Former Obama National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes: “It’s Time to Let the Illusions Die”

For eight years, Ben Rhodes worked as a speechwriter and Deputy National Security Adviser to President Barack Obama. A decade after leaving the White House, Rhodes has become increasingly critical of the foreign policy establishment he once worked within. We begin with his recent essay Let the Illusions Die https://benrhodes1.substack.com/p/let-the-illusions-die (2:48), Trump’s war in Iran (6:35), and what Rhodes took away from the Obama administration’s wars and interventions in Afghanistan and Libya (8:47). Then, we revisit his early years writing speeches for President Obama (30:35), his work during the 2008 campaign around race and identity (31:35), and the contradictions he came to see after years of working in American foreign policy (39:00). On the back-half, Rhodes reflects on the Biden administration’s handling of Gaza (42:30), why he stayed quiet despite believing in early 2023 that Biden should not seek reelection (49:25), and his views on the midterms and the future of the Democratic Party (55:00). To close, he reflects on witnessing the September 11th attacks as a college student in New York City—and the life as a fiction writer he left behind in their aftermath (1:11:50) writing his new book, All We Say https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717294/all-we-say-by-ben-rhodes/ (1:17:52), and what history teaches us about reforming systems that no longer work (1:22:07). Subscribe to our ⁠⁠⁠YouTube channel⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. As always, our email: [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We never went into a room thinking about how to like mess up Afghanistan that day. We were well intentioned. You know, like we, I went to work thinking I was going to try to make Afghanistan better. And I remember this person saying, what you were doing is you were creating chaos. You were creating violence. And, and I remember saying, honestly, I thought, you know, I never went to a meeting where that was the purpose of the meeting. And she's like, what was the outcome? Like, you have to, like, you have to work backwards from what was happening.

• 0:32Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Stanford Goso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:47Sam Fragoso?

  Today, writer and former Obama adviser, Ben Rhodes. For eight years, Rhodes served in the Obama White House, first as a speechwriter, and later as a deputy national security adviser, working on everything from the war in Afghanistan and the Arab Spring, to the Iran nuclear deal and the normalization of relations with Cuba. But since leaving the White House, Rhodes has grown increasingly interested in interrogating the systems he spent his life working within. The establishment logic, the institutional mindset, the Washington playbook that often ignores life beyond the Beltway. And the kicker is, he's been doing this work in full view. He's an opinion writer for The New York Times, an analyst for MSNBC, and the co-host of his podcast, Pod Save the World. His new book, All We

• 1:32Sam Fragoso?

  Say, is a collection of 15 pivotal speeches from American history, including those from Ben Franklin, Donald Trump, and his former boss, that tell us what it means to be American. And so, ahead of the high-level meetings at this year's UN General Assembly, I wanted to sit with Rhodes to discuss the ongoing war with Iran, the erosion of international law, his years writing for President Obama, the key decisions and compromises their administration made over two terms, the rise of authoritarianism here and abroad, the responsibility Democrats have in that ascension, and how we may go about rebuilding institutions in the image of the people they proclaim to be working for and protecting. That's coming up next with Ben Rhodes. Ben Rhodes, thank you for being here.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:18Sam Fragoso?

  How are we doing?

• 2:19Speaker 00

  We're not doing great. You know, you're probably like me, where, you know, people are like, hey, how are you? And you say, I'm doing great. And then you feel like you have to caveat it, you know, despite the state of the world or something. Especially me, because people think, not wrongly, that I'm like following things, but it's not good out there.

• 2:38Sam Fragoso?

  I have to tell you, I'd be a little nervous if you weren't following things.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  I'd be a bit of a fraud if I wasn't.

• 2:43Sam Fragoso?

  I was like, whoa, all those eight years for? On a recent Substack, you wrote a post called, "Let the Illusions Die," where you wrote of this moment, quote, "This is an anxious time. Old orders are vanishing along with the illusions that sustain them. New technologies are transforming human life without a sense of where it's all going. And somehow, the daily realities of life coincide with the forces remaking it, systems that feel beyond our control despite our participation in them."

• 3:14Speaker 00

  What I'm getting at there is there are these existential things happening. We all sense it, you know? Technology, it doesn't feel good anymore. One of our illusions was technology improves our lives. Are we sure about that? You know, it's hot, but we don't like to talk about climate change anymore, because it's not politically popular to talk about that. America, are we sure we're the good guys? You know, I think a lot of people are wrestling, look at things like the war in Iran, and the illusion that we had, the assumption that, you know, well, we might get some things wrong. But, but I think we

• 3:55Speaker 00

  all in this country have some vague sense that, I don't, this doesn't feel right. But we kind of keep plugging into it. Capitalism, climate change, technology. And, you know, I've lived long enough now to see the danger in thinking that the next election is going to fix things. And, and actually, I think some of the challenges in our society go a little deeper than that.

• 4:18Sam Fragoso?

  And when did you stop believing the next election was going to fix things?

• 4:22Speaker 00

  I'll be pretty blunt in terms of, you know, speaking against my own political tribe. It was after Joe Biden was elected, because-

• 4:32Sam Fragoso?

  Why was that?

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Because like, you know, I think there was this kind of presumption among a lot of people, and I kind of shared it, that, well, Trump, you know, he's this aberration, and if we can just kind of wait him out and get past him. But, you know, Biden got elected, and the politics is still toxic, and the problems are still growing. And even things he did that I liked, kind of felt like drops in an ocean. And, and then, I mean, the stuff I care about foreign policy, I was not a huge fan of their foreign policy. And I just kind of felt like, oh, wait a second.

• 5:04Sam Fragoso?

  You're talking about Gaza?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Talking about Gaza in particular. But, you know, some other things. I mean, it's things I'd worked on. They didn't go back into the Iran nuclear deal. They didn't reopen relations with Cuba. There was a caution to the Biden foreign policy that I think is very characteristic of the Democratic Party at large. Like, oh, we don't want to do anything too, you know, we don't want to get criticized about too much. And it's not like the Biden years felt like we were climbing out of a hole. It kind of felt like we were not digging anymore.

• 5:35Sam Fragoso?

  We were treading water.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I didn't go into that administration.

• 5:39Sam Fragoso?

  Were you asked to?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  I had a, I had, yes and no. I mean, I think I got the polite, you know, I was such an Obama guy. And, you know, I'll put my hand on another third rail, which is like, you know, the Biden people, they like Obama, but they, one of their own people, you know? And, and, and so the, yes, they were kind of like, hey, do you want to, are you interested in something? Or maybe, and, but I didn't want to go in. I mean, I had, not just because I had small kids and kind of moved out here to LA, but I was beginning a process of what I would describe as deprogramming myself as a national security person. If people listen to, you know, and I don't assume that you do, but if you've listened to my podcast

• 6:20Speaker 00

  or read, like, I've been kind of going through it, because I, I realized that I was uncomfortable with some of the underlying assumptions of American foreign policy. So I wanted to kind of continue that journey.

• 6:34Sam Fragoso?

  It's good we're talking to you in this moment. The 60-day deadline for the US and Iran to end their conflict and resolve nuclear disputes has recently expired. And Trump has since said, quote, "I'm not in a hurry," and has no time schedule for reaching a peace agreement. So, one, why do you think that is? And, two, six months into the conflict, or war, or whatever you want to call it?

• 6:59Speaker 00

  It's a war, yeah.

• 7:00Sam Fragoso?

  Where are we at?

• 7:02Speaker 00

  You know, we're, we're there because Iran doesn't want a deal. Trump wants a deal, Iran doesn't. And we're there because Iran has already won the war, and the United States has already lost the war.

• 7:16Sam Fragoso?

  Trump has said on multiple occasions that we've won.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  We've won this, this war has been won. And we've won, let me say, we've won. You know, you never like to say too early, you won, we won.

• 7:27Sam Fragoso?

  So is this what victory looks like? Is that what you're saying?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  The objectives, as stated by Trump at the outset, were to change the Iranian regime. And he can pretend like that wasn't the case. That was clearly the case. He called for the Iranian people to rise up. You know, all the reporting at the time was that Netanyahu had convinced them that these guys are weak. They assassinated the leader of Iran. By the way, that is a very rare thing to happen. You don't usually kill the leaders of countries even that were at war with. So we failed to dislodge this regime. They're actually more entrenched now. We failed to help the Iranian people rise up, because when you're bombing a country, it's not exactly the time that they're going to rise up. We failed to destroy their nuclear program. They've moved their nuclear fuel, what Trump calls the nuclear dust. So, so all the objectives that could have been, not that Trump communicated

• 8:14Speaker 00

  them clearly, but surmised at the outset, failed. Even there, they said that they destroyed the navy. Well, Iran has used whatever navy they have to participate in shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war. So we clearly didn't destroy their military, because their military is shutting down 20% of the world's fossil fuel energy. So we've kind of failed against all of our own metrics. What Trump said kind of speaks to what I was getting about, about deprogramming. Like, just destroying a bunch of stuff in a country is not achieving something.

