| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Co-authors of this new book, 2024, How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. | ||
| Beyond the President's decision to run for office again in 2024, the book also details the choice by former President Joe Biden to run for re-election, as well as the role that Vice President Kamala Harris played in the administration and her short campaign for the presidency. | ||
| Your questions, we'll take them this morning on all of that about this new book. | ||
| We'll go to Mike in Akron, Ohio, an independent. | ||
| Mike, good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| I have a couple of points to make. | ||
| I had an epiphany on August 9th, 1974, the day that Nixon resigned. | ||
| I was just a month or two away from 2021 at that time. | ||
| And all the hate I had towards that man simply disappeared. | ||
| So I never hated Donald Trump. | ||
| I will never hate anybody again since that time. | ||
| And I am an independent. | ||
| But I do have a question about what happened right after January the 6th. | ||
| Of course, Trump was impeached by the Democrats. | ||
| And I was yelling at my TV, don't impeach him a second time. | ||
| Don't. | ||
| It is senseless because he'll be out of office in two weeks anyway. | ||
| And if you do that, he'll be back in office four years from now. | ||
| And that was proven right. | ||
| What you should have done instead is say nobody can ever run for president without revealing your tax returns. | ||
| Trump said he would back in 2016 before Hillary Clinton, before he beat her, said I would reveal them after the election. | ||
| He never has, and I feel like he never will. | ||
| Okay, Mike, I want to pick up on what you're talking about. | ||
| After January 6th, he loses the election because our two co-authors here, you write about his mental state, his emotional state after he lost the re-election. | ||
| Describe what he's doing down in Mar-a-Lago and the scene around him. | ||
| Yeah, he's sort of sulking and sad and dispirited and lost, basically, right? | ||
| He has left the White House out of power. | ||
| He's basically become a pariah in the Republican Party. | ||
| Republicans voted to impeach him because of that. | ||
| Liz Cheney, obviously, basically, you know, left or was pushed out of Republican leadership because of her criticism of him. | ||
| So he is a man without staff really around him, and he doesn't know really what's happening. | ||
| And this is a really critical time period where he reconnects with Susie Wiles, now the White House Chief of Staff. | ||
| She's commuting from a different part of Florida every week to sort of help him through this morass, this really challenging period in his life where he doesn't have anyone around him who he trusts. | ||
| And she's trying to walk him through why he lost the presidential election, who's grifting off him, how to get his inner circle back in shape to potentially run again. | ||
| As Isaac likes to say, it's like a coach training a prize fighter to get back into the ring and prepare for a presidential election. | ||
| And Trump really grows to trust Susie Wiles. | ||
| There's a lot of scenes in the book where people are asking him for different things and he says, ask Susie, ask Susie. | ||
| I mean, that partnership has proved to be one of the most faithful partnerships in recent political history. | ||
| Now Susie Wiles is the White House Chief of Staff and Donald Trump is back in office. | ||
| Isaac Arnstorf, what is she telling the president about the 2020 election though? | ||
| Because that's important, what you write in the book. | ||
| What is she saying to him about the loss? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, one of the biggest messages that she was trying to get through to him was that he did not do himself and the Republicans any favors by criticizing male voting and voting early. | |
| And, you know, whatever he thought about whether you could rely on, and we should say there's no evidence that there's anything wrong with voting that way. | ||
| But in Trump's mind, that's what he was blaming for losing. | ||
| And she was taking him through the mechanics of the laws in different states and the operations, you know, why, from the campaign's perspective, it's important for voters to be able to encourage voters to do that. | ||
| Finally, years later, they do manage to get him to stop attacking them and actually encourage it. | ||
| And there's a great moment where he says to someone privately, I still hate it, but I'm going to say whatever I need to say. | ||
| Well, they come up with a phrase that he likes, which is what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Swamp the vote. | |
| So this idea that, again, according to him, we know there's no evidence of this, we know they're going to cheat, and what we need to do is just turn out in such great numbers that you can overwhelm the cheating. | ||
