| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Was a split. | |
| There were firms that immediately settled, offered now close to a billion dollars in free pro bono services for the White House and the Trump administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then there were firms that put up a fight, went to court. | |
| All of those firms have prevailed so far. | ||
| The Trump administration lost quite quickly in all of those cases. | ||
| They're now appealing this, but the firms that stood up are looking pretty good at this point. | ||
| On the sort of other side of the ledger, the firms that entered into these settlements, they had a lot of overheated claims about what would happen if they didn't enter into those deals. | ||
| Brad Karp from Paul Weiss, which is a firm I used to work at, but Brad Karp is not a reputable person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll just leave it at that. | |
| He claimed that the firm was at existential risk and would go out of business if they did not give Trump what he wanted, which was $40 million. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Paul Weiss was the first firm to settle. | |
| They never should have done it. | ||
| It has raised a host of legal issues, including whether or not the firm violated a variety of federal and state criminal laws. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So these deals look worse and worse and worse for the people that entered into them. | |
| And I think particularly the legal profession and I guess I would say the political class or people who follow politics closely have tended to rally around the firms that fought back. | ||
| And I think they're feeling pretty good about where they've landed. | ||
| Time for just one or two more calls. | ||
| Kathleen's waiting in Williamsburg, Virginia line for Democrats. | ||
| You're on with Ankush Kadori. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As a matter of fact, Mr. Kedori has just hit upon it that the minute that's missing with Epstein hanging from the cell. | |
| And Trump and them, they can cover everything up. | ||
| And the young girls, the girls are now women, and they would be the only key to it. | ||
| But as he said, why traumatize them? | ||
| That's Kathleen in Virginia. | ||
| Are you inclined to believe that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered or that he committed suicide? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That he committed suicide. | |
| I mean, I understand that there are questions. | ||
| Many people have questions about them, about it, but I think the notion of there having been like a murder of him in this context, it's very hard for me to take seriously, that it would somehow be covered up in this fashion so successfully. | ||
| When you talk about your concerns about releasing the Epstein files, and again, whatever they may be, the full files, is there a way to release certain information to answer questions like what the caller has? | ||
| And to can you release this kind of thing in parts without doing the damage that you're concerned about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so the answer is, in theory, yes, depending on the nature of the release. | |
| I think the problem that the administration has now created for itself is I think they've burned all of their public credibility on this front, right? | ||
| So even if they're saying, okay, we're going to release this, that, or the other, even if they attempt to do what I told you I would like them to see, try to put this to bed publicly, there's going to be a group of people among the public who just don't darse them anymore or will figure, okay, well, we didn't get the whole thing because they didn't give us the whole thing. | ||
| Maybe they're covering up, so on and so forth. | ||
| So, yeah, again, this is a situation of their own making, and I think there's no really good way to get out of it at this point. | ||
| Last call, Doug, Falls Church, Virginia, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Hey there, thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I love C-SPAN. | ||
| I thought the host asked the guest a great question a few minutes ago about the difference in coverage that Biden got when it was starting to become clear that he's incapacitated versus Trump generally. | ||
| And I think Trump definitely warrants being pushed on, but I think the guests really sidestepped the question. | ||
| And to me, it's very clear that this is revealing the bias of the media generally. | ||
| And it's hard to refute it, doesn't it? | ||
| And I would like to hear your guests' thoughts on that. | ||
| Give you a final minute or so here on Kush Kadori. | ||
| On Epstein, I mean, I just Trump and his administration created this situation. | ||
| They spent years fostering and cultivating these conspiracy theories. | ||
| Not just Trump himself, and we've all seen by now the Fox News clip from last year, but again, the vice president, the FBI director, the FBI deputy director, and the attorney general. | ||
| I don't know what to tell folks who think that we shouldn't be covering this. | ||
| These are the most senior law enforcement officials in the country, and the president, and the vice president. | ||
| I'm very sorry it's inconvenient for folks that these are the people who did this to themselves, but these are the people who did this to themselves. | ||
