The FRONTLINE Interviews
Peter Baker
White House Correspondent, The New York Times
Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. He has covered four administrations, beginning with Bill Clinton’s second term. He is also the co-author of The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore and Gabrielle Schonder on June 22, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Biden’s Childhood Stutter
Let’s start with the vice president, before he was vice president, his background.So he grows up Irish Catholic, a very close family, working class.What’s his youth like?What does he take from his upbringing?
Well, the thing that’s important to remember most about Joe Biden’s upbringing is actually his stutter.As a young boy, he had a hard time, you know, crafting sentences and getting his words out.It left him feeling insecure.It made him the butt of jokes in school.He was called names.And it was a searing part of his upbringing.It took him a long time until he could finally conquer that.And I think to this day, that is one of the most important things to remember about Joe Biden, because it was this overcoming of the obstacle, the idea that he couldn’t articulate what he wanted to say.And he went from this boy, this youth who couldn’t get a sentence out, to somebody who later in life arguably couldn’t stop talking.He was—became one of the most loquacious members of Congress we ever saw, I think a direct result of this, you know, this youthful challenge that he had to overcome.
Even in his biography, even in his first memoir, he talks about that in such searing terms, you know.People would just refer to Bu-bu-bu-Biden.It was just, it leaps off the page from him to hear his memories, scalding memories of that time and something that I think stayed with him throughout his youth and throughout his adulthood.
Some people will say that going through something like that of course affects your self-esteem, the bullying and everything else.Is there long-term effect on Joe Biden from that?
Yeah, I think he always felt he had something to prove.He felt he had to prove that he could be as smart as the better boys in the class.He felt he had to prove something as a football player.He felt he had to prove himself on the playground.And he was not a particularly successful student; he was a pretty middling student through most of his childhood.He was not a particularly, you know, outstanding athlete, although he had a pretty good football game that he still remembers to this day and talks about.
He was somebody who, you know, fancied himself as a product of the middle-class background.He talks about Scranton, Pennsylvania, but he also really grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, where his father moved because of work.And you know, I think he saw his upbringing as very middle-class America.His own challenges were those of many kids of that generation, trying to find a way in the postwar era to prove themselves, to get ahead, to make a name for themselves.And he never, ever felt, I think, to this day, that he got the respect he deserved.
Biden’s First Senate Run
He runs for Senate at age 29.The audacity of that, what it said about him, the fact that few people believed that there was any way possible that he would win against someone who was as famous in Delaware as Sen. [J. Caleb] Boggs.Anything about that race that stands out that’s important to understand about him?
You know, he was a young guy, on the county commission in the Wilmington area.He was taking on the establishment.He felt himself to be one of the young rebels of the era at 29 years old.When everybody else said, “Wait your turn; you’re not ready for this”—in fact, you literally had to be 30 to qualify constitutionally to be a United States senator, so he wouldn’t even qualify on Election Day.He would only turn 30 after he won, if he won the election.So it was the ultimate upstart experience, upstart challenge on his part.
One other important thing about that, and maybe you can help because we’re still struggling with the understanding of this.There are some people that say the Black vote in Wilmington is the thing that helped him win.It was a very close election, 3,000 votes or whatever that actually allowed him to win.… What about civil rights and the Black vote?Did things start out early for him, that he was exceptionally successful in winning over the Black vote in Delaware?
I mean, at that time, in 1970, racial politics were very fraught, not just in Delaware, obviously, but around the country.Busing was a big issue.And for Biden, the challenge was to be a champion of civil rights, which he cared about, but not alienate the white electorate that was pretty anti-busing at the time.And I remember that he had to find that sort of middle ground to avoid, you know, going too far while energizing a national constituency for the Democratic Party, one that was going to help turn out votes for him in the fall.
Biden’s Family Tragedy
So he gets in, and very soon after he’s in Washington, and he gets the message that Neilia, his wife, and baby girl, Amy, are killed in a horrible, tragic accident, and the boys are hurt bad...Talk a little bit about that tragedy, how exceptional it was, but also what it meant for him, how it affected him.Did it change him?What’s your take on that story?
Right.Well, Biden was in Washington.He had just won the election to be a senator.He was getting ready to take office when his wife, Neilia, was out shopping for a Christmas tree.And she had the kids with her in their station wagon when they were slammed into by a tractor-trailer, which I think was carrying something like corncobs.And it was this devastating moment.… And it was obviously the most searing experience anybody could have, to lose not just his wife but his 13-month-old daughter.His two boys were in the hospital, devastating injuries.And he rushed back to Delaware, spends, you know, day in, day out at the hospital, trying to nurse his boys back to health, even as he’s preparing to bury his wife and daughter.
And you can’t imagine a more formative experience for somebody like Joe Biden than this.This was—this was everything to him.He was going to quit politics; he was going to quit the Senate before he even took his seat.How could he go forward?How could he devote himself to this new political career when now he had two boys and no mom at home to take care of them?
And, you know, the Senate majority leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, made a point of checking in with him all the time—“How are you doing?Are you OK?Is there anything we can do for you?”—and encouraging him to still take the seat, encouraging him to still stick with it, to go into the Senate, to serve and try it and see if he can make it work.He felt that was important for Joe Biden’s, you know, his own mental health, and important in some ways as a legacy to Neilia, that he was going to go forward, that he was going to continue to live life and not simply retreat into the shadows of grief that were obviously so overcoming to him.
