Biden’s Former Chief of Staff: Trump Can’t Escape His Record

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, with COVID-19 forcing Joe Biden to deliver his acceptance speech virtually, we get a unique perspective on both the pandemic and Biden himself with our next guest. Ron Klain was President Obama’s Ebola Czar and before that, he was Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, and he remains one of his closest advisers. Here he is now telling our Walter Isaacson how Biden would marshal the nation to defeat the virus and why he is the man for the top job now.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank, Christiane. And Ron Klaim, welcome to the show.

RON KLAIN, FORMER WHITE HOUSE EBOLA RESPONSE COORDINATOR: Thanks, Walter. Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: You were the Ebola Czar. What thing did you do to get that under control that might be less interest today?

KLAIN: Well, first of all, we really started with a whole of government response, really throwing everything we could at it. In that case, the disease was largely overseas. We needed to do some preparations here in the U.S., it was an international response that we were part of. But I think the most important thing we did differently was we put science first. President Obama made it very clear that while I was coordinating the logistics of the response, trying to get organized, making it happen, that the strategy came from people like Tony Fauci and from Tom Friedman and Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Nicky Lurie, who ran the preparedness unit at HHS. We had medical experts determining what the strategy should be, and we took their advice and direction. I think, from the start here, President Trump has allowed kind of politics and political imperatives to suppress the science. He has denied the threat. That’s another big difference, which is that President Obama was very candid with the American people about the fact we had a big Ebola problem in Africa, we were going to see some cases in the U.S., we needed to get ready for it, we needed to get our system prepared for it, we needed to screen, we needed to test, we needed to get hospitals ready, we needed to buy equipment, and we went and did those things. President Trump’s approach from early on has been to deny that there was a problem, saying it was going to go away, say it would go away like a miracle. We didn’t assume Ebola it was going to go away like a miracle. We assumed it would go away when it got hot. We fought that disease every day in West Africa with preparations in the U.S. to get it under control and eventually extinguish that epidemic.

ISAACSON: What are the biggest failures happening right now in the coronavirus response?

KLAIN: Well, I think the biggest failure, if you had to summarize in a sense, is a lack of a national strategy. And we’re facing a global pandemic, and the president has basically walked off the field and said it’s up to each state to sort out. So, we have 50 state testing strategies, 50 tracing strategies, you know, 50 strategies on PPE and protective gear, shutting down and opening up schools, which has left every one of these states on their own. And that’s no way to fight a challenge like this. We need national leadership, we need national strategy, we need the unique tools that only the federal government can muster to face a challenge like the one we’re facing.

ISAACSON: Bill Gates on this show said that the CDC should be having one website and one strategy to do testing, get testing out and get results back quickly. Would that be possible?

KLAIN: I think it would be possible. Whether or not it should be the CDC or some other entity in the federal government, there are lots of ways to structure it. You could have a special agency do it. Vice President Biden, for example, has called for a pandemic testing board that would sit above all other agencies to organize the strategy. But Mr. Gates is absolutely right. What we need is a coordinated federal strategy to drive testing and to drive tracing. I mean, testing is just one part of this, Walter, it’s a critical part, no question. But once we have the results, we need to do something with the results. And that involves what epidemiologists called contact tracing. If you or I test positive, we want to know who we were in contact with, who should be isolated, who we should make sure they’re not spreading the disease to others. That’s a lot of hard work. Vice President Biden has called for 100,000 contact tracers coast to coast to do that work, and that also has to go hand in hand with the testing.

ISAACSON: How would we increase the critical supplies to make it work better? What would you have done?

KLAIN: So, one thing the president could have done as early as March was invoke the Defense Production Act, which is a legal authority the president has to require the private sector to produce more goods. One of the problems here is, in the absence of the federal government ordering and paying for all these testing supplies, private companies said, you know, I keep hearing that these new tests will come online, I keep hearing that we’ll get these instant tests, new saliva tests, new antigen tests, and so, I don’t want to make all this stuff for the old tests because no one will buy it, right? And so, the private sector hasn’t really ramped up to the extent that it could. The answer should have been back in March, even back in February, frankly, the president to use his legal authority to say, the federal government will buy the testing supplies, the federal government will buy the equipment, the federal government will buy the chemicals and pay for the manufacturer so we will have enough of it. The private sector incentives aren’t right by themselves. This is the kind of crisis that requires real intervention by the federal government.

ISAACSON: Down here at Tulane, where I teach, we’re bringing students back carefully day after day in waves, testing them, and trying to make it work with hybrid classes and online. But the University of North Carolina, which also tried to do it carefully, just had to shut down the campus itself and go totally online. What’s your level of concern as colleges across the country return?

