Jeffrey Goldberg: Joe Biden says goodbye to the nation and Donald Trump cements his status as the most dominant American political figure of the 21st century. On his way out, Biden warns Americans that the country is becoming an oligarchy. And as if to underscore the point, joining Trump at the inauguration on Monday will be Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, next.
Good evening and welcome to Washington Week. Donald Trump has promised his fellow citizens a very busy Monday filled with executive orders and radical course shifts. What should we be paying attention to?
Joining me to answer that and other questions, McKay Coppins, my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic, Andrew Desiderio is a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News, Asma Khalid is a White House correspondent for NPR and a political contributor at ABC News, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent at The New York Times.
Thank you all for being here last show before inauguration, so only a few very cold days away from Trump becoming president again. And I have to ask, Zolan, let me ask you the decision to move the inauguration inside, that has to hurt a guy who really cares, as we know, about crowd size.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House Correspondent, The New York Times: It’s a tough pill to swallow, right? I mean, look about eight years until the day when Sean Spicer came out and said one of the first, for the first — one of the earliest times the administration tried to mislead the public by saying that the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration was bigger than what photographs in reality basically said what it was. This time he will have to move inside.
We know that donors were also calling the Trump transition team today to try to figure out how they would make it inside the Rotunda. But also crowd size may be why they moved this inside as well. Not just the dangerous weather, but we know that if you have some of that cold weather, it also increases the chance of a more thin crowd, which obviously the president-elect does not want.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. McKay, any thoughts on if he’s relieved or upset?
McKay Coppins, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I mean, you know, I bet he would have liked the parade, right?
Jeffrey Goldberg: Who doesn’t like a parade?
McKay Coppins: If I had the chance to be in a parade, I think I would be sad if it was inside. But, look, because so much of his identity is wrapped up in the biggest ever, the most amazing ever, the greatest ever, these superlatives, you know, he does not want — and he knows about T.V. He does not want camera shots of him standing in front of a relatively meager crowd of freezing people who, you know, aren’t cheering as loud because it’s so cold. I think he understands the kind of theatrics of it, the showbiz element, and that could have contributed.
Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, he’s also so sophisticated on these questions that he would remember that the first Obama inaugural was also on a horribly freezing day, many of us were there and we remember it, and he still had a million-plus people. So, he would know that on the news the whole day would be look at this crowd and look at that crowd. It’s interesting. It’s interesting.
McKay, let me stay with you and I want to show you all something from eight years ago from President Trump’s first Inaugural. Let’s watch this.
Donald Trump, U.S. President-Elect: The crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Very dramatic speech, obviously. What sort of message should we expect to hear from Trump on Monday?
McKay Coppins: Well, that speech, that clip you just showed, was really in keeping with the tone of his entire campaign in 2016, which was incredibly dark. It was painting a very kind of bleak vision of America. He said he alone was the one who could fix it. He sounded a lot of those same themes in this campaign.
But when you talk to Republicans who are close to him, they are claiming that he will sound a more optimistic note in this inaugural. Corey Lewandowski, who was his first campaign manager, has been in and out of his inner circle, has said that he’s going to be talking about prosperity and security and painting a more hopeful vision for the future. I will say that we should always take those things with a grain of salt because the reality is Republicans always want to project onto Donald Trump what they want to hear from him.
We’ll see if he tries to strike a more kind of morning in America Reaganite message. It’s not in his wheelhouse, but he likes to surprise people.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Asma, what are you expecting?
Asma Khalid, White House Correspondent, NPR: Yes. I mean, I think by and large, this entire campaign cycle has felt different than it did in 2015-2016. I mean, 2015-2016, remember he launched his campaign coming down that escalator, warning about Mexicans as criminals and rapists, said that Islam hates us. There was a lot of dark, dark rhetoric. I would say again, maybe some of the themes are there underlying this idea of putting through executive orders on day one around immigration.
But if you look at some of his major campaign speeches, if you look at his own speech, even frankly at the Republican convention, I do think, tonally, it sounded slightly more slightly more optimistic, I think, I mean, than he did in 2016. You need to be careful.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Kinder, gentler Trump on Monday?
