JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We're just days away from watching Joe Biden and Donald Trump, two men whose combined age is 159, debate in front of a television audience of millions, and a live studio audience of not one single person.
Tonight, a close look at what we should expect when these two superannuated rivals take the stage, next.
Good evening and welcome to Washington Week and to our new studio here at WETA.
If you notice the table, I built it myself.
This coming Thursday, President Joe Biden and the man he defeated in 2020, former President Donald Trump, will make their respective cases to the American people.
Neither would want to hear this, but they actually have much in common.
Both are unpopular, they are more or less tied in recent polls, and both are older than our previous oldest president, Ronald Reagan.
Only one is a convicted felon, however, and yet the pressure is somehow on Joe Biden to prove that he has what it takes to continue in office.
Donald Trump will obviously try to highlight what he and his supporters see as Biden's frailty.
Biden will undoubtedly highlight the fact that Trump led an anti-constitutional insurrection.
Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Anne Applebaum is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the forthcoming book, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The New York Times, Jonathan Karl is the chief White House -- chief Washington correspondent, excuse me, for ABC News and the author of Tired of Winning, Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, and Vivian Salama is a national politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.
John, I didn't mean to demote you, I'm sorry, or promote.
I don't know.
Promote, demote, I don't know.
JONATHAN KARL, Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News: I thought that was still a good title.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.
No, everybody here hears great titles.
So, welcome to our new table, very proud of it.
I want to focus our attention really on the debate tonight.
It's something that I didn't think was going to happen.
I'm still not a hundred percent sure it's going to happen.
We'll get to that.
But I've been thinking a lot about the particular weaknesses that both men bring to Atlanta next week.
And actually watch this short clip and you'll see what I'm referring to.
DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Candidate: And it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT, very smart, he goes -- I say, what would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you're in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater?
So I said, so there's a shark ten yards away from the boat, ten yards, or here.
Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking?
Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking.
Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?
Because I will tell you, he didn't know the answer, he said, you know, nobody has ever asked me that question.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Okay.
So, one man in that little sequence has some frailty issues.
It just seems that way.
I know his people are telling us, the journalists in Washington, that Joe Biden is like the Hulk.
He's all like muscle and vigor, but our eyes are telling us something else.
The other man is only three years younger, actually, and it doesn't seem very frail physically.
But, you know, in matters of cognition and coherence and storytelling, you know, it's something else entirely.
So, I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but often Donald Trump doesn't make any sense, right?
So, Jon, how does Trump come into this debate and prove that he's cognitively competent?
JONATHAN KARL: Well, you did something important there, which is you played an extended clip of Donald Trump.
And, by the way, you could have kept on going.
And I think it's something that people haven't seen much of.
Donald Trump is omnipresent in our lives, the criminal cases, all this, but there has been not much coverage of what he is actually saying since he was in the White House.
I mean, people have largely tuned out.
So, here you will have an extended period of time where we actually hear what Donald Trump have to respond to real basic questions, give answers, have to have rebuttals and hear what he's actually talking about.
And it's -- but he's been out there.
I mean, this is actually the case I've been making, based on my reporting, is this is not even the same Donald Trump of the Trump presidency.
He wanders all over the place.
His ideas have gotten fuzzier.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Because he's never been lenient.
JONATHAN KARL: No, he's never in particular, but, I mean, I think this is the first extended look that a mass group of American people will have of Donald Trump since he was in the White House.
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS, White House Correspondent, The New York Times: And that was the thinking too when sort of the Biden campaign, when President Biden first sort of challenged him this early.
I, like you, was surprised when the news of this popped this early in what is normally the debate schedule, that it's happening this early.
But when you talk to Democrats and Biden's top aides, they think that by being able to put Trump out there in the spotlight can sort of help them accomplish what they've been trying to do for now the past couple of years and have thus far failed to really convey to voters, and that's the contrast.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Vivian, I want to ask you two questions.
The first is, would you rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark?
You don't have to answer that one right now.
The second question is, how does Joe Biden come into this debate and prove that he's not too old for the job?
