>> the whole nation is supporting these families. yamiche: president biden meets with families in the aftermath of a deadly condo collapse. in washington, house speaker nancy pelosi appoints republican liz cheney to a committee investigating the january 6 attack. in new york, the trump organization and its chief financial officer are indicted for tax blood. -- tax fraud. plus, president biden will not meet the january for -- the july 4 vexing goal.

will the nation ever be free from the pandemic and its restrictions? next. >> this is "washington week." corporate funding is provided by -- consumer cellular. kaiser permanente. additional funding is provided by the estate of arnold adams, and by the human foundation, committed to bridging cuural differences in our communities. the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. once again, from washington, moderator yamiche alcindor. yamiche: good evening, and

welcome to "washington week." it was a week of investigations. in surfside, florida, officials are searching for people and answers and what is shaping up to be one of the worst building disasters in american history. thursday, president biden traveled to the town were more than 100 people are still missing after the deadly condo collapse. here is what yasmeen ramsey has to say, whose mother died in the collapse. yasmeen: some very poor decisions were made, and it robbed me of saying goodbye to my mother. yamiche: president biden spent some 300 hours -- some three hours meeting with grieving families. >> the whole nation's morning with these families. they have seen it on television. they have gone through hell, those who survived the collapse as well as those missing loved ones. yamiche: nancy pelosi convened a committee to look into the insurrection at the capitol. in new york, the trump

administration was charged with running a tax fraud scheme. and sunday was the fourth of july, the day that president biden hoped to have 70% of volatile's vaccinated, but he will fall short of that goal as the delta variant is quickly spreading. we have some of the best reporters covering it all. jonathan lemire joins us from new york city. joining at the table, ayesha rascoe of npr and jonathan swan of axios. thank you for being here. this was a busy newsweek, but we want to start with what happened in florida. president biden traveled to florida. he sat with ron desantis. these two men could face each other in a presidential election in 2024. where do you think things go from here, and what did you make of that bipartisanship, that rare glimpse of it? ayesha: it shows the difference

between when you are running for office, running for election, and you are a governor. generally when you are a governor and dealing with a crisis or catastrophe in your state, you need that federal help so you are not trying to pick fights help and you are grateful when you get it. we saw the same thing with chris christie after hurricane sandy. he was criticized because he had very nice to say about then president obama because of the help his state got when they were hit right this terrible disaster. i do not think it lasts beyond now, but i do think if ron desantis ends up having some competition, which i am sure he will if he ends up trying to run, they could point to this and say he said nice things about biden. that, at set up, the way partisanship works, is something

that, even in moments like this, can be seen as unacceptable. we saw that in the trump administration. during a sorts of catastrophes, trump would still make it very personable. yamiche: i want to ask a follow-up question. we don't know exactly what happened with the building collapse, but there is conversation coming -- going on abouinfrastructure and climate change. to do more and give more money. how does this impact the conversation around infrastructure? ayesha: even if it is not directly associated with it, it makes people feel like this is the sort of thing that can happen. these are the sorts of things, whether it is the rising temperatures out west, you had this heat wave, it is this feeling that climate change is t something on the horizon anymore, it is here. we are feeling the effects of it and something must be done, like the planet is at risk. so they want action.

the problem is that there are always a million different things pulling at a president. whether it is infrastructure, roads, and bridges, whether it is voting rights, police action, all these things, and right now, biden is trying to thread the needle to please everyone, but i ink that is why you saw white house officials saying this week we are not backing away from climate, they don't want to feel that pressure, saying that we still support a clean energy standard, that we are going to make sure these long-term tax burdens for clean energy are in -- whatever passes congress, we are going to make sure it gets done. yamiche: i want to say your full name, jonathan lemire, because we have two jonathans on tonight , jonathan lemire, talk about president biden being in his element being the appetizer in chief. where does he go from here -- the empathizer in chief. where is he go from here? jonathan l.:ou may recognize

