Bulwark Takes - INCREDIBLE New Book on Trump’s Unlikely Comeback

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Sam Stein sits down with Tyler Pager, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Josh Dawsey, co-authors of 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and Democrats Lost America, to break down the biggest political rematch of our time. We find out how Trump surprised even his inner circle, why Biden's age wasn't the only issue, and how Kamala Harris tried (and struggled) to define her moment. You can purchase the book here: https://www.amazon.com/2024-Trump-Retook-Democrats-America/dp/0593832531

Hey guys, it's me Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwork, and I am privileged today to be joined by three of the nation's preeminent political reporters. Tyler Pager, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, they are the co-authors, is that co-authors? Tri-authors? Whatever. Of the new book, 2024, How Trump Retook the White House and Democrats Lost America. Tyler and Isaac are not sharing a room. They just have the same backdrop and from the same hotel. Josh, I have no idea where he is. Probably the same hotel too. room. They just have the same backdrop and from the same hotel. Josh, I have no idea where he is, probably same hotel too. But I wanted to, before we get into it, I did want to say, and I mean this sincerely, this is a great book, like a legitimately great book. There is so much fresh reporting in there. On a subject that I thought we knew a lot about, but every page feels like there's a new detail. And it's testament to the type of reporting you guys bring to really interesting and important story. So kudos to you all.

We're going to just kind of go around the horn here. But I want to start by just, I guess most people who watch this don't understand what goes into deciding to do a book like this and how you actually go about executing on a book like this. So like, how did you guys decide that the three of you are going to collaborate on a book like this. So like, how did you guys decide that the three of you were gonna collaborate on a book like this and what was the plan of action for executing on it?

Tyler, you go first and then Isaac and then Josh. Yeah, well, thanks Sam for having us and for the kind words. You can Venmo me later, buddy, okay? But yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we set out more than almost two years ago at this point because we felt that this election was going to be hugely consequential. At the time, it was shaping up to be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

And we knew that it would have historic consequences for not just the United States, but for the whole world. And we felt the only way to tell that story was, Tim, as you said, to have a new detail on every page. Everyone around the world was watching it play out in real time. We all saw the debate. We all saw the campaign ads.

We could see that up close. But what we couldn't figure out was why they made these decisions, what was happening behind the scenes. And in order to do that on the timeline we did, it takes a lot of work. And one of the hallmarks of the Washington Post, where we all work together, is collaboration and collegiality. And so I was covering the Biden White House and Biden campaign.

Josh and Isaac were covering Donald Trump and the Republican Party. And it felt like a natural partnership to bring our reporting and writing skills to bear to tell the definitive and comprehensive story of this election. Yeah, but it's funny because you seem to have separate tracks of reporting and I'm kind of curious if like, you know, you start comparing notes and you're like, oh man, Tyler's got a lot of good shit and I don't or you know, vice versa and like, and also what are the plan

of attacks here? Like, do you play off of each other? Do you say, you know, bring this to your sources or bring that to your sources? Like, how does it actually work operationally? Yeah. I mean, that's part of the collaboration that, that Tyler was talking about. Um, you know, and, uh, broadly Josh and I focused more on the Republicans and, and Tyler was covering the Democrats, although he's now a Trump reporter also to cover this amount of territory in this short amount of time, it took teamwork.

Josh, you've been following Trump forever. And you can't win anyone in the business. Well, I know I was thinking about it like back in 2016. Do we think it was going to be, you know, what is it nine years down? Geez. Were you ever concerned? Like, what more do we have to say about this guy? Like, what more is there to even unearth? Yeah, I mean, that's why I'd never written a book. Uh, I thought there was probably a lot of it was done in real time. And, uh, you know, uh, there is, uh, been so much reporting done on him by, you know, folks at the times like Maggie and swan and, you know, folks are my new paper, the journal and the Post and ABC and Politico.

