 Please join me in welcoming to the stage John, Chris and Mark. Thank you, Mark. Welcome everybody. Thank you for braving the weather tonight. Actually, as you may know from your program notes when you signed up for this program, Emily Ramshaw was supposed to be the moderator for tonight's conversation, but she got a case of COVID. So she sends her best, and I am her sub. And I'm glad to be her sub because these are two gentlemen who are friends and for whom I have high regard and have written wonderful books, as Mark said. John Avalon's Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, and Chris Whipple's Joe Biden and the fight of his life inside Joe Biden's White House. So you've both written about fights. The fight of the 16th president around peace after the Civil War, the fight of the 46th president after the very chaotic Trump presidency. Actually, Joe Biden just tied this together in his State of the Union when he said two years ago, our democracy faced the greatest threat since the Civil War. So John, let's talk about Lincoln's fight. What was Lincoln's fight for peace in the wake of the Civil War? Well, what Lincoln was confronting was a problem without precedent. Not only in American history, but really in human history. There had never been a Civil War on that scale before. And so Lincoln didn't have any precedents to draw on. And here he's the leader of an upstart third party. He's never held executive office, never held military office. And yet he understands in a very deep way that you don't win the war unless you win the peace. And that's particularly true in a Civil War, right? You can't salt the fields. You've got to find a way to live together again. And so even in the middle of the war, in the darkest days of the war, he's thinking proactively about how we can reconcile, how we can reunite. And that just takes a greatness of spirit as well as a wise leadership that was not appreciated by everyone in his time, but I think justly has led him to be regarded as our greatest president. So Chris, Joe Biden had reconciliation and reuniting very much on his mind when he took the presidency in 2021, characterized the situation that Joe Biden inherited as he took the presidency in 2020. Well, first of all, before I answer that, let me just say that what an honor it is to be here at the LPGA Library. John Avalon's written a terrific book. I just finished it. I recommend that everybody get it. And by the way, I've been encouraged by the Biden White House to make as many comparisons as possible between Lincoln and Biden tonight. So when people ask me why I wanted to write this book and my answer is how could I not? I mean, Joe Biden and his team came into office facing the most daunting challenges since FDR's time. A once in a century pandemic, a crippled economy, racial injustice, global warming, and of course the aftermath of a bloody attempted insurrection. And so it really seems to me that this is the fight of Joe. I mean, you could say about Biden that his whole life has been a fight against adversity, tragedy, bad luck. He lost his wife, an infant daughter in a car crash. He lost his son, Beau, to a brain tumor. He lost two attempts to become the presidential nominee. His father always said get up, and he did, and he won the presidency at last. I was kidding about Biden and Lincoln a second ago, but I actually think they have some things in common. Great oratory is not one of them. That would be Lincoln. But I do think that crises, they were both uniquely qualified to meet the moment when extraordinary crises developed. In Lincoln's case, it's obvious. I think in Biden's case, we had an authoritarian president who refused to give up power. Biden was perfectly positioned to rise to that challenge. And I think on February 24, 2022, when a Russian tyrant invaded a democracy in the heart of Europe, no one was, I mean, Biden was uniquely qualified to meet that moment. And I think so far he has. And yet, John, you talked about Joe Biden as the, Joe Biden has more experience than anyone who has ever held the Oval Office. 36 years as a senator, eight years as vice president. On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln had some of the, less experience than almost any president. He was very unlikely to become our 16th president. And yet, just as Joe Biden seems to be meeting the moment, so too did Abraham Lincoln, why? So they are very different figures in exactly that regard. Lincoln had one term in Congress under his belt. That was it. And what had been regarded as washed up politician. And so I'd want to return the compliment because I just got through reading your book. And the hardest thing to do is to sort of, and I try to do it all the time as journalists, think about politics as history in the present tense. But to record administration in real time with an eye towards history is a daunting task. I think in the case of Lincoln, and I think as in the case of all presidents, it comes down to character. You cannot emphasize that enough. I think the study of history is very clearly a story about character. Character is destiny, eventually. It's certainly, it's not an unbroken string of successes. But, and I think we forget how much a person's character, their personality ends up being reflected through in their policy, their principles, their policies and their politics. And for Lincoln, one of his superpowers is empathy. Honesty, humor, which helps him communicate. And humility, by which I mean moral humility. And what he's really able to do politically is balance moderation with moral courage. And those two things rarely go together. But I think that's what's the nature of his transformational leadership focused on reconciliation. And I think with Biden, again, hardest thing in the world to do is view a current president through the eyes of history, although that's what we should try to do. But whatever you think of the politics of the policies, character is a word. You know, when Lincoln was widely hated in his time too, so much so that his election resulted in secession. But I always bring up, you know, Lindsey Graham, who's somehow re-endors Donald Trump. But, you know, who famously said in somewhere around 2012 in a video, you know, he tears up and he talks about Joe Biden. He says, that's as good as, man, has God ever put on this green earth? And if someone who's worked with you in the