myself as the lesser jonathan, no doubt. there has probably never been an elected official that speaks so powerfully and eloquently about grief and was able to have a connection with someone who has gone through a tremendous loss, and that was shaped by biden's own personal tragedy, his first wife and his daughter killed in a terrible car accident which badly injured his two sons. one of those sons later diedf cancer, forcing joe bid to know have buried two of his children. he talks often about how those tragedies and that grief has really shaped him as a person. it also allows him to really connect with people who have gone through something similar. my colleagues and i reportedn thursday down to surfside, florida. it was on public display. he talked about how the whole nation was rallying behind him and how the nation was united in

mourning. now more than a week since the tragedy, they fear the worst. but we also obtained instagram video taken behind closed doors, a private meeting that biden had with those families. he addressed them first all at once and then went person to person, family to family, sharing his story and then listening to their stories about his loved ones. there was a degree of empathy that he is able to show that we do not often see from american public figures. yamiche: let's turn to the case from the trump organization. on thursday, the former president's company and cfo were both charged with fraud and tax crimes. a lawyer for the manhattan district attorney called the allegations and illegal payment scheme. former president trump released a statement saying the charges were part of a "political witch hunt the radical left

mcgrath's." -- democrats are co-what did -- fdemocrats." what does this mean for president trump and his political future? jonathan s.: it is a complicated question. if the allegions are true, this is illegal and should be prosecuted. on the other hand, when you compare it to the expectations that have been set for this investigation, trump's political opponents view this as quite -- cy vance has been working on this for more than two years, has had eight years of trump's tax returns, and we should note it is still an ongoing investigation. we don't know if this is necessarily the final word, but if this rlly is the final word and it is an indictment based on fringe benefits and tax fraud

for his cfo and donald trump himself does not get indicted and if his children get indicted -- when you compare that to the expectations, it is quite underwhelming. that being said, these criminal indictments really affect businesses. it affects your ability to get loans, to partner with people. donald trump has a lot of debt, so it could have real impact on his business, but as for his political fortunes, i don't wait has a huge impact -- i don't know that it has a huge impact. when i talked to his aides, i get the sense that these allegations make it slightly more likely he runs for president in 2024. some of them see it as a bit of a hate shield, the idea that he is not just a former president, but potentially an active candidate is them they sort of ability to say this is all political. another part of it is ego and sort of revenge.

there is a sort of boating element to it as well -- boding element to it as well. that's how i view the situation. yamiche: jonathan lemire, there is a lot otalk of alan weisberg and whether he will flip on the president. jonathan swan is hearing a lot of what i am hearing, which is that unless president trump is charged, he is going to feel like he won. he is going to feel like this does not politically hurt him. jonathan l.: we know donald trump is not shy about claiming victory, whether or not he emerges as a winner in a particular moment. yes, alan westberg for a long time was seen as a key figure in the trump organization. he washe one who handled the books and knew where the bodies were buried, if you will. many in the tmp cam have flipped, chosen to become cooperators. michael cohen, most famously.

to this point, he hasn't. maybe this changes now. he was in court. he is someone who now could face prison time if convicted. maybe that changed the calculation. at this point, there are no signs he will. as jonathan said, if that does not happen, i think there is a sense that trump himself and his adult sons -- remember, donald trump jr. and eric trump were running the organization while their father was in office if they emerge unscathed, than i do think this will be spun as a win. people i have talked to concur with what you guys are hearing. this might make the former president likely to run again and say this was yet another witchhunt and they came after me and they failed. and if i jenna those grievances that he and his supporters are so often fueled that may lead

him to want to get back in the race in a couple of years. yamiche: ayesha, i see you nodding your head. former president trump is a survivor, someone who has had all sorts of people around him charged, but he has not had to face legal consequences. can you talk about that, and is it significant that these activities were having while he was president? jonathan l.: i don't think -- ayesha: i don't think it is significant to president trump, because whatever comes out, he will say that this is all made up, not true, unless something happens to him or to his close family, it is not something he is going to be overly concerned about. i do think when it comes to the idea of him running again -- some of this is neither here nor there. trump clearly wants to be the leader of the republican party. he is not giving that away. if he does not run, he will not

