The Highest Calling, page 47
DR: Let’s talk about his reelection campaign. Did he ever have any doubt in his mind he wanted to be reelected? Or did he say, “Four years is enough and I want to go do something else”?
MH: He was definitely worn out by the job by 2020, but he wanted to win reelection.
DR: Who did he want to have run the campaign for him? Was it Jared or somebody else?
MH: That’s a good question. He left it to Jared. I don’t know whether he thought much about who he wanted. I don’t think he thinks that way.
DR: Did he take Joe Biden seriously as an opponent?
MH: No, he did not. And he should have.
DR: He didn’t take him seriously because he didn’t know him, or because of his age?
MH: I think his age. He bought into the line of Biden making gaffes and all of the things known about him before.
DR: I’ve observed over the years that incumbent presidents of the United States don’t prepare for debates that much because they know the issues well. When I worked for Jimmy Carter, he didn’t really prepare for the only debate he had with Reagan. I think Barack Obama said he didn’t prepare as much as he maybe should have. In his first debate, George W. Bush the same. So did Donald Trump prepare for the first debate with Joe Biden?
MH: He did not, and that was something that his folks had been upset with him about. You are correct. There’s a long tradition of that. There was something else with that first debate, which is that Donald Trump may have had COVID and was onstage very animated and red and sweating.
DR: He seemed to interrupt Joe Biden a lot. Was it planned that way, or did it just happen?
MH: It was planned that way, but it was not supposed to be quite as vigorously done as it was. He was coached by Giuliani to interrupt a lot.
DR: There was one very serious thing about his health with respect to COVID, and a major part of his administration dealt with COVID. How close did he come to having a very serious health problem when he got COVID?
MH: He was much sicker than they ever said publicly. We found out later, my colleagues and I, six months later, that he had what was known as COVID pneumonia, infiltrates in his lungs. The public health officials in the administration believed that if he had not been given monoclonal antibody treatment, he would have died.
DR: Did he ever get told that?
MH: They were pretty clear with him how serious his health was. He knew he was sick.
DR: During the COVID period of time, initially the press briefings at the White House were done by the vice president, then Donald Trump came in and started doing them. Why did he replace the vice president and start doing those when the vice president seemed to like doing them?
MH: There were a couple of reasons. Some of Trump’s advisors, seeing that Pence was getting a lot of coverage, encouraged Trump to step in and do this so that he didn’t look like he was being outshined. Then Trump discovered it could be just like another rally setting. He would stand up there for two hours. These were not informational. He would argue with reporters.
DR: He didn’t seem to get along with Tony Fauci that much toward the end. What was the reason for that?
MH: He considered Tony Fauci to be a showboat is what he would say to aides. But he didn’t like that Fauci was offering information that contradicted Trump’s narrative that everything was fine.
DR: Let’s talk about the reelection campaign. He thought he would win. Is that right?
MH: He thought in 2020 that he was going to win, yes.
DR: When the election came forward that night, and Arizona was declared by Fox for Biden, did that really upset him? Did he ask Jared to do something about it?
MH: It was a seismic moment. When Fox News called Arizona for Biden, Trump said, “Get that fixed.” Kushner called Murdoch. It caused all kinds of chaos within Fox News, but Fox stuck to it, and then the AP did it a few hours later.
DR: Did Trump go to bed that night thinking he was reelected?
MH: It’s a really good question. I don’t know whether he thought that he was reelected or not. I think he went to bed thinking he was going to convince everyone he was, no matter what.
DR: When he wakes up, people say Biden is going to be president. Does he immediately think that the election is stolen from him? Who convinces him the election is stolen?
MH: For the first few days, the campaign’s own data was showing that Trump could make up votes in Arizona and in a couple of other states. By Friday, it was clear that was not the case. Saturday is when the networks called the race for Biden. Trump had already started suggesting the election was going to be stolen from him months earlier when there was widespread by-mail voting because of COVID. So I don’t think Trump needed convincing. This is something Trump’s been saying for years.
DR: Who was his closest advisor trying to convince him to challenge it? Was that Rudy Giuliani?
MH: Giuliani.
DR: There were, I think, 65 cases filed alleging voter fraud of some type or another. And 65 cases were thrown out of court. That didn’t convince Trump that maybe there wasn’t fraud?
MH: There may have been one that went a little further, but yes, almost 99 percent of them were gone. Trump sees everything as an ongoing negotiation, and so he wasn’t looking at that and saying, “Oh, you know what? I might not be right.” Narrative is all, artifice is all. This was no different.
DR: Did people come to him, Republican leaders or others, and say, “You’re hurting the country. You should just concede and go about your business”?
MH: Most people were terrified and afraid of going near him. I do know that Tom Barrack, whom I mentioned earlier, had a meeting with him on November 16th, saying to him, “You are hurting yourself.” Which is really the main way to get through to him, not about the country. “You should just stop this.” And Trump refused.
