Bob Woodward joins us to talk about how Joe Biden is faring a year after the 2016 election, and why he thinks it s a good idea for him to run for re-election in 2020. Bob Woodward has been a journalist with the Washington Post since 1971, winning two Pulitzer Prizes and breaking the Watergate story with Carl Bernstein.
00:01:28.420So it's been one year since the U.S. presidential elections.
00:01:32.380How is Joe Biden faring at this point?
00:01:35.180Well, we recount in our book, Peril, that Robert Costa and I did the first months of the administration.
00:01:45.220I mean, we've learned some things about him that have not been known.
00:01:49.960First of all, at meetings where he's trying to make a decision, he's the question man.
00:01:55.960He has lots of questions and is often quite impatient.
00:02:00.780He turned the corner on the virus, at least temporarily.
00:02:05.900You know, we're going to see whether that is long term.
00:02:09.100He passed one big bill, the Rescue Plan, for $1.9 trillion, a big victory.
00:02:19.680And he started to declare that he was getting out of Afghanistan.
00:02:26.400It turns out now he's working on other legislation.
00:02:31.080He's had some successes run into a stone wall on others.
00:02:38.940Afghanistan turns out to have been a giant disaster.
00:02:44.940Something his aides and Biden say, well, in the long run, the American people are going to be glad we're out of Afghanistan.
00:02:54.940I think that's true, but the process of getting out and that decision making process is going to be examined for his whole presidency.
00:03:08.600And on the issue of his political support, the poll numbers are incredibly low.
00:03:17.880They started quite well, and so he's got to aggressively define his presidency.
00:03:29.800He's doing it through this legislation.
00:03:32.840He's also there needs to be a feeling that he's in charge.
00:03:38.660I've written books about 10 presidents going back to Nixon.
00:03:43.740And I think the one common thing I, from the sidelines, observe is a president needs to realize they have been elected to do something and that they need to define that in simple, direct terms and do that.
00:04:07.500And you can't kind of be wobbly about it, or you can't change the plan in the middle.
00:04:15.320And certainly Biden has added in many, many programs.
00:04:21.940He said he was going to do this, but I think the polling shows, and I think this is quite true, there's not the kind of clarity.
00:04:37.360When Ronald Reagan was president, whether you liked him or didn't like him, he said, I want to do three things.
00:04:45.320Cut taxes, increase defense spending, and cut the size of the government.
00:04:50.680Everything he did was related to those three goals.
00:04:54.880He did actually cut taxes, increase defense spending.
00:04:59.540He failed miserably to cut the size of the government.
00:05:03.780I think no one is ever going to succeed at that.
00:05:07.160I guess perhaps part of the challenge is that a lot of people just said, we want Donald Trump out of office.
00:05:12.080And then the challenge for Joe Biden is he says, okay, well, I'm not Donald Trump, pick me.
00:05:16.240But then as you're saying, well, what is the offer on hand?
00:05:19.460What are the top three, top five things he's going to do?
00:05:21.760And one wonders how many people were voting him in to give him those specific mandates, how many were saying, well, we just want Trump out.
00:05:29.420And then does that present a challenge for Joe Biden right now?
00:05:34.540And Biden himself has said publicly maybe his biggest achievement was getting Trump out, which he did.
00:05:42.780He got him out of the presidency, but in 2024, I think we're, and in the years before then, we're going to see reemergence of a Trump campaign, perhaps in a very dramatic way.
00:06:00.220So one of the other things you learn from writing books and doing newspaper stories on 10 presidents, as Ken Burns, the documentarian, said to me, my God, that's more than a large percentage of the presidents that we've had.
00:06:23.980It's more than 20 percent of the presidents, and you can see how difficult the job is.
00:06:32.940You need to understand that the process of communicating with the public is a central feature of that.
00:06:42.840And if you project uncertainty or ambiguity or contradiction, it's going to make the job much, much harder.
00:06:52.720I want to pick up on 2024, your allusion to the possibility that Donald Trump could be the Republican presidential candidate.
00:07:05.860What I think there's a big burden on the media to look at the Biden presidency with clarity and, if necessary, skepticism, and the same thing with the Trump possible candidacy.
