The FRONTLINE Interviews
Matt Bai
Author, All the Truth Is Out
Matt Bai is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post and served as national political columnist for Yahoo News from 2014 to 2019. He was previously a political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of All the Truth Is Out and The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.
Following are the transcripts of two interviews conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore and Michael Kirk on November 24, 2020, and June 9, 2020, respectively. They have been edited for clarity and length.
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LATEST INTERVIEW: Biden’s Staying Power
So the film looks at the crises that Biden has dealt with all his life, so, what he's gone through with grief, with his mistakes made, with failed campaigns and such.So by 2020, what's he learned from his past?Who is he?
What's he learned by 2020?Can I step back and offer a little context first, before we talk about that?
Of course.
This is—you know, we'll probably get to this anyway, but to me this is really interesting.There's no analog for Biden in the history of presidents.There really isn't, and I think this gets missed a lot, you know.Who do we think of in modern times as having toiled away in pursuit of the prize for really long periods of time?Lyndon Johnson had maybe 20 years in Congress before he found himself elevated to the presidency.Richard Nixon, who's sort of the archetype of a guy who just won't go away, right, who wins through staying power, Nixon was, you know, it was maybe 30 years, his entire political career, before he was president, right?It was—you know, I'd have to go back and look.
But there's no analog for what Joe Biden, in the amount of time and sheer persistence that Joe Biden has put in to get to this point.I think it's kind of inspiring in its own plodding way.I mean, he enters as the youngest member of the Senate in 1972 and will now become, by far, the oldest president we've ever had.And we're talking about a half century in public life during which he experienced, multiple times, the setbacks, any one of which would have and has driven out candidates from pursuing the presidency or has driven them into leaving public life.
So the sheer staying power that Biden has shown, and the unlikeliness, the improbability of where he finds himself is unprecedented in American presidential history.And I think sometimes that's overlooked in the weirdness of the moment.
I do think he's different in 2020 than he was before.And I can't pretend to have known him well in all the steps of his career, but, you know, Biden always had a reputation for being a little bit of a salesman, a little bit too loquacious, a guy who would, you know, who you couldn't get to be quiet or you couldn't get out of the room, right?It was kind of endearing.It was sort of this ruffian type of quality.But it was also mocked widely in Washington.And the lack of discipline was the thing that was always associated with him, the sort of—sort of that he ran hot and ran impulsive.
I remember going into his office when he was in the Senate many, many years ago.I don't even remember the story I was working on; it was a magazine piece, and it was supposed to be a short interview.I maybe had 45 minutes, and he must have taken a half an hour to tell me a pretty well-worn story about his commitment to civil rights and what it was like when he first got to the Senate.And it was—he was not filibustering.He got into the story, and he wanted me to hear it, and I was there for considerably longer than I expected to be, and talked about something for the most part I didn't expect to talk about.But that was—that was Biden.
Now I think you can recognize in him, I guess you could call it more discipline, but I don't think it's actually discipline; I don't think he's tried to change himself.I think he has endured, and he has aged, and it seems to have brought a certain serenity and centeredness.And I don't just mean in terms of his manner; I mean, even when you see him begin to form an administration, when you saw him on the campaign trail, particularly when you saw him down and out in the early primaries, well behind the rest of the field, and everybody saying he's in a lane nobody cares about, the energy's moved to the left, nobody wants him, he's too old, he stayed the course in a very quiet, centered way.And I don't think he would have necessarily done that 20 years ago.I think that sort of lack of panic and that calmness, and even the quietness that some people might interpret as a lack of energy, I think that is what Biden has attained in age and, bizarrely, finds himself at the moment where it might be the most valued quality of all.
He showed his weaknesses, to some extent, during this campaign.He was losing in the primaries.He was not so hot on the debate stage.But for some reason, those weaknesses became strength.Why, in this divided country that we live in, in crisis after crisis, what does it say about the public, America, that they decided to go with him after he certainly showed a lot of those weaknesses that you talked about in the first answer?
That's an interesting question.In other words, you know, why did they choose him after knowing all of his weaknesses, right?You can't underestimate—and I think people do—the ideological statement of the primaries in 2020, because everybody's saying Joe Biden wins the nomination and then the presidency, and everybody says Democrats are in for a big fight; the left wants to make its case; Biden might not be sufficiently liberal; there's going to be all this interparty feuding.Guess what?They had that feud.It may not have felt like a feud, because Joe Biden was very calm and deliberate about it and wasn't up there screaming like a Bernie Sanders or arguing the point, you know, as sharply as an Elizabeth Warren.But the party had that argument in 2020.You had one candidate, one major candidate, who was losing most of the time sitting out there saying, "I am not going to go to the left margins to please the base of my party."And Democrats chose him, overwhelmingly.
So that fight was fought and resolved.And part of the reason that Joe Biden is the nominee is because most Democrats appear to be where he is and not where Twitter is necessarily.He is—he is a moderate.He does believe in consensus building.He believes in sort of pushing toward progressive change, more of a government role, in a way that's palatable to people and in reaching out.And that was rejected by a lot of the candidates and a lot of the base of the party in 2020, but it was overwhelmingly endorsed by the larger Democratic electorate and endorsed by the national electorate.
So, you know, he won in part because he made the right argument, and I think he deserves credit for that.It would have been much, much easier to cave and make an argument that was more popular, that got a lot of applause from the base or made journalists and commentators happy.He stayed the course, and I think because he was so quiet and deliberate about it, people forget that he had a fight, and he won that fight.And I think that's, you know, I think he deserves a lot of credit for that.And it tells you something about where the party is and where the country is.… I think, too, people forget that Joe Biden was a pretty good presidential candidate in 2008.The last time the country had seen him run for president, he was better than Washington insiders thought he would be.He was excellent in those debates.He was disciplined.He made himself cut off his answers at a certain point.He did not do well in the vote, but he impressed a lot of people; he came off as a really serious, statesmanlike figure.And then I think in the vice presidency, he always retained a lot of popularity.
So in Washington, among insiders, there's always been a little bit of a feeling that Biden's a joke because he talks too much, and he misspeaks and all of this, and they made fun of him in The Onion.And so you might look and say, well, you know, how does the public choose a guy who's so often shown weaknesses as a politician?But I think closer to the truth is that he evolved and improved as a politician over time and actually evidenced a lot of political skill now for a very long time, and was prepared in a way for this race—in a way that a lot of people, a lot of candidates in his party, were not—and had thought it through in a way a lot of candidates did not.
… I was watching the initial Cabinet picks that Biden is making, and it occurred to me, it's been a really long time—we're going to wait and see what kind of president Joe Biden is, because I've seen—we've all seen a lot of promise go south in a hurry and a lot of lower expectations exceeded sometimes.But it is, I think, possible to overlook the value of having thought through how you want to govern, and we're not used to it anymore.You know, when you look back at Gary Hart in 1988, who I've written about quite a bit, or even Bill Clinton, I think, in 1992, certainly, probably Clinton was the last president to have spent years thinking about a governing philosophy, putting in place what an agenda would look like, thinking about who he wanted in key jobs and who his key advisers would be, putting forward an argument for the country.We've had, you know, really a series of presidents who governed either on heredity—or ran either on heredity or on personality or on celebrity, and who really did not go through any long period of ideological evolution or thinking about how they wanted to govern the country.
I think one of the interesting things about Biden is he's a bit of a throwback that way.He's obviously spent a lot of time thinking about how he wants to govern.His initial picks for jobs show you that he's not fooling around.He's thought about this for a while.He wants people who have done it before.He knows what he wants ideologically and argumentatively those positions to reflect, and I don't think we've seen that in a while.
That Saturday after the election, when the networks finally came out and said that he had won, gave the race to Biden, he goes up on the stage, and he makes a speech.A couple things about that speech. Number one—
This is the outdoor speech in Wilmington, right?
Yeah, with all the cars.What must that have meant to him?After the failed races, after all those years of striving to become president, what must that have meant to Joe Biden, standing on that stage?
You know, I can't begin to imagine what that moment was like for Joe Biden.I've thought about it quite a bit, and I urged other people to think about it: As you were watching this man, remember what he's gone through to get there.I have to believe that for Biden, there was a sense of spirituality about that moment, a sense of higher purpose, right?When you've tried that long to get somewhere and have experienced those kinds of setbacks, been written off that many times and endured that kind of tragedy, been shaped by so much incredible pain in your life, and you come back around to a moment where the country really is in peril, where we face something unprecedented, not just in a public health crisis but in a leadership crisis and a crisis of the institutions of governance to which you've spent your—you know, to which you've devoted most of your adult life, and then you find yourself called at that moment, and to stand there in front of the country and finally be at that pinnacle, having attained that level of sort of self-knowledge and having thought that much about it, I have to believe that that's a feeling probably none of us can relate to, and probably no one, frankly, who's ever won the presidency can relate to, because it's unique that way.And it has to make you think about what your purpose is.And I think that is the way he thinks about it.
Some people say that that speech is one of the best of his life, but he also stutters a bit during it.And you wrote a little bit about that in a recent piece.What does that say?Is there anything to take from that?Any thoughts on the fact that the malady that throughout his life, especially when he was a young boy, came back to haunt him a little bit, or has always been there?What's your thoughts on that?
That was interesting.That was a—that was a great speech, and I thought—I thought Joe Biden looked—looked and sounded 20 years younger all of a sudden on that night than he had for a lot of the campaign.It was like a weight had been lifted, and a passion had infused his rhetoric in some way.I thought he telegraphed a tremendous amount of energy and confidence and relaxation that, you know, maybe was more closed off during the heat of the campaign, when he was being more cautious and facing so much pressure.
You know, the stutter's an interesting thing.There's almost something, I don't know if it's Shakespearean, but, like, poetic about it, because here you have a guy who struggled with, to overcome—that was the first obstacle in his life, right?There have been so many.And the first big obstacle is this, this speech problem.And you think, well, a kid like that is never going to be a politician or a trial lawyer.You're going to do something—you're going to do something else that doesn't accentuate the problem.He overcomes it, and he goes on to this political life where he's known as a great talker, right?He never—he never achieves his full ambition, but he's like one of the great talkers in Washington; he can talk your ear off, and will.And then [he] comes to this place at the end of his career where he finally reaches the pinnacle of his—of national power and of his own ambition, and does so with the recurrence of that problem a little bit, right?You notice it.You notice it in debates; you notice it in speeches.And there's almost a—there's almost, like, a literary lesson to me in that, right?He becomes more of who he is, like a lot of people when they age, right?He has the problem communicating, but in some weird way, he communicates better because he has more knowledge, and he has more serenity and has more experience, and is communicating with people on a different level, and it doesn't so much matter if he's stumbling over his words a little bit.
You know, there are moments when I think it's—when I've thought, certainly during the campaign, that it was potentially problematic for him.You know, I wondered if voters would look at him as someone who had aged too much.But in a weird way, the foil of Donald Trump took age and the occasional stutter and the occasional misspeaking off the table, because if you're not as smooth in this campaign at this moment, if you weren't as smooth, if the words didn't come as easily, if you weren't as entertaining to listen to, you were, in effect, the opposite of Donald Trump, and a lot of people were looking for that.