RON KLAIN, FORMER WHITE HOUSE EBOLA RESPONSE COORDINATOR: Well, I think there should be a level of concern about it. I think that — again, I think that educational institutions, I know, are trying to do the right thing, trying to balance their educational priorities with the need of keeping students and faculty and staff safe. It’s going to be a big challenge, because, frankly, colleges and universities, they don’t exist separately from our society. They’re not a separate island. And unlike the National Basketball Association, you cannot put them in a bubble completely and isolate them, in the way that the NBA has successfully isolated itself. So they’re exposed to and vulnerable to the same things that are going wrong with our country as a whole. If we don’t have this disease under control, which we don’t, and if we don’t have a national strategy to fight it, which we don’t, then what’s going to happen at colleges and universities is the same thing that’s happening everyplace else, which is, the disease will continue to spread. We won’t have enough procedures, testing, tracing in place to get it under control. And I think that’s the challenge that colleges and universities are facing. They’re part of the society. They don’t exist separate from.

ISAACSON: New Zealand just locked down parts of Auckland because there were 29 cases discovered.

KLAIN: Yes.

ISAACSON: Do you think we should try in this country to have such measures where you can quickly try to shut down any outbreak?

KLAIN: Well, I think we need an actual strategy around fighting COVID. And that strategy — a number of countries have done it differently, but what they have all done it successfully by having a clear, focused strategy. For example, last week, Vice President Biden called for a national — nationwide masking mandate to have every one of the states, not just most, but every one of the states have masking mandatory when we are around other people. And that’s a strategy that’s worked in some countries. I think potentially selectively shutting down places where they’re seeing flare-ups is a strategy that has worked in some countries. Certainly, much more robust testing and tracing regimes have worked in some countries. And, in the meantime, the federal government is providing no guidance or reversing guidance. We have seen our schools, the Centers for Disease Control at first issue guidelines about how to open schools safely. Then the political figures and administration said, oh, that’s just too rigorous, it’s too tough. The president spent a month saying, basically, that the CDC guideline shouldn’t be a barrier to reopening, and then withdrew the CDC guidelines and had the CDC issue new, much more vague guidelines. So I don’t think it’s a question of which of these strategies work. It’s about having a strategy that is up to the challenge. And we don’t have that right now.

ISAACSON: You were chief of staff to Vice President Biden once and you have been a longtime adviser to him. Tell me about what it’s like to brief him and talk to him about coronavirus.

KLAIN: Well, he’s been very engaged right since the start. All the way back in January, he wrote an op-ed in “USA Today,” warning about the potential pandemic, warning that the president wasn’t ready for it. He reiterated those warnings in February, again, when few other political figures were talking about the coronavirus threat, saying that the Chinese government wasn’t being transparent, wasn’t allowing our people on the ground in the right places, at a time when President Trump was busy praising the Chinese government’s handling of this. And throughout this, he’s been outspoken, he’s been engaged. He gets briefed regularly by leading scientists in the field. Those briefings are led by Dr. David Kessler, the former head of the FDA, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general of the United States. He has an entire team of experts that he consults regularly. I’m sure by Vice President Biden is spending more time getting briefed by experts about COVID than the president is. That’s the kind of person he was when he was in the White House, in terms of getting his intelligence briefings and taking threats like this to the American people very seriously. Look, as the vice president has been very candid about saying, the president can’t keep bad things from happening. The president can’t say that nothing bad will ever happen on his or her watch. But what the president can do is two things, which is to really be fully engaged and respond and to take responsibility when things go wrong. And President Trump’s done neither of those two things. Joe Biden would do both of those things.

ISAACSON: The Trump campaign’s latest ads depict Joe Biden as being addled, getting old, no longer mentally totally with it. You deal with him quite a bit. How would you counter that?

KLAIN: I counter that by saying that, obviously, he’s very on top of things. And the American people will see this for themselves. They have seen this for themselves. He gave a speech last week where he announced the selection of his running mate, Senator Harris, and everyone in America could watch that speech and make their own assessment of Vice President Biden’s capacity and his sharpness. I think he seemed very capable and very sharp. He is when we talk to him about issues, whether that’s COVID, or the economy, or the racism crisis. The American people will get to see the vice president again firsthand during the convention and, of course, ultimately, in the fall. They will see him go one-on-one with President Trump in three debates. And I think they can compare head to head which of these two men has more capacity and capability to be president of the United States. And I’m very confident how that will come out.

ISAACSON: There’s some criticism too of the vice president for what are called the basement tapes, that he seems to be hunkered down, that he’s not out there. Will he be able to get out there more?

KLAIN: Well, he has said that he is going to conduct his campaign in a way that’s responsible and that’s safe. And so he has been doing speeches, but obviously in socially distanced settings. He has been visiting places in a very responsible way. I will tell you what he’s not going to do, Walter. He is not going to do events, like President Trump did in Tulsa, where he basically created like a super-spreader event, where, like, we have seen a bunch of COVID spread as a result of that. He’s not going to do things that put people at risk by virtue of his campaigning. And so, yes, it is going to be — I mean, I love campaigns. I love the events. I love the rallies. I love going to them. I love being a staffer at them. That’s not what the fall is going to look like. Will he travel? Yes, as he has. Will he appear in places? Yes, as he has. But it is going to be a very different kind of campaign, at least on the Biden side, because we’re not going to spread this disease in the interest of politics. He’s going to act responsibly, like anyone should.

