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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and first two days of Kwanzaa. By now, you've heard that President Trump signed the Coronavirus Relief Bill last night, allowing unemployment checks to resume, the Save Our Stages program to start sending help to unemployed workers in the devastated, performing arts and more.

What you may not have heard is that shortly after he announced the signing, he also announced a plan for an in-person election Eve rally in Georgia next Monday, a week from today for the two Republicans in the Senate runoff elections that will decide which party controls the US Senate. The election there is the following day next Tuesday. If you've seen the front page of the New York Post today owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News, it's an editorial urging the president to focus on the Georgia election instead of the one he lost, it says, "End this dark charade cheering for an undemocratic coup."

Yes, even the New York Post is ending the Trump presidency accusing him of wanting to overthrow our democracy, but do the Georgia Republicans even want Trump there after his flailing on the coronavirus bill put them in an awkward position these last few days? Remember it's Trump and the Democrats who want to increase the stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000. Senate Republicans, including the two defending their Georgia seats, have been for the smaller amount. While the president was out trashing the bill that Congress passed, Senator David Perdue was running a campaign commercial that celebrated it.

Speaker 1: Perdue again, delivered real meaningful help for Georgians, 900 billion in new COVID relief, direct checks to Georgians.

Brian: That from a David Perdue campaign ad putting him on the wrong side of the stimulus check issue as defined by Trump. The president is campaigning for the Republicans, but his relentless focus on making himself look like a hero may be helping the Democrats. With me now is Gabriel Debenedetti, New York Magazine national correspondent. His article on this is called The Devils Went Down to Georgia. He's also working on a book now about the complicated relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Hi, Gabe gave hope you had a Merry Christmas and a happy Boxing Day, and welcome back to WNYC.

Gabriel Debenedetti: Thanks so much, Brian.

Brian: Is the president's fight for a $2,000 stimulus check for most Americans rather than $600 over now that he signed the relief bill? or does it now go to Congress as a separate measure?

Gabriel: It appears that the measure that the president signed is now signed into law and that there might be more conversation now about future stimulus measures, future relief measures. It looks like this part of the debate is over for now and it appears that the president seems to be fairly happy to let that conversation be over saying, "I fought for more, time to vote for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler." He, of course, is also trying to put focus on the thing that he's been complaining about, talking about for a while now, which is the results of the presidential election. I suspect that that's going to be front and center when he takes the stage in Georgia next week, and that's also part of what the New York Post has been trying to get him to move on from as well.

Brian: The last I saw Nancy Pelosi was going to convene a House vote today to vote for the $2,000 stimulus that the president wants and make the Republican Senate, including Purdue and Loeffler vote against it. Is that canceled now that the president signed the bill?

Gabriel: I actually don't know the latest on whether that's canceled. I believe now that the president has signed the bill, what the president signed is what is going to actually happen. I wouldn't be surprised if the Democrats in Congress continued to try and push forth saying, "Listen, we've been fighting for more. We've been fighting for this 2,000. It's not our fault-" say the Democrats, "-that this didn't happen."

Brian: If they do that, if Pelosi's House does that, will the Georgia Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue now have to come out even more explicitly against the president's call for $2,000 checks to their constituents while the Democratic opponents are for them?

Gabriel: Well, listen, what the Republicans in Georgia have been trying to do is they don't like to talk too many specifics here because the specifics are obviously very complicated for them because they keep having to run up against the president, not just on this, but also on the legitimacy of the November election to begin with and whether they're one should trust the democratic process here.

David Purdue was one of the people trying to get the president to actually sign this latest version of the package because he and Loeffler want to be able to message saying effectively, "Listen, Georgia, we got a relief passed for you one way or the other." For the Democrats to be able to go out and say then, "Well, yes, but we wanted it to be a lot more," it's just another complication,

Brian: By the way, just as an aside, since the issue is apparently moot now, but to be fair to the smaller check side, a lot of fiscal experts say bigger stimulus checks are not actually the best way to help people suffering economic pain from COVID. The $1,200-checks that went out to people earlier this year, they say largely got put in the bank because most Americans still had their jobs when what's really helpful is more generous benefits for those who aren't employed, but are those voices drowned out in this debate?

