America This Week, July 26, 2024: “The Fall of the House of Biden”

Listen to Episode 98

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, this is weird. We’re having a… It’s like a regular show. We haven’t done one of these in a while.

Walter Kirn: No, I know. I mean, to not be in the absolute stream of events is a little odd to sit above them like this. I can’t believe it’s a week since we were watching Trump speak in Milwaukee.

Matt Taibbi: I mean, we’re in dog year territory at this point. I think we’re all… My worry is that we’re aging at the same pace, too, but it’s been absolutely crazy since we were last on the air. Biden stepped down. We did a live hit after that, after he drank the Hemlock on Sunday. And then I guess what’s happened since he did a speech last night, which we should probably go over, and then there has been this outpouring of propaganda and support for Kamala Harris, which has also been remarkable on multiple levels. I guess we should probably start with his speech, though. Should we watch some video of that? What’s your feeling on…

Walter Kirn: Sure. Sure.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Okay. All right, so let’s just go and check out how Joe Biden sounded. He gave a speech at 8:00 PM Eastern Time and I think a lot of people had the same reaction, which was kind of a sense of unease listening to this, but here’s about a minute of it.

President Joe Biden: In just a few months, the American people will choose the course of America’s future. I made my choice. I’ve made my views known. I would like to thank our great Vice President Kamala Harris. She’s experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and a leader for our country. Now, the choice is up to you, the American people. When you make that choice, remember the words of Benjamin Franklin, who’s hanging on my wall here in the Oval Office-

Matt Taibbi: He’s hanging.

President Joe Biden: …alongside the bust of Dr. King and Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez. When Ben Franklin was asked as he emerged from the convention going on, whether the founders have given America a monarchy or a republic, Franklin’s response was, “A republic, if you can keep it. A republic, if you can keep it.”

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And then he goes on. There are some other notable moments in those speeches, but what did you think of that whole thing, first of all, Walter? It was very strange. Actually, why don’t we listen also to some other unnerving moments? This one caught the attention of a lot of folks. It was not clear exactly what he was saying here.

President Joe Biden: We’ve come so far since my inauguration. On that day, I told you as I stood in that winter… We were stood in a winter of peril and winter of possibilities, peril and possibilities.

Matt Taibbi: All right. Winter of peril and possibilities. To some people, it sounded like winter apparel. It was winter of peril, but he had a lot of these moments where he’s now progressed from having trouble talking to people to not being able to read off a teleprompter terribly well or coherently. He was sort of breaking the cardinal rule of reading, which is don’t stop to wonder what it means, just read the words, right?

Walter Kirn: Mm-hmm.

Matt Taibbi: But he looked like a hostage to me in that video. He looked upset. It did not look to me like something he wanted to be doing and a lot of the feelings he conveyed did not feel like his. I don’t know. What do you think, Walter?

Walter Kirn: Well, pictures of the family sitting there next to him that were released showed them looking fit to be tied. They didn’t seem happy at all. He seemed angry throughout the speech. That was a strange comment when he said, “I made my views known,” as though he was recapitulating the negotiations that forced him out. I thought the subtext was clear. “I didn’t want to go. I feel like I’ve done a good job, but the party comes first.” Now, it didn’t explain why he’s leaving other than the party seems to feel he should. He didn’t reference his health at all and he wasn’t explicit about the power struggle that appears to have gone on.

Walter Kirn: He was in ghastly shape, just ghastly, I thought. And it did not bode well for the next six months in which he apparently has a very ambitious agenda to reform the Supreme Court, help cure cancer, and other things. I was not reassured if that was the intention of the speech. Also, it seemed a little bit like a campaign speech. He was urging Americans to vote a certain way, which didn’t agree with an address from the Oval Office, I thought. The stuff about a republic, if you could keep it, was a clear allusion to the notion that Donald Trump will somehow end the democracy of the last couple of hundred years. So it was just jarring in every way to me from the fact that it didn’t explain the situation to his emotional behavior, to his apparently terrible health. And it left me wondering, “What’s going on,” even more than I had wondered before that.

Matt Taibbi: So he imported… Or I’m sorry, he imparted a couple of important pieces of information in that speech, which, as you say, was mostly a campaign speech. When it came time to explain what he was doing, as you say, he didn’t come out right out and say exactly why he was leaving. The quote is, “I revere this office, but I love my country more. It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president, but in the defense of democracy, which is at stake, I think it’s more important than any title.”

Matt Taibbi: So he’s saying, “I can’t win and stepping aside is our best chance of winning.” That is strange because the furor over the last month or so has been about his ability to continue serving as president, but they’re in this really odd place where they can’t claim he is incapacitated because of the other thing that he said, the other important piece of information that he put in the speech, which was that, “Over the next six months, I will be focused on doing my job as president.”