Senate for several decades on the other side of political and partisan divides says that, that's called a character reference. Yeah, I was struck reading John's book. He told the story of Lincoln visiting Richmond as the Confederacy was collapsing. He'd be walking through the streets and he'd come across some bedraggled figure and spent an hour talking to that guy and making that guy feel heard. That's Joe Biden. You know, I was struck by that. So, but I don't think that Lincoln had a chip on his shoulder quite the way Joe Biden does. Why so? Somebody said about Biden that, you know, one of the things that someone said about Biden is that he's the only Irishman who doesn't carry grudges, which I can tell you is not true. Joe Biden is still pissed off with Avril Harriman who was the FDR's famously patrician ambassador to the Soviet Union, a railroad magnate who had the temerity to summon young Joe Biden as a senator to his Georgetown study and interrogate him about foreign policy. Biden left furious, he's still pissed off. He says to a good friend of his, hey, who is it? He can't remember his name, but he says, who is that guy? That rich guy, the railroad guy, right? So, and Biden also, I mean, something else I think that Lincoln and Biden had in common was that they were underestimated over and over and over and over again. Biden has not forgiven those who underestimated him, including a couple of Obama's senior advisors, David Axelrod and David Pluff as one of, because they evidently did not think he was presidential timber, and Biden confided to a friend of his, as a friend of his told me, he hates the Davids. But what marks Joe Biden's character? Well, I think he's a complex guy. I think that he's not a saint, he's not Abraham Lincoln. He does take names of people who've crossed him. He has a temper. I wouldn't say, as was famously said about FDR, that he has a world-class temperament. But having said all that, he knows what he wants, and I think that he's spent, again, decades training for the crises that he's now facing. And that's made all the difference in the case of Ukraine. I wanna go back to something that Chris just referenced in your book, this book begins just magnificently on April 4th, 1865. And this illustrated, this very cinematic scene that you paint in the book, so reflects Lincoln's character, John. Talk about that scene. It's Lincoln in the fall of Richmond. The opening sentence of the book is, Abraham Lincoln walked into the burning Confederate capital uphill from the river, passing abandoned slave markets on his right, holding his boy Tad's hand on his 12th birthday. And just everything about that scene, President of the United States walking into the abandoned and still aflame Confederate capital, not being greeted by a military escort. I mean, he's just wandering basically into the wilds. There are six Navy guys who act as oarsmen on a long boat. There's one admiral, one bodyguard and his 12 year old son. It happens to be Tad's 12th birthday. And he and Tad were incredibly tight, particularly because he and Mary's marriage had been, was in rough shape. And they walk up, not knowing where to find anybody. They said he had barely been secured. It had been lit on fire by the Confederates as they were leaving. But they were just aiming visually for the Thomas Jefferson designed state capital on the top of the hill. And then he's recognized by some liberated slaves who come up to him and followed his feet. And he said, don't, don't kneel to me. You must kneel to God only. And it's captured by a few journalists who were on the scene, including this unbelievable pioneering black war correspondent named Thomas Morris Chester. And, you know, his path is being traced by sharpshooters. It is one of the most cinematic scenes in American history, and yet it gets really short shrift, even in multi-volume biographies of Lincoln. But to me, all the major themes are there. And it culminates with Lincoln going to the Confederate capital, not an ounce of triumphalism about him, which is key to, I think, being a reconciling leader. And sitting in Jefferson Davis' chair. And there are all these moments in that day in Richmond. But I think the one that most sums it up is, the general who's in charge of securing the city at the time is a 29-year-old German immigrant named Godfrey Weitzel, who'd been overseeing the 25th Corps, which was an all-black corps. And black Union soldiers were the ones really securing the city to a large degree. And Weitzel asks Lincoln at the end of the day, you know, how should I treat these former Confederates now under my command? And Lincoln says, if I were in your place, I'd let them up easy, let them up easy. And that's just, that's very Lincoln. Your book too begins very dramatically, Chris, with an unprecedented situation. Biden has to take the White House, taking over for an administration that is not participating in the transition. Set the scene for us. Yeah, it was the most contentious and dangerous, and as it turned out, bloody transition since the Civil War. And, you know, oceans of ink have been written about the final days, Trump's final days. But I was really amazed to discover that nobody had really written about the inside story of how close it actually came to not happening, the transfer of power. I mean, it almost, it came down to an obscure Trump staffer, Deputy White House Chief of Staff named Chris Liddell, who was born in New Zealand, came to the US, rose to become CFO of General Motors and Microsoft, wound up in the Trump White House, didn't like Trump, thought that the office would change him, he was deluded by that. But he found himself there in the final days and he carried out this kind of sub-rosa operation under Donald Trump's nose and without his knowledge. He made sure that the wheels of the transition kept turning. And he stayed out of the Oval Office so that Trump wouldn't know what he was up to. He had friends who would talk him off the ledge every time he was about to quit because of some outrageous thing Trump had said or done. They would say, wait a minute, you can't leave. Somebody's gotta land this plane. And he stayed until 1159 a.m. on January 20th, walked out into the West Wing parking lot, climbed into his 1960 Corvette convertible, tipped his fedora to the Secret Service agents and roared off down Constitution Avenue, thinking somehow we pulled it