| So that it's too big to rig. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then as soon as Election Day comes, he goes, he visits his headquarters and goes right back to attacking male voting and early voting now that it's too late. | |
| We'll go to Lauren, Alexandria, Minnesota. | ||
| Republican, you're up next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| That January 6th thing, they put the wrong ones in jail. | ||
| Nancy Pulosage, the Democrats, and the FBI should have gone to jail. | ||
| They're the ones that staged that that's why she didn't want the National Guard there. | ||
| They thought that was one good way they were going to get rid of Trump. | ||
| All right. | ||
| John in Plainfield, New Jersey. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
| Good morning, Democratic caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, one of the things I noticed is how the Democrats ran their campaigns. | |
| Because one of the things I don't think they've dealt with is the issue of black males. | ||
| I think one of the problems I saw in the campaign was she didn't go to Joe Rogan or other broadcasters. | ||
| And I think that was part of the problem, even with some of the staff. | ||
| And I think there was a lot of issues where she was handcuffed from the Democratic Party. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, John, you've touched on a lot of things that you guys wrote about. | ||
| So Tyler, go ahead, take it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Rogan in particular has gotten a lot of attention because of the platform and the reach that he has. | ||
| We recount in great detail the sort of debate between Kamala Harris and her aid or Kamala Harris' aides about whether or not she should go on Joe Rogan. | ||
| They can't decide. | ||
| Some people say they're worried about it. | ||
| Ultimately, they agree that it's a good idea for her to do it. | ||
| But then there's like sort of scheduling snafu and it doesn't work out. | ||
| But I think the caller is exactly right. | ||
| There is great concern that Democrats have not done enough to reach voters outside of traditional media. | ||
| There's, you know, there is one of the things that I think we found in the book that's really interesting is a lot of Trump's success in the podcasts were on not necessarily political podcasts, but more cultural lifestyle podcasts. | ||
| And those were sort of in the manosphere, you know, reaching men, young men, men of color. | ||
| But those same sort of podcasts on the left that are not explicitly political wouldn't exactly take Kamala Harris. | ||
| So if you think of Hot Ones or the Kelsey Brothers, those podcasts that they thought they could reach softer, maybe Democratic voters, independent voters, particularly men, there just wasn't that same sort of ecosystem for Kamala Harris to penetrate. | ||
| And that ultimately was a huge problem for her as it relates to the gender gap and her ability to reach men. | ||
| Tyler, you also, the three of you, write about the lack of media appearances by Kamala Harris and her indecision to talk to the media and what that led to. | ||
| Yeah, it was a source of concern for Democratic strategists and voters around the country who felt that they just didn't know Kamala Harris. | ||
| One of the things that the campaign said is, oh, she's doing a lot. | ||
| She's doing these big rallies. | ||
| There's a lot of energy and enthusiasm behind her ticket. | ||
| We don't want to curtail that with an interview where she says the wrong thing or sort of halt that momentum. | ||
| But for voters, the question was: well, what is she hiding? | ||
| And the Trump campaign really tried to exploit that by suggesting there was something that she was hiding. | ||
| And then we saw her go on the view and make that flub when she'd been running what strategists thought was a pretty flawless campaign. | ||
| Then she goes on the view, and the one sort of question she really screws up is: they say, What would you do differently than Joe Biden? | ||
| And she says, Well, I can't really think of anything. | ||
| And the reason that's such a disaster for her is because Joe Biden is not popular with Democratic voters or the majority of voters around the country. | ||
| And so there was this effort to try to delicately separate herself from him, and she really just stepped in it there. | ||
| And the shadow, the president's shadow essentially followed her. | ||
| Yeah, it loomed incredibly large. | ||
| And there was this ongoing debate about how and when to separate herself. | ||
| And there were two issues there. | ||
| One is Joe Biden, in particular, made it more difficult for her. | ||
| We have this really remarkable scene in the book, The Day of the Debate Between Trump and Harris. | ||
| Biden calls Kamala Harris, ostensibly to wish her good luck. | ||
| And during that call, he also says, You know, I'm hearing from some friends that the way that you're campaigning maybe is a little disloyal to me, and you should be careful, framing it as political advice, that if you criticize me, voters in Pennsylvania, where I'm very popular, are not going to like that. | ||
