The NPR Politics Podcast - Joe Biden Is Fed Up With Trump's Election Conspiracies

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

On the day electors around the country voted to confirm his victory, President-elect Joe Biden expressed his frustration, in a primetime speech, with the baseless election conspiracies spouted by President Trump and fellow Republicans.This episode: correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.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

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the Biden transition. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And it's 8.25 p.m. on Monday, December 14th. And tonight, Joe Biden just wrapped a speech. The president-elect has been promising to be a president who unites all Americans. And tonight, shortly after the Electoral College cast their ballots, he made a short speech calling on President Trump and Republicans to finally accept the 2020 election results,

saying it's time to move on for the good of the country. Today, a member of the Electoral College, representing the certified winner, cast their votes for vice president of the Electoral College, representing the certified winner, cast their votes for president and vice president of the United States in an act just as old as our nation itself. And once again, in America, the rule of law, our Constitution, and the will of the people prevail. Our democracy pushed, tested, threatened, proved to be resilient, true and

strong. Scott, earlier today, we did a podcast with Miles Parks in which we talked about how normally we don't even pay attention to the Electoral College. And tonight, I think it's worth noting that normally president-elects don't give national addresses following the Electoral College either. Nope, nope. But these are not normal times. In fact, literally, as you said that, an email popped up saying, President Trump's path to victory on January 6. You know, this is not, which is, of course, clearly not true. Let me just say that out loud. And when Biden's transition office sent out excerpts of the speech, I read it and I thought, this feels like it might be a little tone deaf to the moment because it was a lot of the stuff we've been hearing from Joe

Biden all along talking about how he'll be a president for all Americans, how he'll try to unify the country. One line that jumped out was faith in our institutions held. And the reason I say tone deaf is because you have one large chunk of the country who has decided following President Trump's lead that there was illegitimacy here, that Joe Biden was not somehow elected president of the United States. And you have the people who voted for Joe Biden being incredibly troubled by what's been going on and how long this has lasted. So I say that all to say that, you know, when Biden started to give the speech, it was notable that it did shift to a different gear. And for really the very first time of this entire

post-election period, Biden forcefully attacked what President Trump has been trying to do. Every single avenue was made available to President Trump to contest the results. He took full advantage of each and every one of those avenues. President Trump was denied no course of action he wanted to take. He took his case to Republican governors and Republican secretary of state, as he criticized many of them, to Republican state legislatures, to Republican-appointed judges at every level. And in a case decided after the Supreme Court's latest rejection, a judge appointed by President Trump wrote, quote, this court has allowed the plaintiff the chance to make his case and he is lost on the merits. End of quote. Lost on the merits.

Yeah, Mara, it's Biden has been the transition has been very muted in all the weeks where the Republicans have been challenging it in court. It's not that they haven't been responding, but they haven't been like counterpunching at every turn. And tonight it felt like Biden was finally sort of pushing back on all the nonsense. I thought it was a very tough speech about something that I think is not going to be over on January 20, which is that a big chunk of one of the two parties in America does not believe that this election, which has been ruled free and fair by judge after judge after judge, should stand. And they believe it should be overturned. You had 126, over half the Republicans in the House of Representatives, sign on to the suit brought by Texas that would have

overturned 20 million votes in four states, four states that Donald Trump happened to have lost. And that's where we are today. So Joe Biden has a monumental task now, not just to turn his no-coat-tails election into political capital, but also to address what former President Barack Obama has called an epistemological crisis, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, where, you know, a big chunk of voters just do not believe that this election resulted in Joe Biden's win. Has the Biden campaign, either Biden himself or his orbit, his allies, given any indication of what he intends to do when he says he wants to unite all Americans? What does that look like? How do you go about that in a country that's this divided? And

I think like on nights like this, I'm not sure if people didn't vote for Joe Biden. They're not even paying attention to what he's saying in speeches like this. I mean, I think it starts with tone, right? And I think tone does matter because the primary way we, you know, see and hear what a president is doing is what they say themselves. I think he's not going to rage tweet. Honestly, that goes a pretty long way compared to the status quo. I think he's not going to frame every single thing he talks about as us versus them, Democrats and Republicans, singling out Republicans the way that President Trump does. I think he's going to kind of speak in these broad themes that you've been hearing him for the entirety of his presidential campaign and in

the high profile speeches of the last month, you know, including the one that where he declared victory. I think that's the type of way that Joe Biden is going to talk. And I think the next step and where it gets a lot trickier is how he governs and what sort of policies he puts in place, because he has made a lot of promises to progressive voters that he is going to have a pretty progressive agenda. And how do you do that and still kind of have this unifying theme? And I think the bigger question is something that you've seen President Obama almost talk about with a little bit of regret as he's done his memoir tour of if one side is reaching out

and saying, I want to work for all people, I want to come to the middle, I want to cut a deal. And the other side is saying, I even think you're a legitimate president. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to try and block everything you do. At one point, is that tactic maybe not the best tactic to take? Well, you know, Democrats I've talked to have said the trick is for Joe Biden to gain some political leverage without having it all dependent on what Mitch McConnell sees in his own political interest. In other words, he has to take his case to the American people. Here are the very popular things that I want to get done, whether it's an infrastructure bill or raising the federal minimum wage, things that have big bipartisan

