“One of the biggest things the Democrats did wrong was they ignored what their voters were telling them,” Tyler Pager tells Vanity Fair. “Voters kept saying, We don’t want this choice,” he says in reference to Joe Biden. “And they ignored them.”
In a sprawling new book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, Pager, alongside his former Washington Post colleagues Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf, assembled a deeply reported chronicle of this consequential election cycle, starting back in 2022 before the midterms. Pager argues that while there is obviously much intrigue surrounding the final months of the election, with Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, “in order to really understand how we got to that moment, you need to understand the two years preceding that.” He adds that the book’s “context and that comprehensiveness is really crucial to understanding this election.”
The trio, who conducted 350 interviews, were uniquely positioned to collaborate on such an expansive project, with Dawsey and Arnsdorf covering Donald Trump for the Post and Pager covering Biden. “The scope is really key,” Arnsdorf tells me of the book, which provides dueling portraits of both campaigns. “I think you can tell that we had wide and deep cooperation on both sides,” Dawsey adds. “It’s not a book that has an opinion, or really encourages you to take a side. I think it’s just reporting. And I hope that’s what stands out.”
The authors are trying to break through with new revelations following a string of dishy election postmortems from journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Jon Allen and Amie Parnes, and Chris Whipple. They had some success already, with Politico reporting Monday on one of the book’s scoops, a fateful, six-page campaign memo urging Biden to debate Trump early.
When Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf started this project in 2022, they were all reporting for the Post, where a hallmark of the newsroom is “collaboration,” Pager tells me. “With an election this sprawling and with the amount of reporting that we felt we needed to do, under a very tight timeline, we were able to divide and conquer,” he adds. Soon after the election, however, Pager took a White House reporting job at The New York Times, while Dawsey joined The Wall Street Journal as a political investigations reporter, leaving Arnsdorf as the trio’s last standing Post reporter. “Luckily, almost all of the reporting and most of the writing was done before those of us who started new jobs started them,” Arnsdorf says, adding that they’re “working through” the challenges of being at different outlets during publication.
Dawsey and Pager aren’t the only ones to have left the Post in the last year, as the newspaper has experienced a significant restructuring under the leadership of publisher and CEO Will Lewis and owner Jeff Bezos, who caused shockwaves just ahead of the 2024 election for thwarting the Opinion board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. The book’s acknowledgement section is filled with names of recently departed Post staffers, including Matea Gold, Ashley Parker, and Michael Scherer. When Dawsey and Pager were asked to reflect on their time at the newspaper and how it has changed recently, they remained diplomatic, expressing appreciation. “The newsroom of The Washington Post is a wonderful place, and I hope that it gets to stay,” Dawsey says.
Regardless, their experience at the Post, past or present, placed no limits on sneaking a detail into the epilogue regarding Bezos and Trump’s blossoming relationship. According to the book, the pair started to speak regularly after the election, “commiserating over critical stories” published by Bezos’s newspaper. When asked how that revelation went over internally, Arnsdorf replied, “No one said anything to me about it.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Vanity Fair: This book enters a landscape that’s already flooded with reporting and analysis on this election. I’m curious what was the gap you felt this book needed to fill?
Tyler Pager: Just to put our book in context, we started working on this book long before the monumental presidential debate between Trump and Biden. We set out long before that, when we thought it was going to be a historic rematch between Biden and Trump. Josh and Isaac covered Trump for the Post, and I covered Biden, and we felt uniquely positioned to write the definitive story of the 2024 election. We knew it would be unpredictable and monumental and dramatically shape the future of our country, and we wanted to give readers the behind-the-scenes story of how we got to whatever result we did. I think that context is important because there’s obviously a lot of interest in the debate, Biden’s decision to drop out, and that sort of last few months of the election. But I think in order to really understand how we got to that moment, you need to understand the two years preceding that. So our book starts before the midterm elections. The sort of dueling scenes are Trump and the search at Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents, and Democrats thinking about launching presidential campaigns under the assumption that Joe Biden would not run for reelection. And so the book takes you from that through the end, and I think that context and that comprehensiveness is really crucial to understanding this election.
Isaac Arnsdorf: The scope is really key. You can only understand what one candidate is doing when you understand what they’re reacting to on the other side. Some of the most interesting and ironic things happen in those misunderstandings between what one side thinks the other is doing and what’s really happening on the other side. Then also the depth of the reporting in this book, the 350 interviews that we did just for this book, on top of our reporting in real time at the Post, and then also the exhaustive, independent fact-checking, giving everyone the opportunity to respond to what was written about them. You’re getting a comprehensive, definitive, reliable account.
