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Jeremy Allen White, Iowa Debris, Eben Moss-Bakrak, Lionel Boyce, and Liza Colon-Zayas. The Bear is available for your consideration at fxnetworks.com slash fyc. Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts. Back in February, Donald Trump called into this conservative radio program called The Dan Bongino Show.
President Donald J. Trump. President Trump, welcome back to the show. It's always good to have you, my friend. How are you? Well, thank you, Dan, very much. And for lack of a better term, he threw down the gauntlet. I don't think he's going to run, but I'd like to go for immediately debates. I'd like to debate him now because we should debate. Challenging President Joe Biden to debate him, even though Trump had skipped the GOP primary debates.
Oh, wow. Look at that. We're breaking news, Mr. President. Donald J. Trump calls for debates against Joe Biden. That's great. We've been breaking some news here. Eventually, Biden accepted, and he even upped the ante with a campaign pushing the schedule to match up earlier than most people expected, as in tonight at a CNN studio in Atlanta.
And while we can't know exactly what will happen on stage, we've seen the show before. Bitter insults, a constant blame game, and more than anything, a political spectacle that's often judged on the optics more than the substance. But considering both candidates offering radically different visions for the country, it's hard to imagine an election where the substance matters more. So today, there's no buzzer, no mic muting, and instead...
Just the policy. I call four of my colleagues to talk about what the candidates are actually promising for a second term on some of the issues Americans care the most about. From the New York Times, I'm Ested Herndon. This is The Run-Up. Four issues that usually rank high on the list of voter concerns are the economy, immigration, abortion rights, and foreign policy.
And that's where I wanted to focus. Bidenomics is about building an economy from the middle out, the bottom up, not the top down. The minute crooked Joe Biden shuffles out the door, I will rapidly rebuild the greatest economy in the history of the world. Look, we had the greatest economy in history. Starting with the economy.
I'm Jim Tankersley. I cover economic policy at the White House for The Times in Washington. So I called my colleague Jim Tankersley. Okay, I wanted to get a sense of how Trump and Biden differ on the economy in a second. But I think first it would be helpful to get a sense of the big picture. Where has the Biden administration been on economic policy up until this point?
Well, I mean, first off, I think that the administration has a very coherent economic strategy. They basically have had to do two things. The first thing was they had a strategy to try to finish the job of recovering from the pandemic recession with a big stimulus bill, which they passed in 2021. And then they've tried to do a whole bunch of bills to kind of increase basically the performance of the domestic economy.
And they are certainly frustrated that when we talk about economic policy, we don't lead with those attempts or with the fact that economic growth has been faster under Biden in his first three years as president than anyone since Jimmy Carter. That does feel like an important baseline.
It is. It is. But it's also true that the thing that they get dinged most on is also a thing that hasn't happened for decades for a president, which is that Biden has presided over a period of very high inflation and really rapidly rising costs for American families. That inflation rate peaked like a couple of years ago. It's been coming back down, but it's still above historical norms. And when the president is like swimming upstream on economic policy, that's the big problem he is fighting against. People have not liked Biden.
the inflation they've gotten along with his other policies. And it's led them to overlook the other effects of those policies on the job market where unemployment is very low on GDP growth, even on, you know, people's wages, which are growing, but people are just annoyed at how fast prices are growing at the same time.
Yeah, that is the problem. And I think that's a helpful articulation of it. Can you give me a sense of kind of the policy differences that we might understand between Biden and Trump on economic policy? And we wanted to do that based on three key areas, inflation, cost of living, taxes, and jobs. What were the major moves that Biden has done in this term to try to address it? And has he said anything about a possibility of a second term and what he would do differently?
Yeah, if you look at what Biden's done, I mean, first off, just to really stipulate this, inflation is the job of the Federal Reserve far and away. But presidents can influence, particularly at times like this, on the margins inflation. So Biden has mentioned a couple of things that he has really been focused on now, and they're
smaller things in the broad scope of prices across the economy, but there are little things that he's trying to do to bring down prices. He has focused really hard on passing and signing legislation to allow the government to negotiate prescription drug prices, to bring down drug prices. He has tried to
both just rhetorically go after and then also use some levers of government to go after companies for what he calls corporate greed, excess profit margins. And he's targeted what the White House loves to call junk fees, which are like little cost increases like on concert tickets, airline tickets. And in the second term, I think there's a couple of big things that he has said that he would like to do that could affect inflation.