consensus on among the voters. And here's why I can't get it done, even though I've reached out. I don't think Joe Biden is naive. I think that the searing experience of the Obama-Biden administration, where you had Mitch McConnell state plainly, my number one goal is to make Barack Obama a one-term president. I think he knows what he's up against, but this is going to be tough. But I agree with Scott. He's going to have to pick policies that are broadly popular. He's also going to have to be seen doing the things that got him elected. He was considered to be a competent, empathetic person who did reach across the aisle. He's going to have to go visit with people who didn't vote for him, sit down with them in red states, talk to them about why his policies would help them.

You know, there are a lot of things that he can do. This is his brand. And every day, the Biden administration has to remind voters about why they wanted him. And talk about not rage treating. I think that's certainly not going to happen. But he's also was one of the things he had to has a mandate for is to just turn the volume down on the culture wars. Yeah. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about some news out of the Trump administration tonight that William Barr is out as Attorney General. Today, some people argue that the Supreme Court has more power than all other branches of government. But when and how did the Supreme Court end up getting the final say?

How the court became more powerful than anything the framers could have imagined. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. And we're back. And one of the closest political allies of the president, Attorney General William Barr, is out. President Trump tweeted tonight that he had had, in his words, a nice meeting with the attorney general, that they had a good relationship and that he would be leaving his post just before Christmas. Mara, you know, Barr was someone who was a very close political ally of the president. But after the election, that relationship has really been tested. No, during the election, Barr was talking about the possibility of widespread fraud. After the

election, he looked into it and said he just didn't see any or at least not enough that would change the course of the election. He called it as he saw it. And the president didn't like that at all. And he's been complaining about Barr in public. And there were lots of reports that he was considering firing him. Exactly what we want to call this is unclear, but Barr did write a resignation letter. He's leaving a couple weeks before the end of the term. Does that mean that he didn't want to be fired? Or does that mean that the president wants somebody at the Justice Department who won't push back against pardons that he wants to give out? It's unclear about why this happened right now. But like so many other top officials in the Trump administration,

Barr was yet another person that Donald Trump hired and then soured on and then got rid of. The tone of the tweet, to me, is very different than when people like former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson or former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis were out. It was clearly much more confrontational then than this one seems to be, at least from the Twitter tone. But my question, Maren, you might know this better than anyone, is it unusual for people to leave administrations at this point, you know, in the final weeks of an administration? I can't recall it happening. Yes. And don't forget that he also fired a lot of people at the Pentagon recently.

He did a kind of house cleaning there. He's fired Christopher Krebs, who was in charge of cybersecurity around the election. Donald Trump has fired a lot of people since November 3rd. Scott, obviously a lot of anticipation right now about when Joe Biden's going to name his attorney general. What do we know about the status of that? Yeah, Kerry Johnson has been reporting that this has taken longer than any of the other most high profile cabinet positions. And that's because the Biden administration, the Biden transition is looking at a lot of factors at

once, and they don't all go together. They want somebody with experience. They want somebody who can walk into the Department of Justice and really clean up a lot of, in the view of Biden's orbit, tremendous damage that has been done over the last few years, especially when it comes to the way that politics has been injected into the legal process. They also want to make sure that they have a diverse cabinet. Biden has promised the most diverse cabinet process. They also want to make sure that they have a diverse cabinet. Biden has promised the most diverse cabinet ever. He's gotten a lot of pressure, especially as a lot of the people he has named are people who have been around democratic politics for a long time, came from the Obama administration. And Kerry has reported that a lot of the front

runners for attorney general are not people of color. So the Biden transition is working very hard to make sure that other members of DOJ top leadership would be. But we're still waiting for that pick. And certainly there's no other cabinet position that hasn't been named yet that's anywhere near that level of high profile. It seems like one of the politically trickiest jobs to fill, Mara, because on the one hand, AG is something that a lot of people on the left are really looking forward to. They want to know who it is. But it's also got to be somebody that can get through a very narrow Senate one way or another and through that confirmation process. And that seems like a bit of a unicorn in politics right now.

Well, we also don't know how open, if the Republicans maintain the majority in the Senate, how open they are to confirming a large number of Biden picks. Do they want to pursue a scorched earth strategy to say that they don't think he's legitimate or not? But the thing about the attorney general, which is interesting also, is Biden has said he, when he's been asked the question, should Donald Trump be prosecuted? And he has communicated, Scott can tell me if I'm wrong, that he's not that interested in that. But at the same time, he has also vowed to give his attorney general and his Justice Department a large degree of independence. Yeah, yeah, which again, two things that are hard to combine, which I guess might be the theme of the Biden DOJ.

All right, well, we're gonna leave it there for tonight. But we'll be back in your feeds as usual tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis, I cover Congress. leave it there for tonight, but we'll be back in your feeds as usual tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the Biden transition. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.