Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Biden’s future in the race and Trump’s ties to Project 2025

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• Geoff Bennett:

  President Biden comes out in a show of force against pressure to step down from the top of the Democratic ticket, as Donald Trump tries to distance himself from a conservative plan to radically reshape the federal government.

  Let's turn to our Politics Monday duo. It's Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

  It's great to see you both on this Monday.

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  Good to be here.

• Geoff Bennett:

  So, Tam, President Biden, he hit the campaign trail over the weekend. You were with him. He called into MSNBC's "Morning Joe" this morning. He's got a solo press conference pegged to the NATO summit on Thursday.

  Take us inside this Biden strategy to do far more in unscripted situations to prove his fitness.

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  That's exactly what he's doing.

  At the campaign headquarters, where he spoke to supporters, he did not speak from notes. At one point, somebody shouted something about Dark Brandon, which is like the laser eyes meme version of Joe Biden. And he's like, yes, Dark Brandon is coming back. And you're going to hear a lot more about Donald Trump in the weeks ahead.

  He is clearly moving past the part of his rhetoric where he says, well, I'm not as young as I used to be and I have slowed down. And he's on to the, hey, guys, we need to move on part of the campaign. And he really is also sort of pivoting a little bit to say, this is the elites. The elites want me out, regular voters don't.

  And I was with him all day yesterday. The feedback he was getting — obviously, presidents are in a bubble and he was taken to places where he would be very well received. But at that church, the pastor literally led the congregants in a call in response to say, "I love you, President Biden."

  He stayed and shook hands and took selfies and held the camera himself to take selfies, all of this in three different locations, one of which was 90 degrees outside. And I saw someone taken away on a stretcher while he was still out there shaking hands and taking pictures. That is — he was running like a man with something to prove.

  And he has to prove something to a lot of people in his party and convince them that he's not just saying he's not going away, but that he's really not going away and they need to move on, not him.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Yes.

  Amy, resilience is a real hallmark of President Biden's political brand. So is being underestimated. And that came through in something he said in his conversation MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today.

  Joe Biden, President of the United States: I don't care what those big names think. They were wrong in 2020. They were wrong in 2022 about the red wave. They're wrong in 2024.

• Geoff Bennett:

  So he says they have been wrong before; they're wrong now.

  Does public polling support his position?

• Amy Walter:

  Well, I want to talk about two things. One is this idea, which he sort of alludes to in that clip, about the elites and them being wrong and being against him.

  The elites are the reason that he is the nominee.

• Geoff Bennett:

  In what way?

• Amy Walter:

  Voters in polls, Democrats, have been saying for over a year, we'd like a different choice. We want different candidates.

  The Democratic Party had a choice. They could have opened it up. They could have said, we're going to have debates, asking the president to be engaged in those debates. More important, the elites, especially the people who would be candidates, those governors and senators who we hear a lot about now as potential replacements, decided not to run.

  They didn't want to take that risk. So he is where he is in some part because many of those people did not jump in and challenge him and ask him to get into a debate or ask him to have to run a vigorous primary campaign.

  All that said, he is correct that the polls have underestimated him in the 2020 primary, that the polling suggested that the Democrats were going to do much worse in 2022.

  The big difference between where those polls are now and where we are now is, one, in 2020 the polling actually overestimated how well Biden was going to do in the general election. And the second is that the issue right now — and you raised this in your interviews with the members of Congress — is not so much, can he be a good messenger? Right? That's one challenge.

  But the next is convincing the public that he can actually do the job, that he is up to the physical and mental challenge of being in that job for another four years. That wasn't on display.

  And, finally, what was on display in 2020 and in 2022, what was the center of everything was Donald Trump. And he's not the center of everything right now. Joe Biden is.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, let's talk more about that, Tam, because, yes, there are Democrats who have concerns about President Biden's age.

  And there are other Democrats who are flabbergasted by all of this, because they say, look, this election is not just an election between two people. It's an election really between two vastly different world views…

• Tamara Keith:

  Yes.

• Geoff Bennett:

  … and two different visions for this country's future, one of which is escaping scrutiny right now because of all the attention President Biden.

  Donald Trump has been trying to distance himself from this controversial governance plan known as Project 2025. He says he knows nothing about it, doesn't know anything about the people behind it, even though several people linked to the project used to work for his administration and some of them have worked for his campaign.

  Give us a sense of what's happening, right?

• Tamara Keith:

  Right. And some of them were in key positions in his administration. These are not just randos off the street. These are people who are crafting a plan that could potentially, some of it, end up being enacted.

  Some of it overlaps with the Republican platform that just came out. And so Trump realizing that this document also contains a lot of ideas that are quite scary to undecided voters or even moderate Republicans, some ideas that are just downright unpopular if polled among the public, Trump of course is trying to distance himself from it.

  He, as someone who governed, had a very fluid attachment to policy ideas. He is someone who would, if someone was persuasive enough, he would accept the idea and say, that should be our policy. And he often moved all over the place.

  But — so, in some ways, it's hard to know whether him distancing himself from this now really means that it would never happen in his administration, when many of the people who he likely would hire or be taking advice from were involved in developing it. And these are long-term goals of very conservative far right Republicans.

• Geoff Bennett:

  What's the polling show about Donald Trump? We have talked before about how he has a very solid floor of support, given all the Trump die-hards.

• Amy Walter:

  Yes.

• Geoff Bennett:

  But he has a fairly low ceiling of support, or at least he has had a fairly low ceiling of support. Has he been able to grow that at all?

• Amy Walter:

  Well, what we're seeing from just the immediate polls right now is that what was a small Donald Trump lead of somewhere nationally about a little over a point has now grown to basically three points. So it's not significant.

  But you know when that races in this era are decided by one and two points, being able to even gain that much is super, super important. And I think what we're hearing from members, folks that I talk to in these swing states, what they're really worried about is that their own voters are depressed and they don't come out to vote, and undecided voters, while they may not be breaking right now for Donald Trump, they can't guarantee that won't happen as we get closer to the election.

• Geoff Bennett:

  How do Democrats find their way out of this, in the 30 seconds we have left, Tam?

  (Laughter)

• Tamara Keith:

  Oh, my.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Solve it for us in 30 seconds.

• Tamara Keith:

  Well, I think it probably doesn't happen this week, but it might begin next week with the Republican Convention, when former President Trump will be the center of attention once again.

  Or maybe even this week, if he announces his vice presidential pick, Democrats could easily pivot to pointing out that his former vice president does not support him, in part because his life was threatened on January 6.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Tamara Keith and Amy Walter, thanks to you both, as always. We appreciate it.

• Amy Walter:

  You're welcome.