The NPR Politics Podcast - Don't Expect Donald Trump To Retire

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Donald Trump still has more than a month left in his presidency. That's plenty of time left for pardons and planning for the future: three sources tell NPR that he's mulling a 2024 reelection bid. Regardless, expect Trump to continue to openly (and baselessly) question the election's legitimacy.This episode: correspondent Asma Khalid, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, and White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Donald calling from Mesa, Arizona. I just finished submitting the first 24 pages of our high school yearbook for our first major deadline of the school year. My students have embraced their inner journalists and covered remote learning, quarantine, spirit week, fall sports, and more, and I'm so proud of the work that they're doing to create this book. This podcast was recorded at 1 19 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, December 3rd. Things may have changed by the time you've heard this. Okay, here's the show. I'm just, as a former yearbook editor, thinking about the challenge of just like a bunch of screenshots of Zoom windows.

Like, how do you make this exciting? My question on this is, you know, he said that they were channeling their inner journalist. You know, are they past deadline? Are they bumping right up on deadline? For me, that's the issue. Well, hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the Joe Biden transition. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. So one common tradition for outgoing presidents as they head out the door is to issue a bunch of pardons. But in an unusual twist, close allies of President Trump are suggesting that he should preemptively pardon himself, his family and close aides.

So, Ryan, let's start with a very basic sort of explanatory question, which is, can a president issue a pardon before there's an actual conviction of any crime? It is rare, but yes, the president can issue a pardon to someone before they have been charged with a federal crime. You don't have to wait around for someone to be charged by federal prosecutors. The classic case of this would be President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. Nixon had resigned from office, but he hadn't actually been charged with any crimes when Ford pardoned him. And the way that Ford pardoned him, I went back and looked at the official text of the pardon today, and he basically gave him a blanket pardon for any and all actions between two certain dates. And so it is possible to do that. That's interesting.

And is the president able to pardon himself? Now that, that is a trickier question. It is an unsettled legal question, actually. There are certainly people who believe that a president can do that. Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, would count himself among those folks. He has said publicly that he believes that he has the power to pardon himself. But he's also said that he doesn't think that he power to potentially pardon himself leaves office with him. It is, as I said, it is an open legal question. It is something that if Trump were to do, he would be pushing the question of presidential pardons into basically uncharted legal territory. So, Ryan, what do we know about who President Trump might pardon? Paul Manafort, who was President Trump's campaign chairman for part of the 2016 campaign,

was convicted as part of the Mueller investigation, sentenced to more than seven and a half years in prison. He's someone who the president could certainly pardon on his way out the door. Rick Gates was Manafort's deputy. I spoke with him this week. He said he has not been in touch with the White House about a potential pardon, but he said that he would gladly accept one from the president. So you have those figures from the Russia probe. But you also have Steve Bannon, the president's former chief strategist, who is facing federal indictment in New York on fraud charges. He's someone who might be looking for one.

And then you have Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney himself, who was under federal investigation in New York. It's unclear where that investigation stands at this point in time. That's a list of big names of folks who might be considered for a potential pardon. The thing that fascinates me about this whole conversation is that typically presidents do controversial pardons at the very end of their presidency. You know, if you want to have a political future, you may not want to do that pardon. But, hey, you don't need a political future. You're going to be an ex-president. But President Trump, as we're going to talk about later in the podcast, has been entertaining the idea of running in 2024. So why would you do all of these super controversial pardons? But then you think, hey, wait, he's done a ton of super controversial pardons and commutations already when he was running, you know, when he was definitely trying to run for reelection in 2020. So like, you know, do any rules apply? Maybe not. And at the same time, you know, he's pushing baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the

2020 election being rigged and stolen from him. So I guess what would a controversial pardon be in comparison to that? You know, Ryan, you just mentioned the president's allegations of voter fraud. And it's worth pointing out that Attorney General William Barr told the Associated Press this week that the Justice Department had uncovered no evidence of voter fraud that could change the outcome of this election. And Ryan, I mean, that's significant because it is a different tone, clearly, than what the president has been saying. Well, it directly contradicts what the president has been saying. Not just a different tone, yeah.

And it's particularly notable because this is coming from Barr. Barr has been kind of walking in lockstep with the president in the run up to the election with these false claims about the security of mail-in voting and how it was all susceptible to kind of rampant fraud. And now here we are a month after the election and Barr finally comes out and says, look, the FBI has looked into allegations. U.S. attorneys have looked into allegations around this vote, and they have uncovered no evidence to date that would indicate widespread voter fraud to the extent that it would change the outcome of the election. So we have heard this from other officials, something along these lines. But to hear this from Barr himself is a big deal. All right. Well, Ryan, thanks a bunch. We will talk to you more later. Sounds good. Bye.

