Trump v. Musk: Choose Your Daddy
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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. We got a big show for you today. Later in the episode, you will hear the interview Lovett and I did at an event with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson earlier this week about their book, Original Sin. You might have heard of it.

But we have so much news to cover before that. Trump signed a flurry of executive orders late Wednesday night, one that bans or restricts the citizens of 19 countries from entering the United States, one that bans all international students from attending Harvard, and one that orders an investigation into Joe Biden's former aides over potential actions to hide information regarding the former president's mental and physical health.

We'll get to those executive orders, but let's start with the news they seem designed to distract from. Donald Trump's third divorce. This one from his campaign sugar daddy, his doge bag in chief, his dark MAGA brother from another mother, Elon Musk.

Great job. So, yeah, you know, in case it's a lot has happened, Dan, and we're recording this Thursday afternoon. By the time you're all hearing this on Friday morning, who knows what else will have happened? But we'll just give you the quick rundown of how we got here. It all started a few days ago when Elon called Trump's economic plan a, quote, massive, outrageous, pork filled Congress spending bill. That's a, quote, disgusting abomination.

He then threatened to, quote, fire all the politicians who support the bill in the 26 midterms. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about this for about 48 hours until a reporter asked him about it in the Oval Office Thursday morning. And his response was worth the wait.

Elon and I had a great relationship, but I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here. And he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate. And he never had a problem until right after he left. And he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next. You saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the Oval Desk.

And even with the black eye, I said, "You want a little makeup? We'll get you a little makeup." But he said, "No, I don't think so," which is interesting. People leave my administration, and they love us.

So, uh,

Trump correctly predicted that personal attacks would follow, as Elon has responded by unleashing a flurry of tweets. I think it's still going. I don't know. We had to record at some point, so who knows what's happening now. But so far...

The tweets have included, quote, without me, Trump would have lost the election. Quote, such ingratitude. And my personal favorite, which he directed towards Republican politicians. Trump has three and a half years left as president, but I will be around for 40 plus years. In response, Trump posted on Truth Social that he pushed Elon out of the White House because he was, quote, wearing thin and then threatened to terminate all of Elon's government contracts and subsidies.

not to be outdone. Elon then said, I guess this is my new personal favorite. I was going to say. I clearly wrote that line before these tweets. All right. And then Elon said that the reason Trump hasn't released the Epstein files is because Trump is in the Epstein files. And then Elon called for his impeachment and to be replaced with J.D. Vance.

So, Dan, it was just four months ago, it was February, when Elon tweeted, I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man. Now they've broken up right in the middle of pride. And I am just wondering if you have thoughts on the state of male friendship in America. Men today don't have any close friends. This is the problem. It's a classic story. Two lonely love star people meet online. They should...

They bond quickly over shared passions like taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest people. They start spending every moment together. They become inseparable. Almost feels like their personalities merge. But John, they move too fast too soon. And before you know it, it blows up. Maybe they moved in together too quickly. Blows up. Things fall apart. Next thing you know, one of them is calling the other one a pedophile. And here we are.

A pedophile that he says, you wouldn't have been president without me, pedophile. I mean, by moving to impeachment, Elon Musk has moved more aggressively than 99% of House Democrats on Donald Trump. I mean, it's wonderful. It is. Elon, finally, after many years, has found a way to make Twitter fun again.

Yeah. This was the best day on Twitter since he took it over. I think it's the best day in politics in 2025. That's what I mean. Not even easily. Yeah. I mean, there's not a lot of great ones to choose from. But Elon also, let's say he proposed a new political party. He said, why don't we have a new political party for the 80 percent of of of people in the middle? So I guess we're we're bringing back the Innovation Party. Yeah.

I don't think he was. That's a deep cut. For those close readers of Axios in 2017, you would know what that was. You know who you are. And he also hit Trump on tariffs. He quote tweeted someone saying, oh, can we admit the tariffs are stupid now? And Elon says, yeah, there'll be a there'll be a recession. They're going to cause a recession by the second quarter, by the second half of the year.

Elon is just going nuts. He is just tweeting up a storm. This was always the risk for Trump with the Elon partnership. And it's why Trump treads so carefully around Elon for so long. Because Elon has a megaphone almost as large as Trump's. And he is very good at getting attention. And when he goes, he goes bananas. And that's where we are right now. He goes bananas. He certainly is. Today's Pod Save America brought to you by Ketamine.

That's neither here nor there. That's neither here nor there. That refers to nothing. That's just an ad break. If anyone was wondering, that's in reference to a New York Times story. That's for the lawyers out there. I think we all know the New York Times story, which I want to get to at some point. Because I have a question for you before we get into the current implications of all of this. Let's go back to Elon deciding to come out against the bill.

Why do you think he turned on the bill and ultimately Trump? Was it because, as the White House and Mike Johnson and other Republicans are suggesting, that the bill would eliminate tax credits for electric vehicles like Tesla's? Was it out of a genuine concern for the deficit and debt, like Elon says? Was it something else? Trying to make sense of Elon Musk's brain.

That's quite a challenging mission you've given me. Please use the code crooked. 20% off your first order. What's the, what's the website? X.com. What I do not believe it was because of the electric vehicle tax credits.

He, Trump ran against the electric vehicle tax credits, the entire campaign. He, I know this because Elon Musk tweeted it out today, but they, Elon Musk was standing next to Donald Trump when Donald Trump was praising Elon Musk's integrity by pointing out that he was supporting Trump, despite the fact that Trump opposed the electric vehicle tax cuts and Elon had never asked him to change his position on it. So that I do not think that's the reason I think the Republicans probably made a mistake in,

by suggesting that right off the bat, that probably inflamed Elon more to suggest that he could not. I'm not saying his concerns about the deficit are well-founded or necessarily legitimate. I don't know what his real concerns are here. The Republicans made a mistake by trying to suggest that pure picayune greed was what was driving Elon's opposition. You could have just said, we disagree here, and that's it. And they did not do that, and they made this situation much worse. Yeah.

I think that, you know, Elon has been tweeting videos of himself and retweeting other people tweeting videos of him talking about the debt and the deficit and what a problem it was for a long time. And I think that

When Elon took over Doge, you know, he wanted to, he thought he was going to cut all the spending, thought he was going to make government more efficient or whatever. And he knows that Doge has been seen now as basically a failure, that the cuts were far less than what he said he could cut. And so I think it kind of built from sort of

feeling embarrassed or shamed about Doge to now being pissed about the bill. And I also think it results from just Elon still to this day having served in government and supposedly being a very smart person has no fucking idea what actually are the drivers of debt and deficit. And he genuinely thought that

They're fucking feeding USAID into the wood chipper, which has killed a bunch of kids in Africa, that somehow that's going to bring down the deficit in debt. And he doesn't realize that the biggest driver in our debt is the defense budget, entitlements, and the fact that, at least in this bill, Donald Trump and the Republicans want a couple trillion dollars in tax cuts, mostly for extremely rich people like Elon Musk.

Yeah, I think it's like a basic lack of understanding about what causes the debt and deficit. But then also he seems to care about the debt and debt and deficit. Neither Trump nor Elon know what's in this bill or what it does or how it works. Nope. That they're like talking past each other. I mean, maybe he cares about the deficits. Maybe he doesn't. But if he were to truly care about them and truly understand how they worked, he would probably suggest giving back his tax cut.

Right. Right. Or cutting the defense budget, which funds most of his companies. Right. He's not doing that. He calls it like a pork filled bill. There's no pork in the bill. There's a lot of dumb shit in the bill. But this is not this is not the it's not because Republicans did not put pork in the bills because you cannot put those sorts of things in this type of budget reconciliation bill. This is not the appropriations bills that have like.

The bridge to nowhere to another deep cut from a long time ago, or the sort of classic pork barrel projects that are used as earmarks to buy off members. That's not what's in this bill. That's not why this bill has this deficit because it's a giant tax cut and a huge boost in the budgets for the Defense Department and Homeland Security to do mass deportation.

Elon is correct that the bill is a disgusting abomination, as he said. The reason it's a disgusting abomination is because it spends a trillion dollars to give tax cuts for people making over a million dollars and then pays for that by kicking 15 million people off their health insurance.

So that's why it's a disgusting abomination. So he was half right on that one. I also think there was like a slow build in all of the stories that came out as Musk was leaving the White House, after he left the White House, about the cabinet being pissed at Musk and him not getting along with anyone in Trump world. And I have to say, I went back, this is total conspiracy theory for me, but-

This is where we air them out, right? Just in public. Yes, that's how it works these days. That's how it works now. We'll get to some of that later on, but yes. When you go to that, when you reread the New York Times story about Elon's alleged drug use while he was in the White House or while he was at least on the campaign traveling with Trump,

Early on, it talks about how he's campaigning with Trump and the New York Times got a picture of his pill bottle that has like 20 random pills in it and Adderall and a bunch of other stuff. And there's the Academy stuff. And it's like source to people familiar. But the way that it's written, I'm like, who would have given that to the New York Times, including a picture of the pillbox that he travels with? And I'm like, I don't know. He was with all the Trump people.

during the campaign. So maybe he suspects, at least, who knows if it was or not, maybe he suspects that it was White House people who fucked him on that story. Can I try a different theory here? Maybe that's right. I appreciate you delving, getting out the red string for this. Thank you. But do you think J.D. Vance is the one who gave us the New York Times? Oh, interesting. Well, no, maybe not, because he's trying to depose Trump for J.D. Vance. Yeah. So maybe Stephen Miller. Either way. Maybe Stephen Miller. Yeah.

Awkward dinner conversation in Miller household now that... Wow. Yeah, for those who don't know, when Elon left the White House, reports are that Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, who was working for Elon or working as part of the Doge effort, was going to leave also to work for Elon.

post-White House. I wonder if she drafted some of these tweets. And then someone noticed that Elon unfollowed Stephen Miller after the fight broke out today. He also unfollowed Charlie Kirk. This is a... I know this is not really where you spend your valuable time, but this is a classic reality star move. This also happens in sports a lot, too, where there's an entire beat of people who are like,

The receiver just unfollowed the quarterback. What does that mean? Here's my theory of what happened there. I think Elon Musk has convinced himself he is some sort of fiscal austerity guy. He's come to self-identify because of Doge. And he probably thinks this bill is stupid because it is. It's incredibly stupid. So he calls it an abomination. First, he expresses some concern with it in an interview.

He gets some positive feedback for that. Then he calls it an abomination. He gets a lot of engagement over that. Now, all of a sudden, he has attention again because Elon really had stepped – he had been one of the main characters in world drama for about a year straight. Then he stepped back. He was getting less attention. His tweets were getting less traction. He was just kind of tweeting about new Tesla features and SpaceX launches and not in the – he wasn't the main character anymore.

And now he this was a chance to be the main character. Trump's talking about the Oval Office and he's in and he's like getting that dopamine rush of I was going to say that, you know, so well, a lot of people are talking about the ketamine, but really dopamine. It's the dopamine. That's people are people are just discounting all the dopamine that's coming from Elon, just firing off these tweets and getting all the response. And he's all juiced up.