One of them is he wants to raise taxes on people making more than $400,000 a year, but he wants to do so in a way that would reduce the budget deficit. And on balance, that could have some small but marginal effect on bringing down inflation. And then the second thing he wants to do is just kind of do more with his antitrust corporate agenda in a way that the White House argues will help bring prices down. Neither of those are large, but those are sort of the cornerstones of his policymaking.
policies for bringing down price growth, I would say, and are most likely to affect inflation. Can we get to what Trump has said, or particularly on the issue of inflation? We know he has blamed Biden for the current state of prices, but what has he done while in office? And do we have any clues of what Donald Trump would do in regards to inflation if elected in the second term?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important to note that Trump came to office at a very different economic moment than Biden, right? Inflation had been low for basically this entire century. And it's that's important because that's one of the reasons why people are so mad about it now is that they just aren't used to it. You know, in the 70s and 80s, people got used to higher inflation. They're not used to it.
Mm-hmm.
respond to Trump. They just did it because they thought they needed to. But he gets both stimulative monetary policy, stimulative fiscal policy, and that helps to grow the economy. But he's not really that worried about inflation because people are not expecting high inflation and it stays pretty low until the pandemic. So Trump's biggest argument, I
I think for like I can bring back low inflation is I did it before, but it's a very different economic moment. And I think we should just like start with that knowledge that you just came in and reran Trump's playbook from four years ago. You'd have really different effects and that could very well happen. He's talked about a thing that Republicans talk about a lot, which is like cutting unspecified government spending, right?
In theory, if you cut a lot of government spending and reduce the deficit by a lot, you could bring down inflation in the same way that you could bring down inflation with tax increases like Biden wants to do. But I think the other big policy that Trump has talked about that would affect prices, if not the actual inflation rate, is tariffs.
He wants to put new taxes on imports from all around the world and particularly on imports from China. And that's just going to raise the cost of those products for people. So in Trump, you have this sort of rhetoric of I'm going to cut government spending. I'm going to roll back all the terrible Biden things. That's going to solve inflation. And then I can do my own thing. But I,
I don't that's not really adding up to what I think most economists would call a coherent policy to bring down inflation. And there's a lot of what Trump is talking about that economists say really risks exacerbating more inflation. Yeah. Let's get to the issue of taxes. What has Joe Biden done and what does he promise he would do in the second term, specifically when it comes to taxes?
So sort of like very counterintuitively, what Biden has done thus far, if you add all of his tax policies up, is slightly cut taxes over the entirety of his administration. But he wants to raise a lot of taxes. That's mostly reflective of the fact that he hasn't been able to get
Congress to go along with the trillions of dollars in corporate and high earner tax increases that Biden wants to do. That he's campaigned for even back in 2020. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, the big tax debate in this campaign is going to center around the expiration of some tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017. And what Biden wants to do is keep and extend the tax cuts for people making less than $400,000. Right.
And then allow to expire tax cuts for people earning more than that and some business tax cuts that are also set to expire. And then on top of that, raise more taxes on the rich and on corporations. And that's sort of his tax reform plan. Okay. Whereas Trump just wants to make permanent all the tax cuts that he signed in the first place. And he wants to go farther. He wants to give more tax cuts to corporations. He wants to give more tax cuts to people. He even...
has floated this idea of, gee, wouldn't it be nice if we could just get rid of the income tax entirely in this country and replace it with tariffs, which has a lot of problems as a way to raise revenue, but is, you know, theoretically possible and would be a massive restructuring of our tax code. So there's a really stark difference between these guys on taxes.
Yeah, that makes sense. You know, the last bucket we had was jobs. As you mentioned, this has been a period of job growth led by Biden's administration. What should be the biggest difference that we think about between Biden and Trump when it comes to the prospect of unemployment or employment, considering the unemployment rate's been fairly low?
I think it's, you know, both these guys are going to talk a big game about jobs. They're both going to talk about their jobs record. Biden has the best jobs record of any modern president in large part because the recovery from COVID employment was so fast. But even if you exclude that, it's been a very strong record. But Trump had a strong jobs record too. And I think you have a real contrast in how they kind of arrive at their belief that they've been able to stimulate job growth and how they say they would do it going forward. You know, Trump is a...
