The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos on the Balance of Power at the Start of the Biden Administration

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

With Donald Trump rated the least popular President in the span of modern polling, President Biden might feel confident in claiming a mandate to advance his progressive agenda. Yet Democratic majorities in Congress are slim in the House of Representatives, and razor-thin in the Senate. That gives a small number of Democratic conservatives and moderate Republicans outsized influence over what legislation can pass. Senator Mitch McConnell, in a power-sharing arrangement with the Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, remains a force to be reckoned with. What will this balance of power mean for the new Administration? David Remnick poses this question to Jane Mayer, who has reported on McConnell’s tenure as a political operator, and to Evan Osnos, who covered Biden’s campaign and wrote a biography of the new President. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. To restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy. unity. By temperament, unity, by experience, by political leaning,

in just about every way, I suppose, other than their age, the last president, and our new president, are diametrical opposites. It's hard to conceive of two men more different, and with Democrats controlling the White House and the Congress for the first time in over a decade,

Joe Biden stands to make a huge imprint on American public life. His challenges are as obvious as, they are immense. The pandemic, a botched rollout of the vaccine, a struggling economy, a demoralized federal government stripped of its expertise in many areas, and a deeply divided nation. So where does he begin? The New Yorkers Evan Osnosis followed Joe Biden extensively, and he wrote a biography that came out just before the election. Evan, now we're talking on a Wednesday evening after a very strange and somber inauguration.

of now President Biden, what struck you about his inaugural address? I was struck most by the theme of fragility. I mean, this was not a moment for triumph, for, of course, a certain measure of celebration, a sense of relief. But the image that he was projecting out to the country, and it really does also reflect his own life, is this awareness of how easily things can slip away. I mean, he said at one point,

we've learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed. And you know what struck me, David, about that sentence was, at this hour. It was this kind of acknowledgement of the ephemeral moment that we're enjoying. And indeed, there may not be as easy road ahead. What are the forces that are still aimed at the fragility of democracy? Well, what Trump both bequeathed to Biden and then also inherited was this underlying dissolution of the things that have bound America together. And it is obviously truth and the kind of collapse of our collective notions of what constitutes

a fact. But really, it is also about this list of things that he mentioned. He mentioned opportunity and dignity. and it gets to the nature of economic opportunity and the dignity of work or the lack thereof. And the sense that anybody is truly free when they are contained within the systems of systemic racism and economic inequality. And so what I heard in his message was this, on the one hand, kind of pacific description of unity that we might be able to achieve if we just wanted enough. And just beneath the surface was a pretty, pretty harsh landscape of very serious problems that he'll have to contend with on the policy level. You've written a biography of Joe Biden based on profiles you've done for the New Yorker.

You know him, you know his politics, and you know his history, and his history is very various, and it's mediocre in not a few spots. He is now facing challenges that would be daunting to Franklin Roosevelt, Velt or Abraham Lincoln, to any president, what is his capacity to take these things on and succeed? In a curious way, David, I think he is able to do it now to a degree that he wouldn't have been able to do it 12 years ago, much less 25 years ago. He was for a very long time too ambitious. In his own description, he was too arrogant. And he was a figure that many of us recognized. He was sort of bumpshous, he talked too much and he didn't really cohere around a set of ideas. And as he's gotten older and he's been through tragedies that we know well, he has settled a bit

and he has, I think, become more aware of what you might call the sort of moral center of politics. But Bidenism is not a simple set of policy objectives that we could have described a few years ago or today. It is this actually thing that is more, it's more inchoate. And that's either encouraging if you think that what we're facing is a fundamental moral emergency

or it can be distressing because he's gonna now get into the hard calculations of politics. And I think the concern of people who are more progressive than he is is that he'll trade away the things that they care about. For example.

Well, I'll tell you, What I think there is a fear that he will say, we can't make major progress on income inequality without undermining the basic structures of market capitalism. Therefore, we're going to just nibble around the edges. He might be willing to say, I understand that health care is so divisive, not only between the parties, but even within the Democratic Party, that I'll put on hold the idea of adding a public option in order to, avoid that fight for now.

And that, in the end, if you do too many of those cuts, you're eating away at what is the core of the presidency. But I will tell you, though, I'd come away with this. It's with the sense that in a strange way, Biden, who by his nature is a centrist, is not a person who is pursuing transformative change. But he has found himself in this moment in which the need. is so clear, so profound that it has pushed him to be more aggressive, more ambitious than he might otherwise be. 400,000 Americans are now dead of COVID-19, and that number is going to obviously continue to rise. Biden has pledged to administer 100 million coronavirus vaccinations in his first 100 days.