I think that's probably right. I think that's probably right. How do you think to get to something that really matters as opposed to just the fun reality show drama? How do you think this could impact whether Trump's bill actually passes Congress?

I think it makes the difficult task of getting this bill through the Senate and then back through the House even more difficult because Musk is giving voice to two groups of people who voted for it in the House with deep reservations and some senators in these two groups who have reservations about voting for it now.

Those groups are the far right, drown the government in the bathtub, MAGA freedom caucus types who thinks that it didn't go far enough in terms of cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, et cetera. And then you have these sort of more traditional Republicans who are kind of like Paul Ryan Republicans in the closet, um,

who have concerns substantively and politically about voting for a bill that adds $2.5 trillion to the debt at a time of high interest rates where it becomes incredibly and prohibitively expensive to pay down that debt.

And so those – there's a group – so a lot of those people are in the Senate. And so he just is giving them cover to oppose this bill in some way, shape, or form. Does it mean it won't pass? I don't know that yet, but it's a lot harder than it was before this. This is the first real obstacle that's been put in the way other than just caucus dynamics, right? This is someone who is driving – sort of shining a spotlight on the rift within the party and forcing it further apart. And –

How do you think the breakup could impact the future of the MAGA coalition?

because there's a lot of people trying to figure out whose side they're on today. In fact, we have the five on in our office like we always do. We love to watch the five on Fox and see what they're doing. And here's how Jesse Waters tried to navigate this today. But sometimes guys fight. Guys sometimes will punch you in the face and the next night you're having a beer. Sleep with your girlfriend and you patch things up. Really? Really?

Not your wife, your girlfriend. No one slept with my girlfriend. Let's put it that way. A lot to unpack there, Dan. Yeah.

What's going on with Jesse? What's going on with Jesse? That I'm not going to touch that one. I don't really want to know how that all played itself out. I think... Is Jesse saying that you could punch him in the face and then he'll have a beer with you the next night? You think that's what he's saying? I think in the end he's suggesting he's the one who slept with someone's girlfriend. And then they hatched things out. Yeah. And then Greg Gutfeld was kind of quiet after that. But anyway. Anyway, we're too deep into the five right now. Um...

I think that where this creates tension in the Republican Party is in the always uncomfortable marriage between the MAGA right and the tech right. The Peter Thiel, David Sachs, all-in guys, VC bros who came to support Trump in this election for a whole host of reasons.

some cultural, a lot economic, and they bought a lot of Trump's bullshit about, you know, there's when Trump went on the All In podcast and he promised that we were going to do these things to keep the high-skilled workers here in the country, and he just goes, we're going to staple a visa to diplomas, and that's not what this is, right? And this tension has been manifest in the Elon Musk-Steve Bannon feud since the day after the election.

Steve Bannon, you say? Yeah. What does Steve Bannon have anything interesting to say today? Well, yeah. So as this fight was escalating very quickly over the course of Thursday and Trump said, I'm going to terminate the contracts and then we get the Epstein accusation, then we get the call for Trump's impeachment. The joke was, OK, the only thing left here that hasn't happened yet is Trump trying to deport Elon Musk.

And sure enough, Steve Bannon on his show calls for Elon Musk's deportation, an investigation into Elon Musk, how he became a citizen of the United States, what his immigration process was, etc.

suggest deporting him and then calls for Donald Trump to nationalize Starlink and SpaceX. So he just he went Steve Bannon fucking that's it. He went there in the course of three hours. We went from a mild dispute around the financial implications of a budget bill to accusations of pedophilia deportation impeach in impeachment to your point about the tech right Derek Thompson tweeted.

The tech right got suckered by the most obvious con man in political history, defended him while he raised tariffs, slashed science, and scared away foreign talent, and now the administration's going to wreck SpaceX for spite while Bannon calls for Musk's deportation. Well done. I think Derek nailed it. Great job, people. That is exactly what happened with the tech right. They're total con men. And I don't think Donald Trump got conned by them because he got what he wanted. Although I will say...

So Trump had an event at the White House after Elon called for his impeachment and said that he was in the Epstein files. And Trump got a shouted question about Elon at the end of the event and just did not take the bait, but seemed angry the whole time he was at the event. We'll revisit this tomorrow after Trump's 12 Diet Cokes and got his ketamine. He's gotten his phone back.

Because one thing we know about Trump over the years is he prefers his fights in the tweets, not in the streets. And so I could see him launching tonight on True Social. Yeah, there's going to be a Seacott threat at some point. Not to get into the nerdy communications of this, but Elon Musk is tweeting his on a platform where everyone is with millions of people and his millions of followers. And Trump is on his weird...

picky yoon platform that has very very small number of people actually on it and so he's only communicating by posting on this weird platform than other people screenshotting his truths and then putting them on twitter like if he really wants to get this going he's got to get back on twitter that's what i would say yeah i will say that the part of the cobalt the mega coalition this time around which is you know we shorthand it is that the tech right the silicon valley folks the island types it's also you know when we looked at the catalyst data um

Trump did gain ground with college men, not just non-college men. And usually in the Trump era, college educated voters have not been moving towards Trump. In fact, they've been moving towards the Democrats. And I do wonder, and I don't just think it's this fight at all, but I think...

As the Trump administration goes on, some of these college men who voted for Trump in 2024 and maybe hadn't voted for him in 2020 or 2016, maybe because they thought Elon Musk and other business types put their stamp of approval on Donald Trump. I could see them starting to peel away from the MAGA coalition as time goes on. Yeah, I mean, these are most likely economically centered groups.

voters. And so it's less his fight with Trump. Although I think increasing the deficit by trillions of dollars does not help with these voters. I think putting in place tariffs that lead to a recession does not help with these voters. And they are probably... These are

profile as more likely voters. These are the sort of voters who sat out 2016 or voted third party in 2016, or maybe voted for Trump who then voted for Democrat in 2018 and stuck with Biden. And so they are target voters for 2026 for sure. Yeah. All that said, the bill's problems, uh, on the right go way beyond Elon Musk, uh, and, and, uh,

as you just pointed out with some of the people pissed about the deficits and the trillions that it's adding to the deficits. The Republicans who care about the deficit aren't happy. Republicans who care that Medicaid cuts could cost them their jobs in 2026, they aren't happy.

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is unhappy, saying she didn't know everything that was in the bill when she voted for it. She's very upset at a provision. We talked about this on offline, a provision that would prevent states and local governments from regulating AI on their own for the next most of the next decade.

So she's pissed about that. Here's a sampling of some of the Republican complaints. But now they want me to vote for $5 trillion worth of increase in a debt ceiling. And I'm just not for that. That's not conservative. Here's a lesson for us all.

No matter what political party holds office and is in charge, we should all watch carefully the bills that we pass. The president, the president, Senate leadership has to understand that we're serious. They all say, oh, we can pressure these guys. No, you can't. This is immoral what us old farts are doing to our young people. This is grotesque what we're doing. We need to own up to that. This is our moment.

I can't accept this scenario. I can't accept it. So I won't vote for it unless we are serious about fixing it. This is our moment, old farts. What do you think about that messaging? Slam dunk. We're getting from Republicans. This bill is just going to be a huge political gift to the Republicans.

I mean, I'm obviously kidding there, but let me just put in perspective how unpopular this bill is. So Hart Research, a democratic research firm, did a poll for a bunch of groups, including Center for American Progress, Protect Our Care, Families Over Billionaires, and they tested the bill. And

Less than a third of voters support it. And then they went through and they did a message exercise where they did a generic description of the bill, Democratic arguments for the bill, and a back and forth between Democratic arguments and Republican arguments for the bill. When they finished that, the bill is nearly 30 points underwater. To help you understand how unpopular that is, the Trump tax cut in 2017, which was thought to be one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation in history, was about 14 points underwater when it passed in 2017.

And the Affordable Care Act, which is in the lore of this incredibly polarizing bill that cost the Democrats 60 plus seats in 2010, that bill in the Kaiser Foundation tracking poll was six points above water when it passed in March of 2010. And so this is by far the least – no one is asking for this. And there's no benefit coming because people aren't getting – other than the exceptions around overtime and tips –

No one's getting new tax cuts. They're just keeping the tax cuts they've had for four years. And so you're not even going to get this boost of like, all of a sudden you're going to get your check in the mail with your new tax cut or your paycheck is going to look larger. That's not what's going to happen. It's just status quo for everyone other than people are going to lose their healthcare and their food assistance.

And so far, the biggest challenge for those of us who oppose this bill has been that not enough people have heard about it and people aren't paying attention. Data for Progress did a poll also and also found that the bill is very, very unpopular, but then found out that I think it was like 4% of people had heard a lot about it. It was a very small number of people had heard a lot about it. I think 14 total respondents in their open-ended thing knew the bill had Medicaid cuts.

14. Total respondents, yeah. Oh my God. Okay. So that's the other consequence of this being the basis for the biggest breakup of the decade. Yeah. Is that now people are going to like, well, how did this whole thing start? And then maybe they'll look into the bill. On that note, how do you think Democrats should take advantage of all this to kill the bill? It is to, like you've pointed out, the fundamental...

issue with the bill is that it's incredibly unpopular, but not enough people know about it or are paying attention to it. So everyone has to find the tallest mountain they can find, the biggest megaphone they can find, text all the people they can, shout about it, yell about it, talk about it in simple to easy to understand terms that it's essentially a tax cut for the very wealthy and corporations paid for by taking food and healthcare away from millions and millions of Americans. And on top of that, still adds trillions of dollars to the deficit.

Like just everyone has to know about it. When people know about it, they're going to be against it. And I think there, we have two tasks here. If we, we can, there is a chance that we can create enough political pressure that they have to change what this bill looks like to take some of those cuts away. It's something we'll have to pass because if they don't pass something, we will default on our debt and everyone's taxes woke up. So they'll have to pass something, but we can have the potential to change the nature of what that is by making it as politically painful as possible. Elon Musk is helping us do that.

He's not making the arguments that we would be making. He's not out there defending Medicaid. But as you say, he's drawing attention to it and putting a spotlight on it. And we can then come in, follow in the breach and make our arguments.

Yeah, and I says, you know, some people are concerned because as you point out, he's not making the same arguments that we are. And obviously it is adding trillions to the deficit. He's correct about that. But the reason that I think we oppose the bill and probably most, I think if you ask people to choose between what they hate most, Medicaid cuts

and tax cuts for the rich or adding to the deficit. I think they would choose the Medicaid cuts and the tax cuts for the rich, for sure. But, you know, Elon Musk called the bill a disgusting abomination. We should call it a disgusting abomination too. And we can explain why we think it's a disgusting abomination, which is maybe partly what Elon thinks, but also the fact that it's going to kick 15 million people off their health care to pay for a trillion dollars in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

I know we, I agree with you that the Medicaid cuts are by, are much more effective. All the testing shows that as an argument. We have this hesitancy as Democrats because we've been burned by austerity politics in the past to talk about the deficits. Yeah. But we should talk about the deficits. There are times when it makes sense to go in a deficit, like after a financial crisis to save the economy, give people money to stay alive during COVID, right? Like those times make sense.

