The FRONTLINE Interviews
David A. Graham
Political Writer, The Atlantic
David A. Graham is a staff writer covering politics for The Atlantic. He previously reported for Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on June 10, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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It’s New York City.It’s the ’70s, ’80s.It’s drugs.It’s Alphabet City.It’s financial collapse.It’s all of it.It’s race problems.Can you describe that environment for me, in the late ’70s and the ’80s?
Well, it’s a—it is a wild place.There’s—you know, crime is on the rise.It’s a glamorous place.Trump likes to hang out in places like Studio 54.But the streets are dangerous.And there’s real fear… about rape and murder and squeegee men, squeegee boys, and crime inside the city.
Trump’s Early Career
And into that world, Donald Trump has emerged out of military school, an apprenticeship with his father in the real estate business.Going to make it in the Big Apple, even if, in those days, it was the rotten Big Apple.What’s the plan for him at that time?
He emerges as a sort of favorite son among his children, among his father’s children.His older brother doesn’t seem cut out for the real estate business, but he has a mind for it.And he quickly becomes sort of a frontman for the Trump Organization.So even as Fred Trump remains a powerful figure inside the organization, and remains highly involved in things, Donald becomes more and more sort of the face of the organization, the person who is out there making the sells, being quoted in the press, and doing the marketing for the company.
My impression of New York then is it’s a little like the “Wild West” on the East Coast, maybe a perfect set to drop a character like Donald Trump into.
Yeah.And I think Trump has this real interest in Manhattan also that is relevant at this point.He’s from the outer boroughs.The Trump Organization is really an outer-borough place.But he’s attracted to Manhattan in a lot of ways.He’s attracted to the social life.He’s attracted to the glamor of doing real estate there.And he wants to sort of expand out of what he worries is seen as a little bit provincial origins.
And his ambitions?Are his political ambitions evident yet?
Not really.At times he’ll weigh in on political issues, but for the most part, he seems to have no clear interest in elected office, and not really a clear ideology.He has views on certain things.But we don’t see anything like the sort of formed Trump that we have now.And we don’t even see something like the Trump who emerges in the maybe early 2000s as having a somewhat cohesive political identity.
It’s interesting about New York.It’s really the first time young Donald Trump comes up against the government.I would assume some of his views that emerge, that he pulls through all the way to now, about deep state and corruption and everything else, are very much alive and well in the bankrupt and corrupt New York City politics.
Yeah.And I also think he sees things like the Japanese—Japanese companies coming in and buying up real estate.And we see in that, the seeds of the sort of worries about other countries taking … advantage of the U.S. and his interest in protectionism.Those are also forged in that foundry as well.
Would we recognize that Donald Trump now?
I think we recognize elements of him: the sort of brashness, the quickness with the slogan, the sense of what grabs attention, the love of—the love of glamor, the love of the camera, and some of these nascent political ideas.I don’t think it’s a fully formed package.You know, the angry Trump that we see a lot isn’t so much a factor.He’s more fun-loving.He’s a playboy.And I don’t think he—I don’t think he would have described himself as a populist in the way he does now.That’s not what he’s going for.He’s going for a sort of elite, high-flown milieu.
When he watches all the problems around, the drugs, the fear, I gather—I mean, we’re about to talk about the Central Park Five, but in advance of that, I get this sense that he’s—it’s kind of imbuing him in some way about the way other people live in a place like New York at a time like that.
Yeah.He’s really conscious of these things.And drugs and alcohol are an interesting one, because there’s this rich family history where he sees his brother become an alcoholic, and I think that marks him personally.But he also has these judgments about the way other people live.He has questions about who he wants in his properties.He’s always wary of people being on the streets and making things look dirty.That’s another throughline.
You see his sort of interest in homelessness and concern about street drifters going back, really, to the early days of his real estate career, sometimes with different solutions.But it’s often a thing that he is worried about.And he worries about sort of moral decay and law and order.Rudy Giuliani, who obviously becomes a close friend of his later on, is campaigning as somebody to clean up New York, and I think Trump really respects that sort of attitude, and sees himself as like-minded, at the very least.