• 8:47Sam Fragoso?

  Ezra Klein has called this not regime change, but head-on-a-pike foreign policy.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  It is late-stage empire that can no longer control the periphery, and so just takes a hammer and just starts smashing things. You know, if you look at what Trump's doing-

• 9:04Speaker 00

  He'd failed in achieving his objectives. It was apparent he'd failed in achieving his objectives within weeks. And we're still bombing stuff. We're just bombing in office. If you look closely, we're bombing the same stuff we already bombed. You know, there's not only so much stuff to bomb in Iran, you know, and, and we blew up some bridges, you know, that, that goes beyond head on a pike, like bridges that people drive across to get to places, you know, most notably, you know, blew up a girl's school. So the level of destruction that we were leaving in our wake, as we did in Iraq, as we did in Afghanistan, as we've done in a lot of places, like, it goes beyond even head in

• 9:48Speaker 00

  a pike. It's just, we try to control these places by bombing them or sanctioning them. And then, when we can't control them, it's like we double down, and then we'll blow up more stuff, and we'll sanction you more. You know, today, we're speaking, Trump's saying he's unleashing economic warfare on Iran. And to what end? What, this is actual madness.

• 10:12Sam Fragoso?

  But Iran is certainly not the first country that we have bombed.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:16Sam Fragoso?

  In trying to control them.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:18Sam Fragoso?

  Your administration was part of this?

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:20Sam Fragoso?

  Every presidential administration.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  I freely acknowledge.

• 10:22Sam Fragoso?

  So why is this different?

• 10:23Speaker 00

  This one is different for a number of reasons. One, the scale of Iran. Iran is a country of 94 million people. It is a big, powerful, resource-rich country, dwarfing any of the other countries that we've attacked post 9/11. Iran is a country that we had a diplomatic agreement with in the Obama years, and tore it up, and, and then we bombed them. I mean, I think that, that is not how superpowers should act. You don't make deals, tear up the deals, when the other party was keeping them and then bombed them. Importantly, uncomfortably, Israel was a part of this war. We've never done that before.

• 11:05Sam Fragoso?

  Uncomfortably for whom?

• 11:06Speaker 00

  Like, for a lot of pro-Israel people, worry that, you know, blaming Netanyahu for getting us into this war is, you know, flirting with a trope, right? But it's, I believe the New York Times reporting, like, Netanyahu came to Washington and convinced Trump to bomb Iran. But also importantly, Israel was part of the war. Like, we've never gone to war side by side with Israel before.

• 11:35Sam Fragoso?

  It was a joint strike in February.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  It was a joint strike. American and Israeli pilots were flying together. American military assets were flying from Israel. This was very much a war that we were in with Israel. That's a new phenomenon. And I think also, the fact that it comes after 25 years of doing this in the Middle East, it's just like, I mean, the Iraq War was crazy enough when it happened. I mean, but at this point, how, how have we so willfully not learned the lesson that this doesn't work?

• 12:09Sam Fragoso?

  I've read comments, seen videos of people in Iran, or people who have family there, who have described this war as, quote, "a rescue mission and not a war." Is there any credence to the fact that there are people on the ground who are more than happy that this is happening?

• 12:31Speaker 00

  That's the case every time we do this. I mean, there were Iraqis that wanted us to come. It doesn't mean everybody there was going to greet us as liberators. You can, the Iranian, you can hold different thoughts in your head, that the Iranian regime is terrible, and that we would like to see a different government in Iran. That doesn't mean that the United States bombing the country is the best way to bring that about.

• 12:53Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  And like I said, like, the United States is very good, if you look at our history, at finding those voices. There are people that, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, in just about, in any place that we bombed, that are like, that hate their government so much, that are like, you know what, just bring it on, because anything's better than what we're dealing with. But most often, the case is, they quickly learn, actually, the US military is not the vehicle for, for political change in my country. And I don't mean to impugn people's motives, because I used to have these motivations. I used to be a big proponent of, say, like, what you would call humanitarian intervention, which is what Libya was.

• 13:35Sam Fragoso?

  And you aren't anymore.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  I don't think that the United States military is a vehicle for affecting political outcomes inside of countries. There may be, someone might show me a scenario at some point, where limited military intervention on behalf of some humanitarian purpose might make sense. But not if it's to change a government. I have to be informed by evidence. So let me be self-critical, right? Like, the Libyan intervention, at the time, I supported. And what was happening there is, there was a part of that country of Libya that had fallen into control of the opposition. A brutal regime, the Gaddafi regime, basically started

• 14:19Speaker 00

  marching an army towards that part of the country, and announced their intention to massacre a bunch of people. About as clear-cut, you know, if you'd studied, you know, humanitarian intervention theory, that's about as clear-cut a case of, okay, we have to do something. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the use of force for that purpose. So it was legal under international law, sanctioned by the United Nations. The military operation begins, and the army stopped, and the progress of Gaddafi

• 14:57Speaker 00

  is reversed. And not too much later, Gaddafi himself falls. Well, what happened is Libya descended into a civil war, in which tens of thousands of people died. All of North Africa became awash in weaponry, because of kind of the open border of Libya and the guns flowing around. Different extremist groups got foothold. And anybody who's followed that part of the world knows that the contagion from the Libya civil war infected a lot of other countries that now have been dealing with coups and internal strife. And, and

• 15:38Speaker 00

  look, what's complicated about it is, and I think Obama would probably disagree with me, but we did save a lot of lives by intervening. But because we just broke things, and there was nothing to fill it, it generated a form of chaos.

• 15:57Sam Fragoso?

  Why would you say he disagrees with you?

• 15:59Speaker 00

  I think, you know, you know, I don't want to speak for him. I think he would say that there, there are things that we could have done differently to make it work better on the back end. So it's an implementation question. But I have to look at the evidence of, we, I'm talking about regime change wars in particular. We've done regime change wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and Libya. And like, look at the results. A lot of people who've been in jobs like mine, they always think that the next one is going to be the one that works differently. And to me, that, what's interesting about it is, the war exposes a lot of what's wrong about how Trump approaches governing, particularly in his

• 16:41Speaker 00

  second term. He made this decision very quickly, so I don't think that they gave it that much forethought, to be blunt. He had dismantled the National Security Council. When I worked at the National Security Council, that's the coordinating body for foreign policy, national security policy in the White House, there were hundreds of people that worked there. From what I hear, there's like 25 people there, you know, Marco Rubio is doing two jobs, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. So the people that are supposed to coordinate war games and planning actually don't exist. They've purged expertise. When Trump claimed to have obliterated the Iranian nuclear program a year ago, there were some leaked intelligence reports that, no, we actually didn't do that. They fired those people. Like, that was reported at the time. Well, you fire the people who

• 17:24Speaker 00

  know what they're talking about. You end up in a situation like this.

• 17:27Sam Fragoso?

  There are people on the right who would say, okay, you know, go, go to Venezuela, think about Maduro. And even some of the moderate left that I spoke to, they, they said, look, we went in, we took them out, we suffered minimal losses, and then we basically tell the Vice President that she works for us now. So what do you say to people on the right who go? I didn't like the deal that you forged, Ben Rhodes, and I was happy when it was dismantled in 2018. And I think this policy may have problems, but in the end, he's working in our best interests.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  They are following American politics and national security like they follow a football team. You know, like, could they articulate to you why their life is better? Because Nicholas Mendo is in prison. Now, I want to get to Iran because I am not right about everything. Like, I think there needs to be diversity of opinion, but these people are just so utterly wrong. And so this one, like, under what standard does that counterargument on Iran make any sense? Because under the nuclear deal, there were inspections of all the Iranian nuclear facilities.

• 18:42Sam Fragoso?

  They argued not enough, but yes.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  But now they're none. I mean, so like, what's so insane about their argument is the nuclear dust, right? The nuclear fuel, that's the enriched uranium that is the input for a bomb that Trump is chasing around Iran right now, they shipped out of the country under the deal. Under the deal, there were inspections. Under the deal, there was no war. Like, and where are we now? We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this enterprise. We did much more damage to the Iranian nuclear program through diplomatic agreement than by bombing it, in terms of, you know, getting centrifuges out, getting inspectors in, shipping nuclear fuel out. And beyond that, I just am sick and tired of the mentality, because what else has happened?

