Transcript of Biden and Trump: The transition period | BBC News

Hello and welcome to The Path to the presidency. Well, we know who the next President will be now, Donald Trump, but we're going to be here charting his path to the presidency on January 20th for a little bit longer, and all that happens between now and then. We're joined by our colleague, Berne De Boosman, today, who has dashed fresh from the White House into studio. What is the mood like at the White House. We're transitioning Donald Trump in while Joe Biden is transitioning out.

Well, yesterday, when the two men had their meeting, which was the first time the two men have been in the same room since that debate, which arguably led to Biden withdrawing his candidacy, it was busier than I've ever seen it. There was probably 150 reporters there, which even on days where things have been very, very busy, for example, when there's been escalations in terms of the Middle East, it's been nowhere near that busy. I was speaking to some reporters that have been doing this for 20, 30 years, and they said there's just nothing. They hadn't seen anything like that again because they think it's indicative of the amount of interest, not only here, but around the world in terms of Donald Trump making no matter what anyone else says about him, it's a remarkable political comeback, given all the issues that he's had, all the controversy over the last four years, that he's back very much on his way to the White House now, and it'll just be a few weeks until he's there.

Do you know it was remarkable me watching the footage. You were there, we were watching it here. But in addition to all the journalists, you had all the staffers come out of the EEOB. West Wing fans will know about that when the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, they were all standing on the steps there, trying to get a glimpse of the new president coming in, whether they'll have a job, whether they won't. But there were a few dozen of them there, which, again, is not something you generally see.

Yeah, I think, again, they know this is a historic moment. Even But many of them, frankly, informally told me, I just want to see what happens now. We didn't really think this was going to happen, but this is a historic moment. Even if they are already looking to see, Do I need a new job now? Even if I have a job in January, what if there's cuts to government bureaucracy, which is something that Trump has said he's interested in doing, where that leaves them in their position in the future. It's still a a remarkable moment in US history.

It's a nervy moment for a lot of people, I think, in federal agencies and in the administration, wondering where their next jobs will be. But I was really looking at the body language between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I found it so interesting. Of course, a lot talked about that roaring fire between them. It was like crackling and making so much noise.

It was a cold day, of course, as well. It looks divine. I did feel the heat coming out at the screen. It was so cold.

It was hot chocolate there or something. But it was very cordial, very friendly. Joe Biden, in points, had this big grin on his face. Afterwards, we saw the images that were released, the photos as well, and the former and future first lady, Melania Trump didn't attend for a scheduling reason, from what we understand from her team. But you had these pictures then of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Jill Biden, Dr. Jill Biden, the current first lady, and all smiles and different poses in the White House for all of the talk of what we saw on the campaign trail when Joe Biden was facing off against Donald Trump. And up until election day, I just thought that it was such a stark contrast to the smiles and the relatively affable environment that we saw at the White House.

I mean, both men are pledging a peaceful transition of power, so they have to walk the walk and talk the talk, don't they? I mean, their meeting went on for nearly two hours or something, Bernd. I mean, we didn't get a tremendous read out of what they discussed, state secrets aside.

The White House was pretty clear in that their view was quite a substantive discussion, which I think, frankly, a lot of the American public probably had questions about what that meeting was going to be like, given what they've both said about each other in the last year or so. I think also on Biden's part, he wants things to return to a certain sense of normalcy. That was the case in the past. In 2020, that meeting didn't happen. Donald Trump wanted no part of it. I think perhaps it's almost a legacy I see a thing that Biden wants to return a certain sense of civility to the whole campaign and transition process that skipped an election last time.

If we talk about what's left for Joe Biden now in these remaining weeks of his presidency, obviously until the inauguration as you said, January 20th. There are things that, of course, his administration would have liked to achieve, for example, a ceasefire agreement in Gaza. Do we have a sense, Bernie, from your experience also at the White House, of what they see as priorities for these remaining weeks? Is it getting federal judges confirmed?

I think certainly getting federal judges confirmed is something that they'll be looking hard at. I think also in terms of foreign policy, any movement towards a ceasefire in Gaza or anything as far as Eastern Europe, something that would help assure Ukraine and US allies in Europe of their US commitment going forward, which I think clearly some are worried about. I think those are all things that Biden will be looking to do on his way out. Just to end on a positive note, because frankly, even at the White House now, the feeling is very deflated, even among reporters, among staffers. For example, today Biden left on a trip to South America. I think in other circumstances, it would have been a much bigger deal that he's going to go meet and he'll see Xi Jinping in Peru. It went very quietly, frankly. It just happened.

