TOP

Wesley Lowery

Chapters

The FRONTLINE Interviews

Wesley Lowery

Author, They Can't Kill Us All

Wesley Lowery is a journalist at CBS News. He previously served as a national correspondent covering law enforcement and politics for The Washington Post. He is the author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder on July 24, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

President Biden

The Choice 2020

Biden’s Decision

Text Interview:

Highlight text to share it

I’m going to jump right into our chronology which is the Donald Trump backstory, the whole biography, which is what The Choice takes on with each candidate.… So if I can put you in the time machine for a moment, I’m going to take you to 1989 New York.Rudy Giuliani is running for his first term.He will lose this race.But he is entering a New York City that is full of racial strife, and there’s a case, the Central Park Five case, that Donald Trump decides to weigh in to.I wonder if you can help us understand the Donald Trump of 1989 or the Donald Trump that approaches this particular case.

Certainly.Well, to understand the Donald Trump of 1988 and ’89, you have to understand New York of that time, right?And this is a moment where New York really is a tale of two cities. …

New York City simultaneously is enjoying the boom of Wall Street in the ’80s and also is seeing an uptick in crime and poverty driven in large part by the crack cocaine epidemic and, with it, is seeing an uptick in violence.And so Central Park sits in many ways—it literally sits in the center of the city, right?

But Central Park is the place where these two different cities converge and they collide, right, where white Manhattan meets Black Harlem.And we have to remember that at the time, and even today, some of Donald Trump’s chief properties sit overlooking Central Park, that he is seeing all of this.

Now, Donald Trump at the time was engaged in a very public effort to brand himself and assert himself as the face of kind of ’80s Wall Street success, real estate success, and affluence, right?You have to recall, this is one year after he has flirted with running for the presidency for the first time.This is right after The Art of the Deal has been published.And so he is very aggressively in this space, attempting to position himself as the avatar of the white, rich businessman.He’s popping up in Home Alone and rom-coms.He’s asserting himself in popular culture.But also, we start to see some of the ideological underpinnings that I think are really at the core and the heart of Donald Trump.Donald Trump is a rich guy from New York who was molded in the politics of ’80s and ’90s New York City.And at the time, you had an affluent white city that was horrified of violence and drugs and crime that was concentrated largely in the Black and brown parts of the city.

And so he asserts himself in the Central Park Five case, both opportunistically but also because, I believe, these are his chief politics and his chief concerns.He cares about issues of crime.He is horrified about the idea that the police might not be supported or that folks walking down the street would be assaulted because, again, if you lived in white New York, that’s not the world you want to have to interact with.

Trump and the Central Park Five

We talked to Yusef Salaam not too long ago for the project.He said you don’t sign your name to an advertisement that you aren’t proud of, that you believe wholeheartedly in.

And I think that makes a lot of sense.I mean, look, it’s not even sign your name.I mean, we think about this advertisement, which ran in four newspapers.¹

New York Times: Trump Will Not Apologize for Calling for Death Penalty Over Central Park Five

He spends reportedly $85,000 on it.And we just think about the headlines, right: “Bring back the death penalty.Bring back the cops!”And sometimes we overlook the text that was in this.He writes this open letter, essentially, where he decries the idea that he believes the police have been undermined, that they don’t have the ability to aggressively go after crime and suspects.He says something along the lines of, you know, too often people just claim police brutality when in reality they are the criminals, or they are the thugs; that it speaks to the politics that we now are very comfortable with.We understand kind of the policing politics of this moment because we’re dealing with it again now in this era—in the Obama years and now the Trump years, right?

But it’s the sense of, how do you—how do you grapple with it?How do you balance civil liberties and concerns about crime?And Donald Trump, in this moment, very clearly comes down on one side of this.He writes in this op-ed that civil liberties stop the moment you start, you know, committing crime against the citizenry, right; that he is saying: “I don’t care about these suspects.I don’t care about their rights.If they did these bad things,” he writes, “I want to hate them, and maybe we need more hate for them,” right?There’s nothing ambiguous or unclear about what Donald Trump writes and asserts.And again, he unquestionably plays a role in driving the furor around this case, and also he is a reflection of the politics of this moment, right?

One of the chief questions about Donald Trump today is, is he the symptom or is he the disease, right?He runs a nativist campaign and runs a nativist administration, and there’s this debate politically of if he is the quote/unquote “problem or not.”But what I might suggest, and I think this was true back then in the Central Park Five case, is that Donald Trump is a reflection of a very real subset of our politics and our citizenry.Donald Trump is not the only rich white New Yorker horrified by these crimes and who didn’t care what happened to the people who did them; he didn’t care about their rights.He just wanted to never have to face crime personally.He never wanted to deal with the consequences of the levels of poverty, of the drug war, of what was happening in all the rest of the neighborhoods of New York.

