker 3: you look at Project twenty twenty five, which is centered
Speaker 3: around this unitary executive theory, how would that differ from
Speaker 3: the Emerald City he presided over in his first term?
Speaker 3: What does that look like?
Speaker 4: So Project twenty twenty five is, in a sense, a
Speaker 4: preview of what Donald Trump intends to do as president.
Speaker 4: It's a group of his advisors and his loyalists, some
Speaker 4: of whom were involved in the January sixth insurrection, people
Speaker 4: like Jeffrey Clark, who was a Justice Department official that
Speaker 4: you know, they are basically saying, this is what we
Speaker 4: need to do in order to restructure the government to
Speaker 4: allow us to take command. So things like the ability
Speaker 4: to direct the Justice Department to prosecute people who they
Speaker 4: think are their political enemies. I mean, I know that
Speaker 4: we sometimes imagine while the Attorney general is after all
Speaker 4: appointed by the president, so maybe he is loyal, But no,
Speaker 4: all you got to do is look at the fact
Speaker 4: that right now you have an attorney general who has
Speaker 4: appointed a special counsel to investigate Joe Biden's you know,
Speaker 4: classified document handling, or you've got Hunter Biden, the President's son,
Speaker 4: who's being investigated.
Speaker 3: A special counsel that has admitted on the record to
Speaker 3: being a Republican.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's a registered Republican. So that is the current
Speaker 4: state of play. That's how a government actually functions. In
Speaker 4: our system. It's designed to have this intracompetition between agencies.
Speaker 4: Donald Trump and his people want to get rid of that.
Speaker 4: This idea of the unitary executive is this theory of
Speaker 4: the presidency, which basically says the Founders got it wrong.
Speaker 4: You know, remember the founders, after all, we're trying to
Speaker 4: avoid the recreation of a king, and so everything that
Speaker 4: they did was actually to shrink the presidency. It's kind
Speaker 4: of amazing. I mean, I was going back recently and
Speaker 4: looking at this. You know, the presidency as it was
Speaker 4: first conceived in this country was such a minimal office
Speaker 4: that it was James Polk's wife who came up with
Speaker 4: the idea of having the band play Hail to the
Speaker 4: Chief when the president walked into the room, because otherwise
Speaker 4: he was kind of a forgettable guy. People would just
Speaker 4: sort of carry on what they were doing. And so
Speaker 4: this period Donald Trump's movement, and you have to call
Speaker 4: it that is about trying to create a presidency that
Speaker 4: is immune to the oversight and the powers, the checks
Speaker 4: and balances of other branches of government. And you know,
Speaker 4: the best preview of what Donald Trump's government would be
Speaker 4: like if he wins this election is basically how he
Speaker 4: responded to the pandemic. You remember when he you know,
Speaker 4: the pandemic happens. There is pretty clear evidence coming in
Speaker 4: that this thing is going to be a very serious
Speaker 4: risk to people's health, and and that was inconvenient for Trump.
Speaker 4: I mean that was like he didn't want it to
Speaker 4: interfere with business. And so as you remember, you know,
Speaker 4: so he's telling us to put whatever bleach in our
Speaker 4: veins and telling us it's all going to get better
Speaker 4: and everything's going to be okay. And Jared Kushner's telling
Speaker 4: us everything's going to be fine, and we're rounding the curve.
Speaker 3: You didn't put bleach in your vans?
Speaker 4: Still doll, still going. It's hard have it to break, Sam.
Speaker 3: You know, I thought i'd noticed something when I saw
Speaker 3: you on CNN yesterday.
Speaker 4: It just feels so clean from the inside out.
Speaker 3: Your wife too, does she do that?
Speaker 4: Oh, it's a whole family affair. We just get together
Speaker 4: for a big bleach off. I really do think. I
Speaker 4: mean honestly, as I find myself talking about it, I
Speaker 4: get like I almost get heart palpitations.
Speaker 3: Please don't. We're not insured.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I didn't sign anything when we started this interview.
Speaker 4: I hope you're taking full responsibility for the for the
Speaker 4: reminding me of this.
Speaker 3: I'm going to pass it off to Rennick.
Speaker 4: So well, there we are. I think, I mean there's
Speaker 4: something going on that's weird, which is like for all
Speaker 4: of the trauma and that that's a big word, but
Speaker 4: it's the right word that Trump imposed on us over
Speaker 4: that period. I think just as a coping mechanism, we
Speaker 4: all have sort of pushed it into the back of
Speaker 4: our minds and it's easy to be like, ah, well,
Speaker 4: politicians are all pretty lousy. I don't want to have
Speaker 4: to think about it. And I think over the course
Speaker 4: of the next few months, we're going to get a
Speaker 4: pretty vibrant and pungent reminder of what a Donald Trump
Speaker 4: presidency would be like.