• 19:29Speaker 00

  The Iranian people have suffered mightily under our sanctions. People have died because of our sanctions. People have died, including girls, at a school because of our bombing campaign. So the nuclear program is worse than it was during the deal? We're killing people? We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars? I truly cannot even, again, I try to inhabit alternative points of view. I can inhabit this one. It doesn't, there's a fixation that some people have on a kind of permanent conflict of the Iranian government that is completely irrational to me. Like, as long as they don't have a nuclear weapon, that's the, and that was our judgment. If we can stop these people from having a nuclear weapon, like, we can live with this

• 20:13Speaker 00

  and try to manage some of the difficulties of Iran. I think these are people that want to change the Iranian government for ideological reasons. And I just think the United States of America doesn't need to change the Iranian government. Would I like to see the Iranian people do it? Yes. I think the Iranian people would be more capable of changing their own government if we just left them alone.

• 20:34Sam Fragoso?

  So, in thinking about an outcome, do you think the best one basically resembles the deal you negotiated back in 2015?

• 20:43Speaker 00

  I don't think Trump can get that deal. I don't think the Iranians will make that deal with him. I mean, Trump bombed them twice during negotiations and killed their leaders. Those people are probably not going to want to make a deal with you. And actually, those people are probably going to try to develop a nuclear weapon to survive. I think at a certain point, Trump is just going to have to take the loss and cut a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz that allows Iran some access to revenue from that and just move on.

• 21:09Sam Fragoso?

  So long as this war continues, what does that mean for both the Iranian people and for the people here stateside, who, you know, we've seen already the inflationary impacts of this? What does it mean for the people on the ground?

• 21:25Speaker 00

  The Iranian people will suffer the most because they're now dealing with a blockade and they've been bombed, like, so they're suffering, but the Iranian government, precisely because it is a bad regime, doesn't care about the suffering of their own people. The American people, if this Strait of Hormuz doesn't get opened pretty soon, not only will gas prices continue to go up, but other shortages are going to start to kick in. Fertilizer comes through that strait. So if you're a farmer, the price of fertilizer is going to go up. It's going to really squeeze you, right? There are helium shortages, other inputs into the global economy.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  That's why I think at some point, Trump will probably have to just walk away from this thing.

• 22:15Sam Fragoso?

  And does the regime in Iran see its people as necessary sacrifices to that end?

• 22:22Speaker 00

  You're talking about a regime that fought a near-decade-long war with Iraq, in which its people were sent out to the front lines in kind of human waves, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed. But I think that their causes, the regime must be preserved at all costs. And if the cost is the suffering of our own people, that's a cost we're willing to pay.

• 22:45Sam Fragoso?

  In an op-ed in the New York Times over the summer by Thomas Friedman, he wrote a lot about survival in regards to Trump, Iran, Bibi Netanyahu. It seems to keep coming back on all three fronts, for different reasons, mind you, to survival. Punt the questions down the line, face the consequences in the music later, or God forbid, ever.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:12Sam Fragoso?

  Is that something you're seeing? Is that the kind of survival instinct that's undergirding this whole experience?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Netanyahu, yes. Like, his political survival clearly is tied to the perpetuation of war now. You know, like, the wars stop and the need for Bibi Netanyahu goes away, right? Trump doesn't need the war in Iran to survive. Like, he has no next election that he's going to be in.

• 23:37Sam Fragoso?

  Do you believe that?

• 23:38Speaker 00

  He's 80 years old.

• 23:39Sam Fragoso?

  And then stop, Joe Biden.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  But I just mean, like, I don't think this third term thing with Trump, I actually don't think, I could be wrong. But to me, the Iran war, for him, felt more like a vanity play, a legacy play, a "I'm going to do what Obama couldn't play," or other presidents, or "this worked with Maduro, it'll work over here." He doesn't, his political, he'll still be president the day after this war ends, like, in the same way that, you know, the stakes are higher for the Iranian regime, it's literally the survival of the regime. With Bibi Netanyahu, it's like his political survival. Trump, he could still be here after this, which is part of what makes it so insane.

• 24:25Sam Fragoso?

  Trump has said, over the last six months, quote, "It will be over very soon." He's also said, "In August, the conflict will be over pretty soon." He also then framed the six-month war as, quote, "a very important excursion, and one that we're, quote, 'doing very well in,' despite believing that, quote, 'I don't think they can go on much longer.'"

• 24:49Speaker 00

  We're so conditioned by a decade of Trump to not expect rational communication, that somehow that's normal?

• 25:01Sam Fragoso?

  Ben, have you ever been in an abusive relationship?

• 25:04Speaker 00

  I think we're in an abusive relationship, to go back to where we started, with these systems that kind of govern our lives. Because they treat us worse and worse. You know, tech companies treat us worse and worse. Our privacy is violated more and more aggressively. Our tax dollars are spent on more and more insane stuff like this war in Iran. And we kind of take it, you know? And we don't really push back, you know? And so I do think that that is a good insight you have, because I actually think we are, we're in an abusive relationship with the president. We're kind of in an abusive relationship with big corporations and a lot of things that have huge impacts on our lives.

• 25:48Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think international law still exists in any meaningful way?

• 25:54Speaker 00

  No. And I think people, what's different about now versus, say, when I was in the White House, is the, there was still a baseline expectation that you would abide by international law. If you were going to violate international law, as people, Vladimir Putin did, and like, you would at least offer some pretext, you know? I mean, part of, one of the fascinating things about the war in Iran is there was no pretext that it was legal under international law.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Israel's conduct in Gaza, they wouldn't dispute that they were acting outside of international law. Like, Netanyahu actually used to say this line over and over, that "you guys dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima," or "you firebombed Dresden," to defend what he was doing, when international law was written after World War II to prevent that from happening again. And so what worries me, what feels qualitatively different about this moment in history, is that the laws, particularly the laws about war, when you can invade a country and how you conduct yourself in a war, countries that have been like stakeholders in that

• 27:17Speaker 00

  system, now violate those laws without even pretending, no pretense, you know? We're just doing this because we can. Russia, the United States, Israel. And I worry that we're forgetting why we wrote those international laws in the first place. It's because when you normalize war, and you normalize a kind of conduct in war that doesn't really look at civilian harm, you end up in the kind of world wars that led us to write those international laws in the first place. Now, that doesn't guarantee we're going to end up in one of those again, but I'd rather not take the chance.

• 27:53Sam Fragoso?

  Well, speaking of that era and your time in the White House, why don't we talk about that after the break? That's coming up next with Ben Rhodes. I recently made a few changes in my bedroom. I've got a new bed, a brand-new bookshelf, moved a desk around, and it reminded me that when you change one part of a room, suddenly you start noticing just about everything else, especially the bedding. Because you can have a beautiful new bed, but if you put the same worn sheets and comforter back on top of it, it doesn't feel like much of an upgrade. That's why I've been using Boll & Branch. I have their signature comforter set in Shore, a light blue color that really pulls the room together. The bedding is incredibly soft and breathable, and there's something about getting into it at the end of a long day that makes the whole experience feel a lot more relaxing

• 28:38Sam Fragoso?

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• 29:21Sam Fragoso?

  This summer, I traveled to San Jose del Cabo. It was the first time I was in the city for an extended period of time, which allowed me to find a real rhythm within it. We would spend the day by the beach, then head to the famous art district in the evening. We'd have dinner and wander in and out of the galleries before the evening came to a close. I think I even went home with a few ceramics made by local artists. While we were off experiencing this incredible place, I couldn't help but think about the people that call it home. The shops, the restaurants, the views we came to love are part of that everyday experience. It changed how I think about my own home and when I'm away. Rather than simply letting it sit empty while I travel, I've considered listing my space on Airbnb and giving someone visiting Los Angeles

• 30:05Sam Fragoso?

  a comfortable place where they can discover the city for themselves. Maybe they'll find a neighborhood restaurant they love or a museum they didn't know existed. And the extra income from listing my space can go toward experiences for my own trips or just help cover some of the cost of getting there. The next time you're planning a getaway yourself, why not consider listing your space while you're gone? Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com/host.

• 30:35Sam Fragoso?

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• 31:19Sam Fragoso?

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• 31:42Sam Fragoso?

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• 33:11Sam Fragoso?