Gabriel: It's interesting because the short answer is, politically speaking, yes. On the ground in Georgia, you don't really hear a conversation about the broader implications of these kinds of relief packages. What you hear from all four candidates on both sides is essentially broad strokes conversation about relief capital or relief coming to Georgians and the easiest way for them to message on that is to talk about the top-line number involved in these checks.

It's a little bit harder what the message is saying, and also other kinds of reliefs coming in unemployment benefits and then this and that. The reality is that it's a pretty flat conversation and it's basically, "These people are standing in the way of relief." "No, these people are standing in the way of relief." It's been the same back and forth really since these runoffs began in November.

Brian: The Republicans don't want better unemployment checks either anyway, they just want less government spending. That's why McConnell and his crew opposed the $2,000. My next question is, is there any indication that stimulus check triangulation is moving the needle in the race? As of a few days ago, the website FiveThirtyEight, which follows polling said both races are basically tied with about a half-point margin, separating the candidates in each race. Those would be statistical dead heats very much in both cases, both a half a point, but those polls would have been taken just before the president started his rally and cry for $2,000 checks. Is there any way to tell yet if it has mattered politically?

Gabriel: It's really hard to tell for a few different reasons. One of which is that no one really knows how much they can trust the polling in Georgia right now. The general election polling in Georgia was actually pretty good, all things considered, but obviously given the many questions that now exist about the polling industry, people are pretty hesitant to draw any broad conclusions from the polling movement in these races. That said everyone agrees that they're more or less tossups.

The other complicating matter here is that this is happening over the holiday break when a lot of people are tuned out from politics. These races are totally inescapable for people in Georgia, it's all over the airwaves. It's the only thing happening politically speaking and increasingly culturally speaking, but for a lot of people who just aren't consuming media right now, this isn't what they're learning about.

The other final piece of this is often when people's sentiment changes because of a program like this, it's when they see the benefits of it, not simply the fact that it happened. The fact that the Republicans can say, "Well, we passed this. President Trump signed this law," even though it's the Democrats who, of course, can say, "Yes, but he took so long to do so," it's not necessarily an obvious plus or minus for anyone.

That said, the Democrats were making a lot of hay saying, "We're trying to get in there. We're trying to work with Joe Biden to make your life better and these Republicans are not pushing the president enough to sign anything." That's now really not as effective a line of argument as it was for a few months there.

Brian: Listeners help us report this story. Anyone in Georgia, or with ties to Georgia listening right now and want to help us report this story, 646-435-7280, is the $2,000 checks stimulus push by the president hurting the Republican incumbents who have supported the smaller $600 checks? Or what else would you like listeners outside Georgia to know about how these races are being run and what's happening in them that's interesting or important? We are eight days before the end of this election that will determine which party controls the US Senate. 646-435-7280.

If you're in Georgia, or if you have ties to Georgia close enough that you're paying attention to these races and hearing things firsthand 646-435-7280. We'd love to hear from you to help us report this story, 646-435-7280 or you can tweet @BrianLehrer with Gabe Debenedetti, national correspondent for New York Magazine, who has an article called The Devils Went Down to Georgia quoting that old song. You have a quote in your article from Republican strategist [unintelligible 00:10:14] who says, "The Georgia senate runoffs are not the first election of the post Trump era. They're the last election of the Trump presidential era." Why would that distinction matter?

Gabriel: Well, because no one is really able to move on from Trump at this point. Trump is the inescapable fact of this race one way or the other. If you are a Republican, for example, it's been very difficult for the Republican candidates to message around President Trump because while they want to go out there and say, "We support him," that entails saying at this point that they don't think that the presidential election was legitimate. That really casts a lot of doubt on how these people are able to win over new voters, which they really need to do at this point.