Speaker 3: I think the key difference is, I mean, he's already
Speaker 3: previewed this project twenty twenty five planned, but he's also
Speaker 3: publicly aligned himself with several autocrats, I mean Russias Vladimir Putin,
Speaker 3: who he encouraged to quote do whatever the hell they
Speaker 3: want to any NATO member country that doesn't meet spending
Speaker 3: guidelines on defense. Just recently, he hosted Hungary's Victor orbon
Speaker 3: and mar Lago and praised him as quote a boss
Speaker 3: that gets things done. Never mind that those things include
Speaker 3: restrictions on immigration, LGBTQ plus rights and crackdowns on the
Speaker 3: Free Press. Biden contends in your profile that the American
Speaker 3: press has become immune to Trump, that they've become numb
Speaker 3: to his autocratic overtures. Do you think that's true or
Speaker 3: do you think the numbness extends to the electorate as well,
Speaker 3: and that this may be a chicken in the egg scenario.
Speaker 4: That's an important point. I think there is a way
Speaker 4: in which the public has come to see Trump as
Speaker 4: this independent category of person where it's almost as if
Speaker 4: nothing that he does shocks us, and as a result,
Speaker 4: we all make these minor adjustments all the time just
Speaker 4: to kind of get through the experience of knowing that
Speaker 4: he is there, to just kind of say, well, that's
Speaker 4: this guy Trump, when the reality is that individually, just
Speaker 4: take as an example the fact that he is surrounding
Speaker 4: himself with somebody like Stephen Miller, who was, after all,
Speaker 4: the architect of some of the most brutal anti immigration
Speaker 4: policies that we've had in this country in the last century.
Speaker 4: I mean, a lot of Americans, Sam, I think, spent
Speaker 4: the last three years just forgetting about the existence of
Speaker 4: somebody like Stephen Miller, because we have to live our
Speaker 4: lives like we have to be people. And it's not
Speaker 4: as if that guy went away. In fact, he has
Speaker 4: built up more power. And the idea is that if
Speaker 4: they came back in that they would actually know how
Speaker 4: to operate the levers of government, and that this time
Speaker 4: the things that they tried to do last time, which
Speaker 4: were stymied by the checks and balances and the federal system,
Speaker 4: would be a lot easier for them to accomplish, things
Speaker 4: like setting up deportation forces to bring people from the
Speaker 4: interior of the country and send them across the border.
Speaker 4: It's the kind of thing that I think, like it
Speaker 4: or not, we have to come face to face with
Speaker 4: as what the choice is about here.
Speaker 3: And thinking about what a twenty twenty five Trump presidency
Speaker 3: would look like. I'm trying to hold both the State
Speaker 3: of the Union and your interview with Biden, where he
Speaker 3: was quick to warren voters of what could come if
Speaker 3: Trump was reelected, especially in the courts, where Justice Clarence
Speaker 3: Thomas argued in his decision on Dobbs that the legal
Speaker 3: rationale for overturning Row could be applied to quote correct
Speaker 3: the error in cases of same sex marriage, the decriminalization
Speaker 3: of homosexuality, and access to contraception. Do you believe those
Speaker 3: would be the goals of a second Trump term? And
Speaker 3: more broadly, talk about the gap between the organizational prowess
Speaker 3: that they had in twenty sixteen when they were elected
Speaker 3: and what they would have in terms of infrastructure in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is not abstract. The idea of dismantling rights
Speaker 4: like access to contraception or protection of same sex marriage
Speaker 4: are things that Clarence Thomas has explicitly described as the
Speaker 4: natural logical outcome of the Dobbs decision that that laid
Speaker 4: the predicate basically for them going after these things. And
Speaker 4: if you didn't think that that's possible, well then you
Speaker 4: probably never thought it was possible to dismantle Roe v.
Speaker 3: Wave.
Speaker 4: These things are entirely destructible from the perspective of the
Speaker 4: conservative majority of the Supreme Court. And that gets to
Speaker 4: your important point, which is when Donald Trump came in
Speaker 4: in twenty sixteen, they did not yet have the level
Speaker 4: of control that they have over the Supreme Court today.
