This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up?
Like a lot of people, I was worried about Biden’s age when he ran for president in 2020. So after he won, I found myself continuously asking top White House staffers: How’s the president? How is he in meetings? What’s his energy like?
I always got the same answer: He’s great. Completely in command. His energy is amazing.
These are people I had known for a long time. I didn’t think they were lying to me. But the harder question, in retrospect, was whether they were lying to themselves.
The White House, I came to think, had created this false distinction in their minds. They would admit privately — publicly, even — that Biden couldn’t communicate as he had once been able to. But that was just theatrics. The real work of the presidency, they always told me, was decision-making. And it was in decision-making that they believed Biden shined.
That never made sense to me. In what possible definition of the presidency — or of running a re-election campaign — is the ability to communicate with the public not core to the job? And how could you believe that capacity had degraded — but nothing else had?
We all know the story from there: Biden’s collapse in the presidential debate. The push to move him from the ticket. Kamala Harris’s sprint of a campaign. Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
In the last couple of months, I feel like I’ve watched a new conventional wisdom solidify. When I was writing pieces about how Biden shouldn’t run again, I got raked over the coals. I will say it was definitely not something everybody believed. But now the argument is that everybody knew he was incapable of handling the job of the presidency — that they knew it and they were covering it up.
Was there a cover-up? A cover-up would at least reveal the core of cold rationality to this system. It would mean that people dealing with Biden every single day knew the truth, saw it clearly and decided to lie. That there were adults in the room, if only maligned ones.
In a way, that would be more comforting than what I think actually happened. So there are questions here that are relevant, long beyond the Biden campaign. How do you see what is right in front of your eyes when you don’t want to see it? How do you not let loyalty — to a person, to a party, to a cause — blind you?
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” is a reconstruction of what Democrats should have known and when they should have known it.
Tapper is, of course, an anchor at CNN. He was comoderator of that historic — and for Biden, disastrous — presidential debate. Thompson covered Biden at Axios.
So I asked Tapper on the show to talk through what they learned in the more than 200 interviews behind that book and what lessons we can take from it. I wanted to start in a particular moment: when I found my own doubts about Biden impossible to ignore any longer.
And just to note, we taped this before the news of Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis. The episode isn’t any less relevant. In fact, maybe it’s more relevant. But of course I wanted to say: We wish him well.
Ezra Klein: Jake Tapper, welcome to the show.
Jake Tapper: It’s great to be here. Thanks so much, and congrats on all the success of this.
Thank you. I want to start in the middle: You tell the story of special prosecutor Robert Hur’s interviews with Joe Biden in a lot more detail than I had heard it before.
I think people know that when the report came out, the prosecutor called Biden a well-meaning old man with a flagging memory.
Something like that, yes. Which, by the way, is a nice description. That’s not a mean description. It’s an accurate, nice description.
Well, at that moment it was taken as a very mean description.
It was.
So what was going on behind that description?
I think Robert Hur and the prosecutors were legitimately flabbergasted by how President Biden appeared in that deposition in the interview in October 2023. They were stunned.
And I think they legitimately debated how he would appear to a jury and thought: If there’s even one person who sees him the way that we see him — which is addled — we’re not going to be able to get a conviction.
What was happening in those conversations that he seemed so addled?
If you read the transcript of the Hur interview, he is just meandering, unable to focus on a train of thought. He doesn’t know dates. He’s asked about a period that’s significant for the investigation, about his holding and sharing information that is of a classified nature — so 2017, 2018.
First of all, he thinks that it is around that time that Beau died and that Beau was deployed. It’s not. Beau died in 2015, and he had been deployed years before that.
Second of all, he’s just unable to place events.
Archived clip:
Biden: Trump gets elected in November of 2017.
Hur: 2016.
Biden: Sixteen. 2016. All right. So — [Pauses.] Why do I have 2017 here?
Hur: That’s when you left office — in January of 2017.
Biden: OK. But that’s when Trump gets sworn in. In January.
Hur: Correct.
Biden: OK, yes.
It’s beyond just an avuncular, charming Irish Paul sharing anecdotes. It’s a meandering old man.
And while Robert Hur got assailed as a partisan hack out to destroy Biden, my conclusion — and the conclusion of Attorney General Merrick Garland, by the way — was far from that.
There was a suspicion that Hur was trying to find a middle path. He didn’t want to prosecute the president, so he dinged him on memory so the right could feel good about that. I think people understood that as a political document.
When you read those transcripts, though — and you produce some of them in the book — the sense that the president of the United States is actually appearing too forgetful to be convicted of a crime that requires intent in front of a jury is a much more extraordinary and damning thing. In retrospect, it makes the reaction to the Hur report look much too modest because I think people assumed it wasn’t quite on the level.
I think it was on the level.
The pushback was interesting. There was the White House pushback, which was not about: Hey, the president broke the law — which is how prosecutors at the Justice Department thought it was going to be received. They thought the White House was going to be like: Oh crap, the president broke the law.
The pushback was not that, but rather that he was old — which I think is the tell from the White House. And they went to war, not just against Robert Hur but against their own attorney general, Merrick Garland.
This is in our book: Even though Biden brought Garland on board saying he wanted a fair and just attorney general and a Justice Department that had no fear or favor for anyone, Garland ultimately came to the conclusion that that’s not what Biden wanted. Biden did not want an independent Justice Department. He wanted one that would protect him and his son.
I happened to be at the White House on the day the Hur report came out.
Oh, wow.
I was there doing a bunch of other reporting. But one of the things I was there working on was a story that in my head at that moment was titled, “Is Joe Biden Up To This?” Because he’d been doing basically no interviews, not really doing press conferences. We had no real evidence that he was capable of the rigors of campaigning at that point.
And then they decided not to do the Super Bowl interview, which for me was a very big tell. That was a moment when I really shifted.
You have a different explanation than they gave me on why they didn’t do the Super Bowl interview. Why?
First of all, laid across all of this is the fact that he’s not capable of doing good interviews as of 2023. Period.
Right, they don’t do the Super Bowl interview the year before, either. They blame that on it being Fox. But they don’t do it.
They told me it was because they knew the Hur report was about to drop. And they knew it would have all this stuff about classified information and about him seeming superold and addled behind the scenes.
They didn’t want to have an interview on that, no matter with whom and no matter what the format was going to be. They didn’t want 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes of: Oh, my God, this Hur report says that you’re not up to the task.
The Hur interview comes out. Biden seems authentically furious. They call a press conference late that night.
I remember being in my hotel room after being at the White House all day, watching this press conference.
Archived clip of Biden: I know there’s some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events. There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself: It wasn’t any of their damn business.
And Biden attacks Hur. He is angry about the allegation that he didn’t remember when Beau died.
