Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the

bulwark, and this is our first show of 2025. And I got to tell you guys, I had to decide,

do we look forward into 2025 and talk about Trump?

Or do we look backward and talk about Joe Biden's legacy?

And I got to say, this is the last show of Joe Biden as president.

The next time we do this show, Donald Trump will be the president of the United States.

So I decided, let's look back.

Let's talk about Joe Biden's legacy.

Look, it's a tough show for me a little bit because two things are true at once for me.

I wanted Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump.

I wanted it as badly as I could have wanted anything, both in 2020 and in 2024.

But I think that Trump's return to power was driven in no small part by a series of catastrophic decisions Biden made. And mainly it's just,

I wish he'd had the good sense to step away from the 2024 race long before he did.

So I want to talk about what I've heard from voters about him,

how he and his team viewed their relationship with the public, and what his legacy is going to be.

My guest today is one of the great chroniclers of the Biden years, Evan Osnos, staff writer at

the New Yorker, and author of Joe Biden, The Life, The Run and What Matters Now, and Wildland,

The Making of America's Fury. Evan, thanks for being here.

My pleasure, Sarah. Great to be with you. Okay, so you've spent a good amount of time with

Biden in recent years, and I'm just going to cop to something. When I was trying to decide,

do I want to look back, I want to look forward. One of the things that pushed me over the edge

is that Joe Biden has come out of late and made some pronouncements where he is running the

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