off. The peaceful transfer of power actually happened against all the odds. So what would have happened if Chris Liddell had not been in a position to help the Biden White House? Well, it's all too conceivable that Trump would have dug in. The transfer of power would not have happened when it happened. The most dangerous time in any transition, in this case, it wasn't necessarily January 6th, as frightening as that was. It's January 20th when there's the potential for when you don't have the new team in place and you have the old team there. Josh Bolton, George W's chief of staff was worried about January 20th. What could happen? So it was unbelievably fraught. And I'll just, to pay compliment, I mean, I think you really illustrate that shockingly undercovered inverse well. And I think it's difficult because we all live through it in real time. You highlight some of these pivotal moments, McConnell coming out and saying, you know, no, this is gonna move forward. That that stops the momentum. But as we've learned more and more information, not only, I mean, this Fox Dominion lawsuit really exposing in real time the lies that were being told that the people inside that organization knew were lies to, you know, the QAnon people all expecting there'd be martial law and mass executions up until, you know, really noon on the 20th. Yeah. And that, you know, there were a lot of thin reads that could have gone a very different direction. And I mean, Joe Biden's transition team, which was run by his best friend and alter ego, Ted Kaufman, who took Biden's Senate seat when Biden became Obama's vice president. Kaufman was in charge and Bob Bauer, the attorney was the senior legal counsel, they had prepared for 70, 70 emergency contingencies that included Trump calling troops into the streets. They were, they stopped counting at 70. There were, that's how. And I'll just add to that. Remember, you know, the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, is fired after the election in part to potentially create a more pliable situation in the Pentagon. You know, these are details, you know, we forget because there's so much coming down the pike. And, you know, it really, it was close. And you get a, you really show, you know, with I think new insight. It's an amazing story. And Biden had a pretty extraordinary team in place to deal with it. It's astounding how a few people on the right side of history can make a profound difference. And this is an example of that. John, I want to go back to the Civil War for a second. Clearly a very divided time in the course of this nation. Just master of understanding. Well, thank you. Yeah, we had some of it. Do you see through lines between the divisions after the Civil War and those that we are experiencing today? So after the Civil War is an interesting caveat. I mean, first of all, I think part of the reason to study history and I'm passionate about applied history, particularly the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, is to remember that we have been through far worse before, right? That's important, that's important to remember. But I think the lessons of Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, have their own unique gravity and resonance. First of which is to say that even winning a war and getting three constitutional amendments passed is not enough to guarantee equal justice under law for formerly enslaved Americans. You can't understand American history and American politics without understanding the role of race and understanding the massive resistance to multiracial democracy, which has occurred periodically in our country. That is a very deep strain. And sometimes it's expressed in ways that seem disconnected. Some of the details I talk about in the book that are, I think, newly relevant. The voter intimidation, violence, voter election subversion. Nobody really talks about redistricting in 1870, but it was absolutely a tool to disenfranchise newly enfranchised blacks but also retain more political power in the North. There was a, in the South, there was a move to gut public funding of integrated institutions in that period. Not that the South didn't need a lot of public money to rebuild, but if you pulled the money, that would allow integrated public institutions to atrophy. And just the clawing back of power and the way that was helped by an exhausted post-Civil War majority of Americans and really also, I think, clicked into gear with an economic depression. So the way that all these forces are integrated. And so it's just a reminder that there really does need to be vigilance. There needs to be as much historic perspective as possible. And when people start playing these old cards, they're hitting on deeper, synaptic things in the American psyche than we're sometimes aware of, which is why understanding history is really important. Because Mark Twain said history doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes. If you can hear the rhyme, it'll impose some perspective on the debates of our time. So Chris Lincoln famously says in his second inauguration speech, with malice toward none, with charity for all, and in an attempt to reconcile, extend a hand to the vanquished South. Clearly Joe Biden wanted to be the uniter when he became president. What was his plan for bringing the country together? Well, Biden during his first two years was really trying to do two contradictory things. And one was to unify the country. And the other was to call out the threat to democracy represented by MAGA. The thing that shocked Joe Biden more than anything else as president was the staying power of Trumpism. He thought it would be in the rear view mirror by now. He thought, he won the election by seven million votes. I've got a mandate, I'm gonna be able to move past this. Well, what he discovered was that he couldn't. And I think his instinct, you remember for the first year or so he would only refer to the former guy. He didn't really talk, didn't even name Trump. His time went on out of frustration. And I think vaccine resistance was shocked him. He couldn't wrap his head around it. He kept calling Jeff Zients in, the coronavirus response coordinator who is now the chief of staff and saying, Jeff, what's going on? He didn't get it. He couldn't wrap his head around that resistance. So as time went on, I think Biden realized that Trumpism isn't going