Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 7/19/24

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This has been the most tumultuous week in American politics since the Capitol Hill insurrection, and it's not over yet.

Moving over everything is one question.

Will Joe Biden stay in the race and face the Caesar of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, who this week chose a running mate, dodged prosecution in the classified documents case, and most dramatically of all, narrowly escaped death from a would be assassin's bullet.

All this and more, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

It's all been a bit much this past week, but I have an expert panel with me to try to make sense of recent events.

Laura Barron-Lopez is the White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.

Elisabeth Bumiller is the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times.

Leigh Ann Caldwell is an anchor of Washington Post Live and co author of the Post's Early Brief, and McKay Coppins is a staff writer and my colleague at The Atlantic.

So, there's too much to do, but we'll try to plow through.

Let me just start with this huge story that seems to be changing by the day, Joe Biden in or out.

Laura, you've been reporting on this closely, give us the latest state of play.

Where's Joe Biden in this process right now?

Where's his thinking?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, White House Correspondent, PBS NewsHour: Well, he is largely where he was right after the debate, which is essentially that he and his campaign are saying he is in this race.

He's not backing out.

His campaign had a bit of a coordinated effort in the last 24 hours.

We saw them come out forcefully.

Jen O'Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, went on MSNBC this morning and said nothing has changed.

We are in this race.

The fundamentals are still the same.

You know, they maintain that polling still shows, that their internal still show, that there wasn't sure that Donald Trump is not running away with the race and that President Biden can still win it when voters are faced with that ultimate choice.

So, they're not necessarily moving.

But even as they're saying that, more and more Democrats and more and more leaks from members of their party show that they aren't - - the party isn't really with him.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This is what I think you're suggesting, is that from, Biden's perspective, perhaps nothing is changing, but everything is changing around him.

I mean, Leigh Ann, you cover this closely.

You know, my theory of congressional politics is when Nancy Pelosi tells her, you're dead, you're dead.

You know, you just go, just go lie down, because it's over.

And Nancy Pelosi's very clearly signaling in many ways and leading the others in the charge, saying, this isn't working.

So, I mean, how long can Biden withstand that kind of pressure?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL, Anchor, Washington Post Live: I mean, ultimately he can withstand it until the election.

He can continue to stay in the race.

There is nothing that can push him out.

It is his own decision.

So, I'm saying it's his decision.

He can run a broke campaign with no supporters and no one can push him out.

That's the reality.

But what's actually happening, does he want to run that sort of campaign?

When I'm told there are groups of senators who are talking about coming out in a group to call on President Biden to step down, that hasn't happened yet.

They are waiting until they're -- we're talking about it today.

Maybe they'll wait until Monday to see what transpires over the weekend.

There was a lot of those similar conversations among House Democrats as well.

Some Democrats started to come out today.

We've had more than a dozen members of Congress, two in the Senate, some in the House come out today.

So, the pressure is building.

You know, it's not that there's still division among the party for the most part.

There's still some hardcore Biden supporters.

But, overwhelmingly, I am told by many, many sources in the House and the Senate that Biden has lost Congress.

And there doesn't seem to be any way that he can get them back.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Elisabeth, you at the Times has some new reporting on this, correct?

ELISABETH BUMILLER, Washington Bureau Chief, The New York Times: Well, Biden right now has COVID and he's isolated in his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware.

And our reporting hasn't -- people close to him say he's in a very angry.

He feels abandoned by Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

And we have had reporting that he has been receptive at times to talk about his future that, but then the aides get out in front and say that to the press and then we hear from the White House or from Rehoboth or that, no, he's in the race.

So, I think there's a lot of flux right now.

It's very fluid.

The family is very adamant he stays in.

There are aides around him who think it's over.

Other aides think it's not quite as bad as all that.

So, it's a very fluid situation.

It's unclear what's going to happen next week.

We have reporting that he'd like to stay in the race while Bibi Netanyahu comes to Washington next week at the invitation of Republicans and addresses Congress.

He also has a campaign event next week in Texas.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, I mean, coming back to this point about money, it's like you -- yes, you can stay, you can rage against the dying light all you want, but you can't run against Donald Trump with no money.

And it doesn't seem as if the money story is going to change direction.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: No.

And I think, ultimately, I don't see how he stays in this race, but it's taking him a lot longer to get there than people expected.

And he feels, you know, he has years of resentments of what he now calls the Democratic elite, you know, the people who he felt like Barack Obama, who never treated -- you know, look, who did not -- the Democratic elite didn't treat him with respect.

And it goes back to 2016, we all know the story, where he stepped aside for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and we know how that turned out in the 2016 presidential race.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: McKay, you're an expert on Donald Trump, and it's and congratulations on that, by the way, the -- I've just given you a new title, a PhD in Trumpology.

