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Just a couple days after President Biden's disastrous debate performance. I'm telling y'all, you better show up and show out with them ballots. Actress Taraji P. Henson gave a speech at the BET Awards. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up! Where she mentioned something called Project 2025.
A Republican blueprint for the next conservative president, presumably Donald Trump. And in the days since, it seemed like it's everywhere.
More and more people online are talking about Project 2025. We should all be absolutely terrified of what's in Project 2025. On social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The far-right conservatives are revealing their hand now. They have given us the blueprint on what they want to enact in the next conservative presidency.
A lot of people have expressed alarm. If you cannot afford to move out of this country within the next year, I need you to take Project 2025 and Trump potentially getting reelected very seriously. I just read what Trump's Project 2025 would do to LGBTQ people, and you've got to see this. So Project 2025 is what Donald Trump and the
Republican Party are trying to push through and it will literally change the way that our government works. And it's so insane. And let's go through it. It is a thorough plan for how they're going to change the country fundamentally to a place that is unrecognizable to almost all of us. And Democrats are seizing on to that concern, particularly as President Biden faces mounting questions about the viability of his candidacy.
On Wednesday morning, Biden himself invoked Project 2025 on social media. Project 2025 will destroy America. Look it up. While Donald Trump has also posted recently, claiming ignorance. Trump wrote, I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who's behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying, and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.
This is made for an awkward reality, with Biden pinning Project 2025 on Trump, as Trump is distancing himself from it, saying he's never heard of it and doesn't know who's behind it. So today, what Project 2025 is and where it fits in this mess of an election. From The New York Times, I'm Astead Herndon. This is The Run-Up.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Heritage Foundation's Director of Project 2025, Paul Banz. A little over a year ago, the Conservative Heritage Foundation held a summit launching Project 2025. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for...
What we're doing here is Project 2025. What is Project 2025? It is everyone here. This is the movement. We are going to be prepared day one, January 20, 2025, to hit the ground running as conservatives to really help the next president. Back in 2016, when Trump first won the presidency, his team and a lot of conservative groups weren't prepared for what came next.
especially the many decisions around policy and personnel. So this time, they are thinking ahead and planning for a Trump victory. But what we're doing is systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state. At its core, that's what Project 2025 is.
It's a plan. Today we came out with our policy book, Mandate for Leadership. This sets the table for what conservatives want in their next standard-bearer. It includes an over 800-page handbook full of policy proposals. Our common theme is to take down the administrative state, the bureaucracy. And you're going to, yeah, it's not as easy done as it is said. A lot of them are red meat for conservatives.
like the desire to expand executive power, crack down on abortion rights, and use the military for immigration enforcement. But some proposals are more niche, like getting rid of the Department of Education, criminalizing pornography, and eliminating the term gender from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, and piece of legislation that exists. And many of the ideas don't align with the broader electorate,
Which might be one reason Trump is trying to distance himself from the project. My colleague Jonathan Swan, along with Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage, has been reporting on Project 2025 and Trump's plans for a possible second term for a long time. Hey, mate. How's it going? Good. So I called him.
Every four years, there is an effort by conservative groups to prepare policy plans and personnel for the next Republican administration.
What is different this time is the scale of it. So you have this effort that's been called Project 2025. It's an initiative that is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that is very powerful. But what's different is they have convened more than 100 different conservative groups under their umbrella to
And under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, they're working together to develop lists of people to fill administration jobs in the second term. People who have been vetted as ideologically sound and in many cases, people who are believed to be loyal or would be loyal to Donald Trump. Right.
And on the policy side, they're developing both big picture principles that they wrote a very extensive, almost 900 page book on all of this. And they're also developing more granular plans. So they're actually writing executive orders right now that could be really just picked up and used by Donald Trump if he gets elected. They are not affiliated with
with the Trump campaign, but Project 2025, the people who are leading both the personnel and the policy side of the initiative are people who served in senior roles in the first term of the Trump administration. And crucially, they're people who Trump himself trusts, and they would likely serve in senior roles in a second term. I will just single out two in particular. On the policy side, Russell Vogt,
who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump administration. He is close to Donald Trump. Trump likes him, talks to him, trusts him. He will probably serve in an important role in a second term. On the personnel side, John McEntee.
