What a Second Biden Term Would Look Like

President Biden gave a raucous State of the Union speech last Thursday, offering his pitch for why he should be president for a second term. It’s the clearest picture we have yet of Biden’s campaign message for 2024. But while he listed off all kinds of proposals, it’s not as easy to parse what a second Biden term might actually look like. So I sat down with my editor Aaron Retica, who had a lot of questions for me about the speech itself and what Biden would be likely to accomplish if he got another four years in the job. We discuss how my argument for Biden to step aside holds up after he gave such a deft, high-energy performance; what a second Biden administration would likely do when it comes to abortion rights and foreign policy; the issues that didn’t receive much attention in the speech but would likely play a huge role in a second Biden term; the strongest 2024 campaign message that I’ve heard so far; and whether this is a Locke election or a Hobbes election — and what that means. Book Recommendations: Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century by John A. Farrell A Nation Without Borders by Steven Hahn The Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  So we are talking on Friday morning. It's March 8th. It is the morning after Joe Biden's State of the Union, which was a raucous enthusiastic affair. And we thought we'd do a kind of bigger picture episode, talking through a bit of State of the Union, and more broadly, what the State of the Union was beginning to preview, which is what Joe Biden's second term would look like, what his pitch in 2024 for that second term will look like, and then what actually that second term will look like, which I've also been doing a fair amount of separate reporting on. So I'm joined, as I often am in these days, by my illustrious editor, Aaron Reddick. Aaron, thank you for being here.

• 0:58Aaron Retica?

  You're welcome.

• 0:59Ezra Klein?

  So where do you want to begin?

• 1:01Aaron Retica?

  Well, the audience can't see it, but I have brought you a replica of a medieval hair shirt to wear to mortify yourself after the State of the Union. You know why, but I'm going to ask you about it anyway. Many people actually were tweeting away and talking about how the Biden's performance during the State of the Union was essentially a refutation of your argument from a few weeks ago that he should, in fact, step aside from the campaign. So could you talk a little bit about how you felt watching it and what you think about that idea?

• 1:37Ezra Klein?

  I mean, the way I felt watching it was excited to see Joe Biden giving a really great State of the Union. I think it would truly be like the height of pundit egotism, to be like, the important thing about this election is whether it proves my prior takes right or wrong. Look, the argument of that piece is that, at the time I wrote it, Joe Biden was not performing into the campaign well. He was doing very little campaigning, doing very, very few interviews, doing relatively few appearances. The ones he was doing were turning out to be low-energy affairs, when he was going out to give that big press conference. It both did not go well on its own terms, and then he badly messed up the question of how to reassure people about his memory. They were skipping things like the Super Bowl interview.

• 2:21Ezra Klein?

  And the argument of that piece is that Biden was not showing that he is up for this campaign. And if he can't be up for an aggressive campaign, he should not run. Look, if the Joe Biden we get is a Joe Biden of the State of the Union, because that was genuinely, I think, an excellent State of the Union. It was surprising in a bunch of different ways, and we can talk about them, but it was very, very well delivered, very high energy. I've not seen that Joe Biden in a while. Now, why he was so much better there than he's been in a bunch of other formats I've seen him, including very structured formats, a campaign to set up for him, I mean, go look at the kind of social media clips they have been circulating. I don't really know, and I don't really care. The absolute best thing, easiest thing here, is that Joe Biden kind of shook the cobwebs

• 3:05Ezra Klein?

  off and is going to campaign like that from here until November. And if he does that, and in the end, he beats Donald Trump by five, and people want to say my piece was stupid and alarmist, I will happily say my piece was stupid and alarmist, and I was wrong, and that would be a great outcome. But it was really quite good speech, and Biden wasn't just energized, he was very, very quick on his feet. And he had something I haven't seen from him in a while, which is something I've associated with him throughout his almost entire political career, a kind of joy, a happy warrior affect. He seemed delighted to be up there. He seemed to be having fun sparring with the Republicans, making fun of Lindsey Graham.

• 3:48Ezra Klein?

  I mean, it was a very bare-knuckled partisan State of the Union for what that affair typically is, but Biden didn't seem to be plodding through it. There was a real intense energy to him. So there's a long time between here and the election, but I hope that guy keeps showing up. And what I will say, just from having conversations even with top Democrats since then, is I think he, at least for now, quieted a lot of the fears, right? People needed to see a performance like that from him, and they did.

• 4:16Aaron Retica?

  What's funny about that is that the State of the Union last year was supposed to be that moment. They were supposed to get crushed in the midterms. They did not get crushed in the midterms. He then did incredibly well in the State of the Union in 2023. Everyone calmed down. Then all the questions started again. Now he's done well in the State of the Union in 2024. What do you think they can do to make that a more permanent change? And not just he's good when he goes to Congress?

• 4:49Ezra Klein?

  Look, I don't know Joe Biden the way they know Joe Biden. I don't really understand the variance in his public performance. It isn't that people were inventing the thing that happened between the two State of the Unions. The amount of conversation, even among top Democrats, who were not talking about this in public, was very high. People who were out there with him, saw him. His style was, had become oftentimes very listless, what sometimes gets called low energy. And then he really, really, really brought it last night. The reason I am not fully comforted is an election is long. And what you're trying to both do is campaign well at the median event, but also avoid

• 5:32Ezra Klein?

  things that become a crystallizing moment of fears about you. And I don't know that having given a good State of the Union fully comforts me, because I don't really kind of understand what separates his good performances from his bad ones, that, you know, nobody needs to worry anymore. But I think the thing he proved last night is that he is still capable of extremely high performance. I mean, the argument I made in that initial piece was not that he's doing a poor job or not capable of doing the presidency, but that lately he has not been proving capable of performing the presidency, performing the campaign, that the skills you need as a campaigner are different. The thing he did in the State of the Union, which more than any State of the Union I've seen was a campaign speech. I mean, this was much more of a campaign speech than you typically get at that particular event.

• 6:16Ezra Klein?

  He showed the skills of a campaigner. If he can keep showing that, then my piece was simply wrong, and I will happily own that.

• 6:24Aaron Retica?

  So there's been a tremendous amount of chatter about Trump 2025. In our own newspaper, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan have had an incredible series about what they expect his administration to look like. Our own Carlos Lozada had a great piece about Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. There's been comparatively little discussion of Biden 2025, and that's something that I really want to talk about today. There was not so much about that last night. There were pieces of it, little programs, more like triangulation type bits.