Biden’s Early Political Evolution
… Way back in 1972, after the car crash and he's deciding whether he's going to be senator or not, from that point to where he runs for president the first time is 14 years.And you can help us with what happened in those 14 years, how he evolves, how he becomes a man of the Senate.What happens in those 14 years to bring him to the point where he is a viable candidate for the president in 1987?
Huh, it's interesting. I mean, it's a little bit out of my purview.You know, I will say, I talked to him once.I was doing a piece on Jean Carnahan once when she was in the Senate and had lost her husband, and she obviously—and took the seat that he was trying to take.And she said that Biden had been a big help to her in counseling, so I went to see him.I talked to him.And it was interesting.He talked about that period and the senators like Ted Kennedy who had told him, like, "Just hang on; just give it six months; just throw yourself in the work."And he was very grateful for that advice.And I think, you know, as even more so than perhaps the childhood stammering, what Biden found in that experience, what I think people often find in tragedy, is that if you plow through it and find purpose in it, that you feel like you can sort of do anything, that it shows you what you're capable of.
And I think he probably came out of that experience in the Senate pretty soon after feeling like he had a mission, like he was capable of doing anything, and I think very soon after had his eye probably on the presidency.You know, he distinguished himself as a senator, which in those days meant something.Obviously the Judiciary hearings made him a national figure.He was very young when he ran for president in 1988. I mean, very young and very ambitious.
But you have to remember that the other thing that happens there is, Gary Hart runs in 1984.It always comes back to Gary Hart with me; you know this, Jim.But Gary Hart runs in 1984, virtually unknown by the American public at large, and comes out of nowhere and almost topples Walter Mondale, the former vice president, and wins every state west of the Mississippi, and loses by a hair and is instantly the front-runner for 1988.But even though he's the front-runner, there are a lot of candidates, particularly in Washington, of a younger generation now—and Biden is actually a little younger than Hart—who look then at 1988 and say, "Well, if Gary Hart can do that, so can I." And suddenly Hart is sort of the front-runner, right?He's the man now.And so you have this group of what the Hart campaign called, in the period after 1984, the New Garys, people who wanted to be the voice of the next generation and wanted to challenge him for that.And that's where Biden comes in.
So I think part of what happens to drive Biden toward the presidency at the age that—at the young age in which he ran for it, is that the experience of 1984 shows a lot of younger candidates that they might be viable, that their moment has arrived.And of all of them, the most promising in that field, the guy who'd been there around the longest and the guy who probably distinguished himself the most on the national stage, was Joe Biden.
Of course, the '87 campaign doesn't go well with him. … What happened after '87 that allowed him to prosper?
… So he's, you know, I mean, the setbacks just kind of pile up.It's kind of ridiculous when you look at it, you know, historically.It's like the things Biden comes back from.One of the things he shows in that moment that other politicians, Gary Hart chief among them, did not, and others of his contemporaries, is when you knock Biden down and you ridicule him and he feels humiliated, he gets back up, right, in the same way that he gets back up from tragedies.There is, whatever one wants to say about Biden, whatever one thinks his strengths or weaknesses are, his suitability for the presidency or anything else, you cannot deny the kind of freakish persistence of the man.It is his chief quality.
So, you know, there are events, there are markers along the way that increase his public visibility and viability—excuse me—and certainly the Thomas hearings among them, because it puts him on the national stage and shows him in command of the hearings and—and causes a lot of Democrats to take another look at him.But the key thing that happens to keep Biden relevant is his own ability to look past the humiliation or the ridicule or the hurt and just keep going in this remarkable way.Even when he runs in 2008, nobody takes him seriously.The media doesn't take him seriously.I remember writing about him.I remember following him around Iowa one day to house parties and just seeing how well he connected with rooms full of voters, but nobody was giving him a chance.And when you spoke to voters, they always said, "Well, I love Joe Biden, but he can't win, right?"I mean, that was just the word.And, you know, half a dozen times in his career, he faces moments like this, where a normal person looks in the mirror and says, "This is never going to happen for me, either because my time has passed, or because I've humiliated myself, or because I've been on the wrong side of an issue."And he just keeps coming back.
Biden Learns from Political Loss
We talked a little bit about this, but what does he learn from the losses: the 1987, the 2007 losses, and 2016, where he doesn't run? What does he take from all that that helps him run in 2020?
Well, I mean, interestingly, I think when historians look back, as they inevitably will, and say, "Wow, this guy ran for president three times; let's take a look at it," they will find and conclude that he's a better candidate every time.He's a more disciplined candidate every time.He's got a little more self-knowledge every time.I think people who knew Biden in Washington were impressed and surprised by his 2008 campaign, because he was disciplined, because he was on message and he was substantive, and he came off—I mean, it's one of the reasons he ended up on the ticket is because he came off as a really serious guy, much more so than he had running as a much younger man in 1987-1988, for the '88 cycle, when, you know, he was kind of all over the place and giving into his own oratory, and that's ultimately what got him into trouble.And then, of course, he leaves the race in humiliation.
Then when he runs this time, in 2020, much older, but I think understanding the moment, reading the room in a sense, if the room were the whole country and the party.He is quieter, quieter in volume, quieter in rhetoric, and also very steadfast in his beliefs and in his philosophy.He does not waver.He does not appear to be a guy who goes with the wind, even when he appears to be losing and out of step with his own party.So I think it's clear as a progression that he's a better candidate.As he ages, he's a better candidate every time.And that's not always the case for presidential candidates.There's a desperation that sometimes sets in, you know, your second time out, or you overcompensate.You're fighting the last battle.And I think Biden probably deserves credit for aging really well politically.
Campaigning During the Pandemic
That's interesting. So in this COVID world that we live in, what from his experiences helps him and make him so attractive?
… I think Biden and his party caught a little bit of a break in the way—in the bizarre way in which the 2020 campaign played out.I wasn't with him every day, and they were, and for all I know, you know, he's as hard-charging a 78-year-old as—or about to be 78—as you're ever going to find.But it's a grueling schedule, campaigning for president.It is really tough to be out there in multiple cities, sometimes every day, dealing with all the incoming—dealing with the media, the debates, not having time to sit down and prep.I mean, people who have been through it, those of us who watched it closely can tell you, there are few things harder in the world. Like, maybe, you know, I've seen somebody direct a movie; I think that might be as tough as running for president, but that's about it, right?And I think one of the ways in which Biden might have actually been a little lucky is that the pandemic causes this kind of slowed virtual campaign, in which there isn't that grueling schedule.That's not to say he didn't work hard, but the rest was available to him, which, you know, at that age was probably helpful.The prep time was available for him, which debating against a total wild card like Donald Trump was probably helpful.There was a different pace to the 2020 campaign, a different feel that I think played better to someone who was older and more deliberate and a little more serene and, you know, and given to misspeaking, because, you know, if you're not out there talking five times a day or holding rallies, you're not going to say as many things you might regret.
So, you know, I heard a lot of Democrats saying during the campaign: "He's got to be out there!Trump is out there.I get that it's a pandemic, but Biden needs to be out there meeting people."And I think some of that was certainly health-related.You wanted to keep him healthy; you wanted to do the right thing, which President Trump didn't really care much about.But I also think if it wasn't a strategy, then it turned out to be helpful nonetheless, because limiting his exposure was probably beneficial to Biden, and a benefit that he wouldn't have had in any other campaign cycle.
Even though he was so well known as being such a person-to-person kind of guy, a guy who slaps you on the back, a guy who loves being out there, a guy who just lived on this stuff and wanted to listen to people—it was the way he campaigned.Despite that, you don't think that held him back?
He's—he's a great retail campaigner.But since everybody already knows he's a great retail campaigner, I'm not sure, you know, how much benefit he would have derived from being out there showing people. ...But look, Joe Biden, circa 2007, it's probably very disadvantageous if he can't be out there pressing the flesh, as they say, and talking up voters and getting his face out everywhere and flying city to city.Joe Biden 2020, at age 77, I have to believe that rest and time to prepare and practice were more of a benefit than a hindrance, because, I mean, look, at a certain point, I think your exhaustion is a bigger factor at a certain age, and so is the propensity to misspeak, which you've always had.
At a minimum, the weird campaign environment of the pandemic limited his ability to make big mistakes.And in a campaign where the incumbent is unpopular, and it is largely a referendum on whether people believe he should be rehired, not making mistakes is really important.
And one other aspect of that is COVID-19 as well.How did his background, his empathy or whatever the hell else it was, allow the public to see him as someone that maybe is the best choice?Did COVID play a part in that as well?
Yeah, I think it does.I mean, I think the moment plays to his strengths in ways that the other moments he ran probably did not, because look, we're living in a country that's experienced, in 2020, a ton of loss.And I don't just mean loss like the death count, which is really high and which the president never talks about, President Trump, and basically never acknowledges that loss, but there's just been all kinds of loss.There's been economic loss; there have been loss of businesses, loss of sanity and equilibrium, loss of children's ability to go to school, loss of community life, loss of neighborhoods.It's just loss everywhere you look.We've all experienced it.
And here you have a man whose life has been defined in a lot of ways, certainly early on and then later, by loss.And I think it enables people to relate to him but also enables him to speak to people on that very empathetic level.It's not just a cheap bio point—"Oh, Joe Biden has experienced, you know"—as it might have been in some other year."Joe Biden has experienced loss; we should all, you know, see how he sees humanity."It was—it's more a sense of, he gets what you're going through, and that is what people are going through, at a time when the sitting president of the United States simply didn't.
Biden Debates Trump
How surprising was that first debate?We talk about him being bullied when he was a kid because of the stuttering and all.What did he have in his toolbox when it comes to knowing how to deal with a bully?And how did the strategy of the campaign, to some extent, use that understanding? …
Yeah, that's a great question.Let's take a step back for a second.I thought the debates were really treacherous for Joe Biden.I thought it was a big hurdle for him because—not because Trump is such a great debater, but because, by the point in the campaign in which these debates happen, the public has already decided that Donald Trump is not a guy they particularly want to rehire; that's in all the numbers.It's all about Joe Biden now.By the time he steps on that first debate stage, the operative question in the campaign, the operative question for the public is, does this guy deserve a chance?Has he still got it, and is he somebody we can trust?Can he get his party in order?Can he hold—can he show spine when he's under pressure?Can he govern effectively?
Do we want to give him a chance?And, you know, he does have the stammer that's come back later in life. He's older.He'd not been out in public as much.And I thought, man, you know, one bad moment—and I think it's true—one really bad moment for him would have been disastrous.I was super-impressed in that first debate not just—not so much just in his performance, in his ability to master his own—stay on message and master the points he wanted to make, but more that they came with a strategy.They came with an entertainment strategy, which Donald Trump did not, right?Trump, the most celebrated entertainer to ever occupy the presidency, probably even more so than Ronald Reagan, in that sense, comes to that debate just full of rage and fury and irritation, and doesn't seem to have any strategy.Biden, who's not an entertainer by any means, comes to that debate with an idea, a simple idea, I think, which is: "I'm going to speak directly to the voters.Trump's going to huff and puff and talk.And, you know, there's all these voters at home sitting in the middle of this pandemic.I'm going to address my questions to them and not to him."And so, several times in that debate, he looks right at the camera, and he says, "Is this what you want?," basically."Is this how you envision your president?"And I thought it was remarkably effective.