Trump and Racial Strife

What is he learning about the political opportunities in inserting himself in racial strife? …

… He’s learning how to dip his toe in and out of these remarkably racially incendiary issues, right, issues that are overloaded with subtext, issues that are overloaded with context, historic and contemporary.And he’s learning how to flirt with them.He’s learning how to dog-whistle, he’s learning how to signal, and also learning how to do that while keeping a little bit of distance.This was—these were the biggest issues in New York City at the time, right?These are the issues that the Dinkins-Giuliani election the first time is decided on and then is decided on the second time, right; that when we’re looking at the ’80s and early ’90s in New York City, you’re talking about race, crime, police brutality, drugs, poverty, violence.

And when we look at a case like the Central Park Five, it wraps all of those issues up into one, and Donald Trump found a way to insert himself into the story, to signal where he was on these issues, to take on the credit of kind of the populist energy, because again, a lot of people were understandably extremely upset.This was a horrible, horrible crime, and horrifying.And Donald Trump found a way and began to learn the lesson that if you can capture that fear and you can become the champion for those afraid people, that there’s a lot of political opportunity in that. …

The Power of 'The Apprentice'

I’m going to jump ahead to The Apprentice. …The power of that show, the power of Donald Trump being in millions of households for 14 seasons, how significant the show is as a springboard to his entry into politics?

Of course.Well, when you go back to, I think it was 2004 when The Apprentice launches, right, this is the early wave of reality TV the way we understand it now.There have been the Real Worlds and stuff like that, right, but you have the first wave—Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race.And then you see The Apprentice is in the second wave.And when you watch the show initially, it’s a little overdone; it’s a little silly.Donald Trump is the cartoon character then that he is now, right?But there is such an underscoring of his wealth to this, I guess almost to this caricatured level, that it was impossible to watch that show and not marvel, even if you thought Donald Trump was silly, at what appeared to be this intense success that he had had.

He would fly in in the helicopter, and then the limo would drive him up and he would say, “OK, so I just launched a new business called Trump Water; I need you to sell 50,000,” and all these people would eagerly compete to do it, right; that every single episode, you’re being introduced to some new Trump brand, some new Trump organization, some new Trump company.And in many of these cases, these are failing companies; they’re not even real ones.They’re paper tigers that have been kind of set up for—but the perception into the homes of millions of Americans, once a week, every week, was that this was Richie Rich; that this was the American dream, to be so rich that you could slap your name onto steak and to water and to hotels and to helicopters, and then have all of these MBAs compete to be your assistant essentially, right?

It was just a remarkable show.And look, I watched.I watched for years, you know.It was calendar viewing for me.It was fascinating, right?And by the second season, they adapt to the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” right, as their lead song.Every part of this, if you watched The Apprentice, was to know that Donald Trump is the American dream.He’s who you want to be.It’s what you want to do, so much so that this group of smart, brilliant people are going to embarrass themselves every week at his feet.

And the power of reinforcing that message week after week after week, for years, I think politically we underestimate that power.We underestimate that association for the average American; that while those of us who work in media were aware perhaps that he was overstating or he had the bankruptcies, that image is everything; perception is everything.And how could these bad things about Donald Trump be true when I just watched him on NBC last night?I just watched him in the helicopter.What do you mean he’s bankrupt?

And I think that the mythmaking and the narrative storytelling that goes into all television, but much less reality television, served Donald Trump in ways that it’s hard to know that we’ll ever be able to fully measure, right?If Donald Trump is never elected president, The Apprentice probably is a, you know, is a trivia answer.Now it’s one of the most important shows in the history of television.

And I’m not sure that we fully appreciate that.And it’s important because it laundered the narrative about Donald Trump that he wanted the world to see into the—into the households of the entire nation and, in many ways, into the entire world.And it built the foundation upon which he would then run for president.

What is the lesson he then takes from Central Park Five combined with the power of celebrity that he’s cultivated on the reality show?How does he apply those lessons to the 2016 campaign?

I think that what Donald Trump understands better than other politicians of his era, and perhaps better than any other politician ever that we’ve seen, is how to manipulate the mass media.He understands that the average reader, the average viewer, the average voter is not necessarily into the depths of the minutiae of an issue, that they remember the top lines, and that he can get the media to repeat his top lines over and over and over and over and over again.

So few people read that advertisement in those newspapers.Why?Because most people when they’re reading newspapers just flip right past most advertisements, right?Very few people probably read the letter.They saw the big, bold: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.BRING BACK THE POLICE!”But by doing that, he got that simple message stamped in the minds of all of these New Yorkers, that Donald Trump is standing up for the victim here.And if that was the only thing you remembered, that was a win for Donald Trump.

And when you look at the—what happens in the years and decades afterwards, right, The Apprentice follows a very, very similar model here, where he uses the mass media to stamp and reinforce the message he wants to send, that he is richer than God, that he is this brilliant businessman, so brilliant that these folks should prostrate themselves at his feet for the opportunity to work for him, because he has companies and jets and limos and hotels.