Trump and the Central Park Five
... Let’s go to the Central Park Five.Can you narrate the story?What happened there?If Trump, sitting in his apartment, in his penthouse, was witnessing what was happening on the news and in the newspapers and by word of mouth, even, what's the story Trump would have been hearing about what was going on, what went on with the Central Park Five that night?
So a young woman is brutally attacked and raped in Central Park, a jogger.Quickly, these five young men of color are arrested and charged with the crime.Huge tabloid story.And Trump is a major consumer of the tabloids.He loves them.He loves being in them.He loves reading them.He’s also a close reader of The New York Times.And he consumes tons of news.So he’s seeing this lurid story splashed across the front pages, on the evening news.It’s obviously a story outside of New York as well.But it becomes this major story inside New York, and it really captures his attention.
... So the nascent politician Donald Trump watches all that happen.And what do we imagine his response would be to that?
I think Trump had already started to grasp, through his business career, the power of racial division to people’s attitudes.And so he would be interested in, for example, keeping people of color out of Trump Organization properties.He would be interested in getting homeless people to try to—trying to get homeless people to live in the lobbies of buildings to get tenants out.So he’s really attuned to the way people respond to racially coded appeals, whether or not he has any particular personal stake in them.
As you say, he’s got this—he has these nascent political ideas, partly fed by people constantly asking him, in interviews, whether he wants to run for president.And he’s this young, dashing guy with a lot of money.And people keep thinking, you must be interested in running for office.And he sometimes says yes, sometimes says no.
So, as he sees this story going, he—I think he must see a chance to really grab a lot of attention, So he buys these ads in the local papers, calling to bring back the death penalty, calling for a really tough sentence at a time when, at this point, the suspects haven’t even been charged, much less tried.I should check that.They haven’t been—they have not been put on trial, much less convicted.And he’s taking out this ad, basically calling for them to be executed.
What’s up?
It’s a time when people are afraid.Trump knows people are afraid.I think he perpetually sees political leadership as politically correct—who are unwilling to take the bull by the horns and sees an opportunity to get in front—get out in front of the story, and appeal to people who are rattled by this, by calling for something tough, and making himself the leader of the get-tough law-and-order faction?.
And the result?What happens?What is the response to Donald Trump, burgeoning tycoon, taking out a full-page ad in the newspaper?
It’s not clear to me how much real impact it had at the time.It’s part of a really widespread response.I think if you talk to the members of the Central Park Five, and you talk to their lawyers, it really stinks for them to remember this.But he was by no means the only person who was calling for quick and swift justice.And, in fact, the defendants were convicted, and only years later were released from prison and then exonerated.
So it takes on this outsize importance later, when he won't acknowledge the exoneration, continues to seem to believe that they were guilty, maybe more than he did at the time, when the ads themselves came out.
Trump and Racial Division
Is it, in your way of thinking, and others you’ve talked to in their way of thinking, is it true racism or political expedience?
There is division among people about that.If you talk to people who have a sort of charitable view, they’ll take a couple lines.One is, Trump isn't a racist.Trump is a sort of Archie Bunker Queens type, or as one other person told me, Trump is no more of a racist than Jack Kennedy or Frank Sinatra.He’s a product of a sort of New York ’60s milieu.He has views that are maybe a little bit dated.He might subscribe to stereotypes that are not especially welcome today, but he doesn’t have real racial animus.
A second view, which I think is sometimes proffered as charitable, but maybe doesn’t come across that way, is Trump isn’t really a racist, but Trump grasps the way that racial tensions can really be beneficial.And this is something that I think emerges first with the Central Park Five, and then becomes even stronger, first with the Ground Zero mosque, and then later with birtherism.He starts to see the power of these claims and the way people get really excited about them, the way he gets attention for them.So Trump isn’t really racist.He’s just a sort of instrumental racist.
And then the third view is, Trump is a racist.Trump has always been a racist.His father was a racist.His willingness to use these things as proof of his racism and his private remarks echo that as well.