To go into deficit to give tax cuts to rich people at a time of incredibly high interest rates where the debt you're ranking up costs so much more is insane. And it's going to bother a lot of people. And we should not shy away from that argument. Yeah. I think we should make it.

And I just think you don't have to complicate the simple here. Everyone hates the bill, right? Republicans hate it. Elon Musk hates it. This person hates it. You know, we have plenty of quotes now to play from all kinds of Republicans about how they hate the bill. We can talk about the Medicaid cuts. We can talk about the ACA cuts. There's just creating a lot of chaos around the bill about how it's intensely disliked. Because if the casual news consumer, if all they hear, oh, this is a bill that most people don't like. That's all.

And then you'll get enough pressure on some of these Republicans to, you know, like then they have a very thin margin. They can lose three votes in the Senate and a couple more votes in the House when it goes back to the House. So it's, you know, like you said, they probably they need to pass something or else taxes go up. Do you see Trump was on Truth Social Wednesday, I think, talking about we should eliminate the debt ceiling altogether?

You know that's a play that's coming. He's going to try to figure out how to get rid of the debt ceiling. That's a position that we've held personally over the course of time. I know, I know. Because he was like, I agree with Elizabeth Warren on this. So we'll have him minting the coin, minting the gold coin. Well, I mean, there is a legislative abolition of the debt ceiling. And then there is simply minting the gold coin or somewhat just not even enforcing it, which is what Trump is obviously going to try to do if...

Somehow we pass the, we run out of money before they can get this disgusting abomination passed. Yeah. Well, kill the bill. That's the rallying cry. Elon started it. You know, people like him can get credit for good ideas once in a while. Kill the bill. Kill the bill. That's what we got to do now.

Well,

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Okay, let's get to the executive orders Trump would rather be making headlines right now, but are still quite awful. The first one, titled...

Very understated. Reviewing certain presidential actions opens an investigation to determine, quote, whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden's mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the president. Essentially, the claim here is that Biden didn't have command of what was happening in the White House and that his staffers basically ran the country via auto pen,

In a statement, Biden responded, let me be clear. I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false. That didn't stop Trump from elaborating on the conspiracy theory in the Oval on Thursday. Well, I don't think Biden would know whether or not he signed it. I'm asking if you've uncovered any of that information. No, but I've uncovered, you know, the human mind. I was in a debate with the human mind.

And I didn't think he knew what the hell he was doing. So, you know, it's just one of those things, one of those problems. We can't ever allow that to happen to our country. The danger our country was in, but I know some of the people that used that auto pen, and those are not the people that had the same ideology as Joe Biden. These were radical left lunatics that used that, and they didn't get elected. He didn't get elected either, actually. Thank you very much, everybody.

Speaking of mental decline, Dan, what do you think about this? I mean, Trump sounds like an unhinged crackpot talking about this. Yeah, he does. I mean, it makes no sense to most people. This is like you have to be deep into like mega fanfic to know what he's talking about.

I don't want to gloss over the fact that everyone's just treating it as normal that the president of the United States ordered a criminal investigation into his political opponent. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And with a memo and directed the White House counsel to work with the attorney general on it. Not how things are supposed to work. No, no, definitely not. The White House is not supposed to order the Justice Department to conduct investigations. No, that's not supposed to work. And even like...

I know the frog in the pot is a very tired metaphor after 10 years of Trump. But the way everyone just covered this is if he was just signing executive order to like review procurement processes, the Department of Defense are like Donald Trump signed an order today as if like an unprecedented, insane thing just happened. Just like normal news. What happens here? And and do you think this is a who is this a problem for?

Huh. This is a problem for probably the people around Joe Biden, not because there is anything real here. Like this is absurd. Even if you read all the reporting, you read Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book, which you guys can talk about later in this podcast.

There is no allegation that Joe Biden is like purely a puppet of a bunch of woke staffers just like auto-penning whatever they want while he dozes. Like that's not... There are real legitimate... Jake and Alex say that like in the first couple pages. They're like those who expect this reporting to reveal, you know, someone who was like in serious, you know, I forget the word they used. It's just like a purely senile president who didn't know, had any idea what he was doing. You're going to be disappointed. So...

There's that. This is complete and total bullshit. It is.

If this investigation actually moves forward, if the FBI is going to start interviewing people, the people around Joe Biden, some of whom have already been called to Congress to testify in the congressional version of this investigation, will probably incur significant legal expenses and be exposed to risk. Not because of this ridiculous conspiracy. Once you are being interviewed by law enforcement, especially law enforcement with malicious political intent, any sort of thing can happen from that perspective.

It was the investigation into Benghazi through the congressional investigations that led to Hillary Clinton's emails. Once they start digging, they can make your life very challenging if that's what they want to do, even if you never did anything wrong. Yeah. And let's be honest about what they're looking for here. If he doesn't like executive orders that Joe Biden signed with an auto pen, Donald Trump can overturn those orders as he's been doing for the last couple months that he's been president. All that he cares about is the pardons.

So he cares that Joe Biden pardoned a bunch of people or gave preemptive pardons to a bunch of people that Donald Trump would like to investigate and potentially jail. That's that's the only that's what they really care about here. There's also like the drama around it and they can take revenge on Biden and they can, you know, have a bunch of headlines and give chum to the right wing media about, oh, we're finally investigating the Bidens and the cover up and all that. But really, he just wants the pardons to go away.

How you would ever possibly do that? The auto-pen... I don't know that Joe Biden... There's no evidence that Joe Biden auto-penned those pardons. I would be shocked if he did. But even if he had...

That has been – the auto pen has been treated by the courts as a legally recognized way of executing laws and executive orders and things like pardons. So I don't even know what it would mean. The first time he threw out this allegation, people dug up video after video, picture after picture of Joe Biden signing legislation himself.

I realize it was probably just the body double, but at least that's out there. And that's going to be tough for courts to figure out if it was the body double or the real Joe Biden. Did you see that Elon Musk also suggested that there was a Trump body double? Yes. Yeah. No, I swear someone should look into that too. Maybe who was signing his legislation? I want to hear from these 2028 Democratic candidates about what their plan for that is if they win.

So Trump or the Trump body double or the auto pen also signed two more orders, both touching on immigration. One is a revival of his notorious first term travel ban. This one's going to take effect on June 9th and ban citizens of 12 countries from entering the U.S.,

supposedly in the name of fighting terrorism. Those countries are Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. It also partially restricts travel from seven other countries, including Cuba and Venezuela.

We knew at some point this would be coming because Trump signed an order on Inauguration Day directing relevant departments to identify countries where they could implement such a ban. So obviously there was a lot of other news today to cover besides the travel ban. But I would say fairly muted response, considering that last time he tried a travel ban when he first came into office in 2017, people flooded the airports and he had to pull back.

Also because it was poorly written from a legal perspective and the courts kind of threw it out. And then eventually they got to the point where it could pass muster, at least with the Supreme Court. What do you think is going on there with the response? I think it is a sort of a dark and deeply depressing statement about where we've gone after the last seven years now, eight years now.

I think about myself. I headed directly to the San Francisco airport after that was signed and protested with thousands of other people there. And what has happened, I think, is Trump's bigoted, jingoistic, nationalistic politics has become normalized in a way. In 2017, it was possible to imagine that the President of the United States would ban travel

to people from Muslim countries because they were Muslim. Like that was the context for it. And people reacted to that with outrage and fervor. And just that sort of, that is, it's not that it is acceptable. I'm not saying people accept, they don't, I'm not saying people like this, but it is this, we are no longer shocked by these sorts of things, right? When you're living in a world where the president is sending people without due process to a torture prison in El Salvador, these things do not seem as shocking as they were before. And that is ultimately, that is Trump's,

Winning that's our authoritarians take power is that people lose the ability to be outraged at things very very worthy of that outrage and

Yeah, and substantively, you could argue that the travel ban has been overtaken by much more extreme immigration and deportation policies like you just mentioned with Seacott. Also, like they suspended all refugees, the refugee resettlement program in this country except for the Afrikaner farmers and a host of other immigration actions that seem far more extreme even than the travel ban, even though the travel ban is horrific.

So the other order he signed is one that bans Harvard from being able to enroll new international students. Last month, Trump tried to revoke Harvard certification in the government's student and exchange visitor program, which a judge blocked while the court case proceeds. This time, Trump's arguing that he has a national security justification under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

So it was the State Department and DHS last time that tried to block the international students that's currently going through courts that the judge temporarily blocked. Now, I think this is a legal problem.

sort of effort to say, well, this is a presidential power now and this is a national security thing. And so courts should not intervene because it's the president's power. It's article two. This is like their theory, the, you know, the unitary executive theory. And so it's obviously almost certainly going to court. What do you think? Is it just that they're just going to keep fighting Harvard here?

Yeah, I think there's two things happening here. The first is, I think Trump just likes fighting with Harvard. I think he thinks it's good politics to fight with the most elite of elite institutions. It

I think in his mind creates this anti-establishment, anti-elite populist persona. It's like elites and he gets to attack elites and foreigners in one. Yes. Harvard is the easiest one to pick on. They're hard to pick on the sense that they have resources. And so they're not scared like some of the other universities. But they are, I think, the easiest to demonize. It's the most famous school. It's the most elite school.

So I think that this is part of that larger conservative project. I don't know whether Trump thinks about it that way, but the people behind him certainly do. People writing these orders and fighting these authorities do. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, for Trump, it's hard to tell.

there is some evidence that they at least feel the need to sort of paint this action as not as extreme as it is. And Trump's saying like, oh, you know, Chinese students are still welcome in our institutions. It's just, we're going to, we're going to just look at their social media accounts and international students can still come to all, to these schools and to Harvard. And we want to work with Harvard to fix this, but Harvard is not, you know, there's probably some bad ones and Harvard's not giving us

A list of the bad ones are letting us check. Otherwise, we're happy to have international students. And I can't tell why he's doing that, but, you know, it may suggest that they know that it's not quite popular to just say we're going to have a ban on all international students.

and a ban on all Chinese students everywhere in America. And we're going to try to destroy the nation's most elite institution, one of the best universities in the world, right? So maybe there's a hint that they know that that's not super popular.

super popular. I think there's a tension at the heron of all Trump's things, which is that he likes to beat up on elite institutions, but what he really wants more than anything else is being accepted by those elite institutions. Yeah. And if he can't be accepted by them, then he at least wants to be feared, you know? Yeah. So, you know, obviously more bad news on immigration there, but, uh, there's been some slivers of good news out there on, uh, on some of these deportations and immigration. Um, so judge James Boasberg, who Trump, uh,

famously does not like. He ruled that using the Alien Enemies Act to deport over 100 Venezuelan men to El Salvador's mega prison was unlawful and that the administration has to provide habeas relief to them. Of course, the Supreme Court unanimously believes that as well. So we'll see if he actually follows. But then there's a couple of cases that we have talked about last episode and prior to that that we should update you on. The Missouri woman from Hong Kong named Carol

who we spoke about last episode. She's lived 20 years in a very rural Trumpy area of Missouri. I think it was like 80% Trump. And she was arrested. She has three kids. She's thrown in detention. She has been released.