Archived clip of Biden: For any extraneous commentary, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It has no place in this report. The bottom line is the matter is now closed. I’m going to continue what I’ve always focused on: my job of being president of the United States of America.
At the end he takes some questions. And in this interview meant to reassure people about his memory, he mixes up Egypt and Mexico.
Archived clip of Biden: As you know, initially, the president of Mexico, Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.
That was the moment when it went from the question of: Can he do this? To: He can’t.
If you can’t go out and not have a memory flub in the press conference about your memory, you’re in real trouble.
And I would note that what Biden said in that press conference was not true. To hear Biden tell it, Robert Hur says: Do you remember what year Beau died?
But that’s not what happened. Biden brought up Beau.
Archived clip:
Robert Hur: Where did you keep the papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?
President Joe Biden: Well, um, I don’t know. This is what, 2017, 18, now? That period?
Hur: Yes, sir.
Biden: Remember: In this time frame, um, my son has, uh, either been deployed or is dying.
And look, I can’t imagine the grief he feels about Beau or his first wife and daughter.
One of the subtexts — or texts — of this book, obviously, is that the main areas where we think, according to top aides, that his diminishment happened the most had to do with times of extreme stress for Hunter in the summer of 2023, when the plea deal fell apart, and then the summer of 2024, when Hunter was convicted of a crime in a Delaware jury. Because in Joe Biden’s brain, understandably, there was a very real fear he was going to lose a third child — that Hunter was going to either overdose or commit suicide.
I’m not saying that as an excuse. I’m not saying that lightly. I’m just saying: This is part of what happened. That stress helped to really deteriorate his essence.
I think those parts of the books are really persuasive and sad.
The reason I wanted to focus on this Hur week is that it’s a moment when a lot of things burst out into the open.
After that press conference, I wrote a series of pieces arguing that Biden should step aside or be convinced not to run, that there should be an open convention —
You didn’t ask me to toot your horn, but let me just say: That was very gutsy and very difficult for you to do. I applauded you then, and I applaud you now. Because, first of all, probably a lot of people who are fans of yours didn’t want to hear it. And also, it’s kind of lonely to be saying things like that.
Well, I appreciate that. But the thing I want to get at here is: As you can imagine, when I write these pieces, I get a lot of incoming from Biden world. And they’re not happy about it.
And my honest assessment of them, my view of how they think of this, is that they actually think I’m wrong.
Yes.
They think I’m being unfair.
Some of them do.
Some of them do. Certainly the ones I hear from. [Chuckles.]
Well, you’re not telling me who you heard from, but I’ll tell you that this disaster that happened with Joe Biden running for re-election and then the cover-up of what he was like behind the scenes — what Robert Hur saw — was orchestrated by Joe and Jill and Hunter and Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti. There are other people to a lesser extent, but those five people are the most responsible.
“Cover-up” — that’s the word I want to get at here.
Throughout this whole period, like many political reporters, I am constantly asking people in the White House: How’s Joe Biden in meetings? How’s he doing?
And they all say, to a person — the line you often hear is: He can perform the presidency, but he can’t “perform” the presidency. His communication skills have degraded, but as a decision maker, he’s better than ever.
That kept a lot of people from writing about what was in front of your face. You think: Well, these people are seeing things I’m not. If they tell me he’s good in the meetings — I don’t know if he’s good in the meetings.
So when you say there’s a cover-up, my sense of these people is that this is what they believed — or at least had talked themselves into believing.
Do you feel Biden came off in other meetings the way he came off with Robert Hur, and people were just not telling anybody? Or is something more psychologically complex going on here?
Both. Yes, they were lying to themselves. They were lying to others.
But the definition of a cover-up is when you are hiding something that is an ugly fact. And the ugly fact is that the Joe Biden we all saw at the debate on June 27, 2024, did not just step out of nowhere. That was Joe Biden. And that was the logical consequence of what they had been hiding, in a big way, since 2023.
Look, I’m not saying that President Biden came across as addled in every meeting he had. What Alex Thompson, my co-author from Axios, and I are asserting is that, as far back as 2019, there was a Biden who was fine and then a nonfunctioning Biden. And from 2019 to 2024, the nonfunctioning Biden would rear his head increasingly.
What do I mean by “nonfunctioning”? I mean losing his train of thought in a manner that’s uncomfortable. I mean not able to come up with the names of top aides or close friends. I mean not recognizing people that he should recognize. I mean not able — at all — to communicate to the American people.
This metaphor was used by so many White House aides we interviewed: the frog in the boiling water. I think there is a degree to which, as the water is increasingly turned up, people don’t notice that it’s getting hotter and hotter.
We would hear from so many people who left their job at the White House and came back six months later — or turned on the TV six months later — and could not believe what they saw.
I always feel like you can track this across the last couple of elections.
Biden rescued the ticket to some degree in 2012. After Obama’s bad first debate with Mitt Romney, Biden mauls Paul Ryan.
Archived clip:
Paul Ryan: You can cut tax rates by 20 percent and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayers —
Biden: Not mathematically possible.
Ryan: It is mathematically possible. It’s been done before. It’s precisely what we’re proposing.
Biden: [Scoffs.] It has never been done before.
Ryan: It’s been done a couple of times, actually —
Biden: It has never been done before —
Ryan: Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates, increased growth. Ronald Reagan —
Biden: Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy!
Ryan: Ronald Reagan — [Chuckles, with audience.]
It’s an exceptional debate. And he gives the ticket its mojo back before Obama’s second debate with Romney.
Then there’s the 2016 convention. I think Biden gave the best speech there.
Archived clip of Biden: His lack of empathy and compassion can be summed up in a phrase I suspect he’s most proud of having made famous: “You’re fired!”
I mean, really, I’m not joking. Think about that. Think about that. Think about everything you learned as a child, no matter where you were raised. How can there be pleasure in saying, “You’re fired!”?
[Scattered audience applause.]
He’s trying to tell us he cares about the middle class. Give me a break! That’s a bunch of malarkey.
[Steady audience applause and cheers.]
By 2020, I thought his communication problems were already clear.
Archived clip of Biden: There’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey. There’s a reason for it. He doesn’t want to talk about the, the sub-, the substantive issues. It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family, and your family is hurting badly. If you’re making less than — if you’re a middle-class family, you’re getting hurt badly right now.
As even top campaign advisers told me and Alex, Covid was a disaster for the American people, but it was a blessing for Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020 because he got to basically run it from his basement. There were some appearances outside, but nobody was judging the size of the crowds, and a lot of this stuff was just done on TV.
You mentioned some of the accommodations that his staff begins making for him. One that feels very striking is the teleprompter at what are usually impromptu fund-raiser remarks. Do you want to talk through what that was?