... The division is good.And there’s nothing better to divide people, especially at a crisis time in New York City, than race.Talk to me a little bit about characteristics that feel like they’ll live on across the decades, that emerge from Donald Trump in these early historic moments.
Well, I do think that his sense for where there is division and how to exploit it is just a really running trait.It’s true in his business career and in his politics career.He knows where those are.And at a time when other politicians would seek to unify, whether for charitable motives or simply out of political self-interest, he always wants to sort of divide.He sees a way to split people against each other, sort of divide-and-conquer strategy.
I think this obsession with making sure things are orderly, or at least that the right people are orderly, is another thing that comes through.He’s happy to be on the party scene, but he wants to make sure that the streets are safe or perceived as safe for people like him, and people who might want to live in his buildings or for his supporters, so that they’re not worried about riots over police; they’re not worried about people smashing buildings.
You mentioned strength.The question of projecting strength is something that he does pick up at some point, and he keeps that for a long time.Those are maybe the three most salient ones, I think.
Trump and Birtherism
It’s something that its first manifestation, national manifestation, is the birther issue.How?Why?And to what effect?
So I think to talk about the birther issue, it’s useful to step back a little bit before that, to the supposed “Ground Zero mosque” in New York City, which was this plan to build—it’s funny how this was such a huge story and now completely forgotten, but it was a plan to build this Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan, not at Ground Zero, certainly near Ground Zero.And it becomes a conservative cause célèbre, with people arguing that doing this somehow dishonors the memory of 9/11.And there are some conservative figures who, mainstream conservative figures, who jump on this.Newt Gingrich comes to mind.
But Trump is maybe the loudest and brashest of them.And what he discovers is, when he talks about this, he gets a lot of attention from Fox News, from other conservative outlets.And I should say, this is an effort where he is encouraged by two people who will become important political figures for him: Roger Stone, who is already in his orbit, and Sam Nunberg, who becomes one of his early campaign advisers.They had both been involved in this effort against the cultural center.
And they sort of turn him into a figurehead for it, and he loves this.He discovers that it gets him all this attention on conservative media.And then he starts to think about it.So Nunberg told me, if he hadn't done the ground zero mosque and gotten that attention, I don’t think he would have done the birther thing.But he starts to see these possibilities.And he grabs onto birtherism as another example.And there's some similarity here.Obviously, there’s the question of whether somebody is maybe a secret Muslim, or what the Muslims are doing, kind of Islamaphobic hint to it, and also, a racialized hint.
So he grabs onto this birther issue, which is something that had been percolating all over the place, mostly sort of on the sidelines of conservative media.You get these weird fringe figures who conduct investigations and are convinced that, in fact, Barack Obama is a secret Muslim born in Indonesia or Kenya or what have you.You even get some Republican members of Congress who flirt with this idea, either explicitly or sort of by refusing to suffocate it, saying, “Well, I don’t really know; I take him at his word,” is something they say, which automatically raises questions.
But Trump grabs onto it whole heartedly.And he talks about it on The View.He has this weird confrontation with Whoopi Goldberg, where she accuses him of basically pursuing a racist conspiracy theory, and they shout at each other.He pursues this on Fox News.He pursues this anywhere, really, someone will give him a hearing.
And people in the Obama administration told me that they felt like Trump made this mainstream.It had been a weird fringe theory that you could find it if you were looking for it, but it wasn’t in the major discourse.Then suddenly Trump talks about it, and because Trump is a well-known figure, because he has flirted with running for president before, because he has a widely viewed television show, suddenly it becomes a mainstream issue.It allows other people to talk about it, including allowing the press to start asking questions about birtherism.Suddenly, this is one of the leading stories.And Obama feels compelled to go and collect his long-form birth certificate and produce it to the public.
Trump and the ‘Crisis Presidency’
... Talk a little bit about the Donald Trump that’s president of the United States during, first, coronavirus and then the George Floyd murder aftermath.