And I think this helped define who he was.He was somebody who lost seemingly almost everything.And so it mattered to him.What he was doing then had to count for something.It couldn’t just be another political career.It couldn’t just be another campaign.It couldn’t be just another legislative session.It had to be something important.He understood loss.He understood the humanity of the people that he was representing because he had gone through something so horrific himself.
And it was this comeback, it was this recovery that made him such an important figure later on, because he was not going to simply be content to sit on the sidelines.He was going to find something that mattered in terms of his career in the Senate.And the story of loss and recovery is such a human story, such a powerful story, that it—I think it powered his own career, powered his identity, and it powered how other people thought of him, somebody who could get past and move on, even under the most horrific of circumstances.
The empathy question.Everybody says that if you’ve ever reported on Joe Biden, you hear lots of stories from people who say, “I lost someone I loved, and he was on the telephone all of a sudden talking me through it and spent an hour with me.”This aspect of him, the fact that he seems to be so comfortable and so good in situations, giving eulogies at funerals and such, where does it come from?
Yeah, look, Joe Biden is as real as it gets.I mean, he is an all-out-there kind of guy.He’s the kind of politician who is not holding back.He is who he is.He shows you who he is.Bill Clinton popularized the phrase “I feel your pain,” but Joe Biden really lived it.He really did.He saw other people who were hurting, and he wanted to wrap his arms around them and to say to them, “I got through this; you can get through this, too.”And it was such a powerful appeal to everyday people, to everyday people, to other politicians, to people in political life.Obviously we know the story, but you know, the way he reached out to John McCain’s daughter, talked her through her father’s cancer—what she was about to experience when he passed.Talked to her again after Sen. McCain died.Obviously they don’t agree on politics, and yet it was the most human of experiences and the most human of outreach on his part, because to him, politics is people, much more so than ideology or philosophy.To him, politics is people.And I think it’s born out of this tragedy he experienced at the very start of his national career.
Biden’s 1987 Presidential Run
Peter, in 1987, he decides that he’s going to run for the presidency.
Yes.
What does he run on?Why does he want to be president?What was that all about?Does he have policies that he’s for?Take us to the beginning of the impetus for that.
Right.By the time 1987 comes around, the Democrats are desperate for a new face.They had had Walter Mondale as their last nominee, and in Biden a lot of people saw a new star, a fresh face, somebody who could appeal to the younger generation.What Biden saw was a chance to prove himself again.He, I think, was enamored of the attention he was getting.He was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in charge of confirming judges, and even a Supreme Court justice.And he was a good talker; he was a good speaker.He had a lot of razzle-dazzle, I think, on the campaign trail.And he wanted to prove he wasn’t just a lightweight, you know, flash in the pan in the Senate, that there was something more to him.A lot of people saw him as kind of a run-for-the-cameras, you know, love-the-publicity kind of senator, and he wanted to prove he was bigger and better than that.And so what bigger test than to run for president when you’re that young?
Then of course the plagiarism accusations, the speech where he uses a piece from Kinnock and does not define for that one speech that that’s where it came from.The fact that he also, though, is boosting his résumé a little bit.Why the scandal?Where does that come from?[Explain] why he’s padding the résumé and the effect on him and how this campaign just goes up in flames.
Yeah, it falls apart pretty quickly.I think that the Neil Kinnock [thing] shows, you know—he’d attributed that to Kinnock in many of his speeches.It wasn’t that he was trying to get away with something at least all the time.But he got sloppy, and he didn’t attribute it in the speech that got picked up by the Dukakis campaign and used against him.
When you then added the issues with his own college record and so forth, he wanted to be bigger than perhaps he was.And I think there was always in Biden a bit of the exaggeration gene in which he was, you know, presenting himself as a little bit more than he was, maybe to offset some sense of insecurity.But even in the Senate, as vice president, you would always hear him say things like, “I was the first to do this; I had more of this than anybody else; nobody else more than I.”He had the sort of blarney-like penchant for boasting and trying to puff himself up that I think caught up with him at that point.
The fact that he drops out, what does that say about him?Certainly that’s not something that, for instance, Trump would do.Why does he drop out so easily, and why doesn’t he fight it?Was it that big a problem for him at that point?
Well, I think it went to the idea that somehow he was a phony, right, and it became really hard to combat that on the campaign trail.You add to that the fact he was also at that time chairing hearings into the confirmation of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, and he ultimately came to the conclusion that he had to make a choice.He could do one or the other, but he couldn’t do both.And you know, the Bork seat, the Bork nomination was so critical, so important to liberals, to Democrats in particular, that the idea that he could somehow fly off to Iowa and New Hampshire while also managing this process became pretty impossible, untenable, especially given the scandal that he was trying to deal with.He hadn’t really caught traction anyway.He wasn’t, you know, like lighting fires under anybody’s—in the caucus and primary states that were coming up first.And I think it just became too much, and he decided that he would get out.
The Clarence Thomas Hearings
The Thomas hearings, the testimony by Anita Hill, and he’s sort of stuck in this situation of trying to play both sides, trying to be best friends with both sides.And he’s also in the spotlight.He owns this, because he’s the chairman.And it’s seen basically as an insensitive process, and that’s the nicest way to put it.What does that whole piece of history sort of help define about him and how he handled it and how it in the end, to this day, sort of created problems for him politically?