| Now, polling suggests that is not true. | ||
| Part of the reason Joe Biden was no longer on the ticket at that point was because he was not popular. | ||
| The other thing that Harris in her age struggled with was this issue of authenticity. | ||
| She had been framed as the second most important person in the White House in every decision, in every meeting, last person in the room. | ||
| That wasn't exactly true, but that's what the public narrative was. | ||
| And so the campaign struggled to figure out: well, if Harris was in the room supporting and making all those decisions, what do you say publicly that you disagreed with? | ||
| And how do you maintain that image of right-hand man to Joe Biden? | ||
| And now you're trying to run away from him just because now you're at the top of the ticket. | ||
| Isaac, another thing that caller talked about was black and Latino voters. | ||
| You write about that issue in the book. | ||
| What did you find out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it was something that Harris was very concerned about and was convening meetings about before she took over the ticket because it was a problem. | |
| It was something that the Trump campaign was making a lot of noise about and a lot of Democrats weren't taking seriously. | ||
| But she was. | ||
| Her brother-in-law was when he was traveling around the country and saying, not only is the enthusiasm not there, but the organizations that turn out those communities need money. | ||
| They're underfunded. | ||
| They can't do the work. | ||
| And, you know, there was good reason to be skeptical of the Trump campaign strategy. | ||
| And obviously, you know, they did not win a majority of black men, but they absolutely made a difference. | ||
| And, you know, between black men, Latinos, and young voters just made it not only got Trump over the finish line, but set the coalition that the Democrats have been counting on for decades so off base that you see the Democrats in the situation that they're in now, they don't really know who they are or what they stand for. | ||
| We'll go to Kenny in Kentucky, Republican. | ||
| Your turn, Kenny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey. | |
| Yeah, I was going to ask your two guests: I mean, have they wrote any books about Joe Biden and about all his files that he had in his little Corvette? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And want to know about that. | |
| I mean, they want to harp on everything about Paul Trump. | ||
| And it's just unbelievable. | ||
| All right, Kenny. | ||
| Well, they did. | ||
| They talked about the classified documents that were found in the president's garage. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very extensively. | |
| Actually, one of the huge findings in the book, which hasn't been previously reported, is how, you know, the thing that everyone remembers from the Biden classified documents investigation is that line in the report that he seemed like a well-meaning older gentleman with a poor memory. | ||
| But what that actually distracted from was how close the special counsel came to charging Biden and his ghostwriter. | ||
| He had the evidence that the ghostwriter had hidden, had covered up, had destroyed evidence, and that Biden had knowledgeably misplaced the documents. | ||
| And that was the only explanation for why he didn't think that he could get a conviction at trial, but not that he didn't think that a crime was committed. | ||
| Let's stick with the Her report, Tyler, and how does it come to light? | ||
| And does the White House know that it is going to be made public? | ||
| Describe that scene in the book. | ||
| Yeah, in terms of the discovery of the documents themselves. | ||
| No, actually, the Her report and the mention of the president's memory. | ||
| Yeah, so there's a lot in the book. | ||
| And Kenny, I hope you buy a copy because you will see that we cover it quite extensively from the beginning through the end. | ||
| It is a through line throughout the entire campaign. | ||
| But so the report is going to be released, and the White House is given by Robert Hurr's team four days to review the report to see if there's any mentions of executive privilege. | ||
| And they immediately see the line that Isaac mentioned where Robert Hurr describes Joe Biden as a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. | ||
| And they freak out. | ||
| They try to do everything in their power to get some of that removed. | ||
| They think the line they use at the time is that it's gratuitous. | ||
| It's beyond the remit of Robert Hur and the special counsel to be describing Joe Biden's memory. | ||
| And there's a lot of back and forth between the lawyers at the White House, Joe Biden's personal attorneys, the Justice Department. | ||
| They try to go above Robert Hurr's head, complaining to their attorney general. | ||
| And all of those requests are rejected. | ||