Speaker 4: They did not have a system of federal judges at
Speaker 4: lower courts that are operating, in a sense in concert
Speaker 4: together to try to create the conditions that would produce
Speaker 4: a decision like that that could have a profound reversion
Speaker 4: of our rights in this country. And in a way,
Speaker 4: the process is much further along now, and they know
Speaker 4: what the system is capable of stopping, and therefore they're
Speaker 4: better at being able to work around it. You know, Sam,
Speaker 4: one of the biggest mistakes, analytical mistakes that I've made
Speaker 4: in my life was coming to believe that there were
Speaker 4: certain kinds of progress that were irreversible. That I just
Speaker 4: did not believe that you could wrench the clock back
Speaker 4: in time in the ways that we have, And I
Speaker 4: think that was a kind of naivete. It was just
Speaker 4: a basic belief. And this applies to China, where I
Speaker 4: lived for a long time, it applies to the United States,
Speaker 4: and I've kind of had to come to terms. One
Speaker 4: of the sort of wages of maturity is realizing, oh, actually,
Speaker 4: there are people in power who do really want to
Speaker 4: drive this country back into the past, and I'm coming
Speaker 4: to terms with that.
Speaker 3: It seems to me that disbelief, that naivete. It was
Speaker 3: very much in retrospect, the animating feature of the twenty
Speaker 3: sixteen election. I think there were a lot of people
Speaker 3: who thought we had two terms of Obama. Yes, there
Speaker 3: were people who believed that we were in some kind
Speaker 3: of quote post racial society, which never made any sense
Speaker 3: to anyone who's ever studied history, who's ever talked to
Speaker 3: communities of color. No one believed that, except for white
Speaker 3: people for the most.
Speaker 4: Part, I agree.
Speaker 3: And there was a general belief that a man who
Speaker 3: was on the apprentice, a man whose policies could not
Speaker 3: really be defined in twenty sixteen, couldn't possibly beat a
Speaker 3: woman as qualified as Secretary Clinton. And it was because
Speaker 3: of that naivete and that disbelief that I think delivered
Speaker 3: four years of not only abject pain, but policies that
Speaker 3: we are going to have to live with and through
Speaker 3: till God knows when.
Speaker 4: And I would add one thing, which is I think
Speaker 4: that even for people who didn't believe in the kind
Speaker 4: of fallacy of a post racial America, which I think
Speaker 4: even if you never believe that, which really was a fantasy,
Speaker 4: then you still believed on some level that there were
Speaker 4: things that were enshrined in law, There were things that
Speaker 4: were parts of the way the government worked that would
Speaker 4: be very hard to dismantle or roll back. And I
Speaker 4: think that we are kind of coming to the reality
Speaker 4: that we actually have more agency than we think we did.
Speaker 4: This is a it's a bit of a counterintuitive conclusion, Sam,
Speaker 4: and I think it's one that's really important, which is
Speaker 4: that part of what happened in twenty sixteen was people
Speaker 4: felt like, Okay, the march of time is moving this direction.
Speaker 4: As Obama would say, it kind of zigs and it zags.
Speaker 4: We may go backwards at some moments and forwards at others.
Speaker 4: But also, on top of it, what real impact can
Speaker 4: I have? I mean, look, these two candidates. People didn't
Speaker 4: like Hillary Clinton and they didn't like Donald Trump, So really,
Speaker 4: what impact could I have? That was wrong? Actually, like,
Speaker 4: you have huge impact. And I think that that in
Speaker 4: some ways that level of agency is lurking, might be
Speaker 4: on the horizon of this moment, because that really is
Speaker 4: what this thing is going to come down to. It
Speaker 4: is honestly going to come down to whether or not
Speaker 4: people feel as if they have a consequential voice in
Speaker 4: the outcome. And if they believe they do not, then
Speaker 4: curiously enough, they will have that choice made for them.
Speaker 4: And that is a challenge, honestly for people who care
Speaker 4: about and who I think are thinking about the stakes
Speaker 4: of this election is to make the case to people
Speaker 4: that it is not an overstatement to say that every
Speaker 4: person on this question has genuine agency.
Speaker 3: After the break a lightning round with evan Athnas and
Speaker 3: how we should be thinking about the twenty twenty four election,
Speaker 3: stay with us. Trump has ninety one charges against them
Speaker 3: across four criminal court cases. I want to ask some
Speaker 3: broad top of mind questions that people maybe don't have
Speaker 3: the answers to. If he's convicted in any of the
Speaker 3: four cases, can he still be president?
Speaker 4: Yes, which should blow your mind, But it is a fact.
Speaker 4: It's like a little bit of a loophole that the
Speaker 4: people who wrote the constitution didn't think they'd have to
Speaker 4: worry about. They sort of figured little bit. They figured
Speaker 4: that we, in our infinite wisdom, would probably not elect
Speaker 4: somebody who was actually a felon. Yeah, he can still
Speaker 4: take the presidency.
Speaker 3: Well, any of the court cases be resolved by November.
