How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-elected Trump

This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up? Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book argues there was. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” details how Biden’s top advisers closed the circle around him and tried to conceal the extent of his decline. But I think the story here is more complicated. If Biden’s top advisers were misleading the public, I think they were also lying to themselves. And if there was a cover-up, it had a lot of holes; voters had been telling pollsters they were worried about Biden’s age for years. So I wanted to have Tapper on the show to talk about the discoveries in his book, but also about some of the bigger questions raised by the Democratic Party’s decision to almost renominate Biden: How do you see what is right in front of your eyes? How do you avoid letting loyalty to a person or a party blind you? This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” by Ezra Klein “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping” by Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes Book Recommendations: Lorne by Susan Morrison Hitler’s People by Richard Evans The Holy Roller by Andy Samberg, Joe Trohman and Rick Remender Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kelsey Kudak. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  This episode is about a seemingly simple question. Was there a Joe Biden cover up? Like a lot of people, I was worried about Biden's age when he ran for president in 2020. So after he won, I found myself continuously asking top White House staffers, how's the president? How's he in meetings? What's his energy like? I always got the same answer. He's great, completely in command. His energy is amazing. These are people I'd known for a long time. I don't think they were lying to me. The harder question in retrospect was whether they were lying to themselves. The White House, I came to think, had created this false distinction in their minds. They would admit privately, publicly even,

• 1:17Ezra Klein?

  that Biden couldn't communicate as he'd once been able to. But that was just theatrics. The real work of the presidency, they always told me, it was decision making. And it was in decision making that they believed Biden shined. That never made sense to me. In what possible definition of the presidency? In what possible definition of running a reelection campaign is the ability to communicate with the public not core to the job? And how can you believe that that had degraded, but nothing else had?

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  We all know the story from there. Biden's collapse in the presidential debate, the push to remove him from the ticket, Kamala Harris's sprint of a campaign, Donald Trump's return to the White House. And in the last couple of months, I feel like I've watched a new conventional wisdom solidify. When I was writing pieces about how Biden shouldn't run again, I got raked over the coals. I will say it was definitely not something everybody believed. But now the argument is that everybody knew he was incapable of handling the job of the presidency, that they knew it and they were covering it up.

• 2:23Ezra Klein?

  Was there a cover up? A cover up would at least reveal a core of cold rationality to this system. It would mean that people dealing with Biden every single day, they knew the truth. They saw it clearly and decided to lie, that there were adults in the room, if only malign ones. In a way, that would be more comforting than what I think actually happened. And so there are questions here that are relevant long beyond the Biden campaign. How do you see what is right in front of your eyes when you don't want to see it? How do you not let loyalty to a person, to a party, to a cause, blind you? Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's new book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline,

• 3:04Ezra Klein?

  Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, is a reconstruction of what Democrats should have known and when they should have known it. Tapper is, of course, an anchor at CNN. He was co-moderator of that historic and for Biden disastrous presidential debate. Thompson had covered Biden at Axios. So I asked Tapper on the show to talk through what they learned in the more than 200 interviews behind that book and what lessons we can take from it. And I wanted to start in a particular moment, the moment when I found my own doubts about Biden impossible to ignore any longer. And just to note, we taped this before the news of Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis. The episode isn't any less relevant. In fact, maybe it's more relevant, but of course, I want to say that we wish him well.

• 3:58Ezra Klein?

  Jake Tapper, welcome to the show.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  It's great to be here. Thanks so much and congrats on all the success of this.

• 4:03Ezra Klein?

  Thank you. I want to start a bit in the middle.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:07Ezra Klein?

  You tell the story of special prosecutor Robert Hurd's interviews with Biden in a lot more detail than I'd heard it before.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:14Ezra Klein?

  And I think people know that that report comes out and the prosecutor calls Biden a sort of well-meaning old man with a flagging memory.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Something like that, yeah.

• 4:23Ezra Klein?

  But-

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Which is nice, by the way. It's a nice description. It's not a mean description. It's an accurate, nice description. He could have-

• 4:29Ezra Klein?

  Well, at the moment, it was taken as a very mean description.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  It was.

• 4:32Ezra Klein?

  So what was going on behind that description?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think for Robert Hurd and the prosecutors, they were legitimately-

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Flabbergasted by how President Biden appeared in that deposition in the interview in October 2023, they were stunned. And I think they legitimately debated how he would appear to a jury. I think they legitimately thought if there's even one person that sees him the way that we see him, which is addled, we're not going to be able to get a conviction. What was happening in those conversations that he seems so addled? Well, if you read the transcript of the, her interview, he is just meandering,

• 5:25Speaker 01

  unable to focus on the train of thought. He doesn't know dates. He's asked about a period that's significant for the investigation about his holding and sharing information that is, that is of a classified nature. So 2017, 2018. And first of all, he thinks that it is around the time that Beau died and that Beau was deployed. And it's not. Beau died in 2015 and Beau had been deployed years before that. And then second of all, he's just unable to place events.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Trump gets elected in November of 2017, 2016, 2016. All right. So

• 6:17Speaker 02

  2017. That's when he left office, January of 2017. Okay.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  But that's when Trump gets sworn in. Right, right.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  It's beyond just an, an avuncular, charming Irish Paul sharing anecdotes. It's a meandering old man.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  The genesis of the book and the title, Promise Me Dad, was a

• 6:53Speaker 02

  I know they're all close to your sons and daughters, but Bo was like my right arm and that was my left. These guys were a year and a day apart and they could finish each other's sentences. Bo, I used to go home on the train and hear that I was still in the Senate. Anyway.

• 7:32Ezra Klein?

  And while he got a sale, Robert Herr, as a partisan hack out to destroy Biden, my conclusion and the conclusion of Attorney General Merrick Garland, by the way, was far from that. My read of how people reacted to that document was it was a suspicion that Herr was trying to find a middle path, that he didn't want to prosecute the president and so he sort of dinged him on memory so the right could feel good about that. I think people understood that as a political document. When you read those transcripts, though, and you produce some of them in the book,

• 8:12Ezra Klein?

  this sense that the president of the United States is actually appearing too forgetful to be convicted of a crime that requires intent in front of a jury is a much more extraordinary and damning thing. And in retrospect, it makes the reaction to the Herr report look much too modest because I think people assumed it wasn't quite on the level.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I think it was on the level. The pushback was interesting because there was the White House pushback, which was not about, hey, the president broke the law.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Which is how prosecutors at DOJ thought it was going to be received. They thought the White House is going to be, oh crap, the president broke the law. The pushback was not on that, but that he was old, which I think is the tell from the White House. And the White House went to war, not just against Robert Herr, they went to war against their own Attorney General, Merrick Garland. And Garland comes to the conclusion, and this is in our book, that ultimately Biden, even though he brought him on board, saying he wanted a fair, just Attorney General and a Justice Department that had no fear or favor for anyone, Garland ultimately came to the conclusion, that's not what he wanted. That's not what Biden wanted. Biden did not want an independent Justice Department. He wanted one that would protect him and his son.

• 9:34Ezra Klein?

  So I have this weird experience with this, which I happened to be at the White House on the day that her report comes out.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 9:40Ezra Klein?

  And I'm there doing a bunch of other reporting. But one of the things I'm there working on is a story that in my head at that moment is titled, "Is Joe Biden Up to This?" Because he'd been doing basically no interviews, not really doing press conferences. We had no real evidence that he was capable of the rigorous of campaigning at that point. And then they decided not to do the Super Bowl interview.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:06Ezra Klein?

  Which for me was some kind of very big tell. Like, that was a moment when I really shifted. You have a different explanation than they ever gave me on why they didn't do the Super Bowl interview. Why?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, laid across all of this is the fact that he's not capable of doing good interviews as of 2023, period.