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• 33:27Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back, in your book Always Say: The Battle for American Identity, you highlight President Obama in 2008 on the campaign trail, delivering what has often been referred to as "the race speech." And it's my understanding that you had actually started working for him the year prior, writing floor statements. But I want to walk through the significance of this speech and how you think, in retrospect, it set the stage for the administration you wanted to work for over the next eight years.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  In this book, what I'm principally interested in is the arguments Americans have been having for 250 years about identity. What does it mean to be an American? Who decides that question? And this speech in 2008, I think, was the most appropriate entry into that discussion by Barack Obama. And to set the stage for people who don't remember, in the spring of 2008, he's kind of on the way to the Democratic nomination. And he hits a huge roadblock, which is these videos start circulating of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, giving these sermons in which he kind of excoriates America. You know, "America's a racist nation." "9/11 was America's chickens coming home to roost."

• 34:44Speaker 00

  And I should say, it wasn't just that he was Obama's pastor. He married the Obamas, he baptized their children, so there was a relationship there. And so Obama decides he has to give this speech. We had shorthand of the race speech. It was all during the campaign. It was like, does he have to give a speech about his race and about racism? But this time, he made the decision like, I need to address this, and I need to do it. I can't do it in an interview. I have to be able to tell the story how I want to tell it. But the reason this speech, I think, is so compelling from today even more than then is there are two things I'd highlight. The first is, he talks about Reverend Wright, and he basically says, hey, this is a complicated guy.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Like, yes, he said these things I disagree with. But he's also done wonderful things in his community. He was a United States Marine. Like, he's a complicated person. In the same way, and he says, "I can no more disown Reverend Wright than I could disown my white grandmother, a woman who raised me, who loved me, who I love, but who also said racist things that make me cringe." And first of all, that was interesting to me from the vantage point of today because it was kind of a speech against cancel culture before that was a thing. But then, I thought the most important part of the speech is he says, "We are stuck in a racial stalemate in this country." And he describes the experience of black structural inequality, income gap, education gap, housing gap. But then he describes the vantage point of the white working class.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Most working and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they've been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything. They've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their job shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  He's basically talking about Trump voters before Trump. And what he's saying is, people use these racial differences to divide us, and that's why we can't solve things like healthcare. That's why we can't, you know, the things that everybody cares about, because we're so fixated on race and some political and media figures use it to divide us, we can't come together to move forward. And, I mean, we can go many directions from this. I'd say for our administration, it made it possible. Like, the race speech succeeded. It arrested the problems in the campaign, and it gave him momentum again. But I also think it kind of modeled a vision of multiracial democracy

• 37:35Speaker 00

  that was like the absolute DNA of the eight Obama years.

• 37:41Sam Fragoso?

  So that's what it modeled for the country. But I want to hear a little bit about what it modeled or demonstrated to you because you're someone who long had aspirations to be a novelist. You grew up on the Upper East Side. I imagine your mother was probably more interested in you writing your version of Rabbit Run

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:59Sam Fragoso?

  than helping a president run for office.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  That's my mother's favorite author, by the way, John Updike.

• 38:04Sam Fragoso?

  Did you find in Obama a kinship in storytelling?

• 38:08Speaker 00

  I think that for me...

• 38:13Speaker 00

  As a relatively privileged white person from the Upper East Side, it was a pretty unique experience to write for 10 years in the voice of a black man from Hawaii, you know? And it forced me to literally walk in his shoes, right? Because that's the only way you can write for somebody else. And I, at times, was uncomfortable addressing race in his voice. But I think he was so generous, not just with his time and working on speeches, but in providing blueprints. You know, Dreams from My Father, his first book, is all about race and identity.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  And so it forced me to think about identity in the United States from these different perspectives. You know, like, I have mine. Barack Obama has his. Reverend Wright has his. Barack Obama's grandmother has hers, you know? And Obama, at his best, was able to kind of inhabit, or at least try to look at the world from the perspective of people in different identities. That kind of storytelling, you know, definitely stretched me and enlarged my sense of American identity.

• 39:32Sam Fragoso?

  So during your eight years as Obama's national security advisor and speechwriter, colleague after colleague described this kind of, I don't want to say like telepathic communication, but something resembling a mind meld, I think was the term over and over again, between the two of you. Susan Rice said this. Jon Favreau said this. Even former UN ambassador Samantha Power said this, while also adding that the literary character you most resemble is Holden Caulfield. Quote, "He's defiant. He hates being a phony, and he has very strong views." Is that a fair characterization of how you operated in the White House?

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Look, the mind meld stuff, you could overstated. But I think what I was a speechwriter, and to get inside his voice, I read everything he wrote. I read every interview he gave. I, you know, I wanted to inhabit it. I think where we had a commonality and developed, you know, a friendship, really, is we were similar in that he has a very writerly view of the world, you know? You kind of float above and look down. You see the absurdity of an experience. You see the unintentional humor in experience, right? You, and there was a lot of that when you're in the White House, you know? Like, what the hell is going on? People that were just earnestly carrying out what they thought, you know, this is how we do things.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  I would be like, I don't know if I'd question their motivations, but I would, I would have a certain impatience with that.

• 41:02Sam Fragoso?

  Is there an example that comes to mind?

• 41:04Speaker 00

  I remember when, for those who don't remember the Arab Spring, when Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, was trying to cling to power and cracking down. A lot of the senior officials, Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, people much more senior than me, experienced than me, were kind of very sympathetic to Mubarak and very unsettled by the prospect of change. And I just kind of couldn't handle that. I was like, we give these people billions of dollars in military aid a year, and we're just going to not do anything when they use. And by the way, when the military came back into power, I still had that mindset, you know? Like, we should cut these people off, you know? Like, I, there's a lot of hypocrisy written into American foreign policy,

• 41:48Speaker 00

  intentional or not. And I just had a very hard time living with it.

• 41:53Sam Fragoso?

  Your former White House colleague and former national security advisor Jake Sullivan is fond of saying, in regards to national security concerns, what you have when you're facing a hard policy decision are, quote, "imperfect people with imperfect information dealing with imperfect choices." Do you believe that?

• 42:14Speaker 00

  I believe that, but I also think that that is often used as an excuse.

• 42:19Sam Fragoso?

  Is it an excuse that you used?

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Yes, certainly in my own head. Because you, you know, you rationalize things. Like, well, we have to do it this way. Like, you know, we have no, we're constrained, like, Congress, you know, or public opinion, or, you know, some other circumstance. Like, so I think that sometimes you can sit in those jobs and not really feel great about what you're doing. And then you go home and you're like, well, we're just imperfect people with imperfect options, you know? And, and that can, I mean, just to be blunt, and I'd hate to impugn Jake directly, but that can lead you to be like, well, we have to give Israel this military aid, or else Congress is going to go nuts. And, you know, the donor is going to call and yell at me. And, you know, picking a fight with Israel is never good.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  And, you know, you can rationalize doing things that you kind of have in a gut level. Like, I don't, is this what we should be doing? And I'm not going to speak for Jake, but it is wrong to be providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that they're dropping on refugee camps.

• 43:23Sam Fragoso?

  Well, but wrong to whom?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  It should be wrong to them.

• 43:26Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  I mean, that's what I'm saying. And I believe that some of them knew it was wrong. But we're like, well, you know, Biden is pro-Israel, and the Congress is going to, you know, Trump is going to attack us if, you know, we cut Israel off. And, you know, there are these Democratic members of Congress and these big donors that can get on the phone. And, you know, by the way, that does not excuse any of it to me. But you rationalize, you know?

• 43:54Sam Fragoso?

  Is there a foreign policy decision in your eight years that you now look at and go, or maybe even at the time, you thought, this is wrong, but we're going through with it anyway?

• 44:06Speaker 00

  I mentioned one, which is, there was a coup in Egypt in 2013 that overthrew a democratically elected leader. People might not have liked him. Mohamed Mersey was democratically elected. They massacred thousands of people. They threw Mersey in prison. And we kept giving them military assistance. I thought that was wrong. I said it was wrong, and I had lost the argument. I was definitely uncomfortable with some of the drone strikes in the Obama years.

• 44:44Sam Fragoso?

  Which ones?