And I mean, it feels like there's a crazy amount of stories every day about him. I will say the thing that I enjoyed most on the Trump side of his project was like taking time to like really a lot of times covering Trump, you sort of are like filing a crazy story for that night or that weekend, you're getting to him on the phone for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, you're like asking them as many questions as they can until they hang up on you. There's like a real sort of ratatat, you know,

like 90 mile an hour roller coaster. And what we were able to do here that I enjoyed really a lot was have, you know, four or five, six hour interviews with people where we sat down, you know, with the important players on the campaign on both sides. But you know, targeted a lot of the Biden inherence ones and like actually try to understand the meaning of what they were doing and like not just, oh, we've got a file list tonight, can you give me a quote? Or, oh, we have these two like sort of details here or there,

can you confirm that that was said or that happened? Because that's what a lot of the Trump reporting for me has been over the years, like filing a lot of copy and he moves at such a crazy speed that this was the first time really, the exception of sort of a big January 6th project that we did at the post. It was the first time I felt like I had enough time to step back and try and understand a little bit more of what psyche and the players and what they were really doing. Well, let's jump off that.

Although it's not in my sequence of questions, but you did raise it. I mean, the beauty of writing a book is that you do get to sort of understand these people at a depth that I don't think daily news reporters can get to because you spend time with them, you study them, you talk to people who know them, and so on and so forth. What is, and Tyler, we'll start with you because you covered the Democrats, but what's one thing about Harris and what's one thing about Biden that where you feel like the public perception actually is wrong and that from your own reporting,

you got a different flavor of them as individuals? Yeah, I think one of the interesting storylines about Kamala Harris was there was this intense period in the early part of Biden's presidency where she was just being eviscerated by everyone, including people in the White House. They just thought she was doing a pretty bad job. There was that famous moment with Lester Holt

where he asks her why she hasn't been to the border and she says, well, I haven't been to Europe. And so that's sort of the high or the low point of her tenure in that early period, her staff are fighting, it's sort of a mess. And then there's like a two-year period where a lot of people just aren't paying attention to her all that much. And sort of behind the scenes, she's overhauled her staff and sort of found her groove on

some key issues, particularly abortion, where she sort of became the forefront of the administration's response in part because Joe Biden just was not interested in that issue. In fact, he was probably opposed to some of the things his administration might have been doing. Yeah, he was a prominent Catholic, right? It was not comfortable for him, yeah. So I think one of the interesting things is how much she was able to sort of quietly transform her reputation, at least internally within the White House, and also practice, because we see her come out guns blazing after she takes over the campaign, and has these very successful early campaign appearances.

There's a lot of sort of, you know, Monday morning quarterbacking about she should have been out there even more, doing more media, not hiding away, but those rallies were quite successful in ginning up energy and also consolidating the party behind her. And so I think that transformation, which we cover in the book over the course of several months, is a really interesting thing for Harris and also potentially

portends what that might mean for her future as she molds her run for California governor. Is there a similar thing with Trump where like the so the public perception is not quite attuned to what's actually going on in private, Isaac? I think so in that we have some private moments with him in the book where he is showing himself to make these shrewd political calculations that are at odds with this kind of madman that he plays on the rally stage. The moment I always think of is after he got convicted and Larry Hogan said, you know, everyone should respect the outcome. And Chris LaSavita, one of Trump's top advisors, who, you know,

is kind of the id side of the operation, goes after Larry Hogan. And then when he sees Trump privately, Trump says, go easy on Larry. We need the vote. And so like for Trump actually to be the one saying like, don't attack people. You don't expect that. And so he actually, he's not was not like a disciplined candidate, there are also lots of scenes where his aides

and advisors want him to talk about the economy and he doesn't want to talk about the economy, but he was more focused and he was more able to kind of let things go and keep his eye on the prize. I don't know if that anecdote says more about Lassa Vida or Trump. Yeah. Go ahead, Josh.

