JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's a confirmable truth that most presidents want to pivot to Asia, but the Middle East won't let them.
Now it's Joe Biden's turn.
He's wrestling with the Middle East crisis pretty much beyond his control, and he's experiencing the fallout here at home.
Tonight, we'll examine how he's navigating the overlapping domestic and global challenges created by the Israel-Hamas War, next.
Good evening, and welcome to WASHINGTON WEEK.
The actual war is in Gaza, but you wouldn't know it from news coverage this week of American campuses.
In the old days, when someone talked about chaos in Columbia, you would immediately think of Medellin.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump are each trying to address Middle East conflict and campus unrest, and I'll talk about this tonight with Eric Cortellessa, a staff writer at the TIME, who just conducted two epic interviews with Donald Trump, Franklin Foer, my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic, is just back from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, Asma Khalid is a White House correspondent for NPR and the co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast, and Nancy Youssef is a national security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.
Thank you all for joining me.
It's been a challenging week for Joe Biden, among other people, mostly university presidents and world leaders.
I want to read something to you that David Graham wrote in The Atlantic about Biden's speech on anti-Semitism.
He wrote today -- this is yesterday.
He wrote, today, Biden's patience ran out.
In brief remarks at the White House, he affirmed the importance of free speech, but mostly seemed intent on delivering a message of law and order.
And let's listen to Biden's speech a little bit here.
JOE BIDEN, U.S. President: I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions.
In America, we respect the right and protect the right for them to express that.
But it doesn't mean anything goes.
It needs to be done without violence, without destruction, without hate, and within the law.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Asma, in some ways, Joe Biden is sort of addressing the near future, meaning August in Chicago.
That's what it seemed to me, at least.
ASMA KHALID, White House Correspondent, NPR: Yes.
And you're speaking about the Democratic convention, right, that's going to be held -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What he doesn't want is what Hubert Humphrey got in 1968.
ASMA KHALID: And he will have these memories right of 1968, and there was violence there.
Look, I mean I will say that I think Chicago and I've long felt this is certainly a viability.
There's a lot of elements that could certainly lead to unpredictability there.
It has the largest Palestinian-American population in Cook County.
It's a real progressive base of a city, not to mention the fact that my understanding is all the protests have been permitted for Grant Park, which is about three miles away from United Center, where the convention will be held.
Chicago P.D.
may not let them out.
I mean, there's a whole lot of elements that are right for this.
But I do think one thing about what Biden said that's interesting is he certainly was speaking to this issue of law and order.
His comments also came after Donald Trump spoke and they came after, frankly, days of public silence.
I mean, many of us reporters in the press briefing were asking repeatedly about the protests, about concerns of use of police excessive force.
And one thing that's notable is he didn't mention the police response at all in his public remarks.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Well, you know, Frank, you're a student of Joe Biden, a biographer of Joe Biden, in fact.
It's sort of like this moment reminded me of 2020, summer of 2020, when Joe Biden and many Democrats are under pressure to align themselves with abolish the police.
And Joe Biden, to his credit, I mean, he won in part because he wasn't listening to the Twitter left so much as the kind of the broad center, including in the black community, Jim Clyburn and all the rest, and many people who are saying, you know, we're not going to abolish the police.
We need better policing.
This is kind of the same vibe, at least.
He's saying, you know what, you've gone too far.
FRANKLIN FOER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Yes.
On culture war issues, he's lived through so many battles in the past, and he has very hardened instincts when they come to them, and his instinct is always going to be to decide on the issue of law and order.
He was the author of the crime bill, and that's just his fundamental instincts.
And he's torn to some extent between these elements in the base of the party, the progressive wing of the party, that have tried to elevate this into a dominant issue.
And then he looks at the other parts of the polls, and he looks at the voters that he needs in the middle, and he sees that they believe that the college campuses are not being treated harshly enough.
And he sees Trump, and he sees the ways that Republicans are trying to -- crime was a primary issue for them.
It's disappeared.
They've replaced it with the campus protest.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Eric, you practically live at Mar-a-Lago now.
I just want to know for the record that you don't actually live at Mar-a-Lago, in case anybody tweets on that.
But you're very, very tied into what they're saying right now down in Florida, not only Trump but the campaign.
How do you expect them to try to exploit this moment?
ERIC CORTELLESSA, Staff Writer, TIME: Well, I think Donald Trump is going to try to exploit it as much as he can.