be the leader of the republican party. it will be whoever is running for president. when you talk about ego, i think that has to be driving much of this. yamiche: jonathan swan, when you mentioned the word ego, it's stuck in my mind too. can you talk to the audience more about what you are hearing from your sources in the trump world? jonathan s.: a big part of what possesses dond trump at the moment is he wants to be relevant, s his staff are constantly printing out that they will show you all the news clips he is getting so you are still in the game, all the headlines you are getting, and they show him. he does his political meetings with his team on thphone, etc. but from what i understand with talking to people around him, the thing he misses the most is just he is not on television all the time. when he switches on tv, it is

not wall-to-wall trf coverage, not wall-to-wall newspapers. i remember seeing donald trump go into the dining room and watch himself on television. he would experience being covered in a sort of -- the amount of pleasure he got from that was almost visceral. that's got to be the withdrawal -- the withdrawal from that drug has to be quite intense. that is what i hear from people i talked to who are still in his orbit. yamiche: it is such a window into the person we all covered together. i remember him looking into the sky and saying, "i am the chosen one." he felt like he was the man of the moment. i want to turn to something that happened wednesday. the house voted to approve a select committee to investigate the january 6 insurrection. thursday, nancy pelosi announced that republican liz cheney of wyoming would serve on the committee.

here is what she had to say. sen. toomey: -- rep. cheney: our dedication to the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power has come above any concern about partisanship. yamiche: house minority leader kevin mccarthy criticized cheney for accepting the committee assignment from the democrat. -- from a democrat. rep. mccarthy: i was shocked she would accept something from speaker pelosi. maybe she is closer to her than us, i don't know. yamiche: the high term for that is called shade. [laughter] jonathan lemire, what is the politics of all this? how does each party, including the white house, see this? jonathan l.: shade is a good term for it. let's take a step back. republicans in the senate wanted to kill the bipartisan commission modeled after the september 11 commission that was to investigate january 6 capitol

riot which mind you, in just a few days from now, will have hit the six month anniversary. it is remarkable and sort of sad, frankly, that that much time has elapsed without any meaningful congressional probe into what happened. because of that, house speaker pelosi certainly raised eyebrows with the selection of liz cheney, a republican, to be on it. and gop leader mccarthy had previously threatened to take away the committee assignment of any republican who accepted the democrats' invitation to be on the committee. it seems like he has backed away from that, but the question is, who does he appoint? would he pick middle of the road republicans who would give this a fair shake? it is possible, but people i have talked to say the more likely scenario is that he picks more trumpist republicans who will not take this matter all that seriously, the people who are, if not outright denying and belittling what

happened, are eager to turn the page, willing to talk about anything else, rather than get to the heart of what happened that day. that is something we will hear, we assume, in the days ahead. those choices will go a long way to shaping the dynamic of that select committee and what they find. yamiche: jonathan swan, you have interviewed liz cheney. talk to us about where you see things going. a deep sigh. jonathan s.: i don't want to use the word dusional, because i think it is too freighted and pejorative, but this idea that she is going to create a new republican party, it is absurd. it is absurd for anyone who spends any time talking to republican elected officials. it is not worth the party is. the party is extremely united. she gets a lot of press attention, but you talk to

republican congress members, they are united. they want to move on. they want this to be in the rearview mirror. she is so unrepresentative of the republican party that you may as well put a d next to her name at that point. even though she has a completely conservative voting record, that does not matter. the party is not where she is. i think the project she is embarking on of trying to almost restore the republican party to the post-cheney party, i just think it is aantasy. i think it is a complete fantasy. yamiche: all this is going on while the supreme court this week ruled and upheld this arizona gop voting restriction. tell us about what that means for democrats and for these gop back voting laws. ayesha: what it means is it is another blow against the landmark voting rights act. some would say that athis