ISAACSON: In the convention, for all the way it’s being done by Zoom, isn’t there something wrong when there’s no crowd reactions?

KLAIN: Sure. I mean, there’s definitely something lost by not being able to do the kind of convention we have. There’s something lost by not being able to send our children to school safely. There’s something lost by not being able to watch football games this fall. There’s — this country has lost a lot because of Donald Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID crisis. And, of course, it’s lost more than 170,000 lives, most poignantly. I think, on that list of losses, the absence of cheering crowds in a convention hall is not on the top of the list. But, sure, I would much rather be in Milwaukee right now in the hall, seeing old friends and seeing people react to it, and having the kinds of amazing experiences that a political convention is. This is that. And — but I think, in that way, it’s very fitting of what we’re going through as a country. And the kind of convention we’re seeing from the Democrats and that we will see from the Republicans is, sadly, the product of the Trump administration’s mismanagement of this crisis. Now. We’re going to make lemonade out of lemons. And I think we are putting on a very strong convention program with the limitations that we have.

ISAACSON: Joe Biden’s known very well for being able to walk across the aisle. What compromises would he make? What would he give up in order to get a new coronavirus relief bill?

KLAIN: Well, I mean, first and foremost, Walter, he would start by sitting down and talking to the leaders in both parties and trying to put this together. I mean, you can’t pass legislation standing in a sand trap at the Bedminster Country Club. That’s not the way you’re going to get things done. And what I can tell you and what Joe Biden would be doing is to be meeting with the Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate, trying to find a way to get a package passed. And I’m pretty confident that he would get that done. But we all know what needs to happen here, right? We need to fix the post office and get it funded to resolve that crisis that Trump’s created. And then, on COVID, we know what we need to do. We know that we need to get aid to the people who are hurting. We need to get aid to state and local governments that are strapped by the consequences of this. We need to make sure that businesses have the tools they need to reopen safely with the right gear and right protections, right reconfigurations. We need to make sure our schools have the support they need to be able to teach people, either remotely, where that has to be, or to the extent they can do in-person instruction, with safety protection for the teachers in the schools. So, those are the basic things that need to happen. I don’t think it’s that complicated. But it requires presidential leadership. And the president simply golfing and tweeting is not going to get that done.

ISAACSON: Do you think the original Payroll Protection Program shortchanged Main Street? And, if so, what would Biden do about that?

KLAIN: Well, first of all, we know that the money didn’t go to all the places it should have. We know that some people got who shouldn’t have gotten it. We know that a lot of businesses, particularly minority-oriented businesses, didn’t get — didn’t get their loans approved under that. So, I think making sure that the aid to business really gets to Main Street, really gets to the people who are hurting is an important thing that Vice President Biden has emphasized. He’s also emphasized something that our businesses really need, particularly smaller businesses that are struggling to reopen. They need special aid to help reopen. People who are trying to reopen and put up Plexiglas shields, who are trying to equip their workers with the right protective gear, they need help to do that. They need both clear guidance about that, and they need financial help to do that. And that’s the kind of help Joe Biden would provide.  I think the thing that I hear most often from small business people, Walter, is they just don’t know what they’re supposed to do. There’s just no clear guidance. There’s no clear rules, there’s no clear set of procedures they’re supposed to follow. And I think that’s what the federal government should provide first and foremost, and then the resources to help, um, you know, make all that work.

ISAACSON: The democratic ticket is now pretty far ahead in many of the polls, but so, uh, that the case in 2016, are you worried, do you think the Democrats might get overconfident?

KLAIN: I don’t think anyone is getting overconfident in the Biden campaign. I can tell you that. I think we’re going to fight this thing out every single day, as hard as if we were two points behind or five points behind her are far behind, we have to be, to be motivated, to fight very, very hard. We all saw what happened in 2016. We’re not going to let that happen again. And we’re going to fight our guts out to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I do think that we’ve got a great ticket in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I think that’s a great asset to us in terms of winning this election. But I also think there’s one other thing, which is that Donald Trump was able to run in 2016 a little bit as all things to all people. He was kind of a, a well known unknown in the sense that he was a very famous person, but people really didn’t know what he stood for, what he would do.

KLAIN: They didn’t know what kind of president would be. He was able to present an image of someone who was a successful businessman and able to run on an image. And I think what’s really different three years later is that he has a track record. And so track record of spectacular and horrific failure. He is headed into a reelection right now as the first president, since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs on his presidency. He’s seen a death toll from the coronavirus pandemic that is unmatched by, uh, even the death toll in world war II. We’re losing more Americans each month to COVID than we lost in the average month of world war II. Uh, he’s in the middle of a racism crisis, that is the only solution for is just more divisiveness. And so I think what really is different about 2016 and 2020 is the fact that President Trump has to be accountable for his record. You can’t run from, I can’t run away from it and you can’t run on it. And so I think that that’s a, that’s a major difference between this year and four years ago.

ISAACSON: Ron Klain, thank you so much for joining us.

KLAIN: Thanks for having me.