He was Donald Trump's body man initially and then became the head of presidential personnel. And Trump empowered him at the start of 2020 to purge the federal government of people who were disloyal to him. So he is playing a key role in shaping these of the personnel list for Project 2025. Okay. So we know that Trump has said that he knows nothing about the project.
We also know that Donald Trump isn't always an honest narrator. So how should we separate his claims of not knowing anything about the project and the reality that some of those people are involved in its creation?
Well, two things can be true at once. There is no human on earth less interested in that 900-page book of policies than Donald Trump. I guarantee you he hasn't cracked open that book. In fact, not only is he not interested in transition planning, he's not interested in
He's actively hostile to it. So when you talk to people who are trying to get him to focus on your transition, you know, Mr. President, you're probably going to win this election. This is what many of them believe. We really need to get focused on planning for the transition to power.
They cannot get him to engage on that subject. He sees it as a distraction from the task of winning the election. So he may well know very little about this. He knows the people involved very well, but he's not exactly in the weeds on this. However, that's a separate question from how many of these plans will end up being implemented. Yeah.
And the likely answer is a reasonable amount of them because there is really significant overlap between what is being put out through Project 2025 and the plans that Donald Trump himself has articulated in campaign speeches and in the policy section on his website, which is called Agenda 47.
I'll give you a few examples that are salient. The Project 2025 immigration plans are extremely aggressive, including militarizing the southern border. Donald Trump himself has promised the biggest deportation operation in American history, including using the military for domestic law enforcement as it relates to immigration enforcement. Another area would be the Department of Justice.
Project 2025 has...
questioned or challenged the idea, rejected actually is the better word, the notion that the Department of Justice should operate with some degree of independence from White House political control. That suits Donald Trump very well. He has already promised to appoint a quote unquote real special prosecutor to quote unquote go after Joe Biden and his family. That would destroy the post-Watergate norm of a Justice Department that
operates with some degree of independence, particularly with investigations from White House political control. So when you read the mandate document that we just talked about, when you read the Project 2020-05 materials, you find a huge amount of overlap. The book mentions Donald Trump hundreds of times, praises him, and many of his instincts are reflected in that document, which stands to reason because the people who wrote it are people that he
had in senior positions in his first term. How seriously do you think we should take this project? We should take it seriously, as we have in our reporting, but we should not treat it as Trump campaign plans. And there are certain areas where I think it would be misleading to do that. Donald Trump himself has really bucked the social conservative faction of his party on abortion recently. He has...
opposed a national abortion ban, much to the consternation of many of these anti-abortion groups. I think there's a decent chance, given that he doesn't exactly have deeply held views on abortion and he thinks that the issue is politically toxic, I think there's a decent chance that
In that area, for example, he doesn't go as far as they want him to go. So Project 2025 should be treated very seriously because the people riding it are likely to play serious roles in the second term. Also because Donald Trump himself...
is not exactly a policy wonk and will really appoint people and turn over authority to them. There were whole huge areas of the federal government to which he paid almost no attention when he was president. And the people that he'd appointed to lead those agencies...
who were under almost no supervision from Donald Trump, basically did what they wanted to do and just sort of were waiting for the phone call to say, stop doing what you're doing. And the phone call really never came. So there's a decent chance if he appoints certain people that Project 2225 puts up, that a lot of very conservative policy happens in some of these agencies. And in many cases, very radical policy that represents a significant break with past norms and precedents.
I think one of the reasons this is getting so much attention is because of the words of the leader of the Heritage Foundation. The lead author, Paul Dan, said last year, quote,
said recently, quote, that we are in the process of a second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. I mean, this language feels pretty dramatic. How should we think about the words that are coming from these Project 2025 leaders in relationship to the policy that we see on the page? Well...