point, the voting rights act really has no teeth. and it puts great pressure on the white house to try to do something. the white house is in a very difficult position. president biden is inspected to talk about this in the coming days, but he is facing a lot of pressure to get something done, but the problem is there is no -- there is not enough support in congress to get anything done on voting rights at this moment. yamiche: this weekend, millions of americans are expected to travel and gather to celebrate july 4, a lot different from last year. at the white house, president biden is hosting more than 1000 ople for a party, but the delta variant is spreading. experts worry it could cause a new spike in cases amon unvaccinated people. joining us is yasmeen abdalla, author of "nightmare scenario: inside the trump administration's response to the

pandemic that changed history about thanks for joining us -- changed history." biden is not far off, that being said, vaccinations and the south and among republicans are a big part of this issue. what can president biden do to convince more people to get vaccinated, and is it possible to separate the politics from this? yasmeen: the white house is focused on smaller scale efforts, on finding local doctors, community leaders to convince people to get vaccinated. they recognize that the people who want to listen to the presidt and what they say about vaccinations have gone and gotten them, and now they need to take a different, localized approach. to be clear, it is not only people resistant to getting vaccinated that have not gotten vaccinated. it is also communities of color, vulnerable communities, and hard ones where there maybe is not access to a doctor's office. as part of the effort. in terms of politics, it is impossible to separate them, because a lot of people

resistant to getting vaccines -- there are sort of two camps, the people who are anti- vaxxers and resistant to all vaccines, and the people who do not trust this process. the vaccines were developed in record time, there are conspiracy theories, and a big part of it is the politicization of scientists and particularly dr. fauci. he has gotten so tied into the anti-vax stuff and the people resistant to the coronavirus vaccine specifically. yamiche: talk about the delta variant and the challenges associated with that. yasmeen: the cdc director held a briefing yesterday where she said that delta variant is hyper-transmissible. it is clear the white house is extremely worried. the vaccines do seem to protect against the variant. but the bigger concern is, as we have seen, the more the virus is able to spread, the more

dangerous the variants become. they are not necessarily more deadly, but they do become more transmissible. even if vaccinated people are protected, the concern is that if it is allowed to spread, what variant is going to emerge? the more this virus can become more efficient and more transmissible, we just don't know what form that is going to take. right now, the vaccines are effective, but there is a lot of concern about outbreaks among unvaccinated populations, especially in the fall, when people start moving inors more , and because we have started relaxing so many restrictions. yamiche: ayesha, i want to come to you on the economy. jobs in june bt economist expectations. where does that -- what does that tell you about where the economy is going at the recovery the white house is dealing with? ayesha: the white house took a victory lap today, saying they have created 3 million jobs, a record level. they don't mention the u.s. had

lost a record level of jobs, so that is why they have created 3 million. even now, millions are out of work. i think they are making that argument. the issue for them, as they are trying to get all this funding for infrastructure and all these other things, with the economy not in a freefall, that makes it harder to justify or to make the case for trillions of dollars of spending, so they are going to run up against more opposition for that, so that is part of what -- it is kind of like a catch-22 with his economy. yamiche: it is a tough thing they are dealing with, trying to balance the economy while also trying to balance covid, and there are talks of people having to wear masks again. i asked the white house covid tax force about wearing masks again, and they said you do not have to worry about that now if you are vaccinated. that is all the time we have tonight. thank you for your insight, and thank you all for joining us. next week, monday, pase tune

into the pbs news hour, where julie woodruff will interview jimmy carter and his wife as th prepare to celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary. i hope i get there too. don't miss the washingtonweek extra. we will talk about the new book "nightmare scenario." it streams at 8:30 eastern on our website, facebook, and youtube. have a great july 4 weekend. good night from washington. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

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this is gonna be fun! rick sebak: this is gonna be fun. it's gonna be wooden roller coasters and beautiful hand-carvecarousels. it's gonna be vintage mechanical contraptions and a bunch of rides they don't make anymore. it's gonna be a lot of the reasons why you come to an old amusement park. people like thrills, they like excitement. you also come for escapism, and that's what rides provide. you get that old feeling... i can't get in them rides. ...even though you know it's safe, it could break any moment. i get... sebak: we're going to celebrate some traditional amusement parks, smaller than most theme parks, older than disneyland. we're going to whip around the country, stopping at places like playland in rye, new york,