And this followed just an uproar from the town. All these people who said they voted for Trump, they marched and they pushed their local officials on this. And so they have – she's not completely out of the woods yet, her lawyer says, but she is currently released. And they think that they feel good about getting her to stay in the United States. The Massachusetts High School honor student who came here from Brazil when he was five –

and was detained on his way to volleyball practice, thrown in an detention center, shackled. He has been released from ICE detention as well. And I can't remember if I talked about this in the show, but the four-year-old girl from Bakersfield here in California, living in Bakersfield, she's from Mexico. Her parents brought her here. It was legal. She has legal status. She was able to come here because she needed life-saving care here.

that she couldn't get in Mexico. And she got that care and it's keeping her alive. And if they deported her back to Mexico, which is what they wanted to do, doctors said that she very well probably would have died. And she is now being allowed, she's getting an exception to stay here. All three of those cases that I mentioned, the decisions followed just a public outcry, both in the communities where these people have lived for a long time,

And also just nationally, people calling attention to it. And so as bleak as things are, I do think raising awareness of these cases when we hear about them, it's not just doing it to yell about it. I think it really does have, like political pressure does have an effect. And, you know, so we should keep it up. Yeah, our forces have power. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. When we come back, you're going to hear the conversation Lovett and I had with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about original sin, all the Biden discourse. Two things before we do that.

In case you missed it, Lovett sat down this week for a YouTube exclusive with New York Attorney General Tish James, who the Trump administration is now going after because she went after Trump. They talked about weaponizing the justice system, the New York City mayor's race, and a lot more. You can check out the full conversation on our YouTube page, youtube.com slash at sign pod save America. While you're there, please subscribe. It's a huge help to us.

takes less than a second to hit the subscribe button. Also, if you're not subscribed to our Friends of the Pod community, you're missing out on new episodes from our subscription-only shows. On the latest Inside 2025, Alyssa Mastromonaco sits down with economist Cecilia Rouse to unpack big topics like the national debt, tariffs, and the long-term impact of today's economic policies.

And on a new polar coaster, Dan broke down rising approval ratings for Trump and surprising new polling that shows Pete Buttigieg ahead of Kamala Harris in an early look at the 2028 Democratic field. Dan, you also took questions, right? I did. I took lots of questions. Great questions from our Discord listeners who are our subscribers, our friends of the pod. There you go. Join the conversation and get access to these episodes and much more by subscribing at cricket.com slash friends or on Apple Podcasts.

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Starting price for 25 megabits per second LTE internet plan with smartphone plan savings, plus taxes, fees, and economic adjustment charge. Terms apply. For J.D. Power 2024 award information, visit jdpower.com slash awards. All right. Hey, everybody. The first four names on the Biden family Christmas card list. How are you guys doing? Congrats on number one. Thank you so much. New York Times. Look at that. Pretty good.

All right. So the book has now been out long enough that we get to ask you about the reaction to the book, because I don't know if you've noticed, but it's been quite intense, including from the subject of the book, former President Joe Biden. Who, just in case you didn't know, said that he could beat us up. Well, that was my first question.

Because I looked at that clip and he was like, they didn't they didn't mention you guys. The reporter didn't mention us or the book. They didn't mention you guys or the book. They just asked about the discussion about his mental capabilities. And Biden responded, you can see that I'm mentally incompetent. I can't walk and I could beat the hell out of both of them. I thought that I saw that live and I immediately texted you. I said, I think Biden just said he could beat you up. I first I first heard it from you. I think you're the both of them.

Because you're not referenced. You're not referenced in any way. It was unclear if it was simultaneously or one after the other. I think it's like the one gorilla versus a hundred men kind of situation.

Did you guys take that to be you? I don't know who else it could have been, but, uh, I took it to be us. Yes. I took it to be us. Uh, other Bidens have also weighed in on the book, uh, his children, Hunter and Ashley, uh, one of his granddaughters, Naomi, but there's one official response from a Biden spokesperson. That's in almost every single story about the book. They haven't changed it. Uh,

We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite. He was a very effective president. What do you guys think of that response? Well, so that was the response that they gave before the book was released. Yeah.

And I said at the time, okay, wait until you read it and you'll get an answer. You'll have to change that statement, but they have not. And the truth of the matter is that the book has any number of moments where one can wonder if whatever issues he was having did actually affect his ability to do the presidency in the way that we would want. And there was actually...

an essay about this in Slate today about one of the anecdotes that I found most disturbing, which was Senator Michael Bennett from Colorado goes to the White House in June 2024 before the debate, and it's an immigration event. And Biden has a very unsettling kind of moment where he seems to have some sort of neurological episode in front of the cameras. Very quick, but he's like talking and nobody can understand what he's saying. And it's not...

That thing he does when he whispers to make a point. Do you know what I'm saying? Like that's if you couldn't hear that, that's that thing he does when he whispers to make a point. Watch me. Nobody's saying yes. Anyway, it's not that these mics aren't aren't Biden level mics, but it's it's he's having some moment. It's like some weird thing. And Senator Bennett leaves the White House and thinks to himself that

This is why our immigration policy is such a mess because the commander in chief can't manage the portfolio. He can't handle it. He'd like, he can't tell people what to do because he's not able to be engaged the way that,

Whether or not you like his policies, and I imagine this crowd doesn't, Trump or Obama or other presidents have been able to. And in fact, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was waiting at the very beginning of the Biden presidency for the order to

do more border enforcement, which would be a Biden-esque way to do the job or an Obama-esque way to do the job. And the order never came. So there are in the book moments of people wondering if he's not able to do the job.

I want to step back and talk about how you guys went about writing this book. Just for people who don't know how a book like this comes together, could you talk a bit about your reporting process, the sourcing, verifying anecdotes and recollections, the fact-checking and all that, Alex? Yeah, I mean, if anyone's like, well, now you tell us, I don't blame them for feeling that way. But the truth is that this book came about, almost every single interview of the over 200 was done after November 5th.

The origins of it actually are, I was on Jake's show the day before the election. He said, I think Kamala Harris might lose. And I've been thinking about this book where we examine how the Democratic Party allowed Trump to come back. Would you be interested? And like Jake and I were friendly, but we weren't like, let's write a book friendly. And so I was like- Buy me dinner first kind of- Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And so I was like, sure, sure. Okay, whatever. And then didn't think it was going to go anywhere. And then sure enough, Jake sends me a draft of a book proposal the night of November 6th. And we turned in and we did all those interviews. Finally, people that we had been cold calling sliding into their DMs for like four years that never wanted to talk came

Or if they did talk, they weren't exactly candid because I think there was this, and we can talk more about this, this gripping fear that saying anything would ultimately help Donald Trump and not change Joe Biden's mind. Now that was over and people were willing to finally confide,

Yeah.

Yeah, and just because this is the writer's block and this is Los Angeles where even bus drivers have screenplays, I'll give you just the idea of some of the writer stuff we did. For me, just as a writer, this is my seventh book and structure is like the most important thing for me. You know, I'm sure everybody here knows that George R.R. Martin from the Game of Thrones books says that there are gardeners and there are architects and I'm definitely an architect that you need to build the house and then you fill in the rooms.

And so we started with the structure, like here are what I think the chapter should be. Alex and I went back and forth and figured that out. Here are all the people we want to interview. And then we would just write chapters. And, you know, when they were done, they weren't done, but we would just like fill in the rooms and then go back and

The biggest disagreement we had, this is a very, a very gratifying, pleasant, professional relationship. But the biggest disagreement we had was Google Docs versus Word. And you, let me guess, you were the Word guy. Yes, I'm the Word guy. Absolutely.

Listen, we wrote the... As a Word guy. I'm a Google Doc guy. Oh, thank God. Listen, we had to write the entire book in one Word document that we emailed back and forth. It wasn't even by chapters. Yeah. And then I'm like... Jake's doing smoke signals, sending his horse and buggy out with the latest edition.

And as the millennial, I'm like, honestly, my Command-S buttons don't even work anymore. So I was frantically trying to save the document because it doesn't auto-save like Google Docs. So we started with Google Docs, okay? I'm not against Google Docs. Some people are saying that maybe you were saying you were okay with Google Docs, but maybe behind the scenes weren't as capable with Google Docs. That there's some evidence that maybe you'd lost a step with Google Docs. True. It's true.

You can't point to any evidence. This is a cover-up. So, but I will say this. So once, so we, you know, we had a list of

200 plus people that we wanted to interview. And we, we, we interviewed almost every single person. Google docs stops at a hundred, right? So we had, so at the next time we had, so we had two different lists of Google docs. This is too much in the Google docs weeds, but he couldn't handle the second Google doc. The fact that there was a second Google anyway. Yeah. The second, the second Google doc. So the book, there is, you were talking about this, that before the election, uh,

before Joe Biden steps aside, there's this incredible fear, right? And this is not a kind of mercenary or kind of political, it's a genuine concern for the country that if you have concerns about Joe Biden's age and you go public with those concerns, that might hurt him. He's not stepping aside. You've done nothing to make our situation better. You've made Donald Trump's situation better.

What is the logic after the election for people to still be afraid to speak honestly about this, including in the book, you make reference to people who were publicly defending Biden, I believe to this day, while talking to you behind the scenes. Yeah. And you could tell us who they are. Well, you definitely know who they are, but you don't know who they are. So I think that there is still a tremendous amount of fear around

about the anger of the Biden campaign. I mean, it is odd to be attacked by Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ashley Biden, Naomi Biden. I guess there's a wife and maybe like six grandkids that we're waiting for before we get the whole set. But I mean, it's not pleasant.

And then, you know, the Democratic Party is it's not like everybody. I mean, I think that the book has changed the conversation where people just don't.

now accept that what we're saying is true. I mean, you guys were there last year, but a lot of people were very reluctant to acknowledge this. I think the book has changed the conversation, but it's not as though the 2028 candidates are running out there holding the book up and saying, like, we need to deal with this as a party. I mean, people are still in denial about it. Yeah. I mean, you guys use, obviously, the word cover up in the title, provocative intentionally, I'm sure. Yeah.

What I have always tried to figure out is, and I know you guys have said that some of the people you talk to, some of the people in that inner circle, like genuinely believe he's fine or they, or you, at least you leave open the fact that, so is it, is it a coverup if they are genuinely thinking everyone else is crazy? We're around him all the time. We think he's fine. Even if we all see something different. It's a great question. And, and,

The reason why we use cover up is because, listen, everyone knew Joe Biden was old. Everyone saw it. The polling displayed it. But even with people recognizing he was old, the Joe Biden we saw on the debate stage was still very shocking to tens of millions of people. And the reason it was shocking, and I think the book really shows this, is that debate Biden, for lack of a better term, that was not the first or even close to the first time he had acted that way behind the scenes.

