The NPR Politics Podcast - Joe Biden Won The Election—But He's Still Left Waiting In The Wings.

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

As President Trump refuses to concede the election Joe Biden won, Biden warns that that lack of cooperation on the transition could lead to even more deaths from the coronavirus.This episode: reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, correspondent Scott Detrow, and White House 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 Karl Hepekoski, calling from outside my house in Harlem, Netherlands, where I'm about to head out on a run of 26.2 miles, which is definitely not the Athens Marathon I've been training for. This podcast was recorded at 2.05pm on November 19th. Things may have changed by the time you listen to it. Enjoy the show. Very cool, very cool. I wonder if he hangs out with british scott

danielle you you kind of jerry-rigged your own marathon right yeah just a few weeks ago i i did it just outside of dc it was muddy and rainy and cold um good props to our listener as well all right all right hey there it is the npr politics podcast i'm danielle kurtzleben i cover politics i'm scott detrow i'm covering the b transition. And I just had to add that Danielle encouraged everyone else to do this. I ran 2.2 miles that day while she ran 26.2. Close enough. And I'm Franco Ordonez. I cover the White House. And I run occasionally. Okay. President-elect Joe Biden is preparing to enter the White House. He is making personnel choices. He's considering what first actions he might take. And all of that normal activity is taking place amid an extraordinary situation, with President Trump refusing to acknowledge that he lost the election and with a deadly pandemic raging. So we're going to start with that latter point. 250,000 Americans have died of the disease and the outbreak is continuing to get worse. Joe Biden spoke bluntly earlier this week about the real consequences of not working together as the coronavirus pandemic worsens.

More people may die if we don't coordinate. Look, as my chief of staff Ron Kl, would say, who handled Ebola, a vaccine is important. It's of little use until you're vaccinated. So how do we get the vaccine? How do we get over 300 million Americans vaccinated? What's the game plan? It's a huge, huge, huge undertaking. Scott, you've been following the Biden camp closely. What have they been saying about how they want to move forward on combating the disease as inauguration approaches? Sure. Well, the central idea of Biden's plan for confronting the pandemic is to have a centralized

and aggressive federal response to this. He wants to make decisions in the White House with White House advisors and work with all 50 states to coordinate and make sure the states are all the same page, which is just really the polar opposite of a lot of the ways that the Trump administration has approached this, leaving it to a state by state basis and frankly, checking out for large periods of time, especially when it comes to presidential involvement in all of this. And, you know, Biden has been trying to walk a tricky line here. He's trying to calm down the tensions that are really flaring right now, as President Trump refuses to concede, tries to take legal steps to try and overturn the results

of an election. A lot of the times Biden is saying this will sort itself out. But when it comes to COVID, he and his advisors have a very different message. You heard Biden say more people might die. His COVID advisors were telling reporters earlier this week, there's two big problems with this lack of a formal transition right now. The first is that they're not able to talk directly to the government officials and scientists working on COVID. The second is they don't have the amount of data that the federal government has. You know, Biden and his team are trying to make decisions off of public data. They want to see the much more granular and minute-by-minute information that the federal government has about how this pandemic is surging everywhere.

Right. Well, and that brings us to another point, because, of course, there are federal agencies with the CDC, those sorts of places do and say, are surrounding coronavirus. But then there's also what Congress does, what kind of relief efforts they do. So let's talk about bipartisanship for a second, because Joe Biden, one of his big selling points on the trail was, hey, I can work with Republican leaders, Republicans in Congress. And many of those people have not acknowledged that he has won the election. So I'm wondering, both of you, how do you get deals done on something like COVID relief? It's a huge effort in this kind of environment.