The Clarence Thomas hearings were defining for him.I mean, they really put him on a national stage in a way even he hadn’t been in a sense during his presidential campaign because there was such an enormous attention to what was going on, so—this is such an incendiary issue involving race and sex and power and ideology.And Joe Biden was there at the center of it.How to manage all these forces really became the central challenge of his time in the Senate in some ways.He didn’t particularly feel comfortable with this issue.He didn’t seem to be eager to have it aired out in public.And then once it was, he bent over backwards to try to be fair to the Republicans on his committee, but seemingly allowing really harsh questioning of Anita Hill in a way that just offended women in particular, particularly Democratic women, who felt that she had been hung out to dry and he had left her there hanging.
And it really seared a lot of people about Joe Biden for years to come.The thing that a lot of people remembered for many years was his handling of Anita Hill.And it took a long time for him to be able to move past that with a lot of Democrats especially, to change the first line in his identity as far as they were concerned.So he wasn’t just the chairman of the Clarence Thomas hearings, he was—he had other things he could talk about, including, you know, the Violence Against Women Act, which he ultimately passes in the 1990s.With the Violence Against Women Act, he had a chance for redemption, in a sense, with the liberal part of his caucus, the liberal part of his constituency that was so angry with him still over Clarence Thomas and believed he had undermined a credible woman accuser, and this was his way of sort of making up for it, saying: “I actually believe in these issues.I’m a champion of women.I’m a champion of those who have been victimized by men.Don’t define me just by this one bad set of hearings.”
Biden Calls Obama “Articulate and Bright and Clean”
The 2008 election.On the day that he announces that he’s running for president, he also is caught, as he’s apt to do, with saying too much and saying this strange sort of statement about Obama being “articulate and bright and clean.”“Clean.”
“Clean.”
What was that all about, and the effect?
Look, Joe Biden would be the first to tell you, his mouth runs faster than his brain sometimes.And this was the most classic example you could think of that in the Obama era, where he is somehow diminishing the first African American viable candidate, at least since Jesse Jackson, if not ever, with this patronizing description.He didn’t mean it to be patronizing, he didn’t mean it to be condescending, but that’s clearly the way it came across.And it just shows how Biden speaks faster than he thinks, and he just—he didn’t quickly see how that would come across, how that would be taken by so many people as a very offensive way of describing Barack Obama.
He’s lucky that Obama doesn’t take offense very easily and that he was willing to shrug it off, because if he hadn’t been, that would have been the end of things for Biden probably forever.If Obama had taken offense in a big way, we wouldn’t be seeing Joe Biden running for president now.
Obama Selects Biden as Vice President
So why does Obama choose Biden for his vice president?
That’s a great question.It’s so interesting, because the two of them don’t have a natural bond at first.They do not click, you know.Obama comes in; he serves in the Senate.He’s on the Foreign Relations Committee, which at that time was chaired by Joe Biden.And the last thing he likes to hear is a lot of bloviating speeches.Well, that’s what you’re going to get in a Joe Biden-chaired committee.And at one point he’s just so frustrated, Obama is, that he even passes a note to an aide that just says, “Shoot. Me. Now.”He can’t stand the loquaciousness of Chairman Biden.
And so when the choice comes of who to pick for a vice presidential running mate, you wouldn’t naturally expect Biden to be the one he would gravitate toward.They were different generations.Obviously they were different ethnic/racial backgrounds.They were different personal background, different history, different temperament, different style of politics.You know, Biden is old-school, back-slapping, hand-gripping, kind of war-style Democratic politics.Obama is cool and aloof and young and hip.And the two just were Mutt and Jeff.
And yet there’s something in Biden that clearly appealed to Obama.On a cold, calculating basis, he was looking at [Biden] and thought, this is somebody who will reassure the country that even though he didn’t have a lot of experience with foreign policy, his No. 2 would.Joe Biden had been around for a long time, he knew all these heads of state; that Obama would be advised by somebody with a lot of experience.
Secondly, he would reach out, presumably, toward white, middle-class, working-class voters who might be mad that Hillary Clinton had lost.Remember, people forget that today, but Hillary Clinton, in the 2008 nominating campaign, was really the candidate of the working-class, white part of the party to some extent.And when she lost, there’s a fear in the Obama camp about alienating them and that they might go over to John McCain and the Republican camp.Joe Biden was a way of trying to keep them in the Democratic fold.
But it wasn’t an easy choice.And I think that for President Obama, for then-candidate Obama, he was really taking a gamble here.Would they be able to work together?Would they be able to campaign together?What would it be like at these meetings with these endless vice presidential, you know, monologues?Would Obama even give him an office?I mean, nobody knew how it would work out, least of all Barack Obama.
The other side of it was, why did Biden take it?I mean, here he is, a two-time loser, basically, in presidential elections.You tell a great story about what Jill said.What goes into the decision by Biden to accept this role?
Look, this is not an easy choice for Biden either.He’s been in the Senate for 36 years.And you can argue that a chairman of a major committee in the Senate has more opportunity to influence events and policy than a vice president, if the vice president isn’t given a lot of authority by a president.And being a senator means you’re independent; you don’t have to answer to anybody.You are your own person.You can say what you think; you can speak your mind; you don’t have a boss.Being vice president is the ultimate subordinate position.You owe your entire political life at that point to somebody else.You have to subordinate everything to somebody else’s political decision-making power.
And I think that for Biden this was not an easy choice.This was not a natural, necessarily.And he hemmed and he hawed and he struggled and went back and forth.Finally Jill Biden, his wife, kind of, I think, snapped him out of it and said: “Grow up.He’s offering you, in effect, the No. 2 position in the country.How can you not help the first African American nominee of a major party to win the presidency?”