Josh Dawsey: I think you can tell that we had wide and deep cooperation on both sides. One of the things I’m proud of in our book is that we have a lot of scenes and a lot of things where we just let the reader see exactly what we believe happened. It’s not a book that has an opinion, or really encourages you to take a side. I think it’s just reporting. And I hope that’s what stands out from this book.
To get into the nuts and bolts of that reporting, something I found particularly interesting was the behind-the-scenes during the Harris-Trump debate with ABC [in September]. You report that the Trump campaign is furious with ABC and David Muir for fact-checking him about the Springfield claims. Within the context of what we’ve seen with ABC News settling a lawsuit with Trump, was tension building up between the Trump camp and the network far longer than people realized?
Arnsdorf: The context for that is that the Trump campaign was going out of its way to avoid live fact-checking. There’s also this revealing scene at the National Association of Black Journalists convention where he almost won’t go on stage, and they keep everybody waiting because [Trump’s camp] refuse to have any live fact-checking. I sort of see it in terms of how the Trump campaign was managing its relationship with the traditional media throughout the campaign.
Pager: What you saw that night in that backstage scene, Trump’s top adviser is screaming at John Santucci, who’s an ABC producer who’s kind of close to Trump, has been one of the main bookers for them for a long time. Santucci has a deep relationship with Trump’s orbit. And what you see that night is [the adviser] pulling him out of another room, hauling him into the spin room where they are, and just screaming at him in profanities about the live fact-checking, which was a pretty remarkable scene. They did that with other debate moderators too, tried to work the refs during the debate, but there was no explosion quite like this.
There was a fascinating side-by-side of the independent media strategies of the Harris camp and the Trump camp, and it was pretty stark. Can you talk about how they approached that differently? I know Trump’s team consulted even Barron Trump and Alex Bruesewitz to connect with that voting bloc.
Pager: I think one of the really interesting things that we found in the book is clearly Trump had a very male-focused influencer digital media strategy. They had success in getting Trump outside the political bubble and political media space, and joined podcasts like Theo Von and Joe Rogan, and reached nontraditional voters. One of the things that the Harris campaign was really frustrated by was that this same equivalent podcast that maybe reached softer Democratic voters, like Hot Ones or the Kelce Brothers, they wouldn’t have her on. They were like, We don’t do politics. So there was this real dichotomy between Trump’s availability in some of these podcasts, media spaces, and the equivalent on the Democratic side just wasn’t really available for Harris. And so there’s been a big conversation within Democratic Party of, How do we create these spaces where our voters are, or our potential voters, that will take us as that, will bring us in and expose us to their voters?
As I read it, I was very interested in Trump’s deeply rooted concern about Iran’s desire to retaliate against him and his administration. How does that factor into recent decisions the administration is making?
Dawsey: I think there was a pervasive and real threat to Trump from Iran on the campaign. I mean, Trump’s team got repeated briefings from the FBI, from the intelligence community, about Iran potentially having kill teams on the ground. They were flying in a decoy plane for part of the campaign. They were using his friend Steve Witkoff’s plane because they were afraid about missiles potentially coming at the plane. Obviously, they had the two assassination attempts, neither one of them was directly linked to Iran, and we have no evidence that they were. But the FBI at the time could not rule out to Trump that it wasn’t. Trump kept asking them to rule out Iran. They couldn’t do it. And they made it pretty clear that they wanted him bad. It was a real paranoia from Trump at the end towards the Iranians.
There was a real sense that he was sort of under siege. Tony Fabrizio, his pollster, told folks that more than 50% of the time they spent on the campaign was planning, logistics, and security. Several other of his advisers told me that was true. If not, they thought it was more. Everywhere he went, they had to go in advance and do bulletproof glass. I think the threats really were maybe not that serious. But when you’ve been shot in the ear and you have all these things happening, everything feels serious at the time. His team went to some pretty extraordinary methods. One of them, at least, had a gun in the office. They had military equipment, they were trying to keep the blinds closed. They were walking to Air Force One, and the Secret Service told them, Put your head down and rush to the plane. There was a sense of real fear there.
A big part of this book is obviously the partnership between Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. I just saw that Lindsey Graham’s reelection campaign is adding LaCivita as a senior adviser. Just given he’s such a big character in this book, what are your reactions to that?
Arnsdorf: [Chuckles] Good for Chris.
Dawsey: Chris is a great character in the book. It’s hard to really put Chris on page because he’s such a larger-than-life, dynamic character—incredibly profane, mercurial, loves a nice glass of wine. I’m not saying that with any judgment in my voice here. He just loves a nice glass of wine. He is very type A to every degree. There was a time we have in the book where American Bridge put together this oppo book on Chris LaCivita, all these crazy things he had said and done over the years, trying to get a reporter to write about it. We sent it to him and he wrote back, “Lol, all true.” He sort of wears that bravado as a badge of honor, so to speak.