If you're the Democrats, they're just talking about President Trump's handling of this pandemic, and about his inability until last night to pass more relief. At this point, I believe, they're almost certain to be saying, "This is too little too late." It's really a question of, on the Democratic side, "Are we going to be able to recover from the Trump era?" In the Republican side, they're trying to figure out what it looks like to still run arm and arm with Trump without fully embracing him in a way that's going to either engage the democratic base too much, or not some moderate Republican voters who voted for Biden, but who still might like Perdue and Loeffler away from them in the second round of voting here.

Brian: By the way, people say the runoff election in Georgia Tuesday, January 5th, but really, I read that 2 million people already voted in these runoffs, early in person or by mail. In the presidential race for context, 4 million Georgians voted. With more than a week to go and 2 million votes already cast, this is shaping up to be another super high turnout election in Georgia, certainly crazy high compared to most runoff elections. Can you tell if it's again, Democrats flooding the zone with the early and mail-in ballots?

Gabriel: It certainly looks that way. Of course, it's hard to tell in Georgia specifically. One thing that a lot of Democrats are cheering right now is that they've gotten a lot of new voter registration primarily among younger black voters in many cases, but a lot of people who weren't eligible to vote in November, but who are now eligible to vote because they've gotten a little bit older in January. That's something that gives the Democrats a lot of reason for celebration, at least in the short run here.

I think it's really important to note that there's almost no world in which both of these races aren't extremely close. Georgia was the closest presidential contest in November. It seems extremely likely that we're going to have a repeat of something like that. This is going to be a race that's won or lost on the margin. It might take a while to count the votes, but it is true that we're getting a massive number of people voting already. Everyone expects this to be the highest turnout runoff in Georgia's history. It's certainly already the most expensive.

Brian: Let's take a phone call from Robin in Alpharetta, Georgia. Robin, you're on WNYC. Hello from New York.

Robin: Oh, my gosh, Brian, thank you so much for taking my call. I am a longtime listener. Of course, I'm not from New York, but I think you cover politics on the local national and level better than anybody. I listen every day. Thank you for keeping me safe.

Brian: Thank you so much. I see you're a nurse.

Robin: I am. Since I'm trying to keep it together because I am. I am a frontline worker. I've been dealing with this pandemic since March. I used to be a neuroscience nurse and now I work with COVID patients every day. I was just at work for three days. COVID is still really bad here in Georgia. The other day we had a record-breaking 6,000 new cases in one day. Our hospitals are full. We have no staff, we have no beds. Mostly because I'm at work, I don't see the political ads. I've also already early voted. I did that. It's the third time voting for Jon Ossoff and I think he's going to win.

What we're talking about my coworkers and I is about the pandemic response really. I think a lot of the messaging from Warnock and Ossoff on trying to get relief from Georgians because our governor has done nothing. There's been no lockdown here. That's why cases are still out of control. They've never gone down because we've never had any real restrictions. Even though it's funny that Trump hates him now, our governor hasn't done anything. He's staying said with Trump all the way.

I think Warnock and Ossoff have had really great messaging on if you want somebody to do something about this pandemic because Georgians are hurting and Georgians are dying still and will continue to do so until we do something. [crosstalk] That's what we are hoping for.

Brian: What do you hear the Republican candidates Loeffler and Perdue, saying about the virus? Are they mostly saying, "Freedom from lockdowns."? or something closer to the Democrats?

Robin: No, it's definitely the other way if they talk about it at all because it's mostly attack ads against Warnock and Ossoff. It's silly things. It's not even a substantive argument from the other side, and they don't really talk about the pandemic very much. They have rallies and famously, Trump is going to be down here the day before the actual election, and have another rally, which is the last thing we need here.