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Well, overall, I, I, I didn't even say individual. I was, the breadth of the drone program, you know? Not, you know, and if I'm speaking at the time, I remember the more time went on, I was like, hey, I thought this was like an emergency tool. I thought it was like, you know, because Al Qaeda has, did have a pretty significant base of operations in Pakistan. So whether it's drones or something else, the idea that you would attack that base in Pakistan made some sense. Well, then Bin Laden's killed in 2011. And the drone program is not scaling back. And, and, you know, I definitely thought at the time, like, well, wait a second.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Like, we should stop doing this. Like, we've defeated these people. Like, we killed their leader. We've, you know, eliminated most of their leaders. We, and there were other things. You know, I, I've had younger people, including people that called me from the Biden administration during Gaza, asked me, like, when do you resign? You know? And what I always told them is, I, I went to work every day, even the days when I thought something was wrong, believing that overall the Obama foreign policy was something I could go home and look myself in the mirror with. And there was never a Gaza. Actually, that's something I thought was wrong. I was often like the dissenter

• 46:15Speaker 00

  on Israel-related issues in the Obama administration.

• 46:17Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I want to pinpoint an example of dissent because in your memoir, The World as It Is, there's this key moment you describe in the early months of 2012 as Obama was mounting a reelection campaign. And I was hoping you could read this passage for us and see where it lands with you.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Burdened by a reelection campaign, buffeted by the stridency of his opposition at home, divisions among his own team, and a sense that he lacked good partners abroad, Obama seemed at times to be using his powerful mind to find justifications for more modest ambitions. Another time, at a meeting on what he was aiming to accomplish in his first term, I pointed to the potential for a Democratic opening in Burma. "Ben," he said, "no one cares about Burma and Ohio."

• 47:05Sam Fragoso?

  You add on the next page, quote, "I feel we had gradually trimmed our sails and lowered our sights. A year after the heady days of Libya intervention and Bin Laden operation, it felt as if we were becoming technocratic, competent managers of things amid a world roiling with change. Drone strikes to take out terrorists, reducing the population at Gitmo but unable to close it, averting a war with Iran while imposing sanctions."

• 47:31Speaker 00

  I mean, I, now, I'd say, one thing I'd say to give credit to President Obama, in the second term, he took some bigger shots. The Iran nuclear deal, the Cuban normalization. Those are the two things that I worked on the most in the second term. And so I do want to give him some credit. And I think measured against, you know, say, Biden, who didn't do those things, he deserves that credit. But I also think, not saying I'm doing this perfectly, but we need to acknowledge error. We need to acknowledge what's broken in the systems. We need to speak out loud about these political pressures that enter into decision-making.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Because, you know, I recently read a piece in The New Yorker that had all the Biden people talking about Gaza. And all I heard was a lot of excuse-making. You know, here's, well, this was hard. And, you know, well, maybe we could have done something differently, but I don't know.

• 48:32Sam Fragoso?

  I think a lot of people found that galling, including people like myself, who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  I found it galling too, because I, you know why? Because I, I know the game. One of the reasons why people have lost such confidence in American national security and were so ripe for arguments about like the deep state and these out-of-touch elites, is there's so little reckoning with error, you know? I mean, like, look at the Iraq War, you know? Like, nobody was, held themselves accountable for that, you know? It was always somebody else's fault, or, you know? And, and so I think it, when all you seem to care about is deflecting blame or absolving yourself or rationalizing something that is completely unjustifiable, like a genocide in Gaza, you know, you feed this cynicism

• 49:22Speaker 00

  that, well, these people, they, they, they're in some giant tower, and, and they face no accountability for their actions, even the accountability that they hold themselves to. And that leads to the second point. I honestly believe, as a, as a human,

• 49:40Speaker 00

  It is not good for you to do that. You know, like, it is better to sit with the things you were part of, to acknowledge to yourself. Before you can acknowledge to The New Yorker magazine, you have to acknowledge to yourself what you were part of. You have to be willing to go to places that you, that are uncomfortable. And it took me years to do this. And I think the reason I did is I started talking to people from Afghanistan and from Iraq and people who challenged me and said, wait, I'm not letting you off the hook with that answer. I remember telling somebody from Afghanistan who was really challenging me about, why

• 50:22Speaker 00

  did you guys make, you know, if you talked to any ordinary Afghan, they could have told you all the things you guys are doing wrong. You were backing the wrong people. You were backing the corrupt people. You were backing the people that brutalized the civilian population even before the Taliban, you know? And I remember saying in one of these conversations, hey, we never went into a room thinking about how to like mess up Afghanistan that day. We were well intentioned, you know, like we, I went to work thinking I was going to try to make Afghanistan better. And I remember this person saying, what you were doing is you were creating chaos. You were creating violence.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  And, and I remember saying, and honestly, I thought, you know, I never went to a meeting where that was the purpose of the meeting. And she's like, what was the outcome? Like, you have to, like, you have to work backwards from what was happening, you know? This gets to what I was saying at the beginning again about disrupting systems. Like unless you're willing to really question, because I won't name names, but I had, I called some of these Biden people during post October 7th and said, what the hell are you doing? And usually what I would get back is a version of that New York article, you know? Well, we're making things marginally better. If we stop giving them the aid, they'll stop listening to us.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  You know, there may be in the more honest state, well, the politics of this are tough, right? And, and it's like, you, you can believe all that. You may have convinced yourself of that, but you're giving weapons to people that are dropping those weapons on children. Like, like, stop and take two steps back and look at this thing, you know? And that's what I would encourage anybody who's been in these positions to do because we're not going to actually change things unless we actually reckon with things.

• 52:16Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, so I want to reckon with something, which is during the Biden years, you were outspoken, increasingly so, I think, about how woefully and painfully short the administration was on Gaza and Cuba in particular.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:33Sam Fragoso?

  But you maintained public support for Biden during his presidency, calling him, quote, "a good, decent, sympathetic person and dad." Is it because you found him to be such a good, decent, sympathetic person and father that you were reluctant to suggest he not seek a second term as president?

• 52:58Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll hold myself accountable for, you know, to, to, to, you know, I, I did not think Joe Biden should run for reelection in the beginning of 2023, you know? I thought that seemed like a very strange decision. So why didn't I say that out loud at the time? Why did I wait until after the debate? That's when I think I started saying, you should step aside. I guess if I was going to go back to that time, I didn't really know what to do about it. I don't think I ever said, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it's good that he's running. You know, like, I don't think I ever said, like, hey, like, I'm, you know, like, Joe

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Biden is the man to, I just was like, I'm just not gonna, I'm not gonna go into this one, like I-

• 53:47Sam Fragoso?

  But the omission across the Democratic Party-

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:51Sam Fragoso?

  Was the part that Americans found troubling.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they're right to find it troubling. I, I erred by thinking like, yeah, this is not my battle to fight. And, and I think that we talked at the beginning about some of these Obama-Biden tensions, that there was this huge chip on the shoulder from the Biden circle about what Obama did in 2016. They were not subtle about that. They talked about it all the time. And I did think, I'm perceived as so close to Obama, and I am close to Obama, that if I went out in the beginning of 2023 and like, just say tweeted, this is crazy, Joe Biden's too old, he shouldn't run, that there'd be this perception that, oh my God, is he speaking for Obama?

• 54:38Speaker 00

  And then it's going to kick up all this Obama-Biden stuff, and there's the Obama people once again trying to kneecap Joe Biden. And so I think I was probably worried that if I weigh in on this, I'm going to be seen as a proxy for Obama, and I might be kicking something up that Obama frankly doesn't want and that would allow them to kind of retreat behind this narrative of, oh, there they go again, the Obama people, and once again, trying to push Joe Biden out of the way. And I just, yeah, I just didn't want to, I just didn't want to do that.

• 55:16Sam Fragoso?

  But clearly in retrospect, this is an inflection point, because now, as you've said, you spend plenty of time writing and talking about whether Chuck Schumer should resign or not.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  I realize that as someone who had written a lot about democracy and authoritarianism, that the Democratic Party was responsible for some of that, that the Democratic Party made a series of errors, some of them not intentional, some of them, you know, you know, some of them intentional in the sense that they were just the wrong decisions, not that we are authoritarian, that contributed to the authoritarian outcome that we found ourselves in.

• 56:05Sam Fragoso?

  And what are the most pronounced errors as you see them?

• 56:08Speaker 00

  The Democratic Party, in making itself oppositional to Trump, made itself the defender of a whole set of institutions and ways of doing things that were the things that had pissed people off in the first place.

• 56:24Sam Fragoso?

  Like what?