And there were active, even if they would not acknowledge it to themselves, by their very actions. They were trying to hide and conceal things.

Joe Biden from acting like that in public, from members of their own cabinet, from members of the Democratic Party, from members of Congress. And those efforts became increasingly frantic the six to eight months before the debate. Now, your other question of, well, if they don't know they're covering it up, they're not Congress, is it a cover up?

you know, by very virtue, you know, one like quick example, if you saw Joe Biden and Jill Biden on the view, just like two weeks ago, you know, she's doing what she has been doing for the last year and a half, which is she sort of helps him out when he's like struggling, she'll jump in and like sort of complete sentences. No, I'm sure she'll say he's fine. He's great. But by her very actions, she is showing that she recognizes that he needs her to pick up the, she is trying to pick up his slack. I,

I think actually that the statement that they've given suggests that they know he couldn't do the job 24-7. They don't dispute. I mean, what we have in the book, I don't know how many people have actually read the book, but what we have in the book is these aren't like our opinions.

based on our view watching TV. This is based on more than 200 interviews with cabinet officials, members of Congress, fundraisers, donors, people who saw him up close who told us their stories. So when cabinet secretaries tell us

that by the end of the Biden presidency, he could not be relied upon for that proverbial 2 a.m. phone call in the middle of the night with a national security emergency. I mean, that's a big deal. That means he can't do the job of president.

That's what it means. I mean, that's what the job is. I'm old enough to remember when Hillary was running ads against Obama in Texas saying that he couldn't be relied upon to do that because he was so inexperienced. I'm sure that's seared into your brain. And, John, you probably wrote those. It's a good ad. There's a good ad. Love it. Love it. We're just writing it together. Good ad. Good ads don't always work.

Every losing campaign isn't wrong about everything. But he couldn't be counted on. He couldn't be counted on for that. And their answer, like, they don't say in their statement, you know, it's not true that he lost his train of thought in uncomfortable ways. It's not true that he didn't recall the name of his national security advisor. It's not true that he couldn't be relied upon for the 2 a.m. phone call. They say, and his decisions were fine, and you can't point to any evidence as to otherwise. And I mean...

Yeah, I can. But that's not even the point. You're kind of granting the whole premise of the book. Yeah, it does sort of raise the question, well, what does it mean to be up to the job? And what do we require of this person in this sort of unique environment?

role that they play, because I can see how you could say both statements are true. You have this image of what a president does, and it's in the room making a decision. Seven people around a table, they're presenting options. Maybe they disagree, maybe they don't. And you say go, or you say yes, or you say no. And even in the book, you acknowledge that when Joe Biden is in control of the schedule, when it's

at his time, at his choosing, he can do that task, right? But the Bennett example is something else, which is a harder to measure thing, that part of the job of being president is over time taking in information from a bunch of different people, synthesizing it, moving a debate forward. That's never a decision, right? He can no longer have that capacity, in part because of his declining ability to communicate, while still meeting that

kind of decision-making in a meeting threshold. And by the way, I believe people in his, maybe it's Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken have said that they did have the 2 a.m. moment with him and they did feel like he was up to doing that. Yeah. And I think, I think your point of like, what is the job of a president is a good one. And I,

So let's say we have senior officials that say that if the job is making decisions and communicating, he was clearly not able to do the latter for most of the four years and it got worse.

But also, you know, what's sort of striking about their argument is they're saying, yes, he was, he could no longer communicate. Yes, he would ramble and stumble in meetings. Yes, his schedule was often limited from 10 to 4. His energy would be bad when he got tired. He became unfocused. But we swear that it never affected, and all those things that are signs of like decline or aging never affected his decision making, which is,

I mean, they don't know. Yeah. So let me just point to some decisions that he made that we wonder about. Okay. First of all, there's the immigration that Senator Bennett wonders about. And I think that is a fair, a fair argument to make because that is about managing. I mean, Barack Obama was, you know, he pushed for immigration reform, but he also, you know, kept a strict border and discriminated.

deported a lot of people. He got a lot of flack for that. Uh, as you recall, uh, he also got reelected. Um, so I mean, but I do, I do think on that one, the part, I mean, we could tell a whole conversation about the immigration stance of the democratic party and how it evolved over the years. But I do think like the die was cast in the 2020 primary when every candidate was like, yeah, we'll decriminalize border crossings, except for Biden. But the step,

Well, look, how much was Biden involved and how much not? Like, where's the staff? Although that's the point. But that's what we're saying. But I'm saying is that what's surprising about the immigration thing is the the closest aides around him are like pretty moderate Democrats. Right. It's not like a bunch of Ron Klain, though. Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff for the first couple of years.

became this, even though his roots were in like neo, you know, new conservative Democrats like Al Gore, he became the hero to the progressives. And I think there's an argument to be made that he steered the ship of state to the left. But beyond that, I don't know how aware President Biden was that there were criticisms from people like

Larry Summers or Jason Furman that they were putting too much money into the economy and it was going to be inflationary. I don't know. And now that's necessary. I'm not proving it, but I just don't know. I don't know. We have, we have no reporting that suggests that the decisions he made about Afghanistan in 2021 were enrooted in anything other than his fierce, determinative belief that he was right about Afghanistan and that Obama and the generals were wrong. Yes. Okay. Okay.

But I don't know what information he was capable of absorbing and synthesizing, as you say, and on and on. Well, I also part of this, though, is what I realized and I realized in stark relief when reading the book as well is, oh, in the same way that I think people around Biden who do not to this day believe they were part of a cover up. One piece of evidence being they thought he was going to win the debate. Right.

They put him out there. But that over time being around someone, your baseline moves, my baseline moves, right? Because let's say we disagree. And actually, I do think Biden's decision making was up to snuff. And I don't believe his actual capacity to make governing decisions was impacted. Part of the job of

a president is persuading people to come along. If you are unable to persuade people to the correctness of your views, to build a coalition, either in Congress or amongst the public, you're weaker. You can't get things done. You can't achieve the goals you're trying to achieve. And even Democrats who were making this argument that I was among them for a time that no, you can't,

You may have questions about his ability to communicate, but these right-wing fear-mongering about dementia and that he's not doing the job, that's unfair. He's able to do the job of president, but I was accepting less from a president. I didn't realize the cost of having the bully pulpit basically empty. Yeah, I mean, it was... I mean, ever since television was...

was invented. Communication is just an essential part of the job. And you can say like, that's not fair or that doesn't shouldn't matter, but it just does. Yeah. And I, the bar was lowered like gradually. Cause I remember when he gave the state of the union in February of 2023. And I remember watching that state of the union without looking at Twitter and at the reaction, just like, how do I think he's doing? And I was like,

He got through it. He's okay. And then I turned to the coverage, or at least social media, and everyone was like, that was amazing. He's great. And I'm like, he was good. He didn't have any stumbles, and he was quick on his feet to joust with the Republicans, but it wasn't great. And then you think to yourself, and you guys talk about this in the book a lot, that there's the Biden-ness, right? Which is Joe Biden forever, when he was much younger, was still...

long-winded, gives very long answers, tells stories, very gaffe-prone. And so as he gets older, and especially as he gets into this term as president, you're like, is that just Joe Biden being the typical Joe Biden who tells really long stories,

stumbles, gaffes that he's been doing forever? Or is it something else? And I do think that was, it was legitimately difficult to figure that out. So I'm from Philadelphia. So Joe Biden has been on my TV since I was three because Delaware is such a small state. They don't have a media market. They rely on ours. A lot of toll booths, but no media market. Yeah. Yeah.

And so the very first, I was a cartoonist in college and the very first cartoon I did for the Daily Dartmouth was making fun of Joe Biden for his plagiarism scandal. Yeah.

So this is somebody... So you've had it out for him forever. This is actually new information to me. When I worked for Salon.com, I interviewed, or I was part of a briefing that he did in 2001. So I've been aware of this guy for a long, long time. And the Biden-ness, and this is in the book, and it's an important part of...

not to let anybody off the hook, but it's an important part of why for some people it was difficult to understand what was going on with him, is that he's always been long-winded. He's always told long, pointless stories. He's always been a blowhard, and he's always been gaffe-prone. And in fact, it's really remarkable the degree to which his vice presidential staff reinvented him

as the cool, avuncular uncle with the aviators and the ice cream and the Camaro, this crowd looks like they're at least my age. And so, like, you know, like, there was a time when he was just kind of known as a blowhard senator. In fact, not to bring up another uncomfortable moment from the Obama campaign, but here I go. Jake's memory, if only there was someone who could harness it. LAUGHTER

To generate some sort of renewable energy. You can buy original sin. Profile of Barack Obama in Rolling Stone magazine in 2007 or 2008. And there is a moment where Barack Obama is sitting at a hearing and the chairman of the committee, unnamed, is speaking and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Barack Obama writes on a piece of paper and hands it to Gibbs, Robert Gibbs. Shoot me now.

Yeah, I remember that. Who's the chairman and what's the committee? Joe Biden, Senate Foreign Relations. Well, and look...

That had been my impression of Joe Biden until he was vice president and we all worked at the White House. He was a great vice president and the image was recreated. I do think there was part of him that was like, he did want to show some discipline as vice president. He had ascended to this role. And he's just, I mean, for all the blowhard and the stories, he was also like such a good human being and he was like very grounded. And I think the relationship, and we can talk about that.

where it ended up but the relationship between he and Obama which started as okay this is a partnership it makes sense to you they became really really close by the end of those four years and then I think beyond that we all know what happened but

Yeah, no, but my point is just that that Biden-ness in the book, we have aides who are like, well, is he just telling a story like he always does? Or is this something else? Is he just being completely inappropriate because he's 79? Or has he always been completely inappropriate? We have a one European leader sitting down, having a meeting with Biden during his presidency and Biden just.

blah, blah, blah, and like completely misses the brief, does not talk about what he's supposed to. And this leader says something, but he's always been a bit like that, right? I mean, you know, so it was not necessarily, people didn't notice it at first. Well, and this is, I mean, and,

This story is very familiar, I think, to basically everybody who has an aging relative. And is the relative doing X because there's something off or just because they're just being themselves and they're just older? But in this case, it happened on the largest stage possible.

with like potential consequences for all of us. And that's also, I mean, too, you know, we're poking fun at him a little bit, but you know, that's why we frame the book as a tragedy because he is a good, I mean, by all accounts, like he is a good man and a well-intentioned one. And he was undone by both power, his own ego and his own, like, you know, I think in some ways a virtue of never giving up that became sort of a tragic vice. Yeah.

