The Campaign Moment: Biden races to protect his legacy
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So Matt and PK, Time Magazine on Thursday named President-elect Donald Trump as its Person of the Year. I think it's safe to say this is a pretty uninspired choice. You know, he got it when he was elected in 2016 as well.

If you had to pick somebody else to get this award, who would it have been this year? You know, if you're just talking about politics, the countervailing choice would be Joe Biden. I feel like I might have stolen Matt's, so my apologies. Matt's not allowed to pick the guy he covers constantly. Yeah, I was thinking if you went and sat out of politics, it seems like Taylor Swift has had quite an impact in quite a year. It's her birthday today, too, I think. Yeah, happy birthday to Taylor.

Hey, Aaron.

Today, I'm excited to talk to you both about a few big headlines and looming questions over the next several weeks. First, I wanted to talk about President Joe Biden and how he's using and could use his final weeks in office. He's issued a historic number of pardons, and there are other ways that he's trying to shore up his legacy that we will get into.

Then I want to get into the Time Magazine Person of the Year Award interview that Donald Trump did. It's a rare, long-form interview with a non-conservative outlet. Trump talked about transgender rights. He backed off a promise to sharply reduce grocery prices. And he talked about his plans to potentially pardon January 6th defendants.

And then finally, there are a couple of potentially important Senate appointments on the horizon that could impact just how willing that chamber is to go along with Donald Trump's agenda in the next few years. You ready, guys? Fire away. Let's do it.

So, Matt, you've been covering President Biden's moves as his term winds down. Can you just give us a little bit of a breakdown of the main areas of focus for him between now and Inauguration Day? Just kind of a brief list of the most important stuff that he's he's talking about doing and doing right now.

probably the forefront of his mind is solidifying his legacy in some way. So you're seeing him give speeches every week or two, trying to talk about the things that he has accomplished. And this is kind of a way just for him to remind people of what he's done and

Also kind of a recognition that his legacy is a little bit of a work in progress. It's not been a good couple of months for him and that legacy. So I think you'll hear him talk a little bit about that.

There's not a huge amount policy-wise that he can do, but you're seeing ways that he's trying to spend money that's already been authorized to solidify areas of his administration. The biggest one I think of is the Ukraine aid. Just in the past week, we've seen two different packages of a billion dollars and $500 million in aid go to Ukraine.

This is an area where Biden is very worried about what Trump is going to do. So he's trying to arm the Ukrainians and strengthen their position as much as he can before Trump comes in and potentially has talked about not funding Ukraine's defense as much.

Yeah. So so that's kind of a key thing that Biden is doing. There's also money that he's trying to allocate to different projects that have already been approved by Congress through Chips and Science Act or the bipartisan infrastructure law. Just trying to get money out the door so that Trump can't claw it back or or like not spend it.

And then there's judges who are left to be confirmed. You know, there's a couple of things, you know, in the Senate. And as you alluded to, the biggest thing, I think, is the pardons. I mean, that's something that Trump can't undo. So, you know, you're seeing Biden issue pardons to his son, most controversially this week, a huge number of 1500 people getting commutations.

And I think he'll do more of that over the next few weeks before he leaves office. Yeah, let's go through a few of those one by one, starting with the pardons. You mentioned his decision to commute or reduce nearly 1500 sentences early this week. That was a record breaking act of clemency, you know, doing all of this in one fell swoop. Matt, can you describe exactly what those, you know, pardons and clemency are for?

So in a lot of cases, they're nonviolent cases. They're people who were not in prison, you know, so it's not like they're being released from prison in these cases. It's just that they're having their sentences wiped clean for various things. I mean, some of them are first time offenders or drug offenses, nonviolent crimes. So the president is saying, you know, that those things will not be on the record any longer. Mm hmm.

