'Hey, everyone. I'm David Chalian, CNN's Washington Bureau Chief and Political Directo, and welcome to the CNN Political Briefing. In one month, President Joe Biden's one-term presidency will come to a close. He'll be handing the White House back to his political rival, Donald Trump. After being pressured to drop out of the race in July, Biden saw his chosen successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, decisively defeated. Now, Biden has a few weeks left to put his closing marks on his presidency. So what will his last acts as president be? And how will America remember him? Franklin Foer is a staff writer for The Atlantic and he's the author of "The Last Politician," a book that detailed the first two years of the Biden White House. He joins me now to discuss what Biden's legacy will be as we enter his final days in office. Thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate it.

So good to be here.

So you wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election that—I'll quote you—quote, "Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk." Now, is that your belief that, given all the work you've done in studying Joe Biden's presidency, the book you wrote on the first two years of it and your observations of him, history will record his presidency, you believe, as that — that he is the one that handed the keys to the White House back to Donald Trump?

'I think so. I mean, I think, if you could have put a pin in his presidency somewhere and at the beginning of 2023, you would have said he's had a pretty darn successful first term as president. But then, you know, he ran. He said that he was going to return the country to some semblance of pre-Trump normal. His political agenda — preventing Trump from returning to the White House — was really the end goal of almost everything that he proposed and everything that he did. He said he was going to preserve democracy, and by failing to withdraw from the race and by setting up an election where Trump had all the cards stacked in his favor, he essentially undermined the primary goal of his presidency.

And in all the reporting you did during those first two years, did you ever pick up on or was there any discussion or consideration of him not seeking a second term?

No. No. I mean, I think that that was not a conversation that came up that much during the first two years. I think that if you talk to people within the White House, they were assuming that he'd run again. But he hadn't really gone through the process of thinking that through. And I think when Joe Biden talked to his aides about it, he always says, you know, look, I haven't made up my mind if I'm going to run again, but you should assume that the default is that I am going to run. And they did.

You know, a lot of people in analyzing this election have said sort of that — what you just described right there, that assumption and then that decision was the original sin here for Democrats, that Joe Biden, given his advanced age, was never in the driver's seat of any kind of reelection bid. I'm just wondering, do you think his team, again just because of your experience in reporting stuff out with them, insulated him from that thinking that the broader Democratic establishment — I mean, obviously, he was aware of the James Carvilles or David Axelrods bellyaching publicly. But there was a broad sentiment in the Democratic establishment that this was not the best path forward for the party. Was he just impervious to that? Did his aides not allow that in to affect his thinking and your understanding?

'I'm not sure that there was ever really the broad thinking within the Democratic Party. People like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and a lot of other big time Democrats like Joe Biden as a human being, and they think that he did a good job as president. And none of them went to Joe Biden and said you need to step aside. And so it's not just his aides who are at fault here. I think it's everybody was at fault. And to be sure — and I experienced this myself — is that when you looked at Joe Biden up close during the first couple of years of his presidency, he was totally the guy who was in charge. And I think the question wasn't, okay, is Joe Biden compos mentis? Clearly, the answer is that Joe Biden had complete control of his faculties, that he was the guy who — where the buck stopped in the White House. The question always was, does he have the stamina to run for president again? And, more than that, do we want to have an 86-year-old president? And I think Democrats just looked at the first part of that and said, okay, everything is is up in the attic. But they didn't look at the second and third parts.

Which is astonishing because the American people were looking at it. The polling goes back to the summer of '23 of Americans expressing real concern about his age and stamina.

Yeah, I mean, I think, not to reduce this, but it's something that's incredibly common when people have an older relative, that when they're with them all of the time, they don't necessarily notice all of the symptoms of aging and they can just see the ways in which they're navigating their way through the day in a perfectly competent manner. But from afar, when you look at somebody, you haven't seen them on a daily basis, you're able to see the ways in which the advances of time have basically dulled or diminished them.

That makes sense. I've not thought about it quite that way before, but that is our everyday sort of human experience with our own families and friends and neighbors and the like. So, take me into this period as much as you understand it. You know, we hear time and again from the White House and White House aides running through the tape. What is your assessment of how Joe Biden is wrapping up this presidency?

So I think Joe Biden has a lot of things that he's focused on, and he's just kind of given up on maybe some of the public parts of the presidency. And it never really felt like, even going back to the beginning of this term, that he enjoyed the public parts of the job as much as you think that he would. He's got a long sense of grievance with the press, and so he doesn't enjoy everything being filtered through the media. I think he feels like he can't get a fair shake in public opinion or with the press, and so he's kind of playing for history.

I think he may have felt that way for the last 52 years.

That's correct. That is correct. That is correct. Ever since Maureen Dowd ran her famous piece about his plagiarism, I think that, you know, he's felt that — or maybe even going back further beyond that. But so he's, I think he's still doing things, and he's still engaged. But his approval is at the lowest point that it's ever been, and I think that's because he's publicly disengaged.

Yeah. I mean, I saw a new poll out from Marquette University today had his approval at a low in their polling of the entire term. So he's sort of exiting at a low point. Even among Democrats, his approval rating dropped below 70% somewhere in the high 60s among Democrats.

Because Democrats are in the same place that I am, where they kind of blame him for Trump's election.

'There's no doubt. And, by the way, I think appropriately so. I mean, I think it's hard in any honest analysis of what went on in this election to say that he doesn't absorb a whole bunch of the reasons why it ended up the way it did would be sort of just — and some of it in his own doing and some of it in just the way we've seen leaders in the Western world in the post-COVID inflationary period just dealing with backlash from their citizens.

His approval rating is still probably higher than Olaf Scholz's or Macron's or any number of center left politicians.