So Biden’s presidency starts off. We’re all still in Covid lockdown — people forget the degree to which 2021 is still part of Covid. And notecards and teleprompters are just standard procedure for him. They become crutches.
To the degree that Democrats are getting phone calls in 2023 because he’s doing small fund-raisers — 40 or 50 people — and his campaign staff is demanding a teleprompter. There’s a Chicago fund-raiser in which the host doesn’t want to have a teleprompter there, and they’re like: This is the price of admission.
And Biden will walk in, read from the teleprompter and walk out. Sometimes he’ll do a photo line, sometimes he won’t. But it’s very odd and very weird. And that’s not what happens in these fund-raisers.
The whole point of these fund-raisers — if you’re giving huge money to the Democratic Party or to a pro-Biden super PAC or whatever — is you are getting time with the stars of the event. He’s not really doing that to any comfortable degree, and he’s making people feel very uncomfortable because: Why does he need a teleprompter to come in and talk for 10 minutes?
That’s something that anybody in politics or the media should be able to do — just talk for 10 minutes about whatever.
So those become crutches to the degree that then they become also part of the cover-up, even if they didn’t start out that way.
What are other accommodations that the staff begins to make over the course of that term?
The hours in which he’s asked to function. It’s not normal to say that a president can’t do anything after 6 p.m. — or should only very rarely do something after 6 p.m. That’s not normal.
But they would always say he had lots of fund-raisers that were at night. They always resisted this. It got reported, it got rebutted. But your view is that they really did try to keep him unscheduled after 6?
As much as possible. That’s not to say it was a hundred percent. Of course not. But as much as possible.
And the degree to which they started keeping him away from people — or rather, keeping other people away from him, as a cabinet secretary told us. He had a cabinet meeting in October 2023, and then he didn’t have another one until, I think, September 2024, after he had dropped out.
Why would he keep the cabinet at bay? We had a White House staffer — somebody who left because they were so upset by what was going on — say that there was a very purposeful decision to just limit his interactions with anybody who wasn’t in the Politburo or a must visit.
Who makes a decision like that? Because I don’t get the sense Joe Biden himself believed himself to be diminished.
I don’t know what he’s aware of. I don’t let him off the hook because — I’m older than you, Ezra. I’m 56. How old are you?
41.
OK. So I —
You look great, Jake.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
I’m not capable of doing things that I was capable of when I was 41, both physically and probably mentally. I find myself stumbling a little bit more on the teleprompter than I did five or 10 years ago. It just happens. It’s just part of aging.
I only say this because I’m aware of my limitations. I don’t believe that Joe Biden is not aware of his limitations.
My sense of Joe Biden’s belief about himself is not that he has no limits. He knows he walks more slowly and might fall, and they change the way he gets off the plane, that kind of thing. But he is not sitting there thinking: I am addled, I am losing it, I have to limit my meetings.
No —
If you are saying someone is doing that, who is doing that? Mike Donilon, Ricchetti — from everything they say in public, they seem to believe he could have been president through the end of this term.
Which is crazy. It’s crazy.
Fair enough, but I believe on some level they believe it.
I believe that they believe it, too.
When you say somebody is deciding to limit his meetings with other people, who is? And are they saying this to the rest of the staff? Does a memo go out? What is going on here?
As John F. Kennedy quoted after the Bay of Pigs: Success has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan.
There are very few people willing to acknowledge who made the fateful decisions X, Y or Z. I would say that ultimately, on the staffing level, who do I think is responsible for decisions that protected Joe Biden the way that we’re talking about? I would say Anthony Bernal, who was the chief of staff for the first lady’s office — and perhaps the most powerful chief of staff in the history of first ladies — and Mike Donilon. Those two would convey the wishes of the president and the first lady.
So when the decision was made by Joe Biden that he was going to run for re-election, that decision would be conveyed to the staff from Bernal and Donilon.
Donilon would say: Presidents get to decide if they’re running for re-election, and he’s decided he’s running for re-election — end of story. Bernal would say: You don’t run for president for one term, you run for president for two terms. And they were conveying the wishes of the first couple.
In the book, we talk about this. There is a shocking lack of discussion about this with Biden. It is just: Biden decides he’s running, and that’s it.
There’s a very good pollster, John Anzalone. He worked for Biden all the way back in the 1980s, when Biden was plagiarizing speeches in Iowa. John Anzalone has known and loved Joe Biden forever.
And Anzalone wants to poll for it. He wants to see: What are the liabilities? How do we do this? Obviously Biden is aging.
And Anita Dunn says: We’re not polling for this, the decision has already been made. And there is not one meeting where they all sit down and talk about this and kick the tires of it.
Jeff Zients, who becomes the White House chief of staff after Ron Klain leaves in early 2023 — he comes in, and he’s a former Bain Capital guy. He has “Bain brain”: He wants to run the diagnostics. He wants to kick the tires. He wants to see: Is this a good idea?
But the decision has already been made. It’s done.
One thing I saw happen during this period is the bar got set really low for Joe Biden. Because there was a big right-wing argument that this guy is senile, he has actually lost it.
The counterargument then became pretty easy. Because he wasn’t senile. But there’s this really vast range between senile and at the peak of his powers.
How do you think his age affected how he carried out the day-to-day work of the presidency? Not the campaigning, not the politics, but the decision-making, the attention, the party leadership.
I think that his presence in the Oval Office declined, and he would spend more time in the residence. In terms of the decision-making itself, what we call in the book the Politburo — well, we didn’t call them that, people in the Biden administration called them that. They were the people who surrounded Biden who were the true believers: Ricchetti, Donilon, etc.
The Politburo would argue that the decisions were always fine and sound and never problematic. There are Democratic senators in this book who would take issue with that. Not as an affirmative prosecution against him but just as a question.
There’s a scene in the book where Biden talks to the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner — a man with whom he does not have a particularly close relationship. And Warner is concerned because the White House is about to authorize the release of, I think, 11 Yemenis from Gitmo. There are a lot of senators, Democrats and Republicans, who are worried these guys are just going to rejoin the fight, whether with the Houthis or Hamas or Hezbollah or the militias in Iraq or Syria or whatever.
Biden calls Warner. And Warner is under the impression that Biden does not know much about this, that he doesn’t really understand what’s going on. And that concerns him.
There’s another scene in June 2024, before the debate. Biden has an immigration event, and Senator Bennet of Colorado — another pro-Biden Democrat — goes to it. And Biden at this event has this moment where he’s whispering into the microphone.
Archived clip of Biden: Secretary [unintelligible stammer] — I’m not sure I’m going to introduce you all the way. [Audience chuckles.] But all kidding aside, Secretary Mayorkas.
