Honestly with Bari Weiss: Is Biden Too Old to Be President? Frank Foer Isn't Sure.

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I'm Michael Moynihan, in for Barry Weiss.

And this is Honestly.

As we tumble towards 2024, anxiety among Democrats

is beginning to simmer.

It's easy to understand why.

One of my staff members said, remember the famous song,

you know, Good Morning Vietnam, or Good Evening Vietnam.

Last week, Biden found himself on stage in Vietnam,

giving a press conference about upgrading the country's

diplomatic ties.

When he started rambling.

There's famous lines from movies that he always quotes,

you know, and one of them is there is...

These are the words that came out of the president's mouth.

The Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union,

so says he's a lion dog-faced pony soldier.

The Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier

and says he's a lying dog-faced pony soldier.

Well, there's a lot of lying dog-faced pony soldiers out there

about global warming.

But not anymore.

He continued.

I'm just following my orders here.

Then he said he was going to bed.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to go to bed.

Before he left the podium,

he mumbled something about the Third World.

We talked about making sure that the Third World,

you know, is giving me the Third World.

But quickly corrected himself

because we don't say Third World anymore.

Southern Hemisphere had access to change.

It's the Southern Hemisphere.

Thank you, everybody, this ends the conference.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, this ends the conference.

The voice suddenly emerged.

Jazz music started to play.

Biden tried to answer another question,

but they cut off his mic.

This, ladies and gentlemen,

is the president of the United States

and the man the Democratic establishment believes

is best suited to again win

the highest office in the land.

A man who, if elected for a second term,

would be 86 by the end of it.

According to a recent CNN poll,

56% of Democrats are seriously concerned

for Biden's current level of physical

and mental competence.

62% of Democrats say they're seriously concerned

about Biden's ability to serve a full second term.

Another poll, this one from the Associated Press,

found that 69% of Democrats surveyed

think Biden is too old for a second term.

Among the people not convinced

that Biden needs to be in a nursing home

is my guest today, Atlantic staff writer Frank Four,

whose new book, The Last Politician,

tells the behind-the-scenes story

of Biden's first two years in office.

Force as he started is a Biden skeptic.

The incoming president was, in his estimation,

a bloviator who dangerously fetishized bipartisanship.

But he emerges some 400 pages later

with a rather more charitable view of the president.

Biden is the father figure of the West,

someone deeply experienced in foreign policy

and racking up policy victories at home.

Biden, he writes, is an instructive example

of the tedious nobility of the political vocation,

unheroic but honorably human.

He will be remembered as the old hack who could.

So why doesn't the public see it that way?

What if Hunter Biden's legal troubles,

the impeachment inquiry,

what should we make of the many Democratic hopefuls

eagerly waiting in the wings?

And what would it take for one of them to step forward?

And is America's political gentocracy

a challenge for American democracy?

Those questions and more after the break,

we'll be right back.

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I picked up the book, very hard, by the way,

to know how long a book is when you get it in Kindle.

Yes.

An exhaustive book, a very detailed book

on a number of important issues.

But at the top of the book, you say that you went into this

having an opinion of Joe Biden.

You don't really elucidate what that opinion was.

But you say it changed during the reporting for the book

and came out with a more positive idea

of who Joe Biden was as a person and a politician.

Explain that a little bit.

Well, I've always thought he was a bit of a hack

and he was the quintessence for me of the politician

that he had all of this artificiality.

It's like the stories or the same stories over and over again.

There was this sense that he would say anything to a crowd

and then do something different behind closed doors.

And one of the first times I encountered him,

I was 24 years old and I was somehow able to get him

on the telephone, which I guess at that stage in his career

wasn't that hard for any reporter.

And five minutes into the conversation,

I'm thinking, get this guy off the phone.

His stories are just never going to end.

And it was the same thing that everybody else sees about him,

that it's like he's talking about Senator Mike Mansfield

in the 1970s and it was just very, very painful.

But over time observing him up close,

I think some of his hackish tendencies were things

that mutated into things that I saw as strengths

and these things that I see disappearing

from the rest of our political system,

that there are not very many figures

who are kind of these cornball politicians

in the way that Joe Biden is, who exist anymore.

And there's a lot of technique

that goes into the way that Joe Biden moves about the world.

He's a guy who has theories about how power

should be wielded.

And the artificiality, this understanding,

one of the things that I think is so interesting

about the guy in the end is he's so messy.

He's like one of the most supremely human beings I've ever met.

And the messiness kind of informs the way

that he practices politics,

that because he wears his ambitions,

his insecurities, his humanness on his sleeve,

he's able to identify those qualities in foreign leaders

or Republican senators that he deals with

and that forms the basis for the calculations he makes

when he's dealing with them.

You give some practical examples of that in the book.

Sort of recount a few of those now.

I mean, when you see that in a politician,

I always thought of him as a bit of a cornball

and a bit of a phony,

primarily because of those stories that are supposed to be folksy

and they end up, so this might be straddling the line

of just being untrue and maybe just being a lie

and politicians lie, but he seemed to do it in a way,

it was rather different from everybody else,

but it was usually an anecdote.

It wasn't about numbers, it was, I was here, I was there,

this was something about my past.

But if that is a positive attribute to a politician,

how does that manifest itself in reality?

Right. One example is the way in which he's dealt

with Vladimir Putin over time.

And so Putin calls him the second day that he's in office

and there's a debate, do you take the call,

do you not take the call?

Putin's done a lot to interfere in our elections.

Let's just make him wait in line with the attitude

of his advisors.

And Biden's attitude was we've aired in the past

with Russia by treating it as a second-rate nation

and that Putin is likely to do me damage.

And the best I can do in terms of containing him

is to exhibit some outward signs of respect to him.

And so he calls him back in that conversation.

At the same time, he believes in telegraphing

whatever the consequences will be

for whatever bad acts Putin engages in.

And so the next time they meet is in Geneva

and that's very intentional setting

because he's decided rather than meeting with him

on the fringes of a summit,

I need to respect him as big man on campus.

And so I'm going to create this setting

that's going to have the trappings of Regivik

or some other meeting with the Soviet leaders

because that might work with him.

And so obviously that fails in the end.

