Transcript - America This Week, Jan 17, 2025: "The Annotated Final Speech of Joe Biden"

A historically peculiar presidency ends on an oddly half-assed note. Plus, the chilling "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta," by Kate Braverman

Matt Taibbi: All right, welcome to America This Week, I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, are you home?

Walter Kirn: I am, but I’m packing my bags for Washington, D.C.

Matt Taibbi: That’s right.

Walter Kirn: Monday night, 10 P.M, I’ll be live on the Greg Gutfeld Show from some undisclosed location, probably to avoid drone attack, and I’m hoping though that you and I can fit in some coverage from ATW that evening or that day.

Matt Taibbi: We should be able to. I don’t think I’m going to go, it turns out, but it’s going to be a busy day for sure.

Walter Kirn: Well, I’ve been briefed, I’m serious, on some of the security threats, and as a result, I won’t be eating for three days or drinking. I guess I can bring bottled water, it’ll be sort of like a trip to El Salvador, but it is a little daunting because there are circulating all sorts of rumors about things that might happen. I’m less and less scared because of the number of former presidents and leaders of other countries and representatives who will be there. If I’m in any room, I want Obama also to be there and someone from the European Union.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, get someone from the European Union, yeah, I think you should use Ursula von der Leyen as a human shield.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I actually wanted to bring Gavin Newsom as a human shield. He appears to believe that he has a political future, despite others believe that he doesn’t, and I don’t think that the party would want to sacrifice him or whoever these shadowy groups are that might be hostile to the inauguration. I’m not saying it’s the Democrats, it could be the Albanians as in Wag the Dog, it could be anyone, yeah,

Matt Taibbi: Right? Right, the evil Albanians.

Walter Kirn: Right, right.

Matt Taibbi: Albania hasn’t been a character in the American story in a while in the United States.

Walter Kirn: And it’s such a fascinating country. Half Muslim, half Christian, and apparently they get along, and I think Albania is probably a model for us all, which is why we don’t hear about it much. We’re so committed to the politics of division that the unity of Albania would embarrass us.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. No, absolutely. Well, okay, so in addition to the upcoming inauguration, and this is when a whole new era of probably ATW begins, where we’re going to be talking about a new administration, and new issues, and new problems, and-

Walter Kirn: And thank goodness really. Has this not been the most wearisome last two months of this show really? I thought that the election would kind of give us this window of fun and fanciful reflection and future speculation, but instead it’s just been a gauntlet of crises, terrorist attacks, missiles into Russia, bird flu rumors, these terrible fires.

Matt Taibbi: Wildfires, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Walter Kirn: I feel like the second presidential term for Trump is already over. These last two months have felt that way.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, there have been so many bizarre distractions between the drones and the international situation, now we have this new possible ceasefire in the Middle East, but we’re going to have to get to all that. I actually have a series coming up on Racket, on basically outstanding media deceptions from the Biden years, I want to review all the things, the sort of unanswered questions in several different categories, going to be doing that in a couple of weeks. It’s such an exhaustive list of stuff that is still unresolved in the public consciousness, and then they just added a whole new nine or 10 chapters after the election, so yeah, it’s been frustrating since the election. But it’s going to get weird, we’re going to probably talk later about one of the first sort of new things that’s going to happen in the Trump era, apparently even before the inauguration, so we will get to that in a second. But Joe Biden said goodbye to us on Wednesday night, and Walter, how would you evaluate, what grade would you give? That’s a wrong term, how would you evaluate Joe Biden’s farewell address?

Walter Kirn: I watched it late last night, it was recorded, we don’t quite know when, and we don’t know under what circumstances. It had a feeling of having arrived in a can from space. It didn’t feel urgent, it didn’t feel live, and it didn’t feel relevant in any way that I would judge relevance. It was a weird litany of warnings in the vein of Eisenhower, telling us the military industrial complex was to be feared, he actually quoted Eisenhower and imitated him deliberately about the tech industrial complex or something. He also warned us about the rise of oligarchy in the United States, which brought rich laughter from me in the sense that he’s probably done more for oligarchy in the United States since I don’t know, Harding or some late-nineteenth century corrupt president who presided in the time of the trusts and the robber barons. He brought up the trust.

Matt Taibbi: He brought up the trust yeah,

Walter Kirn: And trust-busting, none of which he’s done. It was a weird, it could have been a State of the Union address from early on because it listed so many objectives that were unaccomplished. He mentioned his war on cancer, which I remember him assuring us would be concluded by now, but he now refers to it only as a goal

Matt Taibbi: That may be achieved with AI, which is actually just a huge danger to the information landscape.

Walter Kirn: I would say that if you looked at it coldly, it was a show of ambivalence, almost unprecedented in presidential speeches because everything that it warned us about, it praised at some other point in the speech, and everything it praised, he had done nothing about. In other words, it was a very odd performance.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it was really weird. It reminded me a little bit of the old National Lampoon, Buy This Magazine or We’ll Shoot This Dog, cover because one got the impression of a big rifle pointed right at the president’s head right off camera as he dutifully read off certain things. And I think we should just go through it, there are things that were just too funny to describe, we have to actually hear it. So let’s just start with his introduction. About 35 seconds into this, he brings up a recent news event and takes credit for it, in a way that’s very funny.

President Biden: My fellow Americans, I’m speaking to you tonight from the Oval Office. Before I began, let me speak to important news from earlier today. After eight months of nonstop negotiation, my administration, by my administration, a ceasefire and a hostage deal has been reached by Israel and Hamas, the elements of which I laid out in great detail in May of this year. This plan was developed and negotiated by my team, and it’ll be largely implemented by the incoming administration. That’s why I told my team to keep the incoming administration fully informed, because that’s how it should be.

Matt Taibbi: All right, So a couple of things there. We’ve been in negotiations for eight months, the situation started in October. They had ample opportunity, obviously, to lean all the way into pressuring Israel into some kind of deal. Now, there are varying accounts about how sincere the reports are that Benjamin Netanyahu is not happy with this upcoming ceasefire, that it’s kind of a gift to the incoming Trump administration, that’s a line and that’s being put out there, but unmistakably this deal did not happen before the election, which one would’ve thought they would’ve wanted it to if they wanted to take political credit for it. So very odd that they’re leading off his farewell addressed by taking credit for something that I really don’t think they can take credit for, can they?

Walter Kirn: No, they not only can’t take credit for it, they must take full credit for how prolonged things have been already, and how terrible this war has been, and how little the United States has seemingly affected any real peace process or managed to create restraint on the part of its ally. It was uncharacteristically generous of Trump, I suppose, to call the deal concluded while Biden was still in office. If he’d wanted to pull a Reagan Iranian hostage thing, he would’ve announced it when he was inaugurated, but instead he left the ball in the corner of the goal for Biden to just kick his leg at and pretend to have scored.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, very strange. By saying the incoming administration is going to implement this, what he’s really saying is, “We did this, but they’re going to take credit for it and we just want you to know that it was really all us all along and that as this goes forward, it’s going to be our initiative.”