He talks in some very classic Republican language of low taxes and low regulations are going to drive job growth. But for Trump, tariffs are also a driver of job growth. He wants stuff made in the United States with American jobs. And he thinks the way to do it is basically to make everything you buy from around the world more expensive so that we have to make it here. Biden's doing some of that, but he's doing more sort of like I want.
more stuff made here and I'm going to subsidize it. You know, Biden has all these tax breaks in the Inflation Reduction Act, all the climate tax breaks for solar panel production and wind turbines and hydrogen and all these electric vehicles. And he really wants to seed those new industries here and to be subsidizing those jobs. Trump would repeal a bunch of those incentives, he says. And so theoretically, that would have some real potential effects on job growth.
But Trump has different policies he says would be stimulated job growth. Again, because it's such a different environment now than when either of them took office. It's hard to say, oh, yeah, that policy is definitely the right one to go with. The bigger question, I think, if you're a voter trying to judge the jobs thing is, do I believe Joe Biden's arguments that the jobs of the future are in these particular industries, advanced manufacturing, clean tech?
you know, electric vehicles. If I do, Biden has a real strategy for that. And Trump very explicitly says we shouldn't be targeting those. But if you believe, hey, the jobs of the future just lie in trying to bring American employment back from overseas with tariffs and other and tax cuts, then Trump is your guy. Got it. I guess I will ask as our last question, like, what would be the one question on the economy you would ask the two of them on Thursday?
I mean, I think you have to ask about prices because it's the thing that people care the most about. But I think you have to ask about it in a way that helps people understand what the choice is going forward and not just blame game going back. So I actually might start with a version of your first question, one of your first questions to me, which is what specifically will you do?
in your next term if you win in november to bring down inflation and how will that work and then follow up pretty aggressively if trump's just like well i had low inflation before i'll do it again like that's not an answer tell me how and if biden's just like well i'm gonna make sure the government gets insulin costs down more say like okay great but what about the rest of the costs
And I think it's time for a big national debate on what would be the right policies over the next four years to try to bring inflation down low again, because there are a lot of ways that you could exacerbate it again. If you do a big tax cut or a big spending increase without paying for it, there's a real risk that it shoots up again. Yeah, yeah.
Jim, thanks so much. I appreciate you taking some time out and let's look to this debate with an eye for substance. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed, man. Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun. The first and most urgent action when we win will be the sealing of the border, stopping the invasion. Drill, baby, drill. Send Joe Biden's illegal aliens back home. We'll do all of those things and we're going to have to do them fast. Two weeks ago,
I did what Republicans in Congress refused to do. I took action to secure our border. That included restricting unlawful crossings at our southern border, making decisions on asylum more quickly, and so much more. The next issue I wanted to turn to was immigration.
My name is Zolan Kano-Youngs. I'm a White House correspondent, and I've been covering immigration policy over the Biden and Trump administrations. So you're going to help us understand the differences between Biden and Trump, specifically on an issue that is at the top of mind for many voters, which is immigration. Can you take me through just a couple of the pressure points that are, at this moment, top of mind for the White House?
Sure, sure. So I think when you talk about how the White House views the border, there's one metric that has stood out throughout the Biden administration, and that's border crossings, right? Now, border crossings have more than doubled under Biden compared to the Trump administration. And, you know, there's a couple different factors for that, but it's important to remember that at the end of Trump, you know, the pandemic essentially brought everything to a halt. It also
you know, completely deteriorated the economies in some of these nations in Central America, where many of these people are coming from. Plus, you had natural disasters and then as well, a changing administration, too. Interesting. Let's try to go through the differences between both candidates when it comes to both border policy and broader immigration policy. And let's start with President Biden. What has he done in relationship to the border? And what is he promising to do in a possible second term?
Right on. OK, so I think it's important to go back a little bit to the presidential campaign of 2020. Biden's largely kind of the plans that he outlined for the border was mainly attacking Trump for his policies. And then he comes into office and in those early months,
There were already signs of somewhat backtracking, right? I mean, I remember during the transition, he warned immigration advocates, hey, it's going to take me time to lift these Trump-era restrictions, right? And then we had, honestly, I would say for much of this first term, at least the first half,
a reliance on some Trump era restrictions when it came to the border. Part of that was because the courts sort of slowed down how much the Biden administration could reform that system. But to simplify this, they were relying on Trump era restrictions, including a COVID era rule that essentially sealed the border to migrants. So the Biden administration went from demeaning kind of Trump's
policies on the border to embracing some of them. That's right. Embracing some of them. I think what makes Biden a little bit complicated at the border is he may be incredibly sort of strict when it comes to sort of traditionally people crossing the border. But like he also put forward this policy that allows migrants to apply for an appointment with an immigration officer on a smartphone app.