Biden’s Role on Race as Vice President
Obama’s got this strange situation where he’s constrained on what he can do about race.And it’s a thing that haunts [him], really, through the eight years.But Joe is called upon to sort of help out after Ferguson and then the New York City protests, going to funerals of, for instance, police officers in New York City that were killed, assassinated.Why?What’s going on here?What’s the roots of it?And how is Joe specifically adept at the role that he’s called upon to fill?
Yeah.You know, for President Obama, Joe Biden is the ambassador to the white middle class in a way, I mean, a way of connecting to people who might not necessarily be comfortable with Barack Obama [who] are comfortable with Joe Biden.Biden is a hangout at the firehouse, you know, chat with the cops on the beat.This is the precinct kind of politician.That’s not Obama’s natural milieu.
And so you use a Biden, if you’re Obama, to connect with these people who are suspicious that Obama doesn’t have their back, that he doesn’t in fact understand their point of view.And Joe Biden is there to say: “Yes, he does.I understand him.He understands me.I’m here to tell you that he’s with us, and he’s with you.”
And Biden has a particular skill at that.He has a real—he has a connection to people in a way that Obama doesn’t.Obama inspires a stadium of 80,000 people to tears with a remarkably powerful oration, but he doesn’t connect with small groups of people or individuals in the same way.He’s not a Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, George W. Bush tactile politician who enjoys people.He’s an introvert.He finds politics to be draining.Biden gets a charge out of being in a room.When Biden goes into a room with other people, he comes out of it with more energy than he walked in.And that’s something he could do for Obama in a way that Obama couldn’t do for himself.
It’s not always white audiences.It’s Black audiences as well.I mean, he seems to be—certainly in 2020 we’ll see that in South Carolina and such.He has had a popularity.Where does that come from, and why was Joe able to accomplish that?
Well, first of all, Joe Biden is comfortable with anybody.He’s just comfortable with people.He likes people.And so he has a long relationship with the African American community that feels genuine.It doesn’t feel forced.It doesn’t feel like it’s just politics; that it stems from, you know, a real connection.
And secondly, he has a lot of history on a lot of legislation that has been favored by various constituencies.And I think he has a history there.… Biden was somebody who had a history that they could judge, a record that they could judge, and that they saw him as somebody with an open door, somebody who would listen to them, somebody who would take their concerns seriously and hear them out.
And I think that he traded on—you know, he capitalized on those longstanding relationships to build up support in the African American community in a way that other politicians might not have been able to.
Biden’s Relationship with Obama
The relationship with Obama is sometimes fraught because he gets ahead of himself and talks too much, but he’s also given some of the big jobs, from stimulus to Iraq to Congress, dealing with Congress, to guns.Talk about how that relationship adjusted and the role that Biden played overall for Obama.
Right.Well, Biden comes in saying: “I don’t want to be one of these guys who’s just given a reorganize-government job and then sent off to the sidelines.I want to be in the room for every big decision.I want to be your last person that you talk with before you make your call.”And Obama basically gives him that kind of a mandate, which is a really extraordinary thing.
Now, they have to get over their early disconnect.There are some real moments, you know, at the beginning where you see the two of them on different pages.You know, Biden says, “Hey, there’s a 30% chance we’re going to get this whole stimulus thing wrong,” and that just drives Obama and his people up the wall.Here they are working so hard to get the stimulus through, and the vice president just said, “Hey, we may not know what we’re doing.”That drove him crazy.
And when we reporters asked President Obama about it, he just kind of shrugged it off, said, “Well, I don’t even know what Joe was talking about.”That actually made Biden mad.He didn’t want to be shrugged off.He didn’t want to be diminished as, “Oh, it’s just Uncle Joe talking,” because he knew that that kind of mockery, even at the hands of the president, would diminish his stature, his gravitas, his capacity to get anything done.
And so he went to lunch, the next time he had lunch with President Obama, and said, “Hey, you know, I’m sorry for what I said, but you can’t be talking about me that way in public because it will diminish me, and I will be less valuable to you.”And Obama took that to heart.Obama listened to that, and he heard that, and he realized that.And I think he kind of began to have a different public posture toward Biden, began to make sure he was trying not to diminish Biden by making jokes at his expense, which are easy to do.And in fact, throughout the eight years, there are moments where they even try to get Obama to make a joke about Biden at some of these events where your president’s expected to be funny, and he crosses those jokes out because he doesn’t want to offend Biden.
But it takes a while for them to click.It takes a while for them to recognize that they are who they are, you know.Obama gives Biden the job of managing the stimulus once it’s passed, making sure that spending is done properly, with accountability, is not wasted.He gives Biden a number of other big jobs, including having to rescue budget talks when they falter with the Republicans, including getting out of Iraq by the end of 2011, which is something that’s a big, big priority for President Obama.So he’s not giving him secondary jobs.He’s giving him pretty important jobs, things that are at the top of Obama’s own priority list, which I think sends a signal that Biden is a full member of this administration.
Beau Biden’s Death
Let’s skip to 2015 and Beau’s death.Talk a little bit about those days.It changes the relationship with the president.
Yeah.Look, Beau was everything to Joe Biden.He was his oldest son.He was his political heir.He was his—you know, he was his heart.Beau along with Hunter had survived that terrible tragedy in 1972, and Joe Biden had just hugged these two boys to himself ever since, you know.They clutched each other.They were all they had.And Beau was the successful one.He had gone off and served in the military, served in Iraq.He had become attorney general of Delaware.He was seen by many people as a future candidate for governor there.He had everything ahead of him.
