Hello there. I'm Kristen Welker. I just stepped off the set of Meet the Press where I interviewed Congressman Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, Quentin folks, deputy campaign manager for President Biden and Israeli President Isaac Herzog. President Biden intensified his re election campaign in the new year, placing a strong emphasis on democracy as a voting issue and calling for President Trump a threat to democratic rule.
As Mr. Trump continues to cast January 6th as a beautiful day and calls since arresting Capitol Hill rioters, hostages. The Biden campaigns first week of 2024, including remarks near Valley Forbes, Pennsylvania, landmark for George Washington and the Continental Army. And now we are getting hints of what President Biden may say at another critical speech to State of the Union address for the Inside Scoop.
I'm sitting here now that me see news White House correspondent Mike Mel, who was traveling the president this weekend every week. So great to have you here. Exactly. It's great to start a year, Mike.
So let's start the scene first with this new reporting, these new revelations that former President Obama and President Biden had lunch in December. They discussed the campaign. Former President Obama expressed some real concerns about Trump's strife. The Washington Post reporting that he is urging some structural changes in the Biden campaign.
What can you tell us not just about that lunch, but about what we should expect moving forward? Yeah, I mean, this is such an interesting headline, Kristen, to see these two men who had lunch every week when they were president and vice president at the time still have this open line of communication. And it speaks to the concern that so many Democrats up to and including the former president have about just the state of the campaign generally and with Biden's campaign specifically. And so the interesting part of this is, you know, we've been covering and we've been hearing from our sources, whether they're donors, whether they're strategists, whether they're lawmakers with frustration about what they see as a lack of urgency on the part of the Biden campaign.
And the Biden team that I've been covering for so long, they listened. They listen to it, but they feel so confident in their theory. That case they say, look, we were doubted in 2020, he won the nomination, won the White House. We were doubted about how we were pursuing the midterms.
In 22, we saw the best midterm for an incumbent president in decades. And so they tend to sort of brush it aside because they feel confident in their strategy. You can't do that if Barack Obama's the one making the criticism. Great Point.
And so you now see them indeed, sort of accelerating. They say it's sharpening, not shifting their strategy a bit here. And so it started with that speech I covered, really was struck by how much he cataloged so many of these Trump outrages that he had not discussed at all publicly for months. He did it all in one speech.
Right. He said Donald Trump more in one speech, I think, than he said in a year. And it's gonna continue. He's gonna go to South Carolina on Monday, talk about political violence and doing so with a very important audience, black voters.
He's then gonna be ramping up, travel to battleground states that also tend to be happen to be ones with Michigan, Nevada. This is part of the new Democratic primary calendar. And so we are going to see him and the vice president picking up that pace. But the real moment, that is going to be perhaps the best chance for Joe Biden to answer these concerns, not just about the strategy, but about whether he is up for the job.
That's the State of the Union address. It's one of the biggest television audiences for president any year. They want to talk about what he's done in office. Yes, talk about the economy, too, but also then pivot and show that he has a vision for the country moving forward.
So there's a lot of, you know, time and attention in the West Wing focused on this speech and what it's going to look like. And, you know, within that. Mike, one of the questions that I asked you, I asked Quinn, folks, my interview with him today. How is the Biden campaign going to respond to the fact that former President Trump, the GOP front runner, is facing foreign dictums and trying to cast Biden as a threat to democracy?
You heard that in the interview today with Elise defanik where she tried to double down on that. I fact check that argument that Biden is something behind these four indictments. There's just no evidence of that. But do you think that we're going to start to see President Biden get more forceful in that space?
So it's so interesting as we see this playing out right now, ahead of the first primaries and caucuses, when I was four years ago covering candidate Joe Biden out on the road in Iowa, what was going on at the same time Trump was under the impeachment trial in the Senate during the final days before Iowa, Hancher. And what Biden would be saying on the road then is, listen, the House has their job to do to prosecute Trump. I have a job to do as candidate which is to beat him. And that's very much the way the president now feels about this, too.
There's the added layer of complexity for him, because what has been one of the attacks Republicans are making, that this is Biden's Justice Department weaponized to go against his political opponent. So there's also that layer of the former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, right. Who is such an institutionalist, not wanting to weigh in on those court cases because it might play into that Republican argument. So Biden will say, again, I'm president.
He's the defeated former president. My job is to defeat him again on the ballot and let the court process play out. But listen, there's no doubt that this is going to get a lot of time of attention. And the president, former president, believes that this works for him.
Right. That's why he's going off the campaign trail, not going to be in Iowa this week. He's going to be in a federal courthouse in D.C. during one of these proceedings.
So he thinks it works for them. The Biden team thinks it gets a little bit more complicated than especially Democrats think it does. And of course, we are having this conversation against the backdrop of all of these challenges that President Biden is facing on the world stage, including the war in Israel. I had a chance to interview the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog.
I asked him if he opposes, effectively some of the language coming from within the Israeli administration calling for the forced removal of Palestinian citizens. He said it's not the official Israeli government's position. He wouldn't go so far as to say, yes, Prime Minister Netanyahu has to condemn that kind of language. I bring this up because this is one of these rare moments in history when what is happening on the world stage actually might impact our elections here, because you have so many people across the country here in the United States tuned in.
