AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
We're joined now by NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Good morning, Tam.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hi, Ayesha.
RASCOE: OK, so we just heard about former President Donald Trump's post-RNC rally, the after-party, if you will. You were on the team covering the main event, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. What were your key takeaways?
KEITH: Yeah, you know, this wasn't so much a Republican convention as a Trump convention. And, you know, it was always going to be that way. His team had already rewritten the party's platform in Trump's image right on down to the syntax. But after the assassination attempt, that was supercharged. And just one small example - after the first day when Trump arrived with the white bandage on his ear, more and more attendees came with bandages on their ears in homage to Trump. And he wasn't so much a uniter as a conqueror who transformed liabilities like felony convictions into badges of honor and who had a long line of former rivals singing his praises from the stage there in Milwaukee. And then there are the Republicans who haven't fully bent to his will - his own former Vice President Mike Pence, former speaker Paul Ryan, even the last Republican president, George W. Bush. They were nowhere to be seen, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was actually booed during the roll call on the first day of the convention when he announced his state's delegates were for Trump.
RASCOE: I want to take a look at where the Democratic Party is now. But first, how is President Biden doing? We know he's recovering from COVID. But do we have any updates on his condition?
KEITH: Biden's doctor has been putting out updates every day, and the latest is that his symptoms continue to improve. It's not clear how much longer Biden will be in isolation at his beach house here in Rehoboth Beach, Del. But his team has said that they expect him to hit the campaign trail again by the end of this week.
RASCOE: OK, so in his own party, there are more calls for President Biden to step aside and allow for another person to be the nominee. What do we know about how he's receiving those calls?
KEITH: Right, and our latest count is up to about 35 members of Congress calling on him to step aside. Biden campaign officials continue to say that he is in it to win it, and they are trying to elevate the voices of members of Congress who support Biden staying in the race. There are plenty of them, including Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus. But there have also been conspicuous silences from key Democratic Party leaders, and there are a lot of people who aren't accepting Biden's repeated assertions that he's staying in as his final answer, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was on MSNBC yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ELIZABETH WARREN: So, look, Joe Biden is our nominee. He has a really big decision to make. But what gives me a lot of hope right now is that if President Biden decides to step back, we have Vice President Kamala Harris, who is ready.
RASCOE: Right, so even though President Biden says he has no intention of stepping down, it just seems like his answer is not registering, or they are not taking the no as the answer. What does that mean?
KEITH: The Democratic Convention is less than a month away, and so if Biden is able to gut it out - and that is a very big if at this point - at some point, the party will have to rally around its nominee, but you can also expect members of Congress facing tough reelection fights are going to distance themselves from him as they did in the 2022 midterms. That was an election that was supposed to be a red tsunami, and it was more like a red ripple. You know, one Biden adviser I spoke to said that they hadn't seen anything but resolve from Biden. But there was also this feeling that Biden just couldn't catch a break. And while there have been some positive moments for the president since his very bad debate performance, there haven't been enough of them to get him back on any sort of solid footing.
RASCOE: You know, in a way, I mean, this is a tale of two parties, right? Like, with the Republicans, even the former Never, Ever Trumpers, including his VP pick, Senator J.D. Vance, they just kind of act like they never said those things about Trump and support him all the way. But why are things so different for Democrats?
KEITH: Well, you know, there is this saying that Republicans fall in line, but Democrats want to fall in love. But it's more than that. I'm not sure that Democrats were ever in love with President Biden. In 2020, I would talk to primary voters and ask them what their most important issue was, and they'd say, electability. Democratic voters had this intense focus on beating Trump because they saw him as an existential threat to the country. And they settled on Biden as the most electable candidate in the field, the most able to beat Trump. That's exactly what he did. But after that very bad debate performance, many Democrats have become convinced that Biden simply can't win, that he's too old, that he doesn't have enough fight, and now more than ever, they still see Trump as a threat, and they feel like it is worth it to have this fight with their nominee in hopes of maybe having a last-minute change and a chance to get someone younger.
RASCOE: We've been hearing about this run of bad luck in the Biden campaign. But Trump managed to bounce back from what some might call a bad run with months of headlines on all of his legal troubles, including 34 felony convictions in New York. So can President Biden bounce back?
KEITH: You know, polarization is so intense right now that almost nothing is moving the needle in any massive way. Trump long ago convinced Republicans that Democrats were out to get him, essentially inoculating himself from the very long list of what ordinarily would be career-ending political liabilities that we've been talking about. But Biden doesn't have a cult of personality in the same way. You know, the Democrats have one thing that they are pointing to that they've had success with in the last few weeks, which is attracting attention to Project 2025. But here's what I will tell you. This election is four months away. We have had a lifetime of plot twists in just the last month. Who knows what's going to happen?
RASCOE: That's NPR senior White House correspondent, Tamara Keith. Thanks, Tam.
KEITH: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