• 7:00Aaron Retica?

  But what do you see as the essential elements of a Biden second administration as it looks now?

• 7:10Ezra Klein?

  So I've been doing a bunch of reporting about this. I was at the White House not long ago, talking to a bunch of people before the State of the Union about what was the agenda going to be? I was struck, talking to people across different issue areas, how much the first thing I heard was finish the job.

• 7:28Ezra Klein?

  And in a way that makes sense, because if you think about the major bills of Biden's first term, the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science Act, those are all long, multi-year efforts to change America's built environment in one way or the other. And changing the built environment, as I report on a lot, is slow going, particularly in this country. And so, I mean, the CHIPS and Science Act, one of its core things it's doing is giving $39 billion to semiconductor manufacturing firms to build fabs, the big factories here. That is just begin giving its initial grants. They've given only a tiny fraction of the money. The word is we're going to be hearing more such announcements soon.

• 8:10Ezra Klein?

  So helping to oversee that, trying to clear, Gina Raimondo, the Secretary of Commerce, has been trying to get Congress to exempt these projects from environmental permitting review. She says it'll add years, which I think raises a bunch of questions about what should and should not go through environmental permitting review. But trying to make that actually successful, that's a real project. The IRA, right? I mean, that is trying to do a huge upheaval of the built landscape. Some parts of that are going really well. We are installing solar faster than we had anticipated or hoped.

• 8:42Ezra Klein?

  Wind is coming in well below expectations. So solar is faster, wind is slower. This question of particularly offshore wind is proving to be a problem. Trying to figure out how to unkink that, that's a lot of work. Building that nationwide EV charging system, which has not yet been built, but is funded in the IRA, that's a big project. Then all of that needs to plug into a grid that is actually giving you not dirty energy from coal or certain kinds of natural gas or whatever, but is giving you clean energy. The IRA is not going to hit its goals if they can't figure out how to make it easier and faster to build interstate electricity transmission lines. If they aren't able then to get that clean energy generated from where it is generated

• 9:26Ezra Klein?

  to where the car plugs in, or where the heat pump plugs in, or where whatever it is plugs in, then you didn't solve the problem. So one thing that I think they are pretty clear eyed about is a huge amount of their agenda requires a huge amount of implementation and oversight. And if they lost the White House, they would not be able to do that implementation and oversight. And in fact, probably the Trump administration, number two, would throw a huge amount of sand in the gears of that, maybe roll it back altogether. So that's a place where I actually do think a lot of the second term agenda in their minds has to do with making their first term agenda into a success. They pass the bills, but they have not actually yet changed the built environment. Then there are a couple other, I think, big pieces of it.

• 10:08Ezra Klein?

  You did hear a fair amount last night about Roe, or Dobbs, is maybe the bad way to put it. It is a little less clear to me what they're actually promising there. So they say, send us a bill to codify Roe. They don't have the votes for that now, right? Republicans control the House. But even if they had control of the House and Senate, they're not going to have the votes because you can't do that in budget reconciliation. So you need either 60 votes to get around the filibuster, or you need 51 votes to get rid of the filibuster or create a filibuster exemption. Very, very unlikely Democrats have either of those things in the Senate. But simply by being there. They have something that they will lose if Donald Trump came into office, which is, as we talked about on the last episode we did,

• 10:51Ezra Klein?

  which is about the way the different state policies on abortion are colliding now. There is a huge amount of effort, and it would go up to the top of the Trump administration if they won, to make it illegal, possibly to even use, but definitely to send these abortion pills, which have become the dominant ways that abortions are happening in the country. And the reason that Dobbs has not led to quite the restriction in abortion access that its proponents thought it would. If Trump is elected, they have all kinds of plans to do away with that, including potentially saying the FDA wrongly approved Mifepristone when it was evaluated the first time. So long as Biden is there and is appointing the FDA commissioner, that's not going to happen. So that is, in practice, a very big deal.

• 11:36Ezra Klein?

  And then I guess we will talk about this, but Biden is not going to wrap up the major foreign policy crises or projects of his presidency in his first term. There's going to be no end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It seems unlikely to me they'll be able to execute the pivot they want to execute on moving towards this kind of grand deal where Israel gets recognition from Saudi Arabia in return for recognizing a Palestinian state. That's a much bigger project. And then there's, of course, the geostrategic competition with China. And so that would be a huge part of a second term, too. And all those things, obviously, were big parts of the speech.

• 12:14Aaron Retica?

  OK, I'm going to take those one at a time and just go in the order that you did. Implementation, administration. How do those become transformation? Obama famously criticized Clinton for not transforming America the way Reagan had. If Biden has eight years in office, you know, looking back from Biden 2029, does the kind of work that you're talking about, finishing the job on the CHIPS Act and IRA, transform the landscape of America so much that actually, he's literally transformed the United States? And so he will be thought of that way and seen that way and have done what he wants to do? Or is that, even though it's an enormous project?

• 12:57Aaron Retica?

  Too small bore to actually change the way the United States operates.

• 13:02Ezra Klein?

  I think there are two levels to this. Let's take level one in the hypothetical where he wins a second term and all these policies work because that's an asterisk.

• 13:10Aaron Retica?

  Right.

• 13:10Ezra Klein?

  But if they do, then yes, I think so. I mean, take Obama as the example here, right? Obama wins two terms. I don't think most people can name very much legislation passed in Obama's second term. They did do some things. I mean, they had a huge education reform bill, which was passed relatively quietly and mattered quite a bit as a kind of update and reauthorization and transformation of No Child Left Behind. But I don't think people think of that as transformative. What they think of as transformative about Obama are things like the Affordable Care Act, the investments made during the stimulus, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. I mean, those were all first term bills. I think Biden is likely to look similarly. I mean, one reason is the map for Democrats in the Senate is just god awful in 2024. Even if Biden

• 13:55Ezra Klein?

  wins and does really well, it is a very tough road in a way that it wasn't even in 2022 to keep the Senate. So they're going to lose the West Virginia seat. Joe Manchin is retiring. They are not going to keep that seat. And they have a bunch of other.

• 14:09Aaron Retica?

  That brings them, just for clarity, to 50, right?

• 14:11Ezra Klein?

  That would bring them to 50.

• 14:12Aaron Retica?

  Tester's got to win.

• 14:13Ezra Klein?