| But I think what's important is that Robert Hurr's reason for including that line, as Isaac said, is that is the reason he did not recommend charges. | ||
| And of course, the Department of Justice guidance is that you can't prosecute a sitting president. | ||
| So it would have had to be after he left office. | ||
| But he just felt like he had a case to make, but he was worried he couldn't secure a conviction because of that, that Joe Biden on the stand would present as a well-meaningly elderly man with a poor memory. | ||
| And so even as the White House is melting down over the inclusion, that is Herr's entire case is built around that idea, and that is crucial to this whole case. | ||
| Back to calls. | ||
| Jane and Clemson, South Carolina, Democratic caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I just need to clear up a couple things once again. | ||
| The activity at Mar-a-Lago was not a raid. | ||
| It was the execution of a legal warrant. | ||
| And secondly, Donald Trump is an unrepentant, convicted criminal. | ||
| And we need not forget that, even if we don't like it, it's true. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Tyler? | ||
| Yeah, the use of the word raid is something that Donald Trump uses, and we're very careful to describe it, as I did earlier in the program, as a search. | ||
| And yes, I don't think any of that in terms of Donald Trump's criminal record is we're disputing. | ||
| It's actually a lot of the book talks about his criminal trials and New York. | ||
| Isaac was in New York for much of that case, covering the trial day in and day out, and is a huge part of the campaign. | ||
| And I think one of the interesting findings in the book, and this is something that Trump told our co-author, Josh Dossi, when he met with him at Mar-a-Lago, is even Trump was surprised at how many Republicans came to his defense after he was indicted during the criminal trial. | ||
| Those scenes of Republican lawmakers coming in and out of the courthouse, holding press conferences. | ||
| That is, I think, a critical juncture point. | ||
| And one of the interesting scenes in the book is when Ron DeSantis' team is looking at media coverage and saying they can't break through because all of the coverage is about Trump. | ||
| And they joke, maybe we should have Governor DeSantis arrested because that would be a helpful way to sort of get attention to the governor. | ||
| Anything to add to that since you were up in New York? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, one of the amazing things that comes through in the book, we didn't know this at the time, is, you know, while Trump is on trial, he's stuck in New York. | |
| He can't campaign like he ordinarily would. | ||
| And the campaign takes advantage of that to what do candidates usually do when they go to New York? | ||
| They do fundraising. | ||
| And so while Trump is on trial for charges arising from basically the allegations are campaign finance violations, he's out raising money. | ||
| And we've got him on tape talking about how he's asking people for millions and millions of dollars. | ||
| You know, campaign finance rules, there's a lot that you used to not be able to do that you can do now. | ||
| One of the few things that you're still not allowed to do, technically, is a federal candidate cannot solicit contributions in excess of federal limits, which are, depending on the way they configure it, you can get almost up to a million dollars. | ||
| And Trump's on the tape actually saying, I know I can only ask you for a million dollars, but that's stupid. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| And I want more. | ||
| You're richer. | ||
| You can afford it. | ||
| And does he get it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, I mean, Trump, this is another change from the previous campaigns, the audacity of Trump's fundraisers. | ||
| I mean, some people at these dinners describe them. | ||
| It's not just him bragging on tape, actually, because we also have sources who have been to these meetings and talk about the, you know, kind of a shakedown. | ||
| You come in here, you offer me $5 million. | ||
| I think it should be $50 million. | ||
| We end the night with $25 million. | ||
| Meanwhile, what is the fundraising efforts like for Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, kick that back to Tyler. | |
| I mean, one of the reasons that they did the early debate was they were in real trouble with the money. | ||
| Yeah, one of the things I think is fascinating in the book is we have documentation of Joe Biden's campaign's financial struggles. | ||
| And so it has not been previously reported, but we have these documents that show they kept cutting their, they would set these fundraising targets and they kept cutting them back because they were not reaching their goals. | ||
| And as Isaac said, we have this memo in the book where his senior advisors make the case to the president that he should do an early debate in part because they were so worried about the financial, you know, the financial situation on the campaign. | ||