Speaker 4: The answer is partially meaning that probably none of these
Speaker 4: cases will be fully adjudicated. He'll still be appealing things,
Speaker 4: and in fact there may not even be an early
Speaker 4: verdict in any of them. But that is a genuine
Speaker 4: an issue in flux, because these court cases are all
Speaker 4: moving around. Judges do things at various moments, you know,
Speaker 4: just even in the last couple of days, there's been
Speaker 4: huge changes in the Georgia case. If I was a
Speaker 4: betting person, I would say he will probably get to
Speaker 4: November without having a verdict in any of these cases.
Speaker 4: And that's just a hugely important fact because it means
Speaker 4: that people will be voting without actually knowing if he's
Speaker 4: going to be a convicted felon.
Speaker 3: For those completely disillusioned with both parties, now there's been
Speaker 3: a lot of talk about voting third party, whether that's
Speaker 3: RFK and Robert Kennedy, doctor Cornell West, Jill Stein, the
Speaker 3: list goes on. Do any of them have any real
Speaker 3: impact on the election?
Speaker 4: Yes, they have actually a big impact on the election.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is probably if you were identifying the
Speaker 4: factors that could tip it either to Biden or Trump.
Speaker 4: Third parties are a huge piece of it. Neither one.
Speaker 4: None of the third party candidates are going to win.
Speaker 4: Obviously they're not going to be president. But over time
Speaker 4: time the share of third party votes has in many
Speaker 4: cases actually determined the outcome of the election. I mean,
Speaker 4: just to give you a prime example, in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 4: nineteen percent of the vote went to Ross Perrot nineteen percent,
Speaker 4: huge amount of the vote, and as a result, George H. W.
Speaker 4: Bush lost the election. That's basically the interpretation in two
Speaker 4: thousand Ralph Nader was the RFK of his time, and
Speaker 4: basically he elected George W. Bush president. I know that's
Speaker 4: an unhappy fact for people who loved Ralph Nader, but
Speaker 4: it's also just a fact, and it's come to be
Speaker 4: understood as a historical matter. So yeah, there's a huge
Speaker 4: effort now on the part of even people who don't
Speaker 4: particularly like Joe Biden, but people who really don't like
Speaker 4: Donald Trump, to try to discourage people from voting for
Speaker 4: a third party candidate, because the danger is not abstract
Speaker 4: that it could in crucial state like Michigan, like Pennsylvania,
Speaker 4: like Arizona, that it could end up actually giving Donald
Speaker 4: Trump the decisive win.
Speaker 3: Do you believe RFK pulls more from Biden than Trump.
Speaker 4: I don't think we know at this point. I think
Speaker 4: probably the truth is that incumbents historically, going back to
Speaker 4: the Civil War have been hurt more by third party
Speaker 4: candidates than challengers have. So it's less about what RFK
Speaker 4: stands for that almost is immaterial. It's really about the
Speaker 4: fact that third party candidates run by saying these two
Speaker 4: guys are both terrible and therefore you should vote for
Speaker 4: me as a protest because I'm not going to win,
Speaker 4: but I will be a way of signifying your voice.
Speaker 4: So the result is that if you vote for RFK,
Speaker 4: you are pulling votes away from Joe Biden.
Speaker 3: For people listening, they may have seen in the news
Speaker 3: RFK is considering Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers for vice president.
Speaker 4: Because of his long history on foreign policy and national
Speaker 4: security matters, or I'm sorry, I don't.
Speaker 3: Yes, or for his short history not playing quarterback for
Speaker 3: the Jets. Can you confirm that that's not just a
Speaker 3: headline they ran on the onion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sorry to report that we are actually alive
Speaker 4: and living through this moment in American political history.
Speaker 3: So Trump and Biden have the requisite delegates to be
Speaker 3: the nominees. Will the two ever debate on stage?
Speaker 4: They might? This is a genuine open question. I think
Speaker 4: Donald Trump of course did not debate, wasn't willing to
Speaker 4: debate against any of the Republican candidates in the primary,
Speaker 4: and Joe Biden doesn't seem eager to debate Donald Trump,
Speaker 4: and I think there's probably a few reasons for that.
Speaker 4: One is, you just don't know what Trump's going to do,
Speaker 4: and he's probably going to try to do something weird
Speaker 4: to throw off the system. And then also, of course
Speaker 4: there's the risk that Biden could do something that would
Speaker 4: reignite this conversation about is he too old to be
Speaker 4: able to do the job. So there are a lot
Speaker 4: of reasons why it may not happen. There's also a
Speaker 4: side of Biden, and I think his campaign that says, look,
Speaker 4: do we really have to go and debate a guy
Speaker 4: who's facing ninety one felony counts and is like a
Speaker 4: demonstrated misogynist and a proven rapist, Like, what are we
Speaker 4: doing here? Why do we have to do that? It's
Speaker 4: not as if people don't know who Donald Trump is.