I think he sees it as a real vulnerability for Donald Trump.
And he sees this as a way to sort of fracture the Democratic coalition in a way that could work to his advantage in a few key swing states, particularly Michigan.
And so this is where Donald Trump wants to keep the focus in the coming months.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Chaos?
ERIC CORTELLESSA: Absolutely.
And the fact that it's sort of a Democrats in disarray narrative that he's going to really try to capitalize on.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
If he weren't running against Donald Trump, would Joe Biden be so keen on seeing an end to these demonstrations?
FRANKLIN FOER: No.
I mean, we got to remember that this is also tied in with the larger policy that he's trying to conduct in the Middle East, and people in the Middle East are watching these protests and it's affecting their calculations, and it's complicating in different ways in his ability to end the war.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Nancy, let's talk about the actual war.
Give us the state of play at the moment, and we'll talk to Frank about the trip he was on with the secretary of state.
But it seems that there's a lot of pieces in motion right now.
Where are we?
NANCY YOUSSEF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: So, this week started optimistically that we would see some progress on the peace deal and it has three elements.
It attempts to get a six-week ceasefire.
It attempts to get a partial release of hostages, 33 Israelis for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
And it seeks what it describes as a permanent calm.
The challenge is we heard from Bibi Netanyahu that the Rafah operation would continue regardless of whether there was a peace deal or not.
And so you have both sides now trying to reach an agreement that potentially puts them in danger.
For Israel, the question becomes, will they accept a peace agreement that does not allow them to go into Rafah, and in doing so, not achieve the total victory that they've promised -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: When you say, peace agreement, you're talking more of a permanent - - semi-permanent ceasefire?
NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, okay.
NANCY YOUSSEF: And Hamas' sort of challenge is, would they give up their strongest bargaining chip, Israeli soldiers, and not -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The kidnapped soldiers?
NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right, those hostages, and not secure a permanent peace.
And so what you're seeing now is this sort of discussion of what that permanent calm looks like.
How do you define it?
And is there an agreement that you can reach that allows both sides to come to the table and give up really key parts and strengths and demands from their coalitions, and in the case of Hamas, their survival.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How optimistic should we be that there's going to be progress?
NANCY YOUSSEF: I think it's really hard to say because it's so vague right now, the description of what happens after six weeks, and there's so much at stake for both sides.
We haven't seen anything right now that says that it's imminent.
Having said that, so much of the deal has been worked out, that this is the last thing that really has to be ironed out, it's the most complex part of the deal to be ironed out because it really gets at the potential end of the war, or if not, what does something short of a Rafah operation look like that allows Israel to say that it has secured its nation from the Hamas threat.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Frank, you are on the trip.
Talk about the role of Saudi Arabia in all of this.
FRANKLIN FOER: Right.
So what's happening right now is we're trying to get to this pause in the war.
The administration is essentially trying to wedge its arm into the door to buy a little bit of calm and to let things go from there.
At the end -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And they're trying to do that with Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
That is the main object of the lobbying.
FRANKLIN FOER: No.
So, right now, the main object is Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, is the person who has the ultimate veto power of the deal right now.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But the U.S. has no influence over Sinwar.
FRANKLIN FOER: No.
Nobody has any influence over him, which is part of the problem.
The Qatari, who housed the political wing of Hamas in Doha, have pressured them, and they've essentially signed off on this piece of the deal.
And so there's nothing that they can do to influence this guy who's sitting in a tunnel, who they describe as being kind of erratic, who's in the middle of a war, who's surrounded by hostages.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He has hostages literally as human shields.
FRANKLIN FOER: Human shields, exactly.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
So, where does Saudi Arabia and where does normalization fit into this?
FRANKLIN FOER: Right.
So, if the administration is able to get to a point where there's a calm in the conflict, they're working towards a deal with Saudi Arabia that would allow for a bilateral defense agreement with the United States and paving the way for a normalization deal with Israel.
And that's going to happen simultaneous to another deal that's being brokered with the Arab countries to deal with postwar reconstruction of Gaza, who will govern the country, who will pay for the reconstruction of Gaza.
It's kind of a Rube Goldberg contraption of diplomacy, that they need to do something that calms things down now and then kind of shoots the moon in order to get to some sort of more permanency.
NANCY YOUSSEF: Can I just add to that?
You know what I think is interesting, though, they're trying to reach these normalization deals at a time when whatever happens, the region is different because of these wars.
