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People. | |
| Now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. | ||
| They had something $2.50 a gallon. | ||
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unidentified
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I saw on television a little while ago in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN is televising this right now live. | ||
| So we are not just speaking to Los Angeles, we are speaking to the country. | ||
| In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity, this fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins in a town where partisan fighting prevails. | ||
| One table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
| This fall, Ceasefire, on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Our first guest of the morning is the host of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tappert. | ||
| Jake Tapper, also co-author of the book Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. | ||
| Jake Tapper joining us from Austin, Texas this morning. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| The book has been out several weeks. | ||
| I'm wondering what your reaction has been to the various criticisms from a lot of different sides about the contents. | ||
| I mean, I don't really have a reaction per se. | ||
| The book, my co-author Alex Thompson of Axios and I, after the election, set out to figure out what just happened. | ||
| What exactly happened that night that we were all so stunned, the night of the debate in June 2024, June 27th, to be precise. | ||
| Was that the first time that that adult Joe Biden had ever reared his head as his aide suggested that night? | ||
| What was the decision-making that went on behind having somebody who was so clearly not up to the task of running for president decide he was going to run for reelection? | ||
| So we got to work and we made a list of more than 200 people, Democrats, people who work for the White House and the administration and Congress, donors, et cetera, and talked to as many people as we could to figure out what happened. | ||
| And the result is this book, Original Sin, which goes into what a lot of Democrats feel like was the biggest mistake, which was Biden, President Biden deciding he was going to run for reelection, and then the mistakes that followed, which include, of course, the effort by him, his family, and his top aides to hide the degree to which he was cognitively deteriorating as we saw the night of the debate. | ||
| And the book has been selling very well, and the reviews from the New York Times and the Washington Post, LA Times, et cetera, have been very positive. | ||
| And, you know, anytime anybody does anything in this day and age, I don't need to tell you, there's going to be criticism from the left and the right. | ||
| But generally speaking, we're really pleased with the reception to the book. | ||
| And I guess as a follow-up, what was the tension between perhaps you and your co-author of collecting this material, holding on to it for a book, but not releasing it previous to the election? | ||
| Well, we didn't start writing the book until after the election. | ||
| So this book was, there was no book until the day after the election when Alex and I got together and started working on the proposal and then started doing the reporting. | ||
| So there isn't anything in this book that we knew before Election Day at all. | ||
| And in fact, I mean, Alex and I often joke about this because I know there's this perception that there are a lot of writers who save the best stuff for after the election. | ||
| I don't know how true that is, but it's certainly not the case for me and Alex. | ||
| And we joke about the fact that if we had known any one of these, any one of the scoops in the book, for instance, the fact that George Clooney didn't think that President Biden recognized him the night of that June 2024 fundraiser. | ||
| If we'd known that at the time, any one of us, either one of us, would have loved to have reported that at the time. | ||
| But the truth was that President Biden and his family and his top aides convinced the Democratic Party that one, only he had ever beat Donald Trump, which is true. | ||
| Two, therefore only he could beat Donald Trump in 2024, which I don't know is true, but that was their argument. | ||
| And that three, Donald Trump, in their view, posed an existential threat to the nation. | ||
| And so if you convince yourself of those three facts, you can pretty much justify anything. | ||
| And any criticism of President Biden was therefore really kept quiet during the presidential campaign by Democrats because they were afraid that any admission that he was slipping behind the scenes would only help Donald Trump. | ||
| But after Election Day, finally, people that Alex and I had been reaching out to either started returning our calls or our texts or our emails or started being a lot more candid. | ||
| But there's nothing in the book that we knew before Election Day. | ||
| Everything we learned after. | ||
| If you started writing after Election Day, when did you know, what was the moment when you both figured out you were onto something as far as the theme of this book? | ||
| Well, I'll admit that when we proposed the book, we didn't know how much good stuff we were going to get. | ||