You know, the other thing I remember about that debate is, you know, it was funny.Biden said things in that debate that, if you looked at a transcript, would make you wince, right?At one point, you would think, wow, he really got drawn into the mud, and that's how a lot of people played it in the media, right?Wow, both of them really got drawn into the mud.The thing he says, you know, probably is most piercing, he calls him a liar.And then at another point he says, "Will you shut up, man?"And you see it on paper, and you think, wow, he really—he played Trump's game.
Bu I don't think it played that way on TV because it was so—it was said with such genuine feeling and reluctance, such genuine, like—it's not actually—Biden doesn't look at him with some canned line that we see in debates all the time and say, "Will you shut up, man?," and wink at the camera.He's actually almost involuntarily venting his frustration.And even as he says it, the facial expression and the tone show you that he just knows he shouldn't be doing it, but it's just so frustrating.
And I think it played pretty well, because I think people at home were frustrated, too.And so when he says, you know, "Will you shut up, man?," it's just—it's the feeling we've all had sometimes when we just—we know what's coming out of our mouths isn't the right way to go, but it's the only reasonable way to respond.And I thought it played well.
The other aspect of it is, how much of the campaign and the strategy was based upon the fact that they knew that this was a referendum on Trump, the main point of the campaign?
You know, I thought Biden's team ran an excellent campaign; I really did.And it's hard to do.And it's hard to do in this environment that they had to go through, but it's hard to do anytime.And part of it is, you can look at a campaign against a sitting president as a referendum, and in this case certainly that's where you begin.But I think as we found out, particularly in 2004—I think of John Kerry against George W. Bush, or even, you know, even Bob Dole in '96 when Bill Clinton wasn't incredibly popular either and had just lost Congress—you know, I think it's not enough, right?It's not enough to just say, "Well, it's a referendum on the other candidate; all I've got to do is not make a mistake."You have to put forward some alternate vision.And I think—and I think what Biden's team did really skillfully was to pivot from the referendum part of the campaign to actually, you know, making it clear to the public: this is about character; this is about believing in government; this is about believing in institutions.There wasn't really, I don't think, a serious governing agenda.We could argue about that, but I don't think there really was.But there was a really clear message that Biden hit on in that campaign, from the beginning to the end: about the value of institutions, and the value of governance, and the value of character, and what we teach our children and how we want our president to behave, and he embodied that ideal that he was talking about.And he didn't do—you know, he didn't make the mistake that I think Hillary Clinton made a bit in 2016 of just trying to recede to the corner of the room and let people see how bad his opponent was, right?I think he did offer enough of a vision for governance to get over that hump.
All elections against incumbent presidents—I swiped this from a friend of mine, but I believe it's true.All elections against incumbents, period, and particularly for president, are two-part exams.The first part, the first question on the exam is: Does this guy or woman deserve to be rehired?And if the answer's yes, your election's over.And if the answer's no, then you pivot to the second part of that exam, which is: Does this challenger deserve a chance?Is it worth changing course with this person?And I think Biden's campaign did a really skillful job of letting the country answer the first question without getting into trouble, and then doing just enough during a very challenging environment in the fall campaign to say to people, "I've been here; I'm a good person; I believe in government, and I believe in governing institutions, and you should give me a chance."And I think it's easy to take that for granted in hindsight, but there are a lot of candidates who would have just disappeared and tried to let Trump destroy himself.And I think they balanced that very well.
Biden and Racial Crisis
I think you're right.One other area that we need to cover is the racial crisis that we were also under, after George Floyd and what that ignited.What did Biden bring?We tell it in the bio, him being a—the importance of the Black vote to him, working in the swimming pool in the Black section of town, how he handled to some extent and then dealt afterwards with the Anita Hill testimony, all these things.What does he have in his experiences that helps him, again, deal with this issue, the other main issue that was on the burner during the election?
… I think Democrats and academics and journalists are going to argue for a long time about the summer of 2020 and what it meant politically. They're arguing about it still.You know, was the—were the marches in the cities and the "defund the police" and all of that, was that energizing to an American public that largely believed we had—clearly, if you look at the polls—largely believed there is a systemic race problem in America, or was it damaging in some way?And I think the results of the election showed a little bit of a mixed bag there.I think, you know, for Joe Biden, right, who, remember, only ends up on the ticket in 2008 with Barack Obama, really, because he has this reputation for being able to relate to white working-class voters, and particularly to white working-class men, he's built up a reserve over time.He's a known quantity.People know where he's from.They know what he's about.
And I think for him, you know, that probably energized a lot of the base of the party, and he had enough of a reserve with other, with moderate voters and conservative voters, that he was able still to win in counties and parts of the country that, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016 was not.But I think as you go down ballot to the Senate and House races, I am one who believes that the events of 2020 and the way it was sloganized and talked about were not helpful to Democratic candidates.You know, I always felt that Donald Trump had one card to play in 2020, and that was a culture war.That was his only way to reelection with low popularity, is if you gave him the culture war he really wanted, if you made it about coming for white America, right, coming to overturn the order and set up truth and reconciliation commissions and whatever else you were going to do.That was—Trump's only winning message was: "I'm the thing that stands between you, white America, and the complete dismantling of the world you've known.They're going to tear down all your statues and tear down all the flags, and all of that."
And the activist movement in the summer of 2020 could have given him that.And I think the reason it didn't, on the presidential level, is because Biden is such a known quantity and communicates so plainly to voters that he wasn't really associated with all of the "defund the police" and socialism and all the more leftist elements of the sort of activist party message.But I think he wins despite that and not because of it.
… The Biden victory, if you can talk about it, and how much of that was due and how it was accomplished of support in Black communities and also the ability to hold the blue wall.What allowed him to do that?How important was it, and how do you think he accomplished it?
Well, you know, that's a complicated question, because I tend to view this differently than other people.I mean, personally, I think the stories of the 2016 and 2020 elections and why they turn out differently is pretty clear if you look at an election map.We can argue about why it is, and we can argue about how much sexism was involved or dirty politics or the Russians and Facebook and whatever other factors you want to throw in.But the fact is, in both elections, Democrats did a more than creditable job, an excellent job of turning out their base.They got tremendous support, as always, from African American voters, who are the backbone of the party.They did fine in sort of the urban coalitions.But Hillary Clinton, as a candidate in 2016, wins virtually nothing outside of the urban areas and gets beaten in the suburbs and beaten with Independents, narrowly, and beaten by huge margins with white voters.And, you know, there are just all these places in these industrial states where she wins the city and just nothing else as far as the eye can see.
Biden cuts into losses where the party's going to lose, and he wins a lot more of the suburban and swing counties, and he wins Independents by double digits.Some of that is, you know, thank you, Donald Trump, for governing very poorly for four years, right?I think, you know, Trump's lack of popularity with all but his most ardent base certainly plays a big role in that.But I think you have to credit Biden as a candidate, both the persona he's built up over a career in public life and also his way of communicating and his refusal to sort of bend to some of the currents in his own party that I think would have been destructive, you know.He says—he's very clearly not getting on board with the socialism thing.He's very clearly not a "defund the police" guy.I think that helped him.
So, you know, I think the combination of his being who he is in public life and of his being steadfast in the flow of other political currents enabled him to win in enough places where she did not to make it—to hold traditional Democratic states and make it actually, in the end, not a very close election.
The Challenges Biden Inherits
… He keeps on saying that this was an election for the soul of America.But it's more complex than that in some ways.It's that he comes out of this election with a little less than half the public not supporting him, 70% of Republicans who supposedly, at this point, still believe that the election was stolen.Is the hard part just beginning? How difficult a challenge has he inherited?
He's inherited an extremely difficult challenge, maybe a historically difficult challenge.And we're going to learn a lot about him, but probably more about the country in the next couple of years, you know, because I think Biden believes, as I do, frankly, that if you can't try to build consensus and govern with at least a little bit of crossover appeal and persuade people that what you're doing is for the right reasons, then there's really no point in governing.Governance isn't working when you can ram through your policies with no support from anybody else, and they can ram through their policies four years later with no support from anybody else, and you can keep trading executive orders that keep getting rescinded and enacted.I mean, that's not actually effective governance.That's just score settling back and forth.And I think—and it doesn't help your economic—it doesn't help your business sector; it doesn't help your economic interests; it doesn't help your global standing.So, you know, I do think that's what he believes, and I think he's going to be guided by that principle.
I mean, look, I see what people write.Joe Biden's not under any illusion that he's going to build some massive bipartisan coalition in America, and we're all going to just overcome our cultural differences, and all the people who agree with Donald Trump that the election is stolen are going to come to realize the error of their ways, you know.And that's not the goal.I think the goal is to peel off the support that is peelable, right; is to get a couple of votes in the Senate, is to get a couple of votes in the House, is to get a couple of governors who will work with you.The goal is a modest one, which is to bring along the segment of Independents, conservatives that you can, so that you have some clear majority of support.
And I don't think that should be a naïve or outlandish goal in American politics.And I don't think the aspirations should be any less than that when you're starting out.But do I know that it's possible now, in the country that we've created, in the country that we in the media have helped create, in the country that Donald Trump has created, with conspiracy theories and all the rest of it?No, I don't know that.I mean, I have trepidation about it, and I think we're going to find out.
Have you ever seen a president, though, that has had to meet the challenges that we've been talking about?
Well, you know, I wouldn't want to undersell the challenges that other presidents have faced.We always believe that a president is facing the greatest challenge, you know, ever.Barack Obama inherited a pretty difficult situation in 2008.And Franklin Roosevelt inherited a pretty difficult situation in 1932.And, you know, we could go on.I think you can learn some lessons from actually both of those examples and others.And I think Joe Biden probably has, right?
He has an incredibly difficult situation, but he has a public that will be largely behind him in the beginning, right?You do get a certain honeymoon.And he has the ability to communicate in a sort of calming, serene, steadfast way with the electorate, if he chooses to do that in the months ahead.
So that would be, you know, as difficult as the challenges are, that would be my thinking, is communicate what you want to do.Don't assume you have a mandate for everything you want, just because you won an election.Communicate what you want to do; stay true to who you are and your beliefs, which I think he will, even though it may upset a lot of people in your own party; and keep coming back at it the way he has kept coming back at everything in his political career.
And I think he has the opportunity to really stabilize, you know, not just the response to the virus or the economic fallout from it, but American politics, because I don't think people see Biden—I certainly don't—as a guy who necessarily is going to run for reelection or as a guy who's trying to party-build or burnish his own legacy.I once described Biden as the house-flipping candidate, right?He's—he wants to sort of—there's a house on the street that's just, you know, occupied by squatters, and his whole—he wants to just kind of come in, throw them out, fix the place up, put on a new coat of paint, put the house back on the market.And I think that's—I do think that's the kind of president he can probably be.And I think there's probably a bigger well of support for that out there, for just righting and stabilizing the institutions of government, than we maybe think there is.