| Politico.com is where you can go to see all of Ankush Kadori's columns. | ||
| He is a senior writer with Politico magazine. | ||
| Appreciate your time this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| Author, lawyer, and presidential historian Talmadge Boston joins us now via Zoom from Dallas. | ||
| This weekend, the Dallas Morning News ran his column focusing on the post-presidential legacy of Joe Biden. | ||
| Mr. Talmadge Boston, you write in that piece that in just the last few months, Joe Biden's legacy has moved from downward spiral to full-blown free fall. | ||
| Explain why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, downward spiral had to do with 2024 and his decision in the first place to run for a second term when obviously he was not up to being able to run through an election, never mind, four more years. | |
| And then the delay in his withdrawal from the race meant there was no Democratic primary season. | ||
| And so there was no vetting of the candidates like you typically have in a primary season, which resulted in, of course, his vice president Kamala Harris, who turned out to be a weak candidate, lost every single swing state and thereby delivered the White House back to Donald Trump, which for Democrats anyway, was the worst possible news. | ||
| For years, they had sung Biden's praises as the man who defeated Donald Trump and got him out of the White House. | ||
| And now he was essentially singularly responsible for bringing him back. | ||
| So all that was bad. | ||
| But then in 2025, what's caused the freefall is now all the information coming up about the cover-up of his cognitive decline. | ||
| Most famously, Jake Tapper's in Alex Thompson's book, Original Sin, that goes into great detail about all that was known for quite some time, and that the White House was actually run by a Politburo, not the president. | ||
| None of these people had been elected. | ||
| None of these people had been confirmed. | ||
| Of course, run by a Politburo as well as Jill Biden and possibly even Hunter Biden, who obviously stayed very close to his father. | ||
| And now we have this situation with what's coming out about the granting of pardons that were all signed by Autopen, and people were pardoned whose names Biden didn't even know. | ||
| They were screened under some criteria. | ||
| And so it's reminiscent with all this that's coming out. | ||
| And now the House Oversight Committee is investigating the cover-up and the Autopen and some of Biden's key people, his Joe Biden's chief of staff and Joe Biden's doctor, have taken the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions, which obviously they have a constitutional right to take the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| But it doesn't bode well for the American public's reaction to whether there really is something to this cover-up or not. | ||
| And so you put all these facts together. | ||
| And of course, the House Oversight Committee is continuing with its investigation. | ||
| It's going to call more witnesses. | ||
| It very likely may call Jill Biden. | ||
| We'll see if Jill takes the Fifth Amendment in answering questions about her husband's presidency, which would be a first in American history. | ||
| So you put all these things together, and it's made Joe Biden a pariah to the Democratic Party. | ||
| And he was never thought highly of by Republicans. | ||
| So he is now at this stage in his life, a man with essentially no supporters on either side of the aisle. | ||
| Don't we need more time before we can be talking about the legacy of a president that left office six months ago? | ||
| Is it too early to say that this is the direction that his legacy is headed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Harry Truman famously said that it takes 50 years for the dust to settle. | |
| And certainly Harry Truman was a beneficiary that over he left the White House with very low approval ratings and over time his stature has risen and he's now considered a top 10 president. | ||
| And so yes, you need time to let the dust settle, see how these decisions that have been made by Biden during his presidency play out over the long term. | ||
| But I don't think you're going to get past this cognitive decline. | ||
| The most enduring image of Biden's presidency is going to be that June 27, 2024 debate with Trump and the follow-up interviews where he couldn't complete his sentences. | ||
| And so those facts are not going to change. | ||
| And it's like Woodrow Wilson having a stroke and his wife took over as president and she and his doctor tried to keep everybody out of the loop. | ||
| And so we basically had 15 months with a totally physically and mentally dysfunctional president. | ||
| This cover-up associated of the decline, which is detailed in the Tapper book, is reminiscent of Nixon's cover-up of the Watergate burglary. | ||
| So the facts of the cover-up are not going to go away. | ||
| The facts that we had a president who was not able to function well with more and more evidence coming out about that and exactly who was running the country in Biden's final year and with people taking the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| So these facts are not going to go away. | ||
| So in answer to your question, yes, over time, people will change their perceptions regarding certain things that Biden did. | ||