But you know what, listening to Elisabeth on this question, Joe Biden raging against the elites, Joe Biden raging generally.

I mean, it sounds like -- MCKAY COPPINS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: And consumed with resentment and feeling disrespected by his party's elites.

Like there are some eerie echoes here in the book.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden now feel disrespected by Barack Obama.

I didn't have that on my 2024 bingo card, but, yes, go on.

MCKAY COPPINS: Well, and I do think it's important to kind of think about the psychology here, right?

Because Joe Biden, like Donald Trump, I mean, they're totally different figures in almost every way, except that both of them at key moments in their political careers were laughed at, you know, not taken seriously, ridiculed by the leaders of their parties, right?

Donald Trump responded by kind of making a revenge march to the White House, purging disloyal Republicans, taking over the party.

Joe Biden, you know, did something a little different, right?

He, he did defy expectations in 2020.

He won the primary, he won the White House.

And while he has done his best to unify the party, he has kept a very tight inner circle that does not -- unlike the Trump White House, does not leak, does not, you know, wage kind of turf wars, but that I think has also insulated him from some of the realities that he faces.

And that also reminds me of Donald Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It is a reality distortion field at work where everybody sitting around.

We were just looking at video before when you all were talking of Joe Biden coming down the stairs of Air Force One, not elegantly, let's say, and we all see what we see, and that message that we see it or that the country sees it or the Democratic elites see it is not penetrating the sort of little fortress in Delaware right now.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: And a large majority of American voters think he is too old to be president.

So, he can rage against the elites, but it's also the voters who have this opinion based on what they've seen.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: But I will say there is the base of the party, some of the activists in the parties who are completely still in support of President Biden and they don't want him to step down.

And I keep asking people, well, why?

And people tell me there's a couple of things.

First of all, they don't -- they feel like their votes will have been taken from them from the primary, if it is someone else.

They are worried that someone like Kamala Harris, who could be the first black woman nominee, could get skipped over.

And also they say that some political strategists say that his age was already baked in for a lot of people.

And so they are just also -- they've already calculated that and that they are fearful that the Democratic Party is going to screw this up three and a half months before the election, that someone said to me today, they would prefer a Weekend at Bernie's come strolling in than Donald Trump, and they're willing to do that with President Biden.

They know him.

They don't want to take the risks and they want to move forward.

And so it is very complicated here and based of the party, there's still many activists who are behind him, like, Alex -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: AOC.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes, AOC.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

And, by the way, I'm old enough to remember when AOC and the left crowd were really mad at Biden over Gaza and were saying, we're going to stay.

And now, I don't understand that switch.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Well, what happened is there was some sort of agreement.

There was a commitment from President Biden to AOC and Bernie Sanders about how he's going to switch his campaign messaging, focus on issues of very economic populist message.

And they immediately saw the results of that and his campaign messaging.

And so they think that they have also a lot of power with the President Biden.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Laura, I want to ask you -- it's a simple question, but when is it too late to change courses for the Democrats?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Well, a lot of the Democrats feel like once they hit that virtual roll call, the Democratic National Convention will hold as early as August 1st, that that then it would be too late.

Because there are some fears from some Democrats that you start toying, you know, potentially with ballot access.

You're asking for litigation.

You're asking for legal challenges.

That's something that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez raised in her hour-long Instagram live video post where she said, we could just be opening the door to chaos if President Biden ultimately steps aside.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And so a lot of the Democrats that I've talked to in Congress say that they really want a resolution by Monday.

They want to see this said and done by early next week because they think gives them enough time to then start rallying around a plan B, which they say - - a lot of the ones that I talked to do say they think it would be Kamala Harris and that the party would get behind her.

But I was talking to Congresswoman Veronica Escobar today, who is a Biden supporter, has stood by him.

She's in the Hispanic caucus.

And she was saying that there is not a consensus.

She says that amongst her colleagues there is not a consensus about who they would support if Biden steps aside.

And she is really afraid that it is going to become chaotic that the process is going to fully open, and then Democrats will continue to attack each other and again distract from Donald Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let me just play devil's advocate on that for a second.

The idea that in our democracy, a party has an open casting call for president and that they all argue among themselves and have a quick series of debates.

That's that sounds healthy.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: And that's the view of many in the party and some very senior people in the party that you should -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Not just people who want to be part of it.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: Right.

That would be healthy and that it would be a fantastic convention.

It would be great T.V.

I've heard this argument, you know, everybody would tune in.

And you would have some semblance of, you know, delegates at least.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Pete Buttigieg as Kid Rock.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: On the other hand, there are rules that all the money of the Biden campaign would go to Kamala Harris.

And if she is not the nominee, then it would -- you'd start at zero.

And people say, but, of course, there'd be this huge grassroots support and there'd be more money coming in.

