For Senior White House and Political Correspondent Ed O’Keefe, the incoming presidency means one thing for the country and for the media — disruption.
“[Washington, D.C.] is exactly the place [Donald Trump] wants to disrupt,” O’Keefe said. ”And we will cover it as aggressively as we have in the past.”
O’Keefe sat down in the McKinley Building’s Media Innovation Lab with fellow American University alumni Ken Bibaraj on Nov. 19 for an episode of the latter’s “Coffee With Ken” podcast, described as a thought leadership conversation series.
The two discussed voting trends, the experience of working in the White House briefing room and the future of traditional media in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.
O’Keefe graduated from AU in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree from the School of Public Affairs in Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics & Government, while Bibaraj graduated in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science. The two met during their time as undergraduates and kept in touch after graduating.
O’Keefe previously covered Congress and national politics for The Washington Post for 12 years before joining CBS in 2018. Before his promotion to Senior White House and Political Correspondent in 2021, he was lead correspondent for the network’s coverage of the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign and presidential transition.
Now, four years later, he’s covering the opposite outcome, after President-elect Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris.
Covering the incoming presidency will be very different from covering outgoing President Joe Biden, O’Keefe told The Eagle, especially after four years of what he called a calm and steady White House compared to Trump’s “chaos and drama.”
“But it looks like the country would like the disruption back, so it's going to whiplash back to being faster,” O’Keefe said. “Biden was at 60 beats per minute, Trump’s probably gonna be close to 120 beats per minute.”
With Trump’s inauguration in less than 50 days, O’Keefe said it’s hard to take time off during a presidential transition. He told The Eagle he was headed to West Palm Beach the following day to be closer to the transition process and keep pace with the president-elect’s decisions.
“It’s figuring out who’s in the mix, figuring out why they’re in the mix, or who put them in the mix,” O’Keefe said. “Like, are they representative of an issue, or a group of people, or somebody who’s out of favor? Are they the one that's out of favor?”
The podcast touched on controversy among Democrats regarding nominees for Trump’s forthcoming cabinet. However, O’Keefe said anyone paying attention over the past two years wouldn’t be surprised by the president-elect’s picks.
“Look at what he has said in the past about loyalty, about rewarding those that stand with him even through the darkest moments,” O’Keefe said. “They are people like Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and more recently, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
When it came to discussing the current political landscape amid the presidential transition, Biberaj, now an executive managing director at real estate company Savills, said he knew O’Keefe was the guy.
“He has such a unique perspective, because he’s front row in the White House,” Biberaj told The Eagle. “So much was happening with the incumbent president seeking re-election, and then stepping down to let the vice president pursue it — I knew that Ed would have invaluable insights.”
Biberaj is all about timely conversations. He credits his time in AU Student Government and further studies at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in helping him understand the significance of convening people to solve problems.
“This kind of idea of convening, hosting discussions around important topics across different sectors was always something that I was kind of passionate about,” Biberaj said. “And I tried to find different ways to do that in other parts of my career.”
As the Chairman of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce from 2014 to 2017, Biberaj tested out the idea by hosting conversation events where political leaders met with the business community. Three years after that the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the idea of taking conversations to a virtual stage occurred to Biberaj — conversations anyone could listen to.
“We were doing Zoom webinars that were open source, and I would just interview and have conversations with people,” Biberaj said. “Hundreds of people would tune in and watch.”
“Coffee With Ken” aims to address a “broad spectrum” of relevant topics, according to its website, including anything from business and innovation to politics and social impact. Past guests of the podcast have included Nobel economist Joseph Stigliltz, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce Suzanne Clark.
Although “Coffee With Ken” is normally held online, Biberaj said his conversation with Ed O’Keefe was the first episode of the series held on the campus of his alma mater.
“The privilege of coming back to campus for this conversation is pretty exciting,” Biberaj said during the podcast. “We might hit the dining hall after, check out our old haunts. It’s gonna be pretty exciting.”
Biberaj praised his alma mater’s location in D.C. and all the opportunities that came with attending college there — including access to national leaders and the ability to have conversations with them.
“Other universities and other students maybe kind of think about Washington as so far, so remote,” Biberaj said. “AU provided us with an actual living laboratory to study political science and understand government and impact.”
O’Keefe said when he first heard about the University’s CLEG program, he called the admissions officer to confirm if what he was hearing was right. After that, he “didn’t really have to make up his mind” about going to AU. Without D.C., he said, he wouldn’t be where he was today.
“It wasn’t just about being taught and learning and living with classmates and meeting new people and having all sorts of new experiences,” O’Keefe said during the conversation. “It was being here on the edge of the laboratory.”
This article was edited by Payton Anderson, Tyler Davis and Abigail Turner. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks, Sabine Kanter-Huchting and Charlie Mennuti.