I think it's really interesting that he's going to meet President Xi of China on that trip, because if we see the appointments that Donald Trump has made so far or the nominations, many of them still have to be Senate confirmed, particularly Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator who's been tapped as Secretary of State, takes a very hard line against China, as does Donald Trump. First time around in Trump's National Defense strategy, they named interstate competition, specifically China, as the biggest national security threat. To the US. We've seen him on the campaign trail as well, take a really hard line with China. I think it's really interesting. This meeting with President Xi was only added, I think, maybe on Wednesday of this week, or at least was made public at that point. What is Joe Biden going to be saying to him as the outgoing President, in many ways a lame duck President? How much attention is President Xi going to pay to anything that he says?

To your point, he was asked, or the White House press secretary was to ask this, why is President Biden holding a meeting with Xi Jinping when obviously he's the outgoing President, Donald Trump is coming in? I was at APEC the previous year when President Biden and Xi Jinping met there as well, and of course, to much fanfare. There was a lot of talk about some of the common that they could strike. The images of them walking in a garden together obviously made international news. They talked about curbing fentanyl ingredients and climate change agreements. I actually haven't really followed up on where some of those agenda items actually landed. But I'm sure if you look at where things actually stand in the current Biden administration, they kept the Trump tariffs on China. We were speaking here on the programs earlier this week to a member of the Council of Economic Advisors, Thomas Philipson, who was there during the first Trump administration. He said, Look, a lot of times this tariff talk, this is just about putting something on the table for negotiation. I asked, Okay, will we see 60% tariffs then on goods from China? Obviously, he's not in the current transition team, but his point was that, too, could be a negotiation tactic.

It could be that coming back to President Biden, that he's going there a bit to close what his administration wanted to do in terms of relationship with China, but also to set the path forward, I guess.

He is yesterday's man, though. Sorry, Joe. But things have moved on. It's about Donald Trump. We're following the appointments or the nominations, who he's picking for these various jobs. That he has to appoint. I think we mentioned the Middle East a few moments ago. I think at this point in time, and we'll talk so much, I'm sure, about Joe Biden's legacy between now and the 20th of January. But I think for him personally, the fact that there is a situation that just seems to be so far from peace, so far from a deal being done, will be personally for him a big disappointment. He spent so much of his career committed to the Middle East, committed to Israel. We saw that it wasn't quite an ultimatum, but the threat, if you want to use that word, that was issued to Prime Minister Netanyahu by the Secretaries of State and Defense a month ago, saying if they didn't meet that deadline this week to improve humanitarian situation in Gaza, that there would be conditions attached to the aid. Then you see the US State Department coming in and saying, Oh, no, it's fine. Israel is making progress, which has been disputed by all of the NGOs in the area.

We've spoken to many of them on our programs here. The perceived wisdom from experts in this field at this point is a deal will not be done now. That Joe Biden is officially the outgoing President, the Democrats are the outgoing administration, and that there I mean, notwithstanding a miracle, and everyone hopes for that, but that there won't be a return of hostages or an improvement in that situation. I think that will be something that he personally will be disappointed about.

I do think I wonder at the end of his presidency, usually, there'll be an outgoing news conference. I imagine someone will ask him, What do you think was the low point or a failing of your presidency? I'd be surprised if that wasn't it because he He did deal with a lot of factors outside of US control. But USA to Israel is something that the government could have controlled, and it left many people unhappy. I think we saw that in the election, even in Michigan, for example. There was so much dissatisfaction with how he handled it. At the end of the day, over more than a year now, there was very little movement in the direction they repeatedly said they wanted to go. I wonder if that perhaps will ultimately be seen as a stand on his legacy by people within his own administration.

Well, and things are moving so quickly now with these appointments, as you said. If we look at who Donald Trump plans to appoint as the ambassador to Israel, former governor of Arkansas, Governor Huckerbie. If we look at the appointment for ambassador to the United Nations, Elie Stefanek, Congresswoman, these are two staunch supporters of Israel, and it gives us a sense of where this policy could be going from the next Trump administration.

I think in a way, it's the Trump administration fulfilling his promises. I mean, Trump was very clear that he's a very, very pro-staunch Israel supporter on the campaign trail. I think, as is the case with some of his other appointments so far, by appointing those people, he's living up to what he promised his supporters in terms of Israel going forward. I don't think many of the people within the Trump camp would be surprised by those particular appointments.

For me, with Trump in 2016 being elected in those four years, he actually delivered on a lot of things he promised on the campaign trail during that administration. From what we're seeing now in the nominations, he looks set to do the same, doesn't he? I mean, in those nominations, but also if we talk about immigration, which is his signature campaign pledge in many ways, wasn't it? There's mass deportations, and to be starting on it in day one. For We've obviously covered a lot on this, but appointing... He's calling him an immigration Tsar, Tom Home, and he doesn't have a more official title than that. But that's someone who's worked in law enforcement under, I think, six presidents or something, very, very familiar with border patrol and law enforcement.