VIVIAN SALAMA, National Politics Reporter, The Wall Street Journal: Well, first of all, to your first question, I'm terrified of sharks.
So, definitely, electrocuted, that's just me.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Something you have in common with Donald Trump.
VIVIAN SALAMA: There you go.
As far as President Biden, you know, typically when you go into a debate like this, it's a referendum.
When there's an incumbent, it's a referendum on their presidency.
Of course, now we have a very unusual situation where both men have served as president, and so both of them have a record.
That's one of the big differences between Donald Trump of today versus Donald Trump back in '16, where he didn't have that.
But then you have two presidents who are older and Donald Trump has really fixated on this idea of Joe Biden's age.
They've been playing those clips over and over again on everything from Fox News to any other Republican or conservative networks to show that he is either too frail or kind of wandering off.
Trump talks at his rallies about Biden's cognitive abilities.
Ironically, at one of his rallies a few days ago, he talked about Biden's cognitive abilities and then he messed up the name of the former White House doctor/congressman, Ronny Jackson, he called him Ronny Johnson, immediately after talking about Biden's cognitive abilities.
So, obviously the two men come in here with challenges.
They are both older at this point.
Trump himself, you know, not the man he was in '16.
You just played a clip of him kind of rambling a little bit and that's one of his issues as well.
And so one of them is going to have issues of coming out there and appearing strong and the other one is going to have kind of that beyond the offense to corner him on everything, from his age and his frailty to his record on the economy and other things as well.
And it's going to be a challenge for President Biden.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Anne, just your opinion on this, but who's in greater danger in this debate, in the sense of, oh my goodness, I didn't realize he was like that?
ANNE APPLEBAUM, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I mean, they both face a certain kind of danger.
I think, in a way, Joe Biden has the advantage, partly because that clip that you just showed, plus the other clips that have been circulating, there's one of him appearing to wander off at a G7 meeting when, in fact, he was going to greet somebody.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That was edited.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: That was edited to make it look like that.
But that means the bar for him is very low.
All he has to do is prove that he's not senile.
And, clearly, he isn't senile.
And so he has a chance of doing very well, whereas I think actually the expectations for Trump are higher.
And so it will be harder for Trump to appear coherent, to sound coherent.
Trump doesn't seem to me anymore capable of making a coherent argument or making a case.
And in a way, the difficulty is also going to be for those who are running the debate because Trump is going to lie.
That's what he does now.
He just goes off on these rants.
He makes stuff up.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to get to that.
I want to get -- how do you actually manage this debate in a second?
But I just want to come to this question I sort of foreshadowed a bit at the beginning.
Do you think that the debate is going to happen?
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: At this point.
I mean, just based off of my reporting, what I'm hearing, yes.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Trump is fully in?
He's not going to look for an exit?
JONATHAN KARL: Trump is fully in.
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: Yes.
And, look -- JONATHAN KARL: Biden is fully in.
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: And Biden is fully in.
He's going to Camp David.
He's going to Camp David.
He's in Camp David right now.
Ron Klain will be helping out with moderating as well.
They are going through mock debates.
I'm of the position, the reporting basically says thus far, that's -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
JONATHAN KARL: But I agree with Anne that the expectations game is favoring Biden.
But I think this is a potentially perilous moment for Joe Biden.
I mean, his people will have you believe that the problem that he faces is basically the media hasn't been covering how great and, you know, strong he is.
And there's been -- and that his enemies have taken clips out of context.
But in reality, I mean, Democrats who are not inside the Biden campaign, but very much want him to win are deeply concerned about his ability to make it through this campaign and are worried about at least the perception of him being so old and not able to make it through four years of a second term.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, stay on that for a little bit.
How much of that anxiety is related to the fact that, at the end of his perspective, theoretical second term, he'd be 86 years old, how much of the worry is like, even if he can get through next year, is Kamala Harris going to be president?
Are you voting essentially for Kamala Harris?
JONATHAN KARL: I think that is the concern.