| But it was just, I probably within the first few weeks, we would just check back with each other after and share the notes that we had with each interview and realize that, oh my God, it was much worse than we thought. | ||
| And it was, and we traced the first time that President Biden showed some signs of decline, according to a top aide, was 2015, towards the end of his vice presidency with Barack Obama as president. | ||
| And it was just tracking all of the developments as seen through these top aides who felt like this burden had been lifted that they could be honest about what they had seen. | ||
| As far as sourcing is concerned, one of the critics, and you've probably seen this already, Naomi Biden herself on the book saying it relies on unnamed anonymous sources pushing a self-serving false narrative that absolves them of any responsibility for our current national nightmare. | ||
| What was your reaction to that? | ||
| I mean, Naomi Biden is the president's granddaughter and she's going to defend her grandfather. | ||
| The Biden family is a very tight-knit family and they support each other. | ||
| So that removing Naomi from it, because I'm not going to criticize a young woman defending her grandfather, there are a lot of anonymous sources in the book. | ||
| There are named sources as well. | ||
| It's pretty well sourced, anybody who reads it. | ||
| Some of the anonymous sources are, like, for instance, we have a number of cabinet secretaries who are identified in the book as Cabinet Secretary number one, Cabinet Secretary number two. | ||
| And I don't, I mean, I imagine that they are remaining relatively anonymous because they don't want to experience the wrath of angry Democrats or the Biden family. | ||
| What is more important, I think, is what these sources told us. | ||
| For example, there are cabinet secretaries in the book who told us that they didn't think towards the end of the Biden presidency that President Biden could be relied upon for that proverbial 2 a.m. phone call in the middle of the night with a national security emergency. | ||
| And that's a rather chilling thought. | ||
| Now, why the cabinet secretaries don't want to go on the record for that, that's probably because they don't want to experience the wrath and the harshness of Democrats criticizing them. | ||
| But it's still, I think, more important than the issue of whether or not of who the sources are and why some of them are anonymous. | ||
| Our guest with us until 845, 202748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8000 for Democrats and Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| You can text us questions if you wish at 202748-8003. | ||
| Mr. Tapper, you and your co-author talk about the decline of President Biden, but you also trace it back to after the death of his son Bo Biden. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So one of the things that we've learned from talking to top aides is that a lot of the diminishment in President Biden's cognitive ability seems to have come, and this is not unusual, but it seems to have come during periods of real intense stress. | ||
| And obviously Joe Biden is somebody that has withstood a lot in his life. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why his supporters love him so much. | ||
| He's somebody that is able to get off the floor after life throws some of the cruelest twists of fate imaginable. | ||
| In 2015, he lost his beloved son, Bo, the Attorney General of Delaware, to brain cancer. | ||
| And a top aide told us that it was like watching then Vice President Biden's psyche was like watching somebody pour water on sand. | ||
| And that kind of horrific family tragedy really had a powerful, deleterious effect on President, then Vice President Biden. | ||
| We're also told that two of the most intense moments of diminishment, according to top aides, occurred in 2023 and 2024 during his presidency during moments of intense stress for his son Hunter, who I'm sure your viewers and callers know had some legal problems. | ||
| In 2023, he had a plea deal for a gun charge, and that plea deal fell through. | ||
| And then in the summer, in June 2024, he was tried and convicted, Hunter Biden, of that gun charge. | ||
| And what's significant, and I don't say this with anything other than sympathy for the family, but what's significant is that Hunter Biden, who as we all know, has also experienced tragedy in his family losing his brother. | ||
| President Biden, of course, lost his wife and daughter in 1972 in a car crash. | ||
| Hunter Biden, in addition, struggles with addiction, a horrible disease. | ||
| And Hunter was very outspoken during the period of 2023-2024, saying that he thought that the Republicans and those who were prosecuting him were trying to drive him into relapse and trying to drive him to suicide. | ||
| And what we ascertained from our reporting is that that fear that President Biden had, a very real, understandable and tragic fear that he would lose a third child, that he would lose Hunter, that was to a large degree one of the other reasons why his cognitive abilities declined in the summer of 2023 and the summer of 2024. | ||
| And that explains a lot about, in fact, why his performance at the debate was so awful, because that came right after that verdict, the guilty verdict of Hunter in Delaware. | ||
| And also why the decision was so bad and not well thought out because his decline was so significant in 2023, 2024. | ||
| First call for Jake Tapper, co-author of the book Original Sin, is from Susan. | ||