anywhere. He then gave that, I thought, what was then the best speech of his presidency in the anniversary of January 6th, which was just a really fiery speech in which he laid out the challenge. And I think now he realizes, and I think that I think the Biden White House is planning to run against Trump. I think they think Trump's gonna be the nominee. He's weakened, he's wounded, but he is dangerous. And he, still for all of his legal woes and all the rest, he has a stranglehold on the base. I think, I don't necessarily see DeSantis running that gauntlet without getting taken down. And I think a long-winded way of saying that I do think that the Biden White House believes that democracy is on the ballot in 2024. John, I wanna ask you, you are a very well-respected pundit. What is your view of the Republican field and Donald Trump's prospects for 2024? It's not for the fact that I loathe the word pundit. I appreciate the spirit of that question. Look, I think that one column I will write in the next week or two is sort of the, how Republicans can stop Donald Trump's nomination with this one simple trick, is the tempting headline. The problem is, depending on how many people get in, and as far as I'm concerned, people should get in the race, but then it should winno based on their ability to garner support, fundraising and polling and otherwise. The problem is that Republicans have set up a situation where their primaries are winner-take-all. And that means, in an even relatively crowded field, Donald Trump is going to win. Now, Republicans know that he is deeply damaged, that he is kryptonite to independence and moderates, let alone Democrats and liberals. He splits the Republican party deeply. But as we've seen in the politics around 24, and in the Dominion lawsuit, I mentioned this again simply because what we see is that there's a certain Stockholm syndrome. They're terrified of the base, and they're trying to figure out how to still navigate a lie, which is unacceptable in my eyes. Now, look, I also think that there, I'd be interested to know whether you think Biden is a slam dunk to run. I understand, the midterm elections, by the way, having an incumbent president, below 50% approval, they lose an average of 46 seats. To have the kind of midterm performance, which really was independent voters rejecting election denialism, is unheard of. But I think Biden is betting it being Trump, and I don't think that's a rematch the majority of the American people actually wanna see, even if they think Biden's done a good job. Well, I think some of the polls have indicated that even Democrats, the plurality of Democrats, don't want Biden to run again. I think these polls are basically bogus. I think, and as Joe Biden likes to say, don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. If you rephrase that question and you put Biden up against Trump, or if you were to say in the poll, who has a better chance of beating Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, you get very different answers. I don't think there's a plan B for the Democrats. I don't think, I mean, there's been a lot of ink lately advocating one of two things. Either Biden should step away and just take the gold watch and the applause of a grateful nation and let somebody else carry the baton, or alternatively, a Democratic challenger should get in. I think neither option is viable for the Democrats. I don't think anybody thinks, I mean, if Biden were to step away, Kamala Harris is the immediate front runner and followed by a food fight, followed by a real battle, but everybody would get it. Which would be, does anybody really want to bet on that against Donald Trump? Number one, number two, I think a Democratic challenger, again ask Jimmy Carter, ask Jerry Ford how that went. So a Democratic challenge also sinks their prospects, I think. So I would say, compare them to the alternative. I want to come back to this subject in a moment, but John, let me ask you, given the divisions in America, which are the worst certainly in my lifetime, what role does the media play? You're our resident journalist here, you're on CNN. What role does the media play in fostering the polarization that seems endemic to America in the 21st century? So the rise of partisan media and the fragmentation of the media environment has been very bad for giving Americans the ability to reason together. Now there's some technological innovations, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I think it's pretty clear Fairness Doctrine had a cohesing factor, if only because, before the Fairness Doctrine was lifted in 1987, for example, what happened over, the most popular format on AM went from being music to talk radio, right wing talk radio overnight. Over time, what we have seen is the proliferation of partisan media, first on websites and talk radio, cable news, websites, blogs, social media. And that has moved the power further and further to the extremes as the parties themselves become more polarized in particularly the Republican Party. And you see it, bring it up a third time because it's a really big deal. This isn't about competition between networks. In the discovery around the Dominion lawsuit, what you see is a lot of Fox execs and anchors freaked out that OAN and Newsmax were gonna eat their lunch from a viewer standpoint because they were more willing to parrot Donald Trump's lies. And truth was not the goal. As a matter of fact, there were calls to fire people inside the organization who were fact checking Trump's lies. And that was all about fear of losing market shares. So from a business standpoint, it's called cocooning, right? You play to a narrow but intense niche audience. And you do that through keeping them addicted to anger and anxiety. And that further moves our politics further and further to the extremes. Now, those of us who are in the center and CNN is in the center, there are a lot of different ways to do it. Some are more effective than others, right? You can't do two people screaming side by side with each other. You need to have the ability to say, here are established facts, right? You need to deliver on the promise to make people smarter, not dumber and to offer some perspective. That is gonna be less sexy structurally than playing to the base and keeping people addicted to anger and outrage. But our democracy depends on it. We're gonna