It’s very odd. And it’s reported as: Biden forgets the name of his Department of Homeland Security secretary. But it’s much worse than that.
In any case, Bennet leaves the White House thinking: Well, this is why Biden’s immigration policy is such a mess — he’s not capable of leading the disparate factions in the Democratic Party and in his administration on this.
In fact, there had been a desire to beef up border security at the beginning of the Biden administration, and that faded away. Secretary Mayorkas and others never knew why it just went away. And Bennet’s overall conclusion is this did have an impact on the country.
I want to pick up on the Bennet vignette, because I took note of that, too, in the book.
This binary that they created between “Can you make good decisions?” and “Can you do the superficial, theatrical dimension of the presidency?” — one is real presidenting, and the other is just [expletive] that the media cares about — I always thought that distinction was incredibly false. The power of the president, as is famously said, is the power to persuade. If you can’t communicate effectively, you can’t persuade, and you are giving up a lot of your power.
But a lot of the presidency isn’t about major decisions. It’s just constant presiding over meetings, constant taking in information, constant sensing into the shape and zeitgeist of the country, your party, the issues, the constituencies.
One of my conclusions covering the White House was that Biden’s attentional bandwidth was more limited than it would have been when he was 65.
Yes, of course.
So he was extremely engaged on Ukraine, extremely engaged on Israel and Gaza. But his attention to domestic policy seemed, to me, to flag —
A hundred percent.
And his ability or interest — I mean, Biden had sharp elbows for his entire career. He was a moderate Democrat who had little patience for a lot of the people who would disagree with him. And that intense party leadership: We’re going to do this, not that. And: You guys have gotten too far away from the American people. We’re pivoting back.
That was just gone. That doesn’t mean he was making bad decisions. But energy matters. How present the president is on different topics matters. Because without him, the White House is not going to do risky things that might cause problems for him.
Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. I think that when it came to domestic policy, he let his first chief of staff, Ron Klain, kind of run things for a while.
Klain was a hero to progressives — and therefore, Joe Biden, in many ways, was a hero to progressives. And that’s one of the reasons, by the way, that the progressives were the very last ones to abandon him — the progressives and the Black Caucus — because they had gotten so much that they wanted from him policy-wise. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way — policy is why they’re in the game.
So I think you’re right. It became something that he was not focused on.
And then beyond that, I think also is just the fact that, as you note, he was interested in foreign policy. That’s his area of expertise. And in fact, one of the reasons Obama picks him is for that. It really is just what he likes.
But we had a cabinet secretary say in the book: If you expect the president to be somebody who can be woken up at 2 a.m. because there’s a national or international crisis, Biden was not capable of that in 2024.
And that’s a cabinet secretary telling us that. That’s not Donald Trump Jr. It’s not Steve Bannon. It’s a Biden-loving Democratic cabinet secretary.
And did this person believe that at the time? Or did they believe it in retrospect?
At the time. The way they presented it to me — I mean, 99 percent of this book was told to us after the election. As you know, very frustratingly, they got really honest after the election. And before that they were either not so honest or elusive or didn’t return calls and texts. But we interviewed more than 200 people, and that was almost all after the election.
But yes, we have cabinet secretaries in the book talking about how when something happened, they kept him at bay. And one of them said that they didn’t think that he could be relied upon to handle that 2 a.m. phone call, which is actually a very terrifying thought.
In the campaign, the most consequential decision made after Joe Biden decided to run for re-election —
Which is a huge decision. But yes.
Although, as you say, it doesn’t even seem to have been a decision at all, in the sense that there was a process, a conversation —
There was no process.
It just seems to have happened. But the decision to go for a June debate — for those who are not presidential campaign nerds: We do not usually have June debates.
No — we wait until after Labor Day.
Yes. How does the June debate happen? Because in a way, it’s a show of confidence.
It’s a complicated process, and there are lots of different parts. One of the parts is that both Trump and Biden had lost all confidence in the commission on presidential debates. So they had discarded it. And so, for the networks, it was really every network for themselves, trying to get a debate.
There was an eagerness by both Trump and Biden to start the presidential campaign. In Joe Biden’s case, he and Donilon thought: The sooner we make this a choice election, the better. Right now it’s a referendum on Biden — and as Biden would always say: Don’t compare me to the Almighty — compare me to the alternative.
Biden thought: The moment people realize that it’s between me and Donald Trump, they will come back to me.
Now there were people internally who thought: No, we shouldn’t do this. Steve Ricchetti thought debating Trump just sullied everybody involved in the process, that he brings out the worst in everybody. The old saw: Don’t ever wrestle with the pig, because you just get dirty and the pig likes it.
Anita Dunn, initially, and Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, didn’t want him to debate Trump for any number of reasons. But then the Hur report dropped — in which there were serious questions and a permission structure for folks in the media to talk about the aging issue. And then Anita Dunn thought: OK, we do have to do this. We have to show that he’s OK and he can do this.
That’s where the June debate came in — an eagerness by Biden to change the subject from himself to Donald Trump.
So on some level, doesn’t the June debate imply this is not a cover-up? That they believed he could do this?
I would say it was malpractice by his people. The degree to which they were not honest with themselves about Joe Biden’s abilities is kind of striking.
The evidence for the fact that it was a cover-up is the fact that we were all so shocked by what we saw on that debate stage on June 27, when in reality that was not a shock to people who had seen him like that behind the scenes.
You were right there, moderating the debate.
Yes. Co-moderating with Dana Bash.
Tell me about your experience of it. Because on some level, I was a little bit shocked by everybody’s shock.
Oh, really? That’s funny.
Because when I was writing my piece about Biden, I went back through all of these speeches and clips of Biden, and I came to the view that he really wasn’t looking good quite often.
But what was it like for you being there? You’re co-moderating that debate. It begins. Tell me about your experience that night.
Well, first, before it begins, he is late showing up. We’re in Atlanta, in a battleground state, Georgia, that Biden won in 2020 and Trump won in 2016. Both campaigns and candidates had been offered walk-throughs.
Neither of them showed up on time, of course. But the time for them to show up was laughably early. It wasn’t really necessary for them to show up as early as CNN asked them.
But Donald Trump shows up, and whatever you think of Donald Trump, he’s a pro: Which one is my camera? What if I want to ask a follow-up? When Biden is talking, is the camera on me? Etc., etc.
Now, I’m supposed to go out. The debate is starting at 9 p.m. — which, by the way, was another shocker to me. When I found out that they had agreed to do a 9 p.m. debate for an hour and a half, I thought to myself: That’s late for me. How is it going to be for Joe Biden? I mean, I understand that Donald Trump runs on some energy force that I don’t understand, but that’s late. But OK, I guess they know what they’re doing.