• 56:25Speaker 00

  Like the national security state, you know? To just take my, let's start with my neck of the woods. Like, the last speech Joe Biden gave, or the last major piece of, do you know the last major piece of legislation Joe Biden signed as president? It was a $100 billion supplemental package for arms to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. What the fuck does that have to do with anything Americans care about? You know, like, this kind of, we, you know, we're running the empire over here, you know? The defense of American institutions, including democratic institutions, without an understanding

• 57:07Speaker 00

  of how disconnected those institutions felt from people. You know, we're defending democracy in the abstract, but democracy is, in practice, is not working for people. We became the defenders of the status quo. The kind of self-aggrandizing tone of like the resistance, you know, that we're heroes on the, you know, barricades of democracy, but meanwhile, we have our corporate donors and we have AIPAC donors and we, you know, there's, there's an appearance to people of double dealing. Like, you, you guys, you, you put yourselves up as standing up against, you know, the kind of oligarchic, you know, world that Trump represents, but you guys have your own oligarchs, you know?

• 57:51Sam Fragoso?

  And thinking about the Democratic Party and its future, and people who are going to run, who are running right now in the midterms, and of course, whoever's going to run in 28, many people will, do you believe for a candidate to be viable in this party, they have to explicitly call what happened in Gaza a genocide?

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. And the reason why is bigger than even Israel-Palestine. It's because-

• 58:24Speaker 00

  If you can't tell people the truth about something that they can see with their eyes, why should they trust you on anything else? The bar is higher for Democrats. Like, we earn a credibility gap. And so if you sound like you're obfuscating on the genocide question, I don't know why I would trust that you're gonna like, fight for my healthcare. I don't know why, you know, this is something Mumdani cracked, and his unwillingness to shift his position on this question made people be like, well, maybe actually we'll fight to lower my prices, you know? If you're not willing to kind of name what is happening before our eyes, I don't know why I should trust you to fix it.

• 59:03Sam Fragoso?

  So I trust what you're saying publicly, but I'm curious privately, I want to know and hear more about what you're advocating for, because you're part of this National Security Action Group, and it was reported over the summer in PUC, a group that, you know, was created by you and

• 59:19Speaker 00

  Jake Sullivan.

• 59:20Sam Fragoso?

  Jake Sullivan amongst others.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  In 2017.

• 59:22Sam Fragoso?

  That's right. But it just recently reconvened over the summer. In this backroom conversation, what is the goal? What is the objective here?

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Well, okay, so, and this is reported, so I don't want to, but like, you know, I did not call this meeting. Alex Soros, who's like a, you know, significant, obviously Democratic donor, we convened it at the Open Society Foundation, and we had a bunch of people there. And so I think the main purpose of this meeting was, let's all get together, spanning an ideological spectrum, and kind of air our views, and try to identify like, where the cleavage is in the party on foreign policy issues.

• 1:00:10Sam Fragoso?

  And why did that lead to you having a somewhat contentious exchange with Jake Sullivan?

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I basically said what I said to you, you know, like, you guys need to reckon with this.

• 1:00:23Sam Fragoso?

  In that conversation you had with Jake Sullivan, with plenty of other

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and other people, other Biden people.

• 1:00:28Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, okay, and now that we are in 2026, this happened just a couple months ago, this meeting.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Sam Fragoso?

  Have they reckoned with the stain of that policy?

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  No, I've not heard people say, what we did was wrong. I've not heard that phrase from a senior Biden, like, what we did, what we participated in, was wrong. Not like, we could have done better, we should have done better, I think about it all the time. What we participated in was wrong. Like, full stop, and then talk about that. And I think that's unfortunate, that's a soft word. And it's both for the necessary reckoning that needs to take place, but also, like, again, like, individually, like, you know, twisting yourself in knots to kind of rationalize is not healthy.

• 1:01:20Sam Fragoso?

  The reason I keep harping on this is because they are going to be vying for jobs. Jobs you may not want anymore.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:28Sam Fragoso?

  Fine, but those people are going to be right at the goddamn door next year.

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  What I'm saying to you is what I said to them. There should be new people in these jobs. Like, the revolving door of it all, whoever the person is going to the revolving door, I'd like to see younger and different people in a lot of these national security jobs, and different kinds of experience. And also, like, if you can't, you know, reckon with something like Gaza, yeah, I don't think you should be in those positions.

• 1:01:59Sam Fragoso?

  I think most of us could give a pretty good estimate of what we spend in a month. At least, I thought I could. But there's a difference between having a general sense of your finances, and actually seeing everything laid out in front of you. What you're spending, what you're saving, and how those numbers are changing over time. That's one thing I've been appreciating about Monarch. Monarch brings my accounts, investments, saving goals, and spending together in one place, and increasingly, I use it to look ahead. If I'm planning a trip, or considering a larger purchase, I can map out the costs and see how it fits into my goals before I actually spend the money. I also like Monarch's weekly recap. It flags changes I might otherwise miss, like a spending increase or an upcoming expense, without requiring me to constantly check everything myself.

• 1:02:43Sam Fragoso?

  Over time, that's changed my relationship with money. I'm not just looking at what I've already spent, I'm using that information from Monarch to make better decisions about what comes next. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code TALEASEASY at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code TALEASEASY. The thing that I keep kind of thinking about is that, since 2008, if we were to think about the campaign that you all mounted, speeches that you helped draft, one of the

• 1:03:26Sam Fragoso?

  main things, one of the main proponents of the campaign, was that in electing President Obama, we were ushering in a new moment in this country, free from, quote, "pettiness and immaturity that had poisoned our politics for so long." And yet, inextricably linked from that moment, that night in Grant Park, is what so many have described and seen and experienced as this coarsening of the culture, where we became more partisan, more petty, further poisoned by politics. And I wonder, as we wrap around, kind of to the end of your time in the White House,

• 1:04:07Sam Fragoso?

  but to this moment, this decade of deprogramming, how much responsibility do you bear for the political climate that emerged post-2008? And certainly, the years following, you know, your vacating of the White House?

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  We make a big mistake, I believe, and this is not a coping strategy, believe me, in thinking that, like, history is, plays out in finite periods of time. I kind of reject the premise that what Obama represented, and what Grant Park represented, is somehow over and undone by what Trump did. Because that's not how this works. Like, history is longer than a decade, you know? And these, you know, it's why I wrote this, but like, these stories are fighting, and one story looks like it has the upper hand for a little bit, and then the other story reasserts itself. How this looks today is not how it looks five years, 10 years from now, like, history

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  is much longer, and I think we, our attention spans shrink, and everything, every election feels existential, and Trump is obviously so extreme that it feels like odd, like everything's being destroyed. You know, it will look different in 10 years. Then in terms of the personal responsibility, I do end up bumping up against something that I feel uncomfortable about in these conversations, because if you look at the fervency of MAGA, if you look at the extremism of Trump, and if you look at what about Obama

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  kind of contributed to that, I truly believe in my bones that it wasn't like, I don't know, his response to the financial crisis, or, you know, I don't know, the war in Libya, it was that he was black, you know? And so, it really was, like, from the beginning, too, from the get, the Tea Party, take back this country, you know, it was ostensibly about deficits. The debt, that just hit $40 trillion, they don't seem to care. Like, there's a limit to my self-flagellation, which is, I make no apologies, you know, and I'm not suggesting you were saying this, but like, for working for a black man who

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  became president, and if that's what broke the brains of enough people that they nominated Donald Trump, like, that's telling us to never try to change things, because if you try to change things, maybe you'll get a Trump. Now, underneath that, sure, like, not me individually, but the administration as a part of, you know, I wish we'd regulated, frankly, social media, because it did a lot to fracture the discourse and the reality in this country. We didn't invest enough in the Democratic Party, you know, like, the popularity of Obama just never seemed to kind of be institutionalized into the party apparatus, you know? Because one of the things that you find when you look at American history, like, when

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  a black person disproves white supremacy, like, people kind of lose their minds, you know, because it's really threatening. If he'd done poorly, the backlash wouldn't have been as big, like, in some ways, right? But we had this big multiracial administration, and we had gay marriage, and we were lighting up the White House in rainbow colors, and it was the era of Hamilton, and the kind of cultural lead of the country was starting to change, and there was a, you know, there's a big cultural fight in this country about whether we're a multiracial democracy, or whether we're kind of the J.D. Vance America, that's like a white Christian nation with some other people in it. I don't absolve us for the things we got wrong, I don't absolve myself of the things I got wrong.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  I've never thought about this, like, weirdly, because I was ostensibly more powerful when I was in the White House, but, yeah, I think I kind of was a part of, like, this resistancy mindset in the first Trump term that Wasn't persuading anybody, you know, like it was, it was, we were all talking to each other about like, you know, fighting for democracy and um, we, we kind of did the wrong thing in the first Trump term, you know, like um, and Biden, you know, eked it out, but I, I think he would have lost without COVID, you know, um, interesting historical what if is whether it would have been better to just have two consecutive Trump terms,

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  but that's a whole other podcast.