I have a point. I also think in real time as these investigations and just conduct were sort of mushrooming, inspiring, and there were more charges and, you know, search warrants and subpoenas and all of the various things from Jack Smith and Georgia and New York. He was sort of like swinging wildly away at prosecutors. And, you know, I think the common sort of perception was, you know, Trump is so angry

about these cases and he's losing his mind. And reporting found that to be somewhat true. But what it also found was he sort of had like, and his legal team, a more holistic strategy about these cases and how to systematically delay the cases until he could be the nominee, how to diminish the prosecutors, how to use them for political gain. I think what happened on the criminal side and all of those, you know, various, uh, uh, charges he found himself against is like, he got a bit of more like intuitive and I would maybe even argue like slightly more sophisticated,

um, going to pugilistic pushback against those cases and those prosecutors that I really understood at the time. Like that was one of the things that reporting, you know, sort of born out for me. Now I'm just going to know the fire alarm has gone off in our building. I'm going to actually stick around and ask some questions. But if people hear the fire alarm in the background, and if they read about my death tomorrow, that's why. The cases actually were kind of interesting because in your book, it's pretty clear that that's why he won, or at least one of the real reasons he won, which is the Republican Party really rallied around the guy

as soon as he was indicted, and in a way that even surprised Trump. I mean, he's quoted in your book telling you guys, I was surprised by it. And I'm kind of curious if the Democrats felt the same way, like, oh my God, this is happening. It's actually not a detriment to him, but it's helping his candidacy.

Yeah, I think the Democrats really struggled with how to respond to Trump's criminal problems, in part because some of the cases were prosecuted by Biden's own Department of Justice. And so they wanted to make it clear that the president was not ordering his attorney general to prosecute his chief political opponent. I think so there was just like a lot of challenge for Biden and the Democrats to figure out how to message around this. I do think that there was some alarm that the Republican Party was so quickly consolidating behind him.

But also, if you remember, I think Democrats thought Trump was the person they could best beat, or at least Biden thought that, right? Biden said, I beat him once and I'll beat him again. And so the idea of facing Trump, who they felt, you know, would be wounded by the fact that he was a convicted felon, they were eager to exploit that. They just didn't really know how to do it because of the complications of the Justice Department involved in that. And I think one of the interesting moments in the book that really captures this is towards the end, when the Supreme Court rules on the immunity decision,

and there's this debate about how Biden should respond. And Hunter Biden pops up out of nowhere on a conference call that aides didn't even know he was part of, and urges his dad and his aides to like do a full throated response in the Oval Office. The White House lawyer at the time Ed Siskel says, that's not a good idea. We have to be careful about making Oval Office addresses. Ultimately, that's not what they decide to do. But clearly it was a source of tension because Hunter chimed in out of nowhere to sort of weigh in on that on that

call. Well, what's going on? I want to get back to Hunter in a bit, but like what's going on in the Republican side of the ledger? I mean, there's so many rich anecdotes of just the fuddlement from like the DeSantis camp being like, cannot break through. And you have this weird duality where Trump, in theory, should be at his nadir. He's just been arraigned. And yet his power internally with the Republicans is only consolidating and growing.

Surely there must have been immense frustration from his political opponents as this was transpired. Yeah, I mean, Trump was actually at his low after the midterms when he launched the campaign, and he had regained so much strength with a head start that everyone gave him to redefine his candidacy and remind Republican voters why they liked him such that he was already running away with the polls by the time the first indictment came. And the DeSantis people will argue that there was nothing that they ever could have done at the point that Trump was going to get indicted four times and that was going to take over the news.

But really, if you look at the sequencing, what happened was DeSantis disappeared. Like DeSantis missed his moment. And if, you know, imagine the counterfactual where everyone had jumped in and said, you know, Trump is old news, Trump is a loser. Trump is done. And by the time the indictments came, it would have been kicking a guy who was down, not proud. But let me push back on that. I'm kind of curious for your take and Josh's take.