Yeah, little doubt about that. We're going to take a quick break. We have a lot more to discuss with Frank Foer in just a moment. Stay with us.

Tell me what you thought about the Hunter Biden pardon as a part of Joe Biden's legacy. Where where will that fit into the story of Joe Biden?

'I was honestly surprised that he did it. One of his most famous expressions is, "I give you my word is Biden." And he was so explicit in saying that he wouldn't do it. I thought, okay, he's thought this through, he's made up his mind. But I think that really at core, Hunter Biden was afraid that he would get prosecuted by Donald Trump. I think there's so much guilt, there's so much hurt and pain that encrusts their relationship. That Joe Biden loved Joe Biden best. And everybody knew that. Hunter knew that. Joe Biden knew that Hunter knew that. And there was a lot of guilt that surrounded that. And Hunter Biden has really had kind of a tough go of things, even as he's kind of lived this high-flying life that he's lived. And I think that Joe Biden wanted to protect him in ways that he maybe failed him in the past. And the other thing is, is that I think as Joe Biden's inner circle shrank over time, he was spending more time with Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden became one of his primary political advisers, and, therefore, I think if Hunter Biden really wanted this badly, Joe Biden was spending so much time talking to him in the last phases of his presidency that it became kind of inevitable that he would do it.

Yeah. Personally, I was not as surprised that he ended up doing it. What I was surprised at was how adamant he was that he wasn't going to do it, that he didn't leave himself some wiggle room in the previous months when asked about this on multiple occasions, nor did White House spokespeople. Because what parent with this unique power would not want to preserve the option? And certainly once he was no longer the candidate and didn't have to worry about what it might mean to hand it over to Harris had she won, it seemed like almost a no brainer for him, even though he's gotten a ton of backlash. And, to your point about being sometimes bitter about the way the press covers him or about his fellow Democrats in the way they treat him, all my understanding from the White House is he is not really pleased with a lot of his Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill and in town about the way they've reacted to this.

Yeah, well, there's a very real possibility that Donald Trump uses his Justice Department to prosecute his critics, and one of the things that Joe Biden talked about from day one, one of the reasons that he said that he was getting into this race to run for president to begin with in 2018, 2019, was that he wanted to protect the rule of law. No matter how strong the impulse is to protect your son — any parent would feel something akin to that — when you become president of United States, your primary responsibility is still to the nation. And it doesn't really change anything in the big scheme of things, but it just feels like a disappointing and a bit of hypocrisy given everything else that he talked about.

Yes, more than a bit of hypocrisy, no doubt about that. Obviously, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his role on the world stage is always front and center in Joe Biden's mind, and the painful period for him that you wrote about at length in your book about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaotic nature in which that took place. I'm not sure. Did you ever pick up from him, or those closest to him, regret about that?

Not from him. I think that there were people close to him who were involved in that process who feel regret, but I don't think that he's ever experienced regret. And we've said a lot of uncharitable things about Joe Biden, but I think that that is going to be a decision and a moment that looks better with some distance and with some historical perspective because it didn't collapse American power, like some people said. It didn't make us seem like an unreliable ally, and it helped turn the page from one era in American foreign policy opening up the next.

The other big ticket foreign policy item that sort of remains on his desk is getting the hostages out of Gaza, and clearly, I mean, every indication is that the administration is working to the 11th hour on this and probably in alignment with the incoming Trump administration who would like to see this resolved before January 20th. Do you think all that has happened since October 7th of last year —where does that fit into, do you think, the Biden legacy?

I'm not prepared to make a judgment about that because I think a lot can happen in the next couple of months. So they invested all of this time into brokering a normalization deal between the Saudis and the Israelis. If Joe Biden is able to get to a spot where he's able to help reshape the countours of the Middle East where Iran — this is not necessarily Joe Biden's doing, but it's kind of what's happened in this chapter of history, is that Iran is a is an extremely weak regional power. There is an emerging alliance between the Israelis, the United States, the Gulf states that becomes the primary facts on the ground in the Middle East. And it's not just a defense alliance. It's not just a means of containing Iran. It's also, it's a trading bloc. They've managed to stymie China's efforts to become a strategic power in the region. Obviously, there's so many passions enflamed because of the hostages, because of the destruction in Gaza, and those will continue to be important parts of the historical narrative. But there are other strands to the historical narrative that may supersede those other events.

'So, I want to close out this conversation with you, sort of where we started, which is I want to pressure test this theory of yours about everything else being an asterisk. You poured years of your life into reporting on the first half of this administration, and your book portrays a really high-impact presidency, accomplishing very big things in an era where I'm not sure many people thought big things were possible anymore. And you credit Joe Biden himself and his approach and his viewpoints as a sort of North Star throughout that. If you go back and reread your book, is your belief that that all just gets wiped away with Donald Trump returning to the presidency?

No, I mean, well, look, we need to see a couple things unfold. How does the constitutional system, how does American democracy look four years from now? If Donald Trump doesn't manage to fundamentally transform institutions, doesn't manage to fundamentally transform American democracy, maybe you'll say it was no big deal that Joe Biden paved the way for Donald Trump. I think that he accomplished so many things that have receded into memory incredibly quickly. His management of Covid, which, look, there were problems with, but it was kind of a miracle that within six months of coming into office, you were able to stroll into a CVS or Walgreens and get a shot that would save your life. Trump gets some credit for Operation Warp Speed, but the execution was the really challenging part, and he nailed that. You know, we'll see what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act, which could be the significant boost to a green economy, but it could also be demolished by the Trump administration. There are all of these accomplishments that kind of hang in the balance that depend on implementation and execution, and he's not going to be the guy implementing and executing them. His political enemy will be. And I'm not sure how that's going to work out.

Franklin Foer, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure.

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