He has also relied on like this temporary emergency program, sort of known as parole, to let thousands of people into the country. So on one hand, you've got like the restrictive sort of I'm turning people away. But on the other hand, you've got this innovative approach to try and expand some legal pathways online.
But politics kind of always wins in the end. And recently we did see him issue an executive order after getting derailed or blocked by the Senate and just facing political pressure for years. He did issue an executive order recently that essentially suspended asylum to most migrants at the southwest border, largely mirroring the Trump administration's attempt as well.
Is there anything the Biden administration has said about what they would do differently if they're elected to a second term when it comes to the border? You know, it's a little bit unclear as of now kind of what the plans would be for a second term. I'm going to be honest with you. Right now, the reporting really shows that they are just so focused on trying to
neutralized sort of Trump's attacks that Biden is an open border president, which fueled into some of these recent actions. But the one glimpse that we have heard from Biden, even when he signed that recent executive order limiting asylum, he acknowledged that there would be critics in his own party that want to see more actions that support migrants and immigrants. And he did say, give me time, be patient with me.
Yes. And to that point, we saw a version of this in the past week with a big announcement from the White House announcing a change in policy that would create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are the spouses of citizens and who've already been in the country for more than 10 years. Sure. So this almost crystallizes Biden's approach to immigration in a way. If you are a migrant who is fleeing persecution or poverty and is trying to cross the border,
Biden's essentially telling you that you have to wait. And if you are an undocumented family that has been in the United States for years, working, sending your kid to school,
He's essentially saying that you'll be protected for now. And so it's that difference between those coming outside the border and those who have been inside the country for years now. Okay. Well, let's go through Trump. In his first term, what were the specific actions that he took to the border that stick out the most? And what is he promising when it comes to the border in a possible second term?
Yep. Yep. OK, so Trump definitely prioritized enforcement. And I would say the main difference with Biden is just was incredibly candid about the use of deterrence and even cruelty at the border as a means for discouraging migrants to cross. I mean, everyone knows about zero tolerance and family separation.
But there was a lot of other stuff done in the final two years of Trump, even after his family separation policy was lifted. Remain in Mexico might be one of the more consequential policies, essentially forcing migrants to wait in Mexico until they get an appointment in a backlogged immigration court system. When COVID hit,
they basically seized on it to institute something called Title 42, which essentially turned migrants away, citing a public health emergency. But this also resulted in them initially dropping off kids who crossed the border alone into Mexico, even if they were from a Central American country, right? That's a major difference from even the way the Biden administration used that rule. So that was term one, essentially. So what has he promised about what he would do differently now?
in the second term? Taking it to the next level completely. I mean, if you thought it was extreme in term one, I mean, what me and my colleagues have basically heard is it would impose an even more severe level of sort of extreme policies. I mean, one thing that he talked about doing in term one was citing the Insurrection Act
to basically have the military police the border. That's something that they are planning already, and his aides have been very kind of candid about. He has talked about reinstituting a lot of the policies
from from term one, including that covid era rule, but almost in a more permanent way by not citing covid, but by citing other diseases such as tuberculosis or what have you, even though there's still a lack of data that or evidence that, you know, most of the migrants crossing are sick.
So we're talking about a policy of escalation from Trump that would continue what we saw in the first term, but even kick it up to a different level. What's the biggest difference between Biden and Trump looking forward when it comes to the broader immigration system? Yeah, so I think one thing that sometimes gets lost about Trump is, even though a lot of the rhetoric was about the border and
illegal immigration. He also limited and made attempts to limit legal immigration. Yeah, this is super important. Yeah, yeah. Like, one thing that I think that the reporting shows is you would see a return to extreme vetting.
People essentially going to an embassy and going through a process to try and get a visa to the United States. Trump imposed a bunch of extreme vetting from the smallest detail to just sprawling sort of policies, right? Maybe if you left an answer blank on an application, that might mean that you need to start over now.
And you need to basically provide more paperwork and background that some people fleeing difficult situations in certain countries may not have. Extreme vetting, critics would say, resulted in an exacerbated backlog of the overall system. Biden, when he came into office, lifted those extreme vetting policies. He lifted other policies, including one that basically said,
If you were an immigrant likely to use government assistance programs, think like food stamps, for example, you could have your green card blocked. And like, make no mistake, the system's still incredibly backlogged now. Democrats and Republicans would say that it's, you know, still broken. But there were some of those restrictions that were lifted under Biden.