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Well, there's also, I think there's a more generous version of Biden-ness too, which is something I felt even in the days after the debate, which is,

Part of why I think we would watch that State of the Union or other big Biden moments and feel like, am I misreading this? Is he doing better than I feel? Is because even in past debates, there was a sense that, you know what, the people that are hyper engaged in politics, people that have maybe been writers in their lives, watch it in a different way and a more kind of persnickety and kind of like like the Russian judges are.

kind of grading on points, watching for style, are more, they already know what Biden thinks. They already know his policy views. So they're watching the language. They're watching the stumbles. But people that are just trying to understand what he stands for and what he believes and who he is as a person aren't feeling that. And the other part of this too is he was underestimated.

That's a Ron Klain point. Throughout his life. Throughout his life and as a candidate, you know, that he was underestimated in the 2020 primaries. He pulls it out. He, in the first two years of his administration, I think, governs in an extraordinary way. Has achievements through Congress that a lot of people thought were impossible. Plays his hand as well as anybody could possibly play it. And I remember when Dean Phillips first jumps in, one of the challenges he has is age was the critique.

This is before October 7th and a lot of the fallout that caused. And I think part of what you cover in the book does reveal why he had such trouble communicating and also adjusting. But it was hard to make an argument against Joe Biden, especially in the first two years of his term, because it was hard to point to moments where age really had limited his ability to govern when you look at the legislative achievements, when you look at his response to the pandemic and the economic crisis. So

I do think that was part of it, too, that a lot of people had felt uncertain about their own judgment, especially in a world where Donald Trump could win and Joe Biden was the only person who could beat him. That who are we to question the people around Joe Biden when he'd been so successful? Yeah, I mean, you remember during the 2019-2020 Democratic primary when Joe Biden was like, I'm going to be able to negotiate with Mitch McConnell. There were little guffaws there.

from the base of the party. And Joe Biden passed the infrastructure bill with, I think, 19 Senate Republicans. Don't quote me on that. And then did an event in early 2023 with Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. And Mitch McConnell called the infrastructure bill a legislative miracle. So you could also imagine how Joe Biden and the people in his inner circle who had felt underestimated, who had laughed

listen to the people laughing at them, whereas saying, oh, you know, but that also created this insularity where eventually they would not listen to outside critics, even well-intentioned ones. So America loves an underdog and Joe Biden has been an underdog throughout his life.

And one of the qualities that the American people love about him, admire about him, is his ability to get up off the ground after fate or God or whatever has thrown something horrible at him.

whether it's a debilitating stutter or that horrible car accident that took the life of his wife and daughter and sent his two sons to the hospital in 1972 or his brain aneurysms in 1988 and on and on and on. And what makes this a tragedy is that it's that quality that makes it so he can't see when it is actually time to give up.

because he has been so determined to fight and achieve and do good things for the country. He's not, I mean, members of his family might be, but he's not trying to enrich himself as president of the United States. And then the other tragedy about this story is that he defined his presidency as a battle for the soul of America to save America from Trump and Trumpism,

And because of those decisions he made to run for reelection and to hide what was happening to him, he delivered the country back into the hands of Donald Trump.

Yeah, and look, this is why, you know, reading your book and just having experienced the last couple of years, you know, like I have anger towards Joe Biden. I think I have more anger, especially after reading your book, towards the close group of advisors that kept most of the other White House staff, campaign staff, pollsters, everyone else at bay, and no one thought to themselves...

Can this guy really do it? Is this a good idea? I thought one of the most shocking revelations in the book for me was you talked to some people who worked for Biden back in 2020. And you write that ahead of the Democratic National Convention in 2020, Biden did a series of Zooms to produce a campaign video of him talking to voters. And one Democrat you talked to said,

who's working with the Biden campaign, it was like a different person. This was like watching grandpa who shouldn't be driving. I didn't think he could be president. This was when some top Democrats entered an angry phase. I became disillusioned with the entire apparatus because what I was seeing on this video in 2020, that means people working for him every day see this. Did anyone else tell you that they had concerns as far back as 2020?

A small handful of people who had known him for a long time.

One said that the first time that they noticed any sort of deterioration came after his son Bo's tragic death of brain cancer in May 2015. And this person, this top aide said it was like watching water poured on sand. What happened to Biden's psyche? And then there were people that popped in on him in 2017, 2018 before he ran who said it seemed as though he'd aged 10 years before

in one or two. And then in the Hur report, when Robert Hur does his special counsel report on Biden's mishandling of classified information, one of the things that, one of the reasons they conclude that they can't prosecute Biden successfully, even though they conclude he did break the law with the classified information, was not just the interview they did with Biden in October 2023,

that the audio of which was released a few weeks ago, but because of the audio, the tapes that they had of Biden talking to his ghostwriter,

in 2017, 2018, where it sounds like debate Biden, or for want of a better term, non-functioning Biden, where he is not clear on dates, where he's not clear on situations, and he loses his train of thought in a major way. And Alex had great reporting in the book that suggested that aides said, would privately acknowledge that

that while COVID was one of the worst things to happen to the United States, it was one of the best things to happen to Joe Biden's presidential campaign in 2020 because he could run from his basement. I still, I also can't believe that

There was no real discussion or debate among Biden and even his broader circle of advisors, senior staff, about running for re-election in 2024, particularly because Biden

you know, he talks about himself in the 2020 campaign now famously as, you know, I'm nothing more than a bridge to this generation of new leaders behind me. He also says in 2020, I'm just a transitional candidate. So he doesn't take a one-term pledge, but

makes it seem like he may only serve one term. And then I remember thinking to myself, like, is he going to run for reelection? Like, it doesn't seem like, and then we did well in the midterms. And I was like, oh, I wonder if, I wonder if they're going to have a debate about this, but it sounds like there was no real meeting discussion, anything. Yeah. And what's sort of shocking is one of the most consequential political decisions, perhaps in American history is how little process there actually was.

And basically what happened was Joe Biden, who, you know, we were someone close to him said he is nothing if not for this. And this is the guy that had been thinking about being president as soon as he was constitutionally eligible to be president. And that was in 1977.

And he basically, he wanted to run for reelection. The first lady wanted him to run for reelection. Somebody equated Joe Biden, like a long-term advisor, there was this metaphor, he's like a shark. He just has to keep swimming or he'll die. And basically- Men need therapy. And if you're a man here, and you're not in therapy-

Do a favor for your wife. Or husband. Or husband. Thanks, Jake. Gay-splained to me during fucking pride. Somebody needed to gay-splain. I'm sorry. I was right here. Sorry, I interrupted you. But yeah, I mean... Basically, like...

Just as he was going to run, Jill and Hunter were completely on board. And we can get into Hunter's stuff later if you want to. But Hunter had obviously spiraled and I think saw in his dad's presidency and the fight against Trump sort of a chance to redeem himself. And also a way, if we're being honest, to stay out of prison.

And I think basically the family decided. And when anybody in the inner circle was like, are we going to talk about this? Are we going to have a real discussion, debate? Word came down from Mike Donilon said, president's decided. It's over. And, you know, in fairness, like even those that had concerns, none of them ever got in Joe Biden's face. You could say that's part because of their own, you

you know, cowardice or also because of the culture that Biden and the family in particular had created where dissent or questioning was immediately suspected as disloyalty. Barack Obama went by the White House in spring, summer 2023 to kind of kick the tires and see if this was a good idea. And at that point, their relationship was strained enough because

as Obama would put it when people would say to him, is Biden really going to run for re-election? You should talk to him. And he would say, he's still pissed at me for backing Hillary in 2016. So their relationship was at the point where Obama didn't feel like he could say,

Hey, you should think twice about this. Can you just say about the Hillary thing too? It's not true. Well, the timeline on this is also, I think it's confusing for people because the way the story is told, it's like the beginning of the 2016 race and it's Hillary and Bernie and Joe Biden and Obama's like, and I pick Hillary. And that's not what happened at all. What happened was Joe, Beau dies and Joe Biden is mourning his son and

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton enter the race. They have six, seven months of campaigning there. They have organizations in Iowa. Ten months. Ten months. OK, ten months of campaigning. This is in the book, just so you know. He's not lecturing us. He wants to make sure you know. Well, because it just gets confusing about like what. And so Joe Biden contemplates in the fall a late entry into the race.

after Hillary and Bernie had already been campaigning against each other forever and have these big organizations in Iowa, and then goes to Obama and is like, can I jump into the race this late? And Obama's like, well, if you jump into the race this late, A, probably it's going to help Bernie Sanders win because Hillary and Biden would split the vote of non-progressives. And also was genuinely concerned. You guys write this in the book, genuinely concerned about him because he was still grieving his son.

And but that, you know, it became in Biden's brain. And look, we write about this in the book. This is the Biden mythology. And all politicians have their own mythology. But part of it by 2019, 2020, it had it had changed into a theology.

where there was just this faith, and it's a small cult of people who believed in it, but like all religions, skeptics were not allowed. And this belief and part of this mythology or theology is that

Barack didn't back me in 2016, which is also one of the reasons why, although Alex and I differ on why did Biden endorse Kamala so quickly? My version is the is the more charitable one, which is he's proud of the fact that he picked Kamala Harris to be his vice president, not so much for Kamala Harris, but because of what she represents.

And he doesn't want to do to her what he thinks Obama did to him, which, as you note, is not really accurate. It's revisionist history. But that's how he thinks of it. And I think that what Jake said is true. I just also think that Biden, as he is, you

fuming is like, oh, you're going to kick me out? You get Kamala. You're not going to be able to get the open process that you guys want, that Obama wants, that Pelosi wants. I get to choose who it is, and also I'm going to show what it means to really be loyal to my vice president. This is one of the few areas of disagreement. There's Word versus Google Docs.

This is what motivates him. And we've learned in our San Francisco leg of the tour, he thinks that The Rock is a good movie. That's another... These are... I'm with Alex on that. Thank you. What kind of a feat...

is that The Rock is not a good movie. What? Man, the people are with me, Jake. What a ridiculous statement. But I will say, you know, and you guys saw this, that resentment toward Obama, and I,

all the reporting. We got some of that too. Well, this, like you remember in 2019, Biden would not appear on Pod Save America. I think every, every Democrat running for president appeared on Pod Save America. Every Democrat appeared on the Axe Files with former Obama advisor, David Axelrod. Joe Biden didn't. And I mean, I think he did in the general election. Yeah, we got him. Yeah.

Well, whenever Joe Biden comes on Pod Save America, he does win. One and one. There is one Biden aide said to us that when he's talking about the elites, he's talking about Obama. Yeah.

Which is, it's just, it's sad and I don't like... Not just Obama, he's probably talking about us too, but I'm just saying like Obama is definitely in his brain when he's thinking that. Here's the other thing I've always wondered too. So he decides he's going to run again. And I think a lot of people are like, well, why didn't the Democratic Party do something? Why didn't someone get involved?