| But what I just covered, these facts are not going to go away. | ||
| When you say Biden is a president without a base of support right now, talking about Democrats blaming him and obviously Republicans who never had a great opinion of him if they were Donald Trump supporters. | ||
| The historical perspective here, is it unusual for a president who loses re-election to be sort of in this position? | ||
| Their own party is looking for somebody to blame for the loss, and they're going to get no help from the party that takes over from them. | ||
| Certainly that party would say all the problems are because of what happened over the past four years. | ||
| It's a person you can blame, at least for some amount of time, in a new presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think the key to this is what his own party thinks. | |
| And I think most Democrats today are in a very negative, have a very negative attitude toward Biden's presidency and the results of it and what is being learned about his essentially turning over the reins of decision-making to the Politburo and his family. | ||
| And of course, they're blaming him for the 2024 election loss. | ||
| And so these are beyond atypical. | ||
| These are unique situations. | ||
| This is a unique situation. | ||
| I mean, yes, Jimmy Carter, one-term president, he loses in his bid for a second term, but people knew he was honest and always honest. | ||
| He was a man of great character. | ||
| He was a man who truly tried to do his best for the American people, was always honest, never ducked press conferences or interviews, which, of course, is part of the saga of the Biden cognitive decline, his unwillingness to do press conferences or interviews, particularly that last year. | ||
| So I do think this is a uniquely bad situation for a former president to be viewed as negatively by his own party supporters as Joe Biden is. | ||
| I mean, I made the point in the Dallas Morning News op-ed piece that they're not rallying around him to write seven-figure checks to support the Joe Biden presidential library. | ||
| I wonder whether they will ever be able to raise money. | ||
| A presidential library these days costs upwards of $300 million, $400 million. | ||
| You have to have lots of people willing to write seven-figure checks. | ||
| The burden is really on the president to call on his old supporters to write the big checks, and that isn't happening. | ||
| And the two people who have been charged with the responsibility for fundraising for the Biden Library are two people who've already taken the Fifth Amendment in response to what was going on, Annie Tomasini and Mr. Bernal. | ||
| So we can't just pass over all of these things that we know and act like, oh, well, over time, it will all go away and people rethink it and they'll want to show their support for good old Joe. | ||
| I do not think that's going to happen. | ||
| Phone lines are open for viewers to get your thoughts on this topic. | ||
| We're talking about Joe Biden's presidential legacy. | ||
| Talmadge Boston, presidential historian, author, lawyer. | ||
| His column ran this weekend in the Dallas Morning News on this topic. | ||
| He's our guest. | ||
| You can chat with him on phone lines for Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| One more fact point here, Talmadge Boston, that you raise in your piece. | ||
| What do you read into Joe Biden's book deal as compared to other presidents? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it looks to me like Hatchett, who's the publisher who signed into the contract, paying him one-sixth of what Obama's got, but nonetheless, paying him $10 million. | |
| I can't imagine them making any money on that book. | ||
| I think they're going to lose most of it. | ||
| I mean, everybody knows Joe Biden, who couldn't complete his sentences in interviews, is now, quote, writing a book. | ||
| And so who's writing the book? | ||
| I mean, yes, presidents normally have collaborators who help them write it, but the president definitely is in charge and has a measure of control and so forth. | ||
| So there's the question of who's writing this book. | ||
| And then back to who's going to buy this book? | ||
| Are Democrats going to be standing in line to read some historical collaborator spin on the Joe Biden presidency? | ||
| Because they know Joe couldn't possibly write this book given his mental condition. | ||
| So I think this is going to be a huge loss for the publisher who signed the contract, even though it is substantially below what his predecessors have gotten. | ||
| I mean, Bill Clinton in 2004, more than 20 years ago, got 15 million. | ||
| So here we are 21 years later and stakes and cost of living and everything's going up in terms of book contract advances and so forth. | ||
| And Joe finally found a publisher. | ||
| But let's see when it comes out. | ||
| Let's see what the reception is. | ||
| Normally, when you sign a book contract, they're going to pay you more money in advance if you're willing to say certain controversial things. | ||
| So, exactly, what is Joe Biden going to say about his son Hunter, about the debate with Trump, about the interview with Stephanopoulos, about his going 12 months without holding cabinet meetings between June 23 and June 24, about the George Clooney reception, where Clooney said he didn't even, Biden didn't even recognize him. | ||