And so if you watch The Apprentice, it’s impossible to walk away without having had stamped upon your brain that Donald Trump was some type of business genius.That’s remarkably helpful to him.

So you get to the campaign.You see his proclamations time and time again—the hyperbole of them, in some ways the ad-libbing of them.But in each case, they serve to underscore a message he wants to send to the American people: that bad people are coming over the border, and he’s going to build a wall to stop them.Who cares about the minutiae?Mexico will pay for it, right?No, no, no.The point is, bad people are coming in, and Donald Trump will stop it, right?You see the same thing with the Muslim ban once he’s elected, right?The specifics don’t matter.Who cares what countries?We’ll switch them back up, and like, we didn’t even tell DHS we’re going to do this.

The point is that he is broadcasting to the world and to his base that “I’m going to stop this thing.”And I think politically, he’s done this in ways time and time and time again.He has signaled to people time and time again his values and what he wants people to believe he stands for.Whether he has the competence or the administrative thrust to actually pull these things off?Totally different question.Whether they’ve crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s?Very different question.

But if you know nothing else, you read the headline, you hear the clip on the news, and you think, Donald Trump wants to stop the immigrants coming over the border.Donald Trump wants to keep the terrorists out.Donald Trump is standing up for the flag and against Colin Kaepernick.The specifics don’t matter.It’s all about the messaging.

And again, I think that he, in part because of his experience with The Art of the Deal and then later with The Apprentice, knew exactly how to manipulate the mass media into—into spreading that message.It didn’t matter how many fact-checks we did.It didn’t matter that in the third sentence of the article we said, “Actually, this whole thing is a lie and made up,” right, because Donald Trump got his headline over and over and over again.And I think all of those lessons previously were that if he can get the headline, he wins the debate.

The 'Access Hollywood' Tape

… Let me ask about you about a moment in the campaign, on the Access Hollywood weekend.… When he’s ultimately successful in pushing through that crisis … what did he learn from that moment?… What is he learning about the country, the campaign?

What I think the Access Hollywood moment and weekend that stretched to weeks and then stretched into months, what I think that teaches Donald Trump is that there’s no limit to political shamelessness; that previously, people were confined and politicians were confined to where they perceived the public’s level of shame to be; that if you committed a certain level of hypocrisy, that if you did a thing that felt immoral, that you basically had to bow out; that people wouldn’t support you.

But what Donald Trump learned and had reinforced through this episode was that he could continue to double down and double down and double down; that in part the strength of his brand was so—it had so seeped into the country, into the minds of the voters, and that part of his brand was to be this brash and immoral and womanizing and misogynist and, like, maybe racist, but telling it how it—you know, that he—it was Teflon.He wasn’t—Donald Trump wasn’t going to get in trouble in the minds of the American voters for saying a sexist thing about women, because American voters already believed that about Donald Trump.

I actually think there’s a secondary component to this, because I don’t believe his true base was ever going to leave him on something like this.Again, this is Donald Trump.You don’t make Donald Trump your candidate if you don’t expect him to be Donald Trump.

But one of the key questions there was going to be, how much was this the Republican Party, and how much was this Donald Trump’s party?Did the party itself have the ability to zap him of his support in response to this?And so you see a series of politicians un-endorse him, who—you’re starting to see the backroom conversations about, can we replace him with someone else?Can we get Pence in there?Is it too late to—and Donald Trump puts his head down, he calls the Clinton accusers, he brings them to the debate, and he says: “I’m not going anywhere.You all have fun with this.”

And the Republican base, for whatever reason—be it because they wanted conservatives on the high court, be it because they were horrified of Hillary Clinton, a historically unpopular Democratic candidate, be it because they were actually attracted to Donald Trump and his style of politics—the Republican base said: “We don’t care what Paul Ryan thinks.We don’t care what the elder statesmen of the GOP think.We’re with Trump on this.”And I think that was a clear message that was sent by the electorate.It was a message that empowered Trump to continue to behave this way when he faced scandal throughout the administration, and it should have shown us what was to come in the years that were going to follow.

The Crisis Presidency

… I wonder if you can help us just understand a little bit about how the administration is dominated by crisis, how he applies those lessons from New York, from The Apprentice, from Roy Cohn.We call it the School of Roy Cohn or the School of Fred Trump, in some ways … how he applies those lessons about going up against these adversaries like Mueller or Comey. …

… In the media world, in the journalism world, in the Trump administration, there’s not time for what we used to call a “Sunday takeout,” right?The news would happen on Monday or Tuesday, and we’d have to cover it really quickly, and then by Sunday we would give you the big, meaty story where we’ve really talked to everyone and we’ve pieced everything together.In the Trump administration, by Sunday, there have been 19 crises since the Tuesday story, right?

