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NPR’s Tamara Keith and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter join Nick Schifrin to discuss the latest political news, including the passing of former President Jimmy Carter, the fate of President Biden’s legacy and a look ahead at the political landscape in 2025.
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Nick Schifrin:
As 2025 is about to begin, we look ahead at the political landscape to come and back at the year that was with our Politics Monday team, Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, and Tamara Keith of NPR.
Thanks very much. Welcome to you both.
Tam, let me start with you.
Jimmy Carter had 40 years to define his legacy after the White House. Not only does Biden not have that much time, but is there a recognition that in fact Biden’s successor could help define Biden’s legacy?
Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:
Absolutely.
President Carter really gave himself a new legacy, a second legacy; 40 years is an incredibly longtime. President Biden does not have 40 years. The actuarial tables tell us that’s basically impossible. And so his presidency is likely to be defined both by what he did in office, but increasingly by how his time in office came to an end.
He ran in 2019 for president to make Donald Trump a one-term president. That was why he ran. That is what he said. And now Donald Trump will be a two-term president. History remembers two-term presidents generally more fondly than they remember one-term presidents.
And I have spoken to several presidential historians who say that President Biden, much of his — the fate of his legacy may well be defined by how people ultimately perceive Donald Trump. But, right now, if you ask, he was the dragon slayer, as one historian told me, but then he also is the man who let the dragon back in.
That at least is the perception from this historian I spoke to.
Nick Schifrin:
Amy Walter, is Biden uniquely perhaps vulnerable to have a legacy written by his successor?
Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:
Well, certainly, in this most recent era, where we have had some pretty young presidents, we also have Bill Clinton, who left office in his 50s, much like Jimmy Carter did, who’s been able to watch his own legacy be written and rewritten almost every few years, George W. Bush also leaving office at a relatively young age, and, of course, Barack Obama.
So this is unique in our recent era, but we have certainly had presidents who, soon after they left office, maybe they were defined by — I’m thinking of Lyndon Baines Johnson — things about their presidency that were the most unpopular, and then years and years and years later, their legacy is redefined by some of the other accomplishments they had.
I think what’s also fascinating in looking at Biden and Carter in the same lens for a second, both of them were felled by a similar issue, which is inflation, both of them as one-term presidents. But if you look back and you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter, both when he came into office and after he left, he was really an outsider and really enjoyed and embraced that outsiderness, going back to Plains, Georgia, of course, right after he left the White House.
Biden will be remembered for being the consummate insider whose life was defined by Washington.
Nick Schifrin:
Congress returns at the end of the week. And the first item on the agenda is choosing the House speaker.
President-elect Trump today, through his support behind the incumbent, Mike Johnson, writing this message on a social media platform — quote — “He is a good, hardworking, religious man. He will do the right thing and we will continue to win. Mike has my complete and total endorsement.”
With such a narrow margin in the House, Tam, does this get Johnson over the top?
Tamara Keith:
Well, it’s not clear yet. We do know of at least one House member who has said — House Republican who has said he will not support Johnson.
We also know that House Democrats are not planning to bail him out. Johnson faced another challenge to his speakership and Democrats at that point did step in and support him. This time, they feel burned by the deal at the end of the year, at the end of — right before the holidays to keep the government funded.
It was supposed to do a bunch of other things. It was a bipartisan deal. It blew up in part because of Trump and Musk, but Democrats left that saying, well, we can’t trust Johnson. So, he won’t have Democrats to help.
Trump — this is going to be a test of Trump’s sway with his party, with Republicans, because Trump also said that he wanted the debt limit to be extended and he wanted that done and the decks cleared before he came into office, and 38 House Republicans voted against that.
So this will be a test. We will see. But Trump has every reason to not want a leadership battle right now, because he wants to hit the ground running, and a leadership battle will distract and make it harder for Republicans to have the kind of unity they are going to have to have with that narrow majority in order to get the things done that he wants done.
Nick Schifrin:
Amy Walter, can Trump avoid a leadership battle?