And some of these cases had been, you know, the White House has made the point that had they been prosecuted under current laws, they would have had far less severe sentences. Yeah, I was talking to some pardon experts after the Hunter Biden pardon case.

couple of weeks back. And their point was like, yes, this is a controversial pardon. But also the big story is that President Biden just hasn't used these powers very much over the course of his early, you know, the first three plus years of his presidency. Now he seems to be doing that a lot more. Are there other people or types of offenses or things that seem to be in the works for potential pardons moving forward? Yeah.

Yeah, there's two main areas that are under discussion and that sort of outsiders are trying to pressure the White House to do. The first is around people who have federal death sentences, sort of clearing death row, you know, from a federal perspective. There's several dozen people who fit that category. Most controversially, Dylann Roof, the shooter in South Carolina at the Mother Emanuel Church

Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. These are people who've been federally prosecuted and sentenced to death row. So there's pressure on Biden to eliminate, to commute those sentences and have them spend their life in prison rather than sentenced to the death penalty. The other thing is also fairly controversial around pardoning people for crimes.

you know, various things within the administration that Trump might come after. Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney, preemptive pardons that could, you know, prevent them from being threatened by a Trump Justice Department. And, you know, Trump has suggested that he may go after some of these people. So it leaves it to Biden to figure out whether to protect them in some sort of way.

So I think that's under discussion at the White House as well to figure out, you know, whether to do something like that. PK, I wonder what does this kind of looming pardon effort and the pardons that we saw earlier this week, how does that fit in with

the image that President Biden wants to leave as his legacy. That's the perfect setup because I'm skimming through a list that was sent out yesterday from DOJ. And there's a 58-year-old man from Fountain Valley, California,

pleaded guilty to nonviolent drug offenses at the age of 25. So that's, gosh, math. 33 years ago. 33 years ago. He is somebody who was wrapped up in the

time when Joe Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I believe that, you know, depending on when the sentencing happened, it was probably just before the 1994 crime bill. But several very tough on crime piece of legislation that set these mandatory minimums

for what were often nonviolent offenses. Looking at several other people on this list, there were definitely people that went to trial, got convicted, or pleaded guilty in 1999, 2000, 2001, and they were hit with

These mandatory minimum sentences that came about from the law in 1994 that Joe Biden, chair of the Judiciary Committee, shepherded into law during Bill Clinton's first term. And it has kind of shadowed him late in his career as people began to say,

A lot of these drug offenses were nonviolent drug offenses and people were getting sent to prison for, you know, generations. And essentially their lives were being ended. And it and this these commutations and pardons are essentially in some way Biden exercising that part of his career. And I don't know. I think that's something that's lurking in the background in all of this.

That's really interesting. I think it's also interesting, as PK points out, like the arc of Biden's career, where in 1994, his quote was, lock the SOBs up. And now, yesterday, his quote was, America is built on the promise of possibilities and second chances. Yeah.

You know, so like a dramatic contrast from the Biden of 94 to the Biden of 2024, you know, as so much of Biden and his like long career, you know, it's kind of a remarkable capstone. Yeah. If you're if you're in politics for as many decades as he has been, you will go through some evolutions over the course of that time. John McCain once looked at me and he was like, hey, man, stick around here long enough. You'll see everything. Yeah.

Okay, so let's hit some of the other actions that President Biden is doing or talking about doing right now. And some of them seem, as Matt mentioned, aimed at anticipating some changes that Trump could make when he's in office or spending money so Trump can ultimately spend it. Matt, can you talk about how Biden is trying to preempt the actions of his successor?

Yeah, and I think it's really trying to Trump-proof or kind of like solidify things that he's done. The way I think about that mostly is like the amount of money that was authorized by Congress. And Biden came in and quickly got approval from Congress to spend like trillions of dollars. And there's only so fast that you can get that money out from the federal government. So Biden is really trying to like

get that money out the door, authorized to projects so that Trump can't come in and not spend it. A lot of it's not on controversial stuff. And some of it, Biden, to his frustration, Republicans have touted even though they, because it's money in their district, even though they voted against the actual spending of it. You know, so I don't know that Trump would necessarily divert some of that money, but Biden wants it going to the projects that he

That's really interesting. I also saw this week that the Republican House decided to pass a bill that had previously passed in, I believe, August in the Senate that would expand the number of federal judges.

