May 21, 2025: Defending a legacy, Biden edition

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Government, Politics

3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Former President Joe Biden is trying to lay low. But with the conversation in Washington dominated by the fallout from his cancer diagnosis and the continuing revelations from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book “Original Sin,” his every move is fodder for more discussion — welcome or not. Playbook contributing author Adam Wren joins managing editor and author Jack Blanchard to dig into it all. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill continues to progress through the House, as GOP leadership eyes the legislative endgame. And South African President Cyril Ramaphosa arrives at the White House to try and defuse Trump’s furor over the alleged mistreatment of Afrikaner farmers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Presented by BP.
0:07.7	Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.
0:10.1	And I'm Adam Wren sitting in for Dasha Burns this morning.
0:13.7	And it's Wednesday, May the 21st.
0:16.0	That means we're four months and one day into Donald Trump's presidency.
0:19.6	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:21.8	But first, let's preview three stories which are driving the day.
0:25.2	The one that's going to be dominating much of the conversation in Washington today
0:28.6	is the Republicans' massive tax and spend bill, that big, beautiful bill, as Donald Trump
0:34.0	calls it, which is still inching its way through the House.
0:36.9	There were a whole evening of fraught negotiations happening last night over Medicaid cuts, over assault tax breaks. President Trump, of course, was in the House Tuesday morning, meeting with the different factions. But we're not going to talk about that on this podcast, and that's because, frankly, at the time we're recording it, it's still moving. This story is going all night long.
0:55.2	If you want the latest on that, you're better off reading our playbook newsletter. Newsletters are a slightly better format for a kind of moving story because you can just press send. And it's in your inbox. Podcast takes a little bit longer. The second thing that you need to know today is what's happening in the White House, where President Trump is hosting the South African President Cyril Rama Poza. And this is a really big
1:16.0	deal because Trump has kind of been at war with South Africa since he came back into
1:21.7	power. He's expelled their ambassador to the US last month. He has said he won't cooperate with them in their hosting of
1:29.2	the G20 summit. He's been very, very critical of their treatment of the white Afrikaner
1:33.4	farmers and has actually been allowing them to emigrate into the US as refugees. So quite how
1:39.9	that meeting goes is going to be pretty interesting to watch. And the third thing that everyone's
1:44.5	going to be talking about in Washington today is the thing that everyone has been talking about
1:47.9	in Washington all week, which is Joe Biden, his health, his presidency, the reporting around
1:54.1	that. And Joe Biden has, of course, had one of the most dreadful weeks he can imagine
1:57.8	with the diagnosis of cancer coming amidst all this reporting
2:01.3	about his mental capacity while he was president.
	...

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