  They got to win in Nevada. They have, there are a bunch of places Republicans could easily pick up a seat and not many places where Democrats could easily pick up a seat. So Democrats basically have to run the table. Not completely impossible, but unlikely. So that's one, one dimension of this. I do think, though, that if these policies worked, if at the end of Joe Biden's second term, you look around and there is a nationwide, like coast to coast, real electric vehicle charging structure such that you can truly have the electric vehicle revolution without people being limited by range anxiety and the feeling that they couldn't make an interstate drive feeling safe about it, that's a very big deal. If the percentage of energy generated

• 14:58Ezra Klein?

  from clean sources skyrockets, that's actually a very, very big deal, right? And including if solar and wind costs come down as part of that. If some of the deeper investments are making and things like green hydrogen, right, that they have a lot of more long shot investments happening in there. They're trying to decarbonize industrial buildings. Like, that isn't super sexy, but if they are able to build these innovation hubs and able to get these things moving and get people using heat pumps, all that is a really big deal. I mean, in a very literal way. If they succeed, the appliances that people have in their homes are going to be different. They are going to have heat pumps and not gas furnaces. The cars they have in their driveways are going to be different, right? That would actually be quite literally transformational. And then, of course, there's chips in science, which, I mean, I think

• 15:41Ezra Klein?

  the big thing people know there, if they know anything, is the semiconductor effort. If we're able to onshore advance semiconductor manufacturing, which is a very big if, that would be a huge deal, right? That is, I think, probably the single most important and strategically critical industry of the 21st century. Then you have the question of will all this work? And all of these to achieve what they need to achieve still have pretty big roadblocks. The way I would put this is that Democrats have been very good at addition and not very good at subtraction. Tyler Cowen, who's a more right-leaning economist at George Mason University, he had a good Bloomberg column on this, where he was skeptical. He was saying it's too early to know if Bidenomics is going to work. And I thought his best line in that

• 16:23Ezra Klein?

  column was what they have not done is really any deregulation. And I do think that's true. So take chips in science. They need a huge amount of workforce to make that work. We do not have enough people who know how to do semiconductor, the manufacturing and building of semiconductor facilities. And so the ones we are building are coming in way over cost and are getting delayed and delayed and delayed. And we don't have enough people who know how to run those facilities. They have all kinds of ideas in the regulations they've built around that to try to bring more women and minorities into construction there. They have ideas about how to train workforces in community colleges, and it's all laudable stuff. But if you want to serve the workforce problem fast, what you would do is create

• 17:08Ezra Klein?

  a visa pathway for skilled workers on these issues from other countries. Like, we should just be bringing in a lot of people from South Korea and Japan. So you could deregulate that and bring people in if you were able to get the votes on it. Similarly, the environmental permitting is proving to be a very, very big problem on semiconductors. Again, Raimondo is trying to get the House and the Senate to pass something exempting this part of the Biden agenda from the environmental bills like NEPA. That failed in the House. They were not able to get that done. Similarly, the permitting is a big problem on the Inflation Reduction Act. They want to do all of this building and all this building, which is built to help the environment, can all be sued under its environmental impact. I've done a huge amount of reporting on this in recent years.

• 17:51Ezra Klein?

  It's a big theme of my, my coming book. And I mean, even something as simple as congestion pricing in New York City, where you're just hanging sensors on poles to charge cars for driving into New York City, that was tied up in years of environmental assessment. And so they really do have a problem here. One place where I would ding the Biden administration is they've been hiding behind other people in their effort to address this. They sort of hid behind Joe Manchin's proposals here, right? Manchin was demanding this package and then they put some stuff they liked into the package. Then they tried to sort of do it in this weird debt ceiling deal. What they have never done, what they did not do at the State of the Union is come out and say, this is our agenda for building back faster.

• 18:35Ezra Klein?

  We have passed our agenda for building back better. Here is how we are going to do it faster. Here are the ways we are going to unshackle government to reach its goals more quickly. Coalitionally, that's very hard for them. It puts them crosswise with environmental groups, with various kinds of social justice groups. Now you have begun to see some movement here. There has been a movement among some House Democrats to come up with a permitting reform bill of their own. I think that has some good aspects and some not as good aspects. But that's interesting, right? That's a move you haven't seen really before Democrats beginning to engage on this. So yes, if everything they have passed worked, I think that would be remembered as genuinely transformational.

• 19:15Ezra Klein?

  Whether the things they have passed will work, that remains to be seen and is not simply, as they will be the first to tell you, is not simply an outcome on autopilot.

• 19:27Aaron Retica?

  One thing that they're doing that's sort of stealth Roosevelt is having programs that are not just one group or another. And the Republicans are always trying to make it seem like this is for climate lunatics or whatever, but actually, the number of people who are affected by this is in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, for all of these programs. And they're not specifically for the poor, they're not specifically for any particular group, and they're more of a, you know, rising tide of salt boats kind of structure, which I think is interesting. And do you have thoughts about the sort of politics of that?

• 20:00Ezra Klein?

  I don't think that is actually so different. I mean, Obamacare was also a race neutral bill. And I think that reflects how Clinton governed. I think it reflects how Obama governed. And I think it reflects how Joe Biden governed. Inside these bills, there is a lot of effort to address certain kinds of equity. If you look inside the guts of all of these proposals, you'll find things about how different bids are getting evaluated, and how different grants are getting given out, and the bonus addition on the money if you're building this in a disadvantaged community. There's actually quite a lot on that, I think more than people realize. But that also goes backwards. So I've been doing a bunch of reporting for both my book and for a piece on California high-speed rail. And one of

• 20:44Ezra Klein?

  the things people in California wonder a lot about is why did they start building this line in the Central Valley, Bakersfield to Merced, which is currently all they have any real plans to build or finish, which is not where you would build high-speed rail. The population centers are not nearly dense enough to make that work. One of the reasons is that when the California High-Speed Rail Authority tried to get that federal money that Barack Obama talked about a lot in the stimulus, and Barack Obama talked endlessly there about high-speed rail across the country, but particularly in California, as one of the signature reinvestment dimensions of the stimulus, right, one of the signature

• 21:24Ezra Klein?

  projects. But to actually apply for the program, it wasn't just, can you build some high-speed rail? It had these preferences, including for things that would handle or clean up air pollution in disadvantaged communities. And so if you wanted to look for where you had really bad air pollution in your disadvantaged community, you're looking at things like Fresno, California. And so the actual money that came from the feds in the stimulus,

• 21:50Ezra Klein?