And you see this time and time again, from the very beginning, from the travel ban, which is this moment in the very early days of the Trump presidency—by the way, coming on the heels of the disastrous inauguration and the lies about the crowd sizes, those things we forget now because they’re silly.But there was crisis from literally Day One in the Trump administration.

You get to the Muslim ban, which is a moment where it feels as if democracy is literally crumbling at the seams.You have thousands of people who have shown up at airports.You’re wondering—you have refugees who are being taken into backrooms by TSA agents, and no one knows when they’re going to get out.You’re worried that federal agents might shoot some protester at the Seattle airport and the—democracy feels like it’s crumbling.And the administration just moves on to the next crisis, and they fire Sally Yates, and then there’s the Comey stuff.And then there’s—by Day Three, by Day Four, we don’t even have time to figure out what happened to all the refugees who are in the airport.

And that early weekend, that early crisis, I think, underscored what was to come, day in and day out, for the next four years, that we’re just careening from one crisis to the next crisis.Now, that in many ways has been effective for Donald Trump.Ultimately, will it have been effective?We’ll see at the ballot box, right?It’s unquestionable that he has taken some significant, significant political blowback, especially this year around coronavirus.

But when you look at the many scandals of Donald Trump—from Stormy Daniels to the Mueller investigation to the handling of coronavirus to various Cabinet members and various things—there has been so much content and so much scandal that those of us whose job it is to understand it and write about it can’t keep the facts straight.So imagine the average American citizen, that most Americans don’t have enough time to stay up on top of the facts of the chaos of the Trump administration. ...

Trump and the Death of George Floyd

I wonder if we can talk about the death of George Floyd and the moment in Lafayette Square, if we can apply what you discussed about the lesson of the Central Park Five that the president is bringing to this moment of reckoning right now.Can you sort of help us out?

Of course.So to understand the George Floyd moment, we have to remember the recent history with Donald Trump and these issues.Donald Trump is elected at a moment when there are protests in the streets in American cities around issues of policing, police brutality, police impunity, these cell phone videos we are seeing of people being shot and killed and beaten by police officers.And Donald Trump in that moment is representative of a lot of white Americans who did not want to believe that it possibly could be this bad, and who are very frustrated with what they thought was a political rhetoric that was demonizing the police.Again, Donald Trump is the candidate of the white suburbanite whose parents fled the riots in the ’60s.He’s the candidate of the Wall Street banker in Manhattan who doesn’t want to find themselves in Harlem after the sun goes down.

And he uses that energy, that frustration, wrapping himself in American policing, showing up at the conferences and using their rhetoric, right?Many of these people—historically white, union Democrats, but white ethnic in cities like Milwaukee and my hometown of Cleveland, in Charlotte, places where there were significant protests, at times riots, and Donald Trump said: “Aren’t you scared of that?Isn’t that not what we want?Isn’t this the criminals winning?”And he masterfully took advantage of the backlash to Black Lives Matter to solidify his base in a lot of these places.

By the time—so before that even, sometimes we make the mistake of seeing someone’s death like George Floyd’s as some type of isolated incident, as actually some camel’s-back-breaking moment, right?And it’s certainly true that you have some instances—be it Rodney King, be it Michael Brown in Ferguson—that there really is massive shift.But it becomes too easy to erase the little tick-tock that happens throughout all of this.Much of the narrative throughout the Trump administration was, what happened to Black Lives Matter?Where did it go?Why is there no energy for this?

But what that forgets is two things.

The first is that a significant part of the attention received to these issues during the Obama administration was because of the media spectacle of how the first Black president would handle these Black issues; that it seems unlikely that Donald Trump would have gotten a question about Trayvon Martin in the Rose Garden, right?That meanwhile, every utterance, every word of everything Barack Obama ever said on race became a massive national conversation.The Trump administration saw any number of seriously bad police interactions.There’s case after case.These cases just didn’t bubble up the way, nationally, in part because they weren’t being brought to the White House for comment this way.

By the time we get to George Floyd, there is a pent-up energy on the left and a pent-up frustration that the folks who had been in the streets in ’14 and ’15 and ’16 were horrified by what they’d seen.They hadn’t been fans of Hillary Clinton, but they couldn’t have imagined a Trump presidency; that the folks who are their natural allies had gotten themselves offended and worked up about any number of things, be it the Women’s March, be it Parkland, be it the children in cages at the border, right; that you have a center-left, a multiracial coalition in the center-left, that is ready to take the streets, that is horrified and upset about these issues, and that has had to confront this question, right?The key question of this movement for white people has always been, “But is it really that bad?”And after four years of Donald Trump, many millions more white people were willing to believe it is actually that bad.

And then they watch a police officer kneel on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, and that opens the floodgates.It opens the floodgates.There was no denial in watching this video that George Floyd did not need to be dead, that he should not have been killed this way.Even the most pro-police partisans conceded that what happened in this video should not have happened.