It’s interesting to see the early days of Trump in coronavirus versus the later ones, because at the beginning, we get to the idea of projecting strength.And he says: “It’s going to be fine.We have the best protections here.We’re prepared.It’s going to go from 15 to zero.”And tied up with that, he says, “I’ve talked to President Xi; the Chinese have this under control,” which is interesting.I’m fascinated by the way he goes back and forth with the Chinese.On the one hand, he’s often very critical.He obviously campaigned, talking about branding them a currency manipulator and saying they were taking advantage of us.Then, once he becomes president, he sometimes is awfully deferential.This is a case where he seems very deferential.
Then, of course, the course of the pandemic turns, and we get a different Trump, no longer so much projecting strength, and more “Where can I send blame?”So that means division.That means saying that the Obama administration hadn’t prepared things for the pandemic, which, of course, isn’t true.You know, there are war games.There was a plan.There was a director to the National Security Council.These things all exist.But it’s not about the fact.The point is, where can I assign blame?And the answer is, to Obama.
Another one is to China and to WHO [World Health Organization].So that means defunding the WHO.And that means accusing the Chinese of doing something pernicious, of maybe creating the virus in a lab or maybe simply allowing it to spread unchecked.Or perhaps it was intentionally allowed to spread unchecked.Who knows?And, of course, we call it the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus.”
So here you see cases where people immediately—this is a racist thing to do.You’re blaming the Chinese when this is a virus.And moreover, you’re going to make this difficult for Asians.Like you see attacks on Asian Americans and hate crimes.It’s not a concern for Trump.He’s more interested in what he can leverage than in what the effects are on anybody who he might perceive as collateral damage.
It’s also—it also sort of goes hand in hand with something else he’s been doing since he’s been elected.He’s had, as you know, crisis after crisis, day after day.One person told us it’s like life is a reality-TV show, and it’s just going to be the cliffhanger from today that leads into tomorrow’s episode.And your thoughts about that?
I think that’s true.And I think the interesting thing about that is how many of the crises, up till 2020, I’d say, have been, if not self-inflicted, sort of Trump-controlled.Sometimes he’s taking something that already exists, and he’s throwing fuel on the fire.I think a good example of that is Charlottesville.Trump didn’t create Charlottesville, but he chose to handle it in a way that was going to inflame it.And if you watched even the first few days after that, it’s interesting.It’s almost a question of plot pacing.First, he condemns, and then he walks back.And then he condemns again.And then he walks that back.So you can see him, from day to day, playing with it.
How intentionally he’s doing that, and how much is flailing, and how much is just kind of instinct, I wonder from case to case.But so many of these things are just—they’re things that he creates crises about.They’re things he says to create crises.And coronavirus, and I think also the George Floyd protests, are interesting because they’re cases where Trump didn’t create these and doesn’t seem wholly in control of them, so he’s trying the same tactics, but he’s fighting against these factors that are bigger than him.You can’t demagogue a virus, although he has certainly tried.But it turns out, that doesn’t actually control the spread, just blaming somebody else or inflaming tensions about it.
And in the midst of all of this, of course, David, is this ongoing war with the deep state, fighting against experts, fighting against knowledge-based institutions, the universities, the scientific establishment, the press.Talk a little bit about that, and whether you have any sense that that has come along for the ride with what he did with Central Park Five and the birtherism and other things that we’ve talked about.
Well, there's always a kind of trusting your gut impulse for Trump, it seems.And he’s obviously not the first person to—first politician to be like that.George W. Bush talked about trusting his gut.But I think Trump takes it to new levels.So he has a gut instinct that the Central Park Five are guilty and they should fry.He has a gut instinct, or at least purports to, that Obama just might not be from here.
And in the campaign, he talks about these things.When he’s asked why he doesn’t have a hold on X or Y policy topic, he says, “Oh, I can master it in a couple days.”He says he understands Iraq better than the generals.And sometimes you can kind of bluster your way through that.Foreign policy is a long way away.People aren’t that tuned into it.They may disapprove of what you’re doing, withdrawing troops from Syria, or they may not, but it’s a long way away.