  Was in a way people did not realize, actually not just for high-speed rail, but was to also hit these other equity markers. And so that led to them beginning this bill in a place that, in terms of the political economy of it, doesn't make a ton of sense. There are other things that might be good about it, like it's a little bit flatter and straighter for you to test your trains, but it's, I think, politically a huge problem for high-speed rail that it has started in the politically weakest part of California. You know, you got a high-speed rail near LA, it's like, great. You have it from Bakersfield to Merced, people are like, why? Inside these bills, there is a lot of that. Some of it, of course, Biden is bragging about, right? He talked about buy American, and he talked about the ways in which that has not been enforced even by recent Democratic administrations.

• 22:34Ezra Klein?

  And there are people who care about climate who think that's a bad idea, that we should be just trying to get as much climate infrastructure as cheap as we possibly can, as quickly as we possibly can, and trying to combine that with the construction and preference of an American supply chain. Even if that is good political economy, even if it sounds good, in the end, it won't be good, because it's going to slow you down, it's going to raise prices, and people aren't going to like or benefit from the program the way they otherwise would. People like low prices for things. But in terms of the sort of macro impact of the bills, yeah, I mean, they're trying to build a nationwide electric vehicle charger station. I think in a direct way, that's probably going to be regressive for a while, because electric vehicles are somewhat more expensive.

• 23:15Ezra Klein?

  But in a long-term way, in terms of if it actually works to reduce air pollution and to help with global warming, that helps everybody and helps people in a progressive way. I think the way they do this, which is universal bills that inside of them have significant equity considerations, is pretty standard at this point for Democratic lawmaking.

• 23:58Aaron Retica?

  On Dobbs and Roe, Biden was making the case last night that there's a larger issue of freedom here. Obviously, it's a tremendous issue of freedom in its own right. But he was also making the case that it was a bigger issue tied to larger issues of freedom in the United States. And I'm wondering what your thinking is on how that is going to play out in 2025 and further as they're developing their agenda in a second administration.

• 24:26Ezra Klein?

  That question makes me think of an interesting detail in the profile that Evan Osnos did of Joe Biden in a very recent New Yorker, where he got some time with Biden in the Oval Office. Biden has a really interesting and complex history on abortion. He opposes the initial Roe decision. He's a moderate Catholic Democrat at the time that it happens, and moderate Catholic Democrats in general were pro-life. Throughout his career, he has then largely tried to protect abortion rights. He's got a pretty good record on that. But he's always said, and I don't think this is actually bad politics, and I think it is authentic to him, that he is personally uncomfortable with it. And Osnos is talking about a bit of this history. And he notes then that

• 25:08Ezra Klein?

  when the decision came down, that Biden's reaction inside the White House, at least it has been reported, was, we're just going to roll back 50 years of rights now? And he experienced it, and I think this is true for a lot of people, even people who may not personally be that comfortable with abortion, is, as a rollback of rights, that however you feel about abortion, you shouldn't be taking the choice away from people. I mean, this is the power and potency of the framing of choice. People believe in Roe or this set of rights. The way they understand this is not pro-abortion typically. It's pro

• 25:49Ezra Klein?

  bodily autonomy. And I think that Biden is doing a fairly good job talking about it in those terms.

• 25:58Ezra Klein?

  I don't know about the kind of connection to this other set of things, right? There was a sort of effort in framing at the beginning of a speech to sort of say, you've got Putin on the march in Ukraine and he's not going to stop there. You had an assault on this chamber, the Capitol, on January 6th, and Donald Trump and that movement are not going to stop there. And you've had an assault on rights from Trump-appointed judges, like on Dobbs, and that movement is not going to stop there.

• 26:30Ezra Klein?

  I don't necessarily disagree with any of this. It was not the framing of their message in the State of the Union that I found most compelling. I mean, I think that the simple abortion argument is very, very compelling and very true. I don't think that trying to make everything into one issue tends to work. I think that's something that appeals more to what the political scientists would call highly ideological thinkers than to just normal people who mostly don't really feel that what the Supreme Court did on Dobbs and what Putin is doing in Ukraine are all kind of part of the same bucket. The Biden team wants to make this election about freedom. To some degree, I think that's going to resonate, freedom and democracy. It is definitely a motivating argument to voters.

• 27:15Ezra Klein?

  And I think what is very clear from every speech Joe Biden gives, from every report we get about Joe Biden, is that it is motivating to Joe Biden personally. I would not say that I hope it is the central framing of their campaign. But again, I'm not like, I don't win campaigns. So I don't think you should really care what I think about that.

• 27:34Aaron Retica?

  And if we go back to the question of why was he so much more vibrant in the context last night, maybe this is the thing that animates him. And therefore, it has to be the thing that they pursue because it's what brings out his best self, right? I mean, that could be part of it. I don't know.

• 27:51Ezra Klein?

  That may be, but I thought there was a great argument in the State of the Union. And for me, just listening, the thing that hit the hardest and felt like it was solving the biggest problem they had and was the most flexible of their arguments, which is midway through when you began talking about the economy. They have been facing this problem for a while, which is the economy by every measure and marker you can choose looks pretty damn good. Hell of a lot better than anybody was expecting two years ago. Inflation has come way back down. There's a specific problem with grocery prices, which is very, very upsetting to people and understandably so. But overall inflation is way down. There was no recession. The labor market is very tight.

• 28:36Ezra Klein?

  Wages have continued growing, particularly for the poorest Americans. American GDP growth has been very strong. If you compare us to other countries, we look incredibly strong. I mean, you compare how we have grown since the pandemic to, you know, a bunch of major European countries, to Canada, we're looking great. And yet, people are pretty unhappy about it. And not only are they unhappy about it, they think Donald Trump is much better on the economy. If you want to know the number I find scariest in the whole election, it is the size of Trump's advantage on who do you trust to run the economy? So on the one hand, you can imagine a version where they're trying to say, I feel your pain, we have a lot of ideas here. And on the other, you can imagine a version of, actually, you're wrong, the economy is great.

• 29:21Ezra Klein?

  What they did was he began to build this idea of a comeback America, right? Biden says in the, in the speech, America is seeing this huge comeback and it is the greatest story never told. Let's tell it here. And I think comeback America is a really good frame for them because it does two things simultaneously. One, it allows them to make the argument for how far we have come, and we really have come very far, for how good the economy is, given where it was a couple of years ago. And it allows them to keep space for the fact that we're not where we would like to be. The fact that you're in a comeback, even a really great comeback, does not mean you've won, does not mean you can unroll the mission accomplished banner, to use the old George W. Bush thing.