And suddenly, this cancer is diagnosed.And it’s just crushing, crushing for Joe Biden and crushing for the whole family.And Obama really reaches out to him in this time period.They would have lunch together, just the two of them, and Obama would ask him: “What’s going on?Tell me what’s happening.”And Obama was one of the only ones in the White House that Joe Biden really confided in.He was trying to keep it quiet; he was trying to make sure people didn’t know much about it.He would take these quiet, secret trips down to Houston where Beau was getting treatment at MD Anderson.But Obama was one of the few people he could talk to, and Obama, I think, had already grown warm toward Joe Biden by this point, but nothing probably sealed their relationship more than this period of several months when Obama in effect became another member of the family through this crucible of cancer.
In fact, at one point, Biden was talking about how he was going to have to sell his house in Delaware in order to pay for cancer treatment, and Obama says: “You can’t do that.I’ll give you the money.I’ll lend you the money.Don’t do that.”And that really—that really affects Joe Biden.I mean, I think that he was just very, very moved by that.It was a human reaction by the president of the United States to—for his vice president.This is no longer just a political partnership at this point.At this point, they’re friends.And it—going through that ordeal together in a way brought them closer than they’d ever been.
Then of course there’s the funeral.You get to the funeral, which is this extraordinary scene where Obama is giving the eulogy, and he’s speaking with such passion and such humanity and warmth.And this is not a, you know, overtly emotional guy, Obama.He can be pretty distant and aloof.And here he lets his guard down, and you can see how much Biden matters to him in this moment.And he basically says: “Joe, you’re my brother.This is a tragedy we’re in together.”And he’s wrapping his arms around Joe Biden, who had spent his career wrapping his arms around so many others.
After Beau dies in May of that year, there’s a period of time of deep mourning, and then Biden is working with his people thinking, working towards running in 2016, and he gets pretty far.There’s three months basically of going back and forth on what he will do or what he won’t do.And then it becomes apparent during this time that the president doesn’t think it’s a very good idea.He has assistants bring the polls to him and show the problems, and he says: “Joe, maybe you’re not really ready for this.Beau recently died.”What’s going on there?What are the dynamics?How does it affect Biden that he doesn’t have the support?Why is Obama insistent on Clinton being the right one for that time?Take us through that.
Right.Obama—one of the things that Obama had liked about picking Joe Biden as vice president was the idea that Biden wasn’t going to run for president, that he was going to have a No. 2 who wasn’t looking to take the No. 1 job.And that’s always a tension between a president and a vice president, when the vice president has ambitions of his own to become the president.Obama thought he wasn’t going to have that with Joe Biden.
And then the Beau Biden tragedy happens, and Joe Biden begins looking more seriously at the presidency.And by this point, Obama had already embraced Hillary Clinton.He saw her as the toughest candidate out there, strongest candidate out there, the one who had the most highest chance of success at succeeding him and then cementing his program for, you know, for history.And Biden, as much as the president liked him and personally had become close to him, I think Obama didn’t see him as being the strongest candidate.
He thought that Biden was in the throes of grief.In effect, Biden was working through his grief with this nascent presidential campaign, and that’s not the best way to run for president.You need to have a complete, total, 100% unadulterated commitment to running if that’s what you’re going to do.You have to have the fire in the belly.And Biden was just wracked with grief.This was not the picture of a happy warrior; it was the picture of a grieving warrior.And Obama just didn’t see that as a recipe for success.
And I think he tried to gently let Biden know that, that he just thought that maybe this wasn’t the right time for him.And he didn’t overtly say, “Hey, don’t run; you can’t win; this isn’t going to work for you.”He just tried to ask him questions in a probing way: “Are you sure?What do you think about this?”And he said, “Maybe you should talk to our pollster; he’s got some numbers for you.”The message was fairly clear.Joe Biden got it eventually.
But it was a hard thing, I think, for Obama to find a way to ease a friend out of the race in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Why Biden Runs in 2020
So 2020.Joe goes for it once again.Why?Why now?Is there still some remnants of the feeling that he should have run in 2016?Is there an agenda?
This is Joe Biden’s third run for the presidency, and I think his agenda is to finally win and show that he can—that he can win and that he deserves to win.You know, once again, here’s the kid from Delaware with the stutter trying to prove himself, trying to prove that he in fact is the one who can win the White House for the Democrats.And in fact, they should have thought about him four years ago and not Hillary Clinton, and then we wouldn’t be in this problem today, as he sees it, with Donald Trump in the White House.
He has been trying to prove himself his whole life, and 2020 is the ultimate manifestation of that.Will he finally, in the latter years of his career, finally grab the brass ring for himself and show that he deserves it, that he deserves to belong there?
And it’s not about some broader agenda, like he wants to do this with health care or that with foreign policy.I mean, he has priorities, and he has thoughts about those issues.For Biden, it’s about getting the country back away from where Donald Trump has taken it.His view is, Donald Trump is a dangerous aberration and that it’s up to him, Biden, to fix that, to get the country back on track into its—into more normal politics.I don’t think he brings an agenda that’s larger that, but that’s a pretty large agenda in its own way.
Why him?Why does he think he’s the one?