For even anybody who might have been on the fence about this race, and it's gotten so much national attention, and I think it really has helped propel voter turnout, even here locally, despite all the amazing work from the local people, everybody knows Stacey Abrams, who's just a genius and has really helped all this, we need some pandemic relief. The Republicans are not doing anything, and they're ignoring it. There are too many Georgians sick and dying and losing their jobs. They're not going to get any rental relief, they're going to be upside down. They're hurting. Lack of response is really going to hurt the GOP in this race.

Brian: Robin, thank you so much for helping us report this story and checking in, call us again. Okay?

Robin: Thanks, Brian.

Brian: I hope you stay safe, down there as a nurse on the front lines. Gabe, does Robin's call sound consistent with your reporting as a journalist on the Georgia race, as it pertains to how they're running on COVID?

Gabriel: Yes, absolutely, especially for the last few months up until the last few days, really. It was a very common line to hear from Democrats, "The Republicans haven't passed the thing. They have control, why aren't they passing more?" Perdue and Loeffler who both by the way faced charges that they've used their insider status in the Senate to profit with stock trades during the crisis, they [unintelligible 00:17:36] have profited, but they haven't passed COVID legislation. That's something that you hear constantly from Ossoff and Warnock.

Obviously, it'll be really interesting to see how that changes, but as you noted 2 million people have already voted. For a lot of these folks, this is really baked in. No one from any of the four campaigns that I've spoken to is really looking for crossover voters at this point. There's very little idea that there are people on the fence swinging between the candidates. It's really about just turning out one or the other.

Brian: What's President Trump going to say when he holds this rally for the Republicans next Monday that, "The coronavirus is still a hoax, come on out, even as it's spiking everywhere in the country. Let's show up together, hold hands and not wear masks."? or that the election is being rigged by all the mail-in voting? What's he going to say?

Gabriel: I've been doing this long enough to know not to predict what the president is going to say. Listen, he's done this before. He went down to Valdosta on the southern border with Florida, a few weeks back, and he did the lines that national Republicans wanted to hear from him. He said, "If Warnock and Ossoff win, the communists win." That's the standard line from him. Obviously, they're not communists, which we should know that.

For the most part, he talked about how the election was "stolen" from him. When Perdue and Loeffler went up to speak, they were both nearly drowned out by his voters saying, "Stop the steal," or, "Fight for Trump." He gets up there and he talks about how unfair things are to him and how the fake media is going after him and how he can't let the socialists win. Some of that is, of course, what Republicans want to hear, but a lot of it is very, very nerve-wracking for Loeffler and Perdue.

It's important to note, his first rally was in the southern border, his next rally on Monday will be on the northern border of the state. These are both very, very heavily Republican conservative areas. That's because they're just trying to get massive Republican turnout here. They basically made the calculation they're not going to win over people in the suburbs anymore. Those are the folks that are going towards the Democrats. That's why Biden won in addition to massive turnout in the cities, for example, Black turnout in Atlanta was very large.

The idea here is just to turn out Trump's superfans and essentially scare them into voting one way or the other. I'm not going to predict his message for 6 billion reasons, but it seems pretty clear that his message is just, "If you like me, you got to like these guys. Just get out there."

Brian: Paul in Central Valley, who says his grandmother lives in Georgia. Hi, Paul. You're on WNYC.

Paul: Thanks, Brian. I really appreciate you taking this call. I have to say, first off, Trump never intended to give anybody this $2,000. This is just another attention-grabbing stunt on his part. I think the calculus always was, "Well, I'll drag it out till the last minute and then give in and say, 'Oh, I signed this bill anyway.' " This is another example of political theater to suit his need for attention and his need to feel like he's in control.

You were talking just a moment ago about what the message will probably be. The message will be about Trump and it will be about how the election was stolen from him. There are two facts. Biden won the election and Trump was impeached. This whole notion of "Stop the steal," is absolutely ridiculous.