• 10:25Ezra Klein?

  Right. They don't do the Super Bowl interview the year before either. They blame that on it being Fox, but they don't do it.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  They told me, actually, it's because they knew that her report was about to drop. And they knew it would have all this stuff about classified information and about him seeming super old behind the scenes and addled behind the scenes. And they didn't want to have a interview on that, no matter with whom and no matter what the format was going to be. They didn't want 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes about what it would have been. Oh, my God, this Herr report says that you're not up to the task.

• 10:58Ezra Klein?

  The Herr interview comes out, Biden seems himself authentically furious. And they call a press conference. It happens late that night. I remember being in my hotel room after being at the White House all day, watching this press conference.

• 11:10Joe Biden?

  I know there's some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events. There's even reference that I don't remember. When my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn't any of their damn business.

• 11:30Ezra Klein?

  And Biden attacks her. He is angry about the allegation that he didn't remember when Bo died.

• 11:37Joe Biden?

  For any extraneous commentary, they don't know what they're talking about. It has no place in this report. The bottom line is the matter is now closed. I'm going to continue what I've always focused on, my job of being President of the United States of America.

• 11:53Ezra Klein?

  And then at the end, he takes some questions. And in this interview meant to reassure people about his memory, he mixes up Egypt and Mexico.

• 12:03Joe Biden?

  As you know, initially, the President of Mexico, Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.

• 12:17Ezra Klein?

  For me, like, that was the moment when I realized, okay, it went from the question mark, like, can he do this, to he can't. If you can't go out and not have a memory flub in the press conference about your memory, you're in real trouble.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  And I would note that what Biden said in that press conference was not true. To hear Biden tell it, Robert Hurd says, do you remember what year Bo died? But that's not what happened. He, Biden brought up Bo.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  Where did you keep papers that relate to those things that you were actively working on?

• 12:55Joe Biden?

  Well, um, I, I, I, I don't know. This is what, 2017, 18, that period?

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 13:09Joe Biden?

  Remember, in this timeframe, um...

• 13:13Speaker 02

  My son is either been deployed or is dying.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  And look, I can't imagine the grief he feels about Beau or his first wife and daughter. And that's also one of the subtexts of this book, obviously, or text in this book is that the two main areas where we think, according to top aides, that his diminishment happened the most had to do with times of extreme stress for Hunter in the summer of 2023 when the plea deal fell apart, and then the summer of 2024 when he was convicted of a crime in a Delaware jury, because in Joe Biden's brain, understandably, he thought there was a very real fear he was going to lose a third child, that Hunter was going to either overdose or commit suicide.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying that as an excuse, I'm not saying that lightly, but I'm just saying this is part of what happened. That stress helped really deteriorate his essence.

• 14:13Ezra Klein?

  I think those parts of the books are really persuasive and sad. The reason I wanted to focus on this her week is that, to me, it's a moment when a lot of things burst out into the open. After that press conference, I write this series of pieces arguing that Biden should step aside or be convinced not to run, there should be an open convention.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  You didn't ask me to toot your horn, but let me just say that was very gutsy and very difficult for you to do. And I applauded you then, and I applaud you now because, first of all, probably a lot of people who are fans of yours didn't want to hear it. And also, it's kind of lonely to be saying things like that.

• 14:50Ezra Klein?

  Well, I appreciate that, but the thing I want to get at here, because you have more information on this than I do, is, as you can imagine, when I write these pieces, I get a lot of incoming from Biden world.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:59Ezra Klein?

  And they're not happy about it. And my honest assessment of them, my view of how they think of this, is that they actually think I'm wrong.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Ezra Klein?

  They think I'm being unfair.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Some of them do.

• 15:10Ezra Klein?

  Some of them do, certainly the ones I hear from. Well, you're not telling me who you heard from, but I'll tell you that this...

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Disaster that happened with Joe Biden running for reelection and then the cover up of what he was like behind the scenes, what Robert Hurd saw was orchestrated by Joe and Jill and Hunter and Mike Donilon and Steve Rishetti. And there are other people to a lesser extent, but those five people are the most responsible.

• 15:37Ezra Klein?

  So, cover up, that's the word I want to get at here.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:41Ezra Klein?

  One thing throughout this whole period, and for years before it, which was always a bad sign, is like a lot of political reporters, I am asking people in the White House constantly, how's Joe Biden in meetings? How's he doing? And they all say, like, to a person, that the line you often hear is he can perform the presidency, but he can't, you know, quote unquote, perform the presidency. His communication skills have degraded, but as a decision maker, he's better than ever. And it keeps a lot of people from writing what's sort of in front of your face. Can you think, well, these people are seeing things I'm not, right? If they tell me he's good in the meetings, I don't know if he's good in the meetings. So when you say there's a cover up, my sense of these people is that this is what they

• 16:23Ezra Klein?

  believed, or at least had talked themselves into believing. Do you feel most people were seeing him in meetings and he came off the way he came off with Robert Hurd and they're just not telling anybody? Or is it something more psychologically complex going on here?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Both. Yes, they were lying to themselves, they were lying to others. But at all, like, the definition of a cover up is when you are hiding something that is an ugly fact. And the ugly fact is that the Joe Biden that we all saw at the debate on June 27th, 2024, did not just step out of nowhere. That was Joe Biden, and that was the logical consequence of what they had been hiding since, in a big way, since 2023. Look, I'm not saying that every meeting President Biden had, he came across as addled. What I am saying, what Alex Thompson and I, who's my co-author, Alex Thompson from Axios, what we are asserting is that there was, as far back as 2019, a Biden that was fine.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  And then a non-functioning Biden. And that from 2019 to 2024, the non-functioning Biden would rear his head increasingly. And what do I mean by non-functioning? I mean, losing his train of thought in a manner that's uncomfortable. I mean, not able to come up with the names of top aides or close friends. I mean, not recognizing people that he should recognize. I mean, not able at all to communicate to the American people. And there's a degree to which, and this metaphor was used by so many White House aides we interviewed, the frog in the boiling water. I think there is a degree to which people, as the water is increasingly turned up, they don't notice that it's getting hotter and hotter.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And then we would hear from so many people who worked at the White House, then left, and then came back six months later, or turned on the TV six months later, and they could not believe what they saw.

• 18:18Ezra Klein?

  I always feel like you can track this across the couple of elections. Biden rescues the ticket to some degree in 2012. After Obama's bad first debate with Mitt Romney, Biden malls Paul Ryan.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  You can cut tax rates by 20% and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayers.

• 18:40Joe Biden?

  Not mathematically possible.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  It is mathematically possible. It's been done before. It's precisely what we're proposing.

• 18:45Joe Biden?

  It has never been done before.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  It's been done a couple of times.

• 18:48Joe Biden?

  It has never.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates, increased growth.

• 18:51Joe Biden?

  Oh, now you're Jack Kennedy.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  Ronald Reagan.

• 18:54Ezra Klein?

  It's an exceptional debate. And he sort of gives a ticket, it's mojo back, before Obama's second debate with Romney. You go to the 2016 convention, I think he gives the best speech at the convention.

• 19:07Joe Biden?

  His lack of empathy and compassion can be summed up in a phrase I suspect he's most proud of having made famous: "You're fired." I mean, really, I'm not joking. Think about that. Think about that. Think about everything you learned as a child, no matter where you were raised. How can there be pleasure in saying, "You're fired"? He's trying to tell us he cares about the middle class? Give me a break. That's a bunch of malarkey.

• 19:50Ezra Klein?

  By 2020, I thought his communication problems were already clear.