Amy Walter:
Yes, Tam said it perfectly there at the end. He can’t really afford for this to go off the rails.
Look, I think this is going to be a constant in this Trump second term, is this push and pull between Trump wanting to be the disrupter. That is something that he enjoys. It’s something he campaigned on. It’s something we saw in his first term.
And, as Tam pointed out, this is also what we saw at the end of the year, disrupting at the very end of the process this deal on the funding for the government and potentially a debt ceiling raise. He also, though, the pull side — if we do — that was the push, the pull side is wanting to accomplish something now that he has coming into office very narrow, but still a Republican majority in the House and in the Senate.
Does he want to be a disrupter? Does he want to be a doer? He can’t get a whole lot done in his first two years if what is happening is constant friction and constant disruption, intraparty friction and disruption that he may help to stoke.
So, in this case, he’s seeing the importance of lining up behind a speaker, preventing that disruption in this area. But I don’t think that this means that we’re not going to see the disruptive side sometimes overruling the doer side.
Nick Schifrin:
We have got about a minute-and-a-half left, so you each have 45 seconds.
Amy, you first. Sorry, Tam, you first.
We’re wrapping up 2024, biggest political highlight of the year.
Tamara Keith:
Highlight.
Well, I’m going to go with some surprises. And there were many of them. This was a year of political surprises. I think the ultimate surprise in the election result was that, after two elections where Donald Trump never broke 47 percent, where he was pretty much stuck at 47 percent, he broke 47 percent. He exceeded what was thought to be his ceiling with an effective campaign and obviously the help of inflation and a desire for change among American voters.
Obviously, the other huge surprise was President Biden’s performance in that debate, just a devastating performance that people were trying to say, well, maybe he could do OK, maybe it won’t be the best, but he will be OK. No one was predicting that it would be that bad and that it would have those sorts of consequences, though, actually, I will say, lots of voters were predicting that somehow Joe Biden would get out of the race well before that happened.
Those voters were right.
Nick Schifrin:
Amy, political highlight of the year, in about 25 seconds?
Amy Walter:
Yes.
I think it was that the Republican success was decisive, but also continues to be very, very narrow. Look, control of the House came down to at the end of the day about 7,000 votes split across the three most competitive races. Push those the other way, Democrats have control of the House.
In the presidential race, Trump won a decisive victory, won the popular vote, but it was really thanks to about 229,000 voters in those blue wall states that gave him the electoral victory out of…
Nick Schifrin:
Out of 155 million.
Amy Walter:
That’s right. So, that is very narrow.
And I think this is the reality that we have to continue to remind ourselves, that we live in an era of politics that is fought here on the margins, and the smallest margins seem to be the most important.
Nick Schifrin:
Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, thanks very much to you both.
Tamara Keith:
You’re welcome.
Watch the Full Episode
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Nick Schifrin Nick Schifrin
Nick Schifrin is PBS NewsHour’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent. He leads NewsHour’s daily foreign coverage, including multiple trips to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, and has created weeklong series for the NewsHour from nearly a dozen countries.
The PBS NewsHour series “Inside Putin’s Russia” won a 2017 Peabody Award and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence. In 2020 Schifrin received the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Media Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs. He was a member of the NewsHour teams awarded a 2021 Peabody for coverage of COVID-19, and a 2023 duPont Columbia Award for coverage of Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Prior to PBS NewsHour, Schifrin was Al Jazeera America’s Middle East correspondent. He led the channel’s coverage of the 2014 war in Gaza; reported on the Syrian war from Syria’s Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders; and covered the annexation of Crimea. He won an Overseas Press Club award for his Gaza coverage and a National Headliners Award for his Ukraine coverage.
From 2008-2012, Schifrin served as the ABC News correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2011 he was one of the first journalists to arrive in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after Osama bin Laden’s death and delivered one of the year’s biggest exclusives: the first video from inside bin Laden’s compound. His reporting helped ABC News win an Edward R. Murrow award for its bin Laden coverage.
Schifrin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Overseas Press Club Foundation. He has a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a Master of International Public Policy degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
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