And, look, I went back, and I know you've done this too, but I went back and re-watched the debates from four years ago, particularly the second debate, which was the more -- the first debate was a bunch of shouting, and they both looked awful.
Trump looked a little worse than Biden.
But Biden was sharp in that second debate.
And when you look at it, you're struck at how much younger he looks.
It was four years ago.
It looks like more than four years ago.
And I think one of the significance of this debate coming so early is it is coming before the Democratic Convention, and that dream, that fever dream of Republicans and some Democrats, that there will be some change at the Democratic Convention will not be over until Biden speaks and accepts the nomination in the convention.
VIVIAN SALAMA: But there's also so much riding on this debate because of that.
You have the conventions coming right afterwards.
And then we don't have another debate until September.
So they are going to be there.
It's the first time that these two see each other since the last time they debated.
And for them at this point to be able to come out there and actually have an exchange, a policy discussion, that's why so many rules have been put into place, everything, from cutting the mics while they're speaking, to having them on opposite ends of the stage, so that you don't have an incident like that first debate where they're just shouting over each other.
I'm sure there's still going to be opportunities for them to do that.
But also remember that both of these men, when they are not scripted, they tend to say things that can be a little bit off the cuff and/or, you know, not what their aides would like.
President Biden has been doing these mock debates trying to really kind of soak in all the talking points where they're trying to get him to really memorize and stick to certain policy framings.
But former President Trump is not.
They say he's having policy discussions.
So, whether or not they're really getting into the nitty-gritty of specific policy talking points, or if he's just going to go out there and riff, that could really make a difference for him.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, Jon, you've written a whole book on this.
The idea that Donald Trump is going to read the briefing book is not historically grounded.
JONATHAN KARL: No.
And policy is not Trump's thing, as you know.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
JONATHAN KARL: But if I can just say - - so I think just to finish the Biden point is this is a moment where he can either answer those concerns, particularly the concerns among Democrats that he can do this.
Like here he is hype big moment.
He seizes it.
He looks like he can handle it.
He can take on Donald Trump.
Or, if it's a disaster, there will be questions about whether or not he should continue to be the nominee.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Anne?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: No, I was just going to say that one of the things that's at stake in this election is do we vote on policy?
Do we vote on what's really happening in the economy?
Or do we vote on bombast and identity politics and essentially lies and that suit whatever biases you have?
And the debate might show that.
I mean, we might have a contest between one person who's trying to talk about policy on the one hand and another person who's riffing about sharks on the other.
But there's a constituency that likes the sharks.
I mean, he's funny, he's a showman, I can identify with someone who says wacky stuff, you know, that's just like me, that's just like my uncle.
And that's one of the things that we'll discover.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Zolan, let me ask you about -- I mean, you have -- Jon alluded to this.
You've been watching every Biden debate going back 30 -- ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: A lot of footage.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A lot of footage.
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: 37 years.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And thank God somebody's there to do it.
We appreciate your efforts.
What's changed over the years and the way Biden does this?
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: I mean, well, again, just to emphasize this to folks, he's been engaged in presidential debates for some 37 years.
We're going back to 1987 for the first time for Joe Biden.
That's nearly four decades ago.
Of course, things have changed.
I mean, he is now 81 years old.
So, looking at the performance of somebody in 1987, how much can that really inform the approach going forward?
But we can find indicators of some things that have changed in his overall approach, or the various styles of Joe Biden.
He can be combative.
And, honestly, when he was combative in 2007 or against Paul Ryan later in 2012 re-election campaign, that was when Democrats actually were pretty high on him.
I talked to David Axelrod recently, who was saying that Joe Biden's moment where he -- during a primary where he went at Rudy Giuliani's, saying he basically knows three words, but one of them is 9/11, paraphrasing there, or when he was facing questions on his discipline, and he gave Brian Williams a one word answer when he asked about, you know, can are you going to be giving gaffes?
Yes.
That caught the attention of future President Obama at that point and of Democrats when he was more folksy, almost avuncular against Paul Ryan and sort of laughed at him, called him my friend, mocked him in the debate.
That also people thought -- JONATHAN KARL: Malarkey.