Speaker 3: But if he doesn't debate Trump, and Trump says I
Speaker 3: want to, wouldn't the response then be if he doesn't, oh,
Speaker 3: he's too old to debate him? That would be more
Speaker 3: damning proposition, because then not only is he not equipped
Speaker 3: to run the country, he's not even equipped to debate
Speaker 3: that he should run the country.
Speaker 4: Well, I think it depends on how he decides to
Speaker 4: explain what his choice is, and I genuinely don't know.
Speaker 4: He might debate. It's possible that he will explain why
Speaker 4: he's choosing not to do it in a way that
Speaker 4: people find persuasive. Look, the State of the Union was
Speaker 4: a surprise to a lot of people that he was
Speaker 4: as specific and energetic as he was. And I think
Speaker 4: this is really like the big open question Sam is, like,
Speaker 4: are we going to see more Biden over the course
Speaker 4: of the next eight months that people say to themselves, Okay,
Speaker 4: I don't agree with this man on everything, God knows.
Speaker 4: I disagree with him on policies like his handling of
Speaker 4: Israel and Gaza. But ultimately, this is not an impressionistic
Speaker 4: pie in the sky choice. This is a choice between
Speaker 4: two people, two very specific and real people, Joe Biden
Speaker 4: and Donald Trump. And so if you're sufficiently bothered by
Speaker 4: the fact that he's deciding not to debate, maybe because
Speaker 4: he's too old to do it, well, then you have
Speaker 4: to decide what is the outcome of that? What are
Speaker 4: the second and third order consequences of my choice?
Speaker 3: If Trump wins, does Biden contest, the results.
Speaker 4: No, I don't think so, unless he really believes that
Speaker 4: there is a way in which it's been damaged by
Speaker 4: some sort of interference. Joe Biden is also completely convinced
Speaker 4: and preparing for the fact that Donald Trump will contest
Speaker 4: the result. And we know what that looked like last time.
Speaker 4: That was people physically storming the capitol. And I said,
Speaker 4: what do you think happens this time? You know what
Speaker 4: happened last time? And he said, everything that happened last time.
Speaker 4: Plus I didn't put that in the article, but that
Speaker 4: is what he said, meaning if you thought there was
Speaker 4: violence last time, we need to be prepared for the
Speaker 4: very real fact that a man who started his campaign
Speaker 4: with a public rally at Waco, Texas, sight of an
Speaker 4: anti government movement, is prepared to do, as Joe Biden
Speaker 4: would say, just about anything to avoid losing again.
Speaker 3: The fact that you didn't include that bit in the article,
Speaker 3: now that I'm hearing it and holding it, it's unnerving.
Speaker 4: It should be, honestly. I mean, I came out of
Speaker 4: there with a pretty chilling sense that we think we've
Speaker 4: lived through a period of sometimes unimaginable politics when violence
Speaker 4: and politics have become linked and to realize actually that
Speaker 4: it's not a in fact, we're living in the preamble
Speaker 4: of something right now. Is a terrifying fact, but it's
Speaker 4: not one that we have the luxury of looking away from.
Speaker 4: I have to say, I mean, Biden said as I
Speaker 4: was leaving the room at the end of this interview,
Speaker 4: he said, I have absolutely said it twice. He said,
Speaker 4: losers who are losers are never graceful. And I have
Speaker 4: absolutely no illusions this is my paraphrase. Now, he has
Speaker 4: no illusions that Donald Trump is going to do anything
Speaker 4: but can test this race no matter what happens, win
Speaker 4: or lose. And that's a pretty chilling fact.
Speaker 3: I think it is worrying, as you said, to imagine
Speaker 3: that and to imagine that future of a Trump presidency,
Speaker 3: which we've tried to game out a little bit. But
Speaker 3: I said in the beginning that we'd have to talk
Speaker 3: about Biden's psychology and something I wanted to wait to
Speaker 3: talk about towards the end, because you know, at this
Speaker 3: point every poll has Trump beating by and between four
Speaker 3: and seven points. If you contrast that with twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: Biden never trailed Trump in any major poll. But as
Speaker 3: you said, Biden has long been a politician to defy
Speaker 3: the odds, leaning into what writer Richard ben Kramer described
Speaker 3: as a kind of vision in his book What It Takes.
Speaker 3: I just want to read a section from that. This
Speaker 3: is how he described Biden in nineteen eighty seven, when
Speaker 3: he first ran for president. He said, in the end,
Speaker 3: when you took it apart, it all rested on Joe's certainty.