I think there is a degree to which “I guess they know what they’re doing” infected the heads of so many of us covering him. Because why would you put Biden out there for an hour and a half debate at 9 o’clock at night, when they could have agreed to a 7 p.m. debate? But in any case, he walks out —
But also, as I understand it, they see him as a clutch player. He gives this pretty excellent — at least for him, at this period — State of the Union address in 2024. He’s vibrant, and he’s loud, and his quiet voice is gone. And there’s all this talk about: Do they have him on stimulants?
But I think they had come to the view that Biden can perform in the clutch.
He’s a gamer. That’s what they say: He’s a gamer.
To look at the legend of Joe Biden and everything he has overcome and not realize that infuses the man — and not just the man, but the man and his family and his supporters — with a sense that: This guy rises to the occasion. And it doesn’t matter what fate throws at him — and fate has thrown a lot of horrible things at him — he will rise.
His whole philosophy, as he lays out in one of his books, is: “Get up.” His dad used to say to him: “Get up.”
So yes, this idea that he’s a gamer. This idea that he will rise. That, yes, this has been a horrible month for him — he’s traveled all over the place, and his son was convicted in a court, and he showed up to debate practice unprepared and sick and needing to take naps — but he is going to rise to this moment.
OK. I get it. That’s how they think about these things, and that’s how Joe Biden thinks about these things. Because at 8:30, I’m supposed to be out onstage just sitting there. They’re doing lighting and all that stuff. And I can’t go out there because Joe Biden has just shown up a half hour before the debate. He’s supposed to have been there hours before.
And why was he so late? Because he didn’t think he needed to do it. He didn’t think he needed to do a walk-through — which is crazy. Every candidate does a walk-through. Barack Obama did walk-throughs. You just do this.
So he walks out, he hobbles out — he does that shuffling thing — seeming really old. But I had seen him, so I was not surprised. He starts talking. He obviously has a cold. He sounds awful. His voice is already thinner and reedier than it had been, but now it’s really bad.
His first answer is whatever. It’s serviceable. But then he gets to that horrible answer, where he completely loses his train of thought.
Archived clip:
Biden: Uh, eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with, with, with the Covid — excuse me, with, um, dealing with everything we have to do with, uh — [Stammers.] Look. [Stammers.] If we finally beat Medicare —
Jake Tapper: Thank you, President Biden. President Trump?
Donald Trump: Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicaid — beat it to death — and he’s destroying Medicare.
We have these iPads, and I wrote to the control room: Holy smokes.
And Dana writes to me on a piece of paper: He just lost the election.
This was why his complete absence of doing any extended tough interviews was worrying. And I don’t mean with Fox News. I mean something with, say, you.
You can talk about communication style, you can talk about how somebody comes off when they’re communicating. But one thing communication is supposed to reveal is train of thought and how people are reasoning under pressure.
What I watched in some of the subsequent interviews — but very much in that debate — was somebody who, under pressure, was not reasoning well. You would not want this person in a meeting with Xi. You would not want this person exhausted after a couple of nights of poor sleep in an international crisis. You wouldn’t really want this person being the principal deciding between competing alternatives in a hot meeting about immigration or inflation.
I feel like this is where saying “It’s all communication,” as they often did, really fell apart. Communication is how you think. And he was not staying on normal tracks. His own train of thought was derailing.
There were people who we talked to who worked for Joe Biden — I’m not talking about Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, I’m talking about people who worked for Joe Biden — who watched that debate and thought: Who is running the country? Because it’s not that person.
Now, that’s not me saying that. That’s them saying that. But I think it is a reasonable question. So I found that debate incredibly disturbing. The degree to which the Democratic Party — and when I say Democratic Party, I mean mainly the White House, but also leaders of the Democratic Party — attempted to gaslight the public about it immediately, as if he had a cold.
I’ve had colds. We’ve all had colds. This was not that.
I think one of the reasons the Democratic Party’s numbers are still so low is that they have not reckoned with the lies that they told about this. These are not lies about tariffs. These are not lies about economic policy or things that I don’t fully understand as the average voter. These are lies about things that we all perfectly understand: aging, colds, being addled, not being your best. These are things that we all have access to.
I talked to a lot of members of Congress in that period between the debate and Biden’s stepping aside. And I’d watch them go through this thing where they would talk me through every meeting they had had with him in the past year or two. And those meetings, they began to realize, had become more seldom than they had been before.
Yes.
But there would be the meeting where he was great.
Yes — 2021, 2022.
There were meetings like that in 2023 and even 2024. People still had good experiences with him in those years. And there would sometimes be the memory of something they had pushed aside, where they thought he was tired or they thought he was distracted.
I often heard people say they thought he was distracted by some other matter. It’s not a crazy thing to imagine that the president’s mind is on some terrible crisis.
We all have a bunch of data points in our head about other people. We have an image of them, and then we also have the image of them that is convenient for us to believe. And it can take a lot to push us off that.
But then when you get pushed, you reconstruct a new story out of things you had been downplaying. How much do you think that was happening?
A lot. These are political animals. They were terrified of Donald Trump. And I think that after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to be the nominee, a lot of people said: Well, this is what we got. This is the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump. So this is what we got to do.
And a lot of members of Congress who saw things and wanted to speak up were told: What do you want? Donald Trump? This is what you want? They were called traitors.
I want you to be more specific, because that isn’t what they were told, in a way.
At least in my experience, they were told: Do you want Kamala Harris?
Oh, well, that was another argument.
It seemed to me that was the actual first line of defense.
Sure. Absolutely. “The Kamala Defense,” which is: If Joe Biden doesn’t do it, do you want his vice president — who is even less popular than him — to be the nominee? That’s crazy!
So yes, she was their line of defense. And by the way, this drove David Plouffe insane. He was, of course, Barack Obama’s incredibly successful 2008 campaign manager, served as a senior adviser to Obama and then basically retired from politics in 2012 until he was called back to help Kamala Harris run for president in July 2024.
This drove Plouffe crazy because Plouffe’s whole argument was: You picked her. You picked her to be the vice president. If you didn’t have confidence in her, you shouldn’t have picked her. And he knows what he’s talking about because he and David Axelrod helped pick Biden for Obama.
This was a thing that drove me completely crazy in that post-debate period. Joe Biden’s response when he called in on “Morning Joe” was: The elites are trying to push me out of the race.
Archived clip of Biden (on the phone): I’m getting so frustrated by, by the elites. Now I’m not talking about you guys, but about the elites in the party who think they know so much more.
If any of these guys don’t think I should run, run against me. Go ahead. Announce, announce for president. Challenge me at the convention.
But the elites — myself very much included with my stuff in February of that year — were late.