Are they really confident that they can do that, that they have a functioning government that can pull this off, that requires going about 384,000 doses per day, what we have now to a million doses per day. That actually is not impossible. I mean, this is not my assessment. That's Tony Fauci's assessment. I mean, as a technical matter, if you can actually do what the Trump administration was utterly incapable of doing, which was creating a federal system, a federal response, it's easy to forget just how, how, how critical. it really was that the Trump administration never created a full-scale federal vaccination program. It was left to the states. And, you know, as people have pointed out recently, as the Biden administration

has unveiled its plans for COVID and for the vaccine, there is something frustratingly obvious about the plan. It is not as if it is some elusive science. And I will tell you, the way this connects to this sort of broader question of unity is Biden's view is that the only way that you actually can begin to break down this political uncivil war, as he calls it, is by showing people on the other side that there is some value in what it is you're trying to do. And you take something as unimpeachably necessary as getting vaccines into people's arms. And if you can begin to do that, then you can start in some small way. to erode the barrier. That's the strategy, and we'll have to see if it turns out to be true.

So Joe Biden walks into the Oval Office for the first time and sits down and in essence signs 17 executive orders with more to come. And they range from everything to rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement to extending the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. Now, this is all about undoing the Trump presidency. To what extent can that be accomplished by executive order? Well, there are things you really can do. I mean, it's quite remarkable the degree to which he is able. I mean, this is the nature of our system, to walk in and with the stroke of a pen, you really can undo the Muslim ban. Now, you can't undo the damage it has caused over the last four years. But there's a reason why he believes this, what some people are calling shock and awe approach to doing it is important. It's sending a message to the public that these things are not permanent. But what I think is a thing. is interesting is when you talk to when you talk to the people who are sort of plotting the legislative approach what they say is there's basically two steps there's the rescue and then there's the recovery the rescue is what you have to do immediately like getting vaccines out like imposing a

mandatory mask policy on federal property and interstate travel and then there's the hard thing that's exactly well the hard thing is big legislation isn't it and that demands encountering someone named Mitch McConnell. We've heard for years about Joe Biden's belief in in politics in the way that Barack Obama found distasteful. Remember Barack Obama saying, you go get a drink with Mitch McConnell. Joe Biden seems to thrive on that stuff.

Is he diluted? How far can he get? Well, he and Mitch McConnell have a relationship and that, you know, it is worth both identifying and then identifying the limits of it. It's worth mentioning that Mitch McConnell was the only Republican senator, after all, who attended the funeral for Bo Biden in 2015. These two have a very long history.

And one thing I'm hearing is that they are, in fact, talking quite a bit. They have been in recent weeks. Now, none of that means that Mitch McConnell is going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly be a compliant, enthusiastic promoter of the Democratic Party's interests. But what it means is that there is a basis for communication and a basis. and a basis for some calculation of the interests of both sides. And that is the core of what Biden basically believes about politics. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln comes forth and gives his first inaugural address.

And it's addressed largely to the South. And it's an appeal for unity for the country to stay together, the union to stay together. It's an amazing piece of rhetoric. But it failed. Who does Biden have to reach to keep this country from going mad, from becoming too? so disunited that it becomes non-functional. Well, I have to tell you, David, you know, that 1861 address was very much on my mind as I was listening to Biden.

I mean, he summoned, as you remember, the words of St. Augustine. He said, a people are defined as a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. And when I heard that, I thought of Lincoln saying, of course, that he was appealing to Americans bonds of affection, as he put it, their mystic chords of memory. And six weeks later, the Civil War began. So this fragile notion of coherence, of national unity is, it's a risky bet. And I think the temptation is to assume, well, Biden needs to somehow reach the people who have been lost to politics, you know, folks who have the kinds of people who are drifting further and further from, I mean, reality, to be blunt about it. But I think there's another view of this question of the pursuit of unity. And I had a really interesting

interview in the days before the inauguration with Reverend William Barber, who is a civil rights leader. He's the co-chair of the poor people's campaign. And he's been talking to Biden off and on for months, actually, because they both believe in this idea of unity. But Barber is fairly hard-boiled about it. And what? he said was, look, the Constitution does not call for domestic tranquility. It calls for justice. And what that means is that in order to achieve real unity, that means you have to attack some of the underlying problems in society, and that may cause you more political disunity in the short term. Joe Biden is 78 years old. He's the oldest person to ever take the oath of office. He's the Ronald Reagan left office at around that age. Now, having covered him for some time, what do you make of concerns about his age? This is not a one-year operation. This is a four-year office and potentially eight. I think those concerns are valid. There's no fair accounting

of what he's dealing with would give you any other answer. Look, the presidency is a uniquely, almost monstrously grueling job. I mean, you took somebody as you. You, young and dynamic and fit as Barack Obama and he walked out with silver hair at the end of it. And the truth is Joe Biden comes in at a point in his life when most people are not taking on the presidency. But there's another piece of this, which I guess is in his favor, which is he knows this job better than almost anybody who has ever held it before. He worked down the hall for eight years. He's wanted this for 50 years. And he's also surrounded by people who are very close to him. His wife, his sister, his children, his brothers. There are, and then of course all the people who are his