These are all -- this is endless discussion.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

MCKAY COPPINS: This is, I think, a point of contrast though, that's worth making with the Republican Party, right?

The, the way that the Democratic Party is operating right now, it is chaotic, and it makes a lot of people nervous.

But it is also a sign of a vital, healthy political party that there is still a willingness to kind of put pressure on what a lot of Democrats see as an increasingly kind of belligerent and detached from reality leader.

The Republican Party has not had so much success in that, right?

Donald Trump has, at various points, had the beginnings of a backlash and he's always managed to tamp it down.

So, when I talk to Democrats, they will sometimes say, look, this might be ugly, but it is a sign of a functioning political party acting like a political party.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

And in the Darwinian process, you might get a very potent candidate you didn't otherwise know would emerge.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: Yes, go ahead.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: No, no, no.

ESLIABETH BUMILLER: Just to say, the other thing people say is that, but, of course, all the would-be nominees, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, none of them, they all poll below Biden right now.

Now, that the argument against that is, but, of course, no one knows, once they're on the top.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But the election isn't today.

But I want to talk about I want to talk about the Republican Convention and Donald Trump, and, McKay, I wanted to read you something that you wrote, you, we posted last night.

For a brief moment, Americans saw Donald Trump try something new, stick to a script, addressing delegates at the Fiserv -- I don't even know how to pronounce that, Fiserv?

Is that right?

Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.

The former president -- yes, it takes a little time -- and freshly anointed Republican nominee read slowly and dramatically from a teleprompter as he recounted his near death experience in Butler, Pennsylvania.

But what happened last night that we saw was Trump read for about 15 minutes and then started talking about the amazing amount of blood that can come out of your ear, which is a very interesting subject, but not in the script.

And then he sort of went back to Trump.

I want to play this one clip from the speech because I think this is emblematic of where Trump is, if we could just play that.

DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: They're coming from prisons, they're coming from jails, they're coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.

You know, the press is always on me because I say this.

Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs?

The late, great Hannibal Lecter, he'd love to have you for dinner.

That's insane asylums.

They're emptying out their insane asylums.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He's talking about immigrants.

Obviously, this was not in the script.

There was this idea this week that Donald Trump was a changed man because of the assassination.

That's not a changed man.

That's pre-assassination attempts.

MCKAY COPPINS: What's so bizarre about it is that all week leading up to that speech, the message coming out of the Trump campaign again and again in Milwaukee was that you were going to see a new Trump, right, that he wanted to bring the country together, he wanted to lower the temperature, he's rising to the moment.

Chris LaCivita, campaign manager, kept making this point in every interview that I saw him give.

Speaking to delegates, they kind of embraced this narrative that he had been humbled by his near death experience.

We even saw reporting that people said he had had some kind of spiritual renewal.

I mean, the idea that he was going to get up on that stage and be fundamentally different than he has been was pretty widespread in Milwaukee and it lasted about 10 or 15 minutes.

I was in the arena while he was speaking.

And more interesting than watching him on stage was watching the teleprompter that he was reading from, because right around the 15 minute mark, it just stopped scrolling and he was off riffing about, you know, Crazy Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, the worst president in history, and defaced the nation, all his favorite partisan epithets.

He can't help himself.

And I think that by the end of that speech, and talking to delegates afterward, they had already kind of abandoned the notion of a new Trump.

Trump was back to his old self.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: I'm just surprised that people thought that somehow he was going to be a new Trump because of the fact that even before we got to the speech, when he posted on Truth Social after the assassination attempt, he was posting about the January 6th case hoax.

He was going after prosecutors in the judicial system.

That's the old Trump.

He still is the same Trump.

And also Republicans in the lead up to his speech weren't necessarily changing their tone at the RNC.

They were talking about mass deportations.

They were lying about non-citizens voting in hordes and going to rig the election, Democrats are going to rig the elections with non-citizens voting days before Trump took the stage.

So, this was not some changed Republican Party after this assassination -- MCKAY COPPINS: Although I will just say, I think you're right, but I will say the most interesting thing was seeing some of the RNC speakers try to graft a unifying message on top of what they were already saying.

Kimberly Guilfoyle had a couple really weird lines of rhetoric about transcending political hatreds.

Kellyanne Conway made this point.

You could see them kind of it was almost like they were speaking in a second language that they weren't quite fluent in trying to speak the language of unity, and then falling right back into their normal MAGA rhetoric.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Go ahead.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: You know, he's interesting that his campaign this time around is way more - - it's a good -- way more professional than they were in 2016.

He's got good campaign managers, but they still have the same candidate.

And so, you know, you still have to tame the candidate and worked for about 15 minutes, as you said, and then he went back to remind me of the old Trump.

It reminded me of what we used to say when he was in the White House was people would say, oh, he's going to be presidential now.

Remember that, the first year?

