Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns: the Biden Administration, the Parties, 2022 and 2024

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

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🗓️ 18 May 2022

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

Nearly a year and a half into his presidency, how is Joe Biden doing? What are the key tensions within the Democratic Party? How strong is Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party? To discuss these questions, we are joined by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, New York Times reporters and authors of This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, a thoughtful and provocative account of the 2020 Elections and the Biden presidency so far. As Martin and Burns argue, Donald Trump has remained the leader of his party to a greater degree than Republicans thought possible after January 6th. Meanwhile, Biden has struggled to navigate the polarized politics of the era—including the internal tensions within the Democratic Party. Kristol, Martin, and Burns consider possible paths forward for the parties, including presidential hopefuls in 2024 if Biden and Trump are not the nominees.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm pleased to be joined today by two of Washington's
0:20.5	best reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns from the New York Times, who have been doing
0:25.9	excellent reporting for the Times before that for Politico for years, but now a co-authored
0:30.5	an important book. This will not pass, which we will refer to, I'm sure, in the course of this
0:36.2	discussion. I will say word about both Jonathan and Alex, who I've known over the years. I mean,
0:40.3	they're excellent reporters, dig up things from many, many sources and look into travel of the
0:46.8	country, but also much, I will say, this much more analytical and much more knowledge of history,
0:52.0	maybe than your typical reporter. And so we're a combination of sort of shoe leather and
0:59.6	historical perspective and analysis. So it's really a pleasure to have you both on to explain
1:04.2	our current political situation. Thank you, Bill. And the date is so people know, since God knows
1:10.4	what will happen tonight, totally change everything in the world, is what are we? What are we? May,
1:15.3	May 17, I think so. So mid-May, a year and a half, less than a little less than a half, I guess,
1:22.4	into the Biden presidency. Your book focuses on Trump and Biden in 2020 and 2021. A lot of the Trump
1:29.4	and Republican side of it has gotten a lot of publicity, Kevin McCarthy and so forth. But actually,
1:32.9	I thought maybe we'd begin with Biden because it's so astonishing. He's a new president. He's
1:37.2	replaced a president of another party. There's usually a massive amount of coverage of a new president,
1:42.0	to new White House. What are they doing? What are their successes and failures? There's been some of
1:46.4	that, but it's really striking. And I was struck by this reading your book in a way that Trump
1:50.1	stuff was excellent, but it was a lot of people have tried to cover that ground. I've never been in
1:55.3	the years. I've been in Washington. I don't know if you guys agree with this. The so much less
2:00.0	coverage, understandably, I think, but of the actual president of the United States and his party
2:04.5	who are governing the country, right? It's kind of astonishing. It's remarkable, Bill. And I'm
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