You asked me about also what it would look like in term two for Trump. Once again, it may not surprise you, going to the next level in terms of restrictions here. But extreme vetting would be back. So it'd make it harder for people to apply the quote unquote legal way or right way. And you would also have a major escalation of deportation strategy. Main difference from Biden to Trump, Trump basically directed ICE agents to deport
I'm like in casual terms, go after everybody. Right. Don't be limited. If they're undocumented, target them for deportation. Biden instituted guidelines that basically said focus on people with criminal backgrounds. Being undocumented isn't a reason enough for
for being deported, essentially, or at least having the resources of ICE go after you. Trump is going to go back to that broad sort of approach for ICE. But he also, in a term, too, we've reported that they are planning on creating mass detention facilities, including getting federal officials to help with deportations outside of ICE.
deputizing local police to go after undocumented immigrants. Also, you know, churches, schools, which essentially under the Biden administration have been sort of safe zones. You know, let's not go and send ICE agents into schools or work site raids. That would all be on the table for a Trump administration as well. If you could sum it up,
What would you say is the biggest difference between President Biden and President Trump on immigration? You know, I think President Biden is focusing on enforcement now. And that's where sort of the political momentum is. But this is still somebody that came into office and proposed a bill to establish a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. I do think this is an administration that
The border has been a thorn in their side, which has depleted momentum from their, I think, real intention to try and repair the overall immigration system.
The border isn't a thorn in the side for the Trump administration. It's something that they're going to lean into in terms of basically hardening the overall borders of the United States. Trump's goal is going to be to limit the number of people who can come to the United States in a term two. And I think Biden's focus is hardening the southwest border at this time.
to hopefully build enough momentum to start to make incremental changes to repair the overall system. Thank you so much, Zolan. We appreciate your time and we know you'll be tracking this and we'll check in on it again before the election. Right on. Appreciate being here. After the break, abortion rights and foreign policy.
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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. Governments keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. They might be embarrassed by the information. They might think the public can't understand it. But we at The New York Times think that democracy works best when the public is informed.
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Many people have asked me what my position is on abortion and abortion rights, especially since I was proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded: the end. Roe v. Wade. They wanted it ended. I mean, if Congress ever passes a ban, I will veto that ban.
The next issue I wanted to understand was abortion rights, and specifically what Biden and Trump are both promising in the second term.
My name's Lisa Lair. I'm a national political correspondent for The New York Times, and I'm the author of a new book called The Fall of Roe and the Rise of a New America that details the fall of Roe and federal abortion rights in America. I guess I wanted to start with the incumbent and Joe Biden. What has the Biden administration's major policy moves been on abortion in the first term?
Well, look, they can't bring back Roe. That's not something they're limited in what they can do. So they've tried to do things that protect Roe.
You know, emergency care for pregnant people who may be miscarrying. We have a case like that going, you know, that's up at the Supreme Court because of, you know, a Biden policy. They've tried to protect access to medication abortion, which accounts to the majority of abortions in the country, and also is a way that people in banned states can end their pregnancies. They've tried to enforce certain laws through the DOJ, right?
They're coming up with workarounds. Yeah, they're coming up with workarounds and they're limited. You know, they can't stop these state bans from happening in places controlled by conservative legislatures and they can't restore Roe.
that would take, you know, a bill being passed by Congress. And there isn't even agreement on what that bill should look like. Yeah. So what seemed to be a more fruitful path, potentially fruitful path for Democrats and others who want to expand abortion rights in America is to go through these state referendums and work state by state, which is, of
of course, the strategy the anti-abortion movement used for many, many decades. So when we think about Biden and his promises on abortion, the thing that we hear him most often say in terms of codifying Roe v. Wade faces some serious political headwinds, to put it lightly. But there is a kind of push from the party at large to think about state referendums, like we saw in Arizona, or other means of kind of getting around congressional inaction to make this happen.
Yeah. And, you know, Vice President Harris has had a lot of meetings with these state legislators to talk about how they can, you know, deal with these bans. Or you see some efforts in states like Michigan to protect abortion rights and not just abortion rights, but go beyond that and protect access to contraception, you know, IVF and fertility treatments. So there are things happening in the states, particularly states led by Democrats, to try to protect and expand abortion rights.
Okay, let's flip the coin and go to Donald Trump. A much harder question to ask here is what is his stance on abortion? Well, what he said is basically he takes credit for appointing the justices who overturned Roe, and he sees that as a historic victory in some ways. But he also believes that it should be left to the states. He has said that if a 15-week federal ban reached his desk, he would veto it. He's promised to protect IVF and fertility treatments.