Speaker 3: He tried to tell his experts in gurus, he had
Speaker 3: to see the moves. He wanted to play them out
Speaker 3: in his head with scenes, with dialogue until he had
Speaker 3: worked them, refined them, rehearsed every line until he was
Speaker 3: sure what would happen. Once he'd seen, then it was
Speaker 3: singing in his head and he didn't have to think.
Speaker 3: He just did. He knew what was supposed to happen. Hell,
Speaker 3: it was a done deal. And then it was an
Speaker 3: imagination or even balls. No, not to Joe Biden. It
Speaker 3: was destiny. And so there's a calculus that he has
Speaker 3: been doing for a long time and imagining his place
Speaker 3: in the White House where he can see it. And
Speaker 3: I'm wondering, as we sit here, what can Biden see
Speaker 3: in this moment that so many of us cannot.
Speaker 4: You know, he calls it gaming it out to imagine
Speaker 4: that he can see a lane that others can't see.
Speaker 4: He can see a root, the root that he sees.
Speaker 4: Now reality of Donald Trump, the unbearable fact of the
Speaker 4: idea of Trump coming back to politics, begins to loom
Speaker 4: larger and more concretely in people's minds, and over the
Speaker 4: course of the next few months, as Joe Biden would
Speaker 4: imagine it, people come to terms with the thing that
Speaker 4: his father always used to say, which is, don't compare
Speaker 4: me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. This
Speaker 4: is not a referendum on Joe Biden. It's not just
Speaker 4: about how you feel about him. It is ultimately about
Speaker 4: do you want category A or do you want category B.
Speaker 4: Which vision of the United States is the one that
Speaker 4: makes sense to you. Is it one in which there
Speaker 4: is a deportation force that is taking immigrants from the
Speaker 4: interior of the country and ejecting them. Is it a
Speaker 4: country that is imagining rolling back access to contraception and
Speaker 4: same sex marriage, or is it this other thing. Most elections,
Speaker 4: for all of the months and money that's spent, it
Speaker 4: comes down to, like the last three weeks, people make
Speaker 4: absolutely vital choices in those last three weeks. If you
Speaker 4: had looked at a poll of Wisconsin and Michigan in
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen that was taken three weeks before election day,
Speaker 4: it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to win those states.
Speaker 4: But people made choices in those last weeks whether to
Speaker 4: stay home and not vote for either one of them
Speaker 4: because they didn't like them, or in some cases, to
Speaker 4: vote for Trump. So Joe Biden's belief is that there
Speaker 4: are people out there who are frustrated now with a
Speaker 4: whole lot in the world, frustrated about Gaza, They're frustrated
Speaker 4: about their lives not being where they wanted them to
Speaker 4: be right now because of a whole variety of factors,
Speaker 4: and they put those on the shoulders of the president,
Speaker 4: as they should. But come November, he's not just the president.
Speaker 4: He's also the alternative to Donald Trump. One of the
Speaker 4: things we started with today is that when you ask
Speaker 4: Bien why he's running again, what he says is, in effect,
Speaker 4: I've earned this because I've passed legislation that I think
Speaker 4: is the right thing to do for this country. You know,
Speaker 4: he's done things like a climate bill like nothing we've
Speaker 4: ever had in this country, an infrastructure bill, which by
Speaker 4: the way, includes a clean energy bill that on its
Speaker 4: own would be the largest clean energy investments we've ever had.
Speaker 4: That's just the infrastructure bill. That's not on some level.
Speaker 4: He's a proud man, and he looks at those things,
Speaker 4: and he says, if I wasn't eighty one, nobody would
Speaker 4: be disputing me running for reelection.
Speaker 3: But he is eighty one.
Speaker 4: He is. But you have to remember he got into
Speaker 4: politics when he was really young, and some of us,
Speaker 4: when you are imprinted with a self image, it's very
Speaker 4: hard to relinquish that. And he, in his mind, is
Speaker 4: a lot younger than the rest of us see him
Speaker 4: to be.
Speaker 3: I'm glad you mentioned this because is exactly where I
Speaker 3: want to go. You're right, this is a man who
Speaker 3: was elected to the Senate at the age of twenty nine, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: And this is tough territory to enter, but I think
Speaker 3: we have to because I think it's on the minds
Speaker 3: of people in your reporting, both in this profile and
Speaker 3: in your book on Biden. This is a man who,
Speaker 3: by your description and others, fears that if he stops working,
Speaker 3: he may not be around much longer. In the profile
Speaker 3: you write. In Biden's case, he's been in politics so
Speaker 3: long that one of his aides told me a decade ago,
Speaker 3: this is a decade ago that he seemed quote afraid
Speaker 3: if he stops working, he might just fall over. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the book that you wrote on him, he said. One
Speaker 3: of his aides told me that Biden saw himself as
Speaker 3: quote the shark that has to keep swimming to stay alive.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Mortality, I mean an ever present topic of this podcast.