| And another thing is there's the famous fundraiser that he does with George Clooney in Los Angeles that has gotten a lot of attention because a lot of the guests, including Clooney, were concerned about his appearance during that fundraiser. | ||
| In retrospect, many of Joe Biden's senior aides were racking their brain. | ||
| Why did we have him go twice to Europe, go to Wilmington as his son was on trial, and then fly right to LA for this star-studded fundraiser. | ||
| And they just said it was the only date that George Clooney and Julia Roberts could do together with the president. | ||
| And the campaign was in such dire financial straits that they had to raise that money. | ||
| We'll go to Johnny in Dearborn, Michigan, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I was wondering what kind of role you think the Gaza Israel issue played in the campaign. | ||
| And well, I would say here in Dearborn, it played a big role. | ||
| And we actually had a third party candidate, Jill Stein, show up quite a few times to the city. | ||
| And, you know, there was two groups in the Democrat or the Gaza issue. | ||
| One was called Uncommitted, and another was called Abandoned Harris. | ||
| And, you know, Uncommitted wanted to whine on the floor of the DNC. | ||
| But Abandoned Harris, they went with the third party. | ||
| And some reason, Uncommitted gets all the credit for what Abandon Harris did. | ||
| But what do you think about that? | ||
| All right, Johnny, thank you for that question. | ||
| Isaac, do you want to take it first? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, one of the amazing, there's a, we're in New Hampshire with the Trump campaign, so he's wrapping up the primary and starting to look at the general. | |
| And they're looking at the, they're telling us they're looking at the Israel gods, how that's ripping the Democratic coalition apart and just licking their lips. | ||
| We haven't even started pouring fuel on that fire yet. | ||
| And one of the things that Trump did was he would stand up at rallies or go to donors and say, anyone who protests Israel students on college campuses going to revoke their student visas and kick him out of the country. | ||
| Look what he's done as president, by the way. | ||
| But at the same time, he's going to Dearborn. | ||
| He's going to Muslim American communities and saying, I'm the peace candidate. | ||
| I'm your vote to stop the war. | ||
| He's saying completely different things to completely different audiences, and he gets away with it. | ||
| And on the Democratic side, it was a hugely important issue. | ||
| I mean, I don't think you can underestimate what it did to the Democratic coalition, but also the impact it had on campaigning. | ||
| So it was both a political issue, but also an operational issue. | ||
| We write about in the book a number of examples. | ||
| Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, tells Joe Biden that this is going to be your Vietnam moment. | ||
| We also have General Malley Dillon, the campaign manager, saying that the war was hurting the campaign operations because a lot of presidential campaigns, a lot of political campaigns in general, are staffed by young people. | ||
| They require long hours, low pay, and often moving around the country. | ||
| And Joe Biden was not the most inspiring candidate for young people, but then the war in Gaza made that even worse. | ||
| And so it was hard for the campaign to recruit people to work on the staff. | ||
| And another thing I think is interesting is that this is the, as we were talking about earlier, Kamala Harris trying to break from Joe Biden. | ||
| This is one issue where Kamala Harris really disagreed with Joe Biden. | ||
| She thought he was too soft when it came to dealing with when it came with Netanyahu. | ||
| And she wanted to take a tougher stance, I mean a more empathetic stance toward the suffering of Palestinians. | ||
| But she was told by national security officials that if she separated from Biden on this, it could make the hostage negotiations more difficult, that they had to present a united front publicly because the U.S. was engaged in a lot of diplomatic efforts to try to secure the release of hostages. | ||
| So as much, just to wrap up, yeah, as much as she wanted to break with him on this one issue, it proved to be quite difficult because of the diplomatic efforts underway. | ||
| We read at the beginning in the book jacket talking about the president being unrestrained. | ||
| Conversely, Kamala Harris, from what you've written, what you're talking about today, is restrained in so many ways. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, you know, the six meetings about whether to go on Rogan is such a good example of that. | |
| But there are others in that period of the book where kind of, I think a lot of people thought, you know, the vibes were great and the campaign was going well. | ||
| But it's kind of behind the scenes, they're paralyzed. | ||
