As you know, on the show, we usually dig into one story each day, but there's just so much news happening right now that we thought we'd try something different and close out the week by talking about some of the big stories that are in the news now and will be in the days and weeks ahead. I'm west Kasova today on the Big Take, the latest twists in the US presidential campaign, an escalation in Russia's war against Ukraine,
and high stakes diplomacy between the US and China. Who better to sort all this out than my colleagues Roz Matheson in London, Craig Gordon in New York, and Nancy Cook here in Washington, And they'll also be hosting this podcast for several days later this month while I sneak off for a little summer vacation. Nance se maybe we should start by talking about the US presidential campaign. Joe Biden is going around selling his economic plan, and you think that would be a pretty good thing to.
Sell, exactly, And it's basically an effort on the part of the White House to repackage their economic agenda, which they have passed the last two years amid fears of a recession falling a little bit, the inflation number is getting better, and basically to try to convince Americans that even though a majority of people still feel pretty bad about Biden's handling of the economy in particular, it's a way to try to convince them that actually there is
an agenda here, both short term one and a long term one to transform the economy.
I know we couldn't go back to the same failed policies when I ran, so I came into office determined to change the economic direction of this country, to move from trickle down economics. With everyone on Wall Street Journal, Financial Times began to call Bidenomics. I didn't come up with the name.
And they're hoping that if they keep talking about and they keep sending Pete Buddha Judge to Michigan and Vice President Harris out on the road, that eventually people will come around to their way of thinking on it.
And in an interview with Bloomberg, actually Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, talked about how the inflation fears have cooled down a little bit.
For the United States. Growth is slowed, but our labor market continues to be quite strong. I don't expect a recession. I think that we're on a good path to bringing inflation down.
We saw the latest inflation number drop a lot. I feel like the economic data is good right now, but Americans' perceptions of the broader economy are still not great. There was a poll in June by AP that showed that Joe Biden's approval rating on the economy was like in the thirties and percentage wise, that's lower than his sort of long standing approval rating of forty one percent, which
is also not great. And so there's just been a real mismatch and they've just had a really hard time, not so much like passing policy, because they've passed a lot of sweeping policy that Republicans don't like but the Democrats should like. It's more that they've just had a really big problem with their sales job.
Greig, how much of this do you think just has to do with that's about Biden himself, the idea that the message is pretty good, but people have concerns about the messenger.
Yeah, I think it's largely that that disconnect that Nancy just talked about in that poll. I guess I can't shake the feeling that people look at Joe Biden and he's an elderly gentleman, and they sort of question whether
he understands their problem. I could imagine a certain amount of voters look at a Joe Biden and he's up there a bit in years and saying I don't think he really understands what it's like to go to work and you know, punch a clock, or my wife's a teacher and the hours are getting cut or different things like that. So I do think the message sort of like on paper. I agree it is quite strong. I don't plan it was like three point six percent. If you want a job, you can probably find a job
right now. But it is not translating into personal popularity for Biden, and that be a very worrisome sign for the Democrats.
I also think that Trump has like a big stage presence and Obama is a great orator, and so they both are like these big personalities that sort of have this movement like popularity with Democrats and Republicans, or at least their bases. And Joe Biden has been I think Democrats would say, like a totally fine competent president. He's gotten a lot more done than people thought he would,
but he just makes a lot of gaffes. And you know, when he was asked about what he thought about biden Omics by a reporter at the White House recently, he said it was fine. And this is supposed to be like the cornerstone of his twenty twenty four election. So I just think that that is part of the problem too.
Ros Biden has been spending quite a bit of time overseas too, talking with his counterparts. How is he perceived by other leaders.
He's certainly seen by many leaders as someone that they can engage with, they can have a proper adult conversation with. You've seen that be on a much more even keel under the Biden administration. You see a desire to work together on a bunch of stuff, be a Russia's invasion of Ukraine and supporting Ukraine in taking a toughest dance on China on global issues like climate change. So certainly the atmosphere is friendlier, you'd have to say, in a bit more reliable, the sense of the US is a
more of a reliable partner. But equally there is concern about Joe Biden. He's arguably a more protectionist president than Donald Trump was. He's certainly taken a tougher line on China and stuck to it, And so there's a concern about being pulled along by US foreign policy when it comes to China in particular, And so there are differences of opinion still. I guess what happens now is those can be at least articulated in a slightly more conducive environment.
But you know, countries are really closely watching the build up to the US election campaign. I mean, US elections are always a really big deal for the rest of the world world, and we keep saying each election is going to be the biggest one. Yet I mean, twenty twenty four is going to be hugely consequential for the rest of the world. And the big question now that countries want to know is is it going to be Donald Trump versus Joe Biden Again.