need to put some guardrails around social media in a constructive way, just so at least disinformation isn't amplified faster than facts, which it currently is. And we've got a political problem that contributes to it as well. But in the fullness of time, we'll see, I think Donald Trump on the rise of social media, in terms of the information that gets elevated being more conspiratorial, more confrontational, that's the perfect storm that got us where we are. But we have to think much more structurally. And also remember that you vote with your eyeballs every day, not just your wallet. And what you pay attention to is what you'll get more of. You talked about guardrails. Can I just say it wouldn't hurt at all if Dominion won big time. Right. It's gonna be very difficult to prove that the defamation claims, but it's a strong, strong case. No question about it. But you talked about those guardrails, right? Some sort of regulations that you put in place. What is a quick win on curtailing misinformation and disinformation for the purveyors of social media? Well, look, this was one of my, I had a couple of mission critical things to sort of start healing the breach. The big baseline, at the least you can do is this, was the Electoral Count Act passing. That was a very big deal. But algorithm reform had a lot of bipartisan support in the last Congress. Now you've got, of course, Republicans controlling the House, but there was broad support. Now that doesn't necessarily mean taking on section 230, which is modally technical. What you need to do is simply have more transparency around the algorithms that currently, I'll tell you a quick story. Facebook did an experiment. It's called Carol. They created a dummy account under the name Carol and I think it was May of 2020. And Carol was theoretically a mother of three living in I think Wilmington, North Carolina in her interest for conservatism and Christianity. And the account didn't like anything. It wasn't that which is theoretically supposed to probably work. Within days, the account, according to Facebook's own internal auditors was being inundated with extremist groups and conspiracy theories, including QAnon. And within weeks they shut it down because in their own words it had become a cesspool of extremism. And the rise of QAnon during COVID was a symptom of this which is almost like a test of, how quickly can something utterly insane be mainstreamed because people are going down rabbit holes. That's what's being served up to people. That is a human problem. That is a human created problem that partly preys on our instincts as human beings to slow down at car crashes and listen to loudest voices. But we need to get our hands around that. There is the basis of some bipartisan support. The other thing is we need to invest in civic education again. And those two things should be done and should be doable. Well, it would also help if we did not have a major political party that is opted out of the democratic process and a major network that has become in effect their pravda. So, Chris, in addition to writing the fight of his life as Mark Lawrence mentioned, Chris has written a book, a fabulous book on the chiefs of staff for our presidents called The Gatekeepers. And he is really the expert on that crucial position in a White House. And you write in the book about this very revealing conversation, a Zoom call as it happens between Ron Klain, the incoming Biden chief of staff and 19 of his 21 living predecessors. 22, 19 out of 22 living White House chiefs were on the Zoom call with Ron Klain a month before the inauguration. What is the substance of that call? So it was just a fascinating to me because this is a tradition that goes back to Rahm Emanuel in 2008 when he was the new kid coming into the Obama White House as chief of staff and all the chiefs got together to, as Dick Cheney put it, show him the keys to the men's room. There have been no women alas as White House chiefs of staff in history. But I digress. So anyway, this call was fascinating because among other things, LBJ's last chief of staff, Jim Jones, who was 82 years old at the time, the first thing he said to Ron Klain was you have got to take care of this president. You've got to make sure he gets his rest. I made sure that LBJ got a nap every afternoon. I'm 82. I recognize this guy. I'm a champion at tripping going up the stairs. He has the same gait that I do. Obviously, all of this goes to a big issue in the upcoming election, namely Biden's age. So it was a fascinating call, but everybody had a different piece of advice for Ron Klain. And Klain, as it turns out, probably didn't need it because every living chief would tell you that nobody has ever been better prepared than Klain for that job. And after two years, he's now out and it's been replaced by Jeff Klein, Jeff Zients. You can't do that job effectively for more than about 18 months. That's the average tenure. Klain was wiped out, but he leaves very large shoes to fill. I mean, I put him in the company of James A. Baker III and Leon Panetta as one of the really effective White House chiefs. And the other thing, with the exception of Klain, one of the things that's striking, not only by contrast with Trump, is the relative stability of Biden's administration. These are not necessarily flashy people, but they seem to have a very high degree of collegiality in working together and advancing the boss's vision. And with the exception of, I think the disastrously executed withdrawal of Afghanistan, which hurt Biden enormously with independent voters in particular, because I think it went against that promise of competence. But I think you've seen that promise largely play out. Yeah, so I really see the Biden presidency and my book as a kind of political thriller in three acts. And the first act was this unbelievably fraught transition that we've talked about. The second act was the first year of the Biden presidency in which you had the buckle of the Afghanistan evacuation. And I write about that extensively and talk to Bill Burns, the CIA director and Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, Klain and the others. And that really set off a steady decline in Biden's approval ratings. And the third act, I think, began on February 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Biden rose to that moment, rallied NATO in a way that I don't