Is this a game of tactics or the macro trends such that nothing would have actually mattered? Like, yeah, sure. Let's say Ron DeSantis jumps in a couple months earlier, and I know he had issues with the Florida state law, right? He couldn't necessarily do it. But let's say in theory he does it. Does it change anything?

I mean, I guess that's sort of the prevailing debate. It's like, how much of this is about tactical decisions and how much of this is about certain macro trends? Well, I think we talked to the DeSantis people, which we did for the book. They would say, okay, A, we didn't run a great campaign and we concede that we made a lot of mistakes and B, we could have run a perfect campaign and it really wouldn't have mattered that Trump was going to be the nominee after all of this

happened. And I think that's basically true. I mean, here's really the question, right? If he was more weakened when those first charges happened in New York and his base had sort of moved away from him, I mean, you could see sort of how the other Republicans, Trump said, you know, to me in the interview for the book, I couldn't believe how these guys came out to defend me so quickly. I was even surprised at

it, right. And I think if he had been more weakened, they may have seen opportunity, you know, for proverbial blood there, so to speak, right, they could have, you know, potentially attacked him. But they all felt like where he was at, you know, they've gradually had to defend him. And then the question is this, right? Like, if you're running against someone, and you're saying that person is great, and that person's being unfairly attacked, and that person was the best president ever, but you should also vote for me, like, that's a hard argument to make, right? Like, why wouldn't you just vote for the other

person? And I think there was a real time it's like, why did they pop him up so much? It was crazy. Conundrum there. Yeah. I don't know, Isaac. What do you think about that? Like, is this map? I get caught up on this.

Like how much of this was just sort of baked into the cake and no matter, you know, it didn't, that's true with Democrats too. And we can get to that in a second time. Like, oh yeah, maybe Kamala could have gone on Joe Rogan and maybe that would have made a difference, but like, would it have? I don't know. Yeah. I think in both cases, like the reporting in the book shows that the

renomination of Trump and Biden wasn't inevitable. It's just that the parties treated it as inevitable. And so it became self-suffilling, right? It's like all the Republicans were unwilling to attack him. It's like all the Republicans were unwilling to attack him. And so he regained strength. And then his campaign went out there showing the polls and said, hey, we're running away with this, get on board. And same thing with Biden.

You know, there were all these Democrats who were, you know, the next generation who were ready to launch their campaigns and give them the little, you know, hint, hint, it's time to step aside. And they all chickened out and got outmaneuvered by the Biden apparatus that changed the primary calendar and made it look like they were supporting Biden. So yeah, I mean, these were tactical things. That's a good point about the advisory committee or whatever it was where they just stuffed all the potential opponents. And I just think on the Democratic side, where they just stuffed all the potential opponents. And I just think on the Democratic side,

if you looked at the polling, the majority of Democrats said they didn't want Biden to be the nominee. So yes, there were structural factors that made it very difficult for a Democrat to mount a credible primary challenge to Joe Biden, them changing the primary calendar, them creating this advisory board

that basically cut off the knees of any Democrat that wanted to run against him. But voters wanted something different. I think that's one of the things that, when we were writing about this in real time, there's a lot of coverage of this. Poll after poll after poll showed Democrats were not excited about Joe Biden running for a second term. So there surely were, to your point and question about,

could Kamala Harris have done Joe Rogan? Like, was that going to change the election given by the margin Trump won and him sweeping the battleground states? No, probably not. But it's these series of decisions and listlessness and sort of, you know, just over and over thinking and trying to square the circle that sort of contributed to the sense of paralysis that hurt the Democratic Party across the board. So one one tactical thing that obviously didn't matter was the debate performance, which was a catastrophe for Biden. Stepping back, you guys are launched on this book. Well, many like over a year at this point ago, you have this idea of what it's going to be. You've been doing all this reporting. Just talk to me about what that period, that three week period was like as book authors

and how it sort of affected you. Yeah, I mean, I'll take this question just to start in part because I was on Air Force One and in the pool with Joe Biden for the debate and the four days after that. So I had a firsthand view to what his circle was doing and what he was doing. It was a surreal experience.