It’s a little harder to do that when you’re dealing with a virus.He, again, has this sort of—he trusts his gut.He thinks it’s going to go to zero.He trusts his gut that opening up the economy is the right move and that if we simply remove restrictions, business will bounce back.He has a gut feeling about these things.He has a gut feeling that you should try things like hydroxychloroquine.It doesn’t matter if the experts are unsure.He just—he thinks it might be good.He’s a smart person.And it’s worth giving it a shot, because he’s a smart person, no matter what the experts might say.
But unfortunately, about the virus, and the daily press conferences, which is really his reality television gone mad, it seems like it’s harder.And you see him sort of like practicing saying something about injecting yourself with light or bleach or whatever it is.What do you make of that?
Those press conferences, to me, resemble nothing so much as his campaign rallies.He loves those rallies.And they can be really rip-roaring entertainment.You sort of sit in the rally.Watching it on a screen, you get some sense of it.But I think being in the room, it’s a totally different vibe.And if you sit and you try to desegregate the comments he makes, moment to moment, they often make no sense, and you can’t understand how they’re connected.But it’s rip-roaring entertainment.I mean, he just rolls, and he riffs.And he has fun, and he finds something in the crowd that he wants to talk about, and he toggles back and forth.And he recites “The Snake.”
He does this thing.He loves those rallies.He scheduled his first campaign rally after his inauguration, I think three weeks after the inauguration.So he never really quits campaigning.And I think it’s because that’s sort of his happy place.With the pandemic, suddenly he is shut up inside the White House.He can’t go anywhere.And those briefings became sort of a place for him to do that thing.He’s riffing and free-associating and just coming up with stuff off the top of his head in the way he would if he was in an arena, without maybe understanding the stakes that people are dying over this, and people might actually inject bleach in themselves to try to keep themselves healthy.
Trump and the Death of George Floyd
... The surprise, I suppose, the unanticipated problem of the brutal death of George Floyd.... Talk to me about that piece of news and how it probably hit Trump, and what has happened as a result.
Well, one of the things that surprised me a little bit about the Floyd story initially was that Trump reacted to it with horror, the way a lot of people did.He sees the video, and he says: “This should never have happened.There have to be consequences.This isn’t OK.”And that’s interesting, because he had spent years before that arguing that the police were being persecuted.He talked—he uses the line “Blue Lives Matter” frequently at rallies in 2016 at a time when the Obama administration is pushing police departments and activists are pushing police departments to clean up their behavior and to prosecute cops who misbehaved.
Trump is out there saying, “We don’t need to do this.”Once he gets into office, one of the major focuses of the Justice Department is rolling back those consent decrees.They stopped holding police departments accountable.And they also tried to cancel a consent decree in Baltimore that’s already in progress.And Trump says at times: “We need to take the handle off our police.Police need to be able to be a little bit rougher.Don’t worry about being rough.We’ll have your back.”
There's a rally on Long Island where he, with a bunch of police behind him, he seems—he’s really hitting this idea that cops really need to be allowed to be a little bit more brutal.And so for him to even take that stance and say that what happened to Floyd was an injustice was a real surprise to me.But I think he quickly snaps out of it, either because—well, I think he snaps out of it because he sees that there are these riots, and he sees where the division is.He can’t divide people if he’s taking the side that a lot of people are.He realizes that if there’s anything that his base is going to do, it’s going to gravitate toward the police side of things, and he sort of corrects course to where I kind of expected him to be.
But he can’t control it.And then he makes maybe the most important historical moment that will be in the history books, if there are history books in the future, history videos in the future, is the clearing of the Lafayette Park crowd protesters so he can go across the street and hold the Bible up for a photo op.Talk to me about that.I mean, in a way, what an arc, a narrative arc that is from Central Park Five to that moment.
Well, he can’t control it, but what we see is his attempts to control it.And sometimes he can control it a little bit, or he can direct it.So this is a story that initially is about a policeman killing a Black man in Minnesota, and it becomes within, I don’t know, 36 to 48 hours, a story in great part about Donald Trump.And I think that is intentional on his part, whether it—he wants to put—insert himself into it.And clearing Lafayette Square is another example of how he can exert control, and this way, physical control over the space.