• 1:08:38Sam Fragoso?

  The reason I wanted your diagnosis is because I wanted you to hear kind of a similar question I posed to Michelle Obama when she came on the show earlier this year and her response to why we're here and the people who voted for Trump who also voted for her husband twice.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  That anger, you know, I can't look some people in the face and tell them you have no right to be angry or to do something that maybe is against your own interest. That's what, that's human nature. Many of the people who voted for my husband twice, twice. And I know that that's how they feel. It's like, this isn't, this isn't about anything other than I'm just, we need, we need something different.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  They voted for Donald Trump. Yeah.

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  That's a lot of people.

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  So you can't just pigeonhole them and say you just don't care and you're racist or whatever you're thinking. This is an act of, I don't know what else to do. I just wish we had more leaders that were figuring out how to do more for the middle class, for the working folks, because those are the folks who are drowning in this economy. It's not me anymore, but I, I know those folks and they're good people and they don't have a way out. And that makes for bad choices.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, I agree with that. And, and let me say that there are two things that can be true at the same time. Trump's ability to take over the Republican Party, I think owes a lot to racism, xenophobia, right wing media, you know, ugliness, right? Trump's ability to get elected President of the United States twice owes a lot to, let's call them Obama Trump overs, right? Or independents, people that I don't think are all racist. I agree with her. There's another lesson for Democrats, though, that is, is even simpler

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  and makes the Democratic Party's response to the, the Trump elections or, you know, Trump emergence even kind of weirder. Who wins for Democrats? John F. Kennedy, young guy coming in, wants to shake things up, change things. Jimmy Carter, comes out of nowhere after Watergate, I'm gonna clean things up. You know, Bill Clinton, young guy coming out of Arkansas, I gotta change my party, I'm gonna change, you know. Barack Obama, I don't know why we refuse to like, just like, look at the reality that, that that's what people want from Democrats. The Democrats have to be reformers. Like, a

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  center-left party is, is, should inherently be oppositional to power structures, you know? And by the way, again, you don't need to be a leftist to be, Clinton was not a leftist, you know? Carter wasn't a leftist. Like, and so, so that's the thing, even when we run reformers, their capacity to reform, it's hard where you go, how can you trust the Democrats to do that? But if you look at Obama's presidency, like the ACA benefited middle-class people, you know, a lot of things he did benefited middle-class people. And Obama, could he, I, you know, would, in retrospect, would have liked to see him take a bigger whack at, at, at income inequality.

• 1:12:03Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. Which, which has only increased since you left the White House.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. But I think Americans, a healthy majority of Americans thought, maybe there's things I don't like about Obama, but I don't, I think people generally believed that he was working for them, you know, like he was just trying, he was trying, you know? You know, the irony of the Clinton thing is, after the election, I was, I was shocked. I thought she was gonna win. I was wrong. I remember I woke up the next day and, you know, you ever have like one of those, you know, some people have this when they drink too much and do something stupid, but like, you ever wake up and you're like, it takes a minute to be like, that, that happened? Like, you almost don't be awake in that new

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  reality? And I remember after I shook that off, I was like, shit, man. We ran against her with the exact same message. She's an insider who can't be trusted to bring about change.

• 1:13:01Sam Fragoso?

  That, that was all of 2007, 2008.

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Like, I, I, and I was like, you know, it was so obvious, you know, and um,

• 1:13:10Sam Fragoso?

  Well, if it was so obvious, why was it not obvious in 2015 or 2016?

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  You know, I think part of what happened is the Clintons, again, I'm not, actually, because there's things I like about Hillary Clinton a lot as a public figure and as a public servant, but as a politician, she's not the best candidate. I mean, and one of the things I also thought after 2016 is that maybe our feat in defeating her in 2008 wasn't quite as herculean as we thought it was at the time. But they, they had, you know, much more, um, I don't say control, but they, they were, you know, they had a lot of power in the Democratic Party, you know?

• 1:13:53Sam Fragoso?

  You can say control.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Through the, through the Obama years even. Obama did not clear that field in the way that people think he did. I think the Clintons did more to clear the fields, you know, they, they had donors and endorsements and the whole thing, you know? If, if you look at the Democratic Party, it's something interesting. Where, where are the people between the eight, like right now, Bill Clinton's 80, Joe Biden's like 82, you know, Hillary Clinton's in her, I don't know, I guess late 70s or something. And again, I think some of this is as simple as like, this, like, if the next Democratic nominee is not like under 60, I'm gonna, I'm, actually, I probably will be because I don't know who else is

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  gonna run, but like, can we just please get some younger people to run for president?

• 1:14:41Sam Fragoso?

  When you were a young person, before you had to be deprogrammed, you were in New York City, there in Brooklyn on 9/11, and I think you were handing out flyers.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's election day.

• 1:14:56Sam Fragoso?

  For a city council candidate on the waterfront. When you play that day back, does it also come with all the memories and, and all that change for you in that moment?

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was, you know, 23 years old and I was on a trajectory. I was getting a MFA in fiction writing at NYU. I was living in Astoria, Queens, Zohar Mumdani's Assembly District, you know, kind of hipster, you know, multi-ethnic district. And then I witnessed the attack, you know, because we had this kind of unobstructed view. I was on the waterfront, so I could just see the World Trade Center. I could literally sit and watch it burn and I saw, you know, with my own eyes, like the second plane hit the tower, I saw the first tower collapse. And it changed the trajectory of my life in that I was like,

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  I gotta be part of this, you know, like I, and that's what led me to apply for jobs in DC. I want to get, that's what led me to want to get involved in foreign policy. I'd never considered being in foreign policy before.

• 1:16:05Sam Fragoso?

  And when you say part of the, what about that made you go, I want to be part of this?

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  Suddenly, sitting in my apartment in Queens and writing short stories seemed incredibly trivial and small. I didn't know, I went to an army recruiter, I was kind of out of my mind. I was just like, I gotta, this is changing everything. My city got attacked. It was not even like my country, it was like, if I'm honest, it was like my city. Like, I, yeah, I'll tell you something honestly that I've thought a lot about recently. Maybe it's because of the deprogramming. I feel, and I've never said this, um, I feel now

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  a bit of a sadness about the life I didn't get to lead. Like, as much as, as insane as, because it turned out well for me, right? I got to work in the White House and now I get to do all these things and I, I, and I never used to think about that. I never really did think about that, you know, because I got on a ride and the ride, you know, I was 31 and I was working in the White House, right? I mean, shit, it seemed like it was going great. But like, maybe it's because of how everything turned out, maybe it's because I'm getting a little older, you know, into my late, later 40s. But now I look

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  back and I'm kind of like, you know, I, I, I'd kind of like to watch the movie of what would have happened if I'd been, tried to keep being a writer in Queens, you know? Like, I, I do feel a bit of a nostalgia for the road interrupted.

• 1:17:44Sam Fragoso?

  But is it just a sadness about a road interrupted or is it also a sadness about?

• 1:17:54Sam Fragoso?

  The resulting country.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, and I have these mixed feelings about it, to be honest, because I will, to the day I die, be immensely proud of having worked for Barack Obama and helped elect Barack Obama president and been a part of the things I was a part of in the Obama presidency, including things that Trump undid, like the Cuban normalization and the Iran nuclear deal. Like, you know, very few people get to participate in things like that. However, I believed 100% without a shadow of a doubt in my mind on September 12th that we're going to be the good guys here, you know, and we're going to go against the bad guys. And, and look, I still believe that those were bad guys, obviously.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  But America, you know, you mentioned a subsect I wrote called Let Illusions Die. Like, one illusion is that we are inherently the good guys. Sometimes we are, sometimes we're not. Right now, we're not. And, and so, yeah, I think there's a sadness about the entire enterprise. But if we can't figure it out, then the world is in deep trouble. Because, not just because we're powerful, but because we do have people here from everywhere. You know, and I'm a New Yorker, so I'm deeply informed by this. It's a city where people are from everywhere, you know? And if America can make multiracial democracy work, with all the things we've been given,

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  you know, all the wealth we've been given and the institutions that we've inherited and, you know, then, then how is the world going to figure out how to get along? You know, like, we in some ways have to model as best we can. And so if you go back in our history and you see these cycles of wonderful things happening and terrible things happening, you know? We are, we are the country of, you know, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and, you know, Martin Luther King and Dolores Muerte, all these people. To say that this is where I part company from some on the kind of reflexive left, if it's like, oh, this country's just, you know, this is the evil empire and we're unbearably

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  fucked, you know, well, then everybody is. I truly believe that. And so, the, the struggle version of America is the one I have to cling on to, not the one that is inherently right and won the Cold War and won World War II. And, no, it's like, it, you know, it's, it's the people that, you know, tried to close the gap between the reality and the aspiration. And, and, you know, that includes people like FDR who won World War II, but it also includes all the ugliness, you know? And we can't pretend like the ugliness isn't there.

