I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, March 25th.

I think it's worth taking a step back to just acknowledge how different President Biden's approach is than Donald Trump's.

In a minute, I'll ask my two guests from the Washington Post how different it feels.

But if Trump woke up every day ready to create a bad guy out of someone and slash away at them to aggrandize himself,

Biden seems to be waking up every day to solve problems and be as understated about

them as he can get away with. He's a much more earnest leader. But that doesn't mean history

ended on January 20th or that Biden doesn't have big problems to solve or that he might not be

blowing some things or that he doesn't have strong

opinions about how to solve them. And it's not just the pandemic or the things Biden would like

to make progress on, like the climate, racial justice, economic inequality, infrastructure.

No president can control events that much.

Gun safety has been forced back to the spotlight after the mass murders in Georgia and Colorado.

Unauthorized immigration and the treatment of unaccompanied children have been forced back into the spotlight

as a post-Trump surge continues to grow. North Korea is trying to provoke

him with new ballistic missile tests, and dozens of states controlled by Republicans are implementing

restrictions on voting, embracing the premise of Trump's big lie about a stolen election to make it

harder, especially for African Americans, to vote.

Democrats in Congress are trying to respond.

And those things are leading to a really difficult debate within the Democratic Party right now,

whether to end the filibuster altogether in the Senate so they can pass bills on all these things with

51 votes rather than 60, or maybe end it only for certain things, maybe just voting rights

laws because they're so central to democracy, or that would be the argument.

...