• 19:53Joe Biden?

  There's a reason why he's bringing up all this malarkey. There's a reason for it. He doesn't want to talk about the substantive issues. It's not about his family and my family. It's about your family. And your family's hurting badly. If you're making less than, if you're a middle-class family, you're getting hurt badly right now.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  As even top campaign advisers told me and Alex, COVID was a disaster for the American people, but it was a blessing for Joe Biden's campaign in 2020 because he got to basically run from his basement. I mean, there were some appearances outside, but nobody was judging the size of the crowds. And a lot of this stuff was just done on TV.

• 20:31Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned some of the accommodations that his staff begins making for him. One of the ones that it feels very striking is the teleprompter at what are usually impromptu fundraiser remarks.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm talking about like 40, 50 people.

• 20:45Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, do you want to talk through what that was?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  So his presidency starts off, he's still, you know, we're all still in COVID lockdown. People forget the degree to which 2021 is still part of COVID. And note cards and teleprompters are standard procedure for him. They become crutches to the degree that Democrats are getting phone calls in 2023 because he's doing small fundraisers, 40, 50 people. And his campaign staff is demanding a teleprompter. We have a Chicago fundraiser where the host doesn't want to have a teleprompter there. And they're like, this is the price of admission. And Biden will walk in, read from the teleprompter and walk out. Sometimes they'll do a photo line, sometimes he won't.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  But it's very odd and it's very weird. And that's not what happens in these fundraisers. The whole point of these fundraisers, if you're giving huge money to the Democratic Party or to a pro-Biden super PAC or whatever, is you're getting time with the stars of the event. And he's not really doing that in any comfortable degree. And he's making people feel very uncomfortable because why does he need a teleprompter to come in and talk for 10 minutes? Something that anybody in politics or the media should be able to do. Just talk for 10 minutes about whatever. And those become crutches to the degree that then they become also part of the cover up, even if they didn't start out that way.

• 22:09Ezra Klein?

  What are other accommodations that the staff begins to make over the course of that term?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  The hours in which he's asked to function. It's not normal to say that a president can't do anything after 6:00 PM, or should only very, very rarely do something after 6:00 PM. That's not normal.

• 22:26Ezra Klein?

  But they would always say he had lots of fundraisers that were at night. They always resisted this. It got reported, it got rebutted, but your view is that they really did try to keep him unscheduled after 6:00?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  As much as possible. That's not to say it was 100%. Of course not, but like as much as possible. And the degree to which they started keeping him away from people, or rather, keeping other weak people away from him, a cabinet secretary told us. So he had a cabinet meeting in October 2023, and then he didn't have one, another one until like, I think, September 2024, after he had dropped out. Why would he keep the cabinet at bay? We had a White House staffer say, somebody who left because they were so upset by what was going on, that there was a very purposeful decision to just limit his interactions with anybody who wasn't a must-visit.

• 23:18Ezra Klein?

  Who makes a decision like that?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Well.

• 23:21Ezra Klein?

  Because I don't get the sense Joe Biden himself believed Joe Biden was diminished.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  I don't know what he's aware of. I don't let him off the hook because I'm older than you, Azar. I'm 56. How old are you?

• 23:34Ezra Klein?

  41.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Okay. So.

• 23:37Ezra Klein?

  You look great, Jake.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate it. I, I'm not capable of doing things that I was capable when I was 41, both physically and probably mentally. I find myself stumbling a little bit more on the teleprompter than I did five or 10 years ago. It just happens. It's just part of aging. I only say this because I'm aware of my limitations. I don't believe that Joe Biden is not aware of his limitations.

• 24:02Ezra Klein?

  My sense of Joe Biden's belief about himself is not that he has no limits. He knows he walks more slowly and might fall, and they change the way he gets off the plane, that kind of thing, but that he is not sitting there thinking, I am addled, I am losing it, I have to limit my meetings.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 24:20Ezra Klein?

  If you are saying someone is doing that, who is doing that? Mike Donilon, Rashidi? From everything they say in public, they seem to believe he could have been president through the end of this term. So

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Which is crazy.

• 24:34Ezra Klein?

  Fair enough, but I believe on some level they believe it.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  I believe that they believe it too.

• 24:38Ezra Klein?

  So when you say somebody is deciding to limit his meetings with other people, who is deciding to limit his meetings with other people? And are they saying this to the rest of the staff? Does a memo go out? Like, what is going on here?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  So, as JFK quoted after the Bay of Pigs, "Success has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." There are very few people willing to acknowledge who made the fateful decisions X, Y, or Z. I would say that ultimately, on the staffing level, who do I think is responsible for decisions that protected Joe Biden the way that we're talking about? I would say Anthony Bernal, who was the chief of staff for the first lady's office and perhaps the most powerful chief of staff in the history of first ladies, and Mike Donilon. And those two would convey the wishes of the president and the first lady. So, when the decision was made by Joe Biden that he was going to run for reelection,

• 25:36Speaker 01

  that decision would be conveyed to the staff from Anthony Bernal and Mike Donilon. Mike Donilon would say, "Presidents get to decide if they're running for reelection, and he's decided he's running for reelection." End of story. Anthony Bernal would say, "You don't run for president for one term, you run for president for two terms." And they were conveying the wishes of the first couple. And in the book, we talk about this. There is a shocking lack of discussion about this with Biden. It is just Biden decides he's running, and that's it. And in fact, there's a very good, and I'm sure you know him already, John Anzalone, the pollster,

• 26:19Speaker 01

  who, you know, he worked for Biden all the way back in like In the eighties, when Biden was plagiarizing speeches in Iowa, John Anzalone has known and loved Joe Biden forever. And Anzalone wants to pull for it. You know, he wants to see what are the liabilities? How do we do this? Obviously, he's aging. And Anita Dunn says, you know, we're not pulling for this. The decision's already been made. And there is not one meeting where they all sit down and like, talk about this and kick the tires of it. And when Jeff Zients, who becomes the White House Chief of Staff, after Ron Klein leaves in early 2023, he comes in, you know, and he's a former Bain Capital guy. He's a, he has Bain brain. He wants to run the diagnostics. He wants to kick the tires.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  He wants to see, is this a good idea? And but the decision's already been made. It's done.

• 27:10Ezra Klein?

  One thing I saw happen during this period is the bar got set really low for Joe Biden.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:18Ezra Klein?

  Because there was a big right wing argument that this guy is senile. He has actually lost it. And the counter argument then became pretty easy because he wasn't senile. But there's this really vast range between senile and at the peak of his powers. How do you think his age affected just how he carried out the day to day work of the presidency? Not the campaigning, not the politics, but the decision making, the attention, the party leadership?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I think that his presence in the Oval declined. And he would spend more time in the residence. Now, in terms of the decision making itself, what we call them in the book, the Politburo. Well, we didn't call them that. People in the Biden administration called them that. The Rochetti, Donilon, et cetera, the people that surrounded Biden that were like the true believers. They would argue, the Politburo, that the decisions were always fine and sound and never problematic. There are people in this book, senators, Democratic senators, who would take issue with that. Not as an affirmative prosecution against him, but just as a question.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  There's a scene in the book where Biden talks to the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner. A man with whom he does not have a particularly close relationship. And Warner is concerned because the White House is about to authorize the release of, I think it's 11 Yemenis from Gitmo. And there are a lot of senators, Democrats and Republicans, who are worried these guys are just going to go rejoin the fight, whether with the Houthis militias in Iraq or Hamas or Hezbollah or whatever, Syria, they're going to rejoin the fight. And Biden calls Warner, and Warner is under the impression that Biden does not know

• 29:15Speaker 01

  much about this, that he doesn't really understand what's going on, and that concerns him. And then there's another scene in June 2024, before the debate, Biden has an immigration event, and Senator Bennett of Colorado goes to it, another pro-Biden Democrat. And Biden, at this event, has just like this moment where he's like whispering into the microphone, nobody can hear a word he's saying.