Brian: Paul, thank you very much. "Stop the steal," Gabe, that message, does it dissuade Georgia Republicans from voting? I've seen a lot of speculation about that on cable TV. I'm not sure I get it. I would think that those Georgians who are Republican would still want to turn out and make their voice heard rather than just throwing up their hands and saying, "Oh, there's no point in voting because all future elections are going to be rigged by mail-in ballots." That's a going analysis, that I'm hearing that Trump's "Stop the Steal," message. If he really does go to Georgia next week and dwell on his claim that the election was rigged, that that would hurt the republicans. I'm not sure.

Gabriel: This is obviously something that a lot of Democrats are hoping is the case. Republicans are very worried about it at first, especially when you had a lot of Trump allies in the states saying, "Why aren't we doing less, we're doing more for Trump's "Stop the Steal," messaging? We maybe shouldn't vote for them." There has been a consolidation among Republicans, particularly in the top line messaging to say, "Well, listen, we got to vote for these guys one way or the other." We haven't seen a ton of evidence that there is this mass movement or skepticism of them because of his messaging.

All that said, we have seen examples. I wrote about some of these examples where either the candidates themselves or top surrogates for them have been in Georgia in recent weeks, started talking and then been interrupted by people in the audience saying, "Well, what are you doing for Trump? Why should we vote for you?" A better way to think about this is not that some massive chunk of Georgia Republicans is going to say, "Forget it, all elections are rigged. We're never voting again." That's simply not realistic, especially because these people know that Trump is really just playing hardball here. Well, that's how they perceive it at least.

As I said earlier, these are two races that are likely to be run and won and lost on the margins. Republicans in Georgia cannot afford to have even a few thousand people saying essentially, "I'm not so sure. Maybe I won't vote because I think the last one was stolen from Trump. It's going to be stolen from these guys, so what's the point?" They can't afford for that to be really how anyone is thinking at this point because these races are going to be so close. That's the idea here.

Brian: By the way, that New York Post front-page editorial today, if there's anyone left who's walking by newsstands today in New York between the pandemic and it being Christmas week, the cover of the New York Post is a big photo of Trump with very large type headline lettering that says, "Stop the insanity, " then, "You lost the election. Here's how to save your legacy." All on the cover of the post. Gabe, what are the politics of Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, putting that on the cover of his pro-Trump newspaper?

Gabriel: It's not just that it's a pro-Trump newspaper, it's that everyone knows and no one knows better than Rupert Murdoch that Trump reads The Post. Trump follows what's in The Post. He knows what's in the [unintelligible 00:24:28]. He reads the editorials or at least has them handed to him when they say something that he likes at least. It's pretty obvious that at this point, a lot of people including Republicans, people who are conservative like Murdoch, want to make sure that Washington is not fully controlled by Democrats. That Joe Biden doesn't have a Nancy Pelosi led-House and a Chuck Schumer led-Senate, which would be the case, of course, if Ossoff and Warnock won.

That's basically the messaging that the Republican Senate candidates have been trying to put out there. That's clearly what a lot of Trump's supporters, a lot of donors in particular have been trying to say to him, which is, "You have to be clear that you lost, but there's still a chance to save some of your legacy. There's still a chance to make sure that the socialists don't win." Which is the language that they use with him. The problem, of course, is that Donald Trump is not what they think of as a traditional Republican. It's not entirely clear at all, or at least, there's no real reason to believe that he cares about the future of the party except as a vector of his own political future.

Brian: Of course. One more question on this. Does it matter to debate over $600 checks versus $2,000 checks, that both Perdue and Loeffler are very, very rich? Perdue was the CEO of Dollar General, for people that don't know these Georgia figures. Loeffler is married to the guy whose company literally owns the New York Stock Exchange. Do I have that right for both of them?

If their main campaign theme seems to be to protect America from becoming socialist under the Democrats, are their positions in society of being unabashed top 1% capitalists engendering any backlash among populist Republicans for being symbols of the inequality and concentration of wealth that's been so rampant in the country for the last few decades now that actually helped elect Trump?