But we do face a lot of challenges, and chief among them is the idea that people can't agree on what reality is.
... Review the strategy that the Biden people and Joe Biden himself have used when dealing, after the election, with a president who will not concede that he lost.
I watched his press conference a few days after—his question-and-answer session a few days after it had become clear he was going to be the winner but that Trump was not going to concede.And I really was impressed.I thought he was really playing the long game, you know, because everybody, every reporter who asked him a question, wanted to get him saying, "This is wrong, and Trump is breaking the law, and he's going to break the country even more, and he needs to acknowledge that he's lost."And I think there are a lot of Democratic candidates, had they been the president-elect at that moment, who would have jumped up and down and given themselves over to histrionics about, you know, how horrible this was for the country, sort of pressed their advantage.
Biden, to me, in that moment is playing the long-run game.He's thinking, I'm going to have to work with these people.I believe they want to ease him out; they want to get rid of him; they're in a tough spot.I'm going to have to work with them and try to get something done, these Republicans in the Senate and the House.I'm not going to pile on right now.I'm going to let them work this out, I'm going to let them get their own house in order, and I'm going to be president either way.And that's basically what he said.He said, "They'll acknowledge me; we'll get there.And I'd love to have the daily briefing, if it were part of the transition process, but I can get by without it; I've been here before."And he actually says—he actually makes a point in that presser saying, in that Q&A of saying: "I don't get to make decisions right now anyway.We have one president at a time," he says, "so it would be nice to have all the classified briefings, but I don't get to make any decisions anyhow right now."
So I thought it was really smart and showed his sophistication, coming from the legislative branch of the government, to understand that the better play for the long run was to get some distance, you know, not pile on, let Republicans work out this mess and let them—let them ease Trump out on their own time.
In a country that's as divided as it is at this point, once he takes power, the question is, does he understand the opposition that he's up against?Does he understand their motivations?Will he understand how to deal with it?
I don't think any of us understands the opposition that he's up against.Does somebody understand the nature of the modern Republican Party, the Trumpist Republican?If they do, they should explain it to me.I've been, you know, covering—this is my sixth presidential campaign I've covered; I've been doing this a long time.It surprises me all the time.I was shocked by the complicity of Republicans in this conspiracy-theorizing and this allowing Trump to contest the election and the crazy cartoonish legal shenanigans, shocked at how timid Republicans were.And I've been watching them respond to Trump for four years now.I mean, we are dealing with something entirely new in the long scope of American politics, which is a system so driven by primary politics, so driven by the base and more concerned about being—politicians more concerned about being primaried out of their seats than they are about the general electorate or about what they achieve in office that there's just—there seems to be no extreme to which they will not go to placate the least rational forces in their party, and the least rational actor who's ever occupied the White House.
Does Joe Biden know how to deal with that?I don't think anybody knows how to deal with that.But I'll take my chances with him, as someone who's been in Washington an awfully long time, that he might have a chance to figure it out.
Biden's spent his whole entire life wanting to be president.So where are we now?What have we learned from the election, from his past, about how he will deal with these challenges ahead?I mean, so what do we know about him?Who is he, and what from his past will allow him to deal with it?What's your final say about his abilities here?
… So I actually think, you know, Joe Biden has an opportunity here.Because he has shown such persistence throughout this political career, because he's willing to get knocked down and get up, because he's willing to be humiliated and get up, there's a potential for him to do this better than President Obama does, because I think if you talk to governors who have governed in states where the legislature isn't with them, is of the other side, the other party, they'll tell you, you've got to keep coming back and coming back and coming back.I think, you know, there's a chance Biden is the kind of guy where, you say no to him, he'll ask again.You humiliate him?He'll get over it, and he'll be back.I think there's a—I think that persistence may serve him well, because he's not going to be so easily dissuaded.
And I think the same thing is true within his own party.He has shown during the 2020 campaign, if not throughout his entire political career, he's not—you're not going to pressure him into going a way he doesn't want to go.He's going to hear the left wing of his party, and I think he's going to strive for some kind of consensus, because it's easier that way, but he knows who he is, and I think he will—you know, he won't get pushed around.
So, you know, there's a self-centeredness from both the ordeals he's been through and just the sheer age and experience that he brings to the job, you know, that might enable him to persist in trying to right the political system, even when others are saying it just can't be done.And I hope he does.
You talked about the primaries, in terms of Biden's positioning among the other candidates, and we may start with the primaries and with him being behind and losing in Iowa and losing in New Hampshire, and use that as a way to go back into his life story.What was he drawing on from his experience?This is, like, at a personal level for Biden, somebody who's been through failing campaigns and tragedy and scandal and all of it.What was he drawing on in these months, the beginning of 2016, that allowed him to keep going?
It's a good question.You know, I thought he was done after New Hampshire; I did.I watched him go down to South Carolina and give a speech that night that was almost wincingly aimed directly at African American voters and no one else.And I thought, well, that's not the move of a winning candidate, honestly.And, you know, I'd like to say I wasn't wrong, but I was.And I think, you know, the reason that nine out of 10 or 19 out of 20 candidates in that situation withdraw at that point in time—and I've seen it over and over again, and so have other people who cover politics—is embarrassment.You know, people get out of the race.You can always see a path; you can always see a possibility for getting there.Someone can always give you a rationale; usually you're paying somebody to give you a rationale.But most people get out at that point because it's humiliating to, especially for a former vice president, to keep losing.And, you know, he risked humiliation—I think a lot of us thought just by getting into the race at this age, at this stage of his career, having been through what he'd been through.
And I think what he draws on in that moment, in all his experiences, both personal and political, is sort of an imperviousness to embarrassment.I don't know how to explain it, because I haven't been through all the things that Joe Biden has been through, but he just doesn't really care what you say about him, and he didn't seem to evidence any concern that history would judge him as, again, a three-time loser or an old man past his day who, you know, went too far.We all thought watching it, God, he's going to embarrass himself.He's going to just keep getting beat.And I think what Biden looked at in that moment was: This is what I came here to do.I know who I am; this is what I came here to do.There's a path.I know what I have to do to accomplish it, and I'm not satisfied that it can't be done yet, and so you can say what you want.
And, you know, politics often rewards boldness and persistence and that kind of single-mindedness.And it did this time.
ORIGINAL INTERVIEW: Biden’s 1987 Presidential Run
It’s 1987.Biden is coming to town.Who is Joe Biden?Well, he came to town in ’72, but he’s thinking of running for president in 1987.Give me who Biden has become in those 15 years of waiting to become—you know, he’s been the Amtrak senator.He’s been all of those other things.He’s not really been one of the boys for a long time.Who is Biden by the time he thinks he’s ready to run for president?
At the time Biden runs for president the first time, he is—he is considered the youngest, freshest face in that field, certainly from Washington.Yes, he’s been, at that point, he’s been in Washington for quite a while, well over a decade.But he’s part of a new generation of emerging talent that came to Washington after Watergate.
… He’s elected in ’72, and he’s 29 years old.He’s actually not able to sit in the Senate until he’s sworn in, you know, by which time he comes in in this cloud of tragedy as well.So Biden was sort of the first of that generation to get there.Most of the younger generation thinking about running, by the late 1980s, like Gary Hart, for instance, they come in the mid-70s.They come after Watergate in the Democratic wave.Biden actually gets there a couple years earlier.So he gets a head start on his generation, and he’s younger than almost anybody who’s thinking about running in that generation.
… When Gary Hart is running early in 1987, they describe—his campaign privately describes the rest of the field at that time as “The New Garys,” or “The Little Garys,” meaning, you know, people who are now trying to pick up the generational theme and run with it that he had begun sort of in 1984.And Biden is chief among those rivals.And he’s actually younger than Hart and has actually been in Washington a couple years longer.
... I think you assert, at one moment or another, that it clears the way for somebody like a candidate like Trump to go all the way.What changed in politics when Hart fell out that we’ll see manifest in some way around the plagiarism scandals for Joe Biden.
Well, that’s something I’ve had a lot of time to think about.And it is interesting, when you talk about moments, how many of them Joe Biden’s career has spanned.I don’t think—I don’t think—and this is separate from your question—I don’t think there are many times in the last 40-plus years in American politics when, if you’d said to somebody, “Who is the politician who transcends all the moments of our time, who will endure the longest, and have the most sustained success?,” I don’t think many people would have answered that question “Joe Biden.”I don’t think many people would answer it that way today.
But you can make a pretty good case that Joe Biden is the guy who’s outlasted all the twists and turns, and actually been able to find his way through a lot of changing moments.
… Why has he done that?Why has he outlasted all of that, Matt?
… I think there are two reasons that Biden outlasts so many of his contemporaries to get to where—to where he is over this long period of time.
One is, I think he has a pretty strong sense of self.I actually think, for whatever knock people want to put on Joe Biden, he’s always known who he is.He’s always been pretty much the same guy.He hasn’t gone through these—he hasn’t chased the moment to go through any big ideological transformations or personality transformations.I think it’s been easier for Biden, in a sense, to endure through moments where he’s been in and out and come back and remained relevant, because he’s always been essentially the same guy.He hasn’t had to reinvent himself.Hasn’t cared to, to his credit.
I think the other thing is just tremendous—it just tells you about his tremendous persistence as a politician.This is his life.This is what he’s been doing since he was elected at 29 years old.It’s all he’s ever wanted to do.He’s been incredibly persistent and diligent about pursuing his goals.He’s had a lot thrown in his way.He’s had life-threatening illness.He’s had tragedy in his life a couple of times now that would have crippled somebody else, or sent, you know, emotionally, or caused them to turn away and turn back into themselves and leave.He has just—he’s—he’s been through this tremendous array of challenges, and he stays the course, because he is just so persevering about politics.And I think that’s the other reason that he’s been able to last as long as he has.
Biden’s Enduring Political Career
He’s chairman of the committee that’s about to do—to wage a battle with Ted Kennedy against Robert Bork.And finally, the Senate was going to weigh in, in a big way, on it.Advice and consent feels like a historic moment to a young politician with presidential aspirations.It’s the largest on-television hearing since Watergate. ...
He really goes after Bork.And it is the beginning of his climb back, a trait that will—that you’ve already articulated.This guy doesn’t stop.
Yes.He’s—I mean, it’s a great story.I think if you’d said to somebody in, what, during the Clinton era, say, if you’d said to somebody, you know, 50 years from now, people would be writing biographies of Joe Biden and talking about his amazing rise of political power, I think in Washington, they would have laughed at you.First of all, it was at some point, it was assumed that his time was over, right, that his moment had passed; he’d been eclipsed by other members of his generation.
And then also, you know, what happened to Biden a little bit is what happens to everybody who spends enough time in Washington, is your flaws become exaggerated.And Washington knows you, and they know the thing that’s your—that—that might be your Achilles’ heel, and they assume that the rest of America knows it as well, too.So, you know, the fact that Biden had a propensity to go on and on, that he couldn’t stop himself from talking, that he told the same stories over and over, that you’d go into his office to do an interview and he’d keep you there for the first 40 minutes telling you a story, which is an experience I’ve had when he was in the Senate, right, and everybody had, right, that made him a little bit, not silly—people took him seriously as an intellect, but it made him a little bit of a caricature.