think anybody else could have done. And thereafter, he was able to pass a string of legislative stuff, much of it bipartisan, that rivals LBJ's legislative record. And then, as John mentioned earlier, defied all the odds in the midterm elections. I want to come back to something you said about Biden reviving NATO. You said he was in a unique position to do that. Why? He spent his whole life preparing for that kind of crisis. This is a guy who spent decades in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee studying NATO, championing NATO, these alliances, taking the measure of Vladimir Putin. And Biden was clear-eyed about Putin in a way that none of his predecessors were. He understood that the only thing this guy understands, he didn't look into his eyes and see his soul. He knew that- He refused to say anything negative about him ever. He knew that Putin understood one thing only, and that is force. And so he was in a unique position to rise to that challenge, I think. And I like to think, I've said a lot of nice things about Joe Biden, but I think my book is pretty clear-eyed about what a disaster the Afghanistan evacuation was. And I think that that was a whole of government failure where everybody did almost everything wrong. But in the case of Ukraine, I think everybody did almost everything right. And just tying two themes here together, I think Biden's always been a big believer in multilateral institutions, and so this is that moment. And I keep waiting for, Turkey's got to let in Sweden and Finland, and when that happens, that's gonna be a very big deal. But I was really struck by an interview that you had with President Biden where you're talking about what's the game plan for Ukraine? And it's a text, it's a big paragraph that is dense with detail about the weapons systems that need to go forward, and what needs to be done, well, javelins, and then we're gonna need to sustain that, but the EU's gonna need to really pick up a lot of the economic rebuilding. And it is... Well, like Lincoln has got not only when the war, but when the peace. Well, that's right, no, no, he's already thinking about that and talking about it, but with really detailed weapons systems, economic levers in a way that utterly cuts against the stereotype of him being someone who is in decline without a command of detail. That paragraph jumped out at me. And I've always thought he's better at town halls than people give him credit for, I think it's a struggle, but that really made an impression on me because that, I mean, that's an incredibly, that's someone who understands government, policy, administration, weapons systems, economic aid, and is thinking about it comprehensively. But let me leave you... So, I really missed it. Maybe you just answered my question, I wanna ask you both this. It's amazing how much we miss when we examine our presence. They're perhaps the most scrutinized person on the planet earth, and yet it astounds me when we look back at the administrations of our presence, how much we get wrong. So what are we getting wrong about Joe Biden in real time, Chris? Joe Biden, as I suggested before, has been underestimated time after time after time after time, which is not to say that he didn't have a really rough ride for the first year of his presidency. He did for sure, and his competence, the perception of his competence took a huge hit over Afghanistan, his approval ratings declined steadily, have ever since with a little uptick recently. So I think that what we tend to get wrong, I mean, if you were to ask Joe Biden, Joe Biden would say you get everything wrong. But what we tend to miss is that these guys often have a better understanding of what they're doing than the press gives them credit for sometimes. I mean, the midterm election is a perfect example. And this was a case where they were, the Biden White House was mocked when they were talking about the threat to democracy, MAGA, and women's reproductive rights. And everybody was saying you guys are about to get shellacked. You're gonna get wiped out. People wanna hear about inflation. That's all they care about. Well, Biden and Ron Klain in particular had a very different take on what was required. And finally, Klain actually sat Biden down and said, Mr. President, I know you wanna go everywhere and talk about everything, but here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna go to the states where we know you're gonna make a positive difference, and you're gonna talk about reproductive rights and the threat of MAGA. And he followed that script, and the rest is history. So, we got it all wrong. The press got it all wrong. Yeah, and I mean, that really, I think that was, you know, I think someone had a good line. I think it was Tim Alberta, which is, you know, voters chose, you know... Normal over crazy. Normal over crazy was that. You've got a barnacle saying that in your book. But, you know, I think that was sort of the binary, and it was the hard core election in the Irish and swing states who all lost. That's a good thing for democracy, putting partisan politics aside. You know, the other thing is, I mean, the legislative record, which we have touched on a little bit, is extraordinary and is what, in addition to Ukraine, I think you can say with a degree of confidence that he will be regarded as a consequential president. And to do that with a evenly divided Senate and a narrow divide in the House is almost unimaginably difficult, if not impossible. And I can tell you, there are a lot of newsrooms that were incredibly cynical about his ability to get it done. And I think that's partly, you know, he doesn't have the physical vigor that we expect in presidents. And he sometimes can be sort of a hidden hand with regard to his dealings with Congress and the Senate. You do a great job talking about the mansion back and forth. But, you know, take a really big step back. How do we see Biden in history, which is in part, right? And, you know, I looked at what's, that the C-SPAN grades its presidents, and I was incorporating this into a column. But it's kind of interesting to think about in that light. Public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision setting and agenda, pursuing equal justice for all. Now, you're not gonna get all straight A's on that report card, but dealing with Congress, moral authority, I think, you know, international