| I mean, some of the other examples we have are how are they going to respond to people might remember the ad that the Trump campaign was running constantly about Harris's position on trans rights. | ||
| How are they going to respond to that? | ||
| Trying to come up with a response. | ||
| In the end, they don't. | ||
| They don't run any ads. | ||
| She does address it in a Fox News interview, but they don't run any ads on it. | ||
| She had an answer prepared in the debate. | ||
| They never asked about it in the debate. | ||
| She never got to give one. | ||
| Another great example, Trump was hitting her on her time at McDonald's. | ||
| The campaign is agonizing. | ||
| How do we handle that? | ||
| How do we respond? | ||
| Do we set up a feature story and give them great access? | ||
| It takes weeks and weeks and weeks. | ||
| They eventually put out like a four-sentence statement and hope it goes away. | ||
| Analysis paralysis, sounds like. | ||
| All right, Joanna, Germantown, Maryland, Democratic caller. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Well, I think that the number one bottom line, real reason that Trump won and the Democrats lost is because Trump is a master at playing on people's fears. | ||
| You know, the Mexicans are coming. | ||
| The Mexicans are coming. | ||
| Bar the door, Katie. | ||
| And our transgenders are targeting your children and going to turn them into hermaphrodites. | ||
| He's really good at going after the shiny objects and then playing on people's fears. | ||
| And I think, bottom line, that's what put him over the finish line. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's start with Tyler. | ||
| You want to take that one first? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is something that we have long seen in political campaigns about running to people's fears and appealing to them. | ||
| I think that is definitely a huge part of that. | ||
| I think another thing that Democrats struggled with in this election is presenting a vision for the future. | ||
| I think one of the things as you look at Joe Biden's campaign, a lot of it was sort of resting on the laurels of what they thought was success. | ||
| And we write in the book this sort of exchange between Ron Clain, Joe Biden's former chief of staff, and the president in which Ron is encouraging the president to lay out an agenda for the future. | ||
| And Biden says, well, you know, I don't want to promise something I can't deliver. | ||
| And I've done all this. | ||
| And, you know, I can tout the infrastructure law, the CHIPS Act, sort of the legislative successes he's had in the first two years. | ||
| And Ron is saying, you know, you need to present something for the future. | ||
| And I think that's something else that Kamala Harris struggled with was what was her message. | ||
| Obviously, you know, Trump really honed in on the economy and immigration. | ||
| And to the caller's point, really trying to animate the fears of voters. | ||
| And that's definitely a part of political campaigning and painting your opponent as a danger, as Trump often does. | ||
| But I think Democrats also struggled with their own message, too. | ||
| And you write in the book how the president, President Biden, thought what you all just mentioned was good enough. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| I mean, he thought that what he should, you know, one of the things that I think is really remarkable is in all these interviews and conversations I had, many of Biden's closest aides would point to historians and say, look at this new ranking of modern presidents. | ||
| Joe Biden is in, you know, number 14 of the best presidents the country has ever had. | ||
| Voters weren't really looking at historical rankings. | ||
| They were looking at their bank accounts and the cost of gas and the cost of groceries. | ||
| And that's what they were voting on. | ||
| And so I think there was a little bit of, well, historians think we're doing a good job. | ||
| That should be enough. | ||
| And let me just read a little bit more from the book on this point that you're talking about. | ||
| There was a view popular among some political insiders that this election had been over before it started. | ||
| The overwhelming majority of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track. | ||
| They were fed up with inflation, immigration, and overseas conflicts. | ||
| And they blamed the sitting president and his vice president for their feelings of economic and global insecurity. | ||
| But the true story of the 2024 campaign is not so impersonal, and the outcome was not so predetermined. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, the Democrats recognized that they needed to have a winning message on the economy. | |
| And there's another great moment of the Harris campaign indecision where in her debate prep, They're going through, you know, what are the major issues and what are her key points going to be? | ||
| They get to the economy, let's come back to it. | ||