Did you guys in your reporting hear anything about other potential candidates in 2024? Like, were some of them getting ready? Were they thinking about it? Because honestly, like they are as responsible, like someone would have had to run against him. And we would always because people like our our staff was like, why is Joe Biden the one and other people? And I'd be like, look.

someone's got to run against him. You know, then Dean Phillips ended up doing it. You guys interviewed Dean Phillips. Like MSNBC would not even have Dean Phillips on. You guys like did a tough, like good interview with him. Yeah. And was not, and look, and we were, I, during that interview, I was like, well, I,

I get why someone is running against Joe Biden. It didn't seem like he had. And he did it. And in fairness to Dean Phillips, he was like, look, no one else would do it. Yeah, he tried to get Whitmer, Pritzker, Newsom, Bashir. He tried to get them to run. Some of them wouldn't even take his call. Bill Daley, Obama's former chief of staff, former Clinton commerce secretary. He tried to get people to run. Nobody would do it.

you know, there isn't a very long, proud history of people challenging incumbent presidents and defeating them in primaries. Usually what happens is Ted Kennedy being the one exception. Usually you go off into disgrace. Right. People still, though, were mad at Ted Kennedy for centuries, not centuries, for decades. Well, it felt like centuries to her for, for, you know, blaming him for, you know, weakening Jimmy Carter. So, I mean, it's, it's stupid. It's as revisionist, but yeah. Um,

There were candidates that were up until the end of 2023 watching to see if Joe Biden was actually going to go through with this. And there were maybe five or six that could have on a dime put a campaign together. I think Newsom, Harris, Whitmer, Buttigieg, maybe Pritzker.

Am I forgetting anything? And Klobuchar. They could have, but nobody...

Was going to do it against him. Yeah. There was sort of a just in case primary like going on. I mean, you had Pritzker and Newsome like cutting checks for like the, the Charleston, South Carolina mayoral race in 2023. I'm sure it was completely just good intention out of the kindness of their hearts to get involved in those races. And yeah, they like, there was quietly everyone's fishing and it got to the point actually in early 2024 where the,

Biden campaign chair, General Malley Dillon, actually starts calling some of the governors and feels like they're sort of subtly trying to undermine Biden. She hears that Governor Healey of Massachusetts is talking up Whitmer. Yeah. And O'Malley Dillon gets mad about it. I will say, though, something that is very specific to where we are as a country right now is...

first of all, there is very little incentive for courage built into our politics. People are all about the base and all about not rocking the boat. Second of all, parties are so weak right now. This is a smart crowd, so I'm not going to ask, can you name who was DNC chair during the Biden presidency? Jamie Harrison. But I had to beat you to it. But but

This was not somebody who was brought in because he was going to be able to tell Joe Biden some hard truths. Well, you know, this is there's a more Healy. I think there's the thing is a way to get from that to some of the larger lessons that we should take forward from this other than to probably not nominate Joe Biden in 2028, which I think we're all.

Settled. Pretty good on... He's going to resent Bosnia and Herzegovina even more now. Yeah. You know, you joke about that. They still, to this day, Biden and his top aides, say that he could have won...

could have beaten Trump, and he could serve as president until January 2029. I just think that's sad. They still argue that point. But I think this gets at what I was going to point out from the book, which is you have this, there's a moment with Maura Healey where she's walking out of the, I guess, the White House, and she says to Reschetti, I'd love to see the polling. And he's like, I know polling.

Um, and I believe it's directly to you as it, as a quote where she says, uh, there's no chessboard, uh, some to paraphrase, there's no one pulling the strings behind the scenes. There was just one old man and his enablers, uh, who, uh, refused to do the right thing. That's basically what she says. And that was sort of my, as I'm reading the book, I was like, oh my God, this

Everyone was feeling the same way. Everyone had these questions. If you saw Joe Biden once at his worst, you thought, is this a strange aberrance? Am I seeing something that no one else is seeing? I'm being reassured. And it's not just people that are seeing him at town halls. It's governors. It's

It's senators. There was nobody making some... There was no grand decision being made. There was no DNC making machinations. It was just a bunch of people kind of fuddling along, making the best decisions they thought they needed to make each day, leading us to this kind of cataclysm. And...

The reason why they began increasingly shielding him from governors is to make people say, oh, it was just a one-off. It must have just been sort of a bad day, bad hour. And they were gaslighting not just like the public and reporters, but they were gaslighting their own members and leaders of the Democratic Party, members of their own cabinet. Yeah. And one of the things we learned in this, we learned so much while researching this book,

But one of the things we learned is they weren't just hiding Biden from the world. They were hiding the world from Biden. And when we talk to his pollsters, they are, in my view, some of the most

moving and alarming sections of the book have to do with these three pollsters. Most pollsters don't work in the White House. Pollsters always work outside of the White House. And the campaign had somebody that did data. But then there are also these three pollsters, three of the best in the great pollsters. Yeah. Jeff Garan and Molly Murphy and Jeffrey Pollack. And they they had data.

And they couldn't ever bring it to the president, which is crazy. But they would bring it to Donnellan and Reschetti. And then Donnellan and Reschetti would put it through the Donnellan and Reschetti eiser and present it to Joe Biden. It's a landslide bus. They also told the New Yorker that they genuinely believe that polling is broken now. And so polling doesn't matter.

even though they had polling that was telling them bad things. And when David Plouffe came in after Biden had dropped out and he saw the actual polling and saw that not only were they going to lose all of the battleground states and by a lot, but they were on track to lose Minnesota and Colorado and Virginia and New Mexico, I think was on the bubble and New Hampshire. And it would have been a bloodbath. And,

Whatever you think of Kamala Harris, she at least brought the party to treading water. And so it was it was a bad night, but it wasn't just a complete wipeout. Like, yeah, the Trump campaign believes like they would have a 57, potentially a 57 seat majority in the Senate if it had not been for Kamala Harris. It's 53 right now just for people who are normal citizens.

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Since the book, you guys have taken a lot of shit from both the right and Democrats, Biden supporters. On the right, read the tweets, baby. Well, I'm confused about this because they have accused the Trump media folks have accused you guys of being part of the cover up.

That you write about. It's just Jake. It's mostly Jake. It is mostly Jake. It's just me. But like most, A, most of the information in the book you found out after the election.

B, before the election, people who spent time around Biden either wouldn't talk to reporters or wouldn't tell reporters the truth. So what was the media, not just YouTube, but the media? I mean, Alex, you won an award at the Correspondence Center. And even you said, like, this is a story we all miss. And I thought that was...

I was like, I don't know that you guys necessarily missed the story because there wasn't a story to get if the people who could tell the story refused to tell it. I think, so a few different points on that. I think there is a difference between

While a lot of right-wing media was right to be skeptical of Biden's abilities, there's a big difference between showing on a loop him stumbling up the stairs of Air Force One and doing behind-the-scenes reporting. I also said I thought we missed a lot of the story in part because Jake and I had just done this book and I was like, holy shit, there was a lot that I didn't know. Now, that being said, I do think...

In particular for reporting and reporters, a hinge moment is after Robert Herr's report in early 2024 in which he basically decides not to prosecute Joe Biden because he says the jury would not convict such an

you know, an old man with a bad memory. And if you look at the coverage, I think the White House comms team, you know, props to them, they did a very good job. But I think if you look at the coverage, it was not skeptical enough. And I think that's, I think, you know, I think the fairest critique is really those like four or five months before the debate when after the special counsel report, I think that's what I think like,

you can really, I think, objectively argue the media did not do a good enough job. Yeah. What about you? I mean, I had to watch Megyn Kelly yell at you for a while on that show. I was like, what? I think that... You actually didn't have to. I think that the conservative media, we discovered while we were reporting this, was right to be skeptical of his acuity from the beginning, from 2019. Because our reporting suggested that it was...

an issue as far back as 2015. And so, you know, when I get new information,

I changed my mind, which is not, I think, a difficult thing for mature adults to do. Yeah. So I have no problem acknowledging that the skepticism in 2019, 2020 about his acuity was correct. I thought he was aging. I didn't see acuity issues at that time. I was mistaken. The...

Tone and tenor of some of the criticism, I think, is rooted in the fact that a lot of these same people said that when Obama took office, he was a secret Muslim.

that the new Black Panthers were going to take over the country, that Hillary was going to die in 2016, that the election was stolen in 2020, and on and on and on. I mean, the current president, just a couple days ago, shared a post that said, actually, Biden was executed in 2020, and it was a body double the entire time. By the way, we should have paid more for that body double. Thank you. Can we not get a... If we're going to replace the guy...

This guy, we got a used body double. Do you have anything in a Ryan Reynolds? Yeah, something new off the lot here.

So I think that they are, and you know, they were right about this. And now, again, as Alex says, there's a difference between... Broken clock, you know? There's a difference between calling him an applesauce head and laughing at him and saying he needs a sippy cup and showing these clips on a loop and doing investigative reporting.

But that said, because of what you mentioned, it was it took a lot to do investigative reporting on this. And even if you go back and read some of the pieces that really were shocking at the time, Peter Baker wrote one in 2023 about how much rest they built into his schedule in terms of trips. Alex's incredible scoops about Biden's schedule.

The Wall Street Journal reporters Siobhan Hughes and Annie Linsky, like even if you go back and read those incredibly important stories that were very difficult and brought a lot of criticism to the reporters, they're nothing compared to what we found out after the election was over and people felt like, OK, I don't have to worry about helping to elect Trump. He already won. So now I can unburden myself. I'd also just also add to that the American people had made up their decision.

on Joe Biden's age. They had decided he was too old to seek reelection. They decided that in 2022. But so to the idea that this is something that wasn't in front of people, that wasn't a big subject of discussion, it was one of the most important debates. We were talking about it on Pod Save America all the time. How does he address this liability? He's failing to address it. And the weeks after the debate,

It was shocking, not just the performance in the debate, but that the obvious solution is him going out there over and over again was not one they were taking advantage of. And it's really chilling to read in the book that that's not a demand being made just from people on the outside. Chuck Schumer is asking that. Different senators are asking that. And Schumer concludes that he's not doing it because he can't. Now, I'm sorry to do this, because I do think—

We have some audio that I think is important to play, and I think it is an indictment of you personally. Jake, speaking of this is speaking of Chuck Schumer. I did listen to part of the book in the car. I did some on the text, but some I'm excited in the car. Can we just play a little bit of the audio version of Original Sin? I'm urging you not to run. Do you think Kamala can win? Biden asked.

I don't know if she can win, Schumer said. I just know that you cannot. Biden said that he needed a week. They stood. On their way out, Biden put his hands on Schumer's shoulders. You have bigger balls than anyone I've ever met, Biden told him. You did a voice? What the fuck was that? Multiple voices. Wow. I screwed up. I should have listened to the audio. I don't even know how it's possible that your impression of Chuck Schumer is anti-Semitic. Ha ha ha ha.

You're a Jewish man. You're from Philadelphia. I will tell you, wherever I go on this book tour, people come and they say, I'm listening to the book on tape and I love your impression. That is the God's honest truth.

This is actually the first time I have heard that. Yeah, me too. And I thought it was good. Also, you did a Biden too. I didn't know. The Biden. I was holding back because I didn't want it to be full anti-Semitic. Yeah, that's right. You went half. Just slightly. Unbelievable. I'm Jewish in case people don't know this. He's Jewish. And very proud of it. And if you have a problem with that, you can leave. Okay.