If you look at polling going back years at that point, supermajorities of the country believed he was too old to run again. This had been true in 2022. It was something that Biden himself had to finesse in the 2020 race, when he didn’t quite promise to be a one-term president. But he said things that sounded like that — that he was going to be a transitional figure.
The public had already come to this conclusion long ago. You could see it in every poll. It was the Democratic Party that was late to give it credence.
Put aside whether or not you thought the issue was that he could or could not perform the role of the presidency — the public is saying: We don’t want this guy. We don’t think he should continue being president.
And then the party — in the ways that parties do — closes ranks around him. Nobody of any national profile would dare run against him in the 2023–2024 primary.
Even though Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff, and others were trying to get Pritzker, Whitmer, whomever.
Dean Phillips is attacked. There are efforts to not allow him on the ballot in certain states.
Wisconsin, yes.
But I think there’s a reason that there wasn’t a big primary that year. I actually had been planning to write right after the midterm election: “Democrats need a primary.”
Yes.
Even just to see if Biden was capable of running again. You just can’t give this to him without testing his capability to campaign.
But Democrats were so thrilled with how they gained some ground in the Senate in 2022. They held down losses in the House.
And even though Biden hadn’t been in any supersignificant way out there on the campaign trail, and even though his approval rating was the main thing that Democrats had to get over, the sense was: Oh, Biden did it again. He was underestimated by the media and by the politicos again. Here he is. And he led his Democratic Party to a much better midterm result than Barack Obama did in 2010 and Bill Clinton did in 1994.
Yes — that’s what Ricchetti and Donilon would tell everybody.
And you just felt like all the energy out of the possibility of anybody — any serious national figure in the party primarying him — drain. It was just gone.
Yes. And I would add that there is a lot of evidence the midterms went the way they went despite Biden — not because of Biden.
The two main things that Democrats had going for them were the Dobbs decision — the overturning of Roe v. Wade — which resulted in a lot of single-issue voters very mobilized by the abortion-rights issue.
The other thing is the Republicans had less than stellar Senate candidates — Blake Masters, Herschel Walker — and, in some cases, House nominees, too.
That’s really one of the reasons I think that the midterms went the way they did.
This is one of my “Sliding Doors” moments in recent American politics. Imagine the red wave had hit: The Democrats get wiped out in the House, they get wiped out in the Senate.
It might have been better for Democrats long term.
Biden does not look like some uncanny political genius. And also, the party has to take his unpopularity seriously.
So Biden is unpopular by this point. And I’m talking to his people — the same people you’re talking about — after the election and asking them: OK, well, what are you taking from this? What’s your read of this?
And they are telling me directly that this proves that presidential approval has decoupled from election results. And in this era of highly negative polarization, with a Democratic Party that’s highly committed to beating Donald Trump and to restoring abortion rights, the fact that Biden is unpopular doesn’t tell you that much about how the election is going to turn out.
And then there also isn’t a need to address his unpopularity, to do a big pivot to the center, in the way that Bill Clinton did after 1994 or Barack Obama did after 2010 — a thing that annoyed liberals in both cases but was part of them confronting the fact that voters did not seem to be buying what they were selling. That also feels like it was very significant.
Yes, absolutely. First of all, do all your listeners know this 1990s Gwyneth Paltrow movie “Sliding Doors”? Are they all familiar with it? [Chuckles.]
You could tell them about it.
Well, it’s just a question about: If she walks out of a subway, she lives one life. If she stays in the subway, she lives another.
It’s a great movie. But I just wanted to make sure. I similarly date myself with Gen X references. My staff is so much younger than me, and they look at me blankly all the time.
You know what? The truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the movie.
I don’t think I have, either. [Laughs.]
It’s just a cultural touchstone.
Even though I said it’s a great movie.
You can’t trust the media, Jake. [Chuckles.]
Let me just say, by reputation, it’s a great movie. And it’s great enough that Ezra is referencing it in 2025.
Yes, I think that is very wise. I also would say that Mike Donilon, who came up as a pollster — one of the most interesting things about him and his character is that so much of what he does is based on gut, not data. “Battle for the soul” of America — that’s gut.
The numbers to support that was a strong argument are questionable. The decoupling of the presidency from midterms — I mean, there’s no actual data to back up these arguments. But it’s what they think. It’s how they convince themselves of these arguments.
“He’s the only one that ever beat Trump.” OK, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean —
There have been only two general elections that Donald Trump has run in at this point.
Yes. And Hillary won the popular vote. That one was kind of a fluke.
It created this distance that opened up between Democratic Party elites and the country. The Democratic Party’s view was that Biden was historically successful, and under any normal measure, one: He should — he deserves — to run for re-election and win it. And two: Who are you to question him when he has been so successful?
On the other hand, the country didn’t feel he was being that successful. He was unpopular. People were unhappy with his administration. They were not feeling Bidenomics. They did not feel the world was a more stable and orderly place.
And I think there’s this way in which the Democratic Party just got into an insular conversation with itself. Why did that happen?
I think your question answers itself — which is that the Democratic Party was talking to itself.
I would, without question, argue that the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill are huge achievements. There’s no question.
But why did the American people not know that? Was it because you weren’t talking about it? No. Was it because I wasn’t talking about it? No. I was talking about it.
There’s nothing that the Washington media loves more than bipartisan legislation passing. That is the wet dream of every reporter in Washington, D.C.: It’s bipartisan, and it passed, therefore it must be good.
But in this case, investing in infrastructure in this country is a good thing because our infrastructure is so horrible. So why weren’t the American people sold?
I would argue that it was his cluelessness on the inflation people were feeling — and how much of that is age and how much of that is just his stubbornness — and, beyond that, his inability to communicate.
So then, having not been given a choice in the primary, the party then says: See, the Democratic voters chose Joe Biden.
Right.
And now you’d be betraying them.
Yes.
Put aside everything else — this is just a party that in this period is not listening.
In your reporting, what actually mattered? What took Joe Biden from the defiant Joe Biden that we heard on “Morning Joe” — saying that the elites are trying to push him out — and who is sending a letter basically threatening Democratic members of Congress — to the Biden who, very shortly thereafter, leaves the race. What pushes him to where so many people said he couldn’t be pushed?
I would say that there are two reasons. One: The lack of support among senators meant a lot to him.
They wanted a meeting with Biden, but they didn’t get it. They only get one with leaders of his campaign in the White House.
That was very telling, by the way, when they wouldn’t send Biden to that meeting.
Yes, of course. But basically it comes down to: It’s a 51-member Senate Democratic Caucus, and there are only five senators who are standing with Biden.
There are a lot of Democrats who are running for re-election who are on the bubble or whose jobs are really at risk.