| Come back to it, let's come back to it. | ||
| And they never come up with anything, ultimately. | ||
| And it was that inability to articulate what she was running for on the number one issue that voters cared about, whereas everyone knew what they were getting with Trump. | ||
| Nate in Irvington, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how you guys doing? | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Great book. | ||
| I can't wait to purchase it. | ||
| I think there were two also pain points that America was filling that Democrats didn't really cover or even try to reach out to the people. | ||
| I think one thing that the Democrats, they always message us, hey, we're not the elite group. | ||
| We're not the elite party. | ||
| We're anti-elite. | ||
| But I do a lot of grassroots work with a lot of organizations, and they never reach and talk to the grassroots communities. | ||
| I think that the Democrats have morphed into an elitist kind of party, and they don't have people that are really doing the work on the ground and talking to the people at the table, making decisions, helping out the Democrats kind of frame their messaging. | ||
| Like workforce development, the economy, things that affect the housing, things that affect young kids and young voters they don't talk to, they don't reach out to. | ||
| Okay, Nate, I want to take your point. | ||
| You're both nodding your heads. | ||
| Yeah, I think this is something that Democrats have long struggled with, and we're seeing this sort of fissures in the party explode because of this. | ||
| And I think, you know, just yesterday, my colleague in The Times wrote about this new group, Majority Democrats, that are trying to move the party beyond this sort of elite label. | ||
| I think one of the challenges that Democrats have had and have today is this idea that they are the party of just old people, right? | ||
| I think we saw in the New York City mayor's race, the success of Zoran Mandani, that sort of young, youthful energy is something a lot of Democrats are looking for. | ||
| And I also think one of the things that Trump did quite well that we talk about in the book quite extensively is his outreach to people that are not regular consumers of media, that are not regular voters, expanding the electorate in the way that a lot of politicians talk about and in the way that Bernie Sanders often talked about when he was running for president. | ||
| I covered his campaign in 2019 and 2020. | ||
| And he said, you know, we have to reimagine the electorate and bring people into the fold that are not traditional Democrats and are not regular voters. | ||
| And that's something Trump did quite well. | ||
| And Isaac, when you look at Democrats typically over the past couple of campaigns for presidential, they'll hold these big rallies with these Hollywood stars. | ||
| And they do, I mean, Hillary Clinton did it. | ||
| And then, you know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did it with Beyonce, et cetera. | ||
| Their conventions, Hollywood stars. | ||
| Does it work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there were some instances, particularly in this campaign, that were sort of head scratchers. | |
| Maybe the best example is they brought Bruce Springsteen to a town in Georgia that is prized for its diversity. | ||
| And Bruce Springsteen has an overwhelmingly white fan base. | ||
| I mean, the press corps, really, really into it. | ||
| The people attending the rally, a little less. | ||
| Bon Jovi is another one. | ||
| There was a little bit of a mismatch between the celebrities who the staff thought were cool and who the voters wanted to see. | ||
| Yeah, I was actually at that rally in Clarkston, Georgia, where they brought Bruce Springsteen. | ||
| And Bruce Springsteen's identity is very tied into New Jersey. | ||
| And maybe he would be a great fit for Pennsylvania, a battleground state. | ||
| But Georgia was one where I was there, and it was remarkable to see people just not that interested in hearing him. | ||
| Bon Jovi performed in Detroit the night before the election. | ||
| There's now this ongoing sort of misery among Democrats about Lady Gaga. | ||
| She has done this rally the night before the election multiple times. | ||
| She did it for Hillary Clinton. | ||
| She did it for Kamala Harris, and we know how both those elections turned out. | ||
| So you're right, the celebrities are a huge part of the Democratic Party brand. | ||
| But to the caller's point, that may be saturating for a certain market, but may not do as well to help the party's brand moving forward. | ||
| Let's go back into the campaign previously in the June 27th CNN debate. | ||
| You write in the book this. | ||
| The president signed off on an early debate, and they quickly struck a date with the Trump campaign in CNN for June 27th. | ||
| The senior advisors highlighted this potential date as ideal because it would come almost two weeks after his final overseas trip before the November election. | ||