I remember getting to JBA, about to board Air Force One, and I run into some of Biden's aides and I said, how are you guys feeling? Just came back from Camp David and they're like, he's gonna do well, it's all good. But I think the other thing just to note is we had started obviously writing and reporting this book before that moment.

And the first chapter reads very similar now as it did before that debate. The idea that age was not a central concern and something that we were deeply reporting on much before that is a fallacy. I mean, that early draft of that second chapter, where we open with Phil Murphy and talk about how all these Democrats were going to run,

was there because that was what was in the air pre-midterms and right after the 2022 election. So fast forward, it was obviously a shocking performance just given how bad he was. That being said, I saw Joe Biden for, I've covered him for almost six years now. I've seen him, he's not, and has never been the best public speaker.

That was the worst I've seen. And so just that period was this start and stop. And we have this excerpt that ran in the New York Times that captures this. But I think the defining feature of that three-week period is the insularity of Joe Biden. And it's funny, I'm getting more messages from sources now after that story ran about,

oh yeah, Joe Biden was, didn't even know how much money his campaign was having, how much he like, he was really in the dark. I mean, obviously there was wall to wall coverage of it, but he was very much insulated from a lot of external voices during that period. And that helps explain why it took almost, you know, three weeks for him to jump out. Was that your experience, Josh? I also think the book changed a lot in that period. Because when we started this book, I think we all viewed, I guess I probably shouldn't speak for my dear friends

and co-authors here, but I think we all viewed Trump as probably going to be the main character of the book. Whatever happened, it was a lot of a Trump story. They're 10 years from end. He was going to make a triumphal comeback, or he was going to have a sort of ignominious end, in a way. And I think that sort of reshaped the book.

I mean, so much of the most compelling material, frankly, came from Tyler and on the Dem side, because that part of the book and the change of the nominee and sort of the whole summer really, you know, change the whole trajectory of the book. I mean, we started writing a book sort of about a rematch. And I think by the end, I mean, it was obviously a totally different book. And so during that period, I think we were all so busy, all of us at the post at the time, just trying to cover the daily insanity. And then once sort of things settled out, I think we went back and tried to figure out

what else really happened. You know? Yeah. No, I remember living it entirely. You had to get sourced up in Harris world suddenly. Not that he worked, but I'm just saying. Yeah, I mean, I covered- It's like, you think you're making

a bunch of these changes, you know? I covered her campaign in 2019, and it was really an interesting experience to have covered that campaign and then covered her again. I mean, one of the things about that campaign was that it was mostly the same people. Somehow as people would say, for worse. But I had known her circle because I covered her as VP. But of course, when it shifts so dramatically, as

Josh said, of course, the book was transformed. But I just think it's really important to note that that beginning stuff was was all there. It wasn't like this came out of nowhere. I want to just kind of step back a little bit and talk about how the campaigns became kind of reflections of the candidates and I think you guys talked, wrote about this a little bit too. You know for Biden it's kind of like this meandering slow lethargic enterprise that really reflects his age and is you know even his gait and you know and it's all closed off and very

insular. And for Trump it and some of this is misperception, right? You guys have very dispelled some of this, but for Trump it's like chaos agents that are disrupting everything and throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks and just demanding the attention and all that stuff. Did you find that those are fair descriptions

or are those kind of like tropes that Ria's political journalists can lean on. It's like, oh yeah, now everything Trump touches is chaos and everything Biden touches is slow and lethargic. I remember one of the Trump people telling me like a generic campaign is a bad campaign. Like the campaign has to be built for the message, which has to fit the messenger. Right? And like, that's one of the things that they got about Trump that worked is like, he was an authentic messenger for the message that

they were and they all like that worked all the way down the operation. And, and what stuck with that about me was when you saw like, basically Biden because his personal popularity was so bad. Like the Democrats basically ran a kind of generic, off-the-shelf, Democratic presidential campaign. And that was such a contrast. And then when they swapped out the candidate, they just kept running the same campaign. Like Harris never got a chance in those 100 days.