| I mean, all these things that, of course, the media has been covering well. | ||
| And now, here's CNN, which historically is not exactly a conservative station, is front and center on the story of the cognitive decline and the Pulit Bureau running the presidency. | ||
| And so I think the book is going to be a huge financial loss for the publisher. | ||
| You bring up Hunter Biden. | ||
| What do you make of his recent media tour, his criticism of the party not rallying around his father? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Hunter Biden, I think, is a person who has zero credibility with every American person who has any sense at all. | |
| Everything he's done has been a total disaster for his father. | ||
| And so anybody who would be paying attention to what Hunter Biden has to say, you have to wonder what kind of Kool-Aid have they been drinking. | ||
| He's obviously angry. | ||
| I mean, as long as his father was president, as long as his father was in good standing with at least a lot of folks, he found ways to make money, whether it was off of his paintings, whether it was off of the business deals he did with people from China and other places around the world. | ||
| So he's obviously at a huge financial loss by reason of his father's free fall and popularity and loss of power. | ||
| So he's doing what you would expect, although to get on the air on a podcast and start blasting expletives right and left just confirms that this is a guy who's out of control, been out of control, should not be respected. | ||
| And hopefully he will leave the scene soon so we don't have to hear from him anymore. | ||
| How long does it usually take historically for a former president to take on the elder statesman role in a party? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, normally they go right into it. | |
| I mean, you know, or they certainly try to go back into it. | ||
| But I mean, you notice, I mean, here was President Joe Biden, who, you know, during the last year and a half, two years, whatever, all he could do was read a teleprompter. | ||
| And that was the words that somebody else wrote. | ||
| And so for him now to open himself up to interviews and speaking without some canned teleprompter, that's not going to happen. | ||
| You don't lead a party or a country or anybody else by reading from a teleprompter. | ||
| And his predecessors have all had the horsepower to be able, until, for example, President Reagan, until, of course, he got Alzheimer's disease. | ||
| He lost his power to lead his party then. | ||
| But up until then, he was definitely a party leader. | ||
| George H.W. Bush played that role for a while. | ||
| Bill Clinton has played that role. | ||
| Barack Obama is playing that role. | ||
| So this is in the normal course of things. | ||
| And of course, Jimmy Carter, who had such an unsuccessful presidency, and yet over the time, he wrote all these best-selling books. | ||
| And by the time his funeral rolls around, everybody's singing his praises, regardless of what happened during his presidency. | ||
| But that was tied to Carter's integrity. | ||
| That was tied to Carter's good works and habitat for humanity and all these things. | ||
| Well, Joe Biden's not going to be able to do that. | ||
| I mean, he's not able to do much at all. | ||
| We saw that in the last part of his presidency and ever since his presidency. | ||
| Nobody's hiring him to give canned speeches. | ||
| And so he just, you know, he's 82 years old. | ||
| And the idea of being in his condition at that age, his capacity to lead anybody to do anything, I think is beyond doubtful. | ||
| Tommy Boston, our guest, presidential historian, author, including last year's How the Best Did It, Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents back in 2016. | ||
| It was cross-examining history. | ||
| A lawyer gets answers from the experts about our president's. | ||
| His column on Joe Biden's legacy ran this weekend in the Dallas Morning News, and he is here to take your phone calls, including from Ted out of Las Vegas Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I was referring back to all these. | |
| I've got a question for all these prosperity book writers about Biden's cognitives. | ||
| How was he able to commit all these crimes, including stating the election and all these other conspiracies about barisma and all these other GOP, you know, all these other crimes that he was able to commit in his bunker if he was so cognitive? | ||
| And also his next-to-last speech, it seemed like he had a very robust speech when he addressed the nation and Congress. | ||
| And nobody's talking about that positive speech. | ||
| How was he able to do that one? | ||
| And it seemed like the next to last speech is the one people are focusing on. | ||
| It seems like it was all rigged to me. | ||
| Well, in terms of you make mention of his crimes during his presidency, I have not made any assertion that he committed crimes during his presidency. | ||
| I know that there are some people who think that some of the things he did were criminal, and I'll leave that for others to draw conclusions on. | ||
| I think what he was saying is that the people who accuse him of masterminding crimes or conspiracies, if he was so cognitively declined, as they say, how could he have masterminded those things? | ||
