CNN Reporter Questions Biden’s Agenda in Final Weeks – Could Be Remembered as ‘the Guy Who Was Just in Between the Trump Terms’

MATTINGLY: “Isaac, if you look at the legislative record, particularly the first two years, it doesn’t have much precedent over the course of the last five decades, right? And that’s a lot of what they’ve been doing the last couple months. It’s been trying to push out all the money that was already signed off on there to furnish that legacy. But in terms of how people view the president right now, I think what’s stunning to me, the latest Quinnipiac University poll, his approval is at 38 percent right now. In December of 2020, Donald Trump’s approval after he’d lost the election was 44 percent. Now, that was pre-January 6. After January 6, his approval was 34 percent. That’s kind of within the margin of where Biden is right now. And Donald Trump had January 6 —“

DOVERE: “Right.”

MATTINGLY: “— legacy. Where are we right now legacy wise?”

DOVERE: “He had — I think you’re right, a historic first couple of years in office, more legislation on the domestic front than anybody going back to Lyndon Johnson can claim credit for. I do think that what you’ve seen is a slow receding into the bushes from Joe Biden here. I’m going to do it. I’m going to bring up a West Wing quote here. There’s a moment on the West Wing when John Spencer, as Leo McGarry, the White House chief of staff, says, he’s, like, trying to rally the troops. And he says, we can do more — we can affect more change in one day in this building than we will in a lifetime after we leave the building. That is not the approach that Joe Biden has been taking, at least publicly since the election, certainly, and even since he ceded the nomination to Kamala Harris. But there are things that he could be doing through executive authority. A lot of things that he could be doing would probably put a target on them for Donald Trump to go after first. It does not seem like taking another vacation now is the kind of running through the tape mentality that White House staff has said he and the whole building is approaching things with. I think it’s a really difficult thing for Joe Biden to know that he came into the presidency as a rejection of Donald Trump. And here he is being replaced by Donald Trump. I think back to an interview that I did with Joe Biden. He’d been president for about three weeks, I was talking to him for a book that I wrote. And I — part of the takeaway that I had from it was him trying to assert himself as Joe Biden, the guy who got elected president. Not just Barack Obama’s vice president, not just the guy who beat Donald Trump. But now that is part of who he is, and it may define who he is. A couple weeks before the election, I had a conversation with a senior person in the White House, and I said, if Harris loses, most of the way that Biden is going to be remembered, at least in the short-term, is the guy who was just in between the Trump terms. And — no, that’s not true. At this moment, that is the way that he is acting.”