Well, they always think they’re the one, don’t they?He’s thought he was the one since 1988.He’s been thinking he was the one now for 32 years.This is the moment when the window actually seemed to open for him in a way it hadn’t opened before, in which basically the money was there, the stature was there, the dynamics and the competition was there that he could beat.And you know, from his own point of view, I think his attitude is, “I bring to the table what you need in order to win back the presidency: experience, an understanding of politics, an empathy toward people, and a willingness to scrap.”
I mean, one of the things that’s different about Joe Biden than a lot of the other people who were running for president is that he is willing to kind of give and take with Trump in a schoolyard-y kind of way that doesn’t necessarily feel inauthentic, because he is that kid from Scranton, at least as he sees himself, as he presents himself.And as a working-class kid from Scranton, he’s willing to deliver a punch and take one at the same time in a way that might be harder for some other politician who plays in a different kind of arena.
So South Carolina happens.And he’s the last man standing.Why?What about him allows him to survive?
Well, look, that is one thing about Joe Biden’s life and political career, is he gets back up, right?You knock him down, he gets back up.… And South Carolina is the ultimate get-back-up moment for him.He is really trailing behind his competitors.He did poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire.He looks like he’s almost on the way out.And yet, somehow he manages to hold on.And he does it, of course, through outreach in particular to the African American community in South Carolina, which is such a critical part of that state’s Democratic [electorate] And they know Biden.They know who he is.They trust him.They have a long relationship with him.He’s been there.He’s come again and again and again.
And so when he shows up again in 2020, he’s not a stranger to them, and he doesn’t have to answer for his past to these supporters because it’s his past that makes him what they want.And they’re not looking for something new; they’re looking for somebody they can trust and somebody they can rely on.And Joe Biden’s that person.
The 2020 Crises
And the crises that we’re facing, one after the other, how does Biden’s background, his empathy, his sort of role always as the conciliator, how does that work for him?
Well, ironically, Biden, as a candidate who’s been there for so many years, is the choice of stability.But the choice of stability actually now seems like the contrast to what we have today, right?We have had economic turmoil, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Depression.We have a pandemic, the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1918.We have racial unrest, the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1968.And what Joe Biden is offering at this point, is, “Hey, I’ll get us back to something that seems more normal, that seems more stable, that seems more dependable, that seems”—you know, “you’re exhausted by these last three and a half years,” Biden is arguing.“I will change that, not in a revolutionary way but the other way around.”In other words, “I will make—I will calm the waters.After four years of turbulent water, I will calm the waters.”That’s not a usual challenge or argument.Usually the challenge or argument is, “I’m going to take things, bust them up and change things.”He’s doing it the other way around: “I’m going to calm things down.”
The Choice Between Biden and Trump
So the one we always ask at this point: What’s the choice?Between these two men, what’s the choice?
In some ways the choice is between somebody in Biden who is a creature of the system, and somebody in Trump who is a disrupter.And your view of that may depend on your view of the system.There’s a lot of people out there who think the system needs to be busted out, who [think] that Trump is doing a great job by taking it on and by violating all the norms and the standards that we think that we have set because that means he is taking on the elite.And then there are those who say, the system actually is the values of a democracy.And that’s what Biden’s argument is, is that the system… is a set of governing ideas that allow us to have a civil discourse and a democratic system, and he’s representing that.
Now, traditionally in politics, you don’t want to be a representative of the system.But it may be that after four years of disruption, people are ready to try a little stability again.We’ll see.
I think that it’s not a generational choice, and it’s not a—it’s not even really a demographic choice.It’s really a choice about how you see the country and how you see the presidency.And what Trump is offering is four more years of disruption, for good or bad, four more years of taking on the established parts of Washington, for good or bad.And Joe Biden is saying: “Wait a second.We can make it better, but I don’t believe in blowing up things.I believe in the system that we’ve already got.”And that will be an interesting test.
The Power of 'The Apprentice'
It’s a story you know very well, which is the Donald Trump presidency.I’m going to take you back just a teeny bit into backstory, not as far back, of course, as Biden, but if you wanted to insert anything you do sort of know about the Trump backstory, life lessons, methods that he applies at different points, that would be super-helpful.
So let me start with The Apprentice for a moment.So we’re pre-campaign.And I’m curious to know, certainly he does the show after the failure that is Atlantic City and after the divorce with Ivana, and he’s certainly in rebranding, recalibrating mode.But what does the show do for his career?
Yeah, yeah, no, no question.His time on The Apprentice reinvents himself as a successful businessman.You know, he’s presenting an image to the country of being something that he actually hadn’t been in Atlantic City but now suddenly on the small screen seemed like he was, which was this powerful titan of commerce, this exemplar of American enterprise.And it’s actually—it’s as much illusion as it is reality, of course.But it’s a successful one.It cements him in the public mind as, you know, literally a symbol of business.The idea that he is tough, he fires people, that he is the model of an American magnate is exactly what he wants.It’s the image he sees in himself, and now suddenly it’s being projected to millions of Americans each week.
He was in the living rooms of millions of people all of a sudden, and there’s a lot of power that comes from that.What do you think he learned about the country by doing this show?
I think he learned what the audience wants, right?You know, he studied the ratings; he studied what worked and what didn’t.He had a sense of showmanship.He had a sense of how to please an audience.He had a sense of how to keep them captivated.Remember, this show was not especially complicated.It was not [an] especially sophisticated format or anything.It was a pretty straightforward thing that they did week in, week out, where somehow he managed to keep lively enough, suspenseful enough, fresh enough to be on the air for 14 years.That’s not easy.