But the other thing that was interesting about that was

he told his advisors,

look, I can't leak anything about this in advance

because Putin will feel like he's walking into an ambush.

And afterwards, somebody on his staff told me

that he's just very aware of the insecurities

that foreign leaders have

because he has these insecurities themselves

and he doesn't want to make somebody feel slighted

if that's going to somehow disadvantage him.

I mean, you pointed out it did fail, ultimately.

I mean, Regivik, Reagan actually alarmed his staffers

by saying, let's give up all nukes in his staffers.

What is he talking about?

We didn't talk about this beforehand.

But Regivik was a success in a lot of ways.

I mean, it pushed us towards, you know,

the glass-nosed perestroika era.

Obviously, the interactions with Putin

have been far less successful.

And, you know, you see this even back in the Obama times

and obviously this was part of his portfolio,

part of his remit with Ukraine, et cetera,

the reset button.

People on the Trump side of the aisle say,

this never would have happened,

this being the invasion of Ukraine, on Donald Trump's watch.

But it did happen on Joe Biden's watch.

This will be an argument that's obviously going to be made

during the campaign.

And you write pretty extensively about his interactions

with Zelensky and Ukraine.

What do you think went wrong there from Biden's?

And do you think, and this is speculation,

but do you think it would have been different

under a different president?

I think he was on an adversarial course with Joe Biden,

which was different than the course

that he was on with Donald Trump.

And I think maybe, ironically, having somebody

who spoke more strongly about him

was triggering in some way to his insecurities.

And you look at the way that Putin talked about his invasion.

I mean, there are all of these grand historical reasons

why he launched it that have nothing to do

with who is in power at any given moment,

that during the pandemic he sat alone

in the Black Sea reading Russian history

and bemoaning the fact that he hadn't done anything

to reconstitute the Russian Empire.

I think the perception that he had that Zelensky

was incredibly weak fueled a lot of his thinking.

And then also, he saw Europe was an incredible transition,

that Angela Merkel was no longer the chancellor in Germany,

so there was an opportunity there.

He saw that Macron was weak.

And explicitly, that's how he thought about it all.

One thing that is interesting about the way that he thinks

about Biden is that he was clearly closely attuned

to Biden's physique and health,

and he believed that Biden was somebody

who was probably in decline at the outset.

And then after his first meeting,

when he walked into Geneva, his first remark was,

wow, you look so much better than I thought you did.

And then afterwards, he apparently-

What a nice opening.

I'm exaggerating a little bit in the way that he described it.

And he called Angela Merkel afterwards,

and he told her, hey, Biden looked more fit

than I thought he would.

You mentioned Ukraine as one of Biden's policy successes.

I mean, there's a lot of debate about this now

with a new round of funding

for the Ukrainian military coming up.

Zelensky's visiting Washington next week.

You have a scene at the beginning of that chapter about Ukraine

in which Zelensky comes in and treats Biden

in a way that you find slightly disrespectful.

Is that a fair way of describing it?

Yeah, I think that Zelensky was suffering a lot of trauma

from various interactions with Donald Trump

and was a bit unsure about how to deal with an American head of state.

My personal theory is that there's also some

almost subconscious projection of blame onto Biden

for the Hunter Biden stuff,

which was so complicating for Zelensky.

But Zelensky also had watched the U.S. end sanctions on Nord Stream 2,

which made him feel personally insecure

about his standing with the Biden administration.

So he walks into this meeting with Biden,

I think feeling very insecure and nervous.

And in my view, based on the various tellings of that meeting

that I was able to absorb,

he interacted with Biden in a way in which he was the one wearing

his insecurities on his sleeve.

He was kind of so desperate to ask for NATO membership,

understandably so, justifiably so.

And Biden's reaction was like,

that's just not going to happen right now.

And I think he felt very put off by that

and then started making arguments to Biden

about how NATO was ultimately going to prove irrelevant

because the French and Germans were losing interest in it.

And for Biden, the whole thing felt nonlinear.

It felt like he was getting this argument that was so emotional.

And one of the things that's so fascinating about Scranton Joe

is that he has this moral code about the way that the United States

should interact with various countries.

And going back to Afghanistan, you see this in other places,

when the United States makes sacrifices on behalf of another country

and displays solidarity and sends arms and aides

and puts its troops in peril,

he expects the client state to behave in a way

that reciprocates the beneficence with gratitude.

And I think one source of tension in his relationship

with Zelensky over time

was that he didn't feel the gratitude.

And that sounds kind of appalling on one level, right?

Because Ukraine is fighting this existential struggle

for its survival.

I mean, who cares if Joe Biden feels any sense of gratitude

for the arms that he's sending to Ukraine?

But I think Biden's point,

which is a little bit deeper than the one that I just made,

is that publics in the West are actually sacrificing

on behalf of the Ukrainian cause,

whether in the form of higher gas prices

or just an enormous amount of money that's being sent out the door,

and that politicians like himself

need to feel like they're at least seeing his gratitude

that they're getting some credit for that work that they're doing.

And in the long run, that type of credit

will help them make the case for Ukraine.

Now, I could counter that

and say that it's actually Zelensky's ability

to apply public pressure on Western leaders

to speak over their heads to Western publics,

which has been the basis for the popular support

that we've had in the war.

And in the end, I would say that they're both probably right

in their analyses.

And this relates to the way that Joe Biden, in some ways,

interacts with the American left,

is that he's a politician.

He's somebody who may resent being pushed,

but exists to be pushed to go into a different direction.

He needs to form these sorts of symbiotic relationships

with somebody like Zelensky or somebody like Bernie Sanders

because they create the political space for him to do

the thing that he ultimately wants to do.

Let's talk about that.

I mean, you said in Biden's interactions with the political left,

you have a chapter in the book called Go Left, Young Man.

Am I remembering that correctly?

Yes, that's correct.

So it was during a debate where Joe Biden says,

you know, I am the Democratic Party now,

and he's telegraphing the fact that he's a centrist.

The people that he was running against were kind of listing to the left,

but that was not going to be the person running for president.

And then he did go quite far to the left,

to the surprise of a lot of people, including myself.

What do you make of his lurch to the left

and maybe his kind of return to the center

around time he's going to run for the presidency again?

Right.

