David Remnick: this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm here with my colleague, staff writer, Evan Osnos, who's been reporting for many years on Joe Biden. We've got a big piece coming out in The New Yorker this week, a profile of Biden. How are you doing, Evan?

Evan Osnos: I'm doing okay. Thanks, David.

David Remnick: Now, Evan, I've got a little trip down memory lane for you here from almost four years ago. You went to see Biden during the 2020 campaign. It was the height of the pandemic, and you were at his home in Delaware, masked and socially distant. He spoke about his motivation to run against Donald Trump. Here's a bit from that interview

Joe Biden: With Trump not running, I probably wouldn't be running, but he's so contrary to everything that I believe about government and the antithesis of what I think we should be doing. We have always talked about, we've thought about, we've never lived up to, weed the people, hold these truths to be self-evident. Every kid learns it. I think most of us, even though there was a lot of experience, thought that it's always going to be that way. We've never met it, but we're constantly move closer and closer and closer to more inclusion. All of a sudden, you're thinking to yourself, "Holy God, look at these guys. Look what's happening. Look what's being done. Look what's being said." Not just by him, but by his followers and some of his elected colleagues.

David Remnick: Evan, that is approximately four years ago, and I wonder how you remember that interview and what is the contrast between the Biden of four years ago who was running for president, who would eventually unseat Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, the incumbent whom you saw in the Oval Office just a few weeks ago?

Evan Osnos: Yes, David, I have to say, hearing that brings you back to that. When I went to see him this time, here he was at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. It was a slightly overly formal occasion. The first thing he wanted to do was say, "Let me take you and show you," as he put it, "where Trump watched the revolution." I'm sitting there and Biden has brought me in there, and I think to myself, "Okay, he's going to give me a little speech or something." Biden's famous for, shall we say, having a speech at the ready as needed.

In this case, he didn't do it. Actually, he just gave this very angry, bitter laugh. He walked back to the Oval Office where we did the interview, and it was the first sign for me of what I realized, this is a matter of great personal importance to Joe Biden. He feels almost viscerally, this contempt for Trump and what Trump did to the country, and after all, let's remember what Trump did to Joe Biden. He didn't just try to steal this election from Biden's perspective. He tried to steal it from him.

David Remnick: How did he seem to you?

Evan Osnos: He seemed slower in his movements and his gestures. His voice is very clotted. He didn't do anything that made me think that his mind is any different than it was in 2020, but there is this contrast, this juxtaposition between how he looks and the things that he says that I think is, in some ways, what every voter is trying to navigate through and make sense of.

David Remnick: Evan, years ago, Biden called himself a bridge president, and many of us took that to mean he might be a one-term president, that he'd finally step aside for another generation of leaders. At some point, obviously, he decided to run again. Did you ask him about that decision?

Evan Osnos: Yes, I asked him a question very specifically. Was there ever a moment in the course of this first term, of this term, when you said, "I may not do this again"? He said, "No," right away. What he was saying, and he said it over and over again, over the course of the time that I was talking to him, was, "I've earned this." That's his message. "I've earned the right to do this." He said, "Any other president in my situation would be running for reelection."

David Remnick: No candidate has ever been in his situation. No candidate has ever been 81 years old running for reelection.

Evan Osnos: On some level, he goes right by that fact, and he says, "No, this is about what I have done in the presidency," meaning, in his mind, legislation, "what I've done on the foreign affairs front," things like that. That is the core of what's going on here, David, is that this man has no doubts right now. We and the world are looking very hard and debating this question of, should he be doing this? Joe Biden is not debating this question of whether he should be doing this.

David Remnick: In the tape we played, the message was, I think, and throughout the interview that you did in 2020, the interview was this, "Trump is crazy and I'm going to restore sanity." I think that's fair. Has that message changed?

Evan Osnos: No. On some level, that is still not just the message, but it's also the strategy. They know that there are a lot of Democrats that might be popular presidential contenders. Joe Biden's view is they haven't earned the right to do this, and they haven't shown the ability necessarily to win, and the way that they then imagine that they're going to beat what is this very evident set of obstacles and doubts that people have is that when the moment comes, when it's a choice between two, that they believe that Biden will win.

David Remnick: What would a debate between the two of them in 2024 look like?

Evan Osnos: Oof. I think for one thing, I'm not sure that there is going to be a debate.

David Remnick: Do you think Joe Biden could get away with that? Don't you think that most people would think, "Ah, he doesn't want a debate because he's going to look old"?

Evan Osnos: Some people will say that, but they're already saying that. I think that's already part of it.

David Remnick: It's the Washington term. It's baked in.

Evan Osnos: Actually, David, though, that is a key piece of this whole process, which is how much is baked in because that is a, from Joe Biden's perspective, one thing he said to me that really struck me was he said,"You guys," meaning you the press, he said, "have become numb to all of that." All of Trump's threats of violence, of fundamentally undermining the nature of American democracy. This was one thing that really was noticeable, was there was an undertone of our conversation that was testy. He said over and over again that he thought that the press was not really engaging either his wins adequately or Trump's menace adequately.