• 29:43Joe Biden?

  Secretary.

• 29:46Joe Biden?

  I'm not sure you're going to hear it. But all kidding aside, Secretary Mayorkas.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  It's very odd. And it's reported as Biden forgets the name of his DHS secretary, but it's much worse than that. But in any case, Bennett leaves the White House thinking, well, this is why Biden's immigration policy is such a mess. He's not capable of leading the disparate factions in the Democratic Party and in his administration on this. And in fact, there had been a desire to beef up border security at the beginning of the Biden administration, and that kind of just like faded away, and Secretary Mayorkas and others never knew why, it just went away. And Bennett's overall conclusion is this did have an impact on the country.

• 30:37Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on the Bennett vignette because I took note of that too in the book. This binary, I guess, that they created between can you make good decisions and can you do the superficial theatrical dimension of the presidency? One is real presidenting and the other is.

• 30:57Ezra Klein?

  Just BS the media cares about. I always thought that distinction was incredibly false. The power of the president, as his family has said, is the power to persuade. If you can't communicate effectively, you can't persuade. You are giving up a lot of your power. But a lot of the presidency isn't about major decisions. I mean, you know, you know all this better than I do, but it's just constant presiding over meetings, constant taking in information, constant sensing into the, the shape, the zeitgeist of the country, of your party, of the issues, of the constituencies. One of my sort of conclusions covering the White House was that Biden's just attentional bandwidth was more limited.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:41Ezra Klein?

  Than it would have been when he was 65.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 31:43Ezra Klein?

  And so he was extremely engaged on Ukraine, extremely engaged on Israel and Gaza. But his attention to domestic policy seemed to meet a flag.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 31:55Ezra Klein?

  And his ability or interest, I mean, Biden had sharp elbows for his entire career. He was a moderate Democrat who had little patience for a lot of the people who would disagree with him. And that intense party leadership, we're going to do this, not that. You guys have gotten too far away from the American people here. We're pivoting back. That was just gone. That doesn't mean he was making bad decisions, but energy matters. How present the president is on different topics matters because without him, the White House is not going to do risky things that might cause problems for him.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think that when it came to domestic policy, he let his first chief of staff, Ron Klein, kind of run things for a while. Ron Klein, who was a hero to progressives and therefore Joe Biden in many ways was a hero to progressives. That's one of the reasons, by the way, that the progressives were the very last ones to abandon him, the progressives and the Black Caucus, because they had gotten so much that they wanted from him policy wise. I don't mean in a pejorative way. Policy is why they're in the game. So.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I think you're right. It became something that he was not focused on. And then beyond that, I think also is just the fact that, as you note, he was interested in foreign policy. That's his area of expertise. And in fact, one of the reasons Obama picks him is for that. And that really is just what he likes. But we had a cabinet secretary say, and this is in the book, that if you expect the president to be somebody who can be woken up at 2:00 a.m. because there's a national or international crisis, that Biden was not capable of that in 2024. And that's a cabinet secretary telling us that. That's not Donald Trump Jr. It's not Steve Bannon.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  It's a Biden-loving Democratic cabinet secretary.

• 33:51Ezra Klein?

  And did this person believe that at the time? Or did they believe it in retrospect?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  At the time. The way they presented it to me, they didn't say it to us. I mean, 99% of this book was told to us after the election. As you know, very frustratingly, they got really honest after the election. And before that, they were either not so honest or elusive or didn't return calls and texts. But, you know, we interviewed more than 200 people, and that was almost all after the election. But yeah, I mean, we have cabinet secretaries in there talking about something happened, they kept them at bay, and one of them saying that they didn't think that he could be relied upon to handle that 2:00 a.m. phone call, which is actually a very terrifying thought.

• 34:56Ezra Klein?

  It seems to me that in the campaign, the most consequential decision made after Joe Biden decides to run for reelection.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Which is a huge decision, but yes.

• 35:04Ezra Klein?

  Although, as you say, doesn't even seem to have been a decision at all in the sense that there was a process, a conversation.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  There was no process.

• 35:10Ezra Klein?

  Seems to have happened.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  But it was a decision, yeah, by the president.

• 35:12Ezra Klein?

  Is the decision to go for a June debate.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:15Ezra Klein?

  Now, if you're not a presidential campaign nerd, that doesn't happen usually. We do not have June debates.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  No, we wait until after Labor Day.

• 35:24Ezra Klein?

  Yes. How does the June debate happen? Because in a way, it's a show of confidence.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  It's a complicated process and there are lots of different parts. One of the parts is that both Trump and Biden had lost all confidence in the Commission on Presidential Debates. So they had discarded it. So it was really for the networks, every network for himself or herself, trying to get a debate. There was an eagerness by both Trump and Biden to start the presidential campaign. For Joe Biden's case, he and Donilon thought, the sooner we make this a choice election, the better.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Right now, it's a referendum on Biden, and as Biden would always say, don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. Biden thought, the moment people realize that it's between me and Donald Trump, they will come back to me. Now, there were people internally who thought, no, we shouldn't do this. Steve Rishetti thought debating Trump just like sullied everybody involved in the process. He brings out the worst in everybody. The old saw about, don't ever wrestle with a pig because you just get dirty and the pig likes it. And Anita Dunn initially, and Jen O'Malley Dillon, Jen O'Malley Dillon, his campaign chair, didn't want Biden to debate Trump for any number of reasons.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  But then the "her" report dropped, in which there were serious questions and a permission structure for folks in the media to talk about the aging issue. And then Anita Dunn thought, okay, we do have to do this. We have to show that he's okay and he can do this. And that's where the June debate came in. An eagerness by Biden to change the subject from himself to Donald Trump.

• 37:19Ezra Klein?

  So on some level, doesn't the June debate imply this is not a cover-up? That they believed he could do this?

• 37:26Speaker 01

  I would say it was malpractice by his people and the degree to which they were not honest with themselves about Joe Biden's abilities and such is kind of striking. The evidence for the fact that it was a cover-up is the fact that we were also shocked by what we saw.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  On the debate stage on June 27th, when in reality, that was not a shock to people who had seen him like that behind the scenes.

• 37:57Ezra Klein?

  You were right there.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:59Ezra Klein?

  You're moderating this debate.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, co-moderating with Deanna Bash, yeah.

• 38:03Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about your experience of it, because on some level, I was a little bit shocked by everybody's shock.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Oh, really? That's funny.

• 38:08Ezra Klein?

  I guess because I had done this thing after I'd done these pieces and before I did these pieces where I went back through all of these speeches and looked at all these clips and came to the view, he really wasn't looking good quite often. But what's it like for you being there? You're co-moderating that debate. It begins. Tell me about your experience that night.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Well, first, before it begins, he is late showing up. We're in Atlanta in a battleground state, Georgia. Biden won in 2020 and Trump won in 2016. And both campaigns and candidates had been offered walkthroughs. Neither of them show up on time, of course. But the time for them to show up was laughably early. It wasn't really necessary for them to show up as early as CNN asked them to be. But Donald Trump shows up and, you know, whatever you think of Donald Trump, he's a pro. Which one's my camera? What if I want to ask a follow-up? What if I want this? You know, what do I do when Biden's talking? Is the camera on me, et cetera, et cetera? Now, I'm supposed to go out.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  The debate's starting at 9:00 PM, which, by the way, was another shocker to me. When I found out that they had agreed to do a 9:00 PM debate for an hour and a half, I thought to myself, that's late for me. Like, how is it going to be for Joe Biden? I mean, I understand Donald Trump runs on some energy force that I don't understand, but like, that's late, but okay. I guess they know what they're doing. I think there is a degree to which of, I guess they know what they're doing, infected the heads of so many of us covering him. Because why would you put him out there for an hour and a half debate at 9 o'clock at night when they could have agreed to a 7:00 PM debate? But in any case, he walks out.