And I think the assumption was, first of all, not just that his moment had passed, but that he was kind of, you know, he’s kind of a puffed-up, big senatorial guy who can't stop himself from talking, and goes on and on about—into tangents.And you can’t see a guy like that being president.So I think Washington wrote him off as a national politician at a certain point.When he ran for president again in 2008, and I spent a bunch of time with him, or watching him, he—you know, he was never taken seriously by the press corps that covered that campaign.He was never given a chance.
I remember being in Iowa, and I wrote about it for The New York Times, and seeing how well he connected with people.He ran an excellent campaign.It’s the reason he ended up on the ticket.He was extremely disciplined.He had excellent debates.He had really strong campaign appearances.People in Iowa really liked him.But when you talked to them, they would say, “Well, he has no chance of winning.”And that was largely a Washington perception that I think was exported to the primary states in 2008 that he could not overcome, simply because there was a familiarity factor.And I think when you get too familiar in Washington, the assumption is, your flaws are too well known and your time has passed.
Biden the Conciliator
Also, there's another part of his character that we’re spending time on, which is this conciliator quality that he has, that it was hard to ever pin him down on one side or the other.It manifests itself, of course, most glaringly in the Thomas–Hill hearings, when he wants to be friendly and avuncular to young Judge Thomas, and at the same time, he says to—he says to Anita Hill, “I wish I could be your lawyer.”It’s a sense of, where is Joe on a lot of these?
Yeah, but to a certain extent—I think, to a certain extent, we go back at the moment we’re in, right, in 2020 or the last couple of years, and we overlay past events with the way we see politics now.I mean, Joe Biden was a pragmatist always and a conciliator and someone who tried to cut deals and see all sides.But for most of his political life, he did not consider that, nor did anyone else really, consider that a lack of character or conviction.Nobody looked at Joe Biden as a politician and thought that he lacked for core conviction or thought that he would change with the winds.I don’t think that was ever the reputation he had.
But he was a guy who was very much in the mold of old-style legislators.It’s gotten him in trouble, talking about it, in the last couple of years, how he worked with former segregationists, how he worked with liberals.He was a guy who believed in, quaint as it sounds, getting things done and compromising in a way that sometimes meant you couldn’t have everything you wanted, and you had to do business with people with whom you didn’t agree.
And even during the Obama administration, in his talks with [Eric] Cantor and the Republican majority at that time, trying to come to budget deals and other deals, you know, he had extensive conversations with Republicans.And while it didn’t bear fruit, he was certainly willing to compromise.And they liked him more than they liked anyone in the administration.So I—you know, I actually would dispute the idea that Biden, either as a senator or as a vice president, or anytime as an American politician, has been expedient or slippery.I think he was just forged at a time when legislation meant some sense of compromise and collegiality.And that moment passed him by, and almost, I think, almost endangered his arriving at the moment he’s now arrived at.
It’s a good example of—or another example of something I remember [Tom] Daschle saying about a young Obama: “Run now, before you have a record they can hold against you.”Well, one thing that’s true that’s happening to Biden with the crime bill and the busing stuff, he was around long enough that his name was on an awful lot of legislation.
That is really true.I mean, in a sense, being vice president wipes the slate clean for you.Yes, you have to answer for the administration’s record, which he’s—of course he’s embraced wholeheartedly.But your senatorial record becomes a little less relevant when you’ve—when you’ve been part of a presidential administration at the level of vice president.You’ve been engaged in so many of those decisions and so many of those policies.
But even then, having been in the Senate for as long as he was, that’s a lot of votes.You can go back and pull a lot of instances and a lot of issues and find fault or find reason to declare him too leftist or reason to declare him too moderate.But I think, again, Biden has benefited in this case, and has benefited throughout his career, from being a guy who is basically—who knows who he is.And I think other people think they know who he is.It’s been very—it’s very hard to tag Biden with the kind of thing they tagged John Kerry with in 2004, for either the left or the right, to tag Biden as being either too doctrinaire or too squishy, because his public persona and his—and his private persona have always been—have always—have always been about a guy who knows his center and knows what motivates himself.And I think that’s—you know, that makes him a tough guy to caricature that way.
Biden as Vice President
Why do you think Obama picked him?
That’s a terrific question.It’s interesting.You know, I think at that moment, when, you know, they—when Biden launches his 2008 campaign and has that just horrendous comment about then-Sen.Barack Obama, and says he’s clean and articulate.He’s trying to be nice, right?You would have thought, at that moment, oh, man, there's no way that, if Barack Obama were lucky enough to win the nomination, he’s going to turn and pick Joe Biden to be his vice president.
But in retrospect, that moment was kind of critical to formulating both of their paths forward.I think that was a terrifically important moment for Obama, because it gave him the opportunity to shrug off that kind of casual, ingrained racism.But it gave him—it gave him an ability to show white Americans: “I'm not walking around holding a grudge.I'm not going to police everything you say.I'm not—I'm not here to fight about race.”But it was a—it was a great opportunity for him to show the kind of magnanimity around those issues that I think put a lot of white voters at ease.
And for Biden, it—it gave him an opportunity to, I think, actually deepen his bond with Obama, because he really—he really did feel apologetic, and they did talk about it, and I think they both remembered that.And then later, when it’s time to pick a vice presidential candidate, I think Obama really liked the idea, again, for all the same reasons, of choosing the guy who had said these things about him, that so many other people found offensive, of showing this kind of magnanimity and forgiveness and largeness that I think really is Obama, by the way, but that I also think sent a great signal to people.
So in the end, it ended up probably helping Biden that way.I also think, you know, if you think about that moment in 2008, Obama needed experience on the ticket, just as I think Biden does.You know, Obama needed somebody who could govern on that ticket.He needed somebody who shored up his lack of experience, particularly in foreign policy.You know, I think they felt that was important.And Biden really fit that bill.He’d run—as I say, he’d run a very strong 2008 campaign.He’d shown himself to be a much more disciplined and talented and mature campaigner.He was a grown-up.He’d done extremely well in the debates on foreign policy and sort of the substantive areas where I think, you know, Obama might have been vulnerable as a very short-term senator.So it was a good match in terms of his qualifications.It was a good match because they had built a relationship.And it was a good match because it enabled Obama to, again, showcase this kind of—this kind of magnanimity around racial issues and racial rhetoric that I think was key to his winning.
Biden had not, as he likes to say, worked for anyone for 32 years, never had a boss.He was his own boss.And now suddenly he’s going to be this bright, young, very attractive figure’s griever-in-chief.He’s going to go around to funerals and mall openings and whatever else it is.Why does Biden take the job, Matt?
Well, why does anyone take the job?Everybody knows the vice presidency is more of a headache than it’s often worth.But people do generally take the job.And I think if you are—if you have spent a career in politics and public service, as Joe Biden had, and you’ve done just about everything in the United States Senate you feel you could have done, and you run for president twice and haven't quite exercised that ambition from your mind, it’s the—it’s kind of the obvious career path.It’s historic.It puts you very, very close to the presidency, although you—you know, you hope and have no expectation that—that something will occur to land you there unnaturally.And then you know that it sets you up to run again if you want to.
I mean, I think—I think Biden gave very serious consideration to running in 2016.I think he would have been a really strong candidate in 2016, and—and circumstances persuaded him to stand down.But the vice presidency was a path for him.It was a ticket to the next level.It was a chance to do something new and historic.And I think for the—for the same reasons that very few people turn down that offer, there was no way he was going to turn that down.
But of course it’s hard to find anything that he actually—I mean, he took lots of trips, especially on the foreign policy side.As you say, during the fiscal cliff stuff, he handled Cantor and he had a relationship with [John] Boehner, and he could even pick up a phone in the middle of the night and talk to Mitch McConnell, not so much after 2010, but maybe before 2010.He did a lot of things, but he didn’t really do anything that he could look back on and say, other than: “He’s my buddy.I'm his buddy.We were buddies.We’re close.My brother.”
I don’t think it’s that minimal.I don’t really discount it that much.
The real question is, how much influence did you have?And I think Biden understands power and leveraging power.I think he had a genuine relationship with Obama.They spent a lot of time talking.They lunched weekly.Their staffs worked together.It wasn’t always perfect.And, you know, there was—there was some tension, and there were things Biden probably would have liked to be more involved in or was overruled in.
Biden as Surrogate to Obama on Race
The territory we find that it’s essential he’s there, it seems like, is in race, where Obama had trouble sort of finding his footing. ...
It does become a role he plays inside the Obama White House on behalf of the Black president who can’t do all that a lot of people expected him to do.
Yeah.And actually, you’re making me think, because I answered your question about the vice presidential pick, I sort of left—I was a little off target on that.I do think, you know, Obama picks him in 2008 because he does—he does have the experience and the qualification to reassure a lot of people who wonder if Obama is ready to govern.But he also chooses him because Biden is known to be a champion of middle class and is well-liked by moderate white voters and white men in particular.That’s sort of his identity.
And Obama really needed to do some shoring up.I did a whole long piece during that campaign in 2008 in Virginia about the sort of push for Obama to try and win over the trust, get to make an appeal for working-class white voters that had been so critical to the Democratic coalition for Bill Clinton.And Biden played a role in that.And he played a role in that largely just by being there and saying great things about Obama.And so I do think that’s his role.
And he carries that over into the administration.You know, Obama—race was such a complicated and difficult issue for Obama as president, maybe the most complicated and difficult, because he was just hemmed in on so many sides.African American leaders never felt he was willing to do enough, because he didn’t want to seem like the civil rights leader who’d become president.White voters were always—you know, certain white voters, more conservative voters were always suspicious that he was prosecuting a case about race.Whenever he opened his mouth or waded into any issue, even with race on the periphery, it became this explosive conversation in the country.
He didn’t like to talk about it.I tried many times to talk to President Obama about issues of race.I talked to him about a lot of other things.That is something he would not sit and talk, at least, you know, not on the record about those issues.So it was a really hard thing for him as president to constantly be threading that needle.And I think Biden plays an important role, just as a validator, for not just for conservative, you know, white working-class conservative voters, but unions, union voters who had been solidly Democratic but who were, you know, maybe more jaundiced on issues of social justice, because they felt that the issues of social justice always came back at them, right?
You know, I think race had just been so divisive in the country.And there’s Biden, who is generally trusted by white working-class voters, certainly Democrats, certainly independents, some conservatives, you know, always saying: “This is my guy, and we share convictions.We share values.”And I, you know, wouldn’t overstate the importance of that, but I think it was very helpful for Obama, particularly in moments of crisis, where it would have been so hard for him not to misstep, and he could rely on Biden, and he could send him out there.
Biden as Grief Counselor
…Biden seems to have about him that quality that is just astonishing, when you get down inside of it.He gives his home phone number to people who are grieving in a disaster or whatever it is. ...But the extent to which he is the grief counselor in chief, in some ways, inside Obama’s administration and in his own life and as a senator, the impact of that, do you think?