I mean, it's tough. I mean, frankly, from the White House side, from the president's side, I mean, we're not seeing much from the president. You know, very little action except for fighting the election results. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was on the Hill, but he's also not giving a very optimistic account of, you know, the possibility of the deal. He's saying, you know, the onus is really on the House and Senate. He blames the House for not trying to negotiate. I mean, I think this is, you know, this is just kind of another example of the White House kind of pulling back from the table after President Trump's loss to Joe Biden. You know, it is what it is. You know, actually, literally, as we are speaking right now, Joe Biden is in a meeting with a

virtual meeting with a handful of governors, the governors who are at the executive committee of the National Governors Association. That involves several Republicans. Notably, it's it's a few of the more moderate Republicans in the world. Larry Hogan of Maryland, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, but a few others as well. This is a transition meeting involving Republicans, which it's sad and strange that that's a notable thing to say, but it is, and that's happening right now. So you're seeing Biden try and work around this blockade in ways that he can. He continues to be optimistic that he can strike a deal with Republican leadership once he actually is president. All right. Well, I want to switch gears here to a thing both of you mentioned about

Trump's refusal to accept the results of the election. So Franco, I want to switch gears here to a thing both of you mentioned about Trump's refusal to accept the results of the election. So, Franco, I want to ask you about a more granular detail about the mechanics of transition. There is a political appointee at the GSA whose job is to allow the transition to go forward, and she is following Trump's lead and refusing to do that. So tell us more about her in that situation. Right. Emily Murphy, she is the administrator for the General Services Administration. Her role basically is to sign the paperwork that would officially turn over, you know, millions of dollars so that the Biden team can start hiring people and frankly get to work. That gives them access to government officials, classified materials, also office space in the agencies, equipment that they need. You know, remember all these agency review teams that President-elect Biden has set up, you know, to review the State Department, to review the National Security Council. All these groups of individuals, what they are hoping to do is to get in those buildings and talk to the people there

so they can set up and know where to put their own people. But because of this situation, because Ms. Murphy has not signed that paperwork, they can't get in the building. They can't talk to these officials. So they're limited basically to talking to former officials and people like think tanks to try to kind of do detective work to get information. And it's frankly just another example of how President Trump is making this hard. And we should say the reason the GSA is giving for why they have not yet ascertained the election results is because the president is contesting some of those election results and that they aren't going to do their part until that process is finished. Scott, I have one

more question for you. You mentioned a little while ago Biden has sort of downplayed Trump's refusal to accept the results of the election, COVID data aside. Do we have any other sense of what his thinking is on that, on why he might be downplaying it or not being too loud about that? It's a great question. And I'm really interested to see how much the tone changes in the coming days. Because, you know, I mean, going back to the end of the campaign, Joe Biden has had this this goal of trying to lower tensions, lower anger throughout the country. I think he also thinks the more oxygen that you give this idea that he didn't win the presidential election, the more it becomes a big deal. So he's just trying to say, look, I know I won. I'm getting ready to be president. This other stuff is just nonsense. But we have seen on so many fronts, we did an entire podcast about it

yesterday, ways that this Trump refusal to concede reality is starting to play out in the real world. There's more and more actual pressure on actual county and state level officials to try and overturn election results. I think you might see Biden's message change on that a little bit as this becomes more real. All right, well, we're going to take a quick break right now. And when we come back, we're going to talk about Biden and executive orders. This message comes from NPR sponsor Headspace. Life can be stressful, but 2020 has challenged even the most difficult times of life. You need stress relief that goes beyond quick fixes. That's Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations and an easy-to-use app. Need help falling asleep?