So there's the element of personal ambition and underestimation

that is one of the great themes in Joe Biden's biography.

Anybody who read Richard Ben Cramer's amazing book

about the people who ran for president in 1988

know that Biden is somebody who has a chip on his shoulder

and really is driven by the sense that elites never give him his full due

and that therefore he needs to constantly prove

that the elite is wrong for underestimating him.

It's sort of Nixonian, isn't it?

It's a little bit Nixonian.

That everybody thinks that this guy is going to be a placeholder president.

He's just going to be a return to normal.

And in his mind, he didn't wait around his whole life to be that placeholder.

He wanted to join the pantheon of great Democratic presidents.

So there's that element.

And then I think the other thing is that he was acutely aware of the fact

that he's presiding over a governing coalition

where the left just happens to be a significant part of it.

So there was an element of realism there as well,

that after the primaries he holds the series of meetings

or his staff hold the series of meetings with people from the Sanders

and Warren campaigns and they come up with this synthetic platform.

And one of the things that was interesting to me during the presidential campaign in 2020

is nobody actually paid attention to what he was saying his policy would be when he was president.

It's not like the Build Back Better Bill was anything other than a manifestation of his campaign promises.

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing because I don't understand exactly

what Joe Biden believes at this point.

You go back to Joe Biden in the 1990s, even the 1980s.

I mean, he's instrumental in making sure that Robert Bork doesn't sit in the Supreme Court

and Anthony Kennedy does.

I mean, it's pretty significant.

But in the 90s, I mean, he's very much a centrist Clinton Democrat

and that seemed to be the idea in 2020 that this is a return to the center,

not a swing from the far right to the far left.

And then he does go left.

But do you have a sense of what he truly believes in what is just kind of, you know,

political posturing and political deal making?

Right.

So at core, Joe Biden is a Nostalgist.

Joe Biden is somebody who suffered a lot in the past,

yet is constantly yearning to return to some sort of Eden that exists back then.

And that Eden is more or less the 1950s.

And it's when you had companies like DuPont from his home state of Delaware,

which operated in this fundamentally corporatist sort of way to use the political science jargon,

where you have a big company that's rooted in a community that has a sense of connection

with a community that is in partnership with its unions and its workers.

And everybody is pulling for the common good.

And America is making tactile, tangible things.

That's what he yearns to return to.

And I think the reason that he connected with the parts of the Sanders Warren left at a certain point

is because they were pointing in a direction that he could get behind.

Oh, let's manufacture batteries.

Batteries are things that we can make in the United States.

And we could have corporations that don't have an allegiance to global supply chains

and that they can be rooted in communities.

The other thing that I didn't really get into the book that I find so I wish I'd gotten into the book

is Joe Biden's best friend.

It was his former chief of staff, a guy named Ted Kaufman,

who had actually been an engineer at DuPont in the 1960s

and then meets Joe Biden and kind of falls in love with Joe Biden and is by his side for decades.

And this pair would drive back and forth to Washington every day

because Biden had made a promise to his sons in the 1970s and 80s

that he would never be outside of a phone call range for them.

And they drove in this big car that had a ginormous mobile phone in the trunk

and they would spend all day talking.

Eventually Kaufman gets appointed to fill Biden's spot in the Senate in 2008

and he's just radicalized by the financial crisis in the way that the banks retreated

and nobody got rung up for the role in the collapse.

And then Bo Biden, his beloved son, the son that he loves more than anything

and he sees as the heir to the Biden dynasty,

it gets really pissed off about the deal that Eric Holder and the Obama Justice Department

create with the banks as it relates to the housing crisis.

And so the two people Biden loves most, Ted Kaufman and Bo Biden

are just like hyping him up about the evils of Wall Street and finance

and that's not really who Joe Biden is.

He's not somebody who's very adversarial or populist in his bone

but he had these populists whispering in his ear during that period.

I mean, how important is populism to Joe Biden's presidency now?

I think it's pretty important because he's not done a very good job of laying out a campaign for 2024

and if he was to lay out a campaign for 2024

that I'm a terrible political consultant and prognosticator

but if I were doing it, I would say, look, Trump promised all of these populist things.

He promised that he would restore American manufacturing,

that he would continue to get tough on China, that he would invest in infrastructure,

he would be a friend of the American worker

and Trump is the Park Avenue guy who never delivered on any of that

and I'm the one who has.

And that seems to me like a pretty classical campaign message.

I mean, you say in the book, you have a Biden advisor

and I don't remember which one it was who said,

maybe Trump was a bit right on China in your chapter on Xi Jinping.

I mean, there seems to be a lot of overlap when it comes to certain populist messages.

I mean, even when it comes to Trump and say Bernie Sanders,

I mean, Bernie Sanders used to be very critical of immigration and critical of trade.

There seems to be this kind of drift away on both parties from free markets and things like that

towards a more populist, I mean, Trump was the one that really did that, didn't he?

Yeah, so there's, you may quibble with this metaphor,

but before Ronald Reagan, there was Jimmy Carter

and Jimmy Carter was the guy who deregulated chunks of the economy,

argued that Washington was broken.

I think that Trump in a certain way stands as the Jimmy Carter of this new political order

because of his personality, because of his political instincts.

He saw that we were exiting the era of globalism and of neoliberalism

and whatever jargony term you want to use

and that Biden, who is able to govern in a much more coherent sort of way,

takes a lot of the stuff that Trump began and is able to operationalize it and extend it

and take it and turn it into something,

whether it's foreign policy, into a grand strategy in the Indo-Pacific

or whether it's an economic policy into an industrial policy.

I mean, industrial policy is a phrase you didn't hear for a long time.

That's kind of it.

No, no.

Revisiting an old phrase.

And also, I mean, I think one thing, the chapter that you said in Go Left, Young Man,

is about these establishment type figures like Jake Sullivan and Brian Deese.

Jake Sullivan is the national security advisor.

Brian Deese was the head of the National Economic Council

and they underwent their own ideological evolution.

Yeah, he sounds like a Sandinista at the end of that chapter.

I couldn't believe Jake Sullivan had lurched that part of the left.

Yeah, and he's kind of been the architect of a lot of binonomics for lack of a better term.

And I should say, like, I've had my own evolution on this.