He's very much a hardliner of the kind that... He's been very vocal about pushing the policies that Trump, over the whole campaign, almost every rally I went to, Trump made the same promises in terms of mass deportations and stuff. And Homen is very much the person he sees as the enforcer of those. And also, Christie Noem as head of Homeland Security, which is a very broad position, but also has all responsibility over customs and immigration to a certain extent.

What has Homen actually said, though, about how he plans to implement this? This is something we've asked quite a few guests who have come on who are surrogates for Donald Trump, how they envision actually implementing such a mass deportation plan, which is quite difficult financially and logistically. What is Homan saying about this?

I think they're aware that deporting millions of people is, like you said, really difficult logistically and financially. It'd be enormously expensive. What he said is that initially, they'll focus on people they see as public safety threats and national security threats, but that's quite a small pool of people. If they really want to live up to their promises of deporting more people, I think ultimately, and he's also said, ultimately, they'll have to look at workplace, he doesn't use the term raids, but enforcement operations, which was a feature of the previous Trump administration. Very unpopular, right? Biden did away with it almost immediately when he was President because it was so unpopular. I I think that's probably the next step. I think Homen has started alluding to that fact that we'll start to see a return to that.

For me, the thing that we haven't seen in the detail of this and aware that it's only been a week or so since Donald Trump was re-elected again, but the logistics of mass deportations, that's the part that we have really no information on. If you're talking millions of people, first of all, you have to find them, which is difficult because by their very nature, they who don't have paperwork and they live, as some would say, in the shadows or whatever.

In some cities have said they wouldn't cooperate with local police force either. Exactly.

Those who do have driver's licenses in the sanctuary cities and so on. How do you find people? Then how do you extricate them from the lives that they have and the children that they have, and particularly people are here for decades and decades and decades. Then how do you physically send them to other countries? I mean, who's paying for those flights or buses?Yeah.

That's the challenge.

There's a cost to all of that.

I think he's aware of that cost. He said it's going to be expensive, but as far as he sees, there's no cost too high for this. But I think, for example, family deportations, that's another thing. Home And Homen has been very hard-lined about. Recently, he said he was asked, How would you deal with, let's say, a child is a US citizen and the mother is not. He said, Well, you deport them together. He was very clear about his view on that. But there are still a lot of questions. For example, as things stand, even now, there's nowhere near the detention facilities you would need to house a bunch of people. A lot of countries, for example, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, they might be less than cooperative in terms of taking people back. They're not going to take people back, yeah.

If you haven't lived there for decades as well, that's even harder, isn't it?

It is. Even now, I was just actually on the phone with a dreamer who's at the moment protected from deportation because where they came as a child. But in theory, they're worried that if this happens and their status is revoked and ultimately they're deported, they'll be going back to a country they've not been in 35 years. This is a 37-year-old person. I think that's high on the mind of a lot of these people.

I know you did a lot of reporting on the Latino vote in the election as well, and I found it so interesting in the aftermath and some of the numbers that we're combing through to see how people vote. We did see this shift, particularly among Latino men, but in general, in the Latino to vote towards Republicans, towards Donald Trump, despite the announcement that there would be this mass deportation. What is the sense you're getting from undocumented people in that community? Because I know you've been speaking with them as well.

It was, frankly, a lot more nuanced than I expected it to be. I've had quite a few that told me that, for example, they don't think they will be deported because they're not criminals. They're law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who's only crime in their eyes, was crossing the border without checking in at some point or without doing the visa process. There's a lot of that. Some of them are, quite frankly, as I think we saw with the broader Latino vote, excited by the prospect, maybe the economy gets better, maybe there's more work for them. But others are really quite terrified. They're terrified that that's how it starts. But if Trump wants to deport a million people or two million people, eventually, they have to move beyond criminals to work There's a lot of fear of being collateral damage in those sorts of enforcement operations, which is something... Even the Trump last term, they used the term collateral enforcement to a certain extent. People get caught up in sweeps.

We also saw under the last Trump administration and with John Homan, family separations, didn't we? Where children were separated. Now, Donald Trump did put a stop to that in 2018 with an executive action. Then when Joe Biden came into office, he fully reversed that policy. But I was checking some of the numbers a bit earlier, and the most recent statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, which do come from March of this year, found that there were 1,360 children who have been separated, still are still separated from their families four, six, eight years later, and some of whom they just have no contact information for the families, so will never be reunified. I think the fact that Donald Trump stopped that the last time around, we probably won't see that, but it's just another thing when you're speaking about concerning communities.

I think it also shows the fact that how difficult it is to track these people and these families that are, in many cases, completely off the grid. Once someone is deported, if you want to reunite that person with someone who's still in the States, that's almost impossible in a lot of them. These people might be in rural Central America, for example. It would be very It's hard for someone in the States to bring those families back together.

