Tonight we begin with our one-on-one with Senator Joe Manchin, who is not running for re-election in the Senate, but is considering running for President. Amid a lot of speculation about what he has planned next, Manchin is now openly acknowledging that he is, quote, absolutely considering a potential run for President. He's also dismissing concerns, a lot of them coming out of the White House right now, that he could be a spoiler for President Biden. Manchin's imminent departure from the Senate, though, is also threatening to shake up the balance of power on Capitol Hill. Democrats, of course, there have a slim two-seat majority in the Senate. Let's go straight to the source tonight. And joining me now is Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Senator, thank you for being here. Obviously, Senator Schumer really.

Wanted you- First of all, thanks for having me, Kaitlin. I appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you for being here and for your time. As you know as well as I do, Senator Schumer really wanted you to run again, but you announced that you are not going to be doing so. Do you think Democrats can keep the Senate majority without you?

Well, we'll see. Here's the thing. Everybody's worried about the majority so much, and I understand that because it does set the committees and sets the agenda. But the bottom line is it still takes 60. It takes 60 to pass something. Every senator has a tremendous amount of power, whether you're the majority or the minority. But the majority is always the best place to be. We'll see we have John Tester. These are some good people, and wish him well.

Yeah, there's a lot of key races. You've talked a lot in your time on Capitol Hill about bipartisan in the Senate. Senator Mitch McConnell once praised you for saving the filibuster, which he said preserved the Senate. But then he flew to West Virginia and directly recruited your most formidable challenger. Do you feel betrayed by that?

That's politics. This is not the most honorable profession in the world anymore. But with that being said, it's all about the next election and it's all about the party system. Caitlin, that's the problem. The business of politics has gotten so big because the business model is a Democrat business and a Republican business and it's really forgot about the people to a certain extent. All they want is 51 or greater to be in the majority. Then they do so much damage trying to get there that when they do get there, they're not even close to 60. But if you want to get something done, you have to have 60. It's just a horrible situation when every time you're in a cycle, you're up. It could be one of your better friends on the other side. If you have a D by your name or an R by your name, you're supposed to against the person on the other side no matter who it is. It never used to be like that. They tell us way back when, and it used to be an unwritten rule. Now this is fair game, and there's no way that where we come from, whether it be Alabama or West Virginia, but you try to get someone fired every day you go to work and expect they're going to be your best friend next week.

It doesn't work.

That makes it sound like are you going to leave the Democratic Party?

I don't know if I've ever I've never considered myself a Washington Democrat. I've been a very independent person, and I don't really think that that.

Should have- Does that sound? That sounds like you're leaving.

Well, no, you have a D or an R by your name or an I by your name. It shouldn't identify who you are. If you change who you are because you change, you have a D, then you have an R or you have an I. People go back and forth. It's more for the person's political, I think, than more for who the person is. No matter what I have by me, I'm an independent thinkie. I vote independently, and I've always done that for 40 years. So we'll see. I know what you're saying, but we'll see. I haven't gotten.

There yet. But you're still considering that?

Sure. You always consider that.

Absolutely. Is it likely that.

You're going to be the Democratic Party? And I'm sure they'd be happy. They might throw me out. So who knows? They might do me a favor. I don't know.

Since you made your announcement last week, have you spoken to President Biden?

I have not spoken to him. I got a nice note from him and everything. He's been traveling quite a bit. I spoke to Steve Rochetti in the White House, and he's very, very close to the President, so I'm sure we'll be talking.

What did you make of his statement that he did put out? He basically was tying you to all of his big accomplishments that he's had in office. It seemed like he was sending a pretty clear message with that statement.

Well, the clear message is this. Nothing would have happened without bipartisan, and I've been leading the charge on bipartisan on every piece of legislation. I'm happy that they think some of us being good. I've not been pleased of how they're trying to basically implement, especially the IRA, and I've been holding their feet to the fire on that. But we've done some great things, and we did that basically with a 50-50 Senate. That 50-50 Senate, it was started by bar partnership, myself, Lisa Mukowski, Susan Collins, Matt Romney, just a bunch of us got together and we just worked on all those bills. The Electoral Count Act, we wanted to make sure this never happened again, this insurrection that we saw on January the sixth. Then you go down the line, CHIPSAC, a bipartisan infrastructure. The bipartisan infrastructure bill was pulled out. I pulled that out of the BV because it was something we truly had to have. We hadn't fixed any of our infrastructure for 30 years. You look at that and you look at all the things that we have done. It was an unbelievable stretch.

It really was. You've said you are proud of that legacy, not just that what you've accomplished for the people of West Virginia, but the question is what you are going to do next. You are very clearly exploring a third-party run. But are you worried that a third-party run for the White House could damage that legacy potentially?

Well, let me just say this. Everyone's talking about a third party run. I'm talking about basically trying to resurrect the middle, the moderate, the sensible, common sense middle. Right now, I don't care what you say or what people might be thinking. They're telling me that we've had enough. We can't take it. It's just so much visceral. When you have Donald Trump basically normalizing the attacks on human beings every day, anybody that doesn't agree with him, he's after. I've said this, the country would be in a horrible situation challenging our democracy if he got reelected. I've said this very clearly. He believes that truly that the only fair election is the one he wins. He believes that the law only applies to everybody but him. He attacks anybody that doesn't agree with him. He uses these horrible analogies of so many good Americans just because might not be in his bandwidth, if you will. It would be horrible on that and no truly concern for the rule of law, who we are as Americans, what we're about. That's the thing we're talking about and then I've been to a certain extent on President Biden. He's not the person we thought that was getting elected, being a centrist and moderate.