• 30:04Ezra Klein?

  It does not require you to tell people that everything is great. It is a way of making an argument about, to be a dork about this. A trend and not a level. And I have not heard them come up with a frame for how they talk about their own record in a while. When you go back to Biden's campaign kickoff speech at Valley Forge, it was, I thought, a very strange speech in many ways to have a campaign kickoff speech that has nothing about what you as president have done. It's all about your predecessor. And I think it's fine to make Donald Trump a big issue in this election. He is a big issue in this election, but you still have to run as the incumbent.

• 30:44Ezra Klein?

  And the Comeback America framing Biden adopted last night was the strongest run as an incumbent message I have heard from them by many, many, many miles.

• 30:55Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, it's an interesting thing because people have been saying, oh, well, you know, he can't run the way Reagan did in 84 as Morning in America, and he can't. Because as we've discussed before on the show, like the kitchen table conversation and the elite conversation are very divergent. But the comeback argument does allow space for that because it allows, as you said, for recognizing that there's still a lot that's not going right. And to insist to people that everything is fine would be politically suicidal, actually.

• 31:25Ezra Klein?

  I think one of the challenges they've been facing, and people have been talking about this like pretty openly in this election, is that their sort of argument 2020 was a kind of return to normalcy, a return to stability. And Trump has taken very direct aim at that argument, right? He's been basically arguing what you've got in is chaos. Chaos in Ukraine, chaos in Israel, chaos on the border, chaos just in the country. You look at grocery prices and I, the strong man, will return normalcy. I will bring back order, right? Which is, for many people, a close cousin of normalcy. And there's been this question of, you know, what they're going to do about that, like, no, no, no, you're the chaos candidate. No, no, you're the chaos candidate.

• 32:04Aaron Retica?

  Right.

• 32:05Ezra Klein?

  And this is a place where I disagree with a lot of the media critiques. I think the media's done a very good job reporting on January 6th. I think the media's done a very good job reporting on wild things Donald Trump says. I think people know who Trump is. Like, even if you look at the New York Times poll that came out recently, where Biden was quite far down from Trump, a majority, 50-some percent of people, believed Trump was guilty of serious criminality. Just some percentage of those people were going to vote for him anyway. And it is not that it does not deserve reporting, but people know who Trump is. The thing that I think they do not know or have somehow sort of forgotten is that he's actually not good at running things, that Trump's management is chaotic, that he is not good at running an economy, right?

• 32:50Ezra Klein?

  That by the time he left the economy, it was a crap show. And so I think it is actually quite important for Biden to do to Trump what Trump is trying to do to Biden, which is take away what Trump's actual strength is. Trump's actual strength is not that people have forgotten January 6. Trump's actual strength is that people remember January of 2019, right? His actual strength is people look back in a sort of rose-colored way, I think, and remember kind of a good economy, that, you know, they're making more money, that inflation hadn't been high, and that they don't really blame him for what came next. Somehow, people have just memory-holed

• 33:33Ezra Klein?

  the last year of the Trump administration, where he mishandled COVID terribly, just absolutely terribly. The economy was in tatters. He was responding to a crisis in just the most bizarre, erratic, egotistical, callous possible way. And like, that's the mess Joe Biden inherited, like, just like a total, absolute, chaotic situation. And they righted the ship. And what I think the comeback economy idea does, or the comeback country idea does, is it allows them first to remind people that we were coming back from something, that it was not just like 2019 happened and now we're in 2024.

• 34:16Ezra Klein?

  Like, there was some stuff that occurred in between 2019 and 2024, and Donald Trump was president during it. And comeback America is a good way of combining an argument about how much Joe Biden has done with a constant reminder of what it was Trump left. And you want to run at your opponent's strength, like not just at their weakness.

• 34:38Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, there's so many things that are fascinating about this whole situation. But one of them is that you have, on the one hand, an incumbent who's sort of running against an incumbent, except he's not actually, and he has the privileges of the challenger, right, Trump does. And for them to reset that is absolutely critical. And my sort of fancy, pretentious way of thinking about it is that if this is a John Locke election, Biden wins easily, right? But if it's a Hobbes election, everything is more complicated.

• 35:04Ezra Klein?

  All right, you're gonna have to explain your fancy way of thinking about this.

• 35:06Aaron Retica?

  Well, basically just-

• 35:07Ezra Klein?

  This is what it is like being edited by Aaron Retica. You'll be turning in a piece, and you'll be like, there'll be like a little comment like, "This is a John Locke election, or is this a Hobbes election?"

• 35:16Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, well, I'm gonna get started about talking about 1892 in a minute, too, which is the last time this, well, I'll just say it now, which is the last time this happened, right? We had Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland, Grover Cleveland lost to Harrison, came back and won in 1892.

• 35:30Ezra Klein?

  And why did he win?

• 35:32Aaron Retica?

  Well, that's a good question that I don't know the answer to, really. I mean, it's, there's no direct comparison to the situation now. It's just the last time where you had two, they were, what is similar is that you had two very unpopular politicians running against each other. And for the Biden administration, it should be a source of fear in the sense that Harrison was unable to push back against Cleveland's idea that things had been better under him. Anyway, the point of all this is that it can and does happen, that the person who was out gets back in on the argument, both that their administration was superior and that they're gonna change what was done. But let's stick with Hobbes.

• 36:16Ezra Klein?

  Let's stick with Hobbes and Locke.

• 36:18Aaron Retica?

  The basic idea being that, right, if the question is one of order and constitutions, and who's gonna provide greater freedom, and who's a greater threat to the constitutional system, if those kind of questions, which as you say, Biden is interested in, but it's quite possible that most of America isn't. Then he wins easily on that, right? Because Donald Trump is a clear threat to the constitutional order. It's not a question. It's not a theory. They actually marched on the Capitol, right? But if it's Hobbes election, a war of all against all, state of nature, right? And you were just driving it. This is what made me think about it. It's an election where the question is, who's strong? Who's weak? Who's going to save me?

• 37:03Aaron Retica?