| To start preparing well ahead of time, the advisors recommended he start weekly prep sessions with Bruce Reed, as well as practicing through press and radio interviews and a network town hall. | ||
| The town hall never happened. | ||
| We'll get to that point as to why that never happened. | ||
| But I want to go to the debate, one point in the debate, where the president is talking about immigration. | ||
| We significantly increased the number of asylum officers. | ||
| Significantly, by the way, the Border Patrol endorsed me, endorsed my position. | ||
| In addition to that, we found ourselves in a situation where when he was president, he was taking, separating babies from their mothers, putting them in cages, making sure the families were separated. | ||
| That's not the right way to go. | ||
| What I've done since I've changed the law, what's happened, I've changed it in a way that now you're in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally. | ||
| That's better than when he left office. | ||
| And I'm going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the total initiative relative to what we're going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers. | ||
| President Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I really don't know what he said at the end of this, and I don't think he knows what he said either. | |
| Look, we had the safest border in the history of our country. | ||
| All he had to do was leave it. | ||
| All he had to do was leave it. | ||
| He decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylum. | ||
| Isaac Ardenster, talk about what you learned about the president's preparation for that debate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we should talk about what Joe Biden's doing with his face there, which was advice that came from Steven Spielberg, the Academy Award-winning director, who also coached him on the 2024 State of the Union, which the Democrats thought went really, really well. | |
| So they brought him back to help with the debate. | ||
| And he was telling Biden that, you know, you're on screen the whole time. | ||
| We significantly increased the review. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So even when you're not talking, you know, make use of that time to express your reaction, to communicate nonverbally. | |
| And Biden, in the debate prep, really gravitated to that advice. | ||
| Someone said he clung to it like a life raft. | ||
| Some other aides were concerned, though. | ||
| They said, you know, that might not work the way that you think. | ||
| They were concerned about how he would look confused or lost. | ||
| And I think that's the way ultimately that most Americans watching it saw. | ||
| Tyler? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this debate was just a disaster, and it's remarkable to rewatch it. | ||
| You know, more than a year, more than a year later, I was actually at that debate. | ||
| I was the print pool reporter traveling with the president on Air Force One. | ||
| And that four days from Thursday to Sunday where he has the debate, does some fundraising, and then ends at Camp David was just this really unbelievable period where it's the party is falling apart and it's as if nothing is wrong there. | ||
| But I think one of the critical things that has gotten some attention from the book is this memo that you were reading from. | ||
| This is a memo that was written to Joe Biden by his senior advisors, encouraging him to do an early debate. | ||
| I think what is interesting about that is there's a lot of conversation about how his aides tried to hide him and keep him away from the public. | ||
| But they are the ones telling him, you should go out and do a debate. | ||
| They're realizing that he's not, he's behind in raising money, he's behind in the polls, and they need to do something to shake up the race. | ||
| And they think the best thing to do is to have him go out in the debate. | ||
| Mike Donlin, his closest advisor, says he has to debate. | ||
| There are some people outside that inner circle who think it's a really bad idea, that he should not debate. | ||
| He's not up for it. | ||
| It's not going to go well. | ||
| But the people closest to him didn't really consider that. | ||
| There was sort of universal agreement he needed to do it and they decided to do it early. | ||
| Isaac, as the Trump campaign is watching this debate, what are they saying and thinking? | ||
| And then what does President Trump say when he leaves the stage? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So to set the scene for you, so you know, we're all watching in like a big arena and then the campaigns have their own private rooms. | |
| So when the debate starts in the Trump campaign private room, they start freaking out because they can't hear Biden and they think the TV is malfunctioning. | ||
| Like what a time for the TV to stop working. | ||
| And only then do they realize that it is not a problem with the TV. |