Well, so let's talk about that, because at the moment, it sure does look like it's going to be Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. Nancy more news out of Trump World just this week and not great for Trump and yet weirdly great for Trump.
Yeah, there might be a third indictment for President Trump, and the second one from Special counsel Jacksmith and this one would have to do with Trump's involvement in January sixth in that insurrection, and so we're waiting for those charges. But so far, the indictments have not hurt Trump politically. If anything, they have really caused Republican primary voters to coalesce around him. And you know what that means for the general election, I think is a whole nother question.
But right now he has a lot of support among Republican voters.
Mostly what it tells me is that there's some very weird energy out there in the electorate right now. I think a lot of us who cover twenty sixteen, I didn't predict that Donald Trump would win. I know a lot of people say they did now, but a lot of us, you know, thought Hillary Clinton would kind of pull it out, And I guess I could sort of understand that twenty twenty four, you're looking at potentially the
Republican presidential nominee being indicted four different times. And as we published in Bloomberg News, you know, the calendar of his potential trials kind of interweaves within some of the primary dates and early twenty four and mid twenty four, so you could have a person in a courtroom one day, on the campaign stump the next. And yet, as I say, thirty six thirty eight percent of the country seems prepared
to make him the next president. That strikes me as kind of a primal scream, like there's something out there happening among people. But I do think there's a frustration with the choices. Many many polls have shown people aren't all that excited to have Biden Trump be the top of the ticket again in twenty four as they were in twenty twenty. And that is where I think some of this time talk about a potential third party candidacy is getting a little bit of oxygen, much more than
I would have thought. It always feels like kind of a non starter. Americans are very hardwired to vote for the D or the R, the donkey or the elephant, the one their mother and father voted for and their grandmother and grandfather voted for. But when you have people like Robert F. Kennedy Junior, I feel like.
I'm losing my country.
I feel like Mike Party has got off the rails.
It's become the Party of War. Obviously, you know historic name in American politics. You've got this no Labels movement with Senator Joe Manchin former Utah Governor John Huntsman sort of playing foot seat with the idea of being a third party ticket.
They can't can't live without the independent, without that independent center left, center right, an independent Republican and independent Democrat. If they have another option, then they're in trouble. Both parties trouble they're going to have.
Boy, I tell you as I say, I never would really think any of those people could win. But if I were the Democrats, I'd be very worried they could peel off votes to prevent Joe Biden from winning. And there that's the way Donald Trump gets back to the White House.
Ros everything youre, Craig is saying kind of points to this big change in American politics over the last several years. The idea used to be that people voted their pocketbooks. That was the cliche. If you're doing well, you keep the person in office there and if you're not, then you look elsewhere. But that all seems to have been kind of tossed aside.
Well, that's right, and that's the mystery again. If you're outside America trying to understand America right now, Craig was talking about the primal scream that's going on. I think the question really if you're outside America, is what the heck really is going to happen? And does Donald Trump have that truly lasting, deep bench of support.
Is he actually going to make it over the line?
And if so, why, and then of course the big question of what that would mean going forward. But from the outside, trying to understand his appeal is quite tricky and to understand how deep and lasting it is. And that's why you get a lot of officials from different countries already going into the US and they're going outside
Washington doing their own research. They're talking to ordinary Americans saying, can you explain to us why you feel what you feel, what's important to you when it's going to come to the twenty twenty four election, What issues are going to matter to you?
Why may you vote the way that you will?
Because they're really trying to get their heads around the prospect of Donald Trump getting enough traction to get back to the White House.
Nancy.
There is this difference that, as Craig was talking about, between the primary voters and the general election, and of course we're in the middle of the froth the early season where everything seems possible. But if you look at that head to head matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, you get kind of a different story in how Americans feel about the two candidates.
Yeah, I think that Democrats and people in the White House are very optimistic about running against Donald Trump. While he has this base of support of like thirty percent of Republican primary voters, he has had a hard time sort of expanding support beyond that, and Biden beat him in twenty twenty. The midterms should have been much better for the Republicans given how high inflation was at the time, and it wasn't. You know, the Democrats almost held onto
the House. It didn't go great for Republicans, and I think that they're expecting that again. Polling also shows that independence suburban people, women are very turned off by Trump at this point, and so I think that that will be something that we'll have to watch. I know from the Trump campaign that they really feel like they're going to try to go after young voters. They're going to try to increase the share of African Americans who vote
for them and Hispanics. That's what they're targeting because I think they know that suburban women is sort of a lost cause at this point. But it's just going to be very interesting to see, you know, these two people if there's a rerun of twenty twenty.