But he's been a little shaky on some of the other specifics, you know, things like medication abortion and whether states could track the pregnancies or prosecute women who have abortions in places where it's banned. He's sort of given conflicting answers on those topics. And in some ways, it's, you know, it's an issue that, like Biden, he's really moved all over the map on and in some ways is uncomfortable with. Mm.
How should we go about what to trust on Donald Trump's beliefs with abortion? How much power would the anti-abortion wing have in a Trump second term?
It's really hard to say, but, you know, I think we can anticipate that they would have a fair amount of power. Many of the people who remain close to Donald Trump have been very strong opponents of abortion throughout their careers. They had prominent positions in the first Trump administration. If there was a second Trump administration, they could be put in spots at the Department of Justice or HHS where they could enforce fairly restrictive laws on the procedure.
And, you know, there's sort of ways that they can
effectively create a federal abortion ban without having to go through Congress. What do you mean? Well, they can enforce the Comstock Act, which would ban the mailing of medication abortion, even potentially tools used like speculums or tools used in abortion. And if that were to be enforced, that could end up being sort of a de facto federal ban in a way. We don't know if they'll do that. We've heard conflicting signals from people who have advised...
conservatives and Trump on policy. So, you know, it's hard to say exactly how this would shake out. But we do know in the first Trump administration, anti-abortion activists and people with a long history of being involved in that cause had prominent jobs. Now, if Donald Trump wins again...
And if he puts those same people in those same kind of positions or gives them even more power, they will be operating in a radically different political environment. And so that's the wild card here. Thank you so much, Lisa. This was really helpful. And enjoy your debate watch tonight. Thanks. You too. Last. America is back. America is back.
We wanted to talk about foreign policy. I'm David Sanger. I'm the White House and national security correspondent for The Times. And I'm going to talk about foreign policy.
and the author most recently of a book called New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. I wanted to start with what's happened since October 7th in Gaza and in Israel. It really seems to have overtaken the biggest portions of the foreign policy conversation in this race. I know it's complex, but can you give me an overview of the administration's current policy as it pertains
pertains to the Israeli government and its current campaign in Gaza. So Biden started this off with a great embrace of the Israelis, as you would expect for somebody who views himself, rightly so, as a major friend of Israel for 50 years. But if you go back to his first visit days after the October 7 terror attack on Israel, after announcing great support
He then said to the Israeli people, you are running a big risk, and the risk you're running is making the mistake that we made after 9-11. And that mistake is that we did a number of things in the name of counterterrorism that later on we came to regret and the world came to regard as huge oversteps, if not war crimes.
And of course, that is exactly the problem that he faces now with the Netanyahu government. And we're not entirely certain of the number dead in Gaza. The Palestinians say roughly 37,000. Some portion of that presumably were militants, but obviously a huge number of them were not. Our civilians, our women, our children died.
And I think Joe Biden realizes now by having misjudged the degree of the reaction within his own party, particularly on the left of his own party, that
that he is being held morally responsible for the fact that U.S. weapons were used in many of those attacks. And so he is grappling with that and trying to get Netanyahu into a place where Netanyahu agrees to a ceasefire that would lead to a prisoner swap and then a more permanent ceasefire. He announced this at the very end of May and said it was an Israeli proposal, which it was, although the United States helped
push it along. His problem is that just this past weekend, Netanyahu himself stood up and seemed to walk away from some big principles of what was supposed to be the proposal that he and his war cabinet approved. The result is that
Biden goes into this debate finding himself in the perfectly middle spot where people are angry at him at both ends. A very pro-Israel, let the Israelis do whatever they want, are coming after him and saying, you're not supporting Israel enough.
And the left is saying, you're not restraining the Israelis from killing civilians and you have the blood on their hands. As you mentioned, President Biden has kind of increasingly sharpened his criticisms of the Netanyahu government in an attempt to hold them, I guess, more verbally or rhetorically accountable. How successful has it been considering, you know, you're talking about a walk back just as recently as this weekend?
So most of what he was doing with Netanyahu was behind the scenes because it's very much in Joe Biden's DNA that you work out these kind of agreements, particularly on delicate national security issues, quietly between leaders. He got more and more angry at Netanyahu and Netanyahu more and more angry at him. It's pretty clear who Netanyahu wants to win in this coming election.