I also want to ask you guys about the Department of Government Efficiency and the appointments that we saw there of Elon Musk. Doge. Doge, exactly. Aptly named Doge. Of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaiswadi, I mean, of course, this isn't actually a government agency, we should say. It's like an advisory body, as I understand it. But we are hearing Elon Musk talk about cutting down the number of federal agencies down to 99, I think he said recently on social Do we have a sense, or do either of you have a sense of how they would go about actually not only cutting the numbers of federal employees, but also entire agencies? I'm just wondering how they're going to go about doing it.

I mean, on one hand, you can just do it. You can just stop the funding and shut things down, but it's the practicalities of how you unwind that and all the people who are employed. I mean, this city will be, here in Washington, will be transformed dramatically if these agencies closed and federal workers are laid off in huge numbers. And this concept of... Elon Musk has posted the other day on X saying he put some of these suggestions up on X, what they were targeting. And take feedback.In.

The comments, essentially.Yeah. That's remarkable.A.

Whole new way of doing business. We're speaking here, we're recording this on Thursday evening in Washington, DC, in US Eastern Time, and these names are still trickling out. The latest one, we haven't heard it at the point of speaking from Donald Trump's mouth directly, but it does seem like RFK Junior will be tapped for the Health Department, which is something he had asked for for months, hadn't he? I mean, that's been in the realm since he gave up his own campaign and agreed to endorse Donald Trump, even though Trump has said on the campaign trail, he doesn't fully agree with certain things that RFK Junior stands for. It's going to be really interesting to see if he is appointed to that, what parts of his own platform go in and what parts of the Trump platform go into his mandate.

If that's confirmed, no matter what he does, the fact is it'll still be deeply deeply unpopular with a huge swath of the population that didn't resonate much with him on the campaign trail and is now going to have him in a cabinet position, if that's confirmed.

He's talked about taking fluoride out of water. He's obviously a vaccine skeptic as well, which is one of the issues that has caused him concern. This all raises the question, of course, of whether he can get confirmed. We've been talking really over several days now, as these appointments keep coming out, can some of these nominations actually get confirmed in the Senate? We were talking just before this, Katrina, even if some Republican senators have expressed concern over people like congressman Matt Gates to be the attorney general, or Pete Hegset, a Fox news host, to be the defense secretary, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To the head of Health and Human Services, will they get the support that they need in the Senate? I mean, there is the possibility that Donald Trump could go around them with recess appointments, but we've heard these rumblings on on acts on social media that there are a number of Republican senators that they wouldn't vote for him. At the end of the day, would they? Would they cross Donald Trump and not vote for his specific pics for cabinet positions?

That's the million dollar question.

I thought you might know. If we knew the answer to that, we'd be very rich people.

I think some will see more resistance than others. Matt Gates comes to mind. I think people were a little more outspoken about him. But broadly speaking, I think lawmakers, they're on the same page from what they can tell. Some of them are very keen on, even if they don't necessarily agree with the pics, that they're very keen on pushing these people through as quickly as possible and getting to work on that agenda that he and the Republican Party promised voters.

I think we'll see some horse trading, which is for the course and these things where somebody maybe has an objection to one nominee, another colleague has an objection to the other nominee, and it's, Well, I'll vote for your guy if you vote for my guy, thing. And ultimately, for Republicans, regardless of what they think of Donald Trump, He has delivered tremendous electoral success. I mean, absolutely tremendous victory for the Republican Party. If you're a Republican, if you're a conservative, you're facing into this very attractive prospect where they have now the House, they have the Senate, and they have the White House.

It's a great-A majority in the Supreme Court, conservative majority.

It's a great opportunity for Republicans of any particular persuasion to get their legislative agenda through, to get the things that they've promised their voters through to, and to do that as quickly as possible before. As we know, the electoral process in this country is so long and so long compared to my part of the world anyway. But before they all have to start thinking about re-election again. They have a few months, really, when they can get to work. I think it's probably in all of their interests, ultimately, to do that quickly, isn't it?

In some ways, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a lot of these people. The time frame, they have two years until the midterms, too. If they want to do things quickly, now is the time because the clock starts ticking on January 20th until the midterms. Then in the midterms, who knows what happens. I think you'll see, especially now that they're a majority in both houses of Congress, you'll see people try to push things as quickly and as hard as possible from day one. Yeah.

And as a footnote to all of this, we can say now that Donald Trump has put on Truth Social that he's thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As the Secretary of Health and Human Services. So there you go.

There you go. We're ahead of it. Well, on that note, we'll have to bring our chat to a close for today. Great chatting as always. We'll be here again next week and every week on the path to the presidency until Donald Trump is on those steps, wearing in on the 20th of January.