Headspace has wind-down sessions. Go to headspace.com slash NPR for a free month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every situation. If you need a break from the news, Pop Culture Happy Hour now has you covered five days a week. We're here to help you find new TV shows, movies, music, books, and video games to keep you company in these difficult times. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. Okay, we are back. We have talked about the lack of bipartisan cooperation both today and quite a bit on this podcast. And so when Biden takes office, that leaves one alternative in a divided Washington, the executive order. Franco, I want to start with you to lay some groundwork here. This is

something that Biden could look a lot like President Trump on. So tell us a little bit about Trump's record on executive orders. How is he different and similar to past presidents on this? Right. I mean, certainly President Trump is not the first to use his executive powers to make decisions and do things that he feels that or any president feels that Congress couldn't resolve on their own. But Trump, you know, he took it to a much different level. And he started off with the travel ban on visitors from Muslim majority nations. You know, he did that within a week of taking office back in 2017. And since then, he's used, you know, he's used the power of his pen on so many different things, including the crackdown on immigration, the border wall, restrictions to asylum seekers and reductions in

environmental protections. So he's really carved out this a way of governing in ways that hasn't been done before. And Scott, I want to turn to you because you reported this week about some people from the Obama orbit pushing Joe Biden to use executive orders pretty heavily when he takes office. Tell us more about what you learned from them. Yeah, it was interesting. Asma and I both made some calls. I talked to Dennis McDonough, who was Barack Obama's chief of staff for almost all of the second term. And she talked to Rahm Emanuel, who was, of course, his first chief of staff. Independently, and almost at the exact same time, they both made the same argument to both of us. And they said, you know what,

Joe Biden should follow Donald Trump's lead on that front. He should unapologetically do as much as he can with executive orders. You know, obviously, Biden would want to and would have to deal with Congress on a lot of fronts, but Emanuel made another point saying, especially if Republicans control the Senate, and no matter what, it's going to be tight in either party, the more Biden can do via executive order, the less he has to negotiate with Congress. The fewer things you have to clog up the legislative pipeline with allows you to concentrate your political capital in that legislative front. So it's an interesting argument. And and you're also seeing just tremendous pressure from progressive groups for Biden to do as much as he can. Because remember, he ran on this enormous agenda, kind of assuming that Democrats

would not only win back the Senate, but maybe get rid of the filibuster. Now they have to figure out different ways to get this stuff done. The flip side, though, is taking executive action can be undone. And that is something that is being discussed. I mean, you have Joe Biden pledging to undo many of the executive actions that Trump took. Well, another president could just do the same thing. I mean, I think there's a lot of debate about whether do we want short-term gains or do we want to meet long-term objectives? Right. And depending on who the next president is, we could just have more of this sort of executive policy whiplash. But well, so in that vein, Scott, tell us what kind of other things besides undoing many of Trump's actions is Biden being pushed to

do? Yeah, yeah. And we should just say, I think Biden's going to sign many different executive orders his very first day in office, kind of continuing the flip-flop-flip of Obama policies that were undone now being redone. But, you know, I focused a lot in the story I did on the area of climate because, of course, Biden has promised this $2 trillion plan. He wants to get the country almost entirely on renewable green energy in like two decades. You know, we've done a lot of podcasts getting into the weeds on that, talking to climate advocates saying, you can do this. You can do this through EPA rulemaking. You can do this through executive action. You can do this through the choices the federal

government makes and how it spends its money. We're also seeing a really big conversation right now led by Elizabeth Warren and others saying that Joe Biden could have the power to get rid of tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt for millions of people across the country. Biden has said that he is willing to do this in possibly a more targeted way. But Warren and other progressives are saying, go big, eliminate as much student loan debt as you can with the executive order. I mean, I suppose they also sort of see that as stimulus during a pandemic, right? That it's, it seems even more pressing now, correct? Right. And we've seen over the course of this year,

there were steps taken to freeze student loan payments. I'll be honest, I'm somebody with a little bit of student debt left. I was appreciating not having to pay those bills or kind of pay them in a more targeted way without having to worry about interest. You know, people all over the country in a whole bunch of different economic situations have seen the effect of that this year, and they want more of it, especially as we're looking at a lot of indicators that the economy is getting bad again as the pandemic gets worse. All right, we're going to leave it there for now. I am Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm covering the Biden transition. And I'm Franco Ordonez. I cover the White House.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.