<a class="post__byline-name-unhyphenated" href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/geoff-bennett" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person" itemprop="author"> <span itemprop="name">Geoff Bennett</span> </a> <a class="post__byline-name-hyphenated" href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/geoff-bennett"> Geoff Bennett </a> <br>Leave your feedback<br>New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart join Geoff Bennett to discuss the week in politics, including President Biden's struggles within the Democratic Party and who Trump may announce as his running mate at the Republican National Convention.<br><i>Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.</i><br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>On the week's major political stories, from President Biden's struggles within his own party, to the Republican National Convention next week, we turn to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart.<br>That's New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Jonathan Capehart, associate editor for The Washington Post.<br>Thank you both for being here.<br><strong>Jonathan Capehart:</strong><br>Geoff.<br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>So, President Biden's press conference last night might have reassured some Democrats, but it has not come close to ending this ongoing conversation about whether or not he should withdraw from the race.<br>Jonathan, how do you assess this current moment?<br><strong>Jonathan Capehart:</strong><br>We don't have enough time for me to climb up on my soapbox and climb back down.<br>Look, ever since that disastrous debate performance two weeks ago last night, Democrats have been tearing their hair out, self-immolating, and saying what they need to see from the president to make them assured that he is up to the task. He needs to show some life and some vigor. He does a rally in Raleigh the very next day.<br>He needs to sit down with the press and do an in-depth interview. He sits down with George Stephanopoulos a week ago tonight. He's sitting down with Lester Holt at NBC on Monday. He needs to be extemporaneous and do things like that. He goes to the AFL-CIO, speaks with them, microphone, no teleprompter. He did it again today in Michigan. He did it.<br>He needs to talk to the press. He needs to take questions from the press. He's been ignoring us — 59 minutes last night, he answered questions, particularly an impressive question from your colleague David Sanger at The New York Times, which I thought — I'm sure he didn't do this on purpose, but was devious in how it — in the question that he asked, a multipart, very complex foreign relations question that the president answered, to the point where the press conference got boring, because he got so deep in the weeds.<br>I raise all of these things because people keep putting up these goalposts. He meets them, and then they move them again. Clearly, people are — they're not satisfied. They want someone else, as if they're living in some Aaron Sorkin fantasyland that everything will work itself out in the end with one really good speech, one really great candidate at the end of the hour.<br>This is real life, and real life is scary.<br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>What about that, David, that these Democrats who are critical of President Biden are effectively seeing what they want to see?<br>And how do you view this? Should he stay in the race or is he on track to losing the White House, with Democrats potentially losing the House and the Senate?<br><strong>David Brooks:</strong><br>Well, first of all, I look at the press conference. It was — it reminded me when I used to watch Reagan and when I'm back when I was a young Reaganite. And I would, like, watch the press conferences through closed — like my hands up, like, what's he going to say now? I hope it's not bad. I hope it's not bad.<br>But when you looked at the judgments that he made about world history and historical events, in my view, Reagan's judgments were sound about the Soviet Union. And I felt that way with Biden. He's not what he was a year ago. He's certainly not what he was 10 years ago. I think the Biden we saw at the press is the Biden that is there, which is a little mentally slow, a little cumbersome in his articulation, but basically with sound judgments.<br>Now, will this get him out of the woods? He's got to show some way to win this thing. And that's getting harder and harder to see, when you have swing states, The Cook Report switching them, swing states, over to the Trump, when you see states that should not be swing states like Minnesota being switched over to swing states, when you have Democrats in New York state panicking, that's pretty bad.<br>And so, to me, it's less about how he performs on any given day, but what's the plausible strategy to victory? And I just don't see that out of the Biden campaign right now.<br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>Jonathan, adding to the polling that David mentioned, our new poll, 55 percent of voters want Joe Biden out of the race. In some ways, that has been the story of this election cycle, where the majority of Americans have said that they don't want to see a match-up, a Trump-Biden match-up, and yet here we are.<br>How does this campaign, how does the White House turn the page and focus their attention Donald Trump and his agenda and his vision for the country?<br><strong>Jonathan Capehart:</strong><br>Well, one, start talking about Donald Trump and his agenda for the country.<br>But the other thing is, everyone is focused on the number that shows how many people want him out of the race, how many people think he's too old, how many people think he's not — he doesn't have the mental acuity that he had 10 years ago, and not focus on the other numbers in the polls.<br>For instance, that — the NPR poll, this poll that we're talking about — Biden is up 50-48 in The Washington Post poll that was released yesterday. For the disastrous debate performance that happened two weeks ago, this poll is — was conducted after that. Despite that, Donald Trump and President Biden are tied. They are tied.<br>If this race is lost, if it's so disastrous, why don't these two poll numbers, these two polls that I just talked about, why haven't they cratered? And that's the thing that's driving me absolutely crazy.<br>These scaredy-cats, scaredy-crats, that are out there screaming that the house is on fire, we're going to lose everything, and yet we now have two national polls that don't reflect that reality.