And I think that what we saw in the days and weeks to follow that was the confluence of these multiple factors, of this hypermobilized center-left, of a deeply, deeply frustrated Black Lives Matter movement, of a particularly incendiary video.And people who for four years had been horrified by the behavior of the presidency and the administration said: “This—we’re done with this.We’re not doing this in our country anymore.”And they took to the streets.And people from around the world took to the streets.

Now, to understand Donald Trump and to understand, frankly, a lot of Republican politics is you have to understand there’s a deep villainization of any left-wing protest or protesters.They don’t like those people as a general rule, right?And what is also true is that there have been at times throughout these sustained protests—because there have been sustained protests of Donald Trump throughout the entirety of his administration—and those protests have included violent elements, people who say we have to resist fascism by punching back.

And Donald Trump’s administration has worked very hard to focus the energy of the protest on the violent elements of it and to try to delegitimize the criticisms of himself and his administration.And I actually think that that probably, that existence within that right-wing echo chamber, where every protest is antifa and “They’re all the real problem,” I actually think that probably leads him into a mistake, which is the Lafayette Square Park.

That, if—this goes back to the language he used in the ads in the Central Park Five—that if they’re thugs and criminals, you can do whatever you want to them.Their civil liberties stop once they’re committing crime.That’s what he wrote in ’88.

And so he believes that he’s got an antifa insurgency outside the White House, and he believed it’s going to be attractive to his voters if his guys go beat up those people, tear-gas them, clear them out, when in reality, this is a largely white crowd of D.C. suburbanites peacefully protesting in the daytime who get tear-gassed and cleared out so the president of the United States can do a 30-second photo op and then walk back.

I think Donald Trump in this case goes back to the playbook he has always gone to.There’s nothing new about it.What has changed is America’s appetite for these plays; that after time and time and time and time and time again, this time the majority of the American people said: “We’re tired of this.We’re not scared of those people with the signs in the park.We’re more scared of the government tear-gassing them and beating up them up.”

And what is that playbook that he’s picking back up?

The playbook that Donald Trump’s picking back up is the same one he’s always gone back to, is to frame us in this foundational societal war between the criminals and the rest of us.So the protesters against him?No, no, no, those aren’t Americans exercising their rights; those are thugs and criminals, right?The immigrants coming in across the border?These are not desperate people hungry for democracy; they’re rapists, right?Time and time and time again, anyone who opposes Donald Trump, and especially if they are a minority of some sort, they are a thug, they are a criminal, and the power of the government needs to crack down on them.The police need to beat them up and throw them in the back of the car.The agents need to, you know, to lock them up and throw away the key.We need to build the wall.

And a lot of Americans are attracted to that messaging.Donald Trump didn’t invent this playbook.And I think a lot of other Americans, for a long time, were willing to put up with this messaging.Whether they liked it or not, they were willing to say, “Well, I get what I want out of this.”And what we’re beginning to encounter, and the choice in front of the American people in 2020, is will a majority of voters finally say: “We’re done with this.We are no longer attracted to this, and we’re willing to call it what it is.We’re not going to play coy about it anymore”?

And as much as there’s debate about whether or not Trump will be able to hold onto his base, whether or not he’ll be able to mobilize folks, one of those key questions is, what percentage of Republican-inclined voters are willing to look at Donald Trump, look at his rhetoric, look at his behavior and be honest about what it is and then make a decision based on whether or not that is something they endorse or not?

And I think that’s going to be one of the key questions about whether or not he is re-elected.

Obama’s Constraint on Issues of Race

Take us to 2014: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, the other killings, BLM protests, where America is, and where the Obama administration is, why it’s difficult for Obama, this issue, which is surprising, as our first Black president, and the surprising role therefore that Biden plays.

So in 2014, we see a series of cases where the police have killed a Black American, sparking protests—Eric Garner in New York City; Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri; Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio—and there are quickly massive protests in the streets, hundreds and at times thousands of people outraged by what has happened.And in response, the police come out and begin exerting force, making mass arrests, tear-gassing folks.And the cycle begins, the cycle of American protest we’ve seen time and time and time and time again.

Now, this is particularly interesting, because it’s happening under the administration—second term of the administration of the first Black president.And so there’s obviously this question of how will Barack Obama handle what is, in fact, the oldest question in American history: the race question, the legacy of slavery.And how will this man, who for so many people seemed to represent an overcoming of that history, how will he handle it when confronted with that history?

Now, it’s important to remember, by the time we get to 2014, the Obama administration had already been rocked by these issues at least twice.Barack Obama had been completely sucker-punched after the arrest of Skip Gates in Boston, Cambridge, when he thought he was making innocuous comments: “Of course they shouldn’t arrest one of the leading academics in the world on the threshold of his own house for not doing anything.”And he couldn’t escape the outrage cycles. He hated the police, and he was this race warrior.And no matter what he did, he couldn’t maneuver his way out of this.