| I think that was the caller's point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, okay. | |
| The bottom line answer to that is he didn't mastermind anything. | ||
| His wife and his son were there telling him what to do. | ||
| The Politburo, his Ron Clain and the others were telling him what to do and were doing. | ||
| And so he didn't mastermind anything. | ||
| That was why they were able to have such total control of him, as Jake Topper, Tapper, and Alex Thompson point out in their book. | ||
| And the whole question, who was running the country, is something we still don't know the answer to. | ||
| And that's what the House Oversight Committee is investigating to figure out how these decisions were made. | ||
| What was the second question that Ted asked? | ||
| I'm not quite sure, but Ken is in Manassas, Virginia. | ||
| So let's go to Ken on the Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| Thank you very much, Sir. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you very much, C-SPAN, for having me. | ||
| My question for you today is: I wonder if you will put in your book about how the political party, the newspapers and such covered up Joe Biden's decline. | ||
| And if we look back years into his presidency, it was early on. | ||
| You could even accuse the bike ride as a prime example. | ||
| And I want to know if you will write that in your book. | ||
| Well, thank you for the question. | ||
| About a month ago, I wrote a column for the Dallas Morning News where my subject matter was the Jake Tapper-Alex Thompson book, which on the one hand, is a good read, an easy read, a fact-filled read. | ||
| But what they left out was their own complicity in the cover-up and the media cover-up. | ||
| And here was Jake Tapper, who was in 2020, blasting Laura Trump in an interview because she had the courage to say, hey, I think this guy's in cognitive decline. | ||
| And Jake Tapper accused her of simply making fun of his stutter and was very harsh and rude to her. | ||
| Then a couple years later, Biden, after a prominent Congress woman had died and he had put the flag at half-mast at the White House and given this public tribute to her. | ||
| And then a couple of months later, here he's at a public function with Congressman and he says, where is she? | ||
| And then Tapper interviews him a week or two later and doesn't grill him on what were you thinking when you were asking where is the dead woman? | ||
| And then when the Wall Street Journal did its major investigation that led to its report that came out in early June 2024 about the bona fide cognitive decline and all the insiders who preferred to remain nameless, giving the details of it, and Tapper criticized it. | ||
| And of course, then, you know, two or three weeks later, there was the debate. | ||
| So CNN and Tapper certainly have a lot of complicity in the cover-up from a media standpoint. | ||
| I also did a column last November, Bob Woodward's book, which came out on the Biden presidency in October. | ||
| Of course, it came out after Biden had withdrawn and the debate meltdown. | ||
| But here's Bob Woodward saying that Joe Biden had a steady and purposeful presidency and sang the praises of his foreign policy. | ||
| Even in the book, he acknowledged that all of Woodward's sources from Russia said the only reason that they felt confident about invading Ukraine was because they knew that Biden was such a weak president as evidenced by the Afghanistan withdrawal. | ||
| And so here's Woodward acting like Biden was a good president when, and then, of course, after the debate meltdown, of course, his book's already going to print and ready to come out. | ||
| He acknowledges what everybody had to acknowledge, and that was it was a nuclear bomb meltdown were his words, something to that effect. | ||
| So there is a story here, and that's presumably part of what the House Oversight Committee is going to be investigating. | ||
| Not only what were the people in the White House doing to cover it up, but why was there so much attention or so much ignored by so much of the media about what was obvious to the American people? | ||
| I mean, I wrote a column for the morning news in 2020 saying that if somebody who's over 75 years old says, I want to be president, they need a complete fiscal exam and the results made public to the public so that we can evaluate whether this person has the cognitive capacity to serve for four years. | ||
| Then in January 2024, I wrote a column for the morning news saying with each passing day, he's becoming more cognitively dysfunctional. | ||
| And so what I was seeing was what everybody was seeing. | ||
| And yet so much of the media was pretending like it wasn't there. | ||
| So there's a real story there. | ||
| I think one of the most fascinating and fun incidents in the Tapper Thompson book is on the night of the June 27, 2024 debate, Rob Reiner, the television star and director, producer, anyway, had a big party at his house in California for all kinds of Hollywood celebrities. | ||
| And one of the people who he invited to come to the party was Kamala Harris's husband, Doug Imhoff. | ||
| And so they're all eating and drinking and having a big time and thinking this debate's going to go great and old Joe's going to do great. | ||
| And then he collapses. | ||
| And all of a sudden, Rob Reiner just loses his temper and aims it at Doug Imhoff, who surely has been around Biden. | ||