relations, administration with regard to, you know, you start to see the outlines of why I think there's a case to be made that a one-term Biden presidency would actually be, you know, in the top quartile of presidencies. Second terms tend to be dominated by disappointment, and I think there's actually a historic risk with that. But just judging by where we are now, looking at those categories, I think you can start to see how history might be inclined to view his administration favorably. But I think you could also say that for all the unbelievable challenges that he faced in the first two years that now comes the hard part, because none of this stuff makes any difference if you can't implement what you've done. I mean, the legislation, all the legislation means nothing until the rubber meets the road, and that means getting out there and implementing all of this stuff. That's number one. I mean, he's 80, he'll be 82 years old, running a bruising re-election battle. He's got to avoid a recession and bring inflation down. He's got to deal, you know, the border, again, is gonna be a club that the Republicans beat him with and try to bloody him with. And there's the unfinished job with NATO. I mean, I think the legislation is a big deal, but I think there are three defining tests for this presidency that the historians will be talking about. First will be, what did he do about this once-in-a-century pandemic, which he was elected to wrestle to the ground? Number two, what did he do when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and threatened not just Ukraine, but Western democracy and raising the specter of nuclear war, which is the thing that keeps Biden up at night? And number three, I think it'll be how he faced down the threat to democracy represented by Trumpism and MAGA, which may well be on the ballot in 2024. I think those are the three big things. Let me offer a fourth, because it's- That's not enough. Yeah, no, but because this is in some ways the background music to a lot of the challenges we're facing, and given the scale of the legislation that has passed, he does as much as anybody to talk about rebuilding the middle class, and in a way that's personal to him, right? And Andrew Sullivan had a great column called, after the most recent State of the Union, called William Jefferson Biden. And what it was about is about Biden triangulating with economic populism, and really reaching out and trying to rebuild the middle class and appeal to working class voters, many of whom fell under Trump's sway because they felt so screwed and squeezed for so long, and that part of the opportunity of what's in the infrastructure bill, part of the opportunity of what's in the Inflation Adjustment Act, which could also help us deal with climate change, is an investment in America at home that could actually boost incomes, we're starting to see that in the lowest quartile, boost, strengthen the middle class, in a way that actually makes us a more resilient society. That's not as sexy and headline grabbing as the other three, but that is the background to a lot of what we are dealing with as a country, and we gotta rebuild the middle class in this country, otherwise we're not gonna be in the middle of our politics. Let me talk about, you talked about Kamala Harris a moment ago. There's a moment in your book that's very revealing, and a friend of Biden is asking how Kamala Harris is doing, asking Biden how Kamala is doing, and he said she's a work in progress. How does Joe Biden view Kamala Harris today? A continuing work in progress, a work still in progress. That relationship is complicated and fascinating to me, because they have a genuine bond. They certainly had it early in the presidency. Biden wanted her in almost every, wanted her to be in almost every meeting, not just the president's daily brief in the morning, but almost every meeting, and he would look around and ask where she was if she wasn't there. She was a real participant in these meetings, and he valued her input, and then as time went on, things got a little dicey here when she started taking so much criticism for the Northern Triangle, that awkward trip to Guatemala she made, the fumbled answer to Lester Holt when he asked her why she hadn't been to the border. Then Biden got wind of the fact that the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, was going around complaining that she'd been given mission impossible, she'd been set up for failure, her portfolio was too difficult. Well, Biden, that really pissed him off. That was when he told, that's when this friend asked him how she was doing, and he said a work in progress. Having said that, he's given her a lot of really important national security assignments that she's carried out well. And I tell this previously unreported story about how she met privately with Zelensky on the eve of the invasion at the Munich Security Conference, and Zelensky was still skeptical that the invasion was on, and she told him not only are they coming for Ukraine, they are coming for you and your family, and he was still a little bit skeptical and she turned to an aide as Zelensky left and said, I wonder if that's the last time we see him alive. And she was back at the Munich Security Conference recently, as you know. So I think she's doing better, but she's a work in progress, to be sure. We talked about how we get our presidents wrong, even though we scrutinize them intensely. Are we getting Kamala Harris wrong? How would you rate Kamala Harris right now as a vice president? Well, I mean, you know, Lyndon Johnson was underestimated by the Kennedys, and if you asked anybody before November 1963, they would say he's been, you know, a great Senate majority leader who will never amount to much. And of course, you know, I think what's fascinating to see about the evolution of Lyndon Johnson's reputation is that Vietnam fades and his domestic accomplishments loom larger and larger and larger, particularly civil rights. I think Kamala Harris has so far failed to convert on her promise in a pretty profound way. Now, if she were, I'll say God forbid, to suddenly become president, you would see a very different assessment, simply, I think, given the nature of the responsibilities. But while, you know, vice presidents are rarely given great and easy assignments. This is true. The promise and the premise of Biden-Harris