And we waited a long time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, I mean, we've been promised 14 or 16 times, some sort of -- so, my question is, I mean, how the assassination attempt, this terrible moment in our history now, how this assassination attempt changes Trump's relationship to his own personality, to God?

We're not going to be able to figure out.

My question is how does it change the race or does it change the race?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: I don't think it changes the race.

I mean, at least in the focus groups that I've been sitting in on all week, and some of them were with two-time Trump voters, they said that they weren't changing their vote.

And those two-time Trump voters, yes, this is just nine people in that one focus group, but they said they weren't going to vote for Trump.

They also said they weren't going to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that they were going to either write in third party or leave it blank.

But these were two-time Trump voters that said they weren't going to vote for Trump anymore because they had already made their decision, and that was after the assassination attempt.

And then there were swing voters that also said similar things, which was that the assassination attempt did not change what their decision was at all about the race.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Leigh Ann, does it motivate the base to make sure that every last member of the base comes out?

I mean, does it -- LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: I mean, that's what this absolutely does, like the assassination attempt, absolutely.

I mean, the delegates at that convention Trump was a god-like figure there.

They were literally equating him to God being able to escape death, so, yes.

But many Republicans I talked to, elected officials I talked to, you know, Richard Hudson, chair of the NRCC, Speaker Mike Johnson, and they think that there could perhaps -- they don't have polling yet.

There could be a little bit of an empathy bump.

It's not going to be two points, three points, but it could be that, especially when you pair it with President Biden's debate performance.

And I know, you know, I have a little bit different of a take on this convention.

For the most part, yes, there were those old, you know, Trump moments and there were the mass deportation and that stuff.

But by and far, they largely avoided the most controversial components of the Republican Party.

There was no mention -- there was very little mention, just minor speakers, of pardoning January 6th rioters.

There was not really any talk about abortion, no talk about guns, really, very little talk about the stolen election in 2020.

And so it was a production that tried to appeal to the mainstream using very -- the polling -- very polling metrics that play within a Republican Party and against someone -- LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: But election deniers were everywhere in the convention.

And they were -- fake electors were everywhere.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: But the people don't see that, like the public.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Elisabeth, let me talk about another aspect of the convention, probably the most interesting aspect, the choice of J.D.

Vance.

Does that help the ticket?

ELISABETH BUMILLER: It makes it look younger, more vital.

Trump made clear that this is the political future for the Republican Party.

He got a good -- I mean, I thought his speech was lower key than I expected.

It's almost like he didn't want to upstage Trump, I thought, a little bit.

But he's not really -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's called self-preservation in the context of -- ELISABETH BUMILLER: And he worked very hard to be the nominee.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

ELISABETH BUMILLER: But I think he was well-received.

It was interesting to see how The Wall Street Journal is going after him now for not really being a true Republican, you know, once he's talking about perhaps raising taxes, all this sort of -- you know, will that matter?

I don't know.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: By the way, the idea of real Republican is so interesting.

McKay, you obviously wrote the biography of Mitt Romney who wasn't there.

The other living Republican ex-president, George W. Bush, wasn't there.

The three ex-living vice presidents weren't there.

It's not -- ELISABETH BUMILLER: The Republican Party.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's not the Republican Party.

It's some sort of hybrid of Republican Party isolationist and ultimate fighting in a kind of way.

MCKAY COPPINS: I mean, I was checking in with many of those Republicans who were not there and would have been in past Republican conventions throughout the week.

I was texting them.

And the overwhelming sentiment from them was not just, wow, I disagree with a lot of what I'm hearing, wow, I really don't like the J.D.

Vance pic, I did hear some of that.

More than anything, it was an overwhelming apathy about what was happening in Milwaukee.

The Mitt Romney's and Paul Ryan's and Dick Cheney's, George W. Bush's, they are so far removed from what the GOP has become that it's almost like watching, you know, some kind of distant spectacle.

Like they feel totally not invested in this party anymore.

And it's because of genuine, ideological transformation that has happened.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let me ask you, in the few seconds that we have left, Laura, would that group, if it supported Joe Biden, would it make a difference, or are they sort of just castaways?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: I think it potentially could.

And a lot of those Republicans, like the Adam Kinzinger's of the world, say that if it is Joe Biden, they're going to stick with him and they're going to try to get those independents and Nikki Haley voters to go to Biden.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's all fascinating.

We have so much more to cover, but, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our panelists for joining us and for sharing their reporting.

And to our viewers at home, thanks for joining us.

Before we go, I want to take note of the conviction in Russia of The Wall Street Journal Reporter Evan Gershkovich on sham spying charges.

Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in prison in a kangaroo court.

And we all stand in solidarity with him and with the Journal as it continues to fight for his release.

And we look forward to the day when Evan can join his fellow reporters on this program, and we wish him continued strength.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.