He kept people coming back for more.He understood in the making of this show what is required to keep the country’s attention, and that clearly bleeds over to his politics.That clearly bleeds over into another form of public life where being in the spotlight, keeping people’s attention is central to his very political identity.
How does the boardroom, how do the firings, how does the tough-guy persona translate into setting you up for a political run?Help us make that leap.
Well, you see, even today, you see the reality-show star in him.You know, I watch him at an event, and he’s posing at all times.He has the stern look on his face like he’s giving that “I’m giving you the cover-photo pose.”He’s always in uniform.He’s always thinking about lighting even.Like, if you ask the photographers who cover him at the White House, they’ll tell you that they’ve never had a president, for years, even Reagan, who was an actor, who was as attuned to the lighting of a photograph as he is.That’s why, for instance, you see him talking to reporters at the helicopters rather than in the Oval Office.He prefers the lighting there.He doesn’t like the artificial lighting indoors.He doesn’t let photographers take his picture on Air Force One for the most part because he thinks that lighting makes him look bad.He’s very attuned to the artistry of image in a way that even our most image-conscious presidents never were.And he’s—and he enjoys it.He spends time with photographers looking at their pictures and picking out the ones that he thinks is the most flattering of him or the most gripping or what have you.
All of this, I think, is born from his time at The Apprentice, the idea that image matters, that things like lighting, that sound matters, things like that.He’s still—he’s still performing in a way that he had for 14 years on network television.
The 'Access Hollywood' Tape
So something we’re trying to do with both candidates is walk through the different crises in their life to understand a bit more about how they approach these challenges.One in particular is right in the middle of the campaign, probably the biggest one he faces, the Access Hollywood weekend, the Billy Bush tape.Can you help us understand life lessons that he’s applying to that moment?
The Access Hollywood moment is interesting in part because it’s the first time he really kind of apologizes for anything.He has said so many things up to this point that people find offensive about veterans and Mexicans and Muslims and women and so on, and he never apologizes for any of it.This is the first time he does, partly because Ivanka, his daughter, makes him, and partly because his advisers tell him he can’t survive if he doesn’t.
But then I think what you then see in him is characteristic Trump, which is then to go on the offense, to take the fight back, in effect, to the enemy.
So he shows up for the debate with Hillary Clinton, not with his tail between his legs, but ready to go on the offense, aggressive.He brings with him these women who have accused Bill Clinton in the past of sexual misconduct and has them—parades them in front of the press, so the story becomes not just at least Donald Trump and Access Hollywood, but he tries to force it to be as well about Bill Clinton and Bill Clinton’s, you know, issues.And that’s classic Trump.You know, you’re not going to sit there and take it; you’re going to fight back, and you’re going to push back, no matter what line you need to cross.The idea of bringing women who have accused a former president of sexual misconduct to a debate, even tried to place them in the audience right in front of the stage so that Hillary Clinton would have to see them when she was debating, and the organizers wouldn’t let him do that, it was very brazen.It’s very unapologetic.It’s very in-your-face.And that’s how Donald Trump operates.
But the Republican establishment, some members of his own campaign abandon him during this period.
Republicans are running for the hills.The Republican establishment didn’t want him to begin with.He wasn’t their kind of guy.They were holding their nose once he won the nomination.But when the Access Hollywood tape comes out, finally they have an excuse to say, “OK, I’m out of here; I’m not going to back this.”And they see a loser.They see somebody they think is about to go down to great defeat.And so jumping off the train doesn’t seem like a big thing for them.
So you see Paul Ryan back away.You see John McCain back away.You even see Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, tell the president, “Well, either you drop out, or we’re going to go down to a crashing landslide defeat.”And that shows you where the Republican Party is.They’re very deeply uncomfortable with the person who is now their titular leader, and they see him as a disaster in the making.
But the lasting legacy of that is that Trump remembers who said what when.He remembers who was with him and who wasn’t.He remembers who stood with him and who bailed, right?Reince Priebus bailed; Rudy Giuliani stuck by him.These decisions matter going years forward.He would never forget who was where on the Access Hollywood weekend.And it reminded him of his longtime political and public relations approach, which is never, never, never give up.Never give in, never show weakness, and always fight back.
Underestimating Trump
What did those establishment figures underestimate about him in that moment?
That’s a great question.They thought he was done.They thought he was toast.And he might have been.I mean, there’s no reason that weekend to think, OK, this is a guy who’s still going to come out and win after all this, you know.The polls look terrible; the momentum seemed to be going against him.And I think what they underestimated in him was that he wasn’t going to sit there and cower and take a licking and simply accept defeat and go away; that he was going to keep hammering, hammering and hammering away.
Advising Trump
You referenced Giuliani and Reince, and I was going to ask you this later, but I wonder if we should do it here, which is, when some of these close advisers—Michael Cohen, John Bolton—turn on Trump in this really intense, really visceral, really personal sort of way, what’s going on?Why in that close inner circle do you see folks turn on him in the manner in which they do?
I think a lot of people who went into that White House thinking that they could, if not control him, at least steer him or at least try to manage him, learned how wrong that they were.He is fundamentally unmanageable; that the only people he completely will stand by are his family members; everybody else is expendable.If he gets tired of you, if he decides that you’re not really on his side, he will shove you to the side, and even shove you out.