• 39:49Ezra Klein?

  Well, he also, I think it's an important thing in their heads, as I understand it. They sort of see him as a clutch player. He gives us pretty excellent, at least for him, at this period, State of the Union address in 2024. And he's vibrant and he's loud and his quiet voice is gone. And there's all this talk about, do they have him on stimulants?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:09Ezra Klein?

  But I think they had come to the view that Biden can perform in the clutch.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  He's a gamer. That's what they say. He's a gamer. To look at the legend of Joe Biden and everything he has overcome,

• 40:22Speaker 01

  and not realize that that infuses the man with a degree of, not just the man, but the man and his family and his supporters with a sense of, this guy rises to the occasion, and it doesn't matter what fate throws at him, and fate has thrown a lot of horrible things at him. He will rise. And his whole philosophy, as he lays out in one of his books, is get up. His dad used to say to him, get up. So, yes, this idea that he's a gamer, this idea that he will rise, that, yes, this has been a horrible month for him. He's traveled all over the place, and his son was convicted in a court, and he showed up to debate rehearsal, debate practice,

• 41:06Speaker 01

  unprepared and sick and needing to take naps. But he is going to rise to this moment. Okay, I get it. That's how they think about these things. And that's how Joe Biden thinks about these things, because at 8:30, I'm supposed to be out on stage, just sitting there and doing lighting and all that stuff. And I can't go out there because Joe Biden has just shown up a half hour before the debate. He's supposed to have been there hours before. And why was he so late? Because he didn't think he needed to do it. He didn't think he needed to do a walkthrough, which is crazy. Every candidate does a walkthrough. Barack Obama did walkthroughs. Like, you just do this. So, he walks out.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  He hobbles out, you know, he does that shuffling thing, seeming really old. But I had seen him, so I was not surprised. He starts talking. He obviously has a cold. He sounds awful. His voice is already thinner and readier than it had been. But now it's, you know, it's really bad. His first answer is, whatever, it's fine. Serviceable. But then he gets to that horrible answer, where he completely loses his train of thought.

• 42:16Joe Biden?

  Right, eligible for what I've been able to do with the, with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, uh, look.

• 42:29Joe Biden?

  If we finally beat Medicare.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Thank you, President Biden. President Trump?

• 42:35Joe Biden?

  Well, he's right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death, and he's destroying Medicare.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  And and we have these iPads, and I wrote to the control room, holy smokes. And Dana writes to me on a piece of paper, he just lost the election.

• 42:51Ezra Klein?

  It's one thing about this debate, and it was why his just complete absence of doing any serious extended oppositional interviews, just tough interviews, I don't mean like with Fox News, I mean, you know, say with you, was, I think, worrying. You can talk about communication style. You can talk about how somebody comes off when they're communicating. But one thing communication is supposed to reveal is train of thought, is how people are reasoning under pressure. And what I watched in some of the subsequent interviews, but but very much in that debate, was somebody who, under pressure, was not reasoning well. You would not want this person in the meeting with Xi. You would not want this person exhausted

• 43:36Ezra Klein?

  after a couple nights of poor sleep in an international crisis. You wouldn't really want this person being the principal, structuring and deciding between competing alternatives in a hot meeting about immigration or inflation. I think this is where saying it's all communication, as they often did, really fell apart. Communication is how you think.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:59Ezra Klein?

  And he was not staying on normal tracks. Like, his own train of thought was derailing.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  There were people that we talked to who worked for Joe Biden. Okay, I'm not talking about Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and, I mean, who worked for Joe Biden, who watched that debate and thought, who is running the country? Because it's not that person. Now, that's not me saying that, that's them saying that, but I think it is a reasonable question. So I found that debate incredibly disturbing. And the degree to which the Democratic Party attempted to gaslight

• 44:41Speaker 01

  The country, and when I say Democratic Party, I mean mainly the White House, but also leaders of the Democratic Party, attempted to gaslight the public about it immediately, as if like, oh, he had a cold. I've had colds. We've all had colds. This was not that. And I think one of the reasons why the Democratic Party's numbers are still so low is that they have not reckoned with the lies that they told about this. And these are lies. These are not lies about tariffs. These are not lies about economic policy or things that I don't fully understand as the average voter. These are lies about things that we all perfectly understand. Aging, colds, being addled, not being your best.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  I mean, these are things that we all have access to.

• 45:29Ezra Klein?

  So I talked to a lot of members of Congress in that period between the debate and Biden stepping aside. And I'd watch him go through this thing where they would talk me through every meeting, basically, they had had with him in the past, you know, year or two. And those meetings, they began to realize had become more seldom than they had been before.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:46Ezra Klein?

  But there'd be the meeting where he was great.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2021, 2022.

• 45:49Ezra Klein?

  Or even, there were meetings like that in 2023 and even 2024. People still had good experiences with him in those years. And there would sometimes be the memory of something they had sort of pushed aside where they thought he was tired or they thought he was distracted. I often heard people say they often thought he was distracted by some other matter, which when it's a president is not a crazy thing to imagine, that their mind is on, you know, some terrible crisis. And that, you know, we all have a bunch of data points in our head about other people. And we have an image of them. And then we have also the image of them it is convenient for us to believe. And it can take a lot to push us off of that. But then, when you get pushed,

• 46:30Ezra Klein?

  you sort of reconstruct a new story out of things you had been downplaying. How much do you think that was happening?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  A lot. And I think that especially, these are political animals. And they were terrified of Donald Trump.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  And I think that after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to be the nominee, a lot of people said, well, this is what we got, and this is the only person who's ever beaten Donald Trump, so this is what we gotta do. And a lot of members of Congress who saw things and wanted to speak up were told, what do you want, Donald Trump? This is what you want? They were called a traitor.

• 47:09Ezra Klein?

  I want you to be more specific, because that isn't what they were told, in a way. They were told, at least in my experience, they were told, do you want Kamala Harris?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Oh, well, that was another, that was another argument.

• 47:20Ezra Klein?

  That was the actual, it seemed to me, first line of defense.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Sure, absolutely. The Kamala defense, which is, if Joe Biden doesn't do it, do you want his vice president, who is even less popular than him, to be the nominee? That's crazy. So, yes, she was their line of defense, and by the way, this drove David Plouffe insane. David Plouffe, of course, Barack Obama's incredibly successful 2008 campaign manager, served as a senior advisor to Obama, and then basically retired from politics in 2012 until he was called back to help Kamala Harris run for president in July 2024. This drove Plouffe crazy, because Plouffe's whole argument was, you picked her. You picked her to be the vice president. If you didn't have confidence in her, you shouldn't have picked her.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  And he knows what he's talking about, because he and Axelrod helped pick Biden for Obama.

• 48:12Ezra Klein?

  Well, this was a thing that drove me completely crazy in that post-debate period. The Biden team's response, Joe Biden's response, when he called in to say, Morning Joe, was the elites are trying to push me out of the race.

• 48:32Joe Biden?

  I'm getting so frustrated by the elites, now, I'm not talking about you guys, but about the elites in the party, who they know so much more. If any of these guys don't think I should run against me, go ahead, announce the president, challenge me at the convention.

• 48:49Ezra Klein?