  Who's going to potentially hurt me? And Biden has to be able to win on those terms also because we don't know what events are going to be like. If 2024 somehow turns out to be like 1968, right? Then so much that is going to come, we haven't seen it. In that case, you have Martin Luther King Jr. being assassinated. You have Bobby Kennedy being assassinated. Someone ends up being the Democratic nominee who didn't run in a simple primary. I mean, there's just so many things that no one could possibly have known were going to happen in March of 1968. Johnson hadn't even said he wasn't going to run yet. That's what I mean. So if the world continues to feel like it's a state of nature to people, then Biden has to be able to win that election.

• 37:46Aaron Retica?

  And I'm guess what I'm asking is, do you feel that the comeback kid framework will work if that's the field that is prepared for the election?

• 37:54Ezra Klein?

  I think I actually really like this, this binary you've set. And I think the thing is, you really don't want this to be the binary.

• 38:04Aaron Retica?

  No, definitely not.

• 38:05Ezra Klein?

  Look, this is my biggest worry about a lot of the kind of liberals I've spoken to about the election. They want this to be a referendum on the Constitution, on like the existence of American democracy. And to the extent the American people refuse to cooperate in seeing the election that way, their argument is the media needs to yell at them more about it and tell them they are more wrong about what Donald Trump was like and the threat that he poses. And it's not that you can shelve any of that. I mean, again, like the number of stories that we have all done. I mean, we just did an episode on the show a couple of weeks ago about whether or not Donald Trump should be barred from running constitutionally because he's an insurrectionist. But I do think there are things people know about Donald Trump.

• 38:48Ezra Klein?

  And at some point, you have to ask, like, the voters you need to win, is this the way they are going to see it? Like, are they open to hearing this from you? I'm not sure all of them are. I think you have to make arguments that hit people where they are, not where you are. And the reason I like the comeback America argument is it's neither a Hobbesian nor a Lockeian argument. Could I say maybe it's a Rawlsian argument? You can do it too. It's a little bit more about, you know, go behind the veil of ignorance. Imagine there's another crisis, right? Imagine another COVID. Imagine another recession. Like, think about how this actually went last time. Who do you want? And which kind of group of people

• 39:30Ezra Klein?

  do you want managing it? Well, like, let's look at how America's actually doing now. And like, let's look at how it was doing at the end of the last guy's presidency. It doesn't require you to force people out of something that they're used to thinking about. So, look, I mean, I think you should have both arguments there. And I think part of the power of that State of the Union was that he did, right? He began with the argument that is most compelling to him, the freedom argument. But he made it at some length, the argument that has not really been that present, which is an argument about his own record, his own incumbency, and the kind of America that he is trying to build, right? The kinds of jobs that he is trying to create, the picket lines he has walked, the new technologies

• 40:13Ezra Klein?

  he's attempting to invest in, right? We are in a comeback. The thing it is like is Obama in 2012, right? Obama in 2012 had, at this point, he was polling way above where Biden is now polling. He was beating Mitt Romney in polls. He was polling in the high 40s, not the high 30s, in favorability. So he was already at a much stronger position. But it's easy to forget that the economy was much, much, much worse then, right? I mean, we were still in this slow grinding recovery from the financial crisis. And Obama was running, not against George W. Bush, who was blamed for the financial crisis, and correctly so. He was running against Mitt Romney, who had a very good claim to being a strong economic

• 40:56Ezra Klein?

  manager. He'd been a good governor of Massachusetts. He'd been at Bain Capital. Like, he was a businessman. He had made a lot of money. And what the Obama team was able very effectively to do is make an argument about comeback. We weren't where we wanted to be. But my God, look where we were just four years ago. Look how far we've come. And if you can just get people to the point that, yeah, things aren't perfect, but things are going well enough. That it's better not to do something crazy right now. Somebody is like, you know what? I don't love Joe Biden. I just, I don't love the guy. But I don't know. The economy actually is pretty good.

• 41:40Ezra Klein?

  My paycheck is pretty good. Trump seems kind of crazy. Better just to not rock the boat. You want that voter because that voter exists. And that's the kind of voter who might swing either way. You want that voter to come to you. And that voter is, I think, not just sitting around thinking about liberal democracy. I had a conversation with Jared Polis, who is the governor of Colorado. And he won in 2022 by something like 18 points. I'd have to go back and look at the exact number, but it's in that range. That's a huge victory, right? Colorado is a, you know, it's a bluish state now, but, but it's still a swingy state. 2022 could have been a very hard year. I remember saying, I think actually on a show with you right after the midterm,

• 42:23Ezra Klein?

  that I thought Polis's victory was as or more impressive than Ron DeSantis's victory, even though it was getting like no coverage at that point. And I talked to Polis recently about, well, what was it? And he said that we have focused in Colorado very heavily on a cost of living agenda and message. And I'm paraphrasing him here, but he said, there are a lot of voters who just don't spend their time thinking about liberal democracy. Like, we want every voter who does spend their time thinking about liberal democracy. And I spend a lot of time thinking about liberal democracy, but we need the voters who don't. And so we have here is a cost of living message. And you could see that in what Biden was doing, right? One of the things when he got into talking about second term policies that he began actually talking quite a lot about

• 43:06Ezra Klein?

  were a bunch of policies that he had either already passed, that he had passed and now wanted to expand, and that he had not yet passed and wanted to pass. They were all cost of living oriented, right? Getting rid of title insurance on federally backed mortgages. There was the work he has done to cap the price of insulin for a lot of people. The work he has done to get Medicare to begin to being able to negotiate down drug prices. And, you know, only for certain drugs, but that can be expanded. Right? There were a bunch of things there that, you know, were reminiscent to me a little bit of second term Clinton, where he's like, we're doing good. And we got a bunch of ways. We're just going to try to make your life also just a bit better. He had a whole kind of funny little riff on shrinkflation and how there's like not as much Snickers in the Snicker bar anymore, right?

• 43:49Ezra Klein?

  That cost of living stuff matters to people because again, there are a bunch of voters who are not going to be motivated by liberal democracy. They're going to be motivated by which of these guys can just kind of help me make it through the day a little bit more easily. And Biden really needs to win that argument, or at least win it with enough people to win the election.

• 44:29Aaron Retica?

  What is the foreign policy agenda for Biden, starting in January 2025, the way you see it? And let's start with Israel, Palestine, but I also want to talk about Russia and Ukraine.

• 44:40Ezra Klein?