He is feeling embattled in the White House.He’s been sent to this bunker in the basement, and this gets reported.And he hates this.The idea that he was fleeing from the mob really bothers him, and so he has to go out and do something that can assert his control.And one way to do that is to have this massive police presence to push out.And in some ways, I think the shallowness of the photo op, to simply go out, walk out there in front of St. John’s Church, hold the Bible up, not really say anything and walk back in, something like three minutes total, is the point.He’s not interested in doing something deeper.He wants to show that, just for this little photo op, he can get this massive presence out.He can clear these people out, and he can assert his dominance, dominance being what he’d called on governors to show themselves and what he complained they were not showing in dealing with riots.
Biden’s Political Record
... For just a minute, let’s talk about Joe Biden, if you don’t mind.And you may have some thoughts and some experience with some of these stories.We’re following both of their lives and major events that happen in each one and trying to draw lessons, for the lack of a better word, from the events....
Place him in the quandary of what to do about things he might or might not have done a long time ago, now as he runs for president against the man we’ve been talking about for the last period of time.
I think Biden has a lot of past that haunts him in a different way, because he has—you mentioned earlier that Trump could be politically incorrect, because he didn’t have to run for these other offices.He didn’t have to work his way up the ladder.Unlike Trump, Biden did have to work his way up the ladder, and in doing so, he sometimes took these stances that start to haunt him later.And I think we’ve seen several of these on race.One of them is his comments about working with James Eastland, which he portrayed as simple pragmatism, but I think reads to a lot of younger Democrats now as being a sellout and accommodating yourself to white supremacism.
He comes out against busing, which becomes a brutal issue in one of the early Democratic debates, but I think is, in the context of Delaware politics when he was running for office, a fairly pragmatic stance, maybe not a principled one, but he understood where the political winds were blowing.
When we get to Anita Hill, he’s trying to thread a needle.And I think he understands that he can’t ignore the accusations entirely, but he’s not interested in making a big thing out of it.He’s not interested in Borking Clarence Thomas.And so that—that leads him to this sort of half measure, where he’ll hear some testimony, but he won't hear everything, and he kind of buries it.
Then that moves him, from there, we go onto the 1994 crime bill, which at the time looks like a great accomplishment for Biden, because it’s a law-and-order thing, and he can seem like a defender of law and order at a time when it seems like that’s what the population wants.But all of these are stances that don’t really fly in the Democratic Party today, and he has to figure out how to get around those.
Tara Reade is an interesting case, because it dovetails with some of the things that people think about Biden.There are the questions of him being a toucher, usually not attached to any sort of malicious intent....People talk about Trump being a predator, and you don’t see people, for the most part, calling Biden a predator.He’s somebody who doesn’t seem to understand boundaries, whether out of malice or not.
And the Tara Reade accusations, I think, are important because they suddenly put the accusations against Biden out of being, “Here is a guy who really doesn’t understand boundaries,” to “Here is a guy who did something that is allegedly very problematic.”
... How has his campaign, and how has he responded so far to the—it’s more than a boomlet, but it’s not a firestorm, of the Tara Reade story?
Well, it seems like he got a little bit lucky in terms of the news.So the story has faded a little bit because of coronavirus and because of the protests, but I can’t imagine that it’s gone.The Biden campaign has been really cautious on so many things, and that includes the sort of policies they stake out, which tend to try to triangulate, but mostly stay in the middle of the road.And it also extends to the way they deal with crises.And so in the case of Tara Reade, they tried to just not say anything for a long time, as though they hoped that if they just ignored it, it might go away, and they allowed surrogates to come out and say, “This isn’t the Biden I know; I don’t think he did this,” especially female surrogates.
But the candidate himself didn’t say anything for a very long time.And when he finally did come out to address these things, his answers were very careful and very measured.He basically said: “I didn’t do it.I categorically deny.I want any documents that are related to this to be released.And that’s all I'm going to say.”So it’s a sort of attempt to just stifle the story by not giving it any fuel.
Biden and Empathy
... Can you talk about Joe, the empathetic Joe Biden, and where that comes from, and my proposition that that’s really what they're selling?