Gabriel: Two things here. One, you have it right. Loeffler is not just wealthy, by the way, but the wealthiest member of Congress, Senate or the House by a large margin, and Perdue is also very well off. This is something that the Democrats talk about constantly. Ossoff likes to point out, "Perdue literally lives in a private island. How could they possibly know what you guys are going through?" He says to voters.

Now the question of whether there's any backlash among Republican voters, I think that's much more of a theory than reality. The reality is that Donald Trump, of course, is the president. He is a self-proclaimed billionaire who lives in a Manhattan skyscraper until recently. The idea that he's the man of the people is something that people are just willing to be okay with. In many ways, Republican voters are okay with the same idea for Perdue and Loeffler, even though that strains credulity.

It is a very, very, very common line that you hear from the Democrats. It's something that they put in almost all of their advertising, which is just that they feel that it's a very potent line of argument. That not just these two are out of touch, that they don't understand what you all are going through during COVID. It actually goes one step further as I alluded to earlier, the idea that they're enriching themselves during all this while Americans, while Georgians are really hurting is a huge part of the messaging here from the Democrats. Republicans feel that it's a pretty effective line of reasoning.

Perdue was so thrown when Ossoff brought this up at one of their debates. During the general election, Ossoff called him a crook. Perdue was thrown by that that he then refused to do the final scheduled debate of the general election and then he just didn't show up for the runoff debate. Ossoff essentially had empty podium to debate against for an hour and a half.

Brian: We're going to continue in a minute with Gabe Debenedetti, national correspondent for New York Magazine, on his new reporting on the guy who's actually going to be the next president of the United States. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer in WNYC. A few more minutes with Gabe Debenedetti, national correspondent for New York Magazine. His two most recent articles are one on the Georgia Senate runoff and one on the Biden transition. We've been talking about the Senate runoff. Gabe, your other Biden article is called A Biden Style of Government is Emerging: Lowest Drama Possible. Lowest drama in what sense?

Gabriel: In many senses, actually. The idea that I've sought you out here is how he's building his cabinet. There have been a lot of questions about how he's coming up with some of these picks, not many questions about the actual qualifications of the people because they all are very qualified. There were questions about for example, why Pete Buttigieg made sense as transportation secretary, why Susan Rice, who is a foreign policy expert made sense in a domestic policy role, why Xavier Becerra, the California Attorney General made sense for Health and Human Services.

What I was doing in this story was explaining through my reporting, the way that he's making some of these selections is not necessarily just by trying to find the top experts in every single field though he certainly has done that in many cases, but really to choose people that he trusts, that he knows well, that he knows he can work with because he views the pandemic not as a series of parallel crises that each agency can deal with one-on-one, but rather as an interlocking crisis. For that reason, he wants a team that he knows he can build together and a team full of people that he trusts personally so that he doesn't think there's going to be any questions about how he's communicating with these folks and how these folks are potentially competing with each other.

He wants a team that has worked together already, in many cases, these folks did work together during the Obama administration, and a team that he's confident can work together well in stark contrast obviously to what we often saw in the Trump administration.

Brian: In your report, some people worry about so many cabinet members having pretty close relationships, preexisting close relationships with Biden and therefore direct access. Why could that be a problem?

Gabriel: There's just simply a question, just look, for example, at the foreign policy realm, you have Tony Blinken will be the secretary of state have confirmed. You also have John Kerry, who is a former secretary of state in a major role as the International Climate Envoy. Both of them have personal access to the president and will have that. If you are a foreign diplomat of some sort, trying to get in with the president, trying to get something to his table, there are multiple avenues with which you can have pretty big confidence that you can do that.

There are some concerns in that realm, for example, that there are a number of different ways to get the president's ear. I want to be clear that this is not a new thing. There have been many presidents in the past that like to use the phone, that like to take advice from all sorts of different folks, just look at Bill Clinton, for example, but there is a little bit of a question about what the chain of command is going to look like if foreign policy is just one realm in which that's true.

