Evan Osnos, good to see you again.
You, too. Nice to see you, Trevor.
Yeah. Um, it feels like the last time I saw you,
I was, uh, 30-something years old,
and now I am 52, but I only aged in one night.
How are you doing?
I'm 112, actually.
But, uh, holding up okay. Thank you.
Holding up really well.
Welcome to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
Thanks for having me.
You are a Pulitzer Prize-winning author,
you are a journalist,
you are somebody who has spent a lot of time
living the life of Joe Biden through the lens of your work.
As this moment unfolds,
how do you think Joe Biden is situated
to help the country recover from what is going to be, arguably,
one of the most tumultuous elections in history?
Well, in a strange way, he's had a lot of practice
of a certain kind for this.
And it's terrible practice.
I mean, if we know anything about Joe Biden,
we know that he has been through
some really wretched things in his life.
After all, we know... remember his late wife, Neilia Hunter,
his daughter Naomi, they died in a car accident
when he was just 29.
And then later, his son Beau died of a brain tumor.
And I mention that partly because, I think in politics,
sometimes we're sort of a little cynical
about things like that.
We think that it's kind of being used as a prop.
And what I find fascinating from looking into his life
is seeing the way that it really altered him.
It changed him. I mean, just being acquainted with suffering
in quite that way, in that very real, personal way,
resonates with the condition we're in as a country.
We are literally suffering. We're literally grieving.
And so he knows something of it.
If Joe Biden is to win the election,
he's gonna be in an interesting position,
where it looks like Republicans would still have the Senate,
Democrats will have the House, and so now, in many ways,
his selling point is gonna be tested.
Can Joe Biden be the person who brings the sides together
to get things done for America?
Even though no president, incoming president,
if that's what he is, would ever ask to preside
over a country as divided as it is, the truth is,
he actually has some experience in these moments.
To give you one example, when they came in 2009,
one of the first things he did was he started lobbying
the late Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania
to change parties,
for from being a Republican to a Democrat.
He was also given an assignment.
The Obama administration said: All right, Joe Biden,
we want you to call up members of the Senate,
try to get them to vote for the stimulus bill.
So he did that. He started working the phones.
He was kind of constantly on the phone
with people on Capitol Hill.
And he got people, he got three votes,
and those turned out to be the three votes
that ended up being decisive in passing that bill.
-Wow. -So, in a way, if he was a boxer,
you would say that he's kind of comfortable in the clutch,
like, right up close.
That's-that's his, uh, that's his happy place,
as strange as it may sound.
Once-once Obama took office
and once the Tea Party took its hold of the Republican Party,
and then Trump is in by extension,
there's no denying that politics has changed dramatically.
Do you think he'll still have the same pull and sway
with the Republicans to get them to do it,
or do you think he's now just going to be facing--
if he wins, again-- four years of just being blocked
by Mitch McConnell and the Senate crew?
I think, look, we'd be insane not to worry about that.
That's the reality. That's the lay of the land.
It's certainly the politics we inhabit right now
I think there's something interesting
that we sometimes lose sight of, which is that it matters
the posture with which a president sells the policy.
Meaning, if they're selling it from the middle,
strangely enough, you can actually something sell things
that you can't sell if you're coming at it
from a distinctly, uh, progressive direction
or a hard-line, conservative direction.
I mean, in fact, some progressive analysts
have done some survey work,
and what they find is that people in America
might go for more aggressive climate change legislation
if it's being presented to them as job growth,
-Right, right. or a way of building a sustainable economy,
rather than: Look, this is a moral obligation
to future generations.
You've written extensively about Biden.
You're also written extensively about China.
Um, this is gonna be one of the biggest challenges
that America faces going forward.
Where do you think Biden begins?
Because he's had some tough rhetoric on China.
But you can't deny that America needs
the relationship with China,
or it's been set up in such a way that they need it.
So, like, what does... what does he do,
and how do you see that relationship unfolding?
Well, for one thing, I think, frankly,
China is gonna be a little sorry to see Donald Trump go,
because even though Donald Trump sort of uses a lot of language
of confrontation, he has sort of efficiently undermined
American credibility in the eyes of the world.
There was a recent study that showed that Xi Jinping
and Vladimir Putin now have higher favorabilities
than Donald Trump.
-Wow. -So from China's perspective,
Joe Biden is actually a little bit more of a problem.
He's kind of like a recognizable form of president and diplomat.
So I think what you're likely to see
is that Biden will probably actually hold on
to some of this confrontational stuff that the Biden admin...
that the Trump administration has done,
because it makes it easier-- it gives him leverage.
But what he'll do that's completely different
is he'll do it with allies,
he'll do it in the concert of American allies in Europe
and in Asia, rather than "America first,"
which often meant that we were doing things alone.
Do you think Biden will be able to sell himself as that guy?
Because... I mean, one of the big differences
between Trump and really any U.S. president
has been that Trump knows how to sell his achievements
whether they exist or not.
Joe Biden seems to be the kind of person who says,
"Well, read my record, check what I did."
And people are like, "We don't read, Joe.
We don't read. That's not the world we live in."
-Yeah. -So, do you think that he will be able
to rebuild some of the bridges that have been broken down
in many of these industrial areas
that he used to have such a strong base in?
Look, I, I mean, it is true that he is kind of, like,
stubbornly attached to the reality-based universe.
He seems to think that, like, is consequential
and that he has to respond to that.
We know there are millions of American
who just voted for Donald Trump.
It wasn't a fluke this time-- they knew what they were doing.
And what he's gonna do, I think his basic strategy,
as he said to me and he has said to others, is:
If you begin from the principle that I am listening,
I'm listening to you in a real way,
you'd be surprised what the affect might have
on our political chemistry.
Look, that's an optimistic take, but he doesn't have any options.
It's better than going in there and saying,
"I'm giving up on half of you because you didn't vote for me."
When you look at the journey that America faces,
the next American president would face,
if it would be Joe Biden, would you say that...
his personal loss and the tragedies that he's faced,
put him in a position to be the best leader
to lead America out of one of its greatest tragedies,
which has been the pandemic?
I do, I think in a curious way,
this life of ups and downs that he's had,
of failures in some cases, of embarrassment,
and then of great successes has primed him
to fit into where we are as a country,
because let's be frank, we've had our ups and downs lately.
And if we are now talking more candidly,
also about our whole history and the ways in which
we have not treated people the way we should.
And I think he's at a moment now where we are coming to terms
with a little bit more of a humbler notion of what it means
to be Americans, both at home and in the world.
And he's a bit of a humbler person than he was
when he got into the senate, uh, some, you know, 150 years ago.
So I-I think he really is coming at this from the position
of recognizing our strengths and our limitations.
And that's better probably than coming at with an imagined
idea of what we are and that we're gonna make ourselves
something we never really were.
Evan, thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you for joining us today and, uh, hopefully
-I'll see you again soon. -My pleasure. Thanks, Trevor.