You have large swaths of the president's supporters critical of his handling of the war. How much concern is there about losing support in critical states like Michigan, which has a large Muslim population, for example? And it's not just a concern about the Muslim population, it's young voters. Right.
The Biden campaign was really worried about trying to and figuring out how to mobilize young voters in 2024 in the way that they turned out in 2020. And that was a problem before October 7th. And now since what we've seen, especially with Israel's bombardment campaign in Gaza and the reaction on the streets, literally, of young, animated, engaged progressives primarily, it speaks to a major chall even more for this president who feels in his bones, as he would say, the need to defend and stand by our longest ally, one of our closest allies in Israel. And so the campaign, when you talk to them about this, it's so interesting because they really don't necessarily have an answer.
The kind of hope is that we are still about 300 days until election Day and that this issue will continue to evolve and there should really, they hope, fade away from the sort of front and center of our sort of news coverage and other issues will replace it if it's still a big major headline in September, October. I think the campaign's gonna need to figure out something here. But I think I've already heard from Biden advisors just this week that they feel that the president can ramp up on the domestic politics here right now because the phase of Israel's campaign has shifted and sort of taken new turns. They do feel already that there's an opening now that they can start to capitalize and get the focus back to domestic policy.
But this is what happens when you're president. You have to accountable for everything. There's what you can control, what you can't control. And certainly foreign policy is one of those big wild cards.
Absolutely. And speaking of foreign policy, we learned that the defense secretary, Mike, was in the ICU for four days before the Pentagon disclosed it publicly. Defense Secretary Austin saying it was a mistake effectively not to tell the public. The White House wasn't even aware.
For several days. President Obama and President Biden spoke to his defense secretary. It was described as a warm conversation. What are you hearing inside the White House?
Well, this is really incredible, Kristen, because at the time this week when we know White House National Security Council was having some consequential discussions, especially around what's going on in the Red Sea. You expect that the defense secretary is a part of those conversations. Right. You expect that his team at least is engaged in those discussions.
And so I think this speaks to some potential concern that the White House is going to have to deal about how much a player Lloyd Austin is in this and the fact that he was able to for several days forget about the press corps, knowing that the principle that they cover at the Pentagon was in the icu. The president of the United States not knowing this, I think it's going to be a big red flag to some folks. And the difficult question for the White House have to deal with the data. There's no doubt about that.
Meanwhile, we're having this conversation eight days away from Iowa. What's Notable to me, we have seen Nikki Haley, we see Ron DeSantis really start to ramp up their attacks against former President Trump. He just has a huge lead in Iowa. Doesn't mean he's going to win and see what's going to happen.
But it does seem like we're watching a battle for second place. Do these last minute attacks matter at this point, Mike? Well, what is second place for sensitivity? First loser.
And so I think it was so fascinating to watch Dasha Burns, the conversation she was having with each of the candidates, except for Donald Trump, of course, this week, because you can just continue to see how difficult this balancing act for them is. You want to make. And they can make a case for themselves. Absolutely.
But it's so hard to make the case against Donald Trump because of the hold he continues to have on the Republican base. And so Nikki Haley, for instance, has tried to say, well, I think he was the right president at the right time, but I think he's a distraction now and we want to win. The base of Donald Trump's core support continues to believe that he will win. And in fact, he'd already won in 2020.
And so that just is so hard for them to break through. And the other part of this question is as long as there are multiple challengers, it makes it hard to consolidate behind one. And this is repeat of 2016 all over again. So Iowa, Trump's hold seems pretty strong.
The biggest question really is eight days later in New Hampshire where independents can vote, where you can have not just the core Republican vote, but swing voters, independent voters can pick a Republican primary ballot. That's gonna be the best chance the field has to put up a strong result. Do they need to win versus a strong second to keep this going? Probably they really do need to win, because otherwise we're talking about the earliest start of a general election in decades.
Yeah, it's such a great point. And that's why I don't think these candidates will get out into New Hampshire for the exact reason that you cite. And so I end this conversation where we begin, which is Trump's loyal base, any way you slice it, that was core to that conversation between former President Obama and President Biden. The idea that his base is massive and loyal.
And frankly, he's consolidated even more Republican support around him, around these indictments that he's facing. And I think you talk to Biden advisers and they talk about what an important signal it was early in the Biden administration for Kevin McCarthy to go down to Mar A Lago to interview, revive and resuscitate Donald Trump. Well, now let's draw the line to the conversation you had this morning with Elise Stefanik, who on January 6, you played the clip for her was critical of not just what happened that day, but saying that those who were part of it need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And now she is joining former President Trump and calling them hostages.
What a remarkable exchange that was with you, Kristen. And I think that just speaks to the fact that whether it's a rank and file voter or the one of the leaders of the House Republican Caucus, they can't separate themselves from Donald Trump. And she says she talks to him regularly still. And I think we saw the beginning of the beat stakes on your show here today.
I think you're right. I asked her if she would accept if she got an offer. She certainly did not rule out that she would be honored to serve in what any way she was asked. It's not a no.
MIKE mumbling thank you. It's always great to hear.