Whether you think that a campaign that was true to her would have been better or worse, that's not the campaign she had. It was the same generic slash Biden campaign based in Wilmington. And they never made those fundamental strategic decisions that ordinarily would come years ahead of time. I want to go back to tile here and I keep coming back to you. But like, why didn't they do? I mean, you have in the book that they had plans to, you know, name a Republican cabinet member, and you can go through some of the names that were in the book and they had an answer prepared for how they were going to break with Biden, but she just didn't do it on the field for some, for some God forsaken reason, I don't know.

But like, what was it? Was it just like caution? Or was it as Isaac said, that they had a structure in place and they just couldn't get out of that rigidity? Yeah, I think there was a whole host of things. I mean, one of the reasons Harris was advised when she took over the campaign, that it would be too disruptive in too short of a time period to overhaul the campaign. Obviously Biden's closest aides, Mike Donlon, Steve Fraschetti, Anthony Bernal, Andy Tomasini, they were moved out. And there were some new people brought in, David Plouffe and the like.

But David Plouffe was not a Harris guy, right? David Plouffe was an Obama guy that Tony West, Harris's brother-in-law, was friends with that he brought in. And so, you know, the structure in Wilmington, they just felt they needed to keep it in place because they just didn't have enough time to, you know, really reinvent the wheel or move it or whatever. I think there was just a sense, I mean, one of the really remarkable scenes in the book that I think might interest your audience in particular, Sam, is there was this period in early fall, September, October, where the Harris advisors are meeting

to figure out how to define Donald Trump. They're worried his approval ratings are too high, and they have these hour-long Zoom sessions where they throw around different monikers, dangerous Donald, and eventually what they settle on are the three uns, unhinged, unstable, unchecked. And you know, there's this moment where some aides are like, we've been running against this guy for almost a decade and we still don't know how to run against him.

Like I think that is part of this sort of struggle that the Democrats have been in for a long time. And it was part not knowing how to run against him, but also what she was running for. I think she has long struggled with sort of a message. And this is something I saw in 2019. She had all this excitement and energy at that big Oakland rally when she launched that campaign. She didn't even make it to the Iowa caucuses. So I think there's this, this thing where she just didn't have a clear message about what she was running for and who she was running against. And that is not usually a successful formula for winning presidential elections. All right.

I got to get you guys out of here because you have about 25 more interviews to do for your book tour, but I'm going to end on this question and we can start with Josh, got Isaac, go to you, Tyler. Election night. You know, I went into it with some uncertainty, I pretty much thought Trump was going to him, but I didn't know it wasn't a guarantee. I certainly could conceive of a way that Harris could have pulled it out. And the polls certainly had that as a possibility. But as people who

were like documenting this and writing about it day in and day out and talking to people on an indefinable. Were you surprised when election night came in Trump triumphed in the way he had? I don't know that I was surprised. I mean, talking to Trump's folks, senior people in the campaign for weeks leading up to the election, there was a supreme confidence.

And I didn't think it was just the confidence of, oh, we got to say this publicly. Even privately, I mean, I remember I was out in Palm Beach the day, election day, and I went out to lunch with several of his advisors. And they were all pretty calm and chill. We're going to win, and these are the margins, and these are the numbers that Fabrizio was sitting around.

We would have to, all these things would have to happen. And I think my reaction was like, either Trump's definitely going to win this election, or these people are all going to be spectacularly wrong. And there's going to be a great story on how they miscalculated in one of the biggest ways ever because I just picked up so much confidence from them. I think if he lived in Washington right, there was probably a sense that he maybe could not win again just for probably lots of people hoping but data was pretty clear down the stretch he was going to win.