was handing the torch over to the next generation. It was an inverse of the Obama-Biden relationship in some ways and, you know, that promise has not converted to the respect of her peers or the American people in a broad enough way yet. To me, the most troubling sign, and this isn't as a journalist, this is just as a, you know, if you see high turnover of staff, and I don't care if it's a private business, you know, organization, that's not a good sign. And she has very high turnover in her team. And so that needs to get stabilized. I think she's a very compelling political figure in many respects, but I do not think, if Biden were to step aside, that she would be the prohibitive favorite to be the nominee. Well, she'd start out that way, and then everybody would get it, yeah. For a week, for a job. Yeah. Chris, I want her to succeed as we should all want our presidents or vice presidents to succeed putting partisan politics aside. Chris, what is Biden's thinking process looks like? Look like, as he determines whether he'll throw his hat in the ring in 2024. He's going, he's running. Without a question. Well, in my mind, yeah, I mean, 99%. The only person who could possibly talk him out of it would be his most influential advisor, Dr. Jill Biden. But there's no indication that she's anything but on board. So I think he's running. Biden has spent every, he's spent every four years of his life either running for president or dreaming about running for president and wanting to be president. Presidents do not give up power for the most part voluntarily. The last one who did was Lyndon Johnson in 1968 when he walked away. George W. Bush's first chief, Andy Card once said to me, you know, Chris, if anybody tells you they're leaving the White House voluntarily, they're probably lying to you. So, you know, Biden has the ego and the ambition that every, all of his predecessors had, but I think he also feels, again, that he has unfinished business. And I think the stakes arguably could not be higher when it comes to Ukraine and, you know, the stability of democracy in Western Europe and all the rest because, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to Bill Burns, the CIA director about Vladimir Putin. Burns feels that it's existential for conquering Ukraine as existential. He doesn't think that... It's existential for Putin. He doesn't think that Putin will settle for anything less, that even a temporary freeze or agreement would just be breathing room before he went back for the rest of Ukraine. That's Burns' view. I think that as much as conquering Ukraine is existential for Putin, I think defeating him is existential for Western Europe and for democracy. I mean, I think it's that black and white. So that's just a personal opinion, but I think Biden feels that way. I wonder, do you feel that... We know that politically Biden feels that if Trump's gonna be the nominee, he's the guy who has to vanquish him one last time, that their fate seemed entwined. But he'd be running anyway, anyway. Yeah, but that logic might not apply if someone other than Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. That's the first line of his obituary, right? He rested the presidency from Donald Trump without question. But I guess what you're saying is, until Putin and Trump are off the stage, Biden will feel that his leadership is indispensable. Well... Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I don't know that he would say his... Indispensable's probably doing it this time, but... But I think he would be running even if Trump were out of the picture. I think even if he thought of DeSantis was the favorite, Biden would be running. Biden is running, and it doesn't matter who the opponent is. I think he feels he has unfinished business. Let me go from the 46th president back to the 16th president as we cap off this conversation, John, and ask you what can we learn from Abraham Lincoln at this moment in our history? I think, first, just returning to... Just remembering that basic thing, which is that character is the single most important quality in a president. I would go as far to say that someone's politics, their policies, their partisan affiliation, doesn't matter much compared to the question of whether they have fundamentally good character. And that means caring about people, right? Lincoln is a particularly vivid example of that kindness can be consistent with effective leadership, but I've always been struck by something that General Sherman said, looking back on their last meeting, said, of all the great men I ever met, he was the one who was the most goodness. Of all the good men I ever met, he was the greatest. And the key there is that Lincoln's greatness actually comes from his goodness. And I think that's something where Biden's well-deserved reputation for personal decency, not perfection, but stands him well. I also think the thing that Lincoln challenges us, we need to be honest about the fact that our empathy has been strained. It's difficult when we're having political debates and people are not dealing with facts, facts that go to the heart of our democracy. Disinformation that goes to the heart of their willingness to die of a disease to own the lives, in some cases. But empathy is essential in a democracy. And we need to get back to that place where there is an assumption of goodwill. Lincoln helps us in that regard also because for a president in the middle of the Civil War, who people want to kill, who in private and public is constantly reaching out, who retains his ability to believe that there's more than unites us than divides us as Americans. And to really believe it, not just say it, to show it in private. That's the kind of leadership I think we need. Humor helps, honesty helps, balancing moral courage with moderation helps, but it's that marrow deep belief that there's more than unites us than divides us and showing it in our own lives as citizens, not simply waiting for a president to set that example. That's how Lincoln I think can help all of us out of this. I'm so sorry that Emily Ramshaugh couldn't be here today, but I've had a blast talking to these two wonderful minds. Thanks to Chris Whipple and John Ablon. And thank you all for coming out. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Thanks buddy. You're welcome. Great. Really enjoyed it, Chris. What a delight. Thanks.