And I think he kept on being told: The polls say you can’t win. But Biden kept saying: That’s not what my guys say. And he’s not talking about his pollsters, but about his polls as described to him by Donilon and Ricchetti, who constantly give this unrealistically optimistic view of the polling.
I mean, it would have been a wipeout, without question.
One of the things in this period when they’re saying: Look, he’s still only 3 or 4 points behind Donald Trump — we can make it up. At that point, there was a history of him just not being able to make it up.
He came out for the Robert Hur press conference, he flubbed the countries. He failed the debate. More things could have happened.
This was, to me, the crazy risk that I was watching a lot of Democrats at least publicly say they were willing to take: that this guy had not been a game-time player for a long time, with the exception of one scripted State of the Union. The idea that you’re going to get through a tough campaign where you had to make up ground, and this guy can’t even do interviews?
The pollsters were supposed to have a meeting with Biden, and then that got canceled. So they had a meeting with the Politburo, a Zoom meeting. And basically what they say is: The fundamental reason why you’re behind cannot be changed. The American people have concluded that you are too old and cannot do the job — and you are not capable of disproving that to them.
At this point, you don’t have to be a political science major or a highly paid operative to say: OK, he had a bad debate. Go out there, do 10 tough interviews and five town halls and settle this issue.
Everybody knows that. And he couldn’t do it. And ultimately, the Democrats who were giving him the benefit of the doubt — Chuck Schumer and others — come to that conclusion: He can’t do it.
The last thing that I think was decisive is that Minyon Moore was in charge of the 2024 Democratic Convention. She’s a longtime Democratic operative. Very respected in this town.
When she got the job, she set up an unofficial group called the What If? Committee, which was there to talk about: Well, what if Biden dropped out? What if the protests are so bad they shut down Chicago? Any possible thing.
One of the reasons it wasn’t as difficult to swap candidates in three and a half weeks — I think it was, between Biden dropping out and the convention — is because Minyon Moore had decided they were going to have decorations in as vanilla a flavor as possible, so that if somebody else’s name needed to be in there, it wasn’t like everything was in the shape of Delaware — let’s put it that way.
The What If? Committee was in touch with all the delegates, and they were monitoring everything. Eventually, before the weekend when Biden announces he’s not running anymore, the What If? Committee conveys to the Politburo: You can win at the convention, but it will be really ugly. They were losing delegates to that degree.
The delegates were losing confidence in the president. They were with him 100 percent, but after the three weeks of torture, they were out. Not all of them, but enough of them that it would have been an ugly fight, and Biden would have won, but it would have ripped the party apart.
So when Biden says he dropped out because he didn’t want to have a divided party, he means it quite literally. He doesn’t mean emotionally a divided party. He means an ugly fight on the convention floor in Chicago. It would have been nasty, and there was always a chance he would have lost. Even if he had won, it would have been really ugly.
I think Donilon and Ricchetti and Biden just ultimately concluded: These bastards are chasing you out.
I want to just talk through some of the lessons of all this. One that has been on my mind is how much we in the media prize inside information — when often the truth is just right in front of you.
If you were asking people around Biden in 2023 and 2024: How good is he? How capable is he? You were being told, broadly speaking: He’s doing great.
You have a fascinating little vignette about his press people pulling members of the administration onto these phone calls to say things that they may not even believe. If you were just watching him at his public appearances, you were getting a more accurate presentation.
How do you think about that? The balance between how it seems very official when you get an anonymous senior administration source in a story, but if you just watch these guys and listen to them, what they do in public is what tells you what’s true.
I think that’s right. We have a senior Democrat in the book, in the first chapter, who talks about how he would see what you’re talking about — Biden’s inability to communicate in a way that you would want for a president. And he would call inside people — Donilon, etc. — and they would all say: He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine.
Then after Biden dropped out, this Democrat went to the White House and sat down with Joe and Jill Biden behind closed doors, just the three people. And this Democrat told us: He wasn’t [expletive] fine. Jill had to complete his sentences. He was losing his train of thought. He wasn’t [expletive] fine.
There are a lot of failures in this book. And it’s certainly hard to argue that the news media were on top of this — even people like you and me, who were questioning this publicly. It’s hard to argue that any of us, in retrospect, covered this sufficiently.
Although I want to give credit to a bunch of my newsroom colleagues here and Alex and others. There were a bunch of stories. There were great Times stories, great Wall Street Journal stories, Axios stories.
Sure. A hundred percent.
It was harder to get people to say anything. I mean, you need evidence for stories. But we were trying to crack this.
Well, that’s my point. If a president’s inner circle is willing to lie — and if they don’t even think they’re lying — that’s an incredibly dangerous thing.
I wish I had a solution here, like the three things we need to do and then this will never happen again. In the book, we have Jonathan Reiner, a doctor at G.W., who’s an adviser to the White House medical office and says that he thinks the White House medical reports should be affirmed under threat of perjury and given to Congress every year, so that there could be no lying or dissembling.
But beyond that, what can we do? I don’t know.
But I think there are lessons from this that are broader even than that. And honestly, to me, they reflect Trump as well as Biden.
I think modern political parties have become very personality driven. They have leaders, and the structure of them is to really fall in behind the leader. That was true to some degree in the Democratic Party. It’s true, incredibly strongly, in the Republican Party.
I feel like a big difference even between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is that in Trump 1.0, his own staff was willing to tell people all the time that this guy was wrong. He was making crazy arguments. They had to restrain him.
Now they see him as kissed by destiny — and how dare you question the sun god?
I think that recognizing, as a structural mode of failure, that parties have a lot of trouble saying what is obvious to everybody in front of them is a thing to grapple with.
I feel like Democrats would not admit what everybody knew about Joe Biden. And now I’m watching Republicans not admit what everybody always knew about Donald Trump: that he’s erratic, he’s all over the place, that the stuff he says often doesn’t make sense, that he’s surrounded by yes men and sycophants.
The parties have become too weak — they can be so easily taken over by whoever leads them.
Yes. It’s not just the parties though, right? It’s that all of the institutions that are supposed to structurally check any leader, to one degree or another, failed.
There are any number of moments that one could point to of interviews or weird moments where, let’s say, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer should have marched up to the White House and said: What the [expletive] is this? What is going on? And they didn’t. So it was on them.
But also, donors should have been able to look at Biden at any one of these moments and said: What’s going on here?
The modern presidency, in addition to the weakening of the party — I mean, I’m sure you know the name of the Democratic National Committee chairman during the Biden years, but I bet 99 out of 100 of your incredibly smart listeners do not.
It was Jaime Harrison from South Carolina. And we have a vignette where Biden doesn’t even know Jaime Harrison’s name.