| She joins us from Delaware. | ||
| Republican line, you're on with the guests. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call, Jake Tapper. | ||
| I've been watching you for a long time, and I do appreciate your work. | ||
| And I will say I'm a Republican, but I have been a lifelong fan of Joe Biden. | ||
| I've loved his passion for people. | ||
| He's had a very compassionate heart for people. | ||
| And I was going to ask you, what was the motivation to even think? | ||
| Why did you think we needed to hear this? | ||
| But then I heard you at the very end say you believe the decline happened from all the stress based upon the fear of losing another son. | ||
| And so I think you answered my question, and I do have now a more open mind as far as even thinking about getting your book, because I've watched your interview previously on C-SPAN where you and your co-author discussed this. | ||
| So if you want to talk more about his fear, that would help. | ||
| But I just wanted to put that out there. | ||
| I was kind of a little closed-minded. | ||
| I was like, no, rejecting any criticism against Joe Biden because I'm such a fan. | ||
| I have such a love for him. | ||
| But now I think you've answered the question. | ||
| But if you could just elaborate more on his fear, I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you for your call and thank you for your open mind. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I want to make clear that people understand this is not a mean book. | ||
| We have sympathy for the horrible situations and the horrible things that President Biden has gone through in his life. | ||
| And I think anybody can sympathize with a father who's watching his son go through something very difficult. | ||
| By the same token, it is a clear-eyed book because this is not just One Family's Tragedy. | ||
| The decision to run for reelection and then the decision to hide his diminishment were decisions that had repercussions on the entire world. | ||
| There are a lot of Democrats who feel that, not just Democratic voters, but Democratic officials, Democratic strategists, Democratic lawmakers who feel that President Biden should have abided by his implicit promise to be a one-term president and to be a bridge to the next generation of Democrats, | ||
| and that if there had been a Democratic primary process, then whoever emerged from that, and perhaps it would have been Vice President Harris or maybe somebody else, would have been a stronger candidate and would have had a better chance of defeating President Trump. | ||
| Now, President Trump's team doesn't think that that's true, that he was going to win no matter what. | ||
| And it's a hypothetical, so we'll never know. | ||
| But it is also true that the decision to run for reelection and the decision to hide his diminishment are decisions that have ramifications for all of us right now as we wake up and try to figure out what is President Trump going to do when it comes to Iran? | ||
| What is President Trump going to do when it comes to tariffs? | ||
| What is President Trump going to do when it comes to foreign students? | ||
| And on and on, all the important issues that C-SPAN callers and viewers absorb every day or discuss every day. | ||
| So I think it is important, and I think it's essential that the United States voters understand what just happened and why it happened and how it was allowed to happen. | ||
| Because frankly, voters, when it comes to the incredibly powerful presidency in the United States, I think voters have a right to demand health information about their presidents. | ||
| And Alex Thompson, my co-author and I, feel that we quote a doctor in the book named Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who's an advisor to the White House medical team. | ||
| And he thinks that whoever the White House physician is, that person should have to give the health report that is given annually for a president traditionally, should have to give it under penalty of perjury. | ||
| Now, look, as we all know, no law that Congress passes would apply to the current president. | ||
| So forget President Trump for a second. | ||
| Let's just talk about future presidents. | ||
| Whoever the future presidents are, let's remove Trump and Biden from it right now. | ||
| I think the American voter has a right to know every medication that they're on, every test and the result of every test that they experience. | ||
| And I think it's, you know, we have a very powerful executive branch. | ||
| It's not this powerful in the U.K. | ||
| It's not this powerful in Australia. | ||
| It's not this powerful in Canada. | ||
| Therefore, I think that we voters have a right to know. | ||
| So I think that's also just part of the lesson of this book that we've learned. | ||
| From Virginia, this is Sarah, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Right now, I watch you on CNN, but right now I really don't like you. | ||
| I think you're doing a disservice to Joe and also to the American people. | ||
| When are you going to examine what is going on with Trump? | ||
| Joe Biden conducted himself for four years taking care of the United States. | ||
| He took meetings, he went overseas, he negotiated with other leaders. | ||
| This president has been pure chaos, which indicates to me that there is something wrong with him. | ||
| We will never get a straight answer on his medical examinations, what medication he is on. | ||