David Remnick: Do you agree with him?

Evan Osnos: Look, I think the press is doing what the press does, which is that it presses hard on questions of significance. His age is a legitimate and significant question here. I think there is a degree though, to which the press has become accepting of the idea that everything Trump does is just another level of endless extremity, and what does it really mean? How much can he get away with there? There is a piece of that. I think the press is a part of this election in an awkward way that we're still trying to navigate.

David Remnick: How do you mean?

Evan Osnos: It's become assumed that Trump is in this commanding position now. The best example of this was that in the Davos conference, whatever it was in January, that everybody was essentially assuming, according to the reporting from there, that Trump is on his way to winning. That becomes baked in, to use your term, which is, there becomes a sense of that this is an inevitability.

The truth is that it's noticeable that the Biden people and Biden himself, they're not panicking actually around them, and this frankly gives Democrats a lot of concern, there is an almost ostentatious level of serenity, as if they say, they feel that a lot of the numbers and a lot of the commentary is wrong. I heard over and over again from Biden's advisors and he said versions of this himself that he doesn't really believe that he's trailing in the polls as much as they suggest. They say because we think polls have been pretty bad for the last 10 years, more or less.

David Remnick: They have. After a while in their multiplicity, those polls begin to reflect a reality. One of the realities is that in the State of Michigan, for example, in the primary, we just saw a significant number of people writing in a protest vote, having to do with Biden's support of Israel. Now, we don't know if those people become Trump voters necessarily in the fall, but they're registering tremendous frustration with Biden in a state that is absolutely crucial to the election. You were talking with Arab American and Muslim voters in Michigan about Biden. How is that story developing?

Evan Osnos: Yes, I was really struck by a conversation I had with a voter named Mohammad Kazah, who I've talked to over the years. I met him in 2020 when he was a huge Biden fan. When I talked to him the other day, he is a Palestinian American, and the depth of his rage at Biden, at the Democratic party, is profound. He's a very sophisticated political consumer and participant, and he said, "Look, they think, the Democrats think that we're going to come back in the fall once it's a choice between these two." He said, "We're not coming back," because, in his mind, it's better to stay home and to write in, "Ceasefire now," your ballot than it is to support Joe Biden even against the risk of a Trump presidency. It's hard to make a case that that would improve the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, more than a Biden presidency would.

David Remnick: The State of Michigan is also a place where Joe Biden went and did something I've never seen a president do, was this, get on the picket line for the United Auto Workers.

Protester: Wall Street didn't build the country, the middle class built the country. The unions built the middle class. That's a fact. Let's keep going. You deserve what you earn, and you've earned a hell of a lot more than you get paid now.

Evan Osnos: Yes, that's the balance that is being weighed here. Joe Biden has made an effort to try to say, "I am actually still the person who is close to the labor movement, who is close to working men and women, and I hear, I know what you're saying, I get what you're saying about the war in Gaza, but this is--" He doesn't use this term, "but this is even larger than that, what's on the line." I asked him about it. I said, "What do you say to people, particularly Muslim Americans and young Democrats who feel enraged, infuriated by his handling of the war?"

This was honestly the first time in this whole conversation when he didn't poke back at me. He said, "I asked them for patience to let this process," meaning his attempts to try to wrangle some complicated diplomatic resolution here, that he hopes that that will ultimately demonstrate where his faith and his will lies. I don't think that's going to win him very many political points frankly.

David Remnick: No, particularly since Bibi Netanyahu seems to pocket whatever gains he can get from the Biden administration and ignore the rest.

Evan Osnos: Bibi Netanyahu is an active supporter of the prospect of a Trump return to the presidency. I don't think there's any way in which Biden is banking very much on Bibi Netanyahu having an epiphany, I think the theory of the case is, that what they're trying to do is create the prospect of a deal in which Israel receives normalization from Saudi Arabia and others and that that creates such a popular prospect in the Israeli politics that leads to an Israeli government willing to engage in that idea, and that government should be said, may not be led by Bibi Netanyahu, probably would not be.

David Remnick: Evan, we've had Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on this program, and I've talked with leaders of the No Labels group. What's the prospect in the end for a third-party candidate in 2024? Can any of them, any of the potential third-party candidates have a consequential effect, and in which direction?

Evan Osnos: Historically, if you go back and look at the patterns all the way back to the Civil War, third parties tend to hurt the incumbent. That's simply because they run on the basis of the fact that the current crowd can't get it done, so you need an outsider. In 2016, when people basically assume that Trump was going to lose, third parties did very well. They got about 5% of the vote in the seven battleground states that matter, but in 2020, when people had this very acute sense that this election between Biden and Trump was razor thin, that third-party vote plummeted. It went down to about 1.5% in those battleground states.

