Biden, Trump, and the Challenges of Covering an Aging President
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
The Washington Roundtable discusses new information that has emerged about Joe Biden’s decline while in office, and his advisers' efforts to downplay it, as chronicled in several new books. The group also discusses the challenges faced by members of the press as they report on Donald Trump’s signs of aging and his long-standing incoherence. “I think that’s where we run into trouble,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. “Donald Trump has always been quite ignorant. He’s always been a fact checker's nightmare. He’s always rambled. He’s always lied. And, yes, he’s always not known basic facts about the American system of government. So where do we discern a trajectory with him? How does age factor into it?”
This week’s reading:
- “The Mideast Is Donald Trump’s Safe Place,” by Susan B. Glasser
- “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
- “The Real Audience for Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Spectacles,” by Jon Allsop
- “Donald Trump’s Culture of Corruption,” by Isaac Chotiner
- “Justice David Souter Was the Antithesis of the Present,” by Jeannie Suk Gersen
- “How an Election Denier Became the U.S. Treasurer,” by Charles Bethea
- “The Astonishing Threat to Suspend Habeas Corpus,” by Ruth Marcus
To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, how are you guys? |
| 0:02.4 | Hi, where are you? |
| 0:03.5 | I'm in Tallinn. |
| 0:04.8 | You're in your favorite city. |
| 0:06.2 | You do love it there, don't you? |
| 0:07.6 | She's run away to Estonia again. |
| 0:10.9 | What brings you there? |
| 0:12.7 | No, it's just this annual, it's an annual conference on security. |
| 0:17.6 | It's like, you know, all the Russia watchers come here since it's obviously topic |
| 0:23.0 | number one for them. But I'm very stressed out. I think I told Jane, it put me on the panel |
| 0:28.6 | with three presidents. It's three presidents in me as the president of Finland, Slovenia, and |
| 0:34.8 | Estonia. Oh, my gosh. Susan, I think President Glass. |
| 0:40.3 | The way I think of it is presidents and future presidents is how they think of it. |
| 0:43.2 | I'll tell you. It's freaking nice here, by the way. It's so much nicer. |
| 0:46.4 | You get off the airport and you're like, I want to live here. It is nicer. I'm telling you, there's like a big ping pong table and in the middle of the airport, people are playing it. |
| 0:56.0 | You have to register as a foreign agent registration. |
| 1:02.4 | This country. |
| 1:03.2 | You showed me pictures. |
| 1:04.4 | It looked beautiful. |
| 1:05.3 | Medieval, right? |
| 1:06.6 | Well, it's the, right. |
| 1:07.9 | It was the seat of the Hanseatic League on the Baltic. |
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