Like, what I was writing there was a little bit autobiographical

because I had been somebody who I think in the 90s and in the 2000s

had basically believed in the consensus about free trade

in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

And even, I think to a certain extent, in the aftermath of Trump,

I found myself reconsidering certain economic positions that I'd had.

And so I write about them in a way that is probably too sympathetic for your taste

but reflects, I think, my own empathy.

The era of big government is over has now become

that the era of big government is back and embraced by both parties.

Somewhat, although it's really striking.

I think that Joe Manchin may have done Biden a certain favor.

So build back better on the eve of Afghanistan

was going to be a $3.5 trillion bill

that would have extended the social safety net in fairly significant sorts of ways.

There would have been a measure of real redistribution in the Biden agenda.

And that would have been the thing that probably would have elevated him

into that pantheon of Democratic presidents that he aspired to join.

But Manchin never really believed in it and kept delaying and delaying Afghanistan

in the collapse of the president's approval ratings,

meant that that was no longer possible.

And then you get to what emerges, which is essentially a green energy policy

that's all carrots, no sticks, and all the redistributionist parts

of the Biden agenda have been culled.

In a way, I think he does Biden a political favor

by letting him emerge with the most capacious, least,

tendentious, least controversial version of Bidenomics.

Yeah, and let's talk about Bidenomics for a second.

I mean, not the political phrase,

and I don't really think it's taking off very much.

Which has really been all, right?

It's not a great one.

People are rallying to Bidenomics.

But the economy is not great.

Most people polled, a vast majority of people polled in both parties

think it's in a rough patch, gas prices are rising,

inflation is eased, but seems to be ticking up again.

And if you listen to people, like somebody mentioned in your book,

a Democratic Party grandee like Larry Summers,

they say, you know, this is the problem with the spending.

The spending has created this issue

that was probably necessary in some way or another

during the pandemic.

But after the pandemic, the spending continued,

and this is creating out of control inflation.

I mean, what do people around Joe Biden

think about this messaging?

Because it's going to be a very difficult one

for him to deal with in the next campaign.

So I think that the Summers critique has a lot of truth in it.

Can I just tweak it a little bit?

Which is that you had this wave of pandemic spending,

a lot of which happened in the Trump era,

and then you have this extra bit of it that happens

with the American Rescue Plan

that ends up accelerating pre-existing inflationary trends.

But his big objection to the American Rescue Plan

and that inflationary spending

was that it would actually make it impossible

to spend money in other programs

that would have long-lasting impacts on the American economy.

And I think that that critique...

Yeah, he certainly wasn't being Milton Friedman about it.

I think that the political critique, I think,

is actually the one that is going to be more haunting

to the Biden people than the economic critique

because inflation was going to be a problem for them,

regardless of the Rescue Plan.

But any inflation beyond a certain level

is economic pain to people.

And inflation has come down faster in the United States

than it has in other countries around the world.

It's still biting, though, isn't it?

It doesn't matter politically or practically,

is what you're saying.

And I agree with that.

And it's a very, very, very hard thing for them

to overcome at the end of the day

because whatever you do for the long run

with your political program

doesn't matter if somebody is experiencing

all of this pain in the short term

and I think that their best hope...

And there's no political argument

that they can make to refute that.

And in fact, I think they've been reluctant

to make a political case for their own accomplishments

because they've been afraid

that people will never listen to them

because of the inflationary pain.

After the break, more with Frank Four.

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Rewards subject to expiry.

When you hear criticisms from,

I mean, even from Biden's left,

but mostly from Republicans,

are there any of those criticisms that you think land?

Sure.

I think that in terms of their COVID policy,

I think that there are a lot of right-wing critiques

that I think are justified.

I think that there's a criticism

that they could have pushed harder to reopen schools,

and I think that that is true.

I think it's maybe more complicated,

obviously, than some of his critics portray,

but in the end, it was a place

where he should have devoted greater political resources,

and he didn't.

I think that he made a big...

But he didn't want to upset Randy Weingarten,

the teachers union,

the largest donor to the Biden campaign, right?

Right.

Well, and the other thing,

the other element of that

that I think is important to recall

is that the nation was potentially

on the brink of labor strife around schools,

and maybe you could argue

it was worth forcing a confrontation there,

but there was real anxiety on behalf of teachers

that going into schools,

and so he had a strategy for managing that.

I would argue he could have been more aggressive

in pushing them.

I think that the vaccine mandate

that he imposed in the end of September

of his first term was a mistake

that his instinct had been right about vaccines,

headed into that,

that vaccines were a question of persuasion

and that coercion was never going to work,

and that he did something that was legally dubious

by imposing a vaccine mandate

and ultimately counterproductive

and ended up exacerbating

the culture war around the vaccine.

I think in terms of foreign policy,

I think the chapters in Afghanistan

and my book were very harrowing to report,

and I felt like I was talking to people

in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal

who were traumatized themselves

by the whole experience,

and while I think the idea of withdrawing

from Afghanistan was correct,

I think that his unwillingness

to engage with the humanitarian consequences

of that decision

and to plan for the humanitarian consequences

of that decision

were a great failing on his part.

From the left,

I mean, it's actually interesting

the ways in which the left

isn't that critical of him.

I mean, I think...

Oh, the other thing that I would say,

just criticizing him maybe from the center,

is I think the push that he made for voting rights

was both nonsensical from a political perspective

that he was never going to be able

to get the maximalist Democratic version

of a voting rights bill

and also distracted from coming up

with a centrist voting rights bill

that would have addressed the primary problems

that Trump and his subversionist tactics

posed to democracy,

which struck me as the real threat,

not whether somebody could get a bottle

of water at the 100 foot mark in line.

Well, let's talk about the thing

that the media doesn't stop talking about

and apparently is a very important issue

to voters, too, age.

Yeah.

In your book...

I don't want to say you're dismissive of it,

but you say that...

I have said that Biden should look at his age as a strength

and something to be presented as experience

and that he's pretty sharp

and he gets his notes

and he gives them back to people with scribbled markings on them

and all of his notations

and he's pretty engaged in policy argument.

That doesn't really come through to the American people, does it?

Yeah.

I've thought so much about age

since my book has come out

and it is something that everybody...