The quote you just gave from Paul Danz, Trump himself goes further than that in his own words. He talks about rooting out the Marxists and the communists from the government, destroying the deep state. I guess my point is,
Project 2025 is important and it's, you know, they are going to have to turn to parts of it. Donald Trump, his team doesn't have the bandwidth to find 4,000 people to staff. You know, every time a new party gets into power, 4,000 political appointees are replaced. Donald Trump himself will pick...
the big cabinet role, secretary of state, whatever. But below that level, he's not going to be going, oh, yes, I know who should be the assistant secretary of whatever. You know, they are going to turn to groups like this and their list. So it's important. But like,
You don't need Project 2025 to sort of divine and discern what Donald Trump plans to do. He's told us many times and has put it on his campaign website. So it's like, oh, we've got the magic key. It's like, no, we don't have the freaking magic key. We don't need the magic key. He's told us many times and in many cases gone much further than some of these people have. But like-
I don't know, just play a tape of Trump like at some of these rallies. No, I'm totally with you. I mean, this has come up a lot because we get questions about covering Project 2025. And it's become shorthand, I think, for a lot of people's understanding of what Trumpism looks like. Something that stuck out to me were the things that were in this that he doesn't really talk about. It seemed to have a much bigger focus on.
on kind of what some people call culture war, gender identity issues, about treatment of the LGBTQ community, about mentions of gender and DEI programs being a big priority, where I've always found it very interesting that, like, it doesn't seem like Trump has been as obsessed with those issues as some other corners of the Republican Party. How should we understand where those things kind of fit in the overall policy possibilities of a second Trump term?
I would draw a bit of a distinction within that category that you just laid out. I think a second Trump term absolutely would go to war against any diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government and would absolutely go after anything they could do using their power to curb racism.
transgender, but like any federal protections for trans. Exactly. Like those two things I have no doubt about where Trump differs from where the social conservative movement has been is on gay rights. He doesn't really care. Like for example, the Republican platform that Trump has just pushed through over the quiet, uh,
objections. They haven't really bubbled out that much publicly, but social conservatives basically got bulldozed here. The previous Republican platform defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Trump very deliberately does not have that in this platform. So I think Trump sees that fight. He doesn't really care about that fight. He thinks it's already been won and decided by the left and is not really fighting a rearguard action on that. But
But I think definitely on DEI and trans issues, he will be very aggressive. More with Jonathan after the break.
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I'm Julian Barnes. I'm an intelligence reporter at The New York Times. I try to find out what the U.S. government is keeping secret.
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It takes a lot of time to find people willing to talk about those secrets. Many people with information have a certain agenda or have a certain angle, and that's why it requires talking to a lot of people to make sure that we're not misled and that we give a complete story to our readers. If The New York Times was not reporting these stories, some of them might never come to light. If you want to support this kind of work, you can do that by subscribing to The New York Times.
You mentioned kind of the Republicans are out with the new platform, and we did want to ask you about that. Can you take me through a little bit more of what happened there? And how should we think of this Republican platform versus what he says on the trail or even policy documents like Project 2025? Well, the platform, if you read it, is a couple things. Number one, this is a Trump document. They completely shut out Trump.
the usual activists who shaped these documents. The platform was developed in great secrecy by a very small number of Trump operatives, NAs, and reviewed and with input from Donald Trump himself. Like really, like read, you know, I want it to say this and not this. I'm not suggesting he like edited every line, but really did have input, particularly on the sensitive issues like abortion and gay marriage. But the document is a testament to Donald Trump's
power. That's the way I see this document. It's not particularly useful as a blueprint for what he might do in a second term because it's so vague. I mean, one thing they did very deliberately from this document is just cut it down. I mean, the old document was like 67 pages. They slashed it, slash, slash, slash, slash. And a lot of the sections are just pablum
The foreign policy section is so just platitudes, vague, you know, by design, they really didn't want to give the Democrats opportunities to pick off targets and say, look how radical and extreme this guy is. So to me, the document, because it in a couple of key ways defied democracy,
social conservatives, and they really didn't kick up a huge storm, even though they were shut out of the process and really bulldozed. To me, it's just an indication of how
It's a new level of power and dominance that Donald Trump has over the Republican Party. And I think it foreshadows something about how a second term Donald Trump administration would look like. He still faced some degree of resistance in his first term from elected Republicans. It wasn't a huge amount, but it was a bit. And I think that has eroded.