So, I think these deals are being negotiated in an environment that is constantly shifting in ways that we don't fully understand.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.
No, you can picture Blinken flying back and forth in these capitals, and you land in one, and the reality has changed entirely because of action somewhere else.
Asma, talk about the White House and their level of confidence that they're going to be able to pull this contraption off.
ASMA KHALID: Yes.
I mean, I've been struck by the fact that for months, I mean, frankly, even before that, I would say, going back even two years ago, I traveled with Biden to both Israel and Saudi Arabia.
And even at that time, they were really optimistic about this deal of so-called extending the Abraham Accords.
It's long been something that this White House wants to achieve and would see, I think, as a great success.
But I have I think a lot of skepticism about the ability to achieve this.
And I guess my primary question is, I don't know the answer to this, those of you who cover, I think, sort of national security might have a better idea of what is the incentive for MBS to really negotiate with the Biden administration -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
ASMA KHALID: Yes, of Saudi Arabia, over a potential, let's say, of a Donald Trump second term.
So, in my sense, I don't see what incentive there is to really negotiate a solid deal before November.
And, certainly, this administration would like to see a deal as soon as possible.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You mean the Saudis would much rather have a deal with Donald Trump?
ASMA KHALID: I think both the Saudis and Israelis you saw were very close to the former Trump administration, and who knows what the second term of a Trump administration would look like.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wonderful pivot, wonderful pivot.
Wow, she's such a pro.
Eric, in your interviews with Donald Trump, he talked quite a bit and in a surprising way about Netanyahu, who, one could surmise over the last couple of months, was kind of looking forward to the possibility of a return of Donald Trump.
It turns out, Donald Trump doesn't seem to like Netanyahu very much.
Can you give us a sense of what Donald Trump told you?
ERIC CORTELLESSA: Yes, no, absolutely.
I mean, there's a clear bitterness between them, right?
Donald Trump, I mean, you could feel it in the room.
I asked Donald Trump when we spoke at Mar-a-Lago, do you think it's time for Netanyahu to go?
And his answer was, I had a bad experience with Bibi.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That was his literal answer.
ERIC CORTELLESSA: That was his answer.
We had a bad experience with Bibi.
And he mentioned the Operation Takeout Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian general.
It was supposed to be a bilateral operation between Israel and the United States.
Bibi backed out at the last minute.
He cites that as the source of the tension.
Also, many have speculated that what really pissed him off was when Netanyahu congratulated Joe Biden for winning the election, that that was a bridge too far.
But right now, Donald Trump has said to me, look, I get along with Benny Gantz.
There are others in Israel I've worked with who could be good.
That was quite -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A member of the war cabinet, leads another party within the coalition.
ERIC CORTELLESSA: And so, I mean, just saying that he had a bad experience with Netanyahu and, you know, very, you know, pointedly blaming Netanyahu for allowing the October 7th massacre to happen on his watch and then saying that others could do the job well was a stinging rebuke in Netanyahu.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wait.
Go into that a little bit more.
Trump is saying that Netanyahu is responsible for Israeli security and failed?
ERIC CORTELLESSA: Well, he told me that Netanyahu has been rightfully criticized for what happened on October 7th.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, there was no warmth in the way he talked about Netanyahu at all?
ERIC CORTELLESSA: Not really, no.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.
So, Frank, what does that mean for the relationship between Netanyahu and Biden?
It would seem that Netanyahu could read what he just reported and say, well, maybe I'd better make a deal with Biden because this guy is not my friend.
FRANKLIN FOER: I mean, Netanyahu, as you know better than -- he's a tactician whose goal is to survive until tomorrow.
I don't think his timeline extends to the next election.
He's worried about surviving a ceasefire deal.
He's worried about what's going to happen in Rafah.
He's worried that his promises of total victory, which he makes every day, are never going to come true.
And at some point, he's going to start to pay a price for the failures of October 7th, the failures of this campaign in Gaza to fully eradicate Hamas.
He's not thinking as far as November.
NANCY YOUSSEF: And if I could just add to that, President Biden has tied himself to Netanyahu.
He has really embraced Netanyahu.
His survival, politically, also is intertwined with Netanyahu's in the sense that he has said he's going to back him.
He's criticized him recently.
But he hasn't signaled that he's willing to, for example, not provide weapons or, in any way, put increased pressure on him to reach a deal faster than Netanyahu is ready.