| His wife's been around Biden. | ||
| Let's not pretend like this guy's in good shape. | ||
| And yet here we are and we're stuck with him as our presumptive nominee at that point. | ||
| And so there really is a big story here of the media cover-up as well as the White House insider cover-up. | ||
| And that's not going to go away. | ||
| Just like Watergate doesn't go away for Nixon and Monica Lewinsky doesn't go away for Bill Clinton. | ||
| These things don't go away. | ||
| To California, this is Barbara waiting on Our Line for Democrats. | ||
| Barbara, you're on with Talmudge Boston. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, what I wanted to say is you're right. | |
| You guys have used Mr. Biden as a mirror for yourselves. | ||
| You guys have told so many lies. | ||
| You guys are going to get thrown down Satan's throat. | ||
| And Satan probably a choke on you. | ||
| You know, you guys know, don't. | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| I'm a historian. | ||
| I write history books. | ||
| I don't cover the White House. | ||
| If you've read my book and you find one lie in it, I'd like for you to bring it to my attention. | ||
| I'm telling the truth about what I see and what I analyze from the facts that are really not in dispute. | ||
| And so I don't know what you're talking about, but I think you need to aim your comments at somebody else. | ||
| On your book from last year, How the Best Did It Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents? | ||
| Who are our top presidents? | ||
| What are the lessons? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, our eight greatest presidents, and this comes largely from the C-SPAN presidential ranking poll, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. | |
| The only adjustment that I made to the C-SPAN presidential ranking poll, I think Harry Truman is overrated. | ||
| I pulled him out of the top eight. | ||
| I moved Jefferson and Kennedy and Reagan up a notch. | ||
| I think Truman is overrated. | ||
| He got us into Korea, had no idea how to get us out. | ||
| He had no idea how to deal with McCarthyism. | ||
| He gets lots of credit for bringing a prompt into World War II, which obviously we're glad he did. | ||
| But on the other hand, there was no plan B. | ||
| It was a no-brainer decision. | ||
| Plan B was to invade Japan, which would have cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. | ||
| So anyway, those are my top eight presidents. | ||
| In my book, per president, I have a chapter on each president, an average of three leadership traits per president for a total of 24 leadership traits. | ||
| But they cover integrity. | ||
| They cover how to go across the aisle and work with people who you have issues with to build consensus. | ||
| They go to best practices in communication. | ||
| They go to magnanimity. | ||
| They go to promise keeping. | ||
| They go to addressing your public remarks to the better angels of our nature, the way John F. Kennedy did using those magic words from Lincoln's first in our drill. | ||
| They go to not only the capacity to be optimistic, but to inspire optimism, the way Ronald Reagan did in bringing the country back after the Jimmy Carter presidency. | ||
| So those are just a sampling of the 24 leadership traits that are covered in the book. | ||
| What president do you think had the most integrity? | ||
| And what president do you think was the best able to work with the other side of the aisle? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the best integrity, I think there's a tie for first between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. | |
| Washington, of course, famously could not tell a lie. | ||
| And nobody ever accused Washington of dishonesty. | ||
| And Lincoln, of course, was honest Abe. | ||
| And the same with him. | ||
| So in terms of integrity, you're not going to beat Washington and Lincoln. | ||
| The second question was who best worked across the aisle, could get things done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Across the aisle, I think the award goes to Thomas Jefferson. | |
| Jefferson obviously succeeded John Adams. | ||
| The country had been badly divided during Adams' presidency. | ||
| Adams was a Federalist. | ||
| Congress was controlled by the Federalist Party during his presidency. | ||
| Adams was notoriously thin-skinned, hated criticism. | ||
| And so Adams and the president and the Congress during his presidency passed what was called the Sedition Act that made it a crime punishable by incarceration for anyone to criticize Adams or any Federalist policy. | ||
| And so people were being thrown in jail for exercising their freedom of speech and freedom of the press rights. | ||
| Fortunately, the Sedition Act expired by its own terms at the end of Adams' presidency. | ||
| But that was the country that Jefferson was taking over, a country so at war with itself that people were throwing each other in jail just because of expressing their constitutional rights. | ||
| So Jefferson had this grand strategy, and it started with his first inaugural address, which is regarded as one of the great inaugural addresses. | ||
| He said, my fellow Americans, we are all federalists. | ||
| We are all Republicans, i.e., we are all Americans. | ||
| And we better start acting that way or this country is not going to make it. | ||