It seems apparent that Republicans are on board with this now because they know who those judges are going to be appointed by. Is this something that has any hope of actually ultimately passing or is it just like, well, now it benefits one side over the other and so it's not going to actually happen? The real irony here is the Senate lead author sponsor of that bill is the current president's probably best friend in the Senate, Chris Coons.

He has been a member of the Judiciary Committee for all 14 years that he has served in the Senate and believes this is a very necessary thing because there is this ongoing crisis.

caseload workload that judges, um, especially at district court levels are, are battling. Um, but Biden has, has threatened to veto it. And, um, it is, uh, to him a matter of timing and timing, meaning he is, doesn't want to give over the Donald Trump, you know,

dozens of new judges to appoint and fill. And it's the latest example of basically just the way that the judicial branch has turned into such a partisan battle. A little less than 25 years ago, I was a reporter at Roll Call covering the Senate, and I used to cover these judicial wars that were really small scale and very few people paid attention to them.

Slowly but surely, largely through the work of Mitch McConnell, it became one of the most like defining things of a president. And yeah, it's it's interesting because, you know, the judges are supposed to be nonpartisan. And now we just see constant press releases about the number of judges that Mitch McConnell got confirmed on his watch, which I think is is really a sign of our time.

After the break, we are going to get into that Donald Trump Time magazine interview. And we're also going to be talking about a couple of major questions in the Senate, specifically who could be appointed to a couple of seats in Florida and Ohio. We'll be right back. This episode is supported by Rocket Money. Can you name every single subscription you have? I know I can't name all of mine, and I'm not alone. I

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So moving on to an interview that I found really interesting this week, Donald Trump sat down with Time magazine for an extended interview when he was accepting his person of the year award for the second time. I thought this was a pretty revealing interview. He seemed to sort of moderate and walk back some of his promises from the campaign trail before even taking office. Can you guys just tell me what stood out to you from this interview?

I agree with you about the sort of the moderation and, you know, like the economy was such a driving factor and his suggestion that he could lower grocery prices for for Americans. And now in this interview, he's kind of acknowledging that's going to be kind of hard to do. Maybe people won't see their grocery prices lowered. Yeah, I think it's worth pointing out the incongruency here. Trump, as a candidate, said, OK,

he would get these grocery prices down very simply. He said they would come tumbling down. So vote Trump and your incomes will soar, your net worth will skyrocket, your energy costs and grocery prices will come tumbling down, and we will bring back the American dream, bigger, better, and stronger than ever before, the American dream. And now he says, quote,

look, they got up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will. So that's slightly different than the rhetoric he was serving up in September and October. And it's sort of the same on...

Ukraine, on transgender issues. You know, it's like oftentimes in the campaign, it was black and white on all of these things. And it's like in this interview, he's acknowledging the gray and that things are a little bit more complicated. And, you know, he himself seems to be

uncertain over which path to take on some of these, you know, kind of issues that were very formative during the campaign, you know, are now a little bit more nuanced, it seems in this interview.

Yeah, I think one of those issues that came up in this interview was about transgender rights. And, you know, Donald Trump has offered some mixed signals on this. You know, back in 2016, he was asked about Caitlyn Jenner and like what bathroom she should be able to use. And he's basically like, well, whatever bathroom that she she wants to. And we also saw, you know, during this campaign, his campaign and its allies said,

in contrast, spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-transgender advertising. I think people listening to this might remember the Kamala is for they them ad, which was seemingly everywhere. At least it was when I was watching football games. Yes. In this interview, he was asked about that bathroom issue. And he's basically like,

Yeah, I think we should probably talk about other things. It's a very small number of people who are involved, which I thought it was interesting that he would kind of downplay this issue that was such a focus of the late campaign.