| And yet you have gone after Joe Biden with a vengeance that I'm very disappointed in you. | ||
| I enjoy watching your show, but not anymore. | ||
| And I think right now you ought to start writing another book examining Trump and how erratic and what he is doing, calling out the National Guard, the Marines, and everybody. | ||
| When has a president ever done that? | ||
| It's pure erratic. | ||
| Okay, okay, Sarah, they're in Virginia. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Mr. Tapper. | ||
| Thanks, Sarah. | ||
| Sarah, as you know, from watching my show on CNN, we cover President Trump every day for two hours, every day from 5 to 7 Eastern, and we cover all the things you talk about. | ||
| In terms of the president, the current president's behavior, we have covered times that he has confused Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley. | ||
| I think some of the questions about President Trump's behavior have more to do with personality than with cognitive decline. | ||
| But obviously, whatever lessons we've learned from covering President Biden, we would apply to any politician, any future politician or present politician. | ||
| So I'm sorry if I'm disappointing you by covering President Biden, but journalists, we are supposed to cover stories that we think the American people have a right to know that we think will enhance their understanding of how the country is run. | ||
| And I think Alex and I are proud of this book. | ||
| But if you turn on CNN later today, tomorrow, the next day, you'll see we're continuing to focus on the today in our TV coverage. | ||
| Mr. Tapper, you write about the mythology of Joe Biden, the way he approaches things. | ||
| How did that contribute not only to decline, but how that decline was handled within the White House? | ||
| So to understand how it is that President Biden thought that he could run for reelection in 2024, despite being 82 years old and obviously physically frailer than he had been, as happens to all of us, one has to understand the legend of Joe Biden. | ||
| All politicians have a mythology or a legend about them, and Joe Biden's is about his ability to rise up, to get up, as he would say when talking about the lessons that his father would tell him. | ||
| Get up. | ||
| So, for example, he has a debilitating stutter as a child. | ||
| He learns how to talk and get past it to a degree. | ||
| He has that horrible car accident with his wife and daughter killed in 1972. | ||
| He is able to get up off of the floor for that. | ||
| He runs for president in 1987. | ||
| It doesn't go well. | ||
| He drops out in 1988. | ||
| He has two brain aneurysms. | ||
| The doctors aren't even sure if he'll ever talk again. | ||
| Get up. | ||
| Again, this is one of the things about Joe Biden that his supporters, and we've heard from a couple of them today, find so compelling. | ||
| His ability to get up no matter what life throws at him. | ||
| Now, at a certain point, the Biden mythology becomes almost like a theology, almost like a religion, in a sense that skepticism is not permitted. | ||
| And the ability of Joe Biden to prove the naysayers wrong, to prove the elites wrong, to prove the news media wrong and all the Democratic detractors, that becomes part of this mythology or theology. | ||
| And that's one of the things you have to understand when looking at why did President Biden think he could run for reelection despite he was 82 and obviously frail. | ||
| It was because his has been a life of getting up off the floor and proving the naysayers wrong. | ||
| And that's part of the reason why he made the decisions he did. | ||
| This is Patty. | ||
| Patty's in New Jersey, Independent Line. | ||
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unidentified
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Hello, good morning. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yep, you're on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Go ahead. | |
| I just want to thank C-SPAN. | ||
| I think it's such a great service that the citizens get to call in. | ||
| I would say to the CNNs and the other networks, you can screen the questions, but maybe have three questions a day by citizens. | ||
| It really would go a long way. | ||
| Hello, Jake. | ||
| I was born in Philadelphia, raised in Northeast Philly, and the rest of my time in the suburbs of Philly. | ||
| And I just want to say that I think that you're pretty much way off as far as the book. | ||
| I understand your reason for writing the book with Alex Thompson, but what I don't understand is, you know, when we have somebody like Trump, and I understand you said you cover him, but, you know, there's so many things about Trump, maybe not cognitively, but definitely psychological problems that really need to be explored. | ||
| And, you know, as far as Joe Biden, you know, the one thing I agree with you is that he shouldn't have ran for a second term. | ||
| But, you know, and I don't, and that was a problem. | ||
| But to focus so much on such a good person, such a good man, and a good president, too. | ||
| I mean, he did a lot of things. | ||
| You know, he was just overrun by MAGA, which is so strong and so dangerous. | ||
| Right now, the Americans are in such a precarious situation. | ||
| And I just feel that the book that you wrote is just too much of a focus on Joe Biden. | ||
| And I feel that it's unfair to do that to him. | ||
| That's just how I feel. | ||