political aides. So there are people there who will both help him. And then I think, and this is where it's a harder question, there are people around him who will tell him if the moment has arrived and he is done and he shouldn't run again. You know, it doesn't sound like a difficult job or an impossible job. It sounds like a preposterously difficult job. Do you think he has any second thoughts? No, because he's wanted this for so long and he believes that it is a decent and worthwhile thing to do. And, you know, I think any of us suddenly contending with the outrageous list of challenges that he's dealing. with now, might want to just climb back into bed. And I think there's something about this person that is interesting, because he never really could have done this job the first time he ran for

the presidency and not the second time either. But it just might be that at this point in his life, he's set up to do it. Evan Osnos, thanks so much. My pleasure, David. Evan Osnos is the author of Joe Biden, the life, the run, and what matters now. And he's a staff writer at The New Yorker. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

This election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. A death spiral. For four years, Mitch McConnell aided and abetted nearly every move by Donald Trump, and then, right at the end, he denounced the lies about the election. We'd never see the whole nation except an election again. Every four years, it would be a scramble for power at any cost. McConnell's statement was made all the more dramatic

when in a matter of minutes, the Capitol was overrun by insurrectionists spouting Trump's slogans. McConnell has never been more embattled. He faces a civil war within his own party, and of course he lost the majority in the Senate. Jane Mayer has been reporting on McConnell, tenure as the prime operator in the halls of Congress. Jane, the Trump presidency is over, and yet the Trump show in Washington continues in the form

of another impeachment trial. How important is the role of Mitch McConnell going forward? Oh, he's the most important Republican in Washington at this point, and so very important. And everyone's watching him to see whether he will vote to convince him. evict Trump or not in this coming impeachment trial. And what are the odds? What are his motivations that are going back and forth? Well, he's in a tough spot, actually, where he has cut a lot of his ties with Trump. He has issued an incredibly forceful, surprisingly forceful repudiation of Trump, basically accusing him of having provoked the mob in the capital riot. but at the same time, he has not said whether he will vote to convict Trump.

Okay. This is a very shrewd guy, but we have to ask ourselves three years, 50 weeks. What took you so long? What took him so long? It was a good deal for him. Basically, there has been an unholy alliance throughout this administration, which is between the Trump, base and the corporate wing of the Republican Party, which is Mitch's wing. And neither can really win on their own. You've got maybe 40% of the voters in the Trump base and you've got that 10% in the

corporate wing, but that's where the money is that you need to get reelected. McConnell is fixated on 2022. He wants to get back in the majority. And he must have made the calculation that somehow he'll have a better shot at that if he turns on Trump. Now, in a speech on the Senate floor, McConnell said this week that the mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. Is it your sense that he's pushing the caucus or simply saying what most of them think? You know, it's hard to tell, but he seems like he's out in front of his caucus on this. And that's kind of a dangerous spot for a minority or majority leader to be in.

I think he was probably genuinely offended. and disgusted when his capital was invaded by marauders. His wife quit from the Trump cabinet. That's Elaine Chow, who was Transportation Secretary. And by all accounts, McConnell was very upset with the situation and had enough. But also, McConnell's not really the most emotional kind of guy. I mean, he's a cold-blooded calculator. And Trump, after he lost, couldn't do anything for him anymore.

or once they lost those two Senate seats in Georgia, too. It was over. There wasn't much that Trump could do for McConnell. Now, what Trump did for McConnell over the course of four years is provide conservative judges and corporate tax cuts. But in terms of temperament and approach, they at least seem, the two men seem polar opposites. What was the sense that you had of their personal interactions

over the last few years? Well, so first of all, when I was writing about McConnell for the profile, I asked a lot of people, and he was very careful in what he said about Trump. I mean, he plays his cards close to the vest. And now people are coming out like the Congressman John Yarmouth from Louisville, Kentucky, who's a Democrat and has known McConnell for a long time, came right out and said, basically McConnell hates Trump and has throughout. And he's confessed this to a few people, but he's been very careful about it. Now, isn't that a bit consistent? convenient to have this kind of information come out at this late date?

