They are a couple of journalists. Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, tasked with covering President Biden, already the fifth president the journalist has covered. Previously, he covered Presidents Trump and Obama for the New York Times and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for the Washington Post.
Susan B. Glasser is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington. She was a senior editor for several publications, including Politico and Foreign Policy. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was also an editor. She spent four years as the newspaper’s Moscow bureau chief, covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They came to Portugal, to the FLAD (Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento), to talk about the American division and the cleavages in US policies and gave an interview to the TSF, The state of the sitewhich will be broadcast this Saturday, at 12 noon.
The week before, the headline (translated into Portuguese) of the journalist’s column in the New Yorker was: “Not all blunders are created equal, Biden versus the Almighty Trump.” We asked him to explain:
“One of the big battles for journalists like Peter and I is covering Joe Biden when Donald Trump still looms over the system, like the giant gorilla, as they say. You know, Joe Biden has an old saying that he likes to quote. your father saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” to God, compare me to something fairer, and Joe Biden, in 2024, is probably not going to run against God, against the perfect candidate, he’s going to run against Donald Trump.”
And since you are not competing against God, you do not need to be close to perfection, just have the ability to defeat the man who commanded the destinies of the country (and thus conditioned the world) between 2017 and early 2021: “Joe Biden may not be the perfect president. He is 80 years old. Many people are very concerned about his age. But at the same time, the Democrats remain confident that he can beat Donald Trump, because Joe Biden, for all his flaws, doesn’t have the same kind of flaws and problems with the American electorate that Donald Trump has.”
The argument for Biden’s re-election is not just about his record as president, but mainly “the fact that I’m the only guy to beat Donald Trump, that I’m the only successful Trump ‘hunter.’ And for the Democrats, even now, more than two years after Trump left office, the main goal remains being — to make sure that Donald Trump doesn’t become president again.” But, says Glasser, “The unspoken problem for the Democrats is that Vice President Kamala Harris is not seen as a strong enough candidate. And the fear among many Democrats is that she can’t beat Donald Trump. And I think that’s one of the reasons, frankly. , with Joe Biden very likely to run again, because he has not been able to find a successor who is confident that he can obtain a victory in 2024 ”.
Is Donald Trump a danger to American democracy? The journalist returns with another question, before answering in the affirmative: “Is Donald Trump a threat to the Constitution? The answer is yes. Because he himself publicly threatened the Constitution. Is Donald Trump something exceptional in American history, despite the fact that we have had many periods of division? The answer , of course, is yes.” Donald Trump is, in fact, the only president in the history of the United States, in our entire history, who has refused to accept and admit defeat, in an election in which he was defeated and peacefully relinquished power, this is something which luckily never happened. We’ve tried it before.”
Peter Baker recently said that for Biden, “This is an era where treaties are more likely to be broken than achieved.” TO TSF Ask him if there is any degree of US responsibility for this state of affairs, for this climate of broken treaties? “Yes of course. First of all, there is now an environment at this moment in which the hostility with Russia and China has created a different moment in our international space, where agreements and globalization are no longer so favored. Globalization, which nurtured free trade agreements. and agreements in the last 40 years, has become unpopular not only in the United States but around the world in many places, creating an environment in which there is not much room for diplomacy. But it is also true that the United States itself has been breaking various treaties. in recent years with Trump. It has broken more treaties than it has signed.” Baker recalls that Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement, he pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he pulled the US out of the Iranian nuclear deal, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, he even tried to cancel the US participation in the Postal Treaty. at 144 years old. . So, “There was an era under Trump where the United States has been breaking some of these treaties. So there is natural skepticism from international partners about whether the US will still be there if new treaties are signed and Biden loses office.” I mean, is a treaty that we “signed with Biden, for example, for example” still valid? Because the next guy comes along and America gets out of that treaty. So there’s real uncertainty right now, about America’s place in the world. , partly due to our internal politics”.
The US Presidency announced this Wednesday, and soon, the shipment of a new shipment of military aid to Ukraine, without giving details about the value of that support. The new aid package will mainly consist of ammunition for heavy artillery systems used by the Ukrainian military, a White House spokeswoman said. This announcement coincides with Ukraine receiving the first US air defense systems. Patriot and French light combat vehicles AMX-10. The journalist from New York Times who runs the White House coverage understands that war is, at this point, “A real test for the United States right now, because there is a bipartisan consensus in Washington behind the policy of keeping Ukraine, helping Ukraine resist Russian aggression. But there is some wear and tear on that coalition. There’s some support that’s starting to fade, shift a little bit, more specifically to the right, but also a little bit to the left, and the real question is what happens next year, because the two leading contenders for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump and Ron De Santis, both have basically said that they don’t want to help Ukraine, that Ukraine is not important to them, that Russia can basically get away with Ukraine, as far as they are concerned. And “that means that next year, we” are going to be in a much bigger debate in Washington about what our policy towards Russia and Ukraine should be.
Susan Glasser and Peter Baker wrote the book: “Uprising in the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the end of the revolution”published in 2005. Eighteen years have passed and, the journalist acknowledges, the regime still seems very solid: “Yes, Peter and I wrote this book 18 years ago, after spending four years in Moscow covering the rise of Vladimir Putin. We didn’t expect him, I don’t think anyone did, to be Russia’s longest-serving leader.” . since Joseph Stalin But now that he is, it’s very hard to see, anytime soon, any meaningful challenge to his power.”
The columnist of New Yorker remember that “Basically, a million Russians left the country instead of taking part in Putin’s war in Ukraine. Many, many young people left the country instead of being drafted. Many liberal opponents of the regime now live in other countries, in Europe or in other places, instead of participating in this war in the Ukraine, even though they are in Russia. It’s like when the communists took over and created the Soviet Union for the first time, and a lot of people, the aristocrats, the liberals, left the country. And I think this has happened now.”
Glasser understands that Russia may still lose the war and “if that it’s a military victory for Ukraine, I think it would be a big defeat for Putin and the whole regime he built around him. But certainly, people who have expected Putin to be ousted for the last 20 years have been disappointed time and time again.”
Source: TSF