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: Yes, malarkey, of course.
People also thought that that was him at a strong point.
But then we get to closer to the present, and 2020 presidential primaries, some Democrats thought that he struggled, particularly even to get a word in, right?
And now that was some time ago.
That was four or five years ago, 2019.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Just in term, pure energy, interventionist energy he wasn't bringing.
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: Quite literally trying to like get his time to speak.
I mean, at times he put his finger up to try and get a word in.
There were other times he cut himself off because his own -- when have you ever heard of a politician in debate speaking for not too long, but cutting themselves off?
That's unheard of.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: So, all of that, to answer your question, as we got to more recent years, some of the combative nature actually went to almost like a rule-following elder statesman, but there were still signs when he went against Trump in the debates and the combative nature was no longer just having like a zinger line that was prepared but actually goading Trump into delivering a comment that would be viral.
Think about the Proud Boys comment as well, daring him to condemn the Proud Boys.
And that I think is going to be key to watch for this debate.
It's not almost what Joe Biden says but what can Joe Biden go Trump into saying.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to talk about the mechanics of the debate, but I also want you to watch this brief clip from one of those debates where you can see the combative nature of this.
Why don't we watch that?
JOE BIDEN, U.S. President: Make sure you, in fact, let people know you're a senator.
I'm not going to answer the question because the question is -- would you shut up, man?
DONALD TRUMP: Listen, who is on your list, Joe?
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, so, you know, I've been thinking a lot sympathetically about Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, two excellent colleagues of ours in Washington, who have a very, very hard job.
I mean, Jon, you've done this stuff for a while.
What are the biggest challenges facing the moderators in making this a substantive, illuminating debate?
JONATHAN KARL: I'm thinking the guy in the control room that has to deal with the muting of the microphones.
Because they have all these rules about the -- you have two minutes to start, a minute rebuttal, and as soon as it's over, the mic is -- but they're going to be going back and forth.
As a moderator, the challenge here is you're a moderator.
You're not an interviewer.
It's not like you're coming in, and I'm here to grill, you know, Joe Biden or Donald Trump on X policy.
You're, you're here to moderate, but you don't want to let lies just fly by.
But as you do your fact-checking, you can't look like you're playing a role in debating the people that are supposed to be debating each other.
And also, remember, it's also perilous.
If you're doing fact-checking in real-time, you better damn well be right.
Remember when Candy Crowley fact-checked Mitt Romney in a debate in 2012, actually, the fact check wasn't -- it was murkier?
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
But this is an interesting question, Anne, because, I mean, you've written a lot about this particular subject.
When Donald Trump says he won the 2020 election, how far do the moderators go?
How long do they keep pressing back and saying, you actually lost, and before letting it just go to the next set of issues?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: I mean, they're going to have to do something.
I mean, they're going to have to say, no, Mr. Trump, you lost.
And now the next question is for President Biden, or, alternately, Biden is going to have to do it.
And I hope that's one of the things that he's preparing to do.
When Trump lies, when he says he won the election, when he says his economy was perfect, when he says the economy is now terrible, whatever piece of the mythology he chooses, Biden is going to have to have some prepared way to say you're wrong.
And shouting that you're lying might not work, and so he's going to need some way of countering him.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, it seems almost as if the moderators, the two CNN hosts of this, are representing, not fact-checking so much as reality intervention, but, I mean, it seems like a very, very hard job to do to balance in a polarized society.
And I'm wondering what you would say to them about trying to bring in, and I want to talk about policy for a couple of minutes, how do you get them to say something substantive about the economy, immigration, the Middle East, et cetera?
What's the magic here?
VIVIAN SALAMA: I mean, direct questions and just really hold them to account.
And they have to hold each other to account, too.
And that's one of the things is that the moderators, yes, they're going to have to do it.
But Joe Biden and Donald Trump are going to have to also hold each other to account, and that's the point of a debate.
JONATHAN KARL: There's a real opportunity on the policy stuff from a moderator perspective.
I mean, Donald Trump -- there are some policies that are floating around here.