Very convenient. And of course, he's looking out for his own reputation, which is to try to disassociate himself from the only president in American history who's been impeached twice, who's facing all kinds of potential criminal complications and potential charges in the future, and whose approval rating is at a record low. A lot of this narrative has to do with, money. A lot of it has to do with Mitch McConnell being very anxious that corporate money is going to be steered away from the Republican Party after the experience of the Trump administration culminating in January 6th. Am I right? Absolutely. I mean, money is the language that Mitch

McConnell speaks. And what happened after January 6th, as Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist said to me was that McConnell had to be absolutely. terrified because huge corporations in America that have been the sort of lifeblood financially for the Republican Party said that they were turning against any of the members of Congress who had spread the election lies that Trump was telling and they were going to withdraw their contributions. This had to play a big part in why McConnell decided that he had to break with Trump. Is there going to be a challenge to McConnell? As the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate from Hawley or Cruz or Cotton?

Well, he's always worried about that. And by all accounts, he can't stand Cruz. And I don't know exactly what he thinks of Holly or Cotton. But it was interesting. Cruz was presiding over the Senate during the moment when McConnell gave this the toughest of his denunciations of Trump and of the lies about the election, which Cruz had supported. And it was almost kind of as if he was saying it directly to Cruz as a sort of a shot across the bow. Didn't it show that McConnell's grip is loosening when Hawley and Cruz and others moved forward the way they did?

It was a challenge to him for sure because he came out in front of them and said he wanted nobody, none of his caucus, to challenge the Electoral College's certification of Biden's win. and eight members of his caucus went ahead and did so anyway. This has been the problem for McConnell throughout. The sort of Tea Party wing of the party is not his wing of the party, and he's had a hard time wrangling them. So far, he stayed, you know, kept them all together, mostly because he's so good at winning, so good at raising money. And so they, you know, while they take these wild stances that defy him, when it comes time, they vote for him. The new majority leader, the head of the Democrats and the Senate is Chuck Schumer of New York.

How are they going to interact, Schumer and McConnell? Well, this is going to be interesting, and it's actually already interesting because they've got to divide power. It's a 50-50 Senate, which the Democrats have the upper hand in because they get the vote of the vice president. And so they're trying to work out a power sharing agreement already, but McConnell's already playing hardball. He's basically saying he's not going to help confirm any of Biden's nominees unless Schumer agrees to give up on the filibuster rule. A number of people on the left are pushing very hard for Schumer to get rid of the filibuster rule. All it would take would be a majority of his members. That is, you know, if all the Democrats voted to get rid of the filibuster rule, they could do it.

But there sits Joe Manchin of West Virginia saying he won't do that. Right now. Yeah. I mean, you know, wait and see if there's something that he really wants that gets overrun by a Republican vote. I mean, and so basically what Mitch McConnell is doing right now is saying before there's even a particular piece of legislation at stake, before people's passions are raised over some issue, he wants Schumer to commit to, promise not to attack the filibuster rule. And so he's already injected this kind of hardball negotiating position in so much for unity, I'd say it's not looking good. No, but Jane, in Machiavellian terms, does Schumer have the same kind of juice, the same

kind of skills that McConnell does. We shall see. They both love to win. Schumer's up for re-election. But really, the thing about the Senate is when you are in the minority, even if it's by one vote, you're in the minority. The person who's the majority leader calls the shots in the Senate. They decide which bills get to the floor. They decide what the schedule is about when they're going to get voted on. It's a tremendous amount of power on whoever has the majority's leader position. So Schumer's really got that. And the question is whether he's going to kind of play the same sort of hardball with McConnell that we know McConnell would play with him. Joe Biden talks about bipartisanship, compromise. Is he delusional? Or is he realistic in thinking he can

work with Mitch McConnell? Well, I mean, it seems like the conventional wisdom in Washington is that because Biden came out of the Senate and for many years worked with McConnell, that they'll have some sort of special magic formula and be able to work together. I'm not so sure. I've read McConnell's memoir. And he kind of makes fun of Biden in it. He describes him as such a talker, such a gas bag, the way he describes Biden. He says, if you ask him what time it is, he'll build you a clock and tells the story about how they took a flight to North Carolina together to a funeral and that Biden talked all the way down and then talked all the way back again. That may be, he may be a gas bag, but he's now a gas bag who is in the Oval Office. He's got an awful lot of power. He does. He

And I think there's a feeling that people looked into the abyss on January 6th and saw what could happen if things got any more polarized and any more ugly in American politics. And so what's Mitch McConnell going to do to make it less ugly? Well, we'll have to see if he works out a decent power sharing agreement with the Democrats on the Hill and really works with Biden. You know, he's made clear in the same speech that he really kicked Trump hard, he also made clear that he regarded Biden's election as a near miss, one where the numbers were close and the country is divided. And he pointed out that Biden said he's going to be a president for everyone. And he said sort of basically, let's make sure that happens. So for McConnell, this isn't a change of heart. It's a reordering of Israelpolitik, isn't it?

I'd say that puts it pretty perfectly, yeah. Jane Mayer, thanks so much. Great to be with you. You can read Jane Mayer on Washington and much more at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening to us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garland.

of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Danny Bonner, Monter, Monfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.