Andrew Desiderio, Senior Congressional Reporter, Punchbowl News: Well, look, when you talk to Republicans on Capitol Hill, and what they would say is, look, you won the election, you helped us win the election, you helped us win our races, you helped us get the Senate majority back and keep the House majority, and we won on these issues that you talked about, on border security, for example, and all these other things that Republicans feel like they are sort of, you know, the public is with them on.
And so their message to him that they have not been saying necessarily publicly is to just focus on sort of the policy details. And, again, these are wonky Republicans who just want to start with the pen right away and start writing their budget reconciliation bills on border security, on tax cuts and all that stuff.
And these are the Republicans like, for example, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who is not a Trump Republican, he is not a MAGA Republican, has struck up a very close relationship and even friendship with John Thune in the name of achieving those traditional Republican policy goals. And the message from Senator Thune and others in Republican leadership privately has been focused on the issues that we want on.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: I don’t know. But like I was at that press conference in Mar-a-Lago after the election and I remember hearing from Trump’s allies say that we’re going to hear a more presidential tone in talking about policies. And then it was the second press conference, he went into a 20-minute rant about retribution and about Jack Smith and what have you.
And I feel like there’s been multiple times over the past couple of years that we’ve heard that this is sort of a different era here, but then we see a flashback to the last administration.
Jeffrey Goldberg: And it was kind of a fool me 1,200 times, you know, yes.
Andrew Desiderio: They want it to be a different era.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Everybody want — they want everybody around you.
McKay Coppins: It’s projection. It’s always the Republicans want him to do.
Asma Khalid: Republicans themselves do feel more like upbeat and optimistic about the country.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, they’ve won pretty nicely.
Asma Khalid: In 2016, it was fairly. That’s what I was going to say. I mean, they feel more upbeat. And I think he ran and one I would argue with a wider demographic tent than he did in 2016 too. And so, whether or not he’s aware and conscious of that as he takes office, we’ll have to watch.
Jeffrey Goldberg: One thing to watch for, I think, and all of you watch him very carefully, is if he veers from the teleprompter. What’s going to, what’s going to be on the teleprompter is going to be what everybody decided he should say, but he’s a standup comic and he’s an extemporaneous speaker and he has a thought and he’ll veer and —
McKay Coppins: Well, the best example of this is his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention this last year, right? I mean, he came out, he had just survived an assassination attempt, everybody thought he was going to, you know, be more presidential and sober. And he started out that way. And within 20 minutes he was, the teleprompter had stopped rolling and he was off and, you know, the speech was like over an hour long.
Will he do that with his inaugural? I don’t know. I recall that he was — he stayed relatively on script in his first one. Whether he’ll do that this time, we’ll see.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Zolan, I want to ask about you — I want to ask you some questions about your reporting on immigration over the past couple of weeks. We know, obviously, they’ve telegraphed this pretty strongly, that there are going to be some dramatic steps taken on immigration. Talk about a couple of those, including the things that you’ve been reporting on.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Sure. You’re going to see a flurry of executive orders in the early days of the Trump presidency on immigration. And they are looking at the past when he was last in office, trying to resurrect some of those proposals, but going even a step further.
So, an example, the Trump used a public health emergency to rapidly turn away migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border when he was last in office. We had a public health emergency. It was —
Jeffrey Goldberg: That was at the outset of the pandemic.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: That’s correct. That’s correct. It was the coronavirus. They cited that to use this obscure law. However, Stephen Miller had actually tried to use that law previously reaching for different diseases, the flu, measles, and it didn’t work. He was talked out by cabinet officials.
Well, for the past few months, we’ve been reporting and found out that Miller and basically the Trump camp has been trying to do this again, reaching out to the Border Patrol, trying to survey American communities that have received migrants as well in recent years and basically asking immigration officials, hey, tell us what you’re seeing at the border.
But it’s going to be tough. I mean, this — you’re going to have to convince public health officials that you can do this with sporadic individual cases of illnesses as well as the courts. Both of those institutions have scrutinized this, the use of this rule at the board before. But I say this to say that they are reaching and trying to be creative when it comes to accomplishing some of these immigration methods.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, this is a very interesting question, Asma. The last time they tripped over themselves in trying to — the so-called Muslim ban being —
Asma Khalid: The first weekend.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Being — yes. They rushed a policy. It didn’t work. It made a lot of noise. But do you see — and I use this term advisedly, but do you see them having greater success in implementing some of their early immigration goals?