| Patty in New Jersey from Atlantic City, Independent Line. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Well, one of the things that I think A lot of Democrats feel is that the reason that Trump is president is because Joe Biden made this decision to run for reelection and then to try to hide the degree that he was deteriorating until it was exposed before the world the night of the CNN debate, June 27th, 2024. | ||
| There are a lot of Democrats who look at the Electoral College and see that even though President Trump won the popular vote by millions of votes, that actually the electoral vote victory comes down to about 250,000 votes in about three states. | ||
| And had Kamala Harris or any other Democratic nominee been able to perform just slightly better in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, then Donald Trump would not be the president. | ||
| And there are a lot of Democrats who feel that because Joe Biden made the decision he did to run for reelection and that because he and his team and his family made the decision they did to try to hide as much as possible his diminishment, that they basically set the stage for Donald Trump's return. | ||
| And look, maybe that's a premise that you don't agree with, but there are a lot of very intelligent Democrats who think that they were doomed and that Donald Trump was guaranteed to be reelected because of the decision made by President Biden. | ||
| So if you disagree, you disagree, I say go birds to you, and I appreciate your Philadelphia roots, if not your take on my book. | ||
| Which were the strongest Democrats making the case for Joe Biden to step aside and how were they received by the inner circle? | ||
| Well, not a lot of them were doing it at the time, but there were Democrats trying to make the argument behind the scenes that they didn't think he should run. | ||
| One was a guy named Bill Daly, who you know, who was an Obama chief of staff and a Bill Clinton Commerce Secretary, who had known Joe Biden forever and just couldn't believe that Joe Biden was making the decision to run again. | ||
| I mean, he had daley had worked on, he was political director for Biden's 1987, 1988 presidential campaign. | ||
| And he tried to talk to Democratic governors to see if one of them would consider challenging Biden in the primaries, but nobody would. | ||
| Congressman Dean Phillips, no stranger to C-SPAN viewers, a Democrat who, again, saw this happening behind the scenes, tried to convince governors like Newsom or Bashir or Pritzker or Whitmer to run against Biden in the primaries. | ||
| Nobody would. | ||
| So then Dean Phillips ran. | ||
| And he wanted to show the world, he says, that Biden is not up to the task of running for president in 2024 and wanted to get him on a debate stage. | ||
| But Biden and the Democrats avoided any sort of direct debate with Dean Phillips. | ||
| There were not a lot of people making the argument in front of the cameras or even directly to President Biden. | ||
| That's one of the things that was so shocking about this, how little process there actually was behind the scenes. | ||
| From Hearst in Mississippi, Republican line. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You're on with our guest. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I'd like to know why the news media didn't talk about Biden wouldn't come out and have press conferences. | |
| And when he did come out, he'd all hit and mess up, you know, do all kind of stuff like that. | ||
| And news media fail their job. | ||
| I don't think they're doing the job like they should be doing it. | ||
| And that's all I got to say about it. | ||
| That's Hearst in Mississippi. | ||
| Well, I mean, I do think that the media did cover the fact that President Biden had fewer press conferences than previous presidents. | ||
| And in terms of the gaffes that the gentleman alluded to, I mean, those would be aired. | ||
| It is difficult to argue, now that I have written this book with Alex Thompson, my co-author, it is difficult to argue that we knew everything because in our reporting after the election, we were able to find out so much more that shocked us about how bad things were behind the scenes. | ||
| And if that is a failure of the news media, then I think we should take our lumps on it. | ||
| I do think to a large degree, this is the responsibility of President Biden and his family and top aides and Democrats who saw things behind the scenes and were convinced to not say anything to reporters. | ||
| The reporters that would come out and write about this on occasion, Peter Baker wrote a piece in the New York Times, I think in 2023, about Biden's age, meaning that they wouldn't do long trips instead of a Europe trip and a Middle East trip, all one big trip. | ||
| They would split them into two. | ||
| And he also covered the number of speaking events that President Biden held in contrast with Trump and Obama. | ||
| And then there were some reports by the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Annie Linsky and Siobhan Hughes of the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece titled something like, Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping, that was published in June 2024. | ||
| A powerful piece. | ||
| They got attacked by the White House. | ||
| They got attacked by Democratic members of Congress. | ||
| So there were attempts to get to the bottom of this. | ||