really substantially in the last four to six years. So that's what I see in the platform. You're right, because, I mean, it doesn't feel like a traditional party platform. It's 20 bullet points that are written in all caps that kind of feel like just the versions of the rally chants that we see, examples of
like unite our country and bring it new levels of success isn't a policy platform more than it is like an affirmation in general. When there's a couple of things that feel more specific, like, you know, cancel the electric vehicle mandate or keep men out of women's sports, the kind of culture things you were talking about earlier. But,
The foreign policy section, as you would say, isn't much of a section at all. Just prevent World War III, restore peace in Europe and the Middle East, and bring the great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our country, all made in America. That's more of a platitude than a platform.
Yeah, and look, there's sections that are more fleshed out immigration and trade. Like, yes, there are the 20 points or whatever, and then, you know, they've got paragraphs on some of these sections, like, later in the document. But, yes, it is a very, very, very pared-down document with far fewer policy specifics.
which was, again, developed in secrecy by Donald Trump's team. This is Donald Trump, not the Republican Party. This is Donald Trump dictating the platform in a way that goes far beyond what we saw in 2016.
Yeah. You know, it strikes me that in this platform and in Project 2025, we are talking about a written policy text for someone who famously kind of governed, you know, from their hip, you know, from the last person who talked to him, easily convinced. I guess one question I have is it feels like the rise of Project 2025 in terms of the zeitgeist is partially because of an increased fear that a lot of Democrats have on the possibility of a second Trump presidency.
If someone were to understand what Trump 2.0 would look like, what is that big difference from last time to this time? I think it's two parts. I think, number one, he is not going to do what he did in the first term to the extent that he did in terms of appointing people who saw their job as protecting America and the world from Donald Trump.
So you had a Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, who fundamentally had a fundamentally different worldview from Donald Trump, who believed in alliances, who had a different view of NATO, and who really saw himself as someone who stood in the way between Donald Trump and what he viewed as chaos. You had someone like a Gary Cohn, economic advisor who fundamentally disagreed with Trump on tariffs and trade.
I think you're going to see people who are much more like-minded and also many of the people that Donald Trump kind of became comfortable with in the last year of his first term, people who are much more ideologically aligned and also who learned a lot in the four years they served in government in the Trump administration. So Stephen Miller in 2020 was a different Stephen Miller than existed in 2017. He had the same ideology, but he learned a lot.
Became much more effective at figuring out how to get what he wanted through muscle it through the executive branch, how to operate the levers of power. So I do think you have people who've gained valuable experience, who know, who know what they're doing to a larger extent, and also who are much more ideologically aligned. I think that's the biggest difference. Mm hmm.
That makes sense. Is there something from this document that you could say would definitely or almost certainly happen in the second Trump term? I'm thinking about the plank like the immigration policy where there seems to be an alignment between what Donald Trump says, what a Project 2025 says, and what a lot of the Republican base says. Is there any place that you think if Donald Trump wins again, this is sure to happen? Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you mentioned immigration. I would mention the civil service. Like in his first term, and I've written a lot about this, in October of 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order that is shorthanded as Schedule F, which effectively reclassifies as many as 50,000 career government officials as officials.
effectively political appointees, removing their employment protections, making it much easier to fire them and replace them with people deemed to be loyal to the president and to his agenda. So
Will Donald Trump re-implement that? Absolutely. He said he will. So that's an example of an area where there is perfect overlap, and I fully anticipate that that will be implemented. If you could kind of point to linchpins that you think would undergird Trump in the second term, just what would be the areas that you think would be the most important to understand what Trump 2.0 could look like, what would those be? Immigration, which is, in terms of policy, his...