DR: Did his family go to him and say, “You didn’t get reelected”?
MH: What his family has claimed in private about what they did is very different than what was actually happening. First, his oldest two sons, in the days after the election, did everything they could on social media to whip up Republicans. “Go fight for my father.” Inside, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were not doing a whole lot to try to convince him otherwise.
DR: He made some calls to the secretary of state in Georgia. It’s amazing to me, when I watch TV today, I see people have telephone tapes of people calling them. I don’t tape it when people call me. Do people regularly tape these things? How come he seems to have tapes of calls he’s made? Did the Georgia secretary of state tape all of his calls?
MH: Because by January of 2021, people had figured out that Donald Trump will get on the phone with you and then say that something entirely different was said. People in the White House had started taping him. It’s not a surprise others did too.
DR: Was there any plan by Donald Trump to not leave the Oval Office, as has been suggested?
MH: I have reporting on this in the book. He had started saying to people within two weeks of the election, “I’m just not going to leave.” I don’t think it was a plan, but it was in his mind. “I’m not leaving, we’re never leaving. Why would you leave when you won an election?” I don’t know what would have happened if January 6th, 2021, didn’t happen.
DR: Let’s talk about January 6th. What was his plan on January 6th? It was to rally people and march to Capitol Hill and protest in a civil way? Is that what you think he wanted?
MH: His aides always point to how he said, “March peacefully and patriotically,” to his allies. I don’t think that he had a grand thought of what might happen. He was so angry and so riled up that it was just “Stop this somehow,” “this” being the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win.
DR: When the Capitol was overtaken, there were calls made by leaders of the Congress to Donald Trump to call this off. Did he not take the calls on purpose? Why did he wait a couple of hours?
MH: He did speak to Kevin McCarthy, who told Trump that people were breaking into McCarthy’s office. What we heard at the time and what we reported at the time was that Trump was watching on television and was happy with what he saw.
DR: Did he say to McCarthy, “Some of these people take this more seriously than you do”?
MH: Yes. “They’re angrier about the election than you are, Kevin.”
DR: When the violence occurred on January 6th, eventually Donald Trump issued a statement. How long was it before he actually issued it? Did he write that statement, or did people force him to give that statement?
MH: At around 2:20 or 2:24—I have the time stamp wrong, I think—he tweeted essentially, and I’m paraphrasing, “This is happening because Mike Pence didn’t do what he should have done,” meaning reject Joe Biden’s win. That was his first statement. Aides spent time begging him to say something. He finally issued another statement saying, “You know, be peaceful.” It was an emerging process.
DR: Do you think in truth Donald Trump thinks he won the election, that it was stolen from him?
MH: It’s a great question. I don’t know how to answer it. I think he’s convinced himself of it at this point. I don’t know whether he thought it at the time.
DR: Since he did leave office, has he ever talked to Joe Biden?
MH: No. He did leave Joe Biden a traditional letter, and what Biden said to people who work with him, after he got it—it was in Trump’s familiar scrawl—he said he was more gracious than he’d expected he would be.
DR: Donald Trump has subsequently been indicted in New York. He’s lost a civil trial in New York on a sexual abuse allegation. Would these things deter him from running for president again?
MH: No. In fact, these events made him more dug in on wanting to run, because the campaign becomes a shield.
DR: If Donald Trump runs for president again, as he says he’s going to, and he’s elected, what does he want to do in another term?
MH: There’s been a lot of attention on the CNN town hall and some criticism of how it was conducted. He made a lot of news, and he made very clear what that second term would look like, including reinstating the child separation immigration policy. He promoted the idea of debt default. He wouldn’t commit to aid to Ukraine. He wouldn’t say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war. It would be, and he has said this in his own words, a term of him serving as people’s retribution.
DR: One of the issues that’s arisen with you and Bob Woodward and others is when you’re a journalist and you have a scoop, do you give it to your newspaper or do you put it in your book? How did you deal with that conundrum?
MH: This comes up a lot. The process of reporting for a book is very different than the process of reporting for the daily newspaper. I found it takes time. It takes time to get information confirmed in a way that I could use in the book. My goal is always to get stuff in print in the newspaper as quickly as possible, and I gave a significant amount of information to the paper in real time.
DR: You’ve enjoyed your connection with Donald Trump over the years, would you say?
MH: I wouldn’t think of it that way. He’s a subject I cover. We’re going to be talking about the Donald Trump era for decades, long after you and I are gone. It has been a privilege to be able to report on this moment in history, but this is an ugly moment in history, and it has been for journalists too.
22 PRESIDENT JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.
(b. 1942; president from 2021 to present)
In the country’s nearly 250-year history, no individual who became president was likely talked about as a possible president for as long as Joe Biden.