Yeah.Sometimes people around Biden will describe him; they’ll say empathy is his superpower, or grief is his superpower.And this is a thing that goes back to the—the really horrifying death of his wife and daughter in a car accident just after he’s elected to the Senate.His two sons survive but are injured, and Biden nearly resigns from the Senate.He sends word to the Democratic leader: “I can't come.We should find somebody to fill the role.”And the word comes back, “No, take care of your family, and you can come when you're ready.”And he stays with his sons as they recover.
This story is something he comes back to a lot over the years.Whenever there is a sort of tragic incident, he’s there, and he can—he can reach that place with people.And then it gets amped up even more when his son Beau, the attorney general for Delaware, dies of brain cancer.And the speech that he gives at that—at Beau’s funeral is another really incredible moment of grief and of public grieving at a time when there was a lot of public grieving.I mean, you think about the Obama years, and there’s so many examples where Obama himself comes out and does this role, whether it’s in Charleston or after Sandy Hook.And yet Biden’s speech at that funeral stands out as a really emotional peak.So these experiences of losing his wife, losing his daughter and then losing his son, seem to allow him to connect to people.
And it’s an interesting campaign asset.We think of the president as being somebody who does that, whether it’s Obama in Charleston or after Sandy Hook, or if it’s George W. Bush at ground zero, you know, sort of defining a way.But again, he’s there counseling people through their grief.It’s Ronald Reagan after the Challenger.This isn’t something that Trump does.And when Trump goes places and sort of tries to enact empathy, it often comes across as stilted or weird or just doesn’t really work.
He tries it after Hurricane Harvey in Houston not very effectively.Then, after Hurricane Maria, he goes to Puerto Rico, where he tosses paper towel rolls into the crowd, and gets widely panned.And since then, he’s barely really even tried.I think he understands that it just isn’t a mode that works for him, and it cuts a little bit against his strength thing.
So it’s weird to see Biden running in this presidential role and Trump in a sort of insurgent role.Trump wants to see himself as an outsider in this election.And in some ways, this plays into it.Biden is kind of the classic insider who wants to console the nation.And Trump doesn’t really care to do that.
The Choice Between Biden and Trump
So you’ve already sort of answered it, but I’ll put it in straightforward terms....What's the choice between these two men, from your point of view?
Right.I think it’s a choice between four years of unpredictability and chaos, much like what we’ve seen already, in Trump’s case.There’s obviously no new Trump.This is what we get.And almost something less predicable with Biden.I think his idea of going back isn’t really a tenable one.So we don’t know what a post-Trump world would look like.In some ways, more Trump is more predicable than the alternative.So it’s a leap of faith to go with somebody like Joe Biden.
... [Biden] comes into this election, the 2020 election.Expectations are not too high for him.And one moment that’s of interest to us is the Kamala Harris sort of attack on him during the debate about busing.Take us to that moment, what it says about the reaction of Biden, what that means for him baggage-wise, and yet surprisingly, he overcomes that, and he comes out the winner.
Yeah.That debate moment was really an incredible one, for a couple reasons.It seemed like Biden wasn’t really prepared for the attack.And Kamala Harris was the first person to level it, at least on the stage, because she can make reference to her own experiences…And for Biden, who thrives on personal relationships, that was something that he clearly felt was a personal betrayal, and he knew that Harris had been close to his son when they were both attorneys general, and he seems shocked and betrayed.
And he doesn’t seem ready to answer these questions about the past in a way that’s going to—in a way that’s going to connect with voters.Even though we see these racial questions, even though we see the change in the Democratic Party, Biden seemed on the back foot.And we saw this a couple of times in the debates, where he just didn’t seem ready.He reached the end a lot of time, and instead of sort of plowing through and trying to answer it, he’d say: “Oh, my time is up.I’m sorry.”
And we saw that there.He seemed to be fumbling for an answer, and hadn’t figured out what the—what the sort of correct political answer was in the current Democratic Party.And throughout his career Biden has been somebody who was thought to be politically correct—not the politically correct answer, but the answer that was correct politically, and would seek his advancement, and he hadn’t figured out how to square those things.And he stumbled at it live on the stage there.
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