Asma Khalid: I mean, there were lessons learned, and Zolan cited Stephen Miller, for example. Stephen Miller is known as sort of the architect of many of these hardline immigration policies —
Jeffrey Goldberg: A very, very smart policy analyst.
Asma Khalid: — that was tied to the so-called, you know, Muslim travel ban. And as you said, I mean, that didn’t work, didn’t work. They changed it. It ultimately went up to the Supreme Court and was upheld in the courts, a version of it was.
But I think, broadly, you have some advisers who were a part of that first administration who have learned how to more strategically navigate the executive branch, and I would argue even navigate the judiciary.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: And it’s important to note, they have been working on this since Trump left office last time around.
Jeffrey Goldberg: They’ve had four years of preparation time, McKay?
McKay Coppins: I would just add one wrinkle to this is that Stephen Miller — I profiled him during the first Trump term and spent a lot of time talking to him. And one thing that he said that was really interesting to me is that, you know, I had talked to him about his kind of years as a teenage troll and, you know, he was a political contrarian at his high school and on campus, and he talked about how he had carried that ethos of provocation and controversy for the sake of enlightenment, this was his words, into policymaking.
And so if you asked him about the Muslim ban and the chaos that unfolded, and, you know, the legal battles and everything, I don’t think he would see that as a defeat. I think he would see that as a win, because it drew a bunch of attention to something that he thinks is really important, right?
And so, I would not be surprised if in these opening weeks we see really provocative, noisy, high-profile, for example, raids, you know, ICE raids, or other —
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: A national emergency at the border.
McKay Coppins: Yes, things that are designed to draw the national attention to him.
Jeffrey Goldberg: No, it’s true. Miller is good on policy. He studies — but he’s also a showman. Not quite the showman that his boss is, but he does know —
McKay Coppins: Behind the scenes, but he cares about that.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He does know. I want to get to TikTok in one second. But staying on immigration, what’s the most dramatic thing, Andrew, that you think we might we might see in the first seven days or so on immigration?
Andrew Desiderio: Well, look, I think all of what has been mentioned is definitely fair game here. Congress is going to have a role to play in terms of attaching funding to some of these, right? I think if Congress takes too long with the budget reconciliation process to approve more border funding or more funding to help Trump execute some of these executive orders, he’s going to realize that a lot of them are pretty meaningless, because some executive orders, you know, if it’s a policy change, they’ll have an immediate impact, right? Others, again, designed to make noise, but really don’t have an impact unless they are attached to funding.
And the goal of Republican leadership, at least in the Senate, is to convince Trump to change his strategy when it comes to budget reconciliation and have Republicans address the border first and wait on tax cuts later, and that’s what they’re trying to do.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Just explain one thing. Why is it so expensive to carry some of these things out?
Andrew Desiderio: Well, look, you need detention beds, ICE needs more funding. You’re going to have to hire —
Jeffrey Goldberg: You’re talking about if they’re large scale raids, as they’ve been.
Andrew Desiderio: Right, exactly. It’s not going to be something that can just be done with a flip of a switch. Congress is the only entity that can authorize and then appropriate this funding. And that is obviously something that Trump wants very much, the people around him want very much, Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, who is going to be his budget director coming in. They’re going to do everything they can, even with existing funding and existing law to try to, again, maybe even redirect some funding that’s meant for one thing and try to use it for the border, like they did during Trump’s — yes, during Trump’s first term.
Jeffrey Goldberg: McKay, let me ask you are you a TikTok user?
McKay Coppins: I’m 37 years old. I am not a TikTok user. But my daughter is on the verge. She’s interested. I haven’t let her find out (ph).
Jeffrey Goldberg: I’m thinking of actually joining TikTok tomorrow, just counter opportunistically. But this is going go through.
The politics here are very complicated. Can you unpack that for us, or anybody who wants to volunteer to unpack that in a minute? Because it’s very — and President-elect Trump’s own ideas about this seem to be running into some other ideas in the Republican quarters as well.