And it’s clear when you talk to people who are close to President Obama that he learned a lesson from that.He learned a lesson about the weight of his words, that he wasn’t going to receive any good-faith interpretations, he wasn’t going to receive any benefit of the doubt; that anything he said on these issues was going to be demagogued and painted as him being this race warrior who is out to get the police.

Now, we know Barack Obama; we know his politics.He’s nothing close to that.And yet for eight years, half of the country was engaged in this campaign to argue that Barack Obama was radical on these issues.

Now, Barack Obama is broadly sympathetic to the demands and the needs of the protesters.He knows the history.He’s concerned about issues of race and policing and brutality and profiling.He’s personally outraged when he sees some of these videos.But the lesson he learned from the Skip Gates incident was that inserting himself might in fact work against what he wants to see happen; that in some of these cases, it might be best to say nothing.

Very famously, Barack Obama never went to Ferguson, Missouri.To date, I’m not sure that he still has ever been to Ferguson, Missouri.And one of the reasons he didn’t go was that there was a concern that if he went, the Republicans would argue he was putting his foot on the scale of the investigation, that it would—that Barack Obama had dispatched Eric Holder, the Justice Department was trying to reform this department, and Barack Obama had to worry that if he even showed up in this American city, it would invalidate in the minds of Republicans the work that he was trying to do to fix the problem.

Now, that’s the environment in which these two officers are killed in New York.There’s massive protest around the country.A presidency who is—that is having to tiptoe on these issues to try to avoid getting in the way of any real change, and then two police officers are assassinated in New York. …

Barack Obama couldn’t have shown up in New York.And he deputizes Joe Biden.Now, this is one of the chief roles of Joe Biden from the very beginning, is that Joe Biden, for his faults, for his history, for his own—we all know Joe Biden.Joe Biden can’t be demagogued the way that a Black man with a funny name could be.This is Joe, right?This is a guy from Delaware who takes the Amtrak, who sounds like your uncle or the president of the pipefitters’ union, right?You couldn’t argue that Joe Biden was some race warrior, that he was Al Sharpton, that he was—that he hated the police.

And so Joe Biden was deployed in a lot of these instances seemingly to try to bring the temperature down, to be the ambassador to working-class white America, which includes the cops and the firefighters.And I think that deployment to New York was one of several instances in which one of Joe Biden’s chief responsibilities was to be an ambassador to the country, specifically to the white parts of the country, where Barack Obama’s presence might have only further inflamed the situation.And that’s not a fault of Barack Obama’s.It’s not that he wouldn’t have shown up and given an eloquent speech.It’s that the country itself was ill equipped, was unprepared and unwilling to hear the things that Barack Obama was saying, but might hear those same messages from Joe Biden.

The killings themselves, the police were tying it to that the killer was motivated by the killings of other Black men.It became a political issue.

Extremely.

What did Biden do?What did he understand from the past or pull from his tool bag that enabled him to walk in there and the story would become his empathy towards the families?

There was such a politics of this moment, where the police and the police unions were pushing a narrative where to even talk about bad things the police had done was guaranteed to lead to an increase in attacks on police officers.And so, when cases like this happened, there was a[n] outsized response and reaction and this concern that even having these conversations about race and policing was going to lead to additional dead police officers.And this was what was being asserted by a not insignificant chunk of the political spectrum.

And again, the way policing politics works is very often a seesaw of, who’s side are you on?Are you on the side of the police, or are you on the side of the criminals?And there’s nothing in between.Either you care about the police keeping us safe, or you care about the civil rights and the civil liberties of the thugs, right?And that has been the framing of this for decades in American politics.

And so the thing that folks worked hard to put on Obama was that he cares about the thugs and the criminals.He’s inviting rappers to the White House, and he’s—it was this idea that, “He’s not one of us; he doesn’t have our back,” and that he doesn’t actually care about these police officers who are killed.He wanted this to happen; this is what the, you know—or at least he was permissive of it.

You can’t make that argument about Joe Biden.That Joe Biden has been defined in public life by heartbreak and empathy—that when Joe Biden steps up at the funeral, you know that those tears are real.You know that that hug that lingers a second too long is because Joe Biden is in his feelings about what has happened; that you can believe whatever you want about Joe Biden, about his politics, about whether he’d be a good president.It’s impossible to argue in public life that Joe Biden is not a source of empathy and understanding to people who are hurting.

And so when Joe Biden is dispatched to New York City, what many of the police officers are seeing is someone who they believe probably does understand the pain they’re feeling.And again, it’s not that Barack Obama wouldn’t have felt that pain and that he wasn’t feeling that pain; it’s that they were—would have been unwilling to believe it from him.But in Joe Biden, they could see what he was trying to communicate.