Speaker 4: It is an indelible feature of being alive. So I
Speaker 4: think it speaks well of the podcast that you returned
Speaker 4: to this subject.
Speaker 3: Most podcasts hosts seemed to sidestep it and talk about
Speaker 3: something else. I seem to always come back to it.
Speaker 4: It's the final question in so many respects go on.
Speaker 3: It may very will be our final question, which is
Speaker 3: how much of his decision to run again is informed
Speaker 3: by his father, who Biden himself encouraged to retire way
Speaker 3: back when, a decision he has since claimed to deeply
Speaker 3: regret telling his father to retire. How much of his
Speaker 3: bid is a traumatic response to a mistake he believed
Speaker 3: he made.
Speaker 4: I think it is unmistakably a piece of his psychology.
Speaker 4: In some ways, one of the things that we do
Speaker 4: that actually obscures our ability to understand politics is that
Speaker 4: we start to see these people in one dimensional terms,
Speaker 4: and look, that's politics forces us into that. You know,
Speaker 4: we get kind of one word shorthand for these people.
Speaker 4: But they are people. They're human beings with all of
Speaker 4: the psychological complexity that goes along with that. And in
Speaker 4: some ways there's a reason why I have referenced this
Speaker 4: multiple times in my writing about Biden. He has been
Speaker 4: active as a political person, a public man, as he
Speaker 4: uses that phrase, for so long that I think he
Speaker 4: cannot really imagine what it's like to stop. He's a
Speaker 4: person who is so addicted to contact with other human
Speaker 4: beings that one of his aides years ago told me
Speaker 4: that at the end of a rally, like after he'd
Speaker 4: been out shaking hands talking to human beings all day long,
Speaker 4: he'd get home to his hotel room and he'd have
Speaker 4: to watch like two movies before he could fall asleep
Speaker 4: because he was so amped up. It's the opposite of
Speaker 4: Barack Obama, who would be depleted at the end of
Speaker 4: the day.
Speaker 3: And yet it is his need to keep moving to
Speaker 3: do this job. That very well may be the death
Speaker 3: of our democracy. That is the fear.
Speaker 4: It is the fear. It is also the limit of
Speaker 4: how far I think I am willing to try to
Speaker 4: read his psychology. Look, my job is to try to
Speaker 4: understand somebody's motives, to try to get inside their head.
Speaker 4: You know. Look, he knows the risks he is. This
Speaker 4: is part of what's really looming here is this guy
Speaker 4: is a risk taker. He has been for a very
Speaker 4: very long time, and sometimes it works out and sometimes
Speaker 4: it doesn't. That should be the more bracing fact than
Speaker 4: acknowledging that he is a guy who probably is afraid
Speaker 4: of retirement. I think that there is a way in
Speaker 4: which he has taken a colossal risk here. And what's
Speaker 4: strange about it is he doesn't actually have personal control
Speaker 4: of the outcome. You know, who has control of the
Speaker 4: outcome all of us? All of us, And so we
Speaker 4: have found ourselves, whether we like it or not, kind
Speaker 4: of handcuffed to this guy in this process that will
Speaker 4: ultimately determine the future of American politics.
Speaker 3: He's gambled that we're going to show up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is the good news. Honestly, is like it
Speaker 4: can sound crazy to people that he's an optimist. It's
Speaker 4: not a cheap line, it's not a superficial assessment. He
Speaker 4: genuinely looks at the American public and he finds it
Speaker 4: utterly impossible to imagine that we would do things that
Speaker 4: would put Donald Trump back in office. He finds that
Speaker 4: so repellent to his image of this country. And I
Speaker 4: don't know whether he's right about that. I worry about that.
Speaker 3: I don't know either, But I do know that the
Speaker 3: thing I want to hold as we leave is a
Speaker 3: bit of writing that you produce, and the acknowledgments of
Speaker 3: your book Wildland. Do you have a copy of it
Speaker 3: near you?
Speaker 4: I do. I do not because I'm a psychopath, but
Speaker 4: because they told me that you might do this. I
Speaker 4: want to just point that out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, make sure you blame it on me, if you
Speaker 3: wouldn't mind, go to page four fifty five at the
Speaker 3: very end.
Speaker 4: Nobody nurtures my thinking more than Sarah Beth, whose energy, humor,
Speaker 4: and inexhaustible kindness are the fuel that powers our family.