And I think with Michael Cohen, there’s a Shakespearean story, right?For 10 years he had carried the president’s water through all sorts of controversies.He had bullied reporters and bullied other enemies, or people who were perceived as enemies of Donald Trump, and had done all kinds of things on his behalf, and then when it finally came to it, when he got in trouble, he felt like he—he felt like he had been thrown under the bus, and therefore he wasn’t going to take it without fighting back at the president.He gave this remarkable congressional hearing testimony where he called him a liar, a racist, and a conman.And he had spent 10 years in close proximity to him; it felt very visceral.
So I think it’s a great question why it is.There’s not a lot of people who have been with Donald Trump his whole life who are still with him and loyal to him and he is loyal to them.It’s a rotating cast of people.He burns through them in a year or two and then moves on to the next group.
Trump’s ‘Crisis Presidency’
Let me ask you about the presidency itself.We sort of define it as a presidency defined by crisis.I was wondering if you could help us understand the lessons he’s bringing from New York, from Atlantic City, from Roy Cohn, from his relationship with Ivana, his handling of media and press as [John] Barron, his alter-publicist, if you can help us sort of see what you’ve seen as he moves through the last three and a half years.
It is a presidency of crisis, and that’s the way he likes it.You know, I think a lot of presidents see it as their goal to kind of calm the waters; they see it as their goal to bring people together, to tamp things down if they get too hot.This is a president who likes it hot.He likes there to be controversy.If there’s a controversy that is—even when there’s a controversy he feels uncomfortable with, he simply creates another controversy to move on to something else.And it’s not in his instinct to smooth things over.
He takes—he goes out of his way to look for a fight.In the end, that’s what he’s looking for: He wants to have a fight.One of the reasons why the coronavirus has been such a challenge for him is because it’s hard to fight with a virus, you know.You can’t sit there and punch it.It’s not going to punch back; it doesn’t work that way.And that left him, I think, grappling for a way forward that was very uncomfortable to him.It took a while until he could figure out how to make coronavirus into the paradigm that he was comfortable with, which is where you have an enemy.And then the enemies, of course, became China or the Democrats or the governors or the media or the WHO or even the VoA.
But if he doesn’t have a conflict today, he will find one tomorrow.Everything is personalized.When the Supreme Court hands down rulings he doesn’t like, he tweets out, “Do you think the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?,” right?It couldn’t possibly be, in his mind, that it’s about their interpretation of law or what have you.It has to be about him.And he sees things through that lens.
… And it’s working, and it has worked, right?If you look at some of these successes, Access Hollywood even, some of the ways in which he’s defeated Mueller throughout the Russia investigation, these are wins.
Going back to The Apprentice, one of the things he took from that, he has always had a remarkable skill at branding and marketing, right?He has the power of repetition.And he says something again and again and again and again.It doesn’t bother him to say it again and again.Most politicians get tired of repeating themselves.He doesn’t; he’ll say it again and again and again until it becomes the default setting.So he says “Russia hoax” enough times, and people begin to think, yeah, it’s nothing but a hoax, without looking at the more complicated reality of what the Mueller report actually said, for instance.
The marketing of the nicknames, you know.He has a remarkable skill of refining other politicians’ weaknesses and then skewering them on them.Little Marco.Crooked Hillary.Sleepy Joe.These nicknames are playground-ish.They’re juvenile.But they’re effective because they really—they identify something that is weak in the opponent, and they energize his own supporters.
Trump’s Lafayette Square Photo Op
Let me ask you about Lafayette Square and this idea of the photo op moment … where he walks across the park.Protesters are pushed aside.It’s a pretty interesting scene.Why don’t you tell me what you thought?
Wow.Yeah.No.We, we’d never seen anything like that in modern times.So the president has been in the White House while protesters have been outside for days.And at one point he had been rushed to the bunker underneath the White House by the Secret Service out of concern for his safety.And that really angered him when that story broke.When people learned that he had been in the bunker, it made him look, or at least it made him feel like he looked weak.And that was anathema to him.That was absolutely something he wasn’t going to tolerate.
So on that Monday, June the 1st, he resolved he was going to show toughness; he was going to show that he was in charge; he was not going to let the streets run away with him.And he was resolved that he was going to give a speech in the Rose Garden saying he would send in the military if governors didn’t get their act together.And then afterwards he was going to walk across the Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church, which had had a fire the night before during some of the protests.
And you had this incredible split-screen moment where the riot police are clearing out the Square and the street near the Square of protesters with smoke canisters and flash grenades and chemical spray and shields and batons, and at the same time the president is on the other screen giving this speech in the Rose Garden.And the reporters in the Rose Garden can hear the noises coming from Lafayette Square as they’re shoving the protesters out of the way, all so he could walk across the Square and have this photo op.
And the photo op just consists of him holding up a Bible that his daughter had given him, she had brought in her $1,500 purse.He didn’t do anything with the Bible; he didn’t read from the scripture.He didn’t meet with anybody from the church; he didn’t go inside to inspect the damage.He didn’t give a speech.He just stood there for a few minutes, held up the Bible, and then walked back to the White House.
And that’s all he wanted to do.What he wanted was the picture.He wanted the picture of him striding purposefully across the Square, not cowering in the bunker.And he wanted the picture of him standing in front of the church holding the Bible—not his own Bible—to appeal to his most conservative supporters who were alienated by the violence in the streets and any of the looting that had been happening in some of the cities.
A remarkable moment.And I think that it’s one of those moments that will stay in our history of this presidency for years to come.
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