McKay Coppins: Let’s just take Trump and the Republican politics of this, because it is really interesting, right?
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.
McKay Coppins: On the one hand, you could see a pretty clear conservative case for banning TikTok. And this is why it was a bipartisan issue during the Biden administration. It all has to do with China. Donald Trump, in his first term, did a lot to reorient American foreign policy around, you know, setting up a kind of civilizational clash between America, the west, and China. So, you know, you could see a case for saying we need to crack down on this app for national security reasons. This is owned by a foreign adversary.
At the same time, Trump has signaled pretty clearly that he is going to try to undo this ban for reasons that are a little opaque and might have a lot to do with the politics of it. This is going to be a very divisive ban if it goes through. It’s already very politically unpopular with young people. I think it’s difficult to overstate how many millions of Americans use TikTok every day not just for entertainment, for news, for information consumption. And so taking that away is politically unpopular.
And I think on a just a kind of basic, primal, you know, political instincts level, Trump understands that taking something popular away from voters is bad. And if he can be seen as the one who saved it, he could be rewarded.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Particularly after you benefited from it during the campaign.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right, obviously. We have so much to talk about. I want to do lightning round here. Hegseth, Pete Hegseth, hearings, Asma, more or less likely that he gets confirmed after those —
Asma Khalid: I think more likely after the hearings that he gets confirmed.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He survived?
Asma Khalid: He survived, in my view.
Jeffrey Goldberg: It wasn’t exactly a sterling example of democratic transparency in action, was it?
Asma Khalid: No. But also I think you saw some Republicans show that they are willing to support a variety of Trump nominees, including Hegseth.
I think the other big question mark for me always was some of the concerns that had been raised about his, let’s say, morality. I was wondering to what degree that actually mattered in Washington, because I thought for the last several years none of that stuff mattered. So, it was eye opening to me that for a minute people in D.C. thought some of those things did matter. Maybe that’s the cynicism in me.
Jeffrey Goldberg: But you’re saying that they ultimately don’t matter because —
Asma Khalid: They don’t matter, per usual though, right?
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. No, I mean, I think the most interesting thing about this is apart from the fact that he was asked very little by Democrats or Republicans about China, for instance, or, you know, or Iran. North Korea, American readiness, et cetera. One of the most interesting things is that there seems to be this tacit kind of feeling on the Hill that if you promise not to drink too much, you can be secretary of defense. That’s what I mean by it’s not sort of a sterling — necessarily a sterling moment in American governance.
But, Zolan, is this the new normal?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: It seems like it. I mean, it seems like, you know, the questioning to basically have a viral clip might be sort of the incentive now rather than some of the question we saw like, hey, do you know all of the countries that are in a very important Asian alliance with the United States as well? You know, although there’s been so much attention on some of the most glaring examples and some of Trump’s picks that one through line that we’ve seen, at least for most of them, is that they are consistently not as qualified historically as other picks that we’ve seen.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Andrew, Tulsi Gabbard, is she going to make it?
Andrew Desiderio: Well, I was going to say, actually, this is an example of confirmation hearings really not mattering anymore on Capitol Hill, or at least not as much as they used to. With Tulsi Gabbard, I think this is a case where the confirmation hearing could be determinative in terms of her prospects and her nomination.
I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on this over the last two weeks. Republicans in particular are concerned about her views on a key intelligence gathering authority called Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This is something that civil libertarians, Fourth Amendment proponents try to sort of dismantle on Capitol Hill every time it comes up for reauthorization. Tulsi Gabbard voted against it every time when she was in Congress. She even proposed legislation to get rid of it.
Republican senators who met with her told me they came away from those meetings unclear of what her view was on that critical intelligence gathering authority. That is a no go, especially for hawkish Republicans who see value in that — again, that authority, that program.
And so Tulsi Gabbard and her team gave me a statement after I brought this to them saying essentially she supports Section 702 of FISA. As a result, a lot of additional Republicans came out in favor of her nomination.
I will say when she goes before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where it’s a 9-8 Republican majority, Susan Collins is on that committee. Todd Young is on that committee. These are two senators who are viewed as swing votes. If just one of them votes against her, it’s going to be very hard procedurally to advance her to the floor.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Let’s talk about Joe Biden and his legacy. He promised at the outset that he was going to be a transitional figure for the Democrats. He didn’t mean it in the way that he has become a transitional figure. He’s transitioning between one Trump administration and the next Trump administration.