biggest focus is most, and frankly, is the area in which there could be the most aggressive and disruptive change. Like if he really does follow through with what he's talking about on mass deportations, the effects of that, the flow on effects in terms of uprooting people from their communities and economic effects, like
would be profound. And then this other area of executive power, which is centralizing power and removing obstruction to his power within the executive branch, rooting out independence, wherever it exists in the executive branch, I think is another really important area. And the third one I'd single out is the Justice Department. How does he use that department? He's talked about getting back at the people who've come after him. At different times he said, my retribution will be...
how successful I make the country because he understands that politically it's not popular to be talking about locking up his enemies, but he's also said he will prosecute Joe Biden. So I think the way he uses the DOJ will be one of the biggest stories in a second term.
You know, one of the goals many people seem here to have is to make sure the Trump administration are ready to kind of act on a policy agenda in day one. How prepared do you think he and his team are to do that? I don't think very prepared at all. I think Heritage and Project 25 will have all the plans ready, but the Trump team still hasn't
formed their transition team. And a large reason for that is because Donald Trump himself just won't engage. It's very hard to get him to engage in discussing transition planning. One of the reasons why 2016...
in 2017, his first year was such a mess, was because he appointed Chris Christie to oversee his transition and then decided that Christie was the wrong guy for it. They literally threw Christie's materials in the trash can, Steve Bannon did, and they started again. And it was just a mess. Now, if they actually get their act together this time, they have the potential to be far more organized than
far more effective than they were in 2017. And if I'm going to lean towards making a prediction, I think they will be more effective because the people involved learned a lot and they will have these materials that have been developed. And despite what Donald Trump says, they will turn to some of this, both personnel and policy plans, because it exists. And
It fills a vacuum and it's been developed by people that he largely trusts. So I think it's an important project. I think we should pay very close attention to it, but with some nuance and sophistication rather than just sort of, oh, this is the Trump campaign. Yeah. You know, we've been hearing from some people who are reevaluating the Trump presidency because of Biden's weak debate performance. What are the central things you think people should know that we do know through reporting like yours about what that could look like?
Well, again, I don't think there's a huge amount of mystery here. Like Donald Trump has said all of this out loud. Like this is not, this is not some great investigative project. I mean, I don't know what people read his fricking campaign website. Go and look at it. He said, or look at his, like he said it out loud. Listen to a couple of tapes. Like, you know,
It's not Woodward and Bernstein here. I mean, it's like... I think actually people like, people want it to be Woodward and Bernstein. I know. It's actually a comforting thing for it to be Woodward and Bernstein. What's the secret plan? There's no secret plan. He said it all out loud. Like, what are you talking about? Thank you so much, Jonathan, for your time. We appreciate it. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. So, like Jonathan said...
Project 2025 isn't some secret document or a complete picture of what a Trump second term could look like. But it also doesn't feel right to simply call it a policy handbook. It's a stark reminder of the stakes of this November's election and the binary choice that voters have in front of them. An embattled Democratic candidate who most Americans think is too old to serve four more years versus a convicted felon
who is backed by a conservative movement that is looking to fundamentally reshape America and has the plan to do it.
Thank you.
That's the run-in for Thursday, July 11, 2024. And now, the rundown. This has been a crucial week for Joe Biden, as he faces mounting pressure over his fitness to serve in office. ♪
As of Wednesday evening, the chorus of people calling for Biden to step aside included nine House Democrats. Senator Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, wrote in the Washington Post that Biden should withdraw. Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado had said that Trump will win if Biden is the Democratic nominee. And actor and Democratic activist George Clooney, who was just with the president last month at a fundraiser he hosted, called for an open convention in a guest essay for The New York Times.
But for now, it still doesn't look like President Biden or his allies will be swayed. So we wanted to hear directly from someone who is sticking with the president. What's their reasoning and their plan to win? So we called California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents part of the Bay Area and has been a strong supporter of President Biden.