He's been pushed so far to the left. If we have this movement in the middle, maybe we can pull people back to a common sense middle to where they can govern. This is the long run. It's not just for the next election. We're in this. We have Americans together, and my daughter is taking that and run with that, the 501(c)(4), that we're going to help people anywhere we find, a Democrat or a Republican that wants to work for the betterment of the country.

But Senator Manchin- With what you just said there about Donald Trump, and then you said you believe Joe Biden, the President of Biden has been pushed too far to the left. Which one do you think is a bigger threat to America, though? A second.

Term of Donald Trump? Donald Trump, I think we would lose democracy as we know it because he has no regard whatsoever for the rule of law, who we are as a country, basically the orderly transfer of power, and sowing so much problems as far as within our system. That he has no regard whatsoever.

But that's the White House argument as well as to why they don't believe you should run because they believe that if you did, you'd take votes from Biden and help reelect Donald Trump.

Let me just tell you. I'm not going to be a spoiler. I'm not looking for any spoilers, but I'm looking for basically how we're going to govern this country, Kaitlyn, from the middle. You cannot run your life from the extremes. You're not going to be successful. It's very difficult. You're not going to have a successful business if you're in extremes and you can't continue to run this country. You can't have open borders. You can't have a runaway debt. You can have the problems that we have, the challenges, crime and all the things that we've got to fight. We've got two of our allies fighting for their life in Israel and Ukraine right now that we're trying to prevent ourselves from getting pulled into a war. There's so much going on. President Biden has worked well overseas with our native allies, I think he's done a good job. But right now it's going to be very serious. But we've got to get our financial house in order, we've got to secure our borders. Also on top of that, we have an awful lot of people that come here that need to have work visas so they can pay their own way and pay taxes rather than just sucking off the system.

You just said you never want to be a spoiler. How and when would you know if that's the case?

I think, as I said before, this is the long run. We're out there basically trying to say, Hey, are you happy with what's gone? Why did you leave? I have a lot of friends have left. Why did they leave so early? Are they just frustrated with the system? I know their answer, but I'm saying I want them to be more public. If they can come out and start talking about what they saw, what was wrong and what had to be fixed, then we can start building from that core again. Right now there's not that many in the middle, you know that. Not that many centries are going to say, We're not sure how they're going to vote. You pretty much know most of them are going to vote party-line, whether to be Democrat or Republican. They never did know from me because I was going to look at the issue and I was going to vote what I thought would help my country, my state, and I could go home and explain it. If I couldn't explain it, I don't care whether the Democrats come after me or Republicans, I wasn't going to support something or be against something just because they wanted me to do it.

I won't do that. But you said you're very clearly not going to vote for Donald Trump. You said it would be bad for democracy if he's reelected, and you said you want President Biden to make changes if you're going to support him. What changes exactly do you want to see from the White House?

Well, first of all, we just have suspected that basically it looks as if we'll have a rematch, but we don't know where that's going to go. The bottom line is that I believe that President Biden has been pushed to the left. He feels like that's where the base of the party or where he thinks he has to go. How many times have they spoken the Inflation Reduction Act as being an energy security. Have they ever said about it paid down $230 billion of debt?

Are you saying you don't think President Biden should run again?

I'm not asking and telling anybody what to do. My goodness, no. I'm hoping they see that there's a movement and he can come back to where he started from. That's the election that was done in 2020. Or anybody else, I want to make sure that we have a movement of senators that we're bringing here, Democrats and Republicans, that will be happy to be in the middle because they have support. They're going to be centrist or moderates.

Do you think that Joe Biden could beat Donald Trump if that is the rematch?

I can't predict because you know what? I've never believed... The only poll I believe is election day poll. I'm seeing all kinds of numbers as you are. I can't really predict that. But if it is those two, who would you vote for? It looks very challenging right now. I'm going to wait and see where we have, who we have in this. Let's see what happens. There's a lot to happen.

You're making your decision on whether to enter the race by Super Tuesday?

Well, Super Tuesday, that's been said. Basically, Super Tuesday is when you're going to know exactly who the candidates are going to be by the respective parties. The Democrat and Republican business machine is going to make their determination what they're going to do. You'll have both of them playing to the extreme.

But when do you make your determination?

Well, then that's when anything would be starting. If there's people that we have someone that's going to run for the middle or move into the middle and make a run, that's probably when it would start. That. I would assume because there's no need to start before that, you don't have to be in a primary. Again, I want to tell you this is the long haul. This is beyond the 2024 election. This is '26 and '28. This is basically getting people to understand. There is support. The people want you to make reasonable, responsible decisions, not be beckoned and just to be party-line votes. It's just awful the way that we have just shoved people to their respective corners and expect that's the way we're going to have democracy and have any type of leadership position. Because I can tell you, if we don't get our act together, what you saw yesterday, the behavior and these are good people, I know them all, how they got themselves worked into a frenzy like that where they wanted to fight, calling each other names. This is not a banana republic. It's not a third world country. This is the United States of America.

People are looking at us for leadership, Kaitlin. They're looking for us as a superpower of the world to show them how civility, how democracy, how freedom, how you maintain it.

Senator Joe Manchin, as always, thank you for your time.

Thanks, Kaitlin. I appreciate being with you.