The President's In Tray
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whoever wins the US presidential election, what policy priorities await the next man in the White House?
David Aaronovitch, asks what are the domestic priorities for an-coming President Biden or a second term President Trump and how do they go about rebuilding the US economy amid an ongoing Covid pandemic?
On the international front, how might America's relationship with the rest of the world change with a new President and will this mean a greater commitment to tackling climate change? If President Trump wins a second term, where will he focus his international agenda?
Contributors: James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic
Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden.
Leslie Vinjamuri, Director, US & Americas, Chatham House
Thomas Hale, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Oxford University
Producers: Richard Fenton Smith, Simon Coates, Kirsteen Knight Sound Engineer: Rod Farquhar Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.1 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:07.9 | You, me, top experts of virtual meeting room and 28 minutes. |
| 0:13.3 | This week, we nearly know who the next US president will be, but what will he do? |
| 0:26.3 | No. will be. But what will he do? The US presidential election appears to be almost over, and we appear almost to have a winner. |
| 0:32.6 | Probably Joe Biden, conceivably not. But what items will the newly elected president have on his must-do list, |
| 0:40.0 | and how will he set about doing them? It's a question the answer to which matters to just about |
| 0:45.4 | all of us. So step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 0:59.8 | We've taken four major areas that seem most likely to have pride of place at the top of the president's entry, the economy, foreign affairs, including relations with China, climate change, |
| 1:06.0 | and handling the pandemic. Let's begin right there. James Fallows is national correspondent for the Atlantic |
| 1:12.2 | magazine. James Fallows, let's say Joe Biden comes in in January. His immediate priority, one |
| 1:18.8 | assumes, will be to deal with the COVID crisis. What do you think he will try to do? |
| 1:25.5 | I think you'll try to make the argument that the two crises of the moment, |
| 1:29.1 | the economic collapse and dealing with the pandemic, are in fact the same crisis. And there's |
| 1:33.8 | no way to rescue the economy without dealing with the disease. I think he has a large group of |
| 1:39.3 | people around him on this topic as with a number of others who've had experience in past administration. |
| 1:46.3 | So I would imagine that he would, as soon as he is in office, assuming he goes into office, |
| 1:51.1 | set up a pandemic commission, have, you know, six or eight emergency orders ready to go and say, |
| 1:56.3 | this is what we need to do right now. This is the way to connect with our international partners, |
| 2:01.7 | with the WHO, with the UN. And here's the way to connect our national enterprises. The 50 states |
| 2:07.6 | have been more or less left on their own for the past year, so many cities. So I think it will |
| 2:12.3 | be a harmonized external and internal policy within the U.S. Coordination is one thing, but they've got to coordinate about doing something. |
... |
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