After the break, the fighting in Ukraine intensifies. We've been talking about domestic issues, but foreign policy is also a very big question in this campaign. The war in Ukraine is ongoing, ros just this week we've seen big developments in the war.
Well that's right.
I mean, the Ukrainian counter offensive has been going on for some weeks now and they've made some inroads against the Russian positions, but it's really slow going and the senses on the ground at least this will probably has some way to run, and that's leading to some big moves by Russia, for example, big missile attacks on the southern city of Odessa, trying to take out Black Sea infrastructure and so on, and equally more and more bolder
attacks by Ukrainian supporters, at least a Ukraine doesn't claim these directly, but more overt attacks inside Russia, during attacks around the Greater Moscow area and so on, and so you're really seeing a pick up in the air activity again the use of missiles and drones, because things are pretty bogged down on the ground, and the sense is that even with all the military equipment that's been coming in and a lot of it's still to come, particularly
from countries like the US and supporters in Europe, is that the war's going to be slow going for quite some time yet. And that raises the question again, at what point do nations like the US start to push harder for Ukraine to agree to come to the table and have some kind of negotiated conversation with Russia on it?
Is Ukraine willing to do that?
Of course, Vladimir Zelynsky, the president, has said that he will not negotiate an inch of Ukrainian territory. Is he prepared at some point to sit down and talk? Is the Russian president Vladimir Putin prepared to do so? But as this goes on and on into the rest of this year, do the voices of the US and others become louder about the need to at least be prepared to have a conversation.
Craig, We're starting to see that, Bubba. This has been an area where most Democrats and Republicans have agreed that support for Ukraine is important. On the far right, there has been this feeling that we should stop funding the war in Ukraine.
I've been surprised actually at how long voters and people talking to polsters seem to have been hanging tough on the war in Ukraine. I know the support is slightly down in some of the more recent polls, but right now, I don't think Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell, who's been a vocal supporter of military a to Ukraine, has paid any sort of price for that. But these things don't
last forever. As people start to kind of tally up the cost and we're into multi multi billions of dollars already, could that money be better spent at home, et cetera. I think it's something that Biden probably has to watch very carefully as he's out on the campaign trail and he's starting to think about these issues heading into twenty four. But you're right, most of the opposition inside the United
States has come from pretty far right. Mac Gaates, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Bobert, all around a bill that you know, essentially cut off the aid.
The Biden administration is sleep walking our great country into a world.
War, and the American people are fed up and tired of the hard earned tax dollars that they pay to our government being spent in foreign lands and foreign countries for foreign causes and foreign people.
That's a pretty small number of people, and even in a Republican party that has gone pretty far to the rate, they're even farther to the right than that. So I think right now the opposition has been contained to a fairly small, small but vocal group. But I feel like with every passing day, especially as the Ukraine counter offensive seems to have bogged down a bit, you do feel like those questions are going to be starting to be asked more loudly inside the halls of Congress.
It was interesting that you did see some of that start to bubble up at the NATO summit that was held in Bilnia, Lithuania last week, a slight sense of public exasperation coming in. They've kept that really behind closed
doors most of the time. But Zelensky, before he came TOUS, was quite vocal in his complaints about what he saw as slow walking Ukraine's desire to join NATO, and in turn, you saw some countries, including the outgoing British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace saying, hang on, you could be a bit more grateful. We've sent you a lot of military equipment, We've sent you loads of financial aid. We're doing everything we can, and we don't really like being spoken to
that way. And you saw that with some other countries also, So there is that slight sense of we're doing everything we can and possibly risking some fatigue, and so that's starting to creep up, not just in the US, but elsewhere in Europe also.
Nancy, do you think that that small number of people who are really pushing this skepticism about funding Ukraine and saying that money should be spent at home can start to have an influence and that it can grow, especially if it just keeps being repeated on the rate.
So the war in Ukraine, I think will continue and become an even bigger thing among Republican primary voters. Donald Trump talking about how he wants to settle the war in Ukraine in a day.
Let me just put it a diice away.
If I'm president, I will have that war settled in one day. Twenty four hours.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was asked about this recently and did not commit to sort of giving more money to Ukraine in the future. He sort of dodged the question. So I think that the Republican candidates are definitely on the side of perhaps not supporting Ukraine at all or
definitely not in the long run. And I think that once we hit the election and whoever's the Republican nominee is talking about this against Biden, it will be much more of a talking point because I think that the White House thinks that Biden's ability to hold together NATO and support the war in Ukraine and stand up to putin are assets and selling points and an example of his long standing foreign policy credentials and leadership on the
world stage. And so I think that it will just come up naturally because it will be a contrast between the two parties.