| But at the bottom line is now that I have learned, and Alex and I have learned what we know, obviously we wish that we'd known it before and that there'd been more investigative reporting on it. | ||
| You had mentioned in a previous interview to that end that you felt humility, and I think that's the quote, humility, because of what you know now versus what's been out there. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that? | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| I mean, look, anytime one learns something as a journalist that you wish you had been more aggressive on or trusted your instincts more or dug a little harder or whatever, I think it's just a natural result of being an adult to realize shortcomings or failings. | ||
| I mean, I feel this way about, you know, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq story. | ||
| I was a reporter that was skeptical of the WMD claim, but certainly, you know, in hindsight, I wish I had been more skeptical. | ||
| And there are any number of stories along those lines. | ||
| Certainly when it comes to President Biden's acuity, it's an issue that I had covered. | ||
| I had asked him about in September 2020 when I interviewed him. | ||
| I asked him if he would pledge to be transparent about his health, and he said he would. | ||
| And there are a number of other times that I had covered it or asked people who worked for him about his age. | ||
| But sure, yeah, I mean, I wish I had covered it more aggressively. | ||
| I can't imagine that there are many reporters with a handful of exceptions that don't feel that way, knowing, you know, as soon as the debate made it clear, oh my God, look how bad his acuity is, at least at this moment. | ||
| I'm sure most reporters feel that way. | ||
| There's a story in your book, Dan Abasher, co-author, hand you a note saying he just lost the election and the debate night. | ||
| What's going through your mind as you're watching it play out? | ||
| So Dana Bash and I were obviously the co-moderators of the debate and we are at the Atlanta studios of CNN. | ||
| And first of all, it's really interesting because both Trump and Biden had been invited to do a walkthrough at the debate site, which is normal standard operating procedure. | ||
| Both of them did not show up on time, not surprisingly. | ||
| And then President, but President Trump does show up, and the president, editor-in-chief of CNN, Sir Mark Thompson, gives him the tour. | ||
| President Trump, you know, he's a student of television because of the apprentice. | ||
| And so he's finding out where is he standing, which is his camera, is he going to be on air when President Biden's talking? | ||
| How does he do a follow-up? | ||
| All the normal questions one would ask. | ||
| The debate is set for 9 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| At 8 p.m., President Biden has still not arrived at the studios. | ||
| Now, we know he's in Atlanta because he's the president, and we know from pool reports that Air Force One has touched down in Atlanta, but he's still not there. | ||
| He finally shows up around 8.32, which is really late for a politician to show up before a debate, just half an hour before the debate. | ||
| And he does his walkthrough. | ||
| So Dan and I go out at about 10 of. | ||
| When I'm walking out there, I'm thinking, wow, it's late. | ||
| I'm 56 now, and you're a younger man than I, but there will come a time when you appreciate sleep more than you do right now. | ||
| And the C-SPAN callers know what I'm saying. | ||
| And anyway, when I was walking out there, I was like, this is late. | ||
| It's almost 9 o'clock. | ||
| This is going to be going until 10.30. | ||
| This is way past my bedtime. | ||
| And then President Biden walked out, and I thought, man, what's it like for him? | ||
| Because at that point, we know from Alex's reporting that they tried to keep his activities between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on an average day, at least public activities, because, you know, he's 81 at that point. | ||
| Anyway, he comes out, he starts speaking. | ||
| President Trump comes out too. | ||
| Biden obviously has a cold. | ||
| His voice is thinner and reedier, and he's coughing. | ||
| But okay, he has a cold. | ||
| In that the first answer and rebuttal goes fine. | ||
| But then he gets lost, and I think it's the second answer, President Biden, and he's listing things that he wants to do for the American people, and he just completely loses his train of thought. | ||
| He's talking about childcare and elder care, and then he loses his train of thought, and he's grabbing, he grabs on to like just a placeholder clause, all the things I've tried to do for people or something like that. | ||
| And he's just completely, it's very painful to watch. | ||
| And I think I've watched it since on TV. | ||
| I think it was even worse in person just because of how sad the moment was. | ||
| And anyway, we have iPads so that we can write down and communicate with the control room. | ||
| And I write, holy smokes, to the control room. | ||
| I kept it clean because I didn't know who was back there. | ||
| And Dana writes, Dana passes on a piece of paper to me, he just lost the election. | ||
| Because the bar for President Biden was that so many voters, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, already had concerns about his aging, his energy, his acuity. | ||
| They already had those concerns before the debate. | ||
| It was a major issue. | ||