You know, I think—I don’t know what the public perception of that is.I don’t what the impact is on public opinion.I don’t know that a vice president ever really does more in terms of public opinion than influence very much at the edges, right, unless they do something boneheaded, in which case they can, you know, make a difference.But I think internally, it did have an impact, because, you know, Obama runs so cool.He’s so unemotive; he’s so even-keeled all the time.And Biden’s, you know, I don’t know that I’d call him temperamental, but he’s passionate, and he’s warm, and he’s a touchy-feely guy, which sometimes gets him in trouble. ...
And so, you know, I think some of that did provide some balance and some ballast for Obama.Obama is not an operator.He’s not a guy who understood the levers of government that way.He hadn’t spent that much time with it.He’s not a guy who likes to glad-hand or have people over.He’s not a guy who emotes openly or easily.He’s very analytical.I think there was a little bit of yin and yang there, you know.I think Biden provided around that White House a little bit more of the emotion and a little bit more of the old-time political radar and feel that wasn’t—not based on data, not based on analysis, not based on ideology, but just based on sort of gut-level emotion.
And it’s one of the things that people in Washington sort of make fun of him for.“Oh, Biden.Then he goes off on this big riff, and he gets teary, and this and that.”But it’s real.I mean, I watched him on the campaign trail in 2008, I remember, just come to tears talking to a group of parents about—about the soldiers that he’d seen in Iraq.And it was—it was real.And nobody ever said, “Oh, that’s made up.”He can—he can get very emotional.
And there’s a benefit to that emotion in politics.And I think there was a benefit to it particularly in a White House where the top guy was not someone who sort of went based on emotion.I think there’s a balance there that was helpful.
Any sense of where it comes from?
Where that comes from?
… I didn’t know Biden as a young man, so I can only assume he was always emotive and always drawn to people and their stories.I mean, that’s—it’s who he is.It’s why I think he’s drawn to politics and why he ran at such a young age.He kind of swept in at that civil rights moment.I think that touched him deeply.If you hear him talk about civil rights, and I have, he sits down, he tells you a story about that moment, the depth of his passion about that issue becomes real to you.That’s why I never—anytime he’s been accused of not caring on, you know, racial issues and social justice issues, I kind of laugh, because anybody who’s been around him knows that that’s a real part of his self-image.
But, you know, having said all that, tragedy is its own thing, you know.Anybody who’s lost in their life knows that that phenomenon, where it can come back to you at any moment, where it’s always, even you know, if you’ve lost a parent, if, God forbid, you’ve lost other people close to you, there is this—for, I think, most people, that emotion lingers somewhere close to the surface and—and very quickly can be drawn out in ways that, you know, for other people who [have] been fortunate enough to not experience jarring loss, it’s not there.
And so I think, you know, Biden, to me, to be a little bit of an armchair psychologist, speaking, too, from experience. I think going through what he went through at a young age, and just an absolutely horrific loss that I think no parent or spouse can really imagine going through, I think that’s always been close to the surface.I think he was probably an emotive person before that.But I think the depth of that emotion, the tears that can come, the passion that can be aroused at times, in a very personal way, one-on-one, I think that comes from sort of a deep-seated pain.And I think that’s only been more pronounced in recent years with the loss of his son.And what this guy’s gone through is unbelievable.
So I do think there is a pain that is the wellspring of a lot of emotion and empathy for him.He really seems to get the emotion that people have when they meet him.And that's, you know, you’ve seen—we've seen that in politics many times.I mean, I was too young to cover Robert Kennedy, but you go back and read about Robert Kennedy after the loss of his brother, a couple of brothers at that point, how attuned he was to other people’s pain, how much it drove him.I’ve met a lot of people in politics who were—some of the most effective people in politics, you know, driven by this feeling to—to have it all mean something, to have the loss in their lives amount to something tangible, you know, to do some good for people, to honor—to honor memories, or honor the people they’ve lost.And I think for Biden, that sense of loss is always very acute.
Biden’s Early Life
When he was a little boy—I'm sure you’ve read about it—he had a bad stuttering problem.Little Joey was kind of scrawny.His family had been in some financial distress.He teaches himself not to stutter.Pushes through, figures out bypass strategies and other things, I guess another moment in his life, where he’s forming some way of being that he keeps on keeping on all the way along since then, I guess.Do you know anything about that?
… I mean, some of this is geographic and demographic, you know, too.It is about personality, but it’s places you grow up.I mean, you look at a guy like Dick Cheney, who grew up in, you know, in Wyoming, and had so much of that Western persona.And you didn’t talk about your emotions.And you didn’t talk about your feelings or your upbringing, right?And he had a very hard time sharing pieces of himself publicly, and in a way that sometimes gave me some sympathy for him, you know.
But then you look at a guy like Biden, or I think of John Kasich, who grew up in the same part of the country, in similar economic circumstances, right?They have a lot in common, the two of them, Kasich a little bit younger.But you know, there's a—you can see the imprint of that—that sort of working-class, Rust Belt culture.These are people who fought a lot, talked a lot, big families, and went through hardships and are—and they talk about it.They’re storytellers, you know.And that’s—and this is a big country.And the cultures from our various parts of the country bleed into our politics. ...
There's a certain irony to a guy who can’t talk as a little kid being the guy you know and I know, that when you see him after an interview, he wants to keep you there for another 20 minutes.
That’s interesting.I mean, it’s funny.It’s hard for anybody who’s—who’s known Joe Biden as a—as an adult, right?I met him well into his Senate career.It’s hard for any of us to imagine him as a guy who stutters, you know. ...
But you look at the perseverance it takes to get through that kind of obstacle, and I think whether Joe Biden was born with that perseverance and it enabled him to become this incredible talker, or whether that experience made him more persistent, and maybe instilled in him a belief that if you applied yourself to something hard enough, no matter what it was, you could overcome it, but I think it’s—but I think, either way, it’s sort of a testament to the same attributes that have put him here, after such a long career, is that he does not give up.And I think that’s—you know, that’s—that’s part—that’s the part of the story of him being a stutterer that I think is so relevant to understanding who he became and who he is now.
… And there are stories of the nuns bullying Joe, and Joe’s mom going in and cleaning them up.But if you’ve been bullied and shamed and humiliated a few times in your life because of who you are, and you overcome that, you are still probably very interested in making sure everybody kind of likes you, and nobody is going to, you know, make fun of you or anything like that.You see that in him.
Yeah.We also don’t like bullies.And I think—I think Biden is a guy who really doesn’t like bullies.And that probably goes back to growing up, too.
Beau Biden and the 2016 Campaign
Yeah.Let’s talk about Beau, now. ...
So Beau is sick, and the way the story goes, as he’s dying, he basically encourages his dad to run, almost—
… I always sort of thought Joe Biden would have been likely to run in 2016, even with Hillary Clinton in the race, perhaps, had it not been for his son’s illness and death.I think, you know, the sense I had at that time, because I really thought he should run.I think—I think it would have changed things if he had.I was not in the camp of people who thought Biden was just going to muddy the waters and make a fool of himself, and he should leave it to Hillary Clinton.I thought that was his moment.
And the sense I had, talking to people then, was that, you know, he just wasn’t—he just wasn’t ready, which, you know, I think any of us could understand.He just—he just—in his heart, he had not been able to rebuild himself to the point where he could imagine going out and running that campaign.And I think that’s probably the principal reason he didn’t run in 2016, and I think it would have been a very different campaign if he had.
I think there’s another story, which is that Obama, he asks Obama—Obama asks him, “Are you going to run?,” and he says, “I'm thinking real seriously about it,” and Obama says, “I'm not sure it’s a good idea.”Joe says: “Well, I'm thinking about it.I’ll get back to you.”And somehow he gets back to him, and Obama essentially harshly, his friend Obama, harshly closes the door.
Yes. Yeah.I always had the sense that President Obama’s people, right, his closest advisers, and subsequently President Obama himself, had just made a decision, at that time, for whatever set of reasons, that Hillary Clinton was a better successor for him, was a better candidate, that it was—that she had earned it, that she had control of the party apparatus, and that, to the extent that they had any role in choosing a successor, or in—or in influencing those primaries, they could at least make—they could at least try to make sure that his universe, his part of the party wasn’t divided and fractured.And for that reason, they sort of made a determination, to the extent that they could influence Joe Biden, that he should not be running.
I think that was a boneheaded miscalculation, honestly, because I think it was pretty clear from the beginning that Hillary Clinton was a, a flawed candidate, not because she was a woman, I think—I think that was actually the most inspiring part of her candidacy, and I think a woman could win, but because she was a flawed candidate, who—who wasn’t a great politician, who wasn’t well-loved when she was out campaigning and in the public eye.And also because I think she, to the extent that she could have become, or would have become a stronger candidate running a stronger, more centered and focused campaign, it would have happened with competition.And I think having to vanquish, get around Joe Biden, assuming she could have done that, would have actually strengthened her campaign and her ability as a campaigner enormously, as opposed to running against Bernie Sanders and just trying to, you know, shield herself from flak from the left for long enough to get through the general election.
I—I think he would have performed better in that campaign than most people in Washington assumed.They always underestimate him.He, as I say, he brought a really good campaign in 2008.And I—I think it was consequential that they pushed him aside.But they did push him aside.
And do you know, or can you imagine, Biden’s response to that?
... So, you know, I think Biden was conflicted on his own.He’d just been through so much personally, and yet had always wanted to run for president and understood there was a moment there, you know.I don’t think it was entirely a case of his being shoved aside, railroaded by the president or his forces.I think—I think Biden himself had a lot of conflicts.And I think it was, you know, a lot of people who were interested in him and in his well-being did not think he should run.
So, look, I think Biden’s a realist.He’s been in politics a very long time, and I think he could see that the support he was going to need wasn’t—was not going to be there; that, you know, most of the people in his orbit had cast their lot somewhere else.But I think the party would have benefited from a—from a process that stayed open longer.
Biden’s 2020 Run
So now we bring ourselves to the decision about whether to run or not.And if you're Biden, in 2020, the way the story goes, he still remembers Beau’s extraction of a promise, I gather, that he would run if he possibly could, even at 78, I guess.Why does he run?
You know, I didn’t think he would run.I was probably the last person to be convinced.I had to see him announce.I really—I really didn’t think he would.I thought it took too long to make the decision.I thought if he knew he wanted to run, he would have already run.I didn’t think he—I didn’t—I didn’t think he had a clear enough rationale or was articulating a clear enough rationale in a field full of people who were coming forward.It was clearly going to be a super-crowded field.
And there's always a lot that your risk as a former vice president, as a kind of eminence in the party and in the country, when you put yourself out there in that position, and with the—with the possibility, if not the likelihood, that you’re not going to succeed.And he was so much older, and seemed so much older and looked so much older, and had been through so much and affected by it, I really—I really felt like, if he was going to run, we’d have known.And I was surprised when he got in as late as he did, even though people kept saying, “Biden’s going to run; Biden’s going to run,” I really didn’t believe it.
Of course, I didn’t believe Trump was going to run in 2016, either.So I'm the last guy—I guess I'm the last guy you should ask.