He has said we don't support the Rafah operation.
But we haven't seen any strong pressure on the Netanyahu government to reach a deal or to curtail their ability to conduct these operations in terms of the weapons that they're provided from the United States.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Asma, a political question, how much, in your mind, do the campus protests and the continued uncertainties that we're talking about, how much is it actually hurting Joe Biden in polls today?
Because he's not doing that well in the polls today anyway.
ASMA KHALID: He's not doing that well in polls but for a variety of reasons, right?
I mean, I would argue that when you look at polls and voters consistently complain about high prices and inflation.
And I hear this all the time.
I was just recently out in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania area.
But at the same time, I think what's interesting in some polls is people also even talk about the border.
They talk about democracy, abortion, obviously, depending on where their partisan leanings are.
You know, I don't know.
I was just looking at an ABC poll that came out and it said about four in ten voters disagree with Biden's handling of this war.
It is up a bit from January, so that's not headed in the right trajectory for him.
But the question of is it going to be determinative of how they vote, I don't know the answer to that.
I would also, though, argue there were slim margins for Joe Biden in some states.
You look at a state like Georgia, what, 11,000 votes?
You can't really afford to lose really any part of that coalition in some states.
FRANKLIN FOER: Michigan was said to be the state where he would take the biggest hit because of this, but it actually happens to be the state that he's performing strongest in of all the swing states.
And he's scraping bottom with young voters.
His approval rating is 17 percent with voters under 30.
But when you ask them what are your biggest concerns, Gaza falls 15 out of 20 on that list.
It's not -- ASMA KHALID: That Harvard Institute, yes, poll, which does really good polling on young voters.
So, I think that like, to me, it's really, really unclear.
I will say, to me, this election feels more unclear, certainly a lot more unclear than in four years ago.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, right.
Let's come back to the interview or interviews that you did.
You did two interviews with Donald Trump for this cover story that you wrote.
Apart from the Middle East conversation, which you kind of dipped in and out of, talk about two things, your impressions of Trump, cogency, grip on the issues, how the trials seem to be, or the trial right now and the pending trials, seem to be affecting his mood and concentration.
And then tell us a little bit about what struck you the most about the things that he told you.
ERIC CORTELLESSA: Well, I mean, Donald Trump appeared, as I write in the piece, you know, ever more assertive and confident.
Right now, he feels like he's got a better opportunity to win the White House than he did at any point in the 2016 or 2020 campaigns.
He's winning in most polls, including in several of the seven battleground states that are going to determine the outcome of the election.
So, you know, Donald Trump is in a position right now where he's planning, if he wins, to come into office January 2025 and to consolidate the power of government inside the office of the presidency.
Donald Trump didn't really outline for me many legislative initiatives.
He really wants to carry out his second term agenda through his executive authority.
And that, you know, goes to his immigration plan, including carrying out a massive deportation operation that would remove as many as 11 million migrants from the country.
That goes to having a greater hand in Justice Department prosecutions than we've seen in previous presidents.
He wants to restore the power of impoundment, which means to withhold congressionally appropriated funds.
This was a favorite maneuver of Richard Nixon's who used it to hold money from the Environmental Protection Agency and affordable housing and was outlawed.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I was struck by that.
It's not the most dramatic thing compared to immigration and abortion, but I was struck by that because didn't Congress pass laws after Nixon to restrict a president's ability to impound?
ERIC CORTELLESSA: So, the Impoundment Control Act was passed in 1974 to restrict the use of congressionally appropriated funds.
Donald Trump and his allies feel -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Aren't you glad you memorized that now?
Yes.
ERIC CORTELLESSA: I know more about impoundment than most Americans.
But, look, Donald Trump has said and his advisers have said that they see that as unconstitutional and that they would try to challenge it through a variety of ways.
They might engineer a legal battle for it.
They might try to pass a law through Congress to overturn that Impoundment Control Act of 1974, if they have majorities in the House and Senate.
Donald Trump wants to expand the powers of the presidency.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You call it the imperial president -- you say that he's trying to design an imperial presidency, imperial meaning concentration of power in one branch.
ERIC CORTELLESSA: Yes, I mean, you know, concentrate concentrated power in one branch.
And, you know, he wants to do things on his own through his own executive power.
He feels that if he's won the election, that is a mandate for the vision that he has campaigned on.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Asma, what struck you about the things that Donald Trump has been talking about recently?