  But the elites, myself very much included, you know, with my stuff in February of that year, were late. If you looked at polling, going back years at that point, super majorities of the country believed he was too old to run again. This had been true in 2022. It was something that Biden himself had to finesse in the 2020 race when he didn't quite promise to be a one-term president, but he said things that sounded like that, that he was going to be a transitional figure. But the public had already come to this conclusion long ago. And you could see it. It was in every poll forever. It was the Democratic Party that was late to give it credence. Put aside whether or not you thought the

• 49:33Ezra Klein?

  issue was that he could or could not perform the role of the presidency. The public is saying, we don't want this guy.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:40Ezra Klein?

  We don't think he should continue being president. And then the party, you know, in the ways that parties do, closes ranks around him. Nobody of any national profile will dare run against him in the 2023, 2024.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Even though people are trying to, they're trying to get, like Bill Daley and others, Bill Daley, Obama's former chief of staff, and others are trying to get Pritzker, Whitmer, whoever.

• 50:07Ezra Klein?

  Dean Phillips is attacked. There's efforts to not allow him on the ballot in certain states.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Wisconsin.

• 50:13Ezra Klein?

  In Wisconsin. But I think there's a reason that you don't get a big primary that year. I, I actually had been planning to write, right after the midterm election, Democrats need a primary.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:25Ezra Klein?

  Even just to see if Biden is capable of running again. You, you just can't give this to him without testing his capability to campaign. But Democrats were so thrilled with how they gained some ground in the Senate in 2022. They held down losses in the House. And even though Biden hadn't been in any super significant way out there on the campaign trail, even though his approval rating was the main thing the Democrats had to get over, the sense was, oh, Biden did it again. He was underestimated by the media again. He was underestimated by the politicos again. And here he is, and he led his Democratic

• 51:06Ezra Klein?

  Party to a much better midterm result than Barack Obama did in 2010, than Bill Clinton did in 1994.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Yep. That's what all the, that's what Rishi Sunak and Donald would tell everybody.

• 51:17Ezra Klein?

  And you just felt. Like, all the energy out of the possibility of anybody primaring him, who is a sort of serious national figure in the party, drain, right? It was just gone.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would add, on the midterms, there is a lot of evidence that they went the way they went despite Biden, not because of Biden, that the two main things that Democrats had going for them were, A, the Dobbs decision, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which resulted in a lot of single-issue voters very mobilized by the abortion rights issue. And then the other thing is, the Republicans had less than stellar Senate candidates, Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, and, in some cases, House nominees too.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  And that's really one of the reasons why I think that midterm went the way it did.

• 52:14Ezra Klein?

  This is one of my sliding doors moments in recent American politics. Imagine the red wave had hit. The Democrats get wiped out in the House. They get wiped out in the Senate. Biden does not look like some uncanny political genius. And also, the party has to take his unpopularity seriously. So Biden is unpopular by this point. And I'm talking to his people, the same people you're talking about here, after the election, and asking them, okay, what are you taking from this? What's your read of this? And they are telling me directly that this proves

• 52:56Ezra Klein?

  that presidential approval has decoupled from election results. That the fact that Biden is low 40s, high 30s, that in this era of highly negative polarization, with a Democratic Party that's highly committed to beating Donald Trump, to restoring abortion rights.

• 53:15Ezra Klein?

  The fact that Biden is unpopular, well, you just saw the midterms. Unpopularity doesn't tell you that much about how the election is going to turn out. And so there also isn't then a need to address his unpopularity, to do a kind of big center pivot in the way that Bill Clinton did after 94, in the way that Barack Obama did after 2010. A thing that annoyed liberals in both cases, but was part of them confronting the fact that voters did not seem to be buying what they were selling. That also feels like it was very, very significant.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. First of all, do all your listeners know this 1990s Gwyneth Paltrow movie, Sliding Doors? Are they all familiar with it?

• 53:53Ezra Klein?

  You could tell them about it.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's just a question about like, she walks out of a subway and she lives one life and she stays in the subway, she lives another. It's a great movie, but I just wanted to make sure. I similarly date myself with Gen X references and my staff is so much younger than me. They look at me blankly all the time.

• 54:11Ezra Klein?

  You know what? The truth is, I don't think I've ever seen the movie.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  I don't think I have either.

• 54:14Ezra Klein?

  It's just a cultural touch.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Even though I said it's a great movie.

• 54:17Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  So it's.

• 54:19Ezra Klein?

  And you can't trust the media, Jake.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  By reputation, it's a great movie. Let me just say, let me just say by reputation. And it's great enough that Ezra's referencing it in 2025. Yeah, I think that that is very wise. I also would say that Mike Donilon, who came up as a pollster. It is one of the most interesting things about him and his character that so much of what he does is based on gut and not data. You know, Battle for a Soul of America, that's gut. The numbers that support that that was a strong argument are questionable. The decoupling of the presidency from midterms. I mean, there's no actual data to back up these arguments, but it's what they think. It's how they convince themselves of these arguments.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  He's the only one that ever beat Trump. Okay, that's true, but that doesn't.

• 55:11Ezra Klein?

  There have been only two general elections Donald Trump has run in at this point.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and Hillary, you know, won the popular vote. It's kind of, that one was kind of a fluke.

• 55:21Ezra Klein?

  It created this sort of distance that opened up, I think,

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:24Ezra Klein?

  between Democratic Party elites in the country where their view, the Democratic Party, was that Biden was historically successful and under any normal measure, one, he deserves to run for reelection and win it. But two, who are you to question him when he has been so successful? On the other hand, the country didn't feel he was being that successful. He was unpopular. People were unhappy with his administration. They were not feeling the Bidenomics. They did not feel the world was a more stable and orderly place. And I think there's this way in which the Democratic Party just kind of got a little bit into an insular conversation with itself. Why did that happen?

• 56:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I think your question answers itself, which is the Democratic Party was talking to itself. I would without question argue that the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill are huge achievements. There's no question. But why did the American people not know that? Was it because you weren't talking about it? No. Was it because I wasn't talking about it? No, I was talking about it. There's nothing that Washington media loves more than bipartisan legislation passing. I mean, that is just like, that is the wet dream of every reporter in Washington DC. It's bipartisan and it passed, therefore it must be good. But in this case, you know, investing in infrastructure in this country is a good thing because our infrastructure is so horrible. So why wasn't, why weren't the American people sold?

• 56:49Speaker 01

  I would argue that it was his cluelessness on the inflation people were feeling and how much of that is age and how much of that is just his stubbornness? And beyond that, his inability to communicate.

• 57:04Ezra Klein?

  And so then, having not been given a choice in the primary, the party then goes and says, see? The Democratic voters chose Joe Biden.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:13Ezra Klein?

  And now you'd be betraying them.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:16Ezra Klein?

  Put aside everything else, this is just a party that is not, in this period, listening.

• 57:40Ezra Klein?

  In your reporting, what actually mattered? What took Joe Biden from the defiant Joe Biden that we heard on Morning Joe, saying that the elites are trying to push him out, that Biden, who is sending a letter basically threatening Democratic members of Congress?

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:58Ezra Klein?

  To the Biden very shortly thereafter, who leaves the race? What pushes him to where so many people said he couldn't be pushed?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  I would say that there are two reasons. One, the lack of support among senators meant a lot to him. And there is a meeting that the Senate only gets, well, they want one with Biden, but they don't get it, and they only get one with leaders of his campaign in the White House when-

• 58:30Ezra Klein?