  So I mean, I think it's worth beginning with the thing that he is announcing doing right now, right? America is going to build a functional military port to be able to autonomously bring aid into Gaza. That is not going to satisfy people who are furious about American support of the Israeli attack on Gaza, right? I do think it's very important to keep these things a little bit separate. Many people, including at this point myself, do not believe we should be backing what Netanyahu is doing. And bringing in aid with one hand, while protecting Israel in its, yeah, at least at the UN, while it continues

• 45:23Ezra Klein?

  to promote a war that at this point seems truly detached from like an actual goal that is achievable. Nevertheless, it is very, very important and a very unusual step for America to take to build its own way to bring in aid to help the people in a territory that our ally is bombing using our bombs, right? The whole situation is genuinely weird, actually, when you think about it. But it's a very strong message from Biden, at least given where he's been, that we find the condition of the Palestinian people right now unacceptable.

• 46:05Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, Israel definitely better not be bombing our, right, our created port. And it's notable that the part of reason they're doing this is things like aid have been held up by the Israelis, right? Which is illegal under American law. There are a lot of people who believe, and I think correctly so, that we are not correctly enforcing our own laws here. It is not legal under the rules we have on how we export arms for some of the kinds of human rights abuses we're seeing to be happening with our armaments. We're not really enforcing those rules. But this is something. The other thing Joe Biden really made a point of saying at the State of the Union is that there is a grand bargain, a grand outcome he is trying to get to in the region,

• 46:47Ezra Klein?

  where he is trying to trade Israel recognition with Saudi Arabia and support in containing Iran for Israel's recognition and acceptance of a Palestinian state. So far, the problem is not whether that is Joe Biden's position, it's whether it is Benjamin Netanyahu's position. Now, if Joe Biden has a second term, I think the assumption is Benjamin Netanyahu will not be part of it, right? Benny Gantz is expected to win the election whenever it happens. We don't know that that will be the outcome, but it seems quite plausible. He was just treated here like he was the head of state, practically. Right. Gantz is starting to be treated in other places like head of state. He just had a meeting in the UK as well, right?

• 47:31Ezra Klein?

  The West is beginning to treat Gantz like the real leader of Israel, Netanyahu like a lame duck, like a problem to be managed. So one argument is that what will happen eventually is that this war will end, there will be an election, Netanyahu will lose, and Biden and other Western leaders are going to work with Benny Gantz to try to execute this huge rearrangement.

• 47:56Ezra Klein?

  We don't know, right? I mean, that's the right way to put that, right? You don't lose money betting against peace in Israel and among Palestinians. But we don't know. You know, I think the thing that Biden is going to be trying to do right now is show that he really does value Palestinian life. I mean, at the core of the fury and the critique of him is not that he supports Israel. It is that he is supporting Israel in a way that makes it seem like we do not truly value Palestinian life. Saying they are going too far while they go too far is not enough. Building the port while they go too far, I don't think that's going to feel like it is enough to people.

• 48:36Aaron Retica?

  Well, it also can be read quite easily as a sign of American weakness because we can't get Israel to do it.

• 48:41Ezra Klein?

  Yes, we can't get them to stop doing it, right? It's a very, again, I want to say this, I both respect what they're doing. It's a very strange thing, right? It is a strange thing to see happening. If we think they're going too far, maybe we don't give them our weaponry. But you heard this too from Biden. Biden was very clear. You know, he began that by saying functionally, Israel is right to be attempting to eradicate Hamas. And my understanding, and this is something Richard Haas, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, was saying on the show a few weeks ago, that the reason that this government is still as strong behind Israel as it is and is not moved into a significantly more critical position where it is more willing to draw red lines is Biden himself.

• 49:24Ezra Klein?

  So, I mean, this is Biden's view, and he's trying to balance these two views against each other, and it's a very complicated thing. I don't think by the 2024 election, the pivot, the grand strategy he's laying out will have had time to come to fruition. I do think in a second term, it is likely we will at least see negotiations in that direction, right? They're going to try to reset this entire thing under new leadership. That is his promise, right? That is, that is the policy he's laying out.

• 49:51Aaron Retica?

  In another ongoing area of conflict, the war between Russia and Ukraine, Biden made a big deal of talking about how Putin was, as he's portraying him, on the march. And obviously, at the same time, the administration is having tremendous difficulty getting Ukraine aid through Congress. So what is the second term agenda there? In some foreign affairs thing I was reading, they were saying like, okay, now it's time to start talking about talking. And obviously, that's how talking has to start. But is there another approach you can imagine the Biden administration taking in the second term?

• 50:29Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I don't, I don't know. I'm not deep enough on this issue to know. But I will say, I think it's worth understanding that what he was doing in the State of the Union was trying to pressure House Republicans to let the aid package through. And also trying to make this as part of their kind of anti-freedom agenda, right? To the extent that one of the overarching arguments here that Biden is making is there is actually a worldwide fight between freedom and tyranny. He was connecting Putin and Trump. And he was connecting support for Ukraine and support for American democracy. I think there's a belief that at this point, right?

• 51:13Ezra Klein?

  And I've seen a number of articles saying that it is privately believed and they're trying to figure out inside the administration that Zelensky needs to move into a more defensive position in terms of the war strategy and basically grind Russia to a halt. You can make this continuously costly on Russia. And, you know, at some point, you're going to sue for peace here, right? And nobody's going to like it. But the belief they can win is something that is currently being said, but is not truly internally believed. But the thing that could happen is they could lose. And they could lose if we stop giving them military aid. And the reason we'd stop giving them military aid is that Republicans have decided they wanted Russia to win. And they wanted that because Donald Trump wanted that.

• 51:58Ezra Klein?

  I thought it was very striking when.

• 52:03Ezra Klein?

  Biden just said that it is unacceptable, right, to say that Vladimir Putin can do whatever he wants to NATO members that we feel aren't doing their fair share, that Trump has moved into a position on the foreign policy. It's actually unacceptable that whatever you believe about Zelensky's strategy and whether or not they can actually win, making an American policy that Russia should win is unacceptable. That is un-American. And Biden's right on that. And I think that's, among other things, a strong contrast. I actually do think Donald Trump, when you get out of sort of high-flying, you know, we shouldn't be giving our money to other people, we should be building things here at home. When you actually get down to brass tacks on what he is saying, we should let Vladimir Putin overrun Ukraine. I don't think

• 52:47Ezra Klein?

  people agree with that.

• 52:50Aaron Retica?

