CNN senior reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere said Thursday on CNN’s “Inside Politics” that President Joe Biden will be remembered as the guy who was in between the non-consecutive presidential terms of Donald Trump.
Dovere said, “Legacy was what he had. I think you’re right—a historic first couple of years in office. More legislation on the domestic front than anybody going back to Lyndon Johnson can claim credit for. I do think that what you’ve seen is a slow receding into the bushes from Joe Biden here. I’m going to do it. I’m going to bring up a West Wing quote here. There’s a moment on the West Wing when John Spencer, as Leo McGarry, the White House chief of staff, says to his I try to rally the troops, and he says, we can do more, we can effect more change in one day in this building than we will in a lifetime after we leave the building. That is not the approach that Joe Biden has been taking, at least publicly since the election, certainly – and even since he ceded the nomination to Kamala Harris. But there are things that he could be doing through executive authority. A lot of things that he could be doing would probably put a target on them for Donald Trump to go after first.”
He added, “I think it’s a really difficult thing for Joe Biden to know that he came into the presidency as a rejection of Donald Trump, and here he is being replaced by Donald Trump. I think back to an interview that I did with Joe Biden, he’d been president for about three weeks, for a book that I wrote. A part of the takeaway that I have with him trying to assert himself as Joe Biden, the guy who got elected president, not just Barack Obama’s vice president, not just the guy who beat Donald Trump. But now that is part of who he is. And it may define who he is a couple of weeks before the election. I had a conversation with a senior person in the White House and I said, if Harris loses most of the way that Biden is going to be remembered, at least in the short term, as the guy who was just in between the Trump terms.”
Dovere concluded, “At this moment, that is the way he is acting.”
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