00:07:26.000His, you know, we talk about in politics, and you do in Canada also, what's the rationale for the candidacy?
00:07:36.840And Trump's main rationale is his claim that the election last year, 2020, was stolen.
00:07:47.440It's a little flabbergasting, I think, to lots of people to think that that's going to be enough, that people will go vote for him again in 2024.
00:07:59.160So we'll see, and there's a lot of uncertainty, but Bob Costa and I spent a lot of time looking at what's the evidence that the election was stolen.
00:08:14.160And we found documentation that was presented to Republican Trump supporters in the United States Senate, alleging that election was stolen.
00:08:28.980And those Republican senators, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, investigated as Trump supporters, and they found no evidence, not even a wisp of evidence.
00:08:46.480So imagine, and, you know, I put out my phone number and my email in the United States, I say, if you have really good evidence that something was stolen or something was rigged in the election last year, contact me, and I haven't heard from anyone.
00:09:09.440So let's say Donald Trump drops those grievances and moves more towards, OK, I've got to have that positive campaign moving forward.
00:09:15.440Some of the things that he originally campaigned on, talking about building the wall, the border crisis, well, we see there is a surge on challenges in the border.
00:09:23.360When it comes to dealing with China, they've ratcheted up the tough talk when it comes to potentially threatening war over Taiwan.
00:09:30.120Is the international scene in some way moving towards favorability for people to swing back to Donald Trump?
00:09:37.400Well, I don't think so, because all he talks about, I mean, yes, he talks about some of these other things, but he just says the election was rigged.
00:10:58.560And it is motivational, to say the least, to his base.
00:11:06.880And according to the polling, tens of millions of people.
00:11:10.820So this is going to go on, the march goes on, and it's going to be covered, I hope, not blindly, just by one-sentence lines on social media, by detractors of Trump or proponents of Trump.
00:11:31.380We will dig into that continuing question, who is he?
00:11:47.100Bob, before we move away from Donald Trump, when you say provable untruth, I imagine there are a few people out there who are looking at what's going on with the Steele dossier right now.
00:11:57.320The fact that a second person has been charged in relation to this special counsel investigation, looking at the origins of the Steele dossier, who would say a provable untruth is what we have found the Russian collusion conversation and allegations to be.
00:12:12.280How do you think about that story happening, unfolding right now?
00:12:16.100Well, back before the 2016 election, I looked at the Steele dossier, talked to some people about it, and on Fox News, of all things, I said it is a garbage document.
00:12:32.400It is a document that makes allegations and then says, well, anyone who might be able to attest to these allegations has been bought off or is dead.
00:12:48.200Well, as you know, as a reporter, if somebody tells you, well, here's allegation A and B, which was in the Steele dossier about Trump, but by the way, you're never going to find out if it's true because everyone's been bought off or is dead.
00:13:07.540You look at that and you look at that and you say, wait a minute, this supposedly was written by an experienced intelligence officer.
00:13:16.840No experienced intelligence officer would present that as, at least on the surface, credible, because it's not.
00:13:28.640It is, as an intelligence officer, you make declarations and then you give some backup of who knows this or where it might have come from.
00:14:49.200Republicans are very hopeful of the results that they've seen happen in Virginia, flipping from Democrats to being more in their favor.
00:14:55.620Things in New Jersey were a little close.
00:14:57.340And there's, of course, that one candidate, the state senator, who was a longstanding Democrat and a New Jersey truck driver who only spent 150 or so dollars on his campaign.
00:15:17.940I mean, things happen that are aberrations, but this may reflect something.
00:15:26.020Right after, two days after that election, I went down to Richmond, Virginia, the capital, for a funeral of an uncle of mine who died at age 96.
00:15:39.260And lots of my relatives down there are, I think, all of them voted for the Republican Youngkin.
00:15:49.440And at the same time, I found they were not supporters of Trump.
00:15:55.520They, that Youngkin has found a way to be somewhat less emotional, not insult Trump, but not fully embrace him.
00:16:10.660And, you know, maybe there's a middle ground like this for Republicans.