  That was Biden using the State of the Union speech in a more traditional way to move aspects of his agenda, in that case, Ukraine aid. And he also tried to do that on immigration, which we haven't talked about, but we should. Biden brought up the border deal they had negotiated, which for a moment, it seemed like it was actually about to happen. And he called out Trump for scuttling it in the most overt and direct way because it would hurt Trump's campaign. So again, looking ahead to 2025, let's say Biden wins, let's say he does not have both chambers of Congress, he has one or he has none. Is there a space for a deal like that to finally happen?

• 53:27Ezra Klein?

  I think it's very hard to know the condition of the Republican Party and the sort of leadership trends in the Republican Party in the event of a Donald Trump loss, right? What you might have expected would happen if Donald Trump lost in 2020 did not happen. But there was a period after 2020 when Republicans were more willing to work with Joe Biden. I mean, Joe Biden really did get bipartisan votes on the infrastructure bill. He really did get bipartisan votes on the CHIPS and Science Act. So there very much, I think, could be a period where some kinds of deal making are possible. And it was interesting watching the camera pivot to Senator James Langford, who is very conservative

• 54:09Ezra Klein?

  and was the Republican negotiator on the bipartisan border bill.

• 54:16Ezra Klein?

  And he was like nodding along with Joe Biden, right? I mean, he has suddenly been demonized for negotiating a very conservative bill, a bill that dragged the Democratic Party substantially to the right on immigration and got a lot of things Republicans have often wanted. And then, you know, for the very crime of trying to solve a problem Republicans said they wanted to solve, he became the sort of enemy of the day over there. And so there are people like that. And, you know, what you would have to trade or not trade, what Joe Biden can do through executive orders is also a kind of interesting question. I would say, having done some reporting with the Biden administration on this, I think it, one, it's, I think, very important to realize that they believe this is a real problem, right?

• 54:59Ezra Klein?

  They are not sitting there saying, as has been true at other times, Fox News is making up a border crisis, right? You remember the caravan, right? Like, that was kind of a made up crisis. 2018. In 2018. What is happening at the border now is not a made up crisis. We are actually dealing with record levels of apprehensions. The asylum system, as Biden very, very well described, is completely broken. People are coming in. They get put into America for years as a way to hearing because the system is so overwhelmed and overloaded. That's a perfectly reasonable, like, bet to make, even if you don't think you're going to prevail at your hearing. They want to fix it. And I guess in theory, eventually, Republicans want to fix it as well. But they're not going to fix it in a year when Donald Trump is running for president

• 55:43Ezra Klein?

  and when he's telling them not to. The other thing you saw, though, is what a gift Trump gave Biden, right? What a gift Trump gave him. Because now, you can imagine a world where the bipartisan border bill passed. And these things take some time to implement. It takes time to hire and train however many thousand new asylum officers. It takes time to bring in those verification and drug machines that Biden was talking about. And so Biden is talking about how we passed the toughest border bill in American history, whatever. But actually, it doesn't look like anything is all that different at the border by election day.

• 56:23Ezra Klein?

  But by killing the compromise, what Trump gave them was a way to say, "We were the ones who wanted to pass the toughest border bill, and you kept us from solving the problem. You kept this from happening." Right? So rather than having to own the actual outcome, Biden, right now, doesn't have to own the outcome. Trump, in a way, is owning the outcome, or at least can in an argumentative way. And Biden can own the desire to solve the problem.

• 56:55Aaron Retica?

  I think that's a good place to end, actually, because we've more or less run out of time, anyway. Obviously, we didn't get to everything, but we got to a lot. And there's another eight months, God help us, of this campaign. So plenty more time for this kind of conversation.

• 57:07Ezra Klein?

  But I'm going to spring something on you, because as people maybe have cottoned on to, you're a man who reads a lot of history. You're a man who's deep in the stacks. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience to understand or contextualize this moment in American political history?

• 57:23Aaron Retica?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Was I warned about this?

• 57:26Ezra Klein?

  You were not.

• 57:28Aaron Retica?

  Okay, I'm going to push one book that I've been pushing on everybody, which is, I would not call it a book that will tell you everything you need to know about what's happening now, but it's a really interesting and instructive book about sort of what we've lost. It doesn't mean to be that, but it is, because we've lost it. And that is this biography by John Farrell of Tip O'Neill that I just read, that has many incredible things in it. But it represents a world where Tip O'Neill, when he's Speaker of the House, Ronald Reagan is President, and they are, in fact, able to function. They're slashing each other all day. And then they say, you know, "We're going to be friends at night." And is it perfect? No, it's not perfect, and many terrible things were done.

• 58:12Aaron Retica?

  But even so, the political process is functioning in a way that, right now, it's not. And it was very interesting to read that. I guess another way I would also answer that question is that the 19th century always tells us a tremendous amount about the 21st. Something I've been reading, that I haven't actually finished, that is speaking to the moment very much for me, is Stephen Hahn's History of the 19th Century. It's in Eric Foner's Penguin History of America series. It's called A Nation Without Borders. But the reason it's so resonant now is that the 19th century still informs so much of what happens in the 21st in that you're seeing America attempt to become

• 58:55Aaron Retica?

  an empire, even though that, of course, is not what was supposed to happen, right? You're seeing America, in terms of its internal colonialism, with regard to Native Americans, right? The Seminole War, which Han points out is like the longest American war until Vietnam. And like, you know, it's just a whole set of thoughts and ideas that I think are helpful for this moment. All right. Well, that's two. So for a third, I'm going to stick with the theme of the 19th century controlling the 21st and recommend Joanne Freeman's book, Field of Blood, which is also incredibly resonant today. It looks at political violence

• 59:37Aaron Retica?

  inside Congress, inside the building itself. In the 1830s and 40s and 50s, actual brawls between congressmen, thrashings, there's lots of weapons. And she uses that as a way of understanding the political violence that was taking America over at the time. And that culminated, obviously, in the Civil War. That kind of intersection between personal and political violence has been the subject of all of her work. And in this book, it's really quite extraordinary.

• 1:00:04Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, Field of Blood is amazing. It's one of those books that after you read it, you will never again listen to somebody say to you, oh, my God, American political division has never been this bad.

• 1:00:12Aaron Retica?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Ezra Klein?

  Aaron Reddick, thank you very much.

• 1:00:15Aaron Retica?

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:00:30Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klein Show was produced by Roland Hoop, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristin Lynn. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Semulusky and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rostroscher, and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.