  That was very telling, by the way, when they wouldn't send Biden to that meeting.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Basically, it comes down to there are five senators in a, I think it's a 51-member Senate Democratic caucus, there are only five who are standing with Biden. And there are a lot of Democrats who are running for reelection, who are on the bubble, who, or their jobs are really at risk. And then I think he kept on being told, the polls say you can't win, but Biden kept saying, that's not what my guys say. And he's talking about, he's not talking about his pollsters, but he's talking about his pollsters' polls as described to him by Donilon and Rochetti, who constantly give

• 59:17Speaker 01

  this unrealistically optimistic view of the polling. I mean, it would have been a wipeout, without question.

• 59:26Ezra Klein?

  One of the things in this period, when they're saying, "Look, he's still only three or four points behind Donald Trump, we can make it up." At that point, you had a history of him just not being able to make it up. You know, you come out for the Robert Herr press conference, you flub the countries, you fail at the debate. You could have had more things happen. This was, to me, the sort of crazy risk that I was watching a lot of Democrats, at least publicly, say they were willing to take. That this guy had not been a game time player for a long time, with the exception of one scripted State of the Union. The idea that you're going to get through a tough campaign where you had to make up ground, and this guy can't even do interviews?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  The fundamental problem, the pollsters, ultimately, they were supposed to have a meeting with Biden, and then that got canceled. So they had a meeting with the Politburo. It was a Zoom meeting. And basically, what they say is, "The fundamental reason why you're behind cannot be changed." The American people have concluded that you are too old and cannot do the job, and you are not capable of disproving that to them. And at this point, you don't have to be a political science major or a highly-paid

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  operative to say, "Okay, he had a bad debate. Go out there, do 10 tough interviews and five town halls, and settle this issue." I mean, everybody knows that. And he couldn't do it. And ultimately, the Democrats who were seeing him, giving him the benefit of the doubt, Chuck Schumer, others, come to that conclusion. He can't do it. But then the other thing, the last thing, that I think was decisive. Minion Moore was in charge of the 2024 Democratic Convention. Longtime Democratic operative, very respected in this town.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  When she got the job, she set up a thing, an unofficial group called the What If Committee. And the What If Committee was there to talk about, well, what if Biden drops out? What if the protests are so bad, they shut down Chicago? Just any, any possible thing. One of the reasons why it wasn't as difficult in three and a half weeks, I think it was between Biden dropping out and the convention, why it wasn't as difficult to do is because Mignon Moore had decided they were going to have decorations in as vanilla a flavor as possible. So that if somebody else's name need to be in there, you know, it wasn't like, it wasn't like everything was in the shape of Delaware, let's put it that way.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  The What If Committee was in touch with all the delegates. And they were monitoring everything and eventually, before the weekend where Rochetti and Biden and Donilon talk. And that Sunday, the 21st of July, when Biden announces he's not running anymore. The What If Committee conveys to the Politburo, you can win at the convention, but it will be really ugly. They were losing delegates to that degree. The delegates were losing confidence in the president. They were with them 100%, but after the three weeks of torture, they were out. Not all of them, but enough of them that it would have been an ugly, ugly fight. And Biden would have won, but it would have ripped the party apart.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  So when Biden talks about like, he dropped out because he didn't want to have a divided party. He means it quite literally. He doesn't mean like emotionally a divided party. He means an ugly floor fight on the convention floor in Chicago. And it would have been nasty and there was always the chance he would have lost. But even if he'd won, it would have been really ugly. And I think Donilon and Rochetti and Biden just ultimately concluded like, these bastards are chasing you out.

• 1:03:21Ezra Klein?

  I want to just talk through some of the lessons of all this. One that has been on my mind is, and I wonder how much you have this experience,

• 1:03:33Ezra Klein?

  how much in the media we prize inside information? And often the truth is just right in front of you. If you were asking people around Biden in 2023 and 2024, how good is he? How capable is he? You're being told, broadly speaking, he's doing great. You have a fascinating little vignette about, you know, his press people pulling members of the administration onto these phone calls to say things that they may not even believe. If you were just watching him at his public appearances, you were getting a more accurate presentation. How do you think about that? How does that make us think about the balance between? It sure seems very official when you get an anonymous senior administration

• 1:04:18Ezra Klein?

  source in a story. But, you know, just watch these guys and listen to them. What they do in public is what tells you what's true.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  I think that's right. We have a senior Democrat in the book, in the first chapter, who talks about seeing what you're talking about. His inability to communicate in a way that you would want for a president. And he would call inside people, Donald and et cetera. And they would all say, he's fine, he's fine, he's fine. And then after Biden dropped out, this Democrat went to the White House and sat down with Joe and Jill, Biden, the first lady and the President of the United States, behind closed doors, just the three people. And this Democrat told us he wasn't fucking fine. Jill had to complete his sentences. He was losing his train of thought. He wasn't fucking fine. So, I mean, I think one of the things that...

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  There are a lot of failures in this book. And certainly the news media, it's hard to argue that we were on top of this. Even people like you and me, who were questioning this publicly, it's hard to argue that any of us, in retrospect, covered this sufficiently.

• 1:05:27Ezra Klein?

  Although there was, I do, I want to give credit to a bunch of my newsroom colleagues here and Alex and others. There were a bunch of stories. There were great Times stories, great Wall Street Journal stories, Axios stories. It was harder to get people to say anything.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  That's the point.

• 1:05:40Ezra Klein?

  I mean, you need evidence for stories. But we were trying to crack this.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Well, that's my point is if a president's inner circle is willing to lie... And if they don't even think they're lying, that's an incredibly dangerous thing. I wish I had like a solution here, the three things we need to do and like then this will never happen again. One of the things that we talk about in the book, and we have Jonathan Reiner, a doctor at GW, who's an advisor to the White House Medical Office, who says that he thinks the White House medical reports should be affirmed under threat of perjury and given to Congress every year. So there could be no lying or dissembling. But beyond that, what can we do? I don't know.

• 1:06:24Ezra Klein?

  But I think there are lessons from this that are broader even than that. And honestly, to me, they reflect Trump as well as Biden. I think modern political parties have become very personality driven. They have leaders and the structure of them is to really fall in behind the leader. That was true to some degree in the Democratic Party. It's true incredibly strongly in the Republican Party. I feel like a big difference even between Trump one and Trump two is that in Trump one, his own staff was willing to tell people all the time that this guy was wrong, he was making crazy arguments, they had to restrain him. Now they see him as kissed by destiny and, you know, how dare you question the sun god.

• 1:07:05Ezra Klein?

  And I think that recognizing as a structural mode of failure, that parties have a lot of trouble saying what is just obvious to everybody in front of them, is a thing to grapple with. Because I feel like Democrats would not admit what just everybody knew about Joe Biden. And now I'm watching Republicans not admit that, you know, what everybody's always knew about Donald Trump, that he's erratic, he's all over the place, that the stuff he says often doesn't make sense, that he's surrounded by yes men and sycophants, that the parties have just become too weak. They're, they can be so easily taken over by whoever leads them.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not just the parties though, right? It's all of the, all the institutions that are supposed to structurally check any leader of, to one degree or another, failed. There are any number of moments that one could point to of interviews or weird moments where, let's say, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer should have marched up to the White House and said, what the fuck is this? Like, what is going on? And they didn't.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  So it was on them. But then also like donors should have been able to look at Biden, any one of these moments and say, what's going on here?

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  But the modern presidency, in addition to the weakening of the party, I mean, I'm sure you know the name of the Democratic National Committee Chairman during the Biden years, but I bet 99 out of 100 of your incredibly smart listeners do not. It was Jamie Harrison from South Carolina. And we have a vignette where Biden doesn't even know Jamie Harrison's name.

• 1:08:57Ezra Klein?