| And what he needed to do and what his aides hoped he would do that night was come out and give an energetic performance and put those issues to rest. | ||
| And he did the exact opposite. | ||
| He made those issues the number one issue in the campaign, more so than anything President Trump had to say, more so than the chaos the Democrats would complain about or to some of our callers this morning talking about the chaos of the Trump presidency. | ||
| They made his ability to do the job the number one story. | ||
| Rahm Emanuel, who is another Obama former chief of staff who is President Biden's ambassador to Japan, calls Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, this is an anecdote in the book, and says, this is irretrievable. | ||
| It's irretrievable. | ||
| You can't go back from this. | ||
| This is now the issue. | ||
| So it was very stunning. | ||
| Let's go to Eddie in New York, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, Jake. | |
| Back in 2020, you had an interview with Laura Trump, and she even told you, and you said it was his stutter and everything. | ||
| And if you watch Fox News or News Nation or even Newsmax, every night they would bring up what the problems were, how he couldn't talk, how he didn't know what he was doing. | ||
| And if you noticed, every time when he had an interview, he would have the picture of the reporter, her name, and even the answer to the question on there. | ||
| Mike Johnson in what was it? | ||
| 2022, they had an interview where they were talking about how he signed away the pipeline. | ||
| That was 2024. | ||
|
unidentified
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He suggested he said, no. | |
| No, I signed a thing for it to be investigated. | ||
| And he said, no, no, you signed a thing to get rid of it. | ||
| So the news media covered up for him. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| Okay, Eddie in New York. | ||
| So, I mean, I ran those clips on my show, too. | ||
| I mean, I understand that people feel like that a lot of these clips and a lot of these acuity issues were known. | ||
| And I don't disagree. | ||
| I mean, it's the reason why so many voters had so many concerns about President Biden's ability to do the job because of what we all saw happening in front of the cameras, especially starting in, I would argue, at least according to our reporting, in 2023, 2024. | ||
| The Speaker Mike Johnson story that the gentleman was referring to was from a private conversation that Speaker Johnson had had with President Biden in early 2024. | ||
| I think a really important demarcation moment in the story of President Biden and his acuity came in February 2024 with the publication of the special counsel report, Robert Hur. | ||
| Robert Hurr had been appointed special counsel in 2023 to investigate President Biden's mishandling of classified information. | ||
| And Robert Hurr did a report that came out in February 2024 in which he said that while he thought President Biden, I mean, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically he said he thought that President Biden had mishandled classified information, but he wasn't going to prosecute because he thought President Biden would come across to a jury as a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. | ||
| And the Biden White House freaked out. | ||
| First they tried to, before the report was released, they tried to get the Attorney General to remove that from the special counsel report. | ||
| The Attorney General, Merrick Harland, said, absolutely not. | ||
| We're not going to remove that. | ||
| And then when the report came out, the Democratic Party, the White House, Vice President Harris and others attacked Special Counsel Hurr as unprofessional, as a Republican hack, as gratuitous. | ||
| That was the line they used. | ||
| And what Special Counsel Hurr had done was give us, the American people, a window into what it was like for him and his prosecutors to sit back and listen and talk to Joe Biden for five hours in October 2023 when they interviewed him. | ||
| And that window into President Biden's acuity, his rambling answers, his inability to recall dates in a very significant way. | ||
| And let me just give you an example. | ||
| The question about whether when President Biden, then Vice President Biden, had mishandled classified information was in 2017, 2018, after the vice presidency, before he was elected president. | ||
| And Special Counsel Hurr brought up that time, 2017, 2018, and President Biden, this is during his presidency, October 2023, said 2017, 2018, what you have to remember is that during that period my son Bo was either deployed or he was dying. | ||
| Now, Bo, who served in Iraq, actually had been deployed in 2008, 2009. | ||
| And Bo, as we discussed already on this program, died tragically in 2015. | ||
| So that's the kind of issues that President Biden was having in terms of not being able to come up with dates for major life events. | ||
| What the Biden administration did to Robert Hurr in terms of their effort to discredit him, he had difficulty finding work for several months after that, really is, I think, one of the most important moments of the Biden presidency. | ||
| And I would also argue I would judge news media behavior based on how they covered that. | ||
| Because coverage of Robert Hur's report really split between some in the news media who took what he was saying seriously and others in the news media who ran to defend President Biden and attack Robert Hur. | ||