It's obviously based on the polling,

it's on everybody's mind

and I've had to confront it in a different way

than I did when I was reporting the book

because when I was reporting the book,

I was chronicling two years of governing

and the political demands

based on Biden were very different

during those two years than they are now.

So I'm just going to go through this

in the way that I've started

to untangle it in my head.

So there's a question about

Biden's mental acuity

and his governing capacity

over the course of the last two years

and where he sits at this moment in time.

In the CNN poll the other day

said that 73% of Americans

are seriously concerned

for Biden's current level of physical

and mental competence.

That's three-quarters of Americans.

That's a huge number.

There's his mental competency.

I think that he's not somebody

who's sitting there dancing on the strings

of a puppet master right now.

If anything, it's the opposite of that,

that he's somebody who kind of hurls himself

into the details of whatever

problem A is for better or for worse.

I mean, I think there's strengths and weaknesses

to that style of management,

but he has

the ability to think

through a major problem

in a way that I think does reflect

experience and the like.

So, if you were to give him

a mental acuity test of the likes

that Nikki Haley has suggested

a president should take, I would say

he would pass it.

There's the question of his physical

energy levels, which is a totally

different question,

but also central to being president

of the United States because communication

is a huge part

of the job, and I'd say that

his age

has made it harder for him

to be an energetic

communicator

with the American public, and so it's one of the

strange things about his presidency

is the way in which

he's omnipresent,

he gives speeches every day,

he talks every day,

and yet he seems to be

this guy who's at a

remove.

But he's had the fewest press conferences

of any president since Reagan,

and I think the only one less than that

is Nixon, and Nixon we understand

why, because he was committing

enormous amount of crimes, and

Reagan also had the issue

of mental

infirmity that people suspected had

really overtaken him in his second term.

I mean, he's out there a lot, but he's

not communicating with journalists, he

hasn't given a single interview

since his presidency to a major

American newspaper. It's very rare.

Yeah, and I think with Biden

a lot of that is tangled up

in security and in

his notorious

eternal problem of gaffing

and that...

Is it gaffing or is it lying?

Well, I think it's...

So when you say something like

Putin should be removed from

power, which was the gaff that got him in

trouble, and that's not lying,

that's probably... That's a Michael Kinsley gaff.

Yeah, he's telling the truth.

I think that his problem

isn't the stories that

morph over time and that fact-checkers

would rightly point out to

having problems with him. The problem

that he has, or the

times that he says something

that accurately reflects

what he's thinking. I mean,

the most famous example of this being

when he went on Meet the Press and started talking about gay marriage,

and he's not

somebody who is disciplined with

message, and I think that he's

got a keen

sense of that quality

in himself, and I think he tries

to protect himself from

that. That's my... It's always been my

sense of why he's been

at such an incredible

remove. And also,

he was able to get away with it for a very

long time as a tactic, right?

So for the first

however long he's been

president, he hasn't taken

that much heat for

existing at a remove. I think only

now is it starting

to be visited on him

in a way that hurts

him with the press. To me, the

right question, and it's kind of implicit

in your analysis of the second

Reagan term, is kind of projecting

forward. And that's

hard for me to do personally, because

people age different.

People age differently,

and people...

But I think that... Just precisely what Donald Trump

said yesterday, by the way, to Megan Kelly, he said,

I don't think Joe Biden's too old, people age

differently. I just think he's

bad at his job.

Right. Well, I mean...

He has a reason to say that, right?

Right. But to me, that's

the real question that gets

at... If I were to ask

a question in good faith about Joe Biden's

aging, that seems to me the most poignant

version of it. Yeah.

About the stories he tells,

which I find very strange and

slightly troubling, the other day he said he

was at ground zero the day

after the September 11th attacks.

He wasn't. He said that he was

a professor, I think at the University of Pennsylvania,

teaching political theory for four years.

He wasn't.

Said something similar about his grandfather dying

in the hospital the same

day, and I can't remember one of his sons

was born, but that also wasn't true.

CNN, the other day,

no enemy of Joe Biden

wrote this list.

In 2021 and 22,

he falsely claimed to have been arrested during

the civil rights protest.

He falsely claimed to have, quote,

used to drive an 18-wheeler.

Falsely claimed to have visited the Pittsburgh

synagogue where worshipers were killed

in a 2018 mass shooting.

Falsely claimed to have visited Iraq and

Afghanistan as president. Told a false story

involving a late relative and a purple heart.

And falsely described his interactions

decades ago with late Israeli Prime

Minister, Golda Meir. There are other

ones to add to that, too.

I mean, he frequently refers to his son

in Iraq, not dying because of

burn pits, but dying in Iraq.

At what point is that lying

and not just kind of a

gaffe?

It's clearly a tendency

that is deeply

ingrained in him, that this is not

this is not

we're citing or not

stray examples. They're part

of a pattern of the way

that he describes himself

and his role

in events and history.

And there is something

both disturbing about it on some level

and I think very

reflective of something

deep in his

psyche that this

desire to be

in the narrative and to be

at the center of the narrative and to have

a version of events that

kind of meshes with some

idealized

version of those

events.

But you're looking to call it lying.

Yes, because

it's a lying.

I think, yeah,

it's like on the surface, yes,

it is lying.

But there are different reasons why

people lie and I think that

that then needs to somehow

be wrapped into

the way in which we

morally judge them.

The pattern of lies are really

always about himself.

They're not about

other people and they're

self-aggrandizing. And so it's

this tendency towards self-aggrandizement

which is super connected

to

the way that he exists as

a politician and super connected

to all of these insecurities

that he has.

That's how I think about it.

There has been a lot of

talk amongst people that you wouldn't

expect it to come from David

Ignatius being the most recent one

in the last few posts that saying

we really appreciate your service.

You did a great job of freeing

us from Donald Trump but now it's time

to step down. Number one, do you think

that's the right analysis and

number two, do you think it's going to happen?

I think that there's a lot of pundit

wish casting happening on this

right now and for reasons

that are probably both genuine

but also horseracy craving

for there to be some sort of

alternative in the race.

Like I said, I'm really bad at the

prognostication and the calculation

bit of this. I always get it wrong.