But you know, look, I—why he’s running, why he decided to run, I think, is a central question to the 2020 campaign.It’s not an afterthought, because he’s clearly much older than he was.He seems much older; he looks much older.He does not have a grand vision for the country.They're trying to say now that he does.The truth is, he does not have some transformational or different vision for the country.It’s a—it’s a tough campaign for him.It was a tough campaign for him to win, the primary campaign.
So you know, I think—I think voters ask themselves that question.It’s not just a question of interest to political observers.I think voters look at 2020 and the choice they’re making and ask themselves: “What does this guy want to do?You know, what—what is—what is the reason for Joe Biden to run, and what’s the reason for me to choose him?”And I—I do believe that, at the end of the day, for Biden, this is sort of a last patriotic act, that he looked around and thought, I’ve got one last service to render here.And he really was appalled by what he was seeing and thought he was the best person, the most experienced person, the best-known person who could—who could come make it right.
I don’t think he intends to serve two terms if he’s elected.I don’t care what they say.I don’t—I don’t think he’s going to try to transform the country in some fundamental way.I think this is—I think—I think what we are seeing, and what we’ve really seen from the beginning of this campaign, is the last act of a—of a great career.And I think that’s very—I think that’s the way he thinks about it.
Let me ask you the hardest question I can think of about Joe Biden right now.He’s a very experienced guy, as you and I have talked about.He knows the price and the glare in the spotlight, and the moment, and the gotcha politics.He knows it’s all out there.He knows, or should know, that his son Hunter has had an inglorious set of circumstances now and then.He must know that this particular president, and these particular Republicans, and those particular conspiracy theorists, and those right-wing radio people are going to devour his son if he runs.He must know it.Yet he runs anyway.In a sort of weird Cain-and-Abel moment, he chooses Abel’s admonition rather than Cain.
Yeah.
Whatever it is, Matt, it seems like an ugly choice he made.
Well, I mean, look, when you’re—when you're new to public life, or new to the national spotlight in any event, and there are areas of your life that you know or your family’s life that you know will cause you embarrassment, I think you have an exceedingly difficult and complicated choice to make in many cases about how much you want to expose your family to and what the price of power and success will be.
I think when you’ve been in public life since you were 29 years old, and you’ve been through the ups and downs, and your family has been through the ups and downs, and you’ve been through real tragedy, as opposed to stories in the newspaper that are supposed to feel like tragedies, I think that probably weighs a little bit less.There’s not a lot you can bring at Joe Biden or his family that’s beyond what they’ve already gone through.The Hunter Biden stuff is tough.It’s not good, and, you know, from a disclosure standpoint, there’s a lot of ugliness that can be—and scrutiny that can be brought to it, both his role overseas, you know, the stuff that Republicans have pointed out, and his sort of messy personal life.
But I think, you know, I think that’s a different calculation when you have been in the glare of that and suffered in that glare at moments for as long as Joe Biden has.I think you see that as the cost of doing business, and you know there’s always—there’s always the other side of it. …
'The Apprentice'
Let’s go back to the Gary Hart, your thoughts about the Gary Hart moment, yielding eventually a Donald Trump.How was his celebrity status?How much did it matter that he’d been on The Apprentice and living the zeitgeist of reality television for 14 seasons and was who he was, Tabloid Don?
It mattered for everything.I mean, the simplest—you know, look.You know, I have spent an awful lot of time, obviously, looking back at 1987.And when what you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail, so we all think, you know, we’re all interested in our moments of interest.But, you know, there is this moment in the late 1980s, Biden’s a part of it, Hart’s really the central—Gary Hart is really the central focus of it, where we begin to treat politicians—I mean, we the media, the public, too, but particularly we in the political media—begin to treat politicians in the same way we treat celebrities.Their personal lives are of interest.Their sex lives are of interest.Their families are of interest.Their interests are of interest.They’re suddenly, you know, now they’re Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe—or yeah, the treatment that the Kennedys always got because they were something apart from politics, right?But suddenly politicians are celebrities.
The simplest way I can put it to you is, when you treat your politicians like celebrities, it is inevitable that you will get celebrity politicians and celebrity presidents, because that’s what the process rewards.It’s what the process draws.Everything about—I’m not going to blame all of this on my industry, all of this being the moment we find ourselves in, but everything about the modern presidential process that we have created, and I’ve covered, you know, five or six of these things now, everything about that process is attractive to and rewards celebrity.And there are a bunch of ways that could have gone.I saw it in Minnesota with Jesse Ventura when he became the governor in 1998, former pro wrestler.We saw it with Arnold Schwarzenegger in California.And we saw what I think is the most perverse and troubling and consequential form of it with Donald Trump in 2016.
And, you know, Trump is a modern American celebrity, bringing a sledgehammer to the norms of a political system that breeds contempt in the electorate.And we created and nurtured a process and an ecosystem of commentary and coverage that made it both attractive and possible and plausible for a celebrity candidate like that to game the system, to get tons of free coverage, to call into TV shows, to get his rallies carried live, to use shock value, to sort of ignite protests and emotion and to be a provocateur, all of that, all of what we now sort of offhandedly call the reality-TV-show culture of our politics, none of that was accidental.All of that is a result of what began in the late 1980s, and what’s led us to the moment we’re in. …
Why was [The Apprentice] the sort of perfect setup for Donald Trump to eventually run and become president of the United States?
That’s a great question.You know, it’s interesting.I definitely underestimated Trump’s candidacy at the beginning.But, you know, one thing I think I did understand, and I think is still true, is you don’t get to—you don’t get a 10-year run at the top of the ratings of a reality show for nothing.It’s not like there aren’t other people trying, or there aren’t other networks.That tells you that you’re really good at something.He’s really good at that.
And I—you know, I had some perspective on it.First of all, I grew up in what we called the tri-state area, where Donald Trump was a constant fixture on the news, a really towering figure in sort of the New York area in the time I grew up, in the ’80s, Bonfire of the Vanities period, you know.And I—and I’d written about him and met him in the late ’90s, when he was first thinking about running for president.
The thing that—that made Trump a great reality TV star and a formidable politician is this provocateur’s ability, but more willingness—I'm not sure I’d call it an ability, but a—but he is pretty good at it—a willingness to provoke any kind of emotion, outrage.You know, they sometimes tell us in journalism, “There's no such thing,” you sometimes hear image-makers say, “There’s no such thing as bad PR,” right.There are people who believe, “There’s no such thing as bad PR.As long as they’re paying attention to you, it’s fine.”Very few people can actually put that into practice, because most of us are kind of wired in a normal human way, where if people are hating us for the things we say or find us atrocious or contemptuous in our behavior, we try to amend that, right?
The great reality TV stars, the people who get famous for being infamous on television, understand that it’s just being talked about that matters.It’s just provoking emotion.No one in American politics walks into a room and provokes emotion with as much clarity or depravity or effectiveness as Donald Trump does.It doesn’t matter what emotion you’re feeling; he can draw that out of you.It’s something visceral.He knows how to shock.He knows how to—he knows how to bring outrage.You say, “Donald Trump couldn’t possibly have said that.”So a week later, he thinks of something more outrageous to tweet or to say.
His whole thing is, “Just pay attention to me.”And that really worked for him politically.It’s the thing that made him a sensation on TV.It’s a thing that people had to tune in to see.And it worked very well in a political culture and process where entertainment value mattered for far more than I think it should.
… We always find ourselves saying, well, the only way to describe Trump is that he’s the—like the great escape artist.He gets out of all these fixes.He’s gone bankrupt.Atlantic City is collapsing.The marriages are falling apart.Suddenly headlines start to show up.And it’s as you—I’d never really thought about the willingness versus the ability, right?
Yeah, that was his whole thing in New York, was just, you know, stay talked about, no matter what, and you're going to be OK, because relevance—what he was selling all those years, all those formative years, when Trump was becoming Trump, what he was selling was a brand.It wasn’t the building, right?It wasn’t the casino.It’s not like he built better foundations than some other builder or had some great architectural plan.He was selling his stature.People will come to this place.This place will hold its value because I’m famous.And in order to maintain that level of fame and stature, he learned that he just had to keep being relevant.He just had to keep being talked about.Even if it meant being notorious, what he just really needed to have this—this—this brand that people knew he was wealthy and outspoken and represented some kind of success where you could say whatever you want, do whatever you want.
And I think that was a formative experience in who he is.He brought that, then, to reality television, and he brought it, then again, to politics, the same idea that if I can get you talking about me, it doesn’t actually matter what you think or say. ...
I think people really misunderstand, we in the media often really misunderstand why it is Trump endures and survives with the following that he has—which, by the way, is not enough of a following to get yourself reelected president, but it is a significant and solid following in America—and why he was able to win in the first place.
You know, Trump says something, does something, and it’s appalling, and a lot of Americans look at it, including a lot of Americans who support him, and they say: “I can’t believe he said that, and it’s awful.I don’t agree with it.Look at what he did at Lafayette Park.I don’t agree with that.”And then they see Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo and whoever else on television jumping up and down and launching into tirades about it and how upset and exercised they are.They see us.They see the leaders of religious organizations, in whom they’ve lost faith—the archbishop in Washington, the leader of the Episcopal church in Washington, screaming about how immoral it was that Trump did what he did in Lafayette Park.They see him inciting the heads of the NFL.They see him inciting the heads of major businesses.
And it’s—it’s all—it warms their hearts, because they’ve so lost faith in the institutions of America.They feel so powerless that just seeing the powerful jump up and down, outraged and screaming and feeling powerless themselves, is enough.It’s not that they approve of the things that he does; it’s that it provokes such outrage in us that it’s actually quite gratifying to a lot of Americans who otherwise just can’t strike the blow at the system that they feel it deserves.
The Access Hollywood Tape
Is that how it worked with Access Hollywood?
Yeah.I think—I think Access Hollywood was a great early template for that phenomenon.Nobody approved of what they heard.Everyone found it repulsive.It’s not like there's a huge constituency in America for the—for the way he was expressing himself on Access Hollywood.But it made the media so self-righteous and angry.It made all the moral arbiters of the culture so angry and outraged.There is—there is a large segment of this country that always feels powerless, and has for a long time, and feels it’s taken for granted and patronized.And by the way, I sympathize with that emotion.I get it.I think—I think it’s a fair emotion for people to have.
And they really respond to—they really love the way that Trump incites all of this anxiety and anger and powerlessness in the establishments of the culture.I think, you know, that—that’s worth a lot to people.They’re willing to look away from the things he does and says as long as it—as long as it provokes outrage and anger among the established order, because that’s really what they want from him.
And he knows this, or he intuits this?
Well, he intuits everything.I don’t—Trump’s not a studier, right?I don’t think he’s a person of complex concepts.I think—I think he intuits it.I think he feels it.You know, don’t forget, Trump’s wealthy, but he’s not establishment, right?He’s from the outer boroughs.He never broke into the New York financial establishment.They never lend him any money, right?He’s not—he’s coarse; he’s loud; he can be very silly in his self-promotion.He’s always offended the sensibilities of the patrician New Yorkers and the elite New Yorkers.So I think he’s felt like an outsider to the powerful establishment all his life, even though he was wealthy, even though he was successful and famous.He has always wanted the approval of the establishment.He never got it.Still wants the approval of the establishment.