| And then over the course of his two terms, eight years, two to three times every week during the eight years, he would host dinners with people from 10 to 15 people, people from all beliefs and disagreements on political issues. | ||
| And he served them great wine and great food. | ||
| And he had one rule. | ||
| We're not going to talk about political hide-button issues. | ||
| We're going to talk about our families. | ||
| We're going to talk about what we do for a living. | ||
| We talk about history, literature, music. | ||
| And we're going to have a good time. | ||
| And we're going to decide, even if we have political disagreements by day, we can be friends at night. | ||
| And the old adage, if somebody likes you, they're going to give you the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| And if they don't, they won't. | ||
| And that politics is all about relationships. | ||
| Well, no, he didn't break down all the walls of polarization in the first dinner, the third dinner, or the fifth dinner. | ||
| But if you keep a steady pace of working, working, working to bring those walls down and get people to realize we can have civil discourse, we can have mutual respect. | ||
| And of course, Jefferson had a successful presidency. | ||
| In particular, obviously, the Louisiana Purchase was huge. | ||
| He's regarded as one of our eight great presidents. | ||
| And he was taking over a country that was totally at war with itself politically. | ||
| So he gets my award for being the best at being able to start building consensus, getting people on the same page, and moving America forward. | ||
| Lessons you can learn in how the best did it. | ||
| Leadership lessons from our top presidents, Talmudge Boston's book. | ||
| It's over his right shoulder there. | ||
| And there it is on your screen. | ||
| It came out in 2024. | ||
| He's with us for less than 10 minutes. | ||
| This is Gene waiting in South Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Gene, thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In particular, Gene, you're with us. | |
| Got to stick by your phone, Gene. | ||
| So we go to Otis in South Carolina as well. | ||
| It's Prosperity South Carolina, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I just wanted to know. | |
| Does he think that Biden's cognitive abilities were caused from him contracting COVID? | ||
| And because I remember when the 2020 debates between him and Trump, there's no way Trump beat him in any of the debates. | ||
| So he was on top of his game then, and I just believe that maybe the COVID was what helped him have a cognitive problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't pretend to be a doctor, and I'm not going to therefore weigh in and opine on whether Biden having contracted COVID was related to his cognitive decline. | |
| I agree with you that in the 2020 presidential debates, Biden was better than Trump in the debates. | ||
| Trump was constantly interrupting, and it all was to his disadvantage. | ||
| But I haven't heard any doctor say that the reason Biden lost his cognitive capability was because he contracted COVID, because we've got a whole country full of people who contracted COVID. | ||
| And hopefully most of us are not suffering cognitive decline. | ||
| Some what-if history here on legacies. | ||
| What if Joe Biden had said, I'm going to be a one-term president, stuck with that promise, stepped aside, and a primary happens. | ||
| What would you be saying about his legacy in place in the party today if that had happened, regardless of whether whatever Democrat emerged, be it Kamala Harris or somebody else, had won or lost? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You mentioned the column I wrote that was in yesterday's Johns Morning News. | |
| I said his decline and his legacy is self-inflicted. | ||
| He's done it to himself. | ||
| If he had, toward the end of his one and only term, said, you know what, I was elected as a transition president for one term. | ||
| I've done the best I could. | ||
| We've done some good things. | ||
| We've restored some improved relations with our international allies. | ||
| We've gotten some legislation passed helping the infrastructure. | ||
| I did the best I could. | ||
| He'd be in the Jimmy Carter to maybe better than Jimmy Carter class. | ||
| But of course, at the same time, when we're talking about improving our relationship with our allies, he also, because of his Afghanistan withdrawal, inspired Putin to invade Ukraine. | ||
| He also has a mixed record on Israel. | ||
| So his foreign policy is up in the air. | ||
| On his economic policy, obviously we had the highest inflation that we'd had in over 30 years. | ||
| We had a substantial increase in the federal deficit. | ||
| So his economic policies are not exactly A-plus by any means. | ||
| They're, you know, just a mixed bag. | ||
| And then, of course, we have the extended period during which we had an open border and all that came with that. | ||
| And then states like Texas, where I live and others saying, we don't know what to do with these people. | ||
| And if there's cities that call themselves sanctuary cities, we're going to let you have them. | ||
| You want to be a sanctuary here? | ||
| Have all these illegal immigrants who are just running across the border under President Biden's watch? | ||
| So I think he has a mixed record, but I do think that people wouldn't.org. |