But it's a voter

and a very informed voter because you know

people in the Biden orbit, do you want

him to run again? Well, that's a different

question and

you know, and I've

wrestled with it and I don't

quite know my answer

to that question. I think that

there are certain

attributes that he brings

as a candidate.

So let me disaggregate into

two parts. There's one, there's the

political question, is he the best

candidate for beating

Donald Trump? And then there's the second

question which is

do I think it's a good idea to have

an 86 year old president?

And on the second question, I would

much rather not have an 86 year

old president. And I think if there was

a viable alternative

to that that wasn't Donald Trump

that would be my preference.

On the political question, I think

it's always more complicated than

people assume. It's like

the Democratic Party

if there was no Joe Biden there

has all sorts of

fissures and fractures

and I don't know how they would

come exploding out

into the public view and I don't know

is the alternative Kamala Harris

is the alternative Gretchen Whitmer?

I don't think anybody

could predict that with any

great certainty. And whatever

you say about Joe Biden,

Joe Biden is somebody who's much closer

to I think the center

of American public opinion. He's got a record

to run on that I think he could

be proud of and he could explain

to people. And

again, plan beats no plan

and the crazy thing

is just how consequential this election

will be for the future

of American democracy.

And one thing I just

have also seen a lot of

in media is the way in which

a lot of Bidenism

is being treated on a continuum

with Donald Trump and I

find it very strange. So the age

question, as

we are discussing, they're totally

reasonable, legitimate questions

to be asked of age that should be

asked about his age. But

his mental acuity issues

are different in scale

and kind than Donald Trump's

mental acuity issues.

Donald Trump, in my view,

behaves as a lunatic oftentimes.

But he's an agile lunatic.

He's an agile lunatic.

But that's different than having somebody

who sentences occasionally trail

off or doesn't like to

do things before 10 o'clock in the morning.

You need to be able to look

at the relative merits

of these two discussions, not treat them

as two sides of the same coin.

Or you take something like the Hunter Biden

question. Hunter Biden is a

total scuzzball who

did a lot of things that to me are

symptomatic of the way in which

kleptocracies try to latch on

to these vulnerable political figures.

I think Joe Biden did not behave

admirably in his dealings with Hunter Biden.

He should have been able to tell him

no, don't engage in this

business, don't exploit the Biden name.

That's a moral failing of his part.

But it's still different than

Donald Trump's moral

failings. And Hunter Biden's indictment

is still different than the things that

Donald Trump stands accused of.

I think the troubling thing

about the way that the campaign

has evolved is

from my perspective, is that this is all

now totally muddy for voters.

You don't mention Hunter

in the book. I mean, he gets one passing

mention. Why did you choose

to not dig into that a little bit?

You know, I was writing about the first

two years of his presidency

and Hunter was not

a significant part of that narrative.

And there weren't very many

questions that were being posed of the White

House as it related to Hunter

Biden. And I wish I had more

about Hunter Biden as

an individual and as a figure.

And that was something I

got close to getting some interesting

stuff on and then I just couldn't

end up nailing down.

Oh, how

badly I want you to fill in some of the

blanks on that one. Yeah, good luck.

But I'll trust you, as a reporter, you want to have multiple

sources and everything. Yeah. But it's

you know, I

find the Hunter Biden question

to be so interesting

as it relates

to Joe Biden because

How does it relate to Joe Biden? I mean, there's

a lot of smoke.

There's a lot of kind of

political propaganda. There's

a lot of people on the right

who just see this as an opportunity

to launch an impeachment

investigation when there's, you know,

some curious things there, but nothing I

would suspect would allow

somebody to be like, oh, we can impeach him on this. Yeah.

What about it, though, seems

curious to you and

you would like to know more about? Well,

substantively, I don't find

I know what I know, which

is what everybody knows and that doesn't seem to me

to add up to anything remotely

impeachable at this stage or

it's just there's some suggestive

so where was this failing? Where was his moral

failing? I think it was that

Hunter Biden was clearly

running a business that was

exploiting the Biden family name

and was dealing with

certain figures

that were in areas of the world that

were adjacent to

what Biden was working on

and he should have said not even adjacent

but at the exact area. Exactly

area and he should be able to say don't

you know, I understand

you've got to make a living, but

you know, this is too important for you

to be working here. It's not

to me, that's not that hard of a conversation

to have and where the Biden

story gets interesting is all

the ways in which that does then become a

complicated story for them to

conversation to have because there's

so many layers of guilt

that are built on to this.

I mean, I think of this

as a family story

as much as a political story, although

it is clearly a political story

and the way in which it's so hard for Hunter

for Joe Biden and Hunter Biden

for them both to know that Hunter Biden

was never the son that he loved most

and

that it was you know, Beau was

going to be the one who was going to carry the torch

for the family dynasty.

Hunter was always kind of the hatchet man

in that operation

and

the things that you

said you were reporting out but didn't get

solid enough to put in the book

all related to the emotional

parts of it and just not

substantive. Okay, so it wasn't

anything that worried you if it had turned

out to be true. No, no, no,

no, no, no, I just, I was

just interested in

I'm interested in the way that he

processes

his son.

Let's talk a little bit about

how you became quite popular

in conservative media

much to my surprise and I'm sure to your surprise

when it came to

some of the reporting on Kamala Harris

talk a little bit about

how your kind of reporting became something

that was injected

into the conservative media sphere

and people were celebrating this

and saying, see, we told you so.

I mean, your book seems to be

tough on her in some parts and not on others.

What do you make of Kamala

Harris's vice presidency?

Yeah, well, so I really

would like to thank Fox News

and New York Post and now

there's this comedy where

there are a lot of people who bought my book under false

presences and now are giving it one star

reviews on Amazon which

I will take happily in exchange

for the sale

and there is something really

there's part that I

understand about the way in which

right wing media operates

and goes and cherry picks

stuff from a book. That's

totally

appropriate and in its

way honorable but then there's other

ways in which I've seen

how Jesse Waters on Fox News

just makes things up.