So I think it’s very intuitive for him to want to outrage the sort of leaders of the establishment in America, be it media, religion, sports, business, all of it.I mean, he’s angered everybody.And the more he does, the more solid his base is, because there is this intense contempt for the sort of cornerstones of power in the society.And it’s well-earned.
Biden and Trump on Grief and Crisis
We promised ourselves that we would talk about the two men, compared to each other, on the scales of grief and crisis, how they react, what they do in crisis and grief.Do that for me, will you?
I am trying to envision two men who are more diametrically opposed in the way they respond to grief and crisis than Trump and Biden would be.I hadn’t thought about it before.It would be really—it would be hard to think of two more different people.Interestingly, they’re both very emotive, right?They both sort of shoot from the hip very often.But Biden, I think, forged by genuine tragedy in his life, not so much ideologically but experientially, just has a tremendous amount of empathy, and a tremendous well of emotion.He’ll cry very easily.He’ll grab onto somebody he wants to reach.He’s a very tactile politician.He’s a very passionate politician.And he feels the pain of others, I think, very deeply, even more than his—well surpassing his ability to sort of analytically put it into context or put an ideological template on it.
I mean, President Trump, you know, I'm not saying anything original, but I've never seen a less empathetic human being.I mean, I talked about this very early on.I think it became, over time, sort of a well-worn piece of wisdom about him.But he is not a man who displays a feel for the depth of emotion in anyone else.The more emotion or pain he senses, the more he seems to try to make it about himself.… I’d need a couple of Ph.D.s to figure out why that is, and I’m sure there are people who have.But his response is just complete opposite.And it’s very strange.I don’t think we’ve ever seen that, certainly not in a president.We’re not used to seeing it in leaders, this way in which he—he personalizes all conflict and pain, does not seem to really connect to it in other people, does not seem capable of connecting to it in other people.
The Lafayette Square Photo Op
When you saw the Lafayette Park stuff, your thoughts, your impressions, the things you worry about?
Well, you know, I think some of us who spend our careers and lives in Washington, and I've been here for, I don’t know, 25 years, you know, and we grow up aspiring to be here, you know, we take a really earnest view of the institutions and the—and the history, right?We—we feel it very personally.And I think a lot of people in the country do.And so I've heard—I always hear talk, you know, really going back to George W. Bush in the 2000s, there was always people saying—talking about some very democratic norms, and tyranny, oppression.I never—I never went in for that during the Bush years.I always wrote about and talked about how I thought it was overblown, right?We were not headed to tyranny.
We had a president who had a particular view of the executive, and a particular slate of conservative policies, but who I always felt had sufficient respect for the institutions of government.And even in the early part of the Trump years, I was very cautious about ramping up rhetoric about anti-democratic norms and all of this, even though it was clear he didn’t really have a firm grasp on the system or its tenets.
But when I watched—and I think a lot of people felt this way—when I watched the situation unfold in Lafayette Square from home, when I watched first the treatment of those protesters and then the bizarre march, and to me even—the photo op—the photo op with the Bible was just weird and silly and—and ill-thought-out.But the march across the park with the military leaders and the armed—the armed guards and the Cabinet secretaries, you know, that to me spoke of—of a real attack, a real assault on what we consider the norms of a democracy and the institutions.
I mean, sure, yeah, he had also recently fired a bunch of inspectors general from the agency.So there have been—there had been an assault on all kinds of accountability and oversight.That’s been the nature of his presidency.But in that moment, you could see how an American president could tip into the realm of what we used to think of as kind of a science/historical fiction, how an American president could actually marshal the institutions in the government to suppress the democratic ideals that we all share.It was—and maybe it’s hyperbole to say it was frightening.It was deeply unsettling.And I obviously was not alone.I think we found out the days after it was deeply unsettling to military leaders.It was deeply unsettling to a lot of conservative leaders as well.
And I think—I think it showed us how emboldened he is and how little concern he has for those institutions.I think that is much more of a problem, a question for the ballot in 2020 than is any ideological impulse.You know, we can argue about the tax cuts and the judges all day long.When you win elections, you get to do those things.But I think people are now, for the first time in my lifetime, really legitimately and deeply concerned about the processes and the institutions, and even about what happens if he wins the election.And I understand that.I think it’s a very unsettling moment.
My last question.The coronavirus, the Black Lives Matter, whatever, George Floyd marches, protest marches, whatever you want to call it.At the end of the day, whatever all of that results in over the summer, and heading into the fall, there’s two men who represent, I assume, very different visions of America.Can you contrast those for me?
Yes.Yeah.I mean, let me say one thing before we talk about visions.
I'm not positive this is an election that turns on visions.Jimmy Carter didn’t lose as an incumbent president in 1980 because people thought him ideologically wrong or that his policies were misguided in some way or his vision for the country misguided.He lost in 1980 and was always going to lose that election because the country was in chaos, because he had lost control of events, and he lost the confidence of the American public that he could get control of events.There was a kind of entropy in the air.There was a sense that every day, something else was going wrong.Satellites are hurtling toward the earth, and nuclear reactors are leaking, and the Russians are invading countries, and we still can't get these hostages home from Iran, and inflation is soaring, and interest rates are soaring, and he’s sitting there in a sweater, talking about the American character.
And there was a sense of, whatever you think you’re able to do in this country, you don’t have control over the machinery.That to me is, I think, the thing that all of these crises speak to with Trump’s presidency.We can talk about the threat to democratic norms and the vision of the country and the things he could have done differently around the emergence of COVID-19 or his reaction to the protest movements around—that were sparked by events in Minneapolis.
But the overall impression is of a country coming apart at the seams, where each new day or week brings some new crisis we’ve never seen before, and the president can neither seem to stem them off nor address them when they happen.That sense of chaos and lack of control is something American voters of all ideologies have never tolerated, and I think that is more at the heart of the 2020 election than ideology.
You know, in terms of the contrasting visions, you know, we’re used to elections—my entire career in politics, we have covered elections that are contrasting visions in policy and ideology.Sometimes they’re really contrasting, right, like, you know, like we saw in 2016, or like we saw even in—even in 2000, I think, Al Gore and George W. Bush, where you saw, you know, really different visions of how the country could go.Sometimes it’s harder to see those contrasts.
You know, I think back to 2004, and the argument over who was going to prosecute the war on terror.Was it John Kerry, or was it George W. Bush?They were different, they were really differing gradations on that issue.
This is—this is a conflict that’s less about policy or direction for the country, which would be vastly different.But it’s really—it’s a vision of the democracy, it’s a vision of what the country ought to be, right?Donald Trump, to my mind, represents the last vestiges of an inevitably dying and depleting view of the country; basically says, this is a white country, Christian country, male-dominated country, a country with a common heritage and a common source of pride that’s being assaulted on all sides, you know.And it’s kind of holding onto the old order of things that has been sort of slowly winnowing away for a long time.And in the last throes of survival, old discredited worldviews can be very violent and very intransigent.And I think that is what the embodiment of Donald Trump is.It is the last desperate gasp of sort of 20th-century America.
And then you have Joe Biden, a guy who’s even older than Trump, but who’s basically—who’s basically rejecting the divisiveness and the backward-looking parts, basically saying, “We’ve got to set things right,” right?He doesn’t have some grand liberal view for the country.Despite people telling him he should, I don’t think he will.He’s not FDR, right?That’s not what Biden is coming here to do.His—his vision for the country is to restore the democracy on the path that it was essentially on, is to keep progressing toward a democracy that is more diverse, more flexible, more tolerant, more growth-oriented, more engaged with the world, more multilateral in its thinking.All of those things have been the progression of America from the 20th to the 21st century, until Donald Trump sort of stepped in front of the machinery and said: “No.We’re going back.We’re going back.We don’t like your globalism.We don’t want to be a leader on the world stage.We don’t want your multiculturalism.We don’t want your majority-minority country.We’re going back.”And I think—and you know, Biden really, really represents a sort of a realistic and a less nihilistic continuance of sort of the road that the country has been on for hundreds of years.
Biden and the Presidential Medal of Honor
The only thing I was going to bring up was one of the things that we didn’t cover with Obama, the bestowing the Presidential Medal of Honor on the vice president.Some people can look at that and sort of say, “Well, it was a payoff in some way, because he didn’t stand by his man when he was thinking about running for the presidency.”How do you view that moment?How should we consider that?And sort of just bring us to that moment a little bit.
Yeah.I guess people could look at the awarding of the Medal of Honor and think it was some political calculation to it.It honestly never even occurred to me.I mean, knowing—knowing both of them a little bit—I do—you know, I found it a very moving moment.I think most people who saw it just found it a genuinely moving moment.There was a sort of debt being repaid, I think President Obama’s appreciation for Biden’s loyalty as a vice president, and you know, how strongly he had stood behind him.
I think he understood how much it meant to Joe Biden, because Biden is an American patriot who has spent his entire life in government and has seen so many of those medals bestowed.It’s an honor that I think moved him very deeply.And they were able to sort of share that stage together as a sort of valedictory moment for the eight years in the presidency.So, I mean, look, you can look at it, you can see something cynical there.I guess journalists always do.Or you could certainly see something ideology—if you’re ideologically opposed, I guess you could see something sinister about it.
But I—to me, it’s not—it’s neither about calculation nor ideology.It’s just—it was just one of those moments where you—you know, you realize the politicians we cover are real people, with real friendships and real emotions, and they spend their lives in pursuit of something.And it means something to most of them.And I thought it was a very moving moment.
Trump and the ‘Crisis Presidency’
We’re looking at crisis and tragedy.And over the Trump presidency, it can feel like crisis after crisis, starting from the travel ban at the very beginning, and almost every week it feels like if there's not a crisis, one is created.Or when there is a crisis, he’s exacerbating it.What is it about Donald Trump as president that leads it to feel like that?And is it a strategy?Is it him?Why does it feel like it’s just constant crisis?
Well, there’s no strategy.I don’t believe it’s a strategy.You know, there is—you know, Trump’s sort of DNA as a self-promoter and a TV star is to always get you talking and get you talking about him and to provoke emotions and conflicts.And, you know, in a news cycle like the one we have, where, you know, it’s not the newsweekly cycle anymore; it’s every 10 minutes—it’s social media and cable TV, and it’s round the clock—you have to keep sort of feeding the beast.You’ve got to keep starting new conversations.People won’t be talking in three days about what they’re talking about now.
So I think a lot of those crises and conflicts that embody the Trump presidency have been the result of him always trying to tweak new conversations, always trying to draw attention.He seems to feel like he’s starving if a couple of days go by and he’s not the center of national attention.I think that comes back to bite you, when, as in 2020, you have a series of really profound crises that shake people in the country, that you didn’t start and can't control.I think, you know, it’s exhausting for people to go through a presidency like Trump’s.And the danger of that exhaustion is always that you lose control of it in some way, that you can’t just—you can’t change the subject anymore.And I think he’s found himself, for much of 2020, unable to dictate the subject and unable to get control of the crises, and I think it’s put his presidency in grave peril.
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