Ros and other big development was that Russia pulled out of this very important Green deal.
Well, that's right, So this is a deal that was set up to ensure that Ukrainian grain, which is really important to the global market and particularly to countries in places like Africa, could continue to come out of the
black seaports even with the war going on. So safe passage for ships, and it was negotiated between the UN, Russia, Ukraine and via Turkey and that's been operating with some success until recently, just in the last month or two, things have really slowed down and very few ships have been getting out. So essentially it was on a slow crawl anyway, and now we've had Russia saying it wasn't going to renew the deal, and that means that ships
can't be guaranteed safe passage at all. What we've been reporting is that Ukraine is saying we'll find a way to get this done anyway. We're going to try and negotiate to get ships to come. The reality is that without insurance, shippers aren't going to take that risk, and certainly they're not going to band together in a convoy. There's been taught before about getting naval ships to be escorts. That's never gone anywhere, and so what you're seeing is
really an impact on the global grain market. As a result, you're seeing increases in prices for things like wheat, for example, and the concern about the knock on effect to supply in many countries, but there's not with that risk. Also for Vladimir Putin in this because he can be blamed for doing this by these countries, and he's been seeking to keep them on side over his war in Ukraine.
So we're talking countries in Africa again, and North Africa in particular, and if they turn their gaze to him, that's not particularly good for Russia. So it's probably in his interest at some point to come back to this deal, but not in the next couple of months at.
Least when we come back the US in China try to cool things off Nancy. Another country very top of mind always, of course, is China, and there's been a lot of back and forth between the US and China, which really shows how important the US China relationship is to both nations economies and really the world economy.
The US China relationship in the last year and a half got to be very poor and very very tense. What has happened is that the US is just trying to make it a little bit less frosty, and so they have sent Anthony Blincoln, the Secretary of State. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was just there. John Kerry, who is a very key climate advisor, was there. And the purpose of these visits is really to try to talk about some key shared issues like climate change and the economy
and the supply chain, and obviously national security. But it's also just to sort of make sure that there's a dialogue between the US and China again, because our economies are so intertwined and there are such key national security questions that affect both countries, like the war in Ukraine, that I think that the Biden administration is really just trying to make sure we're talking to them.
Ras.
Joe Biden came in talking really tough about China, and she pushed back pretty hard. Now it seems like Biden thought maybe he pushed a little too hard, and because China's economy is in turmoil, it seems that she himself also has an incentive to kind of come back to the devil.
Yeah, it's interesting seeing the way that Sijing Ping is talking about both his own economy and the relationship with the US because his economy is in trouble.
That's clear.
There are slow downs across the board. There's wobbles again in the property sector, and of course for Sieging Ping, his hold on power is absolutely anchored in the view amongst ordinary Chinese people that the Communist Party will deliver stability and prosperity across the board.
And so he really needs.
To get his economy moving again, and that's a really big incentive for him to open up China a bit more economically, to encourage investment to come in, to show that he's supporting the private sector, and that involves conversations with the US and perhaps encouraging Joe Biden if possible to loosen some of the penalties that he's put on China, but equally to sort of do not discourage American companies
from going in to China and doing business. And so for Siegingping, the biggest imperative right now is that he needs to get his economy moving and so you could really see a knock on effect as a result in terms of the outreach that China may do to the US.
Right, so something earlier in this session that when I heard her say, it has struck me. But she's absolutely right. Biden has been more protectionist to Donald Trump. And we all remember Donald Trump's trade war on China, but Biden has taken it to new levels. And even this latest idea of sort of limiting the outbound investment into China.
But again, Jenny Ellen told Bloomberg News this week that this billd are going to put forward, or this idea is going to be very narrowly, terribly probably not start till twenty twenty four, only affect you know, super like high security things like semiconductors, leaving alone the energy and
biotech sectors. And it does really feel like Biden talked so tough that he kind of looked into the abyss a little bit and realized that the US economy and the Chinese economy are just completely interconnected and might have been being too tough. And so you definitely feel like a little bit that they're kind of pulling the punch back.
Obviously sending all those very high level officials. Even this one act that was meant to really, you know, crack down on investment in China is going to be sounds like a bit watered down. I think Joe Biden again heading into an election where the economy and bidenomictually going to be front and center. He needs Chinese the United States, and it went to kind of a bad place, and you do have a sense both countries are starting to try to reel it back. We'll see if they can.