Netanyahu wants Donald Trump to be elected president again because it was a very rare day that Donald Trump stood in his way.
That's where I'm going next. Yeah. So if that's President Biden's relationship to Israel and Gaza, what do we know about Donald Trump? What has he said? And more importantly, do we know anything about how a potential Trump administration would change their relationship to government or conflict if he were to win in November? Trump has said very little.
Yeah.
But, you know, he gets away with a huge amount of vague statements. I mean, this is the usual arm waving of the Trump presidency. So we don't know for sure. But what we can work from is what happened during his term in office from 2017 to 2021.
Pretty much he allowed Netanyahu to do what he wanted to do, but he also was responsible mostly through his son-in-law and a team that was working around him for the Abraham Accords, which began to bring Arab states into an actual recognition and peaceful resolution with the Israelis.
Biden was trying to build on that before the October 7th attacks and still is by trying to bring in the biggest element of this, which would be Saudi Arabia. So to be clear, though, if you are a voter right now who is upset with the current situation in Gaza and believes that Biden has empowered Netanyahu on an offensive assault that has killed too many Palestinian civilians, there is not evidence that Donald Trump
as president would curb those actions. In fact, quite to the contrary, he would probably undo the few things that Biden has done in that regard. I was just wanting that to be clear. I mean, it seems like the Netanyahu interest is one that tells all we need to know.
I also wanted to talk to you about the policy differences between Biden and Trump when it comes to Ukraine. Obviously, this conflict has engulfed a lot of the political conversation in the lead up to this presidential election year. But it also shows the big differences between the parts of the Republican Party who have pitched isolation and the Democratic Party who has been some of Ukraine's most ardent and vocal supporters. When we think about the policy differences between Biden and Trump on something like Ukraine itself,
and the conflict there. How would you describe it? Well, from the very start of the 2016 campaign...
Former President Trump made it very clear, including to me and Maggie Haberman during our two foreign policy interviews with him, that he did not regard Ukraine as something worthy of American defense. The country was corrupt, he said. He's certainly right about that. He maintained that the Europeans weren't as interested as we were in
in defending it. That has turned out to be wrong. And he basically said, let the Europeans go deal with it. It's their continent. And this became sort of the heart of America first thinking that
Later on, when the invasion happened, his party reacted reflexively to providing funding for pushing back on Russia until a sort of Trump core came to the fore and basically said, this isn't our battle. And that was very much a reflection of Trump thinking. The Biden view, on the other hand, has been the exact opposite. It has been that Ukraine, for all of its flaws—
is an emerging democracy, that it's the core of American values that the U.S. stand up for democracies, but also that if the Russians win in Ukraine, they will not stop there.
and it will become a threat to NATO countries that we are treaty-bound to go and defend. And therefore, if we failed on Ukraine, we would be repeating the mistake we made in the run-up to World War I and the run-up to World War II, where there was a big isolationist movement. The fact of the matter is that at its fundamentals—
This is an argument between a Joe Biden who says, if America is not there to fill the vacuums, someone else will. And that someone right now will be the Russians or the Chinese. And a Trump argument that these are not America's battles and we should erect high walls. And if anybody comes after us, we'll just whack them, which is the core of sort of an isolationist view.
That is a helpful summary. And it also feels reflective of where both of those individuals and wings of party were at the beginning of the conflict. Have we seen President Biden shift any, considering we've seen some public sentiment shift in the time that it's been going on? So Biden, if anything, has doubled down with one exception. He will not allow
Ukraine to join NATO while the war is on, because that would bring American troops directly in. So Biden has had two major strategic objectives here. The first one is don't let the Russians win. And the second one is don't get into World War Three.
And it's the World War III part of it that has led to his hesitation to arm Ukraine with everything it asked for when it asked for it.
Because Biden always said our arms can't be used against Russians on Russian territory or that will take us down a nuclear escalation path. Yeah. Yeah. What do we know would be Donald Trump's position on Ukraine if he were to get a second term? For Trump, he has said somewhat vaguely that he would solve this problem in 24 hours. Now, he has never told us how he was going to solve the problem in 24 hours.
The only way I can think of of solving this issue in 24 hours is calling up Vladimir Putin and saying, OK, you can keep all the lands that you've already taken, which is roughly plus or minus 20 percent of Ukraine.
I think you'll also hear Trump say, well, Vladimir Putin didn't do this kind of invasion of Ukraine while I was president. He respects me too much or fears me too much in order to go do this. And I think that will sound appealing to his supporters. It has very little factual base about why it is that Putin did not invade the majority of Ukraine. He simply wasn't ready to during the Trump years.