I know we were talking a little bit before about immigration.
ASMA KKHALID: Yes.
I mean, the abortion is really noteworthy as well, how he spoke about abortion, and I'm curious what struck you about that, because, to me, that is single-handedly the most, I think, decisive issue that many Democrats see, and they think they have an advantage there.
He seemed to suggest, I guess, that he would not veto, it sounded like, a federal ban, right, if it came up to him.
ERIC CORTELLESSA: We had a line of questioning where I asked Donald Trump, you know, quite pointedly, you know, President Trump, if a bill came to your desk that would impose any federal restrictions on abortion, would you veto it?
And he said, I don't have to veto it.
It will never happen anyways.
We'll never have a 60-vote majority.
So, I said, so just, will you not rule it out?
You know, and I asked him at least three times, and he said, no.
And then I asked him about, you know, the functional outcome of his position, that this is a states' rights issue.
You know, so I said, President Trump, would you be comfortable with states prosecuting women who have had abortions after the ban?
He said it's totally irrelevant whether I'm comfortable or not because the states are going to make those decisions.
I said, President Trump, should states be able to monitor women's pregnancies, to know whether they've gotten an abortion after the ban?
He said they might do that.
So, that is the ground that Donald Trump is going to trod in the coming months before the election, which is this is a states' rights issue, and states can make their own policies in whichever direction they want on abortion.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's very dramatic.
Also something that struck me as equally dramatic or in the same range is the promise or threat to use American troops, to use at least the National Guard, if not regular troops, to engage in roundups of illegal immigrants, of deport mass deportations.
NANCY YOUSSEF: A violation of posse comitatus.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.
You're an expert, you covered the Pentagon.
Tell me, when you hear that, do you think it's even plausible?
I mean, we've spent years, among other -- me and you, writing about the Pentagon and its uneasy relationship, uneasy is almost euphemistic, with Donald Trump and his ideas of what the military should be used for.
What would happen if Donald Trump says to the generals, you're now being deployed domestically to get all these undocumented aliens out of the country?
NANCY YOUSSEF: So it would be a violation of pasi comitatus, which was passed -- I did not memorize, so I might have it wrong, 1878.
And the idea is that you cannot use the U.S. military to go after civilians.
His answer to you was, well, they're not civilians.
The challenge that he puts his military generals in is they are not, under their oath, allowed to follow an order that is illegal or immoral, and he would put that question potentially to them to have to answer.
And also, we have really taken pride in this country.
You know, most militaries in the world are built to combat internal threats.
The United States military is built for external threats.
And once you start having boots on the ground and uniforms on American streets, it changes the very relationship the United States military has with the American people and its function in our country.
So, we saw that on January 6th.
It was startling in some ways to sort of see people in uniform going after the protesters because I'm not used to seeing it.
That would be another extension of it.
It becomes a legal challenge, some would argue, and it really forces the military to make a decision between how they interpret the law and how to follow the orders of the commander-in-chief.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You think he was bluffing?
ERIC CORTELLESSA: I think that if there's anything Donald Trump plans to go full throttle on in a second term, it's immigration.
You know, he's planning, if he wins, so day one, a slew of executive orders that would restore the policies he had in place in the first term, remain in Mexico, Title 42.
He's going to allocate money, probably from the military, to resume construction of the border wall.
But when it comes to this deportation operation, you know, Donald Trump doesn't want to not fulfill this particular campaign promise.
So, you know, I asked him some very specific questions about how he would do that.
And as you say, he would be willing to use the military.
You know, I asked him about the U.S. law that prohibits the use of military on civilians.
He doesn't consider undocumented migrant civilians.
There are other things he's going to do to try and, you know, expand presidential power in this realm.
He said that he would try to induce local and state police departments to participate by tying federal funding to their involvement.
He said if they don't, they won't partake in the riches.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Frank, a few seconds left.
Is Joe Biden doing enough from his perspective to stop Trump from using immigration the way he's using it?
FRANKLIN FOER: I don't know if you can do anything to rig against this.
What was incredible about this is just the way in which you got to see inside Donald Trump's spray and all the authoritarian ideas that are rattling around inside there.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's a good note to leave it on.
We'll probably pick up that conversation next week, but, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.
I want to thank our panelists for joining us and for sharing their reporting.
Please visit theatlantic.com to read David Frum's piece on President Biden's upcoming speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.
Good night from Washington.