00:16:15.700But this is 2021, and the next off-year election is 2022.
00:16:23.960It's a year away, and anything can happen.
00:16:28.200I got to ask you about Canadian politics for a moment.
00:16:30.800Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was really adored around the world when he first came into office, and things have been a bit more difficult for him here.
00:16:37.580He has been re-elected twice, but each time he's sort of gotten a fewer count, and he went from a majority government to a minority government.
00:16:43.920How would you say the U.S., broadly, whether it's the Washington establishment or just regular folks, how do they view Justin Trudeau right now?
00:16:52.240Well, I don't have any special knowledge on that, and I try to be empirical as a reporter.
00:16:59.560I mean, I followed what's happened about him.
00:17:28.880Well, you know, we in the United States and you in Canada live with the Internet, and the Internet has changed all discourse, including political discourse.
00:17:43.940And the impatience and the speed of the Internet must drive you crazy doing these long-form podcasts where people will just come out and say one thing and a sentence or a phrase or a headline.
00:18:00.580And it's not examined, it's not supported.
00:18:15.820And so we know from our own educations that's not the way you learn.
00:18:23.000And you learn by going in-depth into matters.
00:18:28.880And I have the luxury of time as a journalist, still work at the Washington Post, but spend most of my time doing books.
00:18:39.700And I think there's great value in in-depth reporting because you often discover surprises in peril.
00:18:51.800Robert Costa and I found that there was a national security crisis that was completely secret.
00:18:58.200We were on the brink of some sort of conflict or misunderstanding with China that we never knew about.
00:19:06.180The chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the United States, who's the number one military officer, was so worried about Trump, he called in the staff in the Pentagon from the war room and said,
00:19:22.400make sure that you don't take orders from Trump or the White House without involving him, General Milley, in the process.
00:19:31.920The last time, the only other time that happened was 1974 with Nixon, evidence that Nixon was unstable and drinking and depressed.
00:19:44.340And the Secretary of Defense at the time did exactly the same thing, made sure he was involved if there were any kind of military orders.
00:19:55.360And when Costa and I discovered this first learned that we were flabbergasted.
00:20:02.900I mean, there was no hint in public reporting at all that something like this was going on.
00:20:15.180You know, when you get up in the morning, you don't think about what you know, but you are plagued by what you don't know.
00:20:23.780You know, we're told that Watergate was a bit of a sort of before the fall, after the fall moment,
00:20:29.340in that previously people were able to see that their politicians, even if they didn't support their political party,
00:20:33.740were still sort of decent people, more or less honest people.
00:20:36.760And now that's just made so many people cynical.
00:20:39.280I know that observation was made, it's already been made years ago.
00:20:42.480Where are we at now in that situation, the sort of general cynicism and sometimes outright hostility we have towards those who seek public office?
00:20:50.620Well, there should be cynicism, skepticism, not hostility.
00:20:58.000I mean, what government does obviously makes a big difference in our lives.
00:21:02.480Witness, when we have a war, it convulses the country.
00:21:07.380When we have a government that's not functioning, people don't get what they need.
00:21:17.540And government is a big part of everyone's life in either small or large ways.
00:22:46.160And, you know, I like evidence-based reporting.
00:22:51.180And when you're interviewing people, you have to ask them.
00:22:55.860More and more, we're in open-source territory in terms of government posting documents online that previously would require a lot of people to search for.
00:23:04.500You're getting real-time data, whatever it is, about the finances, about COVID-19 numbers.
00:23:09.360Has this been empowering citizen journalism in a good way?
00:23:12.620Or are there still concerns about traditional media being able to sort of filter through all of this stuff?
00:23:18.020I mean, how are the traditional duties now being skewed or redefined?
00:23:24.020What do you mean by citizen journalists?
00:23:26.980Well, I mean, a lot of people just say, all right, I got the budget up on the website, and that's all I need to know.
00:26:31.640Did a great job of putting a movie together.
00:26:38.740I don't know that you've ever seen it.
00:26:40.880That really conveys the nitty gritty and the scramble and the uncertainty and the lump in your stomach moments that happen when you're chasing a story, any story.