Hello, it's Thad Herndon from the New York Times. Is this Congressman Khanna? Hi, sorry about that. I was trying to get connected. It didn't work. Oh, okay. But we got you now. That's what's most important. I appreciate you taking our time.
Of course. You know, we're talking on Wednesday evening, and of course, many things can still happen. But from where it looks like we're sitting right now, it doesn't seem like there's any major change afoot. And President Biden is still digging in on the course to be the Democratic nominee. I'm going to first start with just a broader question. Do you think that President Biden is the best Democratic candidate suited to be Trump? I believe that he has the votes in the nomination process and
And it's his decision on what to do. Are there other candidates in our party who could defeat Donald Trump? Absolutely. Many of them, though, are unknown and it's taking a risk. And the question of whether he's the best is a decision that he needs to make with the input of his family, close advisors, members of Congress and the grassroots activists. I guess.
Voters have consistently said they thought Biden was too old for a second term. Concerns that were only reinforced during the debate and its aftermath. What should the Biden campaign do to address those concerns? It
He needs to be out there. He needs to have town halls. I would have a 60-minute town hall with voters where they have open questions and he answers those questions. He needs to continue to be out meeting with different voters and the media. And he needs to prosecute the case against Donald Trump as well as offer a vision for what he wants the next four years to be.
Yeah. I'm curious what you're hearing from constituents. You know, polling would tell us that President Biden has put the Democrats in a tough position in a lot of key places to win. I know that you're out in California, but you're someone who has been an open surrogate for Biden. I remember seeing you in New Hampshire making the case for him over the challengers that were there. What have you heard since the debate about voters' confidence in President Biden? I've heard mixed things. I've heard...
Some voters and activists reach out saying we absolutely have to stay with President Biden. He's had a great four years. He can make the case. He's a known quantity. I've had other people have concerns that he is no longer the same Joe Biden and that we he can't win and he's going to hurt our chances down ballot. So I've heard both from people and it's
I think why this debate is so polarized. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm thinking about some of the kind of messaging changes that have happened for the Biden campaign since the debate. They've acknowledged his age. They've acknowledged that he kind of speaks and talks differently. And I kind of wonder why that stuff didn't happen before. As I said, I saw you in New Hampshire at a time when polling and voters were telling us even back then that they thought President Biden was old and maybe too old for a second term. Why do you think it took so long? It wasn't a mistake for Democrats to...
to take so long to address voter concerns specifically when it came to age? Well, the voter concerns were raised throughout the primaries and the president did very well in the primaries. Now, granted, his opposition was Dean Phillips, but he still was getting robust percentages. The uncommitted was 15%, but he was getting strong support. And he had a lot of support from the Democratic activist base.
And so I think that people haven't seen the performance at the debate. And obviously that didn't go well. And now there's been more concern whether he's up for a vigorous campaign. Yeah. You know, I hear you. But I also, you know, we reported back at the time that the White House was doing very explicit efforts to reach out to people.
to kind of make them stay distant from the primary, to make sure folks stayed in the fold, that they were part of the reason that they didn't get more robust challengers on the question of age. Was it a real primary? Can we use that primary as a proof point of voters having a place to weigh in about this question?
Well, it was not a contested primary in a rigorous sense. I mean, Dean Phillips launched the challenge, but he didn't have the name, idea, or the resources to really fight a full primary campaign. But the reason people didn't run is not because of the White House poll then. The reason they didn't run is they saw the poll numbers. I saw the poll numbers. I mean, I
was never contemplating running, but I saw the poll numbers for Biden, and he was very, very, very strong among Democratic primary voters. Remember, this was coming off a big win in the midterm where we overperformed. And so I think that that wouldn't be the case today. You would probably have a Whitmer or a Newsom beat him, but it was the case back then.
It does feel like there's a little distance between the seriousness of the stakes that Democrats have communicated to voters and to others for a long time. And this idea that it's just President Biden's decision on this front. Why wouldn't you kind of call for something more actively if you felt that he wasn't mounting a type of campaign that could beat Donald Trump in November? Because, you know, as I hear from Democrats, democracy is on the line.