Biden’s Struggle to Be Taken Seriously

Let me take you back to one thing you said earlier, which is maybe a good point that we should talk about for a second: the Uncle Joe syndrome, the fact that Joe struggled.Even during the years of vice presidency, a lot of the staff ridiculed him behind his back.He struggles to be taken seriously—the gaffes, the loquaciousness.What is it about Joe, his history that has led him to a point where he’s always struggling to overcome that?

You know, I think that Joe Biden’s greatest strengths can also be among his greatest weaknesses, right?Joe Biden is the guy you love to have a beer with, you love to talk to.You know that if you brought him a problem, he would listen to you and talk it through.Yet we live in a world, especially a media world right now, where every word of every sentence is being dissected, where it’s being interpreted by all types of actors, good-faith actors and bad-faith actors, right, where you don’t get do-overs.And the problem with talking all the time is that you’re talking all the time.You’re flubbing things; you’re getting them wrong.

Now, Joe Biden, there’s very little about Joe Biden’s political career that should lead us to believe he is personally the most thorough, right?He drops out of his first presidential campaign on a plagiarism scandal.And that lack of thoroughness, lack of at times rigor and specificity is something that comes back and manifests in different ways in different incidents throughout his career and then throughout his time in the administration.

Now, again, it’s both the most endearing thing about Joe Biden and at times one of his starkest weaknesses, right?“Big effing deal” is one of the best Joe Biden moments!It expressed what the country thought about this moment.But then you’ve got all his other flubs; you’ve got all types of other things; you’ve got all types of other statements, right?

And so, you know, again, I think that Biden’s, you know—to succeed in politics the way Joe Biden has requires a level of genius.But these political geniuses so often, their biggest strengths are also their biggest weaknesses.And for Joe Biden, his relatability, his empathy, the fact that he’s a real person, is undoubtedly his greatest strength.And also, sometimes people don’t want a real person as their president; they want Superman.

And so one of the questions becomes, can Joe Biden now project himself as Teflon, not as your buddy from the bar, not as Uncle Joe, but as the guy you want with his hands on the wheel?And I think that’s going to be one of the key questions for Joe Biden as November approaches.

Biden’s 2020 Run

So why now?Why is he running in 2020 at the age of 77?Is it perhaps because of what he learned from not running 2016?Why now?Is he too old?He knew he was going to get senility questions and all sorts, looking back at his long career.What do you think is the motivation here?

I think Joe Biden, like any number of people in the Democratic Party, see a true crisis of American democracy in the Trump presidency.And it’s hard to believe, based on his own statements, that Joe Biden doesn’t see some level of personal responsibility for the rise of Donald Trump.First of all, this was a response to the Obama-Biden administration.But second, Joe Biden was the vice president, and he chose not to run for president.And what ended up happening was a candidate in Hillary Clinton who is both an historic candidate and also a historically unlikable and unliked candidate, lost to Donald Trump.

It’s hard to imagine that Joe Biden doesn’t see some responsibility that falls to him on that.What would have happened if he would have run?Would they have been able to run the playbook that they run—that they ran against Hillary?Would these attacks, the racial—you know, would any of this have worked against Joe Biden?Because what we’re seeing now is that a lot of it doesn’t seem to be working.And so had he run in the first place, might America have been saved from these four years?

By the time you get to having to make a decision, 2018, you have to imagine that’s weighed pretty heavily on Joe Biden; that all of these things that, based on his politics, you know he’s horrified by what are happening, and maybe he could have stopped it.What we also know is that Joe Biden was going through a very difficult time in his personal life.You know, he’d lost one son; another was in the midst of personal crisis and scandal.And you can imagine the way that that weighed on him.

And then you can imagine how having made a decision that was seemingly personal in the first place, he now might feel a guilt about having done that, that he let the country down because he didn’t have a thicker skin.

And so it isn’t surprising to me that he would throw his hat in here.Again, Joe Biden, many of his chief weaknesses are much harder to exploit when the other candidate is Donald Trump.You’re worried about him going off script?Well, the president’s Donald Trump.You’re worried about him being a little old or a little too white?Well, guess what? The president’s Donald Trump.You’re worried about his old positions on things like crime and race?The president is Donald Trump!

And so in a moment where much of the party has moved kind of beyond where a President Biden might be, he represents a vast improvement in the eyes of many American voters from the current status quo.

Biden and the 1994 Crime Bill

… The mass incarcerations that happened in the Black community: Did he understand—and what that did to Black communities across America?Do you think he learned from that?Number one, the consequences.Number two, how he learned, evolved from that point, and why the Black community still supports him.

So, going back in time for a moment, in the early ’90s, there was deep concern about rising violence on the back end of the crack era in major American cities.There was deep frustration, there was horror at the violence that was being seen in some of these cities, and there was a demand from the American people, including from most Black Americans, that something be done about this crime.