One is mass deportations of tens of millions of people that are in the United States undocumented.
How is that going to work?
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: And make no mistake, some of the announcements that Joe Biden just made recently also factored directly into a strategy of bringing up immigration in this debate.
I mean, he just had two executive actions, separate executive actions, one that I know from talking to people involved with his campaign, basically the line is going to be, hey, look, we helped to unite families in the U.S. JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, it's interesting to stay on the shark theme, it's almost like that's chum in the water, right, before the debate to sort of talk about allowing more legal immigrants to come in.
I mean, it's really -- ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: It's a kind of a high wire balancing act.
But from the strategy perspective for them, it's say what we did, right, and then immediately flip to what do you plan to do.
What do you plan to do?
Because, remember, it's not just about pulling in sort of a swing voter or a Republican that might be undecided.
It's also about energizing your base that might be on the couch come November.
VIVIAN SALAMA: And that's where the challenge is going to be for Donald Trump.
Because if you watch him in his rallies, a lot of times he will say that, you know, Joe Biden is the worst president ever.
When I was president, I did X, Y, Z.
Okay, but that's backward-looking.
You have to say what you're going to do next and really lay out your vision for the country moving forward.
And we have not heard that a ton from Donald Trump.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Anne, I want to ask you about another policy issue just as important as immigration or the economy, and that's something that Donald Trump referred to yesterday when he said, for 20 years, I heard that if Ukraine goes into NATO, it's a real problem for Russia.
And I think that's really why this war started.
Basically, Donald Trump is back to the sort of semi-isolationist.
We provoked Russia.
We, the west, provoked Russia.
And I'm wondering to get your -- I wanted to get your commentary on that as a Russia expert, but I'm also wondering if you could place this issue and rank it in terms of importance for the voters.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: I mean, I doubt that the issue as such has huge importance for the voters, although there are ways in which it could even change the election in the next couple of months.
I mean, a surprise either way, a breakthrough on the front line, a Russian -- some unexpected piece of aggression could -- I mean, that might suddenly burst into the campaign and change it.
And there are a lot of people who are watching Putin for exactly that.
It's true that Trump has -- I think under the influence of some of his advisers and some of the people around him, he has started to use, once again, this Russian propaganda about how the war was our fault.
I think because that gives him a way of contrasting to Biden.
If I had been in office, it wouldn't have started and so on, and, you know, somehow the U.S. is at fault rather than Russia.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Jon, just in the minute that we have left, I'm curious to know, I want to hear you on what you're looking for out of this debate, something that -- how will you advance the understanding of these two candidates for the American people?
JONATHAN KARL: I think that the biggest thing, the single biggest thing is how Biden does.
And does he rise to the occasion and does he calm these fears?
And like I said, this is not just Republican carping, it's really fears among some of his real allies about his cognitive state.
And I think he has the ability to rise to the occasion.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Cognitive state or his ability to -- I mean, is it a physical issue or is it a cognitive issue?
JONATHAN KARL: I mean, it's his ability to be quick.
And, look, we're in a visual, I mean, this debate iss on television.
How he looks when he takes on Donald Trump is a big part of that, his ability to take this campaign to Donald Trump in what's going to be a vicious fall campaign.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Vivian, very quickly, how worried are the Biden people that this doesn't go well?
VIVIAN SALAMA: They are worried, but they also point to people underestimating him ahead of the State of the Union and they felt that he did well at the State of the Union.
They say, you all underestimated him, primarily the media.
Watch what happened then.
That's the Joe Biden that we know and he can do it again.
ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: No teleprompter this time though.
VIVIAN SALAMA: But there's no teleprompter.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This is a much tougher venue.
But I have a teleprompter.
People don't know that at home, but I've made it myself too.
And I'm reading it right now when I tell you that we have to leave it there for now.
And I want to thank our panelists for joining us and sharing their reporting.
I want to thank all of you at home for joining us.
And please be sure to read Anne Applebaum's recent cover story on the power of propaganda at theatlantic.com.
I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.
Good night from Washington.
