ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President Biden addressed the nation today in the Rose Garden. He said he'll do what he can for an orderly transition to the next Trump administration, and he called for people to bring down the temperature after the heat of the presidential campaign.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We accept the choice the country made. I've said many times - you can't love your country only when you win. You can't love your neighbor only when you agree.
SHAPIRO: His staff and cabinet members were there to hear his remarks, and he gave his party a bit of a pep talk after their big loss this week. NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson is here to talk about this. Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: What struck you about Biden's speech today?
LIASSON: I think what he was doing in that speech and in that clip you just played was modeling to the country and to Donald Trump what he considers to be the correct behavior for a leader in a democracy. When you lose, you leave office without telling your supporters to march to the Capitol to try to overturn the election.
SHAPIRO: He also spoke to supporters and talked about his own legacy. Let's listen to that.
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BIDEN: Much of the work we've done is already being felt by the American people. But the vast majority of it will not be felt - be felt over the next 10 years. We have legislation we passed that's just - only now - just really kicking in. We're going to see over a trillion dollars' worth of infrastructure work done.
SHAPIRO: You can hear him trying to establish how history will see him there. But with only one term, is this going to come to fruition, or will the new administration try to roll it back?
LIASSON: Well, a lot of those infrastructure projects, mostly are - of them are in red states. They're just getting off the ground, as the president said. He said the road ahead is clear if we sustain it. And we know that Donald Trump has made very clear he wants to undo as much of the Biden legislative legacy as possible, including climate measures in the Inflation Reduction Act.
But there was another audience for those words. Obviously, you mentioned his staff, and they are bereft. He's trying to tell them their work meant something. The subtext of that is also it's not my fault because one of the criticisms of President Biden is that he decided to step aside too late, and things might have been different if he'd done it earlier, if he'd been the transitional figure that he once said that he would be.
SHAPIRO: Did he express any regrets about that?
LIASSON: No. He said the vice president ran a great campaign. But there are a lot of finger-pointing going on in the Democratic Party, as is normal with a loss as profound as this. And there are a lot of reasons for his loss, and the Democrats are trying to figure out which one was really the cause. Was it because he stayed too long, missteps that Harris made in her campaign strategy?
But then there are these giant headwinds, when only 24% of people say their financial situation is better now than four years ago, or when three-quarters say inflation has caused them severe hardship, or three-quarters say they're dissatisfied or angry with the direction of the country. Those are headwinds that any incumbent would have a hard time getting over. But what all this means is that the Democratic Party has a lot to sort through, a lot of soul-searching to do. Biden did not talk about what his role would be in that conversation, and I cannot imagine it would be a very big one.
SHAPIRO: Well, let's talk about the transition. Any idea how that's going?
LIASSON: Well, Biden has promised help to the incoming Trump administration. And Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters today that the Trump-Vance transition team has not yet entered agreements with the General Services Administration who facilitates transitions. But we also are looking for how fast and how Trump is going to move to enact his most important promises. If you ask Trump's voters what they expect from a Trump administration, the two things they would say is a strong border and lower prices.
Certainly, it's easier to deliver on the first one of those than the second. But then there are those - all those other more extreme, radical promises to use the Department of Justice against his political opponents. He has said that he wants to bring Barack Obama and Liz Cheney before military tribunals, appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Biden crime family. And I think most of Trump's supporters didn't focus on those. They've - they - sometimes they thought he was kidding or sarcastic. But we do know that he was explicit about those goals, and we know he has more power and ability to enact them in this term than he did in his first.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Mara Liasson, thank you.
LIASSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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