And so we see waves of legislation at both local levels, cities, states, but then also at the federal level, that seeks to crack down on crime.We see hundred—you know, we see, I think there was 100,000 new police officers through the crime bill put on American streets.We see new investments in technology and crime tracing.We see new aggressive policing around drugs.We see the creation of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug crimes where now we’re locking people up and throwing away the key.

And, you know, very often in this conversation there is a debate between, or there’s a grapple between—between the sense of order and then a sense of safety, because those are two different things.And what many Americans wanted in this moment is they wanted order, and they didn’t have much time to think about what the consequences of that order would be.What happens when you lock up every man in a neighborhood?What happens when you aggressively strip people off the streets for drug crimes, take them out of school, take them out of their jobs, lock them up for years and years and years?What does that do to a community?What does that do to a country?

The two things can be true at once: that crack cocaine wreaked havoc and destruction on American cities, and the response to crack cocaine also wreaked havoc and destruction on American cities, to American families, to American communities; that it locked up a generation of Black men; it broke a generation of Black families.And there were few public champions for the policies that did this as strident, as forceful as Joe Biden.

Now, what Sen. Biden still says is that he didn’t do most of this, that the legislation was only federal, that the problem with mass incarceration is a state-level issue.And that’s true. It’s 100% true.And also there is no more big bully pulpit—there’s no bigger bully pulpit than Washington, D.C.; that when the federal government passes something into a law on criminal justice, it sets the tone that the states follow.It sets the best practices that the states follow; that if the feds institute mandatory minimums on this, then why should our state legislature not do this as well; that from one of the biggest stages in the country Joe Biden championed locking people up and throwing away the key as a response to drug crime.

To act as if that did not have trickle-down consequences for real people and real families is to live outside the realm of reality.

So what do we learn about Joe Biden and where we are now from that response and the way he did or did not learn from those mistakes?

I think Joe Biden is eager to show that he has learned from those mistakes.I think Joe Biden rhetorically at times remains defensive; that he doesn’t want to engage in the minutiae and the debate of all of the reasons why he might have been complicit in building a system that has broken Black communities.

But I believe Joe Biden in his heart truly did not want to harm anyone through this legislation, and I think he now believes it is his responsibility to do something not only that repairs that harm, but also that solidifies his reputation in this space; that when Joe Biden sees the opportunity of the presidency, it’s an opportunity to never have to hear the word “crime bill” again.Why? Because he will sign into legislation X, Y and Z, right?He sees himself as an LBJ figure who, we don’t have time to remember LBJ as a segregationist.Why? Because we are too busy remembering him about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, right?That Joe Biden sees—you know, that on these issues, historically, Joe Biden has moved a bit with the winds of the party; that in response to crime he’s been the champion of a crime bill in the same way that in response to violence against women, he was involved in the Violence Against Women—in response to the crisis of sexual assault on college campuses, he responds and begins being the face of that fight, right?

That Joe Biden is someone who at his core is empathetic to pain and to hurt.And I think that what Vice President Biden sees in the opportunity to become president is a means of putting his empathy for those families into practice by shifting on these issues, undoing some of the things that he did, but then also pushing everything one step further.I think that’s how he would argue he sees the presidency and the opportunity of the presidency. …

The Choice Between Biden and Trump

The name of this film is The Choice 2020.In a moment of the crises that we are now dealing with in America, COVID and the dramatic debate that’s going on in the streets about civil rights and the way that this administration has been dealing with it, what kind of a choice is Joe Biden for president at this very moment in history?

I think that in this moment in history, Joe Biden is a choice to return to some level of normalcy.He’s a choice to make politics something that doesn’t feel like such a crisis at every moment.That even for a lot of Democratic voters, they may find Joe Biden frustrating.They might think he’s not as progressive as he should be.He may not be where they are on any number of issues.But for a lot of people, a choice, even to just go back to where things were the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated is a choice they would eagerly make.

Joe Biden represents a return to American politics that is different than what we’ve experienced for the last four years.And for folks who are frustrated and upset by what we’ve experienced for the last four years, that’s a really compelling choice.

The follow-up on that is, the choice between Biden and Trump?What is that choice?

I think the choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, rhetorically, is in many ways a choice between a politics of unity and we’re all in this together, a rose-colored-glasses look at America; and chaos, and the savages are at the gates, and only I can help save us, right?These are two hyperbolic and, in many ways, divorced-from-reality views of American society.Yet our constant presences in our politics that we are seeing two of our political tropes come up against each other and the choice that voters have is, what do you believe about America?Is America a place that’s more good than bad, on the right track even if it’s screwing stuff up, and a place where you can grow and you can learn?You can write the crime bill and then now decry it.Or is America a place on the brink of destruction, with immigrants stealing your jobs, and crime surging in cities, and people coming for you and your family?

This election is in many ways a choice about what America Americans want to believe to be true.

Latest Interviews

Get our Newsletter

Stay Connected

Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

Koo and Patricia Yuen

Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.