Brian: How's the attorney general sweepstakes going? That nomination has not been made yet. We hear names like Sally Yates, Senator Doug Jones, Merrick Garland, but also recently at least here in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo. What can you tell us?

Gabriel: Sure, it's an ongoing saga, and every time someone asks the Biden team, "When is this coming?" they say, "Ask us later." It's certainly one of the most politically complicated picks, but it's also interesting because Biden does have a close relationship with a lot of these folks. He's very wary of the notion that the Department of Justice should be independent in a way that President Trump really never paid attention to at all, trying to make the attorney general his personal lawyer in many cases.

For example, Biden has been close with Doug Jones since the '70s, and there is some concern among some people close to Biden that if he were to name him attorney general, which would actually make a lot of people very happy particularly in the Civil Rights community because of his history there, that there might be some perception that, "Maybe they're just too close." Obviously, with some of the ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden, that's something that they don't even want to begin to have to worry about.

To make a very long and complicated story short, we don't know when they're going to make this announcement. There's still a lot of people who are said to be up for consideration. I've been led to believe that Governor Cuomo is not a top tier contender, but obviously, Joe Biden does think very highly of him. For the most part, he's shied from naming sitting governors to roles in this cabinet because he does want them to continue to work on the pandemic response.

Brian: How much do you see at this point, Hunter Biden's problems, he is being officially investigated for possible tax fraud, rubbing off on the president? One thing I see on conservative media is at very least the soundbite that they keep playing a Biden from during the campaign saying, he's never spoken to his son about his son's finances or businesses, business relationships in foreign countries, and then apparently there's some email that indicates maybe he did.

Gabriel: This is something that Biden himself has expressed publicly to be completely confident about. He and the people around him have been very clear that he has not thought about this or talked to any of the potential attorney general appointments about this issue. He wants to make it very clear that these are separate, that he's not going to interfere in that investigation. Obviously, it looms over. It's an inescapable fact of the presidency that he'll have to enter with these investigations or with this investigation happening, but they're not treating it as if it's some sort of scandal hanging over them, more as a family member who is under investigation, period.

Brian: Before you go, Gabe, I see you're writing a book about Biden's relationship with Obama, and I know you can't scoop your own book before it comes out, but your publisher's announcement says you'll describe their close, complex relationship. What can you tell us about what complexities you're exploring or how to watch for them in the early days of the Biden presidency?

Gabriel: This is a relationship that's lasted for nearly two decades and it's one between two men with long histories and politics. They've really shaped the way that each other thinks about the world. As you said, I don't want to scoop myself here, but they have a complicated relationship because of their very different experiences, but also because of their shared time together. What I would say is you see it already in how Joe Biden has appointed a ton of alumnus of the Obama administration to his administration.

These two men still talk and I wouldn't be surprised at all if we continue to see more of the, not necessarily a hidden Obama hand, but a lot of the imprimatur of the Obama administration in shaping the way that Biden is planning out his at least first 100 days.

Brian: That's really interesting. How do you think it might show itself? Obama, certainly got out there to help Biden during the campaign. Do you see Obama playing any advisory role on an ongoing basis after the inauguration?

Gabriel: I would be surprised if they didn't continue to speak with some regularity. Obama has been out there still, and he, for example, did a rally for the Georgia Senate candidates for the Democrats just last month or earlier this month. It's still December. He's not going anywhere. He was very careful about not being too public during the Trump years, but he's no longer going to be the immediate past president now. He doesn't want to overshadow, but he's very careful about that. Biden is a very independent guy, but he has been pretty open about the fact that he does rely on his former boss whenever he feels comfortable doing so.

Brian: Gabriel Debenedetti, national correspondent for New York Magazine. Thanks a lot, Gabe.

Gabriel: Thanks, Brian.

 

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