One of the things Democrats and the people who want Democrats to win are doing is focusing very much, and you're going to hear more about this, I suspect, in the months to come, I'm saying to people, it's fine if you want to vote for a third party, but you are, in effect, in their view, voting for Donald Trump. The number of elements, David, that could conceivably throw an election like this against them is mind-boggling.

When Houthi rebels started firing rockets at ships in the Red Sea, it had an immediate effect on global shipping to the point that it could have and could yet still push inflation back up. That could end up having a decisive effect on this election. This thing is a tie, DAVID. It is a tie right now. It is a dead heat. There will come a point later in this year when one of these factors, whether it's the thing Donald Trump says that adequately scares people into voting against him, or the thing that Joe Biden says that makes people scared about his age and capacity, not only today, but in the future, that could have a decisive effect, or it could be one of these issues. I know this is the worst cliche in journalism, but this election has an element that is beyond anything we've ever really dealt with before.

David Remnick: It seems pretty familiar, no?

Evan Osnos: Well, it's a rerun of the last election. The difference now is that Donald Trump is pretty explicit about why he's doing this, which is retribution. This is a man running very clearly, to avenge what he lost, to prevent himself from going to prison, and to seek vengeance against the people who he thinks have done him wrong. I don't think we've had a condition like that before.

David Remnick: Do his voters understand it that way, too?

Evan Osnos: I think his voters are, at this point, part of something that has almost nothing to do with ordinary politics, and it has to do fundamentally with identity and their sense of themselves. It is a movement, which is a really different thing than what Joe Biden is doing. Joe Biden is not running a movement, Joe Biden is running, essentially, a PowerPoint presentation to Democratic voters about the risks and benefits of how they vote. That's a different thing. Biden thinks that the Trump's constituency is not as big as we sometimes believe it is. Meaning, yes, he has people who would do anything for him, but when it really came down to it in places like Iowa in the caucuses, it was the smallest turnout they've had in years.

David Remnick: You see the South Carolina results too is not an overwhelming 20-point victory, but in fact, a one in which 40% of Republicans voted against Donald Trump, and that bodes poorly for Trump.

Evan Osnos: It's a pretty powerful fact because it does indicate that there are a lot of people out there who don't want to ever have to vote for Trump again. What Biden has to do is make enough of a case to say, "I know you have your problems with me, but we simply cannot bear that again."

David Remnick: Well, what is the agenda for a second Biden term other than just to prevent Donald Trump from occupying the White House again?

Evan Osnos: One of the big things would be codifying Roe v. Wade, the idea that you could establish this through law, which of course, in order to do so, would require a big political win, you would have to be able to get control of the House of Representatives. I think that's the right idea for them to be running on. That is the single most powerful argument against Republicans right now, is the rollback of a fundamental right in American life.

David Remnick: Let me read to you what Biden says at the end of your piece about Donald Trump in the election. "Losers who are losers are never graceful. I just think he'll do anything to try to win. If and when I win, I think he'll contest it, no matter what the result is."

Evan Osnos: Remind us, if we remember what happened the last time that he contested this, we had violence in the US Capitol, and we've now had four years in which he is been draping himself in the language and the imagery of an anti-government resistance. This is not abstract.

David, I think a lot of people didn't really have any reason to pay attention to where Donald Trump held his first big rally of the campaign. It was in Waco, Texas, on the anniversary, the 30th anniversary of the FBI raid on a cult that had been stockpiling weapons. It's a scene that is really a touchstone in the far-right anti-government movement, and Donald Trump held his first campaign rally there. They played the national anthem as sung by members of the insurrection on January 6th, who sang it into a phone in prison.

[MUSIC - The Star-Spangled Banner]

On the screen behind them, they were playing images of his supporters storming this Capitol on January 6th. That, in some ways, is what Biden is getting at when he says that the press has become numb to it. The fact that we are not all talking about that and how truly dangerous that is.

David Remnick: Just to be clear, what you're suggesting is not just violence after November, you're suggesting that between now and November, there well could be violence in the streets on behalf of Trump, if not inspired by Trump.

Evan Osnos: Absolutely. Any fair analysis of the risks that the United States faces as a result of Trump's candidacy includes the very real prospect that the people who say that they will do anything for him and are well-armed will try to do something. Part of the task, I think, for Democrats is that the avalanche of information from Trump world is so extraordinary, and it's so many of us are so sick of politics, that we just tune it out. The Democrats have to figure out a way, and their technique is to do it slowly but steadily of saying, "This is not an optional election, my fellow Americans. This is a moment in which we are being told, in technicolor, what this other candidate is going to do." There will be a day when we can talk about who is next in line in this party and who will take over the future, but for the moment, Joe Biden has put himself in the position of running again, and that's your option. That's the message that Democrats will be forced to try to convey.

David Remnick: Evan Osnos, thank you.

Evan Osnos: Thank you, David.

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David Remnick: Evan Osnos is reporting on President Biden's campaign. He's in the forthcoming issue of The New Yorker. He's a longtime staff writer, and he joins our podcast, The Political Scene, every Friday.

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