Is that one of those issues where it's like he doesn't really have strong feelings of this and he'll kind of go along with what other Republicans want to do? Yeah, I mean, I think he's he's usually pretty smart at identifying the political space of something, even if he himself doesn't necessarily believe it. But now that he's president again, you know, you don't sort of know if it's something that he wants to spend time on, you know, and if it's something that his base really wants.

But on the other hand, you see people on the Hill like Nancy Mace who continue to kind of like drive at this issue as something that clearly they see the space that's going to animate their base, which Trump often pays attention to.

Yeah, Nancy Mace is, of course, the congresswoman from South Carolina who recently spearheaded the effort to get transgender people, you know, require them to use the bathrooms of their sex assigned at birth. In the Capitol. Yes, in the Capitol. Yeah. But has talked about expanding that more broadly as well. Yeah.

PK, did you have more thoughts on that? Yeah, I think to Matt's point, it's not an issue that Trump himself is really focused on, but his most fervent allies in the Capitol are deeply, they get really, really, really riled up on this issue. And so they are going to try and continue to make it an issue. Nancy Mace did it with a

you know, forcing Mike Johnson to issue a rule saying that essentially designed for one person, Sarah McBride, the incoming Congresswoman from Delaware, that she could not use women's restrooms as she's the first trans person to serve in Congress. Like there's going to be more examples of those sort of things that happen. It's not just going to sort of go away.

Yeah. And there's also a sense that this was a politically fruitful issue for the Trump campaign in the closing weeks of the election. I'm not sure how much evidence we have that this was that decisive of an issue, but it was such a big focus down the stretch. And of course, Donald Trump went on to win. The other thing from the time interview was the January 6th pardons. You know, this is something that Trump has been talking about for a very long time.

In this interview, he talked about what he intended to do and basically signaled that this is something he intends to do very quickly. I think there's a question about what the scale of this is going to be, you know, how many January 6th defendants he could ultimately pardon. He said if they're nonviolent, quote, I think they've been greatly punished. You know, he didn't commit to pardoning all of the nonviolent defendants, but he kind of gestured in the direction of a lot of them getting pardons.

What are the dynamics here? And are there people in the Republican Party and around Trump who are concerned about something like this blowing back on him? I sort of get the sense that there's not there does not seem to be much pushback of anything that Trump is doing. And you're seeing a minority, like a very small number of voices who even are willing to express objection over some of his cabinet nominees who have said,

all sorts of what traditionally have been very problematic histories and lack of experience for the jobs that they're being appointed to. So I just I don't really see the amount of pushback to Trump on much at all. And the people that he's appointing, I don't think are going to be providing that pushback. So it sort of is feeling like at least within the party, he has almost complete control at the moment.

Just real quick, I think there's going to be a distinction between some people who are sort of not really well known, who have been serving brief prison terms for entering the Capitol prison.

versus what does he do about Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, who he was sentenced on sedition to 22 years in prison. Seditious conspiracy. He was not in there fighting police and battling police. Is Trump going to pardon him and say that he was a nonviolent person on that day? Well, that's actually technically true. He did not himself pardon

do things. So if he starts pardoning people like that, then you really are heading into a different level of the political question. And it'll be tougher for Republicans to explain this. Interesting.

Guys, the last thing I wanted to talk about is something that has some bearing about just how much the Republican Party goes along with Trump's agenda. And actually, we don't know what the Senate is completely going to look like. And that's because we have a couple of vacancies that are likely to be filled by governors appointing replacements. One of them is in Ohio, where J.D. Vance's seat will be filled by

Okay.