Bye bye. And when we get back, we'll talk about what President Trump plans to do after leaving office. Mitch McConnell has spent decades making sure there is more money in politics, not less. Why? We do it because we'd like to win. But all along, one person opposed him on this. Someone in his own party. There's too much money washing around, and this money makes good people do bad things and bad people do worse things. McConnell versus McCain on NPR's Embedded Podcast. And we're back, and we're joined now by NPR White House correspondent

Franco Ordonez. Hey there, Franco. Hey there. Great to be here. So I am very excited to have both you and Tam on in this portion because you all have some really fascinating reporting about the president's plans after leaving office. I know he has not yet conceded, but it sounds like he's already thinking about 2024. Yeah, no, no doubt. You know, Tam and I have been talking with campaign officials and people close to the campaign who say the president is very seriously considering launching a bid in 2024. I mean, that, you know, I talked with a campaign official who said that he continues to actively fight, you know, alleged fraud, which we've often reported, you know,

is not widespread. But if those things do not exist, that President Trump is very seriously considering a run in 2024. And there's a lot of thinking going into this. It's not just an idea. There's some strategy involved. I'm told by another former campaign advisor who is still very close with those in the loop on the top sphere, who tells me that the president is considering announcing his 2024 bid either in January, either by the end of the year, early January and possibly or likely the day before Inauguration Day of President-elect Joe Biden, you know, say January 19th or that weekend in order to kind of like overcast Joe Biden's inauguration. So it kind of disrupts the narrative. And so there's a lot going to be a lot of not only is there going to be talk about Joe Biden, but that there would also be talk about President Trump. Though I will say that campaign aide who I spoke with said that in planning meetings that he's been a part of, there hasn't been anything that concrete. He doesn't doubt that the president

may be talking about that, but that that is not, you know, a concrete plan at this point. But running in 2024, that is something the president is very, very seriously considering and would dangle out, if nothing else, as his time in the White House comes to a close. So it sounds like collectively, you all spoke with three sources who confirmed that the president is mulling over this idea of a 2024 bid. You know, that sounds like it's serious enough if, you know, at least three people you all have talked to are saying that. So talk to me a bit about what his motivation is for wanting to jump back into politics. And why would he want to do that? And he'd be, what, 78 years old at that

point? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of reasons that the president would be considering this. One is that he is allergic to losing. And obviously, he's not admitting publicly that he lost. But to be able to go out there and say, I'm going to get redemption, is something that is very much part of the narrative that the president has built around any number of other failures in the past. Also, he is hugely popular with Republicans, with his base. He got more than 70 million votes in 2020. And that means that he would be a dominant force in the Republican Party if he is still in politics and not just back to being a former president doing business. No question. You know, the former officials that I've spoken to say this would specifically freeze out other Republicans who may be considering a bid of their own. One of them put it to me, you know, kind of half joking,

you know, like, Nikki, who? Larry Hogan, who? I mean, this would really hurt them because they would not know what to do. I mean, just as Tam says, you know, the president has such strong support among Republicans that they would be kind of left in this realm of uncertainty. So there is some serious strategy about that. And we should be clear that Nikki Haley and Larry Hogan, who you just mentioned, these are both Republicans, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, Larry Hogan, the current Republican governor here in Maryland, who have, you know, seemed to express interest in running for president in a few years. And it sounds like what you're saying is nobody would give them really even a second

glance if Trump is in the race. I don't know. I don't know if I'd want to say they wouldn't give him a second glance, but certainly it would kind of like it would certainly make them think twice or three times about, you know, moving forward. And it's not only them. It's also Tom, Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio. All three of those have also been kind of wanting some of, you know, Trump voters. So this is this would cause serious complications for them. I mean, it does make me also wonder what kind of environment this would create for a Joe Biden administration. I mean, it seems like from the outset of his campaign, Biden has been fairly optimistic about the idea that once he was able to step into the White House, and once Donald Trump was off the scene, that he would be able

to work with Republicans in Congress. And in fact, he gave an interview with Tom Friedman of the New York Times just earlier this week, where he talked about the fact that, you know, once Trump is gone, he felt like not he didn't think that sort of ugliness that we've seen in some of American politics would continue. He thought that maybe there would be 20, 25% of it, but he didn't really think that it would continue. But it makes me wonder if, if Donald Trump isn't gone from the scene, as he thinks, what happens to his kind of quest for bipartisanship? Well, I think a big part of what's going on here, and Franco can talk to this, too, but a big part of this is trying to delegitimize the the win that Joe Biden got. You know, all of President Trump's I've been robbed.

It's fraud, all of the, you know, he put out a 46 minute video he lost the popular vote or, you know, there was the Russia investigation. And so Trump and his allies have no interest in giving Biden any easier time than they feel that Trump had. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, there's kind of two minds that I've been, you know, when I speak with Republicans on this. On the one hand, some will say that, you know, this disruption, this chaos could actually help Biden and that people are tired of the chaos. They're tired of, you know, the uncertainty and, you know, just non-regular government. On the other hand, though, like Tam says, anything that kind of keeps the Trump supporters kind of invigorated does not help Biden. Anything that shows that America is still kind of divided, that would hurt Biden and possibly help President Trump. All right. Well, we will leave it there for now. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the Joe Biden

transition. I'm Tamara Keefe. I cover the White House. And I'm Franco Ordonez. I also cover the White House. And thank you all for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.