Well, but democracy ultimately is respecting the democratic process. We had a nominee chosen, and if others chose not to run, that still was the process. No one prohibited them or discouraged them explicitly from running. And so I think it has to be a process where President Biden is making that decision and given the space to make that decision. And I guess I still have confidence in
in him to be clear-eyed in making that decision. Right now, do you think the Democrats are in a position to win the presidency, House and Senate in November?
I do. I think we're the underdog, but I think we can run a campaign if we talk about the issues, if we talk about the fact that we've had record job creation in deindustrialized parts of America, the very parts that Trump said have been left out. Joe Biden in the last three years has created more jobs than in the last 20 years in those areas. If we talk about our working class agenda of universal child care,
of expanding Medicare, of increasing Social Security. That's what we need to do to win. You know, I hear that, and I definitely don't think there's any kind of debate about the policy accomplishments of this administration. But we do see that Biden kind of have a unique liability specifically around age that's causing voters not to really credit that with looking ahead to the next four years. How do you kind of respond to the question that no matter if Biden was a successful president in this administration,
administration that this unique liability around age stops people from being excited about him in terms of the next administration? Well, I think that we have to go out and talk about an agenda that excites people. And then the president obviously has to go out and convey that agenda. But that agenda needs to be centering the working class and talking about what we're going to do to improve their lives. But, you know, one of the things that comes through in our reporting is that there's a lot of legitimate concerns from voters around the question of the president's age.
When, as a representative, you say you've heard those concerns also, even if they've been mixed about what to do with it. When did that start? Did that just start at the debate? I can't imagine so, because we've heard about people being worried about the president's age for a long time.
Well, I think there's a difference. I think that there is a sense that, oh, is he too old? He's going to be 81 in an abstract way of, do we really want to field a nominee who's going to be 81? I think post-debate, there's been a concern of, is Joe Biden up to the task of campaigning? Can he make the case? And it's become much more specific. It's no longer, should we be running an 81-year-old
Is Joe Biden the same person? OK, well, that will be my last question. How do we evaluate that? At what point does I mean, what are you looking for? I mean, I know that there's these interviews coming up. Is there a deadline? I mean, it does seem as if like that's a big question to just have there out in the open. Like what should we be looking forward to say how you're evaluating that decision?
Again, I think the decision is the president's. What I can do is convey to our leadership what we should be sharing with the president. And that is the feedback we're getting about whether he can win this race. But ultimately, he needs to sit down with his family, with independent advisors and search his conscience and say, can he beat Donald Trump? Is he the best person to beat Donald Trump?
And he needs to make that judgment. I trust him in making that judgment, but surrounded by candid feedback. But, you know, what I have told the White House and my leadership and would tell him if the president ever asked is that there's a lot of concern about your age and your ability to make the case. And you need to continue to address that. And you're comfortable with that being President Biden's decision and his family's alone.
I am comfortable about it being his decision because he won the vote in a primary process. And I believe if we're going to campaign on democracy, we have to respect democracy. And that means respecting that it's his decision. But I have confidence that he would make the right decision if he felt that he was not the best person to defeat Donald Trump. Thank you so much for your time, Congressman. We really appreciate it. Thank you. There are four days until the Republican National Convention.
39 days until the Democratic National Convention, and 117 days until the general election. We'll see you next Monday for the start of the RNC. The Run-Up is reported by me, Ested Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Caitlin O'Keefe, and Anna Foley. It's edited by Rachel Dry and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Sophia Landman, and Alisha Ba'i-Tubb.
It was mixed by Sophia Landman and fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Sam Dolnick, Larissa Anderson, David Halfinger, Maddie Macielo, Mahima Chablani, Jeffrey Miranda, and Elizabeth Bristow. Do you have questions about the 2024 election? Email us at therunupatnytimes.com. Or better yet, record your question using the voice memo app in your phone. That email again is therunupatnytimes.com.
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