Okay, so every state is usually a little bit different in this, but, you know, Ohio, Vance, you will have an appointment that will run essentially from the moment J.D. resigns, and I assume he will resign effectively the morning of January 20th. When Trump is sworn in and when he's sworn in. Yeah, when they're sworn in. And then you'll have an appointment for the next—

Two years, essentially, going to the next election, November 2026, and that person will, whoever wins that election, will get the remaining time in Vance's term, which goes to 2028. Whoever gets the appointment, if they want this person to run and win, would have to then run a special election in 2026 and again in a regular election in 2028.

And different people do it different ways. Sometimes governors look to pick somebody who they want to give the head start to and to start their career off and run for reelection. Others have chosen to pick caretakers, essentially elder statesmen of their party, and then sort of let it be an open primary for the next election.

I think one of the big questions is, you know, obviously, who will be appointed to these seats. But even beyond that, how MAGA will these picks be? You know, there is some talk in Florida about DeSantis potentially picking Laura Trump, the president elects daughter in law.

I think it's also interesting to note that both of these governors who are making these appointments, Ron DeSantis in Florida and Mike DeWine in Ohio, have had differences with Trump over the years to varying degrees. I think DeWine is probably somebody who has more latitude than DeSantis because, you know, DeWine is probably at the end of his political career, whereas DeSantis is somebody who has designs on potentially running for president again.

What do you guys expect as far as how loyal these picks will be? Because obviously that'll matter when it comes to how many senators could potentially object to, you know, these cabinet picks or any number of things that Donald Trump might push over the next few years. Yeah.

I mean, it seems like the Ohio pick is potentially one that could go in a different direction. I mean, as you're pointing out, DeWine has a little bit more latitude. He sort of has a reputation, at least as more of a kind of an independent arbiter. He had a close relationship with Joe Biden, you know, so like he he he was very critical of Donald Trump's comments about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and

And J.D. Vance's, you know, J.D. Vance's. Yes. Yeah. There's been a number of episodes that, you know, indicate that DeWine isn't truly on the MAGA train. I'm almost kind of more intrigued maybe with Florida. You know, I mean, if it's Laura Trump, the president's daughter-in-law, obviously she would probably be pretty loyal to her father-in-law. I think the big question there is whether

There's at least the appearance of a quid pro quo if DeSantis gets appointed to something, you know, if not an actual quid pro quo in there. So, I mean, I think that that one is also quite fascinating to watch. Yeah. And DeSantis, of course, has been talked about as a potential backup candidate.

for defense secretary if Pete Hegseth's nomination doesn't wind up moving forward. And so the idea would be, you know, DeSantis gets defense secretary and then Laura Trump gets the Senate appointment. I think that's something that in another time would certainly raise quite a few eyebrows, but maybe a little bit less so in the Trump era.

PK, any thoughts on these two appointments? The day that Matt Gaetz withdrew for attorney general nomination, I saw Rick Scott, Florida's other senator. And I half jokingly said to him, like, hey, how about Matt Gaetz to get the appointment to be senator? And he he chuckled and then basically spent several minutes explaining all of the virtues of Laura Trump. Mm hmm.

It left me with the impression that it was almost a done deal. Interesting. That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much, PK and Matt. Anytime. Thank you. Paul Kane is a senior congressional correspondent and columnist for The Post, and Matt Visor is a White House reporter.

If you're tuning in via post reports, we'll keep bringing you these conversations most Fridays, but we are taking the next couple of Fridays off for the holidays. So we'll see you next time in the new year. Today's episode was produced by Laura Benshoff and mixed by Justin Garish. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and Rachel Van Dongen.

Our team also includes Maggie Penman, Rina Flores, Monica Campbell, Ted Muldoon, Alana Gordon, Ariel Plotnick, Bishop Sand, Renny Svernovsky, Sabi Robinson, Emma Talcov, Sean Carter, Peter Bresnan, Allison Michaels, Renita Jablonski, Martine Powers, and Elahe Izadi. I'm Aaron Blake. Have a great weekend.

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