<br>I want those people who are saying he should get out of the race, please tell me, what are the numbers you are using? What do you see that the rest of us don't see? Tell us, because if you can show me, if you can back up your conjecture that we're going to lose the White House, lose the Senate, lose the House, then show me the numbers, and then maybe, maybe I will set my hair on fire too.<br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>David, I want to get your take on this — on the national conversation and our coverage of it.<br>And I raise the question because I was talking to a top Democrat this morning who said that there's too much focus on performance and not enough focus on substance, and that we, we in the media, have basically failed to learn the lesson of 2016, and that, when President Biden was giving that press conference last night at NATO, Donald Trump was in Mar-a-Lago alongside Hungarian President Viktor Orban, who is this anti-democracy icon of the far right, and that there's no focus on that.<br>There's focus — there's a focus on whether Joe Biden should have a neurological test.<br><strong>David Brooks:</strong><br>Well, I think there's some credence to that.<br>All of us in the media have one thing in common. We're all in the communication business, and so articulate — smooth articulation is super important to all of us. And when we see Joe Biden not smoothly articulating, we assume it's an indictment on his entire cognitive abilities.<br>And I think that's a little overstretched. On the other hand, in my — I will just speak for myself. The Biden we saw at the press conference, I think, is an adequate president. He would make the right judgments, his staff would do the things he needed to do, and he'd be an adequate president.<br>But nobody's worried about 2024. They're worried about 2025 and 2026 and 2027. And we have all had relatives and friends who've declined. And often the pattern is gradually, gradually, all at once. And so the decline is genuinely worrisome.<br>So I don't think we're — we're — we're paying attention to nothing here. We're paying attention to whether the president of the United States has the ability to do the hardest job in the world. And so I think that's legitimate.<br><strong>Jonathan Capehart:</strong><br>I'm worried about 2025 and 2026 and 2027 as well, but worried about it if Donald Trump is president of the United States.<br>And if President Biden is reelected with Vice President Kamala Harris, and God forbid something were to happen to the president, the nation would be in good hands with Vice President Harris if she were to have to step in and become president of the United States.<br>That's the other thing that is driving me crazy about this conversation. People are acting like there's no succession plan, that there's no one out there. They're right there. It's the president and the vice president.<br>And, look, I have interviewed President Biden on October of '22. I interviewed him just this past March. That man we saw at the NATO press conference yesterday is the same person I talked to both those times over the spread of two years. I am not worried about him, his abilities, his performance or his mental acuity.<br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>We have got a couple of minutes left, so let's look forward to the Republican National Convention next week.<br>The big thing we're basically waiting for is, who is Donald Trump going to pick as his vice presidential nominee? The reported finalists include Senator J.D. Vance, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.<br>Who do you think has the greatest shot?<br><strong>David Brooks:</strong><br>We had Tim Alberta on the show earlier. In his "Atlantic" piece, the Trump campaign kept talking about, we're going to run a visual campaign. It's got to look pretty. And we know Biden — or Trump — now I'm doing the Biden thing.<br>(LAUGHTER)<br><strong>David Brooks:</strong><br>President Trump, he loves — wants somebody to look the part. He picked Jim Mattis to look the part. And so I think Doug Burgum looks the part of a business executive who's going to give you a strong economy. So I'm going with the guy from the Dakotas.<br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>Jonathan?<br><strong>Jonathan Capehart:</strong><br>He's cribbing my notes.<br>(LAUGHTER)<br><strong>Jonathan Capehart:</strong><br>Because I have said that. I think I even said it here.<br>Absolutely, I think of the three, it's Governor Burgum. The other thing that Governor Burgum has that the other two don't have is seeming ambition for the job themselves. And Marco Rubio, Senator Rubio ran for the job himself. J.D. Vance, Senator Vance, I'm sure has aspirations, especially if he gets chosen.<br>Governor Burgum, he's a wealthy man. He's doing this apparently out of public service. I don't — maybe he will have ambition, but I think David is right in quoting me from a while back.<br>(LAUGHTER)<br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>Well, final question, David.<br>Nikki Haley has released her delegates to Donald Trump, but she won't be at the convention because she wasn't invited. Now, that could change, but as we sit here and talk right now, she's not planning to go. Was that a mistake? Was that an unforced error of the Trump team not to invite her?<br><strong>David Brooks:</strong><br>Kindergarten level politics is, you try to unite your party, so you invite Nikki Haley. But Donald Trump does what Donald Trump is going to do.<br>And I have to say, I'm mystified by how well they're sitting. I think the Republicans are just sitting pretty and feeling it. And God is good, omniscient, and omnipotent, and yet somehow he seems to want Donald Trump to be reelected, because there's just been a string of events that have lined up for Trump, whether it's DeSantis being a bad candidate, whether it's the indictments, whether it's the Democrats imploding in the middle of the Republican Convention.<br>Trump.<br><strong>Geoff Bennett:</strong><br>David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, we will see you in Milwaukee.<br><strong>Jonathan Capehart:</strong><br>Yes.<br><span>Watch the Full Episode</span><br>Jul 12<br><span>By</span> Joshua Barajas<br>Jul 12<br><span>By</span> Meg Kinnard, Associated Press<br>Jul 12<br><span>By</span> Laura Santhanam<br>Jul 09<br><span>By</span> Thomas Beaumont, Christine Fernando, Associated Press<br>Jul 05<br><span>By</span> Colleen Long, Seung Min Kim, Associated Press<br> <a class="post__byline-name-unhyphenated" href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/geoff-bennett" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person" itemprop="author"> <span itemprop="name">Geoff Bennett</span> </a> <a class="post__byline-name-hyphenated" href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/geoff-bennett"> Geoff Bennett </a> <br>Geoff Bennett serves as co-anchor of PBS News Hour. 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