And so my question for all of you is, is he going to be remembered ultimately as the guy who inadvertently enabled the return of Donald Trump?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: I think President Biden will forever be linked to Trump. You know, for the last four years, we have heard his aides say, whenever they were faced with questions about his age or his ability to win reelection, that he was the only person who defeated Trump and that he was the only person who could defeat Trump, and he did not end up doing that. I think that you cannot talk about his legacy without linking him to President Trump.
Jeffrey Goldberg: McKay?
McKay Coppins: I think that’s true. I also think that he, very self-consciously, framed his entire presidency around defending and protecting and restoring democratic norms and democracy. And when you end up doing what he did and losing your party, the White House in pretty dramatic fashion to usher in the return of Donald Trump, who his party believes is, you know, a quasi authoritarian figure, it’s going to be hard to make the case that he did what he set out to do.
Now, there are other things that he could claim as key parts of his legacy, the infrastructure bill, bipartisan legislating. But on the thing that he promised that this was going to be what his presidency was, I think it’s hard to make a case that he succeeded.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Andrew, I want to ask you about something he said in his farewell address. Let’s just actually watch a short clip of it, and then I’ll ask you the question.
Joe Biden, U.S. President: Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He was supposed to be the — let me just acknowledge, for fairness sake, that there are plenty of rich people who could be called oligarchs in this — in Biden’s circle, including George Soros, to whom he just gave a Presidential Medal of Freedom, acknowledging that for fairness sake. But he’s saying after four years of his administration that America is threatened by oligarchies. That’s not a successful administration by his own standard here. Is that fair?
Andrew Desiderio: I think that’s totally fair. And I also think him using the word oligarchs and oligarchy sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders talked about this in 2016, when he first ran for president. This has been a problem, an issue that progressives have been talking about for a long time, and it was very fascinating to hear him embrace sort of that line of questioning, that theme.
But also, as McKay just referenced, you know, he’s frustrated that Americans apparently didn’t give him enough credit for the bipartisan infrastructure law, for the Chips and Science Act, things that he believes Democrats believe are really impacting American communities, positively revitalizing parts of the country that really needed it. Republicans, of course, supported all those pieces of legislation.
The first two years of Biden’s presidency, that Congress, the 117th Congress, was historically productive. They passed a number of major landmark bipartisan bills, and there was an obvious frustration on the part of Biden that he feels like that didn’t break through to Americans and, you know, Democrats running in contentious Senate races and House races tried to use that to their advantage too, and it fell short.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Asma, could you answer the very quick question. Why didn’t that break through? And then I’ll give you the last word on — you’ve covered Joe Biden so closely.
Asma Khalid: Why didn’t the policy stuff break through? Look, I covered — I spent like two years going out actually specifically looking at this policy stuff in action. I think it is massive investments, whether or not you agree or disagree with the purpose of the investment. It didn’t break through because, frankly, it hasn’t yet been felt in a lot of communities. I think that’s fundamentally the issue.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Andrew Desiderio: Projects take a while, yes.
Jeffrey Goldberg: The last question to you is, how will he be remembered by Democrats at least, not tomorrow necessarily, not Tuesday, but five or ten years from now?
Asma Khalid: I feel that I should wait five or ten years, to be honest, to actually make that assessment.
Jeffrey Goldberg: You just want to be invited back.
Asma Khalid: No, because I think, look, we just saw the funeral of Jimmy Carter. I think Jimmy Carter was remembered at his funeral in a different way than he was in the moment. And so I think it’s worthwhile to be cautious before we write the pages of history.
Jeffrey Goldberg: That is a very fair point to end on, and I thank you for that point. And I thank all of you for coming. Unfortunately, we do need to leave it there for now. There’s a lot to talk about, and we’ll be talking about it next week, of course. I want to thank our panelists for joining me, and I want to thank you, our viewers, for joining us.
And don’t forget to visit theatlantic.com for Shane Harris’ interview with William Burns about his time as the director of the CIA.
I’m Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night, from Washington.