Isaac, I guess the question for you like, and then to Tyler, you know, it's I guess it depends on your vantage point. But like, what's like the overarching lesson of the election? Is it the what's the main storyline? One is like, resurrection triumph of Trump, you know, is the tragedy of Joe Biden is in a mix of both. Like, what were your main, what's your main sort of thematic takeaway from how this all played out? I mean, can I say like, listen to the voters, right? I mean, the, the, the Trump campaign just had a better theory of the case and a better read on the electorate. I mean, the Biden theory of the case was when

people are faced with a binary choice between Trump and Biden, they're going to come home to Biden. Wrong. The Harris theory of the case, I'm not sure she ever really articulated one. The Trump theory of the case was a reach, I think that we were on solid ground to be skeptical is like, okay, you're going to run up the score with men because you have issues with women and you're going to get a bunch of people who don't usually vote to vote. Like, all right, like hard way of going about it. They pulled it off. Um, but I think that, you know, the lesson from that going forward is that could be hard to replicate because you're relying on people

who don't usually vote and the personal appeal of a guy who's term limited. Lutha, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I just will always remember I was in Philadelphia at the final rally that Kamala Harris was doing Lady Gaga performed and And I got a call from a source, a senior official on the Harris campaign. And they said they had just gone out of their final closeout meeting, and the analytics team did their final presentation, and they had them losing. They had them losing very narrowly. And we report those numbers in the book in that chapter about election eve. And I came out of that thinking, it's not determinative

that she's going to lose, but it seems pretty clear that it is headed that way. And so I think I had that insight there. And the Harris people said, well, it's within the margin of error. It could go either way. It's going to be tight. We still think we could pull it off.

But if their numbers were saying they were basically going to lose the night before, they're usually pretty on this. Well, let's talk then maybe about, talk a little bit about Joe Biden then. Like, what is the, it's complicated obviously, but what is the ultimate legacy that he leaves? Is a stubborn man who just didn't know when to leave the stage? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really one of the things that this book carries out is a sort of psychological study of Joe Biden to a certain extent. We have in the book that when he first met the wife, when his first wife's parents, they asked him what he wanted to be.

And he said, president. And they said, of what? And he said, the United States. So this man has always wanted to be president. He's been in public service more than half his life. And I think what's important to know is he thought he was doing a good job. And he has this chip on his shoulder that no one ever gave him the credit he deserved. And they felt the 2022 midterms were validating his strategy and his presidency. They would often tell me, look, historians ranked Joe Biden, one of the most successful presidents in American

history. Historians don't make up enough of the most successful presidents in American history. Historians don't make up enough of the American population to determine who's going to win the presidency. So I think a huge part of his legacy is this decision to run again and to set the party up for failure against Donald Trump. And I think they were keenly aware of that. And that is one of the reasons he ran.

They thought he beat him once and he was the only one that could beat him again. And in fact, as we have in the book, some of his aides still believe to this day that he should have stayed in the race and he would have won. There's no polling that suggests that to be true. But I do think that there is this, the legacy of Joe Biden has been very complicated by this. His whole reason for running in 2020 was he thought that Trump was an existential threat to the country, and arguably he paved the way back for his return. Well, look, I appreciate you guys joining me,

and I appreciate the viewers for watching through the multitudes video, including a fire alarm in the office that has gone on and off, so I survived that one. I encourage people to buy the book too. 2024, Howard Trump, reach look right us and the Democrats lost America. Josh Dossi, Isaac Aronson, Tyler Pager.

Thank you so much. Appreciate you guys. Good luck selling this thing. It deserves to be sold. And we will talk to you hopefully a little later. Thanks so much, Sam. We really appreciate it. Of course.

Thank you, Sam.