| And to me, that's a very significant moment that we had not yet talked about. | ||
| One more call. | ||
| This will be from Catherine, Democrats Line from New Jersey. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, Pedro Jake. | |
| I usually watch your show and I like you a lot, but I was a little disappointed in the book about the President Biden. | ||
| But my question for you is, how did you come up with the title, Original Sin? | ||
| And I'll take my answer off the phone. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you so much, and hello to the Garden State. | ||
| As a Philadelphian, we would spend a lot of time in New Jersey during the summers. | ||
| Original sin was a term that some of the Democrats we spoke with who were bemoaning what happened in the election of 2024 talked about because obviously the questions about Biden's acuity were top of mind because of what we all went through as a country, | ||
| starting with the debate and then the three weeks plus until President Biden dropping out of the race, which is, you know, which has never happened before in this country, a truly historical event and a historical moment. | ||
| But people would say, just in conversation, oh, you know, but the original sin was that he ran for re-election. | ||
| It was a way of pinpointing the moment that they thought history could have changed, that if he had not run for re-election, maybe things would have turned out differently. | ||
| Maybe there would have been a robust Democratic primary. | ||
| You could have had governors Newsom and Whitmer and Pritzker. | ||
| You could have had Pete Buttigieg. | ||
| You could have had Senator Klobuchar, Senator Warnock, Governor Shapiro. | ||
| There would have been, in all likelihood, a very robust list of Democratic candidates. | ||
| And it would have been a fierce contest. | ||
| And then there would have been, in the views of all these Democratic officials we talked to for the book, a winner who would have had the backing and support of the Democratic Party and a better chance at defeating Donald Trump. | ||
| So it was a term used by Democrats with whom we spoke. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| Jake Tapper co-wrote the book with Alex Thompson, Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. | ||
| Jake Tapper, thanks for giving us your time today. | ||
| Thank you, and thanks to all the great callers with the tough questions and the curveballs. | ||
| And I appreciate it, and I appreciate so much what C-SPAN does. | ||
| Thank you for what you do. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
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C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country. | |
| Coming up Wednesday morning, we'll talk about the future of Iran's nuclear program with Darrell Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, and then Axios politics reporter Steph Kite on members of Congress receiving security briefings after the Minnesota lawmaker shootings. | ||
| And the Migration Policy Institute's Doris Meisner on the impact of the Trump administration's ICE workplace raids and how immigrant workers' employment eligibility is verified. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Wednesday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, or online at cspan.org. | ||
| This show and C-SPAN is one of the few places left in America where you actually have left and right coming together to talk and argue. | ||
| And you guys do a great service in that. | ||
| I love C-SPAN too. | ||
| That's why I'm here today. | ||
| Answer questions all day, every day. | ||
| Sometimes I get to do fun things like go on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN is, I think, one of the very few places that Americans can still go. | ||
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unidentified
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C-SPAN has such a distinguished and honorable and important mandate and mission in this country. | |
| I love this show. | ||
| This is my favorite show to do of all shows because I actually get to hear what the American people care about. | ||
| American people have access to their government in ways that they did not before the cable industry provided C-SPAN access. | ||
| That's why I like to come on C-SPAN is because this is one of the last places where people are actually having conversations, even people who disagree. | ||
| Shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective. | ||
| Thank C-SPAN for all you do. | ||
|
unidentified
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it's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard where hard questions are asked and where people have to answer to them in a nation divided a rare moment of unity This fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | |
| In a town where partisan fighting prevails, one table, two leaders, one goal to find common ground. | ||
| This fall, Ceasefire, on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| It's a story from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. | ||
| The book by Claire Hoffman is called Sister Center: Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Amy Semple McPherson. | ||
| FSG, the publisher, further emphasizes that the story is: quote, the dramatic rise, disappearance, and near fall of a woman called Sister Amy, who changed the world. |