At the age of 29, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating an incumbent Republican, Caleb Boggs, who was thought to be unbeatable when Biden entered the race, after having served just a few years on the New Castle County Council in Delaware.
But then tragedy struck. A month before Biden was to be sworn in, his wife and young daughter were killed in a car crash; his two sons survived but were badly injured and needed extensive medical help. Biden considered abandoning the Senate seat, instead focusing on taking care of his family and living his life fully in Delaware, rather than spending time away from his sons in Washington.
But many senior Democratic senators spent time with Biden and convinced him to be sworn in and assume the position. He agreed to do so but resolved to come home every night, via the Amtrak train from Washington, D.C., to Delaware. And he did—and continued doing so long after his sons were grown. He stopped these daily train trips only when he became vice president under Barack Obama, a position that ended Biden’s 36-year Senate career.
Prior to becoming vice president, Biden had run for president twice—once in the 1988 election cycle, though he pulled out early due, in part, to a desire to lead the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; Biden was then the committee chair. In 2008, he made another run at the presidency, but did poorly in the Iowa caucuses and pulled out of the race. (Biden seriously considered running in 2016, but the death of his oldest son, Beau, from brain cancer made that a difficult time to focus on a campaign. President Obama counseled Biden not to run because of it and to support Hillary Clinton, which he did.)
When he left the vice presidency, Biden spent time building a think tank at the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn Biden Center, and working to keep his extensive political network alive. At the age of 76, he decided to run for president. Despite his name recognition, Biden did poorly in the first two contests, coming in fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary. As a result, he was seen potentially as someone destined to drop out in the near future. But James Clyburn, the dean of the South Carolina congressional delegation and the House majority whip, decided to support him before that state’s primary, which was enough for Biden to win the primary. Shortly thereafter, most of the other Democratic candidates dropped out of the race and supported Biden, giving him a much easier path to the nomination than many had once thought possible.
The path to the presidency was not quite as easy. Donald Trump, despite his many challenges—a special counsel investigation, an impeachment, frequent staff and cabinet turnovers, frayed relations with longtime European allies, difficult press and media relationships—had maintained, if not strengthened, his support among his base. For most of the campaign, Biden seemed ahead in the projected popular vote, though the projected Electoral College vote seemed likely to be closer. When the voting was completed, former Vice President Biden prevailed, winning the popular vote by seven million votes and the Electoral College vote 306 to 232, capturing five states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia) that President Trump had won in 2016. But in a nearly unprecedented series of actions and statements, President Trump refused to concede the election, and had his lawyers and supporters challenge the results. He also sought to have Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate (and the official presiding over the official Electoral College vote), declare Trump the winner of the election.
As the world now knows, none of the sixty-plus lawsuits prevailed, Vice President Pence declared Joseph Biden the winner, and ultimately, after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, President Trump left the White House without meeting his successor or attending the inauguration. Former President Trump was later indicted by a Justice Department special counsel and a Georgia prosecutor for a number of actions surrounding the election aftermath. Neither of those cases have yet been resolved.
While the transition was truncated, for President Trump did not authorize the governmental transition process to proceed until late November, President Biden did start his administration on time on January 20, 2021, and was able to achieve his nearly 50-year dream of becoming president (and in so doing became the oldest person, at 78, inaugurated as president). And, in that position, he worked to get vaccines, developed under the Trump administration, distributed throughout the country, and to get additional spending approved by Congress to keep the economy going during the COVID period. (Early in the administration, Congress passed legislation to inject $1.9 trillion into the economy; President Trump had earlier persuaded Congress to inject $2.2 trillion into the economy when it became clear that COVID was dramatically weakening the economy.)
I have known President Biden for many years, in part because he was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter for president, and he worked with the Carter administration on many initiatives. Because I have stayed out of elective politics and campaigns since the Carter days, I have not been a political supporter of or contributor to any of President Biden’s campaigns, but over many decades I got to know him through interactions at the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center. Because of that relationship of many years, I did offer to let him use my Nantucket, Massachusetts, home for Thanksgiving when he casually told me, during a Kennedy Center reception at the vice president’s home, that he needed to find a home for the annual Thanksgiving visit of his family to that island (the house he normally used was not available). He actually did not know at the time that I had a home there. He used it twice as vice president and several times as president. (I am not there when he visits; I prefer warmer weather that time of the year.)
For this book, I asked President Biden’s staff if I could interview him about the presidency itself, as opposed to the specifics of his administration, and he agreed to the interview, which follows. My interest in doing the interview was designed principally to hear his views on the office itself and the way he conducts it.
My own views on his presidency are not fully formed, for it is not over, and any real assessment will take time once it has been completed. But preliminarily, I think he won the election in part by being the anti-Trump, seen as a safe option who would restore some normalcy to Washington and would be able to reset relationships with international allies and be able to get some bipartisanship in Congress to get his agenda passed.