I think he was a tip of the spear in this campaign. We put in the book that Trump told Susie, you’re too nice, we need an asshole. And she found that asshole in Chris. Someone who would be aggressive, who would be out there posting the kinds of things Susie’s never going to post on Twitter, screaming at people, doing the public-facing part of it. Susie took a more managerial behind-the-scenes role. I don’t think Susie has ever used some of the language that Chris LaCivita uses. And I think Chris would laugh and say, That’s true. I’m not just trying to say that he’s a bombastic, wild guy. He’s a shrewd guy. I think there’s a lot of things about him that are quite smart, but he played a particular role, and Susie played a different role.
All three of you started writing this book while at The Washington Post, and a lot has changed since then, with two of you now reporting elsewhere. How did that work logistically in the writing and reporting process, and did it get more complicated?
Arnsdorf: Luckily, almost all of the reporting and most of the writing was done before those of us who started new jobs started them. So that definitely helped. We’re working through it, the three of us all being at different places when the book comes out. But in some ways, that’s helpful.
Pager: I would also say, in terms of writing a book with three people, one of the hallmarks of The Washington Post is collaboration. So we developed this sort of relationship where we work well together, and I think with an election this sprawling and with the amount of reporting that we felt we needed to do, under a very tight timeline, we were able to divide and conquer and tell the most comprehensive story of this election. I mean, there were three campaigns that we covered from start to end, and there were three of us, and we didn’t directly divide it up that way, but we were able to cast a wide reporting net, and each of us, I think, brought different and complementary skills to the project. I think we were able to really bring all of the reporting and writing together to tell this story in the most definitive way we could.
Dawsey: I don’t think you could do a book that required this much reporting, this many fact-checks, this many interviews, on a compressed timetable, by yourself. I don’t know how you would do it.
In the epilogue, you write about Trump’s relationship with Jeff Bezos, reporting that they started to speak regularly, commiserating over critical stories in the Post, according to Trump. How is that detail going over at the Post, given that one of you is still there promoting this book?
Arnsdorf: No one said anything to me about it.
Pager: I don’t work there anymore, but The Washington Post has long done critical coverage of Jeff Bezos and continues to cover Amazon. There’s been no evidence or knowledge of interference.
Dawsey: Whatever you think about Bezos, whether you hate him or love him, he never messed with any of my stories, and we did some pretty critical stories of him last fall after the endorsement. I don’t think there’s any evidence he’s really messed with the newsroom. I mean, he certainly made his improvements to everything on the editorial board, but he’s the owner. Owners get to have an impact on the editorial board.
As I was flipping through the acknowledgements, I was just struck by how many people are mentioned who have left the Post over the last year. I’m curious if either Tyler or Josh want to reflect on your time there?
Pager: I have nothing but positive things to say about my experience at The Washington Post. Josh was there for longer, so I don’t want to speak for him, but I got a great opportunity to cover the White House at The New York Times and was very excited to do that. I have nothing but positive things to say about my four years at the Washington Post.
Dawsey: I have nothing but positive things to say about the newsroom and the folks that I worked with closely in the newsroom, and the journalism that we were able to do in the newsroom. That’s what I would say. I really want to put a pin on that. I think the newsroom of The Washington Post is a wonderful place, and I hope that it gets to stay. That’s what I’ll say.
I wanted to end on the subtitle of the book, not simply how Trump returned to the White House, but also “how Democrats lost America.” Do you feel that there’s a particular decisive error that they made during this election, or just a lot of dominoes fell in the wrong places?
Pager: One of the biggest things the Democrats did wrong was they ignored what their voters were telling them for months. For years, Democratic voters made clear, the majority of them, that they did not want Joe Biden to run for a second term. We saw that in poll after poll after poll, and it didn’t seem to matter. The Biden view was, They’re wrong. The numbers will improve as Trump becomes the clear opponent, as we make the case. There’s a really good scene in the book where Biden, just before Thanksgiving, is sort of yelling at his aides, Why are my poll numbers not higher? And his aides are like, They’ll get better, just stay the course. And they didn’t, and voters kept saying, We don’t want this choice. We want something else. And they ignored them.
Arnsdorf: They recognized that they needed to have a winning message on the economy, and once Harris took over, they recognized they had the problem with Biden’s shadow. And in both cases, they just never came up with an answer. They agonized over it, they had meetings, they spun their wheels, and they wrung their hands, and they just did nothing.
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