The one place that seems like they haven't done as good a job reeling it back. As on the military sort of military to military communications. You know, we're flying all over the Child China Sea and so are they, and it always seems like, you know, we're one plane bump away from a really, really bad situation. So I'm sure that's on the front of Biden's mind and trying to get some of those military to military connections re established and re established.
Quickly and Nancy in the US, that's a kind of delicate balance for any candidate that you need to talk tough on China because that's just sort of the expectation, and yet you also have to make sure that you're not being so out front that China takes that as an act of hostility. I guess right.
And I think that the rhetoric on Taiwan has really sort of hurt the Biden g relationship quite a bit. I was with Biden in Japan, I don't know, maybe a year and a half ago, where he sort of indicated that yes, the US potentially would send troops into Taiwan if China invaded them. You know, that really got China's backup, and so I think that these military things have just really, you know, hurt the relationship as well.
And Roz, how does China view all of that tough talk? Obviously the Chinese do the same thing back well.
Certainly China has an appreciation of talking to your domestic audience, because that's really what Ciging Ping and other senior officials are doing all the time. Everything they say is aimed at that domestic audience. So they can see the need for US politicians to also do that, particularly coming into the election cycle. So they're probably going to be a
bit forgiving of some of that. The question is when the attacks are seen to be very personal, and particularly about Siging Ping directly, and that's the place that you just don't really go. And Joe Biden's recent comment about Ciging Ping, we're in the middle of talking, he suddenly
essentially called Siging Ping a dictator. That's the sort of thing that can really cause a problem in the relationship because you're coming directly for Ciging Ping, You're questioning his authority, you're questioning the way he governs his country, and that's really the no fly zone probably for China. The rest of it they can overlook a bit, they can understand the imperative, but it's when they make personal remarks about their leader.
Well, we've touched on a bunch of news stories happening right now. We could go on for another couple of hours to try to even get our arms around everything else that's happening. So let me just ask each of you what is a story that you're keeping a close eye on in the weeks and months ahead. Craig, I'll ask you first.
Yeah, not to be repetitive, but I am watching the third party movement closely. A third person who's been talking about that is Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who was, you know, pretty popular in a pretty democratic state. He put out like an ad the other day that Nancy Cook actually flagged it to us, and it looks for all the world like a campaign announcement of a guy who might run for president.
I've always been an underdog, and people have always counted us out, but every single time we've beaten the office.
He looked at possibly running for President's Republican in twenty twenty four, took himself out of that race. But you've got three pretty prominent politicians in you know, the West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin you tah Governor John Huntsman, who is a kind of a heart throb of the moderates, was our China ambassador for a bit, and then of course Larry Hogan there in Maryland. And they are doing everything you would do if you wanted to run for president.
Does that mean they will? I don't know. I know a lot of Democrats are kind of freaking out about it, and are you know, trying to side channel them to say, hey, what are you doing. I don't think a lot of Donald Trump voters are going to necessarily go with any of the three of those gentlemen Mansion, Huntsmen or Hogan. But a lot of moderates or even disaffected Democrats might, you know, might say, hey, let's give it something else
to try this year. If any of them were to put together a ticket, and Ron I would argue a vote for that ticket is a vote for Donald Trump, because it's essentially a vote against Joe Biden.
Rise, how about you.
I'm actually watching the weather quite closely. We've got global heat waves, We've got very very extremes of weather all around the world, and looking at the knock on effect of that. I mean, there are political ramifications, but also there are economic ramifications. There are big impacts potentially on
food supply, food prices, inflation. We're seeing signs of unresting countries like Nigeria and Kenya, which are related very much to food prices and food supply, and you can sort of see that may even feed into the Spanish election this weekend, where we could get the emergence of quite a far right government from that election. And so just looking at the way that the weather is actually playing into politics and economics around the world, that's something I've very much got.
Dare I say a weather ion, Nancy.
Margine, to see what happens with abortion in the US. You know, Democrats really want to use abortion rates as a very galvanizing force. In twenty twenty four, Republican candidates are sort of shying away from saying that they would support a national abortion ban, some of them are. But meanwhile states are just passing this whole crazy patchwork of restrictions and so the country's just really be divided into two different countries on that issue, and I think it's just going to continue.
Nancy Roz Craig always great talking to you.
Thanks for having us, Thank you, Thank you.
Wes, thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments at Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of the Big Take is Vicky Ergalina. Our senior producer and the producer of this episode is Katherine Fink. Its additional production support from Samgabauer.
Phil de Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidron. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back on Monday with another Big Take. Have a great weekend.