Although, you know what disturbs me so much about that vignette? There was no stronger Biden defender in this period than Harrison —
Still to this day —
Saying: What you do is you protect your quarterback from getting sacked. Treating this as if it’s a question of loyalty — as opposed to the country itself. I thought that Jaime Harrison covered himself in dishonor in this.
Harrison is still out there saying that the mistake was having Biden step down from the ticket.
That’s a little bit what I mean when I say this is a thing people have to begin thinking about in the structures of their parties — I mean, look, Lara Trump was co-chair of the R.N.C.
I think you’re right to say Congress is probably where the authority to check things like this should lie, and people need to be able to speak a bit more freely. But when you look back at what people were willing to explain away, to cover up, it’s as if the point of politics is your loyalty to the politician and not what the country needs from them.
The number of Democrats who made arguments like: Joe Biden has had our back, now we have to have his —
I know — what the hell does that even mean?
The point of the party is to come up with a candidate who is the best person to lead the country — and, if you’re a Democrat, keep the country out of Donald Trump’s hands. This is not some interpersonal payback for years of friendship with Joe Biden or any other president.
A hundred percent. I keep thinking about the Clooney fund-raiser, which was in June 2024.
Biden shows up, and the behind-the-stage Biden is shocking — to George Clooney, to Barack Obama, to a whole bunch of people. The only one who said anything was George Clooney.
But this is a roomful of people who saw this. Barack Obama is one of them. I’m not blaming Barack Obama. But institutionally, there’s so much deference given to a president — even by a former president. I don’t think it’s healthy for this country.
You’re talking about the weakness of the parties, and I agree. I also think that the strength of the presidency in this regard is a problem.
Well, in a way no one is saying anything because no one is saying anything. It’s such an obvious dynamic that it barely bears pointing out: People look to each other to see what is safe to say.
If you watch Dean Phillips get defenestrated by the party, if it seems clear that you’ll be profoundly on the outs and if you don’t think your saying anything will do anything — even people who would privately tell me they understood how bad this problem was — what kept them from saying anything on some level, in addition to careerism, was fatalism: Nothing is going to change. Joe Biden is not stepping aside. It’s impossible.
So to say anything about it is simply to weaken him against Donald Trump. To admit what is in front of your face is to empower the other side. And that became a very powerful enforcement mechanism inside the party.
And in this time of silos and social media, the fear of being labeled MAGA Ezra, or whatever. When Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes, the great Wall Street Journal reporters, put out their piece about Biden behind the scenes — the degree to which Dean Phillips was defenestrated, Annie and Siobhan got kneecapped.
I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant when you did your things. I know it wasn’t pleasant when I did mine. Alex, the same.
No, you felt like you were destroying all of your relationships with the White House all at once.
Yes, and not just with the White House but the Democratic Party.
And I’m not saying it was literally that bad. But I was fairly public on this. It was a bigger firestorm of pushback coming from — like, privately, a lot of people said: Oh, you’re right. In the email inbox, just normal people said: Oh, thank God, somebody is saying something.
But then people I thought of as friends, who were liberally aligned pundits or people in politics proper — and believed this stuff in private — were absolutely flaying me in public. That was the most shocking part to me: having people with whom I’d had a version of this conversation in private then slam me in public when I said it publicly.
There is a Democratic operative in our book who defended Biden publicly, who says to us on background that Biden stole an election from the Democratic Party and from the American people. This person has only publicly said positive things about Joe Biden.
This is where truth telling of any sort — because we’re so tribal and in camps — is legitimately a career ender, or at least a risk.
Robert Hur could not find work after being special counsel. He finally did months later. But the word went out: Don’t hire him.
I mean, it’s nasty. Look, the same thing is going on now in terms of anybody questioning Trump — although it’s more policy oriented, at least at this stage. But none of it is healthy for a republic.
And I don’t think, by the way, that it’s like this in other democracies. I think there’s much more room for debate in other democracies, whether England or France. It seems like they have more room for interparty criticism or even the notion that journalists or commentators are allowed to say things without not being able to feed their families.
It also reflects different political systems. A lot of systems are parliamentary, and the party leader is chosen by the party elites and the people in parliament. And if the person loses the confidence of his or her supporters, they’re out.
We just watched the U.K. go through a bunch of different party leaders in both parties in the last couple of years.
We choose with primaries, which is not how we’ve done it for most of American history. This is one of the whole arguments about open conventions. We actually did used to pick people at conventions. It’s not a completely unknown thing to do.
Yes, but it was back-room people.
But that’s what I mean. I think one reason in some other countries it’s easier to deal with these problems, if you believe it is, is that more power is still in the back room.
I think we have quite irresponsible political elites in this country, but we also have quite weak ones. And I think those two things exist in relation to each other.
Elite failures are most obvious when elite power is most degraded. I don’t think elites were some grand class of hypercompetent guardians of the public trust in the 1950s or the 1940s or the 1930s. But among other things, they had more privacy and they had more power.
The closest we got to that in the last few decades was in 2020, when the elites got involved because they feared a Bernie Sanders nomination and rallied around Joe Biden. And they didn’t do it because they liked Joe Biden. They did it because they thought Joe Biden could beat Bernie and then Trump.
And that was just strictly on the numbers: Who can win college-educated white voters in the suburbs of Philly and also Black voters in South Carolina? There was only one person running who could do that, and it was Biden.
We’ll never know, probably, the extent to which Barack Obama and others called Buttigieg and Klobuchar and Booker and Warren and all the others, and encouraged them to drop out and get behind Biden. But it did happen, and that’s the closest we’ve gotten to a smoke-filled room in my lifetime.
I give the Democratic Party some credit here. It did, in the end, happen in 2024. It happened too late, but the party did something very unusual and pushed Biden off the ticket. It did persuade him not to run.
Well, it’s like what Churchill said about the United States: You can always count on them to do the right thing after they’ve exhausted every other possible option.
I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Oh, that’s such a great question. I assume “Abundance” is implied.
This is a fun diversion if you’re like me and you spend too much time laying in bed doomscrolling: Susan Morrison has a book called “Lorne,” which is about Lorne Michaels and the history of “Saturday Night Live” that is great.
There’s a book called “Hitler’s People” by Richard Evans, which is about how it came to be that the Holocaust happened in Germany. If anybody out there read Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” which is very damning of the German people, it’s building on that scholarship. Like: What is it about Germany that this happened there?
And because I am also a fan of graphic novels: There is a graphic novel that is written by Andy Samberg and some others — “The Holy Roller” — which is about an Ohio Jewish bowling superhero that I have started and is enjoyable and weird. So those are my three.
Jake Tapper, thank you very much.
Thank you. What a pleasure.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kelsey Kudak. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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