• 1:20:44Sam Fragoso?

  Is there a section in this book, one that I know that you have worked tirelessly on, that you think is particularly poignant or reflective of this moment that we're in?

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  Benjamin Franklin, I start the book with Benjamin Franklin, fascinating character to spend time with, who was responsible for the closing argument for the US Constitution. And, you know, in that speech, which is about compromise and the need to come together across differences to forge a union, he issues a warning that, the first time I read it, I thought, well, this is going to be the last sentence of my book. So in 1787, the closing argument for the Constitution says, "Our system of government can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other." And that landed with me because, not because I think we're there, but there's something corrupted in America that has allowed us to get here. And, you know, I end the book with Trump's second inaugural, and I start with that tableau of, you know, Musk and Bezos and all the tech oligarchs and all the cultural MAGA elites and all, like, gleefully welcoming this person back to the White House.

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

  And I wonder what Benjamin Franklin would make of that tableau and how close he thinks America had gotten to that warning. Because, again, like, this is what I mean, we all participate in this system. Trump is not something happening to us, he's a reflection of us, you know? Any president is a reflection of what America's like at that time. That doesn't mean we're all supportive of him or even responsible for him, but it means we're all, all responsible for not becoming what Franklin says, you know?

• 1:22:55Sam Fragoso?

  It's also astonishing to me how much of what Franklin wrote and said there is echoed in, really, this, this moment that we've been talking about for the last hour.

• 1:23:10Sam Fragoso?

  This is a speech that President Obama delivered in 2016 at the DNC. He describes here why he believed the American people would choose Hillary over Donald Trump. And a lot of what Franklin wrote is echoed in this segment we're going to hear and end on. Okay.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  He's just offering slogans, and he's offering fear. He's betting that if he scares enough people, he might score just enough votes to win this election.

• 1:23:46Speaker 03

  And that's another bet that Donald Trump will lose.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  And the reason he'll lose it is because he's selling the American people short.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  We're not a fragile people.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  We're not a frightful people. Our power doesn't come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don't look to be ruled.

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  Our power, our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that we, the people, can form a more perfect union. That's who we are. That's our birthright, the capacity to shape our own destiny.

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  That was a good speech. I remember that one, yeah.

• 1:24:56Sam Fragoso?

  "We don't look to be ruled."

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think that's true after the last 10 years?

• 1:25:01Speaker 00

  I do, and like I said, he was wrong about the 2016 election, but we gotta stretch our view of history here a little bit. Because it's not like the fight is over, and it's not like, and again, this is why I wrote this, but the fight's been going on for 250 years, and it's a tug of war. And sometimes we're yanked in one direction, another time we're yanked another. We're in a particularly acute emergency right now with Trump. We've been in acute emergencies before, and I think what he said is still inherently true. It does feel like we're at a time, again, where we've been before, we fought a civil war in this country, we had a gilded age in this country, that actually if people don't

• 1:25:45Speaker 00

  tug back, though, you know, I'm stretching my metaphor, but we could tumble over onto one side. Because it's not just Trump. There is a concentration of power in this country that is happening right now that is kind of world historical. And when you look at tech oligarchs and you look at, you know, the scale of wealth being concentrated, and you look at the destruction of, literally, like, whole agencies of the United States government to kind of get out of the way, you know, like, this is, this

• 1:26:21Speaker 00

  is actually a real, we're on Franklin's warning, we're on that Obama warning. And it's not a foregone conclusion. The only reason we didn't tumble over in the past is because people, like, really yanked hard in the direction. I will say...

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  You know, one of the cliches of American history that is actually true is like, wow, we were lucky we had Lincoln, you know, the Civil War. We were lucky we had FDR for the Depression, World War II. Like, one of the things I think is making people really uneasy right now is it's like, where's the FDR or Lincoln? And the reality is like, we can't count on that. Like, and now I'm gonna sound like Obama, but like, we need to tug on the other side. And there are people stepping up. I mean, I'm, I like these younger, you know,

• 1:27:25Speaker 00

  whether it's M'Ghannan or I was mentioning Rob Sand in Iowa or Ossoff. Like, you know, I'm not sitting there FDR and Lincoln, but on balance, I'm hopeful because I've seen, you know, if you look at our history, the pendulum tends to swing. But it's not, you know, there's no inevitability to it.

• 1:27:48Sam Fragoso?

  So I think we both believe this country can heed the warning.

• 1:27:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Sam Fragoso?

  I'm asking you, because we gotta go, will we?

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  I think so. I really do.

• 1:28:00Sam Fragoso?

  What gives you that belief?

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  I do just, you know, you do get a sense that, I mentioned the long view of history, like, we might look back in 20 years and be like, that Minneapolis thing, like, it felt like something shifted there because it was, it was real pushback. And it was from like, it wasn't from Chuck Schumer or Nikim Jeffries, you know? Something has not quite been the same since Minneapolis. Like, there's more and more, there's a contagion to pushback. And there's a contagion to people being like, oh, wait a second. Like, this is, this is indecent, you know? This is not like, you know, what I signed up for, even if I voted for Trump. And, and, you know, he's still got his, if

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  you look, he's still got his 33%. And hell, always had, Obama used to tell me, you know, remember, 33% of this country would have voted for George Wallace, you know? And, and so I, I do, I, you feel like a building, not resistance in the Trump one term of like, there's, you know, Bob Mueller coming to save us. Then you get a Zohar M'Ghannan in New York, and suddenly like, people pay attention to John Ossoff, and you've got, you've got more and more institutions telling Trump, no, you know? You got other countries pushing back, which is actually helpful in a lot of ways, like, you know, and then you, this war is like, such overreach, you know? And, and so I kind of do feel like,

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  I don't know what's gonna emerge on the other end of it, but this kind of patchwork of opposition that is not Washington-led, that's what's good about it. But ultimately, if that energy cannot connect to political power, then we are screwed. And so the Democrats have an obligation, doesn't even begin to describe it, like, an imperative, to somehow capture an energy that I think is waiting for something different. And it cannot just be about, and again, to go all the way back to where we started, it can't be like, hey, we want to restore ACA subsidies, and, you know, we want to give a middle-class tax

• 1:30:13Speaker 00

  cut. It's gotta be a much bigger vision about how we can have a different kind of economy, and a different kind of governing structure in this country, and a different whole way of doing politics.

• 1:30:28Sam Fragoso?

  You're saying the illusions have to die?

• 1:30:29Speaker 00

  The illusions have to die. Like, this is not working. Our capitalism isn't working, our democracy's not working, our foreign policy's not working. Like, we need to let those things, you know, Joe Biden talked about America's back. Like, no, whatever comes on the other side is not like what came before. Like, there's a new America that is kind of struggling to be born, to quote the poem. And I would bet on, to use my former boss's phrase, I would bet on that over, like, MAGA, you know?

• 1:31:04Sam Fragoso?

  Per the poem, Auden wrote, "We would rather be ruined than changed."

• 1:31:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Sam Fragoso?

  "We'd rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die."

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  I mean, that quote kind of knocked me out for the day. I came across that. Because "we'd rather be ruined than changed" is a pretty good warning, you know?

• 1:31:26Sam Fragoso?

  May we be so lucky.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  As to be changed. Yeah.

• 1:31:30Sam Fragoso?

  Exactly. Ben Rhodes, thank you for all the time.

• 1:31:32Speaker 00

  Good talking to you.

• 1:31:35Sam Fragoso?

  All right, sir.

• 1:31:35Speaker 00

  All right, man.

• 1:31:41Sam Fragoso?

  Thank you for watching Talk Easy. If you enjoyed that episode with Ben Rhodes, be sure to subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also leave us a review on Apple, drop us a comment on Spotify, or follow us on socials at Talk Easy Pod. Our producer is Caroline Reebok. Today's episode was edited by Alex Dishal. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. Photographs today come from email Ravello. Social media by Sofeen Kavorkian. I want to give a special thanks to Julian Simcock, Dan Feirman, and of course, our guest, Ben Rhodes. This episode was made in partnership with Higher Ground Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you again for watching, and I'll see you back here next Sunday. Until then, stay safe, and so long.

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  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand

• 1:34:24Speaker 06

  your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz, that's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S dot com slash r c, for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.