  Although you know what disturbs me so much about that vignette? There was no stronger Biden defender in this period than Harrison.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Still to this day.

• 1:09:06Ezra Klein?

  Saying, you know, what you do is you protect your quarterback from getting sacked. Right. Treating this as if the, the question is loyalty as opposed to the country itself. I thought Jamie Harrison like covered himself in dishonor in this.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Harrison is still out there saying that the mistake was having Biden step down from the ticket.

• 1:09:21Ezra Klein?

  That's a little bit what I mean when I, when I talk about, this is a thing people have to begin thinking about in the structures of their parties. I mean, look, Laura Trump was co-chair of the RNC. I mean, I, I think you're right to say Congress is probably where authority to check things like this should lie and people need to be able to speak a bit more freely. But when you look back at just what people were willing to explain away, to cover up, to talk about this as if the point of politics is your loyalty to the politician and not what the country needs from them. The number of Democrats have made arguments like Joe Biden has had our back. Now we have to have his.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  I know. What the hell does that even mean?

• 1:10:04Ezra Klein?

  The point of the party is to come up with a candidate who is the best person to lead the country. And if you're a Democrat, keep the country out of Donald Trump's hands. Like this is not some kind of interpersonal payback for years of friendship with Joe Biden or any other president.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I keep thinking about the Clooney fundraiser, which is in June. And Biden shows up and the, and the behind the scenes, behind the stage Biden is shocking to George Clooney, to Barack Obama, to a whole bunch of people.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  The only one who said anything was George Clooney.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  But this is a room full of people who saw this. Barack Obama is one of them. I'm not blaming Barack Obama, but institutionally, there's so much deference given to a president, even by a former president. I don't think it's healthy for this country. So you're talking about the weakness of the parties, and I agree. I also think that the strength of the presidency in this regard is a problem.

• 1:11:17Ezra Klein?

  Well, in a way, no one is saying anything because no one is saying anything. It's such an obvious dynamic that it barely bears pointing out. But people look to each other to see what is safe to say. And if you watch Dean Phillips get defenestrated by the party, if it seems clear that you'll be profoundly on the outs, and if you don't think you saying anything will do anything, even people who would privately tell me they understood how bad this problem was, what kept them from saying anything on some level, in addition to careerism, was fatalism. Nothing's going to change. Joe Biden's not stepping aside. It's impossible.

• 1:11:59Ezra Klein?

  So to say anything about it is simply to weaken him against Donald Trump. To admit what is in front of your face is to empower the other side. And that became a very powerful enforcement mechanism inside the party.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Right. And in this time of silos and social media, the fear of being labeled, oh, MAGA Ezra, or whatever, when Annie and Siobhan, the great Wall Street Journal reporters, put out their piece about Biden behind the scenes, the degree to which Dean Phillips was defenestrated, Annie and Siobhan got kneecapped. I'm sure it wasn't pleasant when you did your things. I know it wasn't pleasant when I did mine. Alex, the same.

• 1:12:44Ezra Klein?

  No, you felt like you were destroying all of your relationships with the White House all at once.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And not just the White House, with the Democratic Party.

• 1:12:52Ezra Klein?

  And I'm not saying it was literally that bad. But I mean, I did, I was fairly public on this, and it was a bigger firestorm. Of pushback coming from, I would say, like privately, a lot of people said, oh, you're right. In the email inbox, like just normal people, like, oh, thank God, somebody's saying something. But then people I thought of as sort of friends who are like liberally aligned pundits, or, you know, people in politics proper, in public, even people I knew who believed this stuff in private, were absolutely flaying me. And that was to me, the most shocking part. Having people who I'd had a version of this conversation

• 1:13:36Ezra Klein?

  with in private, then slam me in public when I said it publicly.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  There is a Democratic operative in our book who defended Biden publicly, who says to us on background, that Biden stole an election from the Democratic Party and from the American people. This person has only publicly said positive things about Joe Biden. I mean, this is where we are. We're truth telling of any sort, because we're so tribal and in camps, is legitimately a career ender, or at least a risk. Robert Herr could not

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  find work after being special counsel. He finally did months later. But the word went out, don't hire him. I mean, it's nasty. Look, the same thing is going on now in terms of anybody questioning Trump, although it's more policy oriented, at least at this stage. But none of it's healthy for a republic to be able to. And I don't think it, by the way, that it's like this in other democracies. I think there's much more room for debate in other democracies, whether England or France. I mean, it seems like they have more room for inter-party criticism, or even the notion that journalists or commentators, like, are allowed to say things without, like, not being able to feed their families.

• 1:15:07Ezra Klein?

  Well, it also reflects different political systems. So in a lot of the systems, the, they're parliamentary and the party leader is chosen. By, you know, the party elites and the, you know, the people in parliament. And if the person loses the confidence of his supporters or her supporters, they're out and they get, I mean, we just have watched the UK go through a bunch of different party leaders in both parties in the last couple of years. And I think here, the division between we choose with primaries, which is not how, you know, we've done it for most of American history. This is a sort of one of the whole arguments about open conventions that like, we actually did used to pick people at conventions, it's not a completely unknown thing to do.

• 1:15:52Ezra Klein?

  It's still how the convention is structured.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was the backroom people.

• 1:15:55Ezra Klein?

  Right. But that's what I mean, that I think one reason in some other countries, it's easier to deal with these problems, if you believe it is, is that more power is still in the backroom. I think we have both quite irresponsible political elites in this country, but we also have quite weak ones. And I think those two things exist in relationship to each other, that elite failures are most obvious when elite power is most degraded. I don't think elites were some grand class of hyper competent guardians of the public trust in the, you know, 1950s or the 1940s or the 1930s. But among other things, they had more privacy and they had more power.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  The closest we got to that in the last few decades was in 2020, when the elites got involved because they feared a Bernie Sanders nomination and rallied around Joe Biden. And they didn't do it because they liked Joe Biden, they did it because they thought Joe Biden could beat Bernie and then Trump. And that was just strictly on the numbers. Who can win college educated white voters in the suburbs of Philly and also black voters in South Carolina? And there was only one person who was running who could do that, and it was Biden.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  And so, and we'll never know probably, the extent to which Barack Obama and others like called Buttigieg and Klobuchar and Booker and Warren and all the others and. Encourage them to drop out and get behind Biden, but it did happen. And that's the closest we've gotten to a smoke filled room in my lifetime. I mean, I give the Democratic Party some credit here. It did in the end happen in 2024. It happened too late, but the party did something very unusual and pushed him off the ticket, did persuade him not to run. Well, it's like what Churchill said about the United States. You can always count on them to do the right thing after they've exhausted every other possible option. I think it's a place to end. And also final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Oh, that's such a great question.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  I assume abundance is implied.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  I am reading right now, and this is a fun diversion. If you're like me and you spend too much time lying in bed doom scrolling, Susan Morrison has a book called Lorne, which is about Lorne Michaels and the history of Saturday Night Live, which is great. There's a book called Hitler's People, I think it's called by Richard Evans, which is about how it came to be that the Holocaust happened in Germany. And it's kind of like a, if anybody out there read Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which is very damning of the German people, it's kind of building on that scholarship. Like, what is it about Germany that this happened there?

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  And then just because I am also a fan of graphic novels, I will say that there is a graphic novel that is written by Andy Samberg and some others with him called The Holy Roller, which is about a Jewish bowling Ohio superhero that I have started and is enjoyable and weird. And so those are my three.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  Jake Tapper. Thank you very much. Thank you. What a pleasure.

• 1:19:38Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Azoklan Show is produced by Elias Isquith. Fact checking by Kelsey Kudak. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin, and Jack McCordick. Weave original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Siemilouski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Stross.