I mean, there was a story in the book about

how Biden was looking at a map

of Kabul during the evacuation

and was looking at a parking lot and said

this is a place where refugees

could gather and then suddenly

in the Fox News version of it it became

Joe Biden actually wanted to build

a parking lot in Kabul and his

aides were laughing their asses off at him because

he's so mentally deranged

and so there's that. Okay,

Kamala Harris,

what's the real question

about Kamala Harris because

every vice president

suffers for some version

of what she's suffered

from, which is

they struggle to figure out what their role is

in the White House, they have this relationship

with the president

where they end up on some level resenting

the president for

constraining them and

it's kind of a hapless...

She seems to want to be constrained in some

sense in your book. Yes.

You say that you didn't want to talk about race

or gender despite the fact that informed a lot

of her hiring decisions and a lot of her

thought processes and said you know what

put me as the liaison in the

emissary to Scandinavia. I know

it's comical.

I think Peggy Noonan

in the Wall Street Journal compared that to

Conor Roy in succession like

wanting his piece of damn.

I think it just doesn't make

any sense. If you're Kamala Harris

your identity is your identity

and your ability to talk

to certain parts of the Democratic Party that Joe

Biden is incapable of

connecting with your

job description essentially

writes itself yet

she resisted for a long time

playing that sort of

role and I was

told at the onset

of the administration she was much

more interested in trying to find a way

to talk to the white working

class voter

and that she'd spent a lot of energy

trying to direct her way and in

way like of course that's

she should right you should be vice

president of all America etc etc etc

but

politically her role felt like it

was kind of screamingly obvious

and yet

she just didn't want that role

particularly as it pertained to the border

well the border

to be fair to her

her assignment was dealing

with the root causes of migration

and dealing with Central America it was a role

that Joe Biden had had

assigned to him by Barack Obama

and maybe there was something almost sadistic

about giving that role

to Kamala Harris given

all the politics of it all but I think

that the way that Joe Biden

thought about it and the way that Kamala Harris

thought about it initially

was that this was a foreign

policy assignment where it's actually possible

to get something done

you're going down you're dealing with very

corrupt governments in that part of the world

yet

like the prestige

of the American vice presidency

is sufficient to be able

to conduct negotiations

with these governments and

then of course

you know you have that

role yes it's going to

people are going to automatically connect it

to the border and

yet there's something so

defensive and so

ham-fisted about the way in which

she denied having any

responsibility for the border

and seemed to be

directing responsibility for it

in other directions

so I would say that the real issue with Kamala Harris

at core is just

her inability to

navigate

the politics of the job

that's been the place that she's really

to me she struggles the most

and

you get these sentences that she has

like

in the interview with Lester Holt where

she says I've been to the border

we're going to the border I can't remember

the exact phrasing

but she's like talked herself

you have not been to the border

she says I also haven't been to Europe

which is a very strange response

it is she talks herself into a cul-de-sac

and there's something about the way

that she communicates

that's not just artificial

it's just over thought

it's overcooked and it seems like

you can hear her

unfolding sentences in a way

in which

she's trying to avoid

making the mistake

and of course then

if you try to talk in that sort of way

you end up just littering your sentences with mistakes

yeah

on the border

Donald Trump took

rightfully a lot of heat for saying that

we're going to build a wall he didn't build a wall

Mexico's going to pay for it

Mexico didn't pay for the wall that he didn't build etc

the border seems to be an issue

that is looming pretty large in voters minds

at this moment

how do you rate Joe Biden's performance

on immigration

and on the border

I mean he kept of course some of Donald Trump's policies

for a little bit that remain in Mexico policy

how is he doing now

because it seems to be something that

voters are pretty annoyed about

yeah I mean I would think

he would get a lot of heat from the left

because if you looked at his border policy

in aggregate

it's reasonably hawkish

in the ways in which they've dealt with

asylum policy

is reasonably hawkish there are all sorts

of systemic reasons

for why there was pent up

demand to cross the border

and even

stringent enforcement at this stage

is not

enough to stop

the levels of migration that we're seeing

and Biden

is actually somebody who is

that hawkishness reflects

a political sensibility that he has

he understands

that this is a big problem for himself

it's a topic he does not

relish dealing with

in public or because he understands

that there are limits

to what policy can accomplish

and also that

it's going to put him cross ways with his own base

and people in

the middle of the country who

are about the issue

if you're trying to attract

working-class voters and becoming a populist

one of those tricky issues

is of course immigration

and the border

most voters don't care about root causes

they say there's people here

and I went to star county

the most Hispanic county

in America

it's not a big county

it's probably 20,000 voters there

and they swung pretty hard towards Donald Trump

99% Hispanic

and I talked to people there

that said nobody cares

it's not an issue of being Hispanic

but there's just people in my backyard

and I don't like it and something has to be done about this

and it seems to be something that neither party

has been particularly good

at getting their hands around

I wanted to ask you one thing about reporting

it's not a book with footnotes

in the sense that

you would see in a history book

mostly anonymous sources

most of these people I'd imagine

have a pretty positive view

of Joe Biden

they work for him, they want him to succeed

did you worry that

that was going to color your impression

of Joe Biden because most of the people

that you're talking to

are employees of Joe Biden

I wrestled with this

pretty hard throughout

I came to the book

this is the first book I've done

of this kind which is a form of

journalism where

if you don't manage to get

access to the people who are in the room

then you're going to have nothing

at the end of the day

and I've read every Bob Woodward

book and

I've written

a negative review of Bob Woodward

books and been

critical of

different parts of this genre

there's a lot about it

that I don't like

about it that I came to respect more

after having engaged

in this sort of project

and what you're describing

is kind of the inherent problem

which is you have to

make this bargain

essentially with the people

who are the only people available

to pull off a book like this

which is that

you're not going to attribute things to them

everything is going to be kind of murky

and yet like it's kind of

sometimes obvious where information

comes from

and there's a real trade off there

in terms of

transparency

and just being able to capture

something that is

journalistically and historically

useful and what you're describing

is also true that there is

when you sit with one group of people

and like you're getting their version

you're getting their version of events

of course that's going to influence

the way that you process things

that's very human

and you do your best to navigate through it

by applying skepticism

and like insisting on moments

where you ask yourself the type of

question that you asked me earlier

what are the ways in which you would be

which are the criticisms do you consider to be

legitimate and the other thing I should say

is probably obvious