I'll do a last question that's based on the criticism that you guys have gotten from a lot of Democrats, Republicans,

this criticism we get whenever we talk about it, which is why is this still relevant now? And leave the guy alone, you know, leave, leave the past in the past. And let's focus on the current president who at least half the country would argue is, is more unfit than Joe Biden, albeit for different reasons. What do you guys say to that?

I mean, I would say this is part of the reason why the Democratic Party is in the situation it's in. I mean, anytime there was any coverage about age, whether I brought it up or Jake brought it up, it was what about Trump? And, you know, reporting is about holding up a mirror. And the Democratic Party can either look in the mirror and recognize this is part of the reason they lost that age.

you know, while they rightly mock Republicans for trashing Trump in private, and then going out there and saying he is the most ethical, bestest president in his American history. You know, they were doing the exact same thing when they were trotting out being like, Biden is sharp, he's running circles around us, he is so engaged, you wouldn't even believe it. All you had to do is be in the meetings. And it just wasn't true. So I guess, you know, Democrats, if they if they

want. I have no idea if the Democratic Party, if the voters are actually going to engage with the content of this book. But reporting is just about trying to hold up that mirror in front of people and whether or not they look in is up to them. So I have two points on this. First of all, it just happened. The debate wasn't even a year ago. It was June of last year. I mean, it just happened. When are we supposed to write books? Yeah.

Yeah, by the way, also, I learned here tonight that you did the book proposal on November 6th. You are sick. You're a sick man. I have problems. The other point I would make is

It's true. I'm very driven. I agree. He cares too much. That's his biggest weakness. That's my... Okay, quick Obama aside. Oh, no. No, this is a good Obama story. This is one of my favorite Obama stories. It's one of the first debates in 2007, 2007, or 2008. And it's like Hillary, John Edwards, and Obama, and they're asked, what is your biggest fault? And Obama goes first, and he's like, well, I'm really messy. I have a messy desk.

It's a real problem. And then John Edwards is like, I care so much about people. The voices. The voices. I really, really, it's a problem. I really care about the American. And then Hillary's like, I work so hard. I work so hard for the American people. And then Obama's like, wait a second. I didn't think we were giving answers like that. I thought we were supposed to really answer the question.

The best Obama moment ever. And then he would, he would tell that story on the stump for like the next couple of weeks. It was like a great laugh line. The other thing I would say in response to the, why aren't you covering Trump? I cover Trump every day for two hours. Um, still even on the road. Uh, but beyond that, so, uh, I don't know how many of you have gone to New York to see good night and good luck. Um, if you haven't yet, it's great. If you haven't yet, CNN is actually going to show it on Saturday night on CNN. Um,

And you should see it because it's really good. They're doing a live broadcast of the play. But at the very end of the whole play takes place in 1954. It's Murrow and McCarthy and all that. At the very end...

And there is like the one thing that's not said in 1954 is this is montage of video clips of the tell of television news. And, you know, there's like the moon landing and JFK getting assassinated and all these things. And at the end of this montage, it's maybe I don't even know, five, 10 minutes, something like that. It goes like that. But at the end of it there, you see Republicans lying about the 2020 election on cable. And then you see Democrats lying about Biden's acuity on cable.

And I asked Clooney for an interview I did when we did the New Yorker excerpt of the book, just to give like a little special something for the New Yorker. I asked Clooney to...

way in. Why did you put that in? Obviously, George Clooney played a role in all of this when he wrote his op-ed calling for Biden to drop out. And he said, it's important that we that we, you know, call that out to the people vouching for Biden because we have to speak truth to power no matter who's in power. And I said, well, what do you tell people who say, you know, what about Trump? He said, how do you think we got Trump? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I mean, look, from a perspective of, you know, a couple Democrats who want Democrats to win again, like you can't.

you cannot tell people that what they are seeing and what they are hearing isn't true. And it wasn't just over the last four years, it was a Biden thing with the age. Like it was also about inflation and costs. And, and, you know, someone would say, oh, gas prices are high. And then someone would say, oh, well, you just took that picture in front of a gas station where the prices are always high. And it's like, I get that that can be frustrating. Like I've been on the other side of it. I've worked

in the White House and yelled at reporters, maybe you guys. But like at some point,

The voters get to decide and you have to listen to the voters because if you do not listen to the voters, you cannot get the votes you need to take power. It seems very simple, but it is something that we have at least some parts of the party have forgotten. I mean, I think it's a lesson of this book that there's an old expression that Washington is often the last to get the news. And the Democratic Party and very much including and especially this the Biden White House,

did not want to respect or listen to their own voters. And I think you could also argue that the Democratic Party has not listened or totally respected their voters in the last three presidential primaries. And some of the argument has been, well, we don't want a divisive primary because Hillary was hurt by Bernie. You guys know, probably the most divisive Democratic primary in recent American history was your guys'

And Obama entered with 60 Democratic Senate seats. Divisive primaries allow for debate and for voters to decide who the strongest candidate is. They're not inherently bad. I would argue that the last time the Democratic Party, on the presidential level, listened to its voters was 2008. What about 2020? I don't know. In 2020, the party...

So just to remind folks, Buttigieg won Iowa, Bernie won New Hampshire, Bernie won Nevada, Joe Biden won South Carolina. And then there was this uprising of Obama and the party influencers to get everybody out of the race, except for Joe Biden, so that they could beat Bernie because they were terrified Bernie was going to be the nominee. And they did that. I'm not here to advocate for Bernie Sanders, but-

And obviously it worked out the way the Democrats wanted it to work out. But the last time Democrats actually in 2012 doesn't really count because it's an incumbent. But the last time there was an open process and the Democrats said, OK, go, you know, Obama, Hillary, Edwards, whoever, Biden, Chris Dodd, whatever, like anything.

And the voters did a pretty good job. Well, the voters also. I mean, look, yes. But voters chose Joe Biden in that primary in 2020. I think I think there's some truth in what you're saying. But I will also say there was another moment when I feel like what we saw was a kind of the voters having their say in a way and a kind of moment where you saw how the Democratic Party is very different than the Republican Party, which is after that debate.

Because I do think there's a part of this story that is, I think, even though it did not end the way we had all hoped, is inspiring, which is in the wake of that debate, what you saw is people willing to tell the truth about what they saw and the importance of making a change. You have leading Democrats going to Joe Biden, asking him to step aside. You have these incredible moments, which you report on in the book of Congress, members of Congress trying to speak directly to Joe Biden about this, not liking what they're hearing, not accepting no for an answer.

answer. You have people on the outside talking about this. You have people, you have a real and genuine moment of a group of people coming together and saying, hey, for the good of the country, this guy has to step aside because Trump is an existential threat. And it may not have ended in Kamala being president, but it did, I think, speak to, to me, like the values you're trying to say we didn't evince before.

when Joe, but when people were getting behind Joe Biden, I would say, uh, they get half credit. I mean, I think your point is well taken that if, if Donald Trump had had, if Donald Trump had had like showed serious signs of decline or whatever, that, uh,

and had that similar debate, I grant the point that a lot of Republican lawmakers would not have the courage to finally speak out and say something. He tried to steal an election and, you know, stage an insurrection in the Capitol. And they're like, all right, let's do it. They had 24 hours of courage in the wake of it. All I'm saying is I think what I take away from it is there was no one in charge. There was no one making the decision. We were kind of sleepwalking towards disaster. And then after that debate, we woke up. And the

And the question is now, how do we make sure we stay awake and are honest about challenges the Democratic Party faces? Granted, I was just going to add, though, I don't think you get points for courage when you only do it because you now believe you might lose.

Oh, Alex, I thought we were going to lose for months. I mean, we just knew it after the debate. I think that Alex and I have a slightly less positive review of Democrats, and I'll just tell you why. Can anybody here guess how many Democratic governors called for Biden to drop out of the race after the debate? One. Governor Healey of Massachusetts. How many Democratic senators? One.

Senator Welsh of Vermont. I mean, it wasn't an outpouring of courage. It was a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvering because people didn't want to come across as jerks. The House members were braver. Yeah. And they're the lowest on the totem pole in Washington. We thought we were going insane. We were like, what is happening? Did we miss something? Well, that was what was so surprising, right? Because we're talking about it and we're getting a lot of blowback online, but privately. Yeah.

Hearing from a lot of people being like, thank you guys for saying, I'm glad you guys are out there saying this. We need people out there saying this.

And then the other thing I would say is that the the argument is about whether or not he should be the nominee. But the truth of the matter is our reporting suggests that he he could not be an effective president 24 seven, which is what the job requires. And there's only one member of there's only one elected Democratic official that I know of. And that's Congresswoman Marie Glucenkamp Perez in Washington state who actually said he shouldn't be the nominee. And to be honest, he probably shouldn't be president either.

Although you said, too, in the book, this also shocked me, that out of the 200-plus people you guys talked to, there were very few who actually thought he could serve out a second term, which that means that that would include senior White House staff, campaign staff, who told you that they did not think he could serve. Yeah, they were like, the plan was to get to November 5th and figure it out later. I mean, we had one longtime Biden aide that...

I mean, that like that was I mean, if if, you know, the right wing sometimes refers to, you know, the Trump derangement syndrome, mocking Democrats that I think actually very sincerely are opposed to Trump's agenda. But if you continue the metaphor, the biggest symptom is publicly telling everyone that Joe Biden could be president for another four years.

And it just and the people knew that he could not do the job he was running for. But there there was such fear of Trump that they said, let's go. And, you know, members, longtime Biden people basically felt that eventually if he had won, there would have eventually been some sort of constitutional crisis because clearly the people around him were not willing to like cede power. So we always say that we almost all the interviews are.

of the more than 200 we did for the book were after the election. We have to put in the stupid almost because of this one interview that Alex did with somebody. Tell them what they told you. I mean, they were honest. It was a long time Biden aid. And they said all he had to do was win and then only had to show proof of life every once in a while. I feel like we've... I want to end on a light moment from the book.

Let's let, which is, it's a small. Do we have another clip? No, this is a small moment, but. We didn't even play my Obama, which is really good. That is true. His Obama is good. Not because I've listened, but because he does it all the time. Save it for the sequel, but the. The return of Hunter. You can do the voiceover for the second volume of Promised Land for Obama when he does. But, so the debate happens, and how does it come to be that Doug Emhoff is watching the debate with Rob Reiner,

And then the debate ends. Rob Reiner, furious, starts berating Doug Emhoff. Poor Doug. Well, I think it was more that he was that Rob Reiner, who is a very excitable fella, was just screaming. And he seemed to be yelling at Emhoff. And he said, we're going to lose our fucking democracy because of you. And Emhoff thought, because of me? Because of sweet Doug?

We can all agree that Doug is not to blame. Well. Okay, that has to be it. That's it. Doug Emhoff. Jake, Alex, thank you so much. Thank you. Go buy Original Set. That's our show for today. Long one. Love it. And Tommy and I will be back with a new show on Monday.

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