Speaker 4: I started reporting this book before we had children. I'm
Speaker 4: finishing it in the company of Oliver and Rose. In between,
Speaker 4: I often oscillated between reasons to despair at our politics
Speaker 4: and occasions to rejoice at home. By the end, I
Speaker 4: was writing this book for them in the wish that
Speaker 4: they might someday read of a time when their country
Speaker 4: lost sight of its moral ambitions, and I hope began
Speaker 4: the process of seeing them again. That is how I
Speaker 4: feel about this stuff. It feels intensely personal. It feels
Speaker 4: intensely personal.
Speaker 3: And reading it, what part makes you emotional?
Speaker 4: I think there's a way in which it feels as
Speaker 4: if the decisions we are making right now, as people
Speaker 4: in public life and private life, people who cast votes,
Speaker 4: people who write about politics and think about politics, we
Speaker 4: think we're making decisions for ourselves. We're not. We're making
Speaker 4: decisions for people who don't even yet know that we're
Speaker 4: making it for them. Like my kids will inherit the
Speaker 4: world that we make now in our choices, and they
Speaker 4: are so grave. And I do sometimes look at my
Speaker 4: kids and they know that I write about politics, and
Speaker 4: you know, I have this strange experience of trying to
Speaker 4: shelter them from the full reality of what it means
Speaker 4: to live in the era when somebody like Donald Trump
Speaker 4: is contending for power in this country. I don't tell
Speaker 4: them everything. I remember my daughter was three and when
Speaker 4: Trump lost, she said, Donald Trump lost the election because
Speaker 4: he didn't wear a mask. And I remember thinking, that's
Speaker 4: actually a pretty elegant simplicity to explaining what happened. But
Speaker 4: the reality is, my kids are going to grow up
Speaker 4: in the world that all of us make for them.
Speaker 4: All of our kids are going to do that, and
Speaker 4: that is a kind of weighty burden. And it feels
Speaker 4: like this stuff matters beyond the superficial reality of politics
Speaker 4: at it's most infuriating.
Speaker 3: And today, in this moment oscillating between despair and rejoice,
Speaker 3: where are you?
Speaker 4: I'm willing to believe, actually that we find it within
Speaker 4: ourselves to make the right choice. I am not willing,
Speaker 4: by any means to relinquish that idea. I think that
Speaker 4: when the moment arrives, we won't subject ourselves and our
Speaker 4: descendants to the country that Donald Trump wants us to be.
Speaker 3: Would you say the same thing to me if we
Speaker 3: weren't recording this.
Speaker 4: One hundred percent I'm an earnest person, which is kind
Speaker 4: of weird in the political world. You know, you're supposed
Speaker 4: to be cool and cynical, And I think it's probably
Speaker 4: why I've never really felt particularly at home in political writing,
Speaker 4: but I think maybe from that passage you can tell
Speaker 4: that I kind of feel like cynicism is not an option.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: It's not an option. The consequences are profound, and the
Speaker 4: people with the least power to defend themselves bear the
Speaker 4: most consequences for it. And for that reason, we don't
Speaker 4: have the luxury of looking away.
Speaker 3: And I thank you for this entire conversation where we
Speaker 3: have done just about anything but look away it is.
Speaker 3: It's meant the whole lot to me.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Sam. It's a pleasure to talk to you,
Speaker 4: even when it's about hard things, and I'm grateful for
Speaker 4: the chance to do it.
Speaker 3: Have an ass until next time.
Speaker 1: Talk to you then, and that's our show.
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Speaker 3: on Spotify, Apple, wherever you like to listen. I also
Speaker 3: want to give us special thanks to our friends at
Speaker 3: the New Yorker FSG Books and Simon and Schuster, and
Speaker 3: of course our guest Evan osnos To read the books
Speaker 3: and pieces we talked about in this episode. Visit our
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Speaker 3: I'd recommend our talks with Gloria steinem Maria Ressa and
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Speaker 3: slash shop. Talk easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our
Speaker 3: executive producer is Jenison Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden.
Speaker 3: Today's talk was edited by Caitlin Dryden and mixed by
Speaker 3: Andrew Vastola. It was taped at Spotify Studios in Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 3: Our music is by Dylan peck O. Illustrations are by
Speaker 3: Christian Chanoy. Graphics are by Ethan Sineca. I also want
Speaker 3: to thank our team at Pushkin, Justin Richmond, Julia Martin,
Speaker 3: John Stars, Kerrie Brody, Eric Sander, Kira Posy, Jorna McMillan,
Speaker 3: Tara Machado, Justin Lang, Sarah Nix, Malcolm Gladwell, Greta Khan
Speaker 3: and Jacob Weisberg. I'm San Fragoso. Thank you for listening
Speaker 3: to Talk Easy. Just a heads up if you enjoy
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