from the contours of this conversation

I bring to the subject

my own ideological

policy commitments

and I think one of the reasons

why I was able to

get ultimately the access

that I had was the way that I wrote about

the campaign where I actually

was taking seriously

some of the policy proposals that they were

writing and I was

calling attention to them

in articles that I wrote for the Atlantic

and was saying you know what

he's probably going to govern in a different sort of way

and so that buys you

credibility with the people on the inside

who see like oh you're somebody

who's showing curiosity in what we're

actually saying and you're taking us

seriously when the rest of the world isn't

so that's all there

but I think that

I don't know if I would do another

book like this in the future

I enjoyed the challenge of it

I enjoyed the challenge of having to try to

impose narrative on

the chaos of events and

you make choices about what's important

and some of those choices

you get right and some of those choices

you get wrong and some of the historical

judgments that you make about what

you've witnessed are going to prove

out and others are

not because that's the nature of

writing something where you end

in the middle of the story

yeah I don't envy you

I mean Washington is obviously a

pit of vipers and you have to

adjudicate why people are telling you things

and what their motivations are and you know

how that affects their recall of certain

things I mean obviously

Kamala Harris

and Kamala Harris' office has said that

there are people inside the administration

that have been trying to make us look bad

and leaking stories etc so I mean this

is obviously just the way politics works

you didn't get an interview with Joe Biden

yeah I did see him

twice in private settings

with other reporters

who got invited in

to meet with him and so

there's colors the way that

I think about him

because I was able, especially

on these questions about

mental acuity for me it was

those were the moments where

I felt like I had the biggest

gut check about that

where I could sit and listen to him

tell stories

Had you not had that

would you have worried about it more

that they're not giving you access to Joe Biden

because they're worried about how

Joe Biden will be in front of somebody

writing a book about him?

Yeah I think so

there's a couple other wrinkles to this

one is I learned that he

as somebody who's been

around the block so many times

he has theories of the world and the way

the world operates and theories about media

especially that are very strong

and he really doesn't care for books

written about presidencies

and so he

I don't totally understand them

but maybe at some day

he wants to write his own memoir

and there's like a sense of competition

he has with other books

that exist however absurd

that line of thinking may be

but I mean I

don't understand why

he doesn't talk more

like whatever gaffs

he might make or whatever

exaggerations

he might display

it's worth

using the public to that

because

there's a lot there that the public should see

I've seen him

tell stories where you're like oh man

like enough about Jesse

Helms' funeral already

but then I've also

seen him talk about

American strategy in the Indo-Pacific

and it's actually a very sophisticated

way of looking at the world

and you can see he's got these

chess pieces in his head

and you know I think that those two parts

of Joe Biden probably have always coexisted

that there is

there's the bloviation

there's the storytelling

that can sometimes be dodgy

and then there's this other part of him

that is got this street wise

sophistication

about the world

and to me the appealing thing about him

is a literary character

and the thing that ultimately

became more appealing to me about him

about him as a political figure

is the messiness, is the humanness

and

if you don't expose people to that

then

the missing some of the stuff that would turn them off

but they're also missing the stuff

that might actually lead them to

admire him more or to understand

how he's running the country

I mean when you spoke to his

advisors and you spoke to many of them

did anyone telegraph that to you

or tell you directly that

you know we try to keep him away from

media and press conferences

because we don't suspect that anything

will be gained from it?

No, the way that they would describe it

and take this for what it is

like this doesn't necessarily

feel authentic

but it's that

Joe Biden has this abiding

insecurity about

not knowing what he's talking about

and it all goes back to the

Neil Kinnick story in the sense that

he was getting fed somebody else's

life story and that there's something plastic

about him

and that when he prepared

and to be clear for those who don't know that's the plagiarism allegations

in 1988 that he

took a bit of Neil Kinnick

the labor politician's life story

that's a seminal moment

in the official Joe Biden

biography when he went from being a

show horse in the parlance of Washington

to being a work horse

and I think this is

actually authentically true that there was

a moment in his life where

he got publicly shamed

and that he just decided that

he was going to prove everybody wrong

by digging in and so

he became a homework guy

and when he prepares now

there's like a messiness to that as well

so he'll start asking questions

in order to achieve mastery

where he'll say alright

you know you're giving me this thing about

child poverty I don't

totally understand it

can you bring in the person to help me

master this and that person comes in

and there's something there that he's like

he asks the question like I don't totally

I need to understand this can you bring the next person

in to help me master this and then

it becomes a pile up where

his schedule is completely

wrecked because

he spent all of this time

preparing for a press conference

and it's actually it's interesting at Kamala Harris

for very different reasons

much the same tendency

I mean you could argue there's probably something

about the overachieving

meritocratic ethos of the

democratic party where

appearing stupid

about policy is the most grievous sin

and

there's this tremendous overcompensation

for that if that makes sense

it does and I know we're right up against the clock here

I'm just gonna ask you one quick final question

Hunter's been

indicted there's this impeachment

stuff Zalinsky's coming back to town

a lot is happening a lot has happened

in the past six months

what has happened since you turned in the draft

of the book that you just wish you could have included

I mean I think the hunter stuff

to me is just as somebody

who's interested in character

I think that that is something I wish I'd had

in the book I think the McCarthy

debt ceiling negotiations

is a great story and illustrates

in a way the idea that

he is this last politician

that McCarthy was somebody that

he was able to size up I think

pretty quickly and identify his weaknesses

and then had this strategy of dealing

with him where he let McCarthy

seem like he was dominating

in public while he was beating

him on substance in private

and also I think that the Ukraine

story is a story

that just keeps turning and

it's so hard one of the values

of a book if I can

if I can be self-aggrandizing

in the Joe Biden style is

that it helps look at

the bigger sweep of the narrative

and

to me Ukraine

is a story of our times and at the center

of Joe Biden's foreign policy

and its survival

is a miraculous

story and

how we end up extricating

ourselves from this war

if we end up extricating ourselves

from the war is the

end point it's the terminus of this

story in a way that I wish I was still

chronicling now

Franklin Ford

author of the last politician inside

Joe Biden's White House and the struggle

for America's future

thank you so much for joining us

thank you for an excellent interview

thanks for listening

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now Michael Moynihan, you can usually find me

at the fifth column podcast

thanks for listening

until next time

they're really gonna make me vote for Joe Biden

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