The last kind of foreign policy bucket that seems likely to come up in this debate is the United States' relationship with China. How would you describe how each one of these figures has positioned their administrations in terms of its relationship to China? And what would you say is the most important thing for the next four years in terms of that relationship?
Former President Trump thinks almost purely in terms of economics and economic punishment. His favorite thing is tariffs. And so he has said he would put huge tariffs on basically all Chinese goods. Biden has gone about something quite different. He has said, look, there are some things we need to keep the Chinese from doing.
And that is to stop the Chinese from getting the most high-tech semiconductors, the kind of equipment to make them that would empower them to make military equipment of the highest end type and to make progress in artificial intelligence.
Quantum computing, all of that, of which semiconductors, advanced semiconductors are the core to all of this. So I think that what you're going to hear from Biden is he's going to say, I have come up with a way to deprive the Chinese of the most advanced technologies without triggering huge inflation by taxing Chinese goods with big tariffs.
And I think that President Trump will come in and say that he is going to teach the Chinese a lesson by putting tariffs on everything, preserving gasoline-powered cars, you know, so forth and so on. Mm-hmm.
If you could sum up the biggest difference between Biden and Trump when it comes to a possible second term and what their role as president would be, what would you say is the biggest difference specifically in the arena of how we relate to others? So I think Biden would tell you that his fundamental philosophy is that the world is too big and complex for the United States to manage alone and too expensive to do that.
And therefore, he has focused on America's greatest single power, which is its ability to build alliances. For Trump, if you're big and you're tough and you're strong, the world will respect you. They won't mess with me. And they've been messing with Joe Biden.
And so I think that a Trump second term would be the enactment of America first, which is also to say sort of America alone. He talked about it a lot in the first term. He did not know how to pull those levers. And he surrounded himself because he didn't know the foreign policy community with some people who he thought fit well.
the look of what a secretary of state or a secretary of defense would look like, but who it turned out were actually interested in engaging in the world. Yeah. Right. He's not going to make that mistake again. He's going to pick loyalists who sign up for his view of America first for Biden. I think the biggest concern that he's running into is that his form of quiet, incremental, uh,
diplomacy has not yielded the kind of clear victories for America that he would like to be able to go advertise. So I think there is going to be a critique of him that he's a bit out of gas. Now, his best argument in response to that is he's
Imagine what Ukraine would look like if Joe Biden had not organized the world to defend it. Yeah. Beyond chaos, you would have had Russian forces right on NATO's border. Mm-hmm. Yeah. David, thank you so much for your time and for your expertise. We really appreciate it. And we'll be watching the debate with this landscape in mind. I'm not sure that we might get more policy discussion from this than we do from them on that stage. But we'll see. We'll be hopeful. Well, let's hope. Yeah.
Tonight's debate will underscore the massive stakes of this election. Policy-wise, Biden is largely promising more of the same. And Trump threatens to upend everything, from the political system to the immigration system and our relationship with foreign allies. But on the big stage, debates are often judged by how the candidates look and sound. So good policy won't guarantee a win. They'll need a soundbite to present well.
And somehow, to convince the millions of voters desperate for other options. To get excited about the ones they have.
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That's The Runner for Thursday, June 27, 2024. And now, The Rundown. Friends, how do I say thank you? Thank you.
How do I say thank you? On Tuesday night, in New York's 16th congressional district, Westchester County Executive George Latimer won one of the most contentious Democratic primary races of the year, defeating incumbent Jamal Bowman. Our opponents, not opponent, may have won this round.
at this time in this place. But this will be a battle for our humanity and justice for the rest of our lives. Bowman is an outspoken progressive, a member of the squad, and has been a leading critic of Israel's military action in Gaza. We will continue to fight for a free Palestine now. That was a defining issue in this race.
Latimer was backed by AIPAC, which spent nearly $15 million to unseat Bowman. Overall, almost $25 million were spent, making this the most expensive House primary in history. Also on Tuesday, in Colorado's 4th congressional district, far-right Congresswoman Lauren Boebert won the Republican primary.
Boebert has represented Colorado's third district since 2021, but recently decided to change districts after barely winning re-election. God called us of faith. We know there's a head, not just one. There are many. There are 18 days to the Republican National Convention, 53 